Against Anarchy: ​Political Alterity in Early Modernism 9783110645873, 9783110644654

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Cord-Christian Casper Against Anarchy

Transregional Practices of Power

Edited by Milinda Banerjee, Julia C. Schneider, Simon Yarrow

Volume 1

Cord-Christian Casper

Against Anarchy

Political Alterity in Early Modernism

ISBN 978-3-11-064465-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-064587-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-064644-3 ISSN 2625-235X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943091 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Cover image: Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow (by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1876); Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop; Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College www.degruyter.com

Contents 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2

Introduction 1 Drawing Distinctions 3 Alterity 12 Political Fiction 17 Politics of Demarcation 18 Politics of Exception 34

2 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.1.4 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2

Political Literature and the Demarcation of Alterity Post-Foundational Demarcation 45 Demarcating Alterity 46 Instituting Foundations 51 Constituting Authority 56 Constructing Anarchist Alterity 62 The State of Exception 84 The Structure of Exception 85 Literature of Exception 90

3

3.2.1 3.2.2 3.2.3 3.2.4 3.2.5 3.3

Demarcations of Culture and Anarchy in The Princess Casamassima 97 “Illuminated Ignorance” – Demarcating Cultural Identity Fashioning Culture 104 “Illuminated Ignorance” – Differentiating Culture 122 “No smashing, no smashing” – The Anarchist State of Exception 180 Anarchist Slumming 182 Anarchist Indeterminacy 190 Anarchist Calculus 196 Anarchist Bifurcation 218 Anarchist Carceral 223 Conclusion 250

4 4.1 4.1.1 4.1.2 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2

Residual Politics in The Secret Agent 251 Demarcation of Alterity in The Secret Agent Constructing Anarchist Alterity 262 Perpetuating Anarchist Alterity 278 Dissolution of Alterity 290 Dissolution of the Police Function 292 Dissolution of Anarchism 314

3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.2

39

255

102

VI

Contents

States of Exception in The Secret Agent 364 Vladimir: Permanent State of Exception 369 The Assistant Commissioner: Contained States of Exception 406 Conclusion 447

4.3 4.3.1 4.3.2 4.4 5

5.2.1 5.2.2 5.2.3 5.3

Politics beyond Demarcation? Loss of Alterity in Conrad and Chesterton 449 States of Exception in Under Western Eyes 450 The Dissolution of Alterity: “Autocracy and War” 451 Autocratic Exception 462 The Anarchist Deep-Structure in The Man Who Was Thursday 517 Dissolution of Anarchist Alterity 520 Recovery of the Anarchist Deep-Structure 550 Literature and Politics beyond Exception 574 Conclusion 601

6 6.1 6.2

Conclusion 602 First Model: Demarcation against Anarchy Second Model: State of Exception 610

5.1 5.1.1 5.1.2 5.2

Sources

619

Acknowledgments Index

657

655

604

1 Introduction Where’s the man to stop the rush of social-democratic ideas? The opportunity and the day have come and gone! Believe me: gone for ever. The sun is set and the last barrier removed. England was the only barrier to the pressure of infernal doctrines born in continental back-slums.1

In this 1885 letter, Joseph Conrad presents his addressee with a stark dichotomy between English national identity and socialist radicalism. The ensuing attempt to pinpoint the ideological antagonist, however, stalls. The forces arrayed against the “great British Empire”2 exceed their bounds and resist identification with a single set of ideas and representatives. What begins as an imagined triumph of the “International Socialist Association” is extended to “every disreputable ragamuffin in Europe [who] feels that the day of universal brotherhood, despoliation and disorder is coming apace.”3 In contrast to such ubiquity of imagined socialists, the traits of the ‘barriers’ keeping this breakdown at bay are barely dwelt upon. Instead, Conrad’s description emphasises an everexpanding vision of ‘infernal doctrines’, their adherents, and their metonymical associations. The establishment of antagonism takes precedence, while any positive content on the side of ‘England’ is few and far between. It is this strategy of representing and perpetuating political difference that will be analysed in the following chapters. Specifically, this study will trace the possibility of drawing a distinction between a residual identity and a disavowed political Other in a set of early modernist narratives. Whereas the letter, however, is concerned with ‘social-democratic’ ideas, the political novels by Henry James (1886), Joseph Conrad (1907/1911) and G. K. Chesterton (1908) turn to a broader marker of dissolution, chaos, and imminent breakdown, namely ‘anarchism’. These narratives will be shown to revolve around the question whether anarchism can be misrepresented and distorted so as to furnish a position of negativity — an encapsulation of ‘infernal doctrines’. The novels contend that a manufactured antagonist of this kind is necessary as a ‘political outside’ on which the unacknowledged, unwanted, and disavowed characteristics of collective identity can be projected. In analysing the attributes discarded to the fenced-off anarchist side of a ‘barrier’, the following chapters concern themselves with a political imaginary 1 Joseph Conrad. “To Józef Spiridion.” 19 December 1885. The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Ed. Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 10–11. 11. 2 Joseph Conrad, “To Józef Spiridion,” 11. 3 Joseph Conrad, “To Józef Spiridion,” 11. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-001

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1 Introduction

of decline and imminent breakdown. After all, if it is to provide a foil to an imagined, normative inside, the excluded anarchic outside has to present a trajectory towards cultural collapse. Only against this background of impending disorder can the novels assert a decisive antagonism and narrate the converse characteristics of order and hierarchy. This study argues, consequently, that it is the possibility of a boundary – of a distinction between a collective self and an anarchic outside – that is at stake in political fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. Whenever it becomes difficult to determine what, precisely, a communal identity might consist of beyond rote assertions of “the great British Empire,”4 these narratives shore up a residual sense of self by inventing, denigrating, and elaborating its obverse. Each novel offers an equivalent to the conjunction of a tenuously realised sphere of identity and an anarchic Other. This book investigates how early modernist narratives functionalise anarchism as an external threat. How and why does political fiction of this period define ideologies of stability, normativity, and certainty against a self-created ‘radical’ menace? To explain how the novels broach this question, I will draw on the concept of ‘alterity’, the construction of relational Otherness for the purposes of a complementary sense of self. Specifically, the analysis will pinpoint the cultural knowledge – journalistic, biologistic, aesthetic – that goes into the making of the anarchist stereotype. While the ensuing distinction of identity and alterity bears on James’, Conrad’s and Chesterton’s ‘radical theme’, the study will particularly trace the narrative and formal consequences of political difference. Such interdependence of politics and narrative technique finds an important corollary in the successive problem presented by each of the novels: what happens when a representative Other is lost? And: how to narrate a political sphere in which alterity can no longer be discerned? To provide an answer, the study will demonstrate that the comfort of a bifurcated political system – however constructed its distinctions may have been – is dissolved in each text. As a result of this disintegration, the novels present variations of a mode of power that denies normative orders their relational foil of ‘infernal doctrines’ — and increasingly impedes the determination of any polity whatsoever. Throughout, I will examine the diegetic and narrative correlates of this failure of distinction. The political imaginary explored in these narratives, then, is twofold: the novels weigh a (1) residual sense of political demarcation against the (2) collapse of differential boundaries. In tracing the evolving relationship between these two models both within each narrative and across the sequence of political fiction from 1886–1911, the study will inquire into the ambivalent role accorded to

4 Joseph Conrad, “To Józef Spiridion,” 11.

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3

anarchism. The interdiscursive worlds of political fiction expose the fabrication of a relational Other. Nevertheless, they also feature extensive justifications of the alleged stability made possible by alterity politics. Overall, the study aims to trace the precise construction and narrative form of the tenuous boundary against imagined anarchy — and to consider the consequences of its collapse.

1.1 Drawing Distinctions “Draw a distinction. [. . .] Call it the first distinction. Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by the distinction.”5 This, in short, describes the principle of politics in early modernist fiction.6 The political narratives under discussion replace a shared, naturalised ‘we’ with an emphasis on enemies, antagonists, and excluded beliefs. This is because, in and of themselves, the bearers of shared value can barely be elaborated in either of the novels. Whether they are grounded in high culture (Casamassima), domestic stability (The Secret Agent), or ‘law, order, and respectability’ (cf. Thursday, 11), positive values are shown to exceed representation. Instead, the ‘unmarked state’ of identity is communicable only on the condition that it is reconstituted as a differential sign.7 Conrad’s letter again encapsulates this strategy: if the imagined infraction by ‘infernal doctrines’

5 George Spencer-Brown. Laws of Form. New York: Dutton 1979. 3. 6 I follow Clarke in distinguishing early modernism from a later strand “consolidated in 1923 with T. S. Eliot’s publication of The Waste Land and founding of the Criterion” (4). This differentiation between two modernist phases is especially pertinent because at its “outset in the first two decades of the twentieth century, early modernism manifested its antitraditionalism as an obligatory iconoclasm, the literary corollary of the political mood running throughout western culture” (5). Bruce Clarke. Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. The corpus of my study, extending to the late 19th century, treats this developing strain of modernism with scepticism and aims to contain its ‘anarchic’ iconoclasm — yet also surreptitiously takes over some of its politics and formal strategies. 7 Cf. William Rasch. Introduction. Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. By Niklas Luhmann. Trans. Joseph O’Neil, Elliott Schreiber, Kerstin Behnke, and William Whobrey. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. 1–32. In Rasch’s summary of SpencerBrown’s Laws of Form, which popularised the distinction of marked and unmarked states: “First step: draw a distinction. Then, mark one side of the distinction [. . .] and leave the other side the unmarked state. From the marked state, one starts one’s further operations, piling distinctions upon distinctions, until the form of the world takes shape. One may cross the line and enter the former unmarked state, but then one marks it, pushing the unmarked state beyond a further boundary, the boundary created by the distinction that was used to cross the original boundary.” (22)

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1 Introduction

(as a signifier) can be associated with ‘the man to stop the rush’ (as the normative signified), the featurelessness of an assumed identity at least attains some narrative potential. That is to say: implicit norms acquire a story structure if, in the face of disorder, they appear to restore order, represent justice, and, most importantly, allay an imagined drift towards ‘anarchic’ chaos. This, however, also means that the vision of the rational, normal, and stable is rarely conceived as autonomous. After all, from this antagonistic perspective, the collective self only ever derives its consistency in a permanent process of differentiation against its disavowed, anarchic outside. In tracing this salvaging of order from its disavowed Other, the analysis has to account for the specific choice of anarchism and anarchy as the representatives of the abjected outside. After all, in the strand of political fiction investigated in this study, it is the penultimate term in Conrad’s epistolary enumeration of the stations of cultural decline – “robbery, equality, anarchy and misery”8 – that stands for chaos and disorder. Why this concern with anarchy? The answer lies in a contested intellectual history, in which the positive embrace of the epithet ‘anarchist’ runs up against persistent attempts to turn it into a synonym for disorder.9 Proceeding from Enlightenment notions of perfectible social order,10 at least from the 1860s onwards its proponents use the term programmatically as “the name given to a principle [. . .] under which society is conceived without government.”11 ‘Anarchy’, then, describes the social organisation emerging from the enactment of such a non-governmental principle. Every use of the term in this sense entails an implicit response to the question whether society without coercive authority is possible in the first place. Anarchists answer this in the affirmative: they posit concrete practices by means of which an egalitarian ethos can be given social and economic form, as “systems of exchange” or “forms of decision making.”12 Most importantly in the context of early modernist fiction, such proposals gain particular traction in the 1870s, “after people with anarchist sympathies became involved in popular

8 Joseph Conrad, “To Józef Spiridion,” 11. 9 Ruth Kinna. The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism. London: Penguin, 2019. 15. 10 David Weir. Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 14. 11 Peter Kropotkin. “Anarchism.” The Essential Kropotkin. Ed. Emile Capouya and Keitha Tompkins. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976 [1911]. 108–120. 12 David Graeber. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh, Oakland, and Baltimore: AK, 2009. 215.

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struggles.”13 Notably, such involvement deepens as a result of the split of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1872, after which its anti-authoritarian wing comes into its own as an internationalist, libertarian socialist organisation opposing participation in the existing political process and rejecting the capture of state power.14 ‘Anarchism’, thus, is already the result of a distinction: before the expulsion of the anti-authoritarian factions “anarchists in the First International called themselves simply ‘socialists’.”15 As its opponents, then, exclude anarchism from the purview of rationality, they do so partly because it emerges as a successful strand of socialist thought and practice — and can, as a result, plausibly be made to stand in for anticapitalist revolutionary thought as such. In addition to this historical dimension, however, the principle of anarchy can also be derived transhistorically. From this systematic perspective, any mode of thought or collective practice is conceptually ‘anarchist’ if it “rejects coercive authority, the state, and participation in existing systems of government” and “advocates federalism (or voluntary association), libertarianism, and direct action.”16 This distinction between the historical and the systematic perspective, in particular, will be shown to be utilised by anti-anarchist discourses and borne out by political fiction. Notably, if manifest historical anarchists are made to appear as incarnations of breakdown, a systematic potential for more equitable social relationships is sought elsewhere. For instance, to take up a particularly British ideological tradition, the almost ‘motiveless’ destructiveness attributed to contemporary anarchists is offset by ‘culture’ as the repository of value ostensibly independent of market forces. For its enemies, libertarian socialism is particularly useful as a figuration of non-political chaos because the anarchist spatial imaginary is, in fact, vastly different from nationalist and imperialist territories and borders. Anarchy conceived as a positive mode of social organisation, as Kropotkin puts it in 1911, is to facilitate an “infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international.”17 In contrast to Conrad’s fetishisation of hard-and-fast boundaries keeping at bay lawlessness and crime, 13 Robert Graham. We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK, 2015. 2. 14 Lucien van der Walt. “Anarchism and Marxism.” Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 505–559. 537. “While opposing all such statist projects, reformist and revolutionary alike, the anarchists were deeply troubled by the Marxist tendency to substitute the revolutionary party for the proletariat.” 15 Davide Turcato. Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. 14. 16 Graham, The First International, 4. 17 Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” 108.

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1 Introduction

the limits of Kropotkin’s federations would overlap and change constantly, with delegates only ever representing their community on a temporary basis.18 The distinction between borders and such multiscale organisation shows that the term ‘anarchy’ is a litmus test for material as well as conceptual practices of ‘drawing a distinction’. Anarchy – conceived as non-hierarchical social organisation of horizontally organised federations – stands in contrast to ideologies that equate the “government of no one”19 with breakdown and division outside of a constituted political accord. To this counter-hegemonic organisation of space, libertarian socialism adds a distinct temporality of practice. ‘Anarchy’ in its positive sense not only describes the horizon of abolishing the state and organising an economy according to need,20 but also guides concrete activist organisation and procedures of communal decision making. That is to say: future anarchy is enacted in the present, a process that Luke Yates describes as a “hypothesised homology between movement practices and movement goals.”21 While there is no blueprint for how, precisely, future anarchist society would function, its alternatives to state and capitalism are to be prefigured by non-hierarchical organisation in the present. In this equivalence between means and ends, as Jesse Cohn puts it, the “hope of what can come” is derived by “specifying practices through which what we want may be elicited” — without any “historical ‘must’” prescribing ironclad rules of development outside of these practices.22 It is not surprising, then, that political novels engage with the temporal organisation of their fictional communities on a formal level and feature the collapse of shared ‘time’ in the storyworlds. Negotiating anti-anarchist thought, Conrad, James, and Chesterton present and evaluate efforts of restoring linear development and national teleology. They do so not only in response to fears of a general modern sense of shock, but also as a concrete response to the alternative temporalities of anarchism. The interlocking scales of prefigurative politics run counter to the temporal organisation of an imperial centre. Indeed, anarchist practice is adapted to 18 For an overview of the anarchist idea of “decentralised, non-hierarchical society based on direct action and voluntary cooperation, with local groups linked via networks and federations,” cf. Mark Mattern. Anarchism and Art: Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins. New York: SUNY, 2016. 20. 19 Kinna, The Government of No One, 11. 20 Alexander Berkman. What is Anarchism? Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK, 2003. 156. 21 Luke Yates. “Rethinking Prefiguration: Alternatives, Micropolitics and Goals in Social Movements.” Social Movement Studies 14 (2015). 1–21. 15. 22 Jesse Cohn. Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. 237.

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internationalist class politics, which “certainly had its theoretical side, but more important, it was a matter of experience and struggle in non-European contexts and terrains.”23 This applies especially to anticolonial revolt since, as Maia Ramnath has argued, “under colonial rule it is easy to recognize the state and all its avatars as hostile forces external to society”24 — and not to misperceive them as a guarantors of collective identity, as the anti-anarchist ideology represented in political fiction would have it. After all, as per the adaptable anarchist principles, “[o]nly a social revolution could abolish class and imperialism, and such revolution must be ‘international in scope’.”25Abiding by prefigurative politics, then, anti-colonialist anarchist practice opposes statist and imperialist oppression while simultaneously prefiguring “a new society ‘within the shell of the old’.”26 By contrast, anarchists put little stock in states, which cannot but reproduce existing class systems. Reactionary distinctions drawn against anarchy will be shown to pit themselves against this internationalist scope by applying a logic of inclusion and exclusion. The occasional headline-grabbing ‘dynamite scare’ in the 1890s notwithstanding, Britain is nevertheless imagined to be fundamentally unaffected by internationalist socialism. To represent that security internally, however, political fiction follows contemporary journals in imagining the intrusion of anarchist elements in lurid detail. For the bourgeoning ‘new journalism’, the construction of a ‘black peril’, after all, was an opportunity for sensationalist headlines: “The study of anarchist mores and circles also grew into a genre in its own right,” with foreign anarchists infiltrating the “London backdrop.”27 It is not enough, then, to draw a distinction to signify an antianarchist perspective in early modernism. Rather, the excluded internationalism returns as distorted synecdoche, with mass movements condensed into figures observed and traced on the national interior. If an anarchist interloper can be apprehended at the frontier, so the logic goes, the national self can

23 Benedict Anderson. “Preface.” Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Practice of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution. Ed. Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van der Walt. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. xiii-xxxi. xv. 24 Maia Ramnath. “Non-Western Anarchisms and Postcolonialism.” The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams. Cham: Palgrave, 2019. 677–697. 690. 25 Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK, 2009. 309. 26 Cf. David Graeber. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004. 7. 27 Constance Bantman. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the first Globalisation. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. 115.

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contain its socialist Other. Disconnected from their goals – and, specifically, their anti-imperialist and internationalist orientation – anarchist movements can be presented as aberrant deviations from a norm of teleological development. The challenge for anti-anarchist politics is set: they misrepresent this global variability of anarchism as one undifferentiated threat to the bounded space of the nation. The internationalist context, then, is crucial to the modes of ‘drawing a distinction’ negotiated in political fiction. After all, the opposition to anarchism represented in my corpus of political fiction (1886–1911) frequently evokes equivalents to the ‘barriers’ in Conrad’s letter. In aiming to stop the ‘rush’ of socialist ideas from the ‘continental back-slums’, Conrad extracts England not only from manifest anarchist threats, fictive though they are in a country in which anarchism never gained a significant following.28 What is more, anti-anarchist invective denies libertarian socialists the very “social bases of the good society to come: mutual help, mutual sociability, loyalty to the comrades, a common vocabulary.”29 In other words: establishing a conceptual and material boundary against anarchy consists first and foremost in denying the existence of such forms of internationalist solidarity. To this end, antianarchist texts dissolve ‘common vocabularies’ into miscommunication and alienation. When the motley anarchist conspirators of Conrad, James, and Chesterton fail to exhibit any common principles, they are well on their way towards being represented as an inchoate ‘tide’, a chaotic force stripped of its internationalism and its prefigurative tenets alike. It is boundary work of this kind that transforms ‘anarchy’ from a shifting goal of perfectible social organisation to a signifier of undifferentiated flux. The demarcation against anarchy, thus, identifies anarchy with disorder, denying organisational forms associated with “the no-government state of society” at least since Proudhon’s 1840 Qu’est-ce que la propriété.30 On that basis, ‘drawing a distinction’ allows for strategies of projection. Specifically, as Peter Kropotkin argues, representatives of state and capital present the term ‘anarchy’ as a distorted equivalent to the “theory that modern capitalism has come into being through ‘the anarchy of exploitation’,” the states’ formula of “let them do as they like.”31 In other words, if anti-anarchist differentiation is successful, it is not the capitalist class, but rather the populace that ‘does as it

28 George Woodcock. Anarchism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. 414. 29 Anderson, “Preface” to Anarchism and Syndicalism, xvi. 30 Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” 112. 31 Peter Kropotkin. “Modern Science and Anarchism.” The Essential Kropotkin. Ed. Emile Capouya and Keitha Tompkins. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976 [1913]. 57–94. 84.

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likes’, in Matthew Arnold’s oft-repeated formula.32 An unruly mass of this kind “tends to cause distress, and so to increase the sort of anarchy and social disintegration” that requires “a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us.”33 The traits of the dominant economic system, then, are reinscribed into the exploited class: it is not laissezfaire capitalism that is deleterious in accounts of this kind but rather the actions of a populace no longer held in check. This strategy of denigration, in a further twist, is all the more effective since, according to libertarian socialists’ own analysis, the supposed ‘anarchy of exploitation’ is itself a fiction. In other words: there is no self-regulating market in the first place. Instead, Kropotkin reminds his readers that the state enforces monopolies. What is more, far from maintaining lofty non-interference, it extends “direct support, help and protection” to the class interests of capital.34 For libertarian socialists, then, the very characteristics of disorder and destruction that its opponents pin on ‘anarchy’ best describe the “geopolitics of the state system,” with its “prejudice for violence that ‘order’ concealed.”35 The projection of that violence onto anarchism both deflects from state power and calls for it to be reinstated. In the process, the “anarchists’ best efforts to highlight the disorder and violence of state systems”36 are redirected so as to suggest the disorder and violence of the socialists themselves. Thus displaced, anti-socialists can invoke ‘anarchy’ flexibly in order to furnish a marker of deviance: the term is not only a marker of pathologised ‘anarchists’, but also located in marginalised groups, discovered in the populace at large, or observed in countries not pacified by a professed British class accord. Though this reactionary re-reading of anarchism proved an adaptable strategy internationally, it takes specific form in the British context. As per Shpayer-Makov, in the international history of anarchist and anti-anarchist struggle for hegemony, “the discrepancy between stereotype and objective reality was even more pronounced in Britain. There the movement was particularly small and nonviolent, yet the distortion proved highly influential.”37 This difference between real and imagined socialist movements is no accident; rather, it forms the very condition for the continued production of boundaries against

32 Matthew Arnold. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. Jane Garnett. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 61. 33 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 61. 34 Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism,” 85. 35 Ruth Kinna. Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. 97. 36 Kinna, The Government of No One, 41. 37 Haia Shpayer-Makov. “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880–1914.” Victorian Studies 4 (1988). 487–516. 487.

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an alleged anarchist tide. In the absence of manifest mass movements, anarchy recurs fantasmatically in the political imaginary as “violence, rebellion, atheism, aliens, internationalism, and threats to private property and the bourgeois lifestyle.”38 Such distinction against anarchy can be leveraged into a number of associated distinctions, not least between an alleged liberal common sense and continental cycles of authoritarian repression and socialist resistance.39 An entire mode of anti-anarchist cultural knowledge develops in a process which political fiction lays bare — while also contributing to it. The transformation of anarchy from an aspirational horizon of communist organisation into a marker of chaos, thus, develops out of an international history of ideas, but is finally refigured to bolster a particular, often national, identity. As a result, SpencerBrown’s ‘space severed or cloven by the distinction’ yields an imaginary of anarchism as an alien concern: its internationalist scope is imagined as a threat originating elsewhere, which has to be kept from infiltrating a healthy body politic. In this changing conceptual history, the specific elaboration of the anarchist peril during the period covered in this study develops out of the late Victorian discursive environment. In the mid-1880s, an emerging “individualizable group of statements”40 dedicates itself to determining what should (and what should not) be considered ‘anarchist’, considered from a position strictly outside of libertarian socialist movements and philosophical traditions.41 This knowledge offers a specific potential for repudiation and disavowal in the “general domain of all statements,” as claims about radicalism coalesce into a “regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.”42 As a result, an entire discourse about political radicalism revolves around the anarchist as the figure of an impending dissolution of order. As a purported embodiment of

38 Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion,” 513. 39 David Goodway. Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2006. 10. Goodway asserts that in contrast to, for instance, the French massacres in the aftermath of the Commune or the strict penal measures against Italian anarchists between 1894 and 1900, “[t]he liberal, minimal statism of Britain, even though the powers of the State, both national and local, were increasing after 1867, principally for reasons of social reform, was situated in a world apart from these turbulent and sanguinary histories.” 40 Michel Foucault. Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 90. 41 Cf. Graham, The First International. In an anarchist context, ‘libertarian’ specifies that revolutionary means are consistent with revolutionary ends. (4) Graham shows that the term had been in use by anarchists since the 1850s, long before the term was coopted by laissez-faire capitalism. (5–6) 42 Foucault, Archaeology, 90.

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chaos, this arbiter of radical politics is commented on, described, decried, and explained in journals and newspapers, in biologist and criminological tracts, parliamentary addresses, court proceedings — and, not least, in short stories and novels. The narrative accounts in particular add a penchant for violence to the anarchist stereotype, associating activists with spectacular ‘dynamite outrages’.43 In the process, the negative traits associated with the radical figure of breakdown, dissolution, and even physical devolution are condensed into an ever-expanded heterostereotype, an ‘ascription of difference and otherness’.44 The corpus of political narratives treated in this study does not merely reproduce this image of the anarchist as a metaphorically and literally foreign influence. Instead, the analysis will specify the ways in which fiction always already presents anarchists as a discursive construct to begin with. The novels lay bare the function of anarchism as the Other of order and painstakingly trace the mechanisms by means of which suitable figures of anarchist deviance are constructed and disseminated. Each novel, thus, revolves around the possibility of maintaining an ideologically convenient condensation of disavowed traits rather than offering any adequation to extraliterary libertarian socialism. Radicalism in political fiction, thus, derives from negotiations of extant heterostereotypes rather than reflecting with any seriousness the theory and practice developed in anarchist philosophies, writings, and movements. Specifically, the novels subordinate the entire history of libertarian socialist thought in England to the question whether anarchism can be made to appear as a suitably ‘infernal doctrine’ to ensure the cohesion of autostereotypes. This requires a whole host of displacements, abridgements, and satirical denunciations of historical anarchist tenets, such as anti-statism, direct action, and co-operative or federal organisational forms.45 Historically, in

43 Barbara Arnett Melchiori. Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel. London, Sydney, and Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1985. 9. 44 Cf. Manfred Pfister. Introduction. The Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996. 1–20. With Pfister, “[e]ach heterostereotype has as its reverse an autostereotype, and it is the autostereotype that has functional priority. A culture defines itself by defining other cultures; the self defines itself by defining the other. The need for cultural or national identity always expresses and realizes itself by ascriptions of difference and otherness to the neighboring cultures and nations.” (4) Cf. also Annegreth Horatschek. Alterität und Stereotyp: Die Funktion des Fremden in den ‘International Novels’ von E. M. Forster und D.H. Lawrence. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998. 210. 45 Cf. Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, 4. Regarding these three aspects of the ‘libertarian socialist programme’, Goodway points out that “the first is entirely distinctive, the second typifies revolutionary ideologies and the last is shared with most other forms of socialism as well as trade unionism and co-operation.”

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1 Introduction

contrast to their stereotypical fictional counterparts, libertarian socialists proceed from the possibility of non-coercive organisational forms such as mutual aid and voluntary agreement, which, far from chaotic, are to ensure “free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional.”46 Proponents often introduce this position with an etymological detour: “Anarchy,” as Errico Malatesta assures his readers in 1891, “is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, ‘without government’: the state of a people without any constituted authority.”47 However, after establishing the possibility of anarchic organisation without coercive rule, Malatesta acknowledges that the term is contested. More and more, its detractors present anarchy as a catch-all term for lawlessness, irrationality, and indiscriminate destructiveness. Formerly, he laments, “the word ‘anarchy’ was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.”48 In political fiction, whether this ‘distortion’ can be effectively inculcated and an ‘adversarial’ norm determined against anarchy, however, is not a foregone conclusion. Whereas Malatesta alleges the ubiquity of a distorted, anarchist stereotype, for Conrad, James, and Chesterton such a maligned political Other can just barely be constructed. What constitutes a robust taxonomy of the monstrous, degenerative anarchist in pseudo-scientific works and journalistic screeds becomes tenuous in the narratives.49 The novels set apart the anarchic by a fragile ‘barrier’ rather than presenting an assured, essentialist notion of ‘irrational destructiveness’.

1.2 Alterity In political fiction, thus, the primary procedure is one of ‘distortion’ and exclusion geared towards the provision of residual alterity. In what follows, this term will be used in its relational sense to describe images of the foreign, irrational and disorderly which allow for the elaboration of a collective identity presented 46 “Anarchism (from the Gr. ἀν, and ἀρχή)” is “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional.” Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” 284. 47 Errico Malatesta. Anarchy. Trans. Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press, 1974. 11. 48 Malatesta, Anarchy, 11. 49 Cf. Elun Gabriel. “The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe.” Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Niall Scott. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. 103–122.

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in contradistinction to these disavowed traits.50 In this vein, anarchist alterity is deployed on a scale ranging from the domestic to the national and even the transnational level of what The Secret Agent identifies as “universal repressive legislation.”51 The choice of anarchism for these procedures of manufacturing political Otherness is not a matter of indifference, but influences the type of identity that can be defined against it. The anarchist mode of political alterity comes with a number of discursive traits that set it apart from alternative modes of marking a constitutive outside. Firstly, this version of radical political alterity furnishes a means of depoliticisation in order to delegitimise movements as diverse as socialism, Russian Nihilism, Irish Republicanism, or the libertarian socialist syndicalist, educationalist, and feminist movements towards the turn of the century.52 As soon as these diverse forms of political thought and activism are deemed to be ‘anarchist’, no further consideration of their demands is required. Secondly, anarchism is an internal alterity, located within the body politic and emerging from the ‘heart of the empire’.53 Finally, the

50 Cf. Anna-Margaretha Horatschek. “Kulturelle Alterität.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze, Personen, Grundbegriffe. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2013. 18–19. It is especially the irreducible relationality of images of selfhood and otherness that is borne out by the novels (“Entwürfen von Hetero- bzw. Autostereotypen, d.h. Fremd- und Selbstbildern, die sich zu ‘images’ eines national character verdichten” 18). / Cf. also Ernst van Alphen. “The Other Within.” Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship. Ed. Raymond Corbey and Joep Leerssen. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi 1991. 1–16. 5. Van Alphen differentiates a (1) hermeneutic, (2) an epistemological, and (3) a psychological approach to alterity. All of these, however, share the relational and differential orientation that underlies the political imaginary of early modernist fiction. “[I]t is not so much the constative aspect of a cultural (arte)fact which defines its identity (that what it has to say or what can be said about it) but its performative aspect (what is done in the act of speaking it). This view would imply that discussions on the problematics of identity and alterity should not focus on the intrinsic characteristics of a cultural artefact, but on the interlocutionary situation in which such an object receives its meaning.” 51 Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1907]. 23. All future references are to the page numbers of this edition and will be provided parenthetically in the text. 52 Clarke, Dora Marsden, 226, n.1. 53 Cf. for a discussion of the organicist imagery of the metropolitan ‘pulsating heart’: Roy Porter. London: A Social History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. 326. For a contemporary, pejorative use of this imagery, cf. Charles Masterman. The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England. London: Unwin, 1907. Masterman’s account of metropolitan life shares with anarchist alterity the ‘social imperialist’ transferral of racist and colonialist traits to the “new race” of the “‘street-bred’ people of the twentieth century.” Like the anarchist, the “‘new generation knocking at our door’” presents a development of domestic Otherness, albeit with a more pronounced reformist (and racialised) hope for a turn to “development and action” of the “new Town type” for the “future progess of the Anglo-Saxon Race.” (7)

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1 Introduction

anarchist stereotype can be conceived as a condensation of modernity as such, a pathological symptom of what Max Nordau in 1898 describes as the “effect of contemporary civilization, of the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life, the vastly increased number of sense impressions and organic reactions.”54 These symptoms of sped-up modernity find their discursive complement in radical activism, which a diagnosis of this kind understands as an epiphenomenon of a destabilising acceleration of social change. Each of these specific features not only circumscribes specific targets, spaces, and areas of knowledge that can be subsumed under the moniker of ‘anarchism’ but also imposes constraints on the types of identity that emerge from the differential operations undertaken and represented in political fiction. Each of the heterostereotypical features – anarchism as deligitimisation, internal alterity, and an epiphenomenon of rapid social shifts – will be shown to recur in political fiction. The novels present the ensuing differentiation between identity and alterity as both contingent and necessary. That is, regarding the anarchist foil, the novels opt for a subordination of epistemological validity to social utility. Sceptical inquiry into the political demarcation of anarchism is presented as warranted — for a select few. Everyone else else is to continue believing in an anarchist enemy threatening a vaunted way of life. In other words, the possibility of exposing the heterostereotype as a set of contingent discursive procedures requires containment in these texts. After all, collective identity is understood to be predicated on the stabilisation of illusions of certainty. Affirmation rather than suspicion is the watchword of the model of political difference. According to this model, any communal order requires validation of its essential value, incapable as its members are of sustaining critical inquiry into the merely relational status of their community and its norms. What emerges from this strategy of demarcation is a collective identity stabilised by boundaries. These ‘barriers’ circumscribe a sphere of discursively bolstered self-images55 that shore up remnants of identity against the ‘constitutive outside’ of impending anarchy.

54 Max Nordau. Degeneration. London: Heinemann, 1898. 42. 55 Cf. Antonio Negri. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans. Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P 1992. Negri differentiates constituent (revolutionary, processual) power from constituted (authoritative, centralized, statist) power. In this context, he also indicates means of occluding the difference between these forms: “[A]t first sight the distinction between constituent and constitutive power fades, so that constituent power appears according to its nature as originary power or counterpower, as historically determined strength, as a set of needs, desires, and singular determinations.” (7) In early modernist political fiction, it is precisely this ‘fading’ that is at stake. If, with Negri, we are to differentiate constituent from constituted power, for Conrad, James, and Chesterton the latter depends on occlusion and denial of the former, imparting the impression of ‘timeless’ stability on the ensuing sphere of identity.

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The conceptual and material borders setting apart the imagined anarchist outside, however, are liable to collapse. That is, differentiations based on ‘barriers’ against radicalism break down whenever the antagonists can no longer be set apart with any certainty. Such failure to both fabricate and ward off anarchy gives rise to the second political model analysed in this study. This constellation takes hold upon the dissolution of the amorphous heterostereotype of anarchism. Without its anarchic outside, the stabilising, universalised and teleological selfimage obtaining on the identitarian inside is likewise shown to be untenable. The characteristics of the respective collective self, after all, are rarely grounded in explicit, shared norms. Instead, a sense of self is derived negatively — and collapses without its disavowed counterpart. What results from this breakdown is not presented as liberation from the restrictions of a merely relational political identity. Instead, this second, post-binary model of politics gives rise to oblique coercion uncoupled from residual illusions of a collective self. This unconstrained political power – which precludes the possibility to set apart anarchism as a bearer of disavowed traits – will be described as a state of exception. This term, an adaptation of the concept developed by Giorgio Agamben, allows for an analysis of modes of power which function by suspending differential order. Each of the narratives in my corpus presents the increasing impossibility to “distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law”56 as the ultimate outcome of a failure to maintain a sufficient anarchist heterostereotype. As differentiations collapse, not only do protagonists lose their assurance of identity in the storyworld; what is more, the suspension of representable ‘barriers’ by the state of exception also impacts the range of possible narrative modes. An entire approach to narrating events – based on establishing and selectively crossing a classificatory border between identity and its anarchic outside – is called into question at the same time as assurances dwindle within the diegesis. The study will elaborate on both models – (1) demarcation and (2) the state of exception – in chapter 2. This theoretical elaboration will also indicate the ways in which the models of politics are inflected by their narrative transmission. The aim is a delineation of literature as a mode of political theory in its own right rather than as an area of application for preconceived models of the political. In the subsequent chapter, demarcation in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima57 will be shown to revolve around the possibility of maintaining a

56 Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 57. 57 Henry James. The Princess Casamassima. Ed. Derek Brewer. London: Penguin, 1987 [1886]. All future references are to the page numbers of this edition and will be provided parenthetically in the text.

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residual version of Matthew Arnold’s 1869 distinction between Culture and Anarchy. In James’ iteration of this political difference, shoring up alterity is presented as a more individual endeavour than in later political novels. Although its register is less overtly political, the stakes of deriving residual identity by delineating a radical outside are equally high. Upon the collapse of a system of ‘Culture’ and ‘Anarchy’, the latter exceeds representation. As the anarchist Other no longer provides an adequate foil, protagonists find themselves confronted with a capitalist mode of production and images of state power that take on the very traits formerly attributed to political radicalism. The radical sphere acquires characteristics of the rapid shifts of modernity as the anarchist state of exception imbricates unconstrained anarchism with a capitalist mode of production and the state. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (the focus of chapter 4) presents demarcation as a more explicitly political endeavour. The novel sketches a veritable institutional poetics, an entire apparatus of demarcation dedicated to maintaining a communicable anarchist heterostereotype. As these strategies fail, however, a state of exception also takes hold. This mode of power dispenses with comforting political Others. Yet, instead of one monolithic ‘state’, exception itself becomes a matter of contestation in this narrative: we are confronted with a liberal and an autocratic strategy of suspending the boundary separating identity and alterity. Finally, with chapter 5, the analysis will turn to two polarised outcomes of the representation of demarcation and exception. In Under Western Eyes,58 differentiation of alterity is barely sustained from the outset. Any residual illusions of collective identity are placed under erasure as the protagonist is suspended in borderless states controlled by an oblique, indistinct mode of power. Rather than certainties of selfhood, a permanent state of exception appears as the inescapable condition of life under autocratic rule. In contrast to this immediate dissolution of ordering ‘barriers’, The Man Who Was Thursday offers a return to stability and certainty — an authoritatively ordained, deepstructural reassertion of order that will be analysed as the second outcome of the trajectory from demarcation to exception traced throughout the corpus. After presenting the collapse of classificatory borders between order and anarchy, the novel offers a reconstitution of certainty by disclosing a foundational deep-structure.59 This foundation – described as non-relational, absolute Otherness – ensures that political differences can be drawn and redrawn, in 58 Joseph Conrad. Under Western Eyes. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 [1911]. All future references are to this edition. 59 G. K. Chesterton. The Man Who was Thursday. London: Penguin, 1986 [1908]. All future references are to this edition.

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full view of the artificiality and contingency of the resulting antagonisms. In contrast to Conrad’s bleak account of all-encompassing exception, Chesterton’s narrative maintains the possibility of deliberative politics. The polarised outcomes presented by Under Western Eyes and The Man Who Was Thursday indicate that neither text presents the impending state of exception as a foregone conclusion. Rather, the novels are concerned throughout with the recovery of stable identity, however tenuous such determination against anarchy is shown to be.

1.3 Political Fiction In what follows, the analysis of political fiction follows a twofold trajectory. On the one hand, the study has to account for the profusion of models of the political that is presented in the narratives. On the other hand, it is necessary to extract the overall bounded constraints within which these negotiations of the political take place. The narratives, that is to say, are not just deemed ‘political’ because they reflect contemporaneous “normative statements, or systems of such statements, about an area of human experience and activity called ‘politics’.”60 Rather, what constitutes that area is precisely at issue in early modernist fiction. In this, the novels bear out Connolly’s claim that to “examine and accept, or to examine and revise, the prevailing terms of political discourse is not a prelude to politics but a dimension of politics itself.”61 Specifically, the possibility of politics in each novel hinges on ‘demarcation’, the drawing of a distinction between a collective self and a disavowed Other. The question what, precisely, is consigned to alterity is the determining factor for a specifically ‘political’ act. In what follows this concern with political difference will be shown to present a distinctive strand of political thought, a lineage that the novels take up and inflect. After establishing this first model of politics as a dissociative drawing of boundaries, this chapter will trace theoretical and critical precedents for the second model of political power in the novels, namely the ‘state of exception’.

60 J. G. A. Pocock. “Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. Ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 163–174. 61 William E. Connolly. The Terms of Political Discourse. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

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1.3.1 Politics of Demarcation The analysis traces competing attempts at disavowal. Each novel under consideration presents, negotiates, and evaluates endeavours to determine identity against negated anarchist alterity. Rather than a constraint, such an establishment of a constitutive outside is the only means of garnering residual agency in the early modernist ‘political imaginary’.62 This aligns with Moebius’ contention that identity inheres in the necessary reiteration of a demarcation. Specifically, the ‘social constitution of an Other’ varies with the precise contours of the abjected heterostereotype.63 Although the means of demarcation differ in each novel, once contingent distinctions have been established, they are naturalised, precluding an exposure of the constructedness and contingency of the excluded anarchist stereotype. In tracing this two-stage process of drawing and naturalising a difference, the study reverses Mark Bevir’s notion that “the dangers and exclusions of having power and policy based on essentialist concepts and formal explanations always outweigh the benefits of acting on simplified correlations or models.”64 It is not the ‘danger’ but rather the utility of manufactured alterity that underlies the novels’ concern with a model of demarcation. The ‘political’ that derives from such “boundary-work”65 is not always coterminous with the thematic politics presented in the diegesis. Paradoxically, The Secret Agent, for instance, presents the determination of an avowedly a-political sphere of aesthetic appreciation as one of the few political acts of demarcation, whereas the literal, thematically political sphere of

62 Cf. Jeffrey W. Robbins. Radical Democracy and Political Theology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 31. “[T]he political imaginary properly conceived is not adverse or antithetical to the truth. On the contrary [. . .] it sustains the very values it envisions even as it recognizes the inevitable gap that exists between the ideal and the real, the imagined and the actual.” 63 Stephan Moebius. Die soziale Konstituierung des Anderen: Grundrisse einer poststrukturalistischen Sozialwissenschaft nach Lévinas und Derrida. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2003. 159. 64 Specifically, this is Bevir’s characterisation of the pragmatic justifications furnished by anti-foundationalism. Cf. Mark Bevir. “Anti-Foundationalism.” The Oxford Handbook of British Politics. Ed. Matthew Flinders, Andrew Gamble, Colin Hay, and Michael Lenny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 115–137. 117. 65 Cf. Thomas F. Gieryn. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1999. “Epistemic Authority exists only to the extent that it is claimed by some people (typically in the name of science) but denied to others (which is exactly what boundary-work does).” The broad remit of the concept is outlined by Lamont and Molnár: “Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality.” Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002). 167–195. 168.

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the Home Secretary is relegated to debates about a Fisheries Bill. On these terms, governmental procedures are denied their political status as long as they fail to contribute to a distinct sphere in which they apply — and demarcate an outside in which they are not in force. Although each of the texts in the corpus has been the object of political readings, such models of alterity and political difference have not so far been systematised. Early modernist literary politics will in the following be shown to hinge on the exclusion of features which, conversely, grant consistency to their included counterparts. As Jameson cautions, an analysis of a political imaginary cannot proceed from a “working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not.”66 Presuming such a split, after all, reconfirms “that structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic.”67 However, in each of the novels, the very ‘gap’ decried by Jameson is a matter of explicit concern, permanent re-description, as well as anxieties regarding its eventual collapse. That is, rather than classifying these texts as prima facie political, the analysis will attend to the ways in which the question of the political re-enters the narratives. What counts as political, what differentiates the ‘public’ from the ‘private’, and what separates the interior from the anarchic exterior is precisely at issue in early modernist fiction. It is the contingent determination of a boundary separating a shared identity associated with norms, order, and hierarchy from its antagonistic outside that is presented as the founding political gesture. The analysis will, thus, proceed from Jameson’s concept of “strategies of containment” to show how a sense of ‘ideological closure’ can be imparted within the text. This will be combined with a reconstruction of the implicit evaluations of these closed spheres of stability in order to systematise the range of symbolic containments which the first model of politics enables in the narratives.68 Given the emphasis which the novels place on anarchism as an ideological foil, they will be analysed in terms of a dissociative concept of the political. With this term, Oliver Marchart describes a mode of political thought in which “a collectivity is established through an external antagonism vis-à-vis an enemy or constitutive outside.”69 The terminology established in Marchart’s

66 Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 6. 67 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 6. 68 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 37. 69 Cf. Oliver Marchart. Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. 41. Marchart introduces dissociative as the result of a “Schmittian angle” further developed in Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony.

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Post-Foundational Political Thought (2007) will recur throughout the analysis of the model of demarcation. Proceeding from Heidegger’s distinction of the ontological and the ontic, Marchart lays out the notion of a political difference. What is set apart in a difference of that kind is politics on the one hand and the political on the other. The former (‘politics’) denotes an ‘ontic level’ of specific discursive regimes, social systems, forms of action, or institutional organisation. This level of sedimented modes of deliberating and governing is set apart from the “ontological level,” at which “the political assumes the role of something which is of an entirely different nature: the principle of autonomy of politics, or the moment of institution of society.”70 It is this ‘moment of the political’ which is at issue in the political novels under consideration. In order to enable contingent, deliberative processes bolstered by collective identity, what is required in each narrative is a founding act, which sets apart this identity from its anarchic obverse. This instigates a collectivity, the traits of which are renegotiated with each symbolic act of setting itself apart from a “constitutive outside.” These acts enable the collective self to project unwanted traits onto an anarchic space. Not least because of this differential, negative formation, this supplementary ground withdraws in the very ‘moment’ in which it institutes the social. As a result, society will always be in search for an ultimate ground, while the maximum that can be achieved will be a fleeting and contingent grounding by way of politics – a plurality of partial grounds.71

Narrative will be shown to be particularly amenable to the representation of a post-foundationalist position. Early modernist storytelling presents and negotiates political differentiation as the (necessary yet contingent) foundation of any collective identity. After all, a sense of self is exposed as contingent only from the point of view of those characters who institute and sustain its demarcated consistency. Meanwhile, political difference appears natural for those included in such collective identity. The novels will not only be shown to evince a model of post-foundationalism, but also to present competing attempts to found the political. In different ways, the texts vary the insight that “foundations will always be plural, they will be established only temporarily, they can be reversed, and they have to be established against conflicting foundational attempts.”72 More so than the theories assembled under the ‘post-foundational’ rubric by Marchart, however, the novels attend to 70 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 8. 71 Cf. Marchart, Post-Foundational, 8. 72 Oliver Marchart. “Democracy and Minimal Politics: The Political Difference and Its Consequences.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110 (2011). 965–973. 966.

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the stabilising function achieved by a disavowal of the ‘moment of the political’. That is, the question whether a set of founding truths undergirds the resulting identity or not emerges as a matter of narrative perspective. After all, only a select few characters are made privy to the lack of ‘grounding’ of any one collectivity. Particularly, awareness of the contingency of identities is restricted to the figures setting apart a polity from an alleged ‘anarchic’ environment. Where does this leave the reader? Just like the characters, we are also confronted with the decision whether to accept the demarcation that serves as the foundation of the society represented. As Erdinast-Vulcan has shown in a compelling bid for reader-response criticism that makes the reader one among several ‘subjects-in-progress’, the early modernist political imaginary privileges the necessity of a “regulative context,” however constructed it may be. “In the absence of this regulative context, which stretches between the butcher and the policeman, our moral codes are no longer relevant, and we are all too easily claimed by the wilderness.”73 In Marchart’s terms, ‘regulation’ is located on the level of politics. The reader is called upon to evaluate the founding of the very distinction between ‘codes’ and ‘wilderness’ that precedes the possibility of taking up a position between those opposed semantic spaces. In this evaluation of the founding demarcation, the narrated politics and the politics of reading align. Any analysis of the differential delineation of a political sphere is indebted to postcolonial theory and its attention to the interrelation of collective identity and alterity. Edward Said’s formulation of the construction of an Orientalist Other still proves instructive for the ways in which literary texts both participate in and inflect such distinctions which ‘act dynamically’ within a political rationale, as well as their economic and military ramifications.74 Crucially for the narratives that concern us here, Said also draws attention to anarchism. Specifically, he argues that in analogy to the non-Western Other, maintenance of essentialist verities can also function on the basis of an outcast, yet perpetually represented and researched Other of anarchist radicalism. Further, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Autobiography presents radical stereotypes as the result of processes of projection which reduce political radicals to “captives of an unsuitable, uncongenial idea or image.”75 This is not to overstrain the similarity between the discursive procedures that create an ‘anarchist’ and those that develop a ‘colonial’ heterostereotype. Yet, proceeding from Stephen Ross’ study 73 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. “The Conradian Subject-in-Progress.” The Conradian 36 (2011). 95–105. 104. 74 Cf. Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. 12. 75 Edward Said. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Autobiography. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 153.

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of Conrad and Empire, the “means by which Empire cultivates and reproduces itself in the subjects it already governs”76 will be shown to find implicit and explicit correlatives in the representation of anarchism. There is, for instance, discursive overlap between the respective procedures of drawing a distinction, not least because modes of biologist and social Darwinist typology assert similar, essentialist traits for the ‘anarchist radical’ and the ‘colonial subject’. What is more, The Secret Agent sees a return of imperialist security measures to the metropolis, in a curious case of an auto-colonial imaginary. In the context of that procedure, the analysis will briefly adumbrate a developing semantic transfer of anarchist characteristics to anti-colonial resistance movements, which are increasingly identified as ‘anarchist’ to delegitimise their status as political antagonists. These examples demonstrate the isomorphic procedures of alterity derived from an “uneven exchange with various kinds of power”77 that produces hegemonic intellectual, cultural, and moral knowledge. At the same time, a comparison of these productions of the normative against the aberrant should not lose tract of the specificity of the respective stand-in for alterity. Most of all, the analysis will proceed from Said’s injunction that “we better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting.”78 That is, within the constraints of the collectivity demarcated against its anarchic outside, identity formation appears as an active engagement with high-cultural signs (cf. chapter 3.1), institutional frameworks (4.1), or an anticipated recognition by a state and its patrilinear surrogates (cf. chapter 5.1.2.1). Within the critical work on the concept of ‘alterity’, this analysis principally follows restricted and relational definitions of Otherness and the Other.79 These variations of the concept particularly concern themselves with the construction and function of auto- and heterostereotypes. With certain exceptions in The Princess Casamassima, there is little indication of Levinasian ‘radical’

76 Stephen Ross. Conrad and Empire. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2004. 185. 77 Said, Orientalism, 13. 78 Cf. Said, Orientalism, 14. 79 Using a capital ‘O’ for ‘Other’ aligns this analysis with a nomenclature going back to Lacan; it indicates that, more than the particular historical circumstances that cast ‘anarchists’ into the role of political foil, the abjected figure also stands in for a broader negativity against which any type of knowledge comes to define itself. As Roger Silverstone puts it, capital O “refers to the recognition that there is something out there that is not me, not of my making, not under my control; distinct, different, beyond reach, yet occupying the same space, the same social landscape.” Roger Silverstone. Why Study the Media? London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 1999. 134.

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alterity “with respect to which, in an unexceptionable responsibility, I posit myself deposed of my sovereignty.”80 Rather than a ‘deposition’ of the self, anarchist alterity allows for a salvaging of the self, defined precariously against the anarchy outside of its bounds. My approach to this type of alterity proceeds from Schlieben-Lange’s definition, according to which the different iterations of the concept “share the absolute allocation of alter to the first, the one, to ego or to the subject. Alter is the second of two similar and equiprimordial entities rather than any one, arbitrary Other: alius, or the foreigner.”81 That is not to say that the figure of anarchist alterity cannot also be classified as ‘foreign’. In fact, as Conrad’s quote at the beginning of this study has shown, the anarchist is conceived as an imposition from outside (such as the ‘continent’, Russia, or southern Europe). As soon as, however, a status of ‘alter’ is imposed, the origin of the radical features selected is subordinated to the provision of a counterpoint to a self-image of order and hierarchy. In proceeding from alterity as a mode of stabilising a ‘cultural semantics’ organised around complementary oppositions, the analysis furthermore takes its cue from approaches by Turk (1990) and Spinner (2000). Turk presents the complementarity of self and Other as a constraint, with a concept of alter ego defined from the position of the self “on the basis of only one systemic reference.”82 A binary system of politics appears a as limit from Turk’s perspective, which is geared towards facilitating understanding of the Other. By contrast, it is precisely the restriction to ‘one systemic reference’ that makes an anarchist alter ego so useful to the early modernist political imaginary. Such alterity, after all, is to enable demarcation of collective identity. That is to say: this cultural semantics ensures a set of norms precisely because it imposes limits on the degree to which disavowed radicalism can be understood. In this vein, the novels present what Spinner deems a ‘narrow area of acceptance, an area of neutrality that tends towards zero, and an exorbitant area of rejection’ as a

80 Emmanuel Levinas. Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. 59. 81 Brigitte Schlieben-Lange. “Vorwort.” LiLi Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 28 (1998). 5–6. 5. My trans. Orig. quote: “Gemeinsam ist den verschiedenen Ausdeutungen jedoch die unbedingte Zuordung von alter zum ersten, einen, zu ego oder zum Subjekt. Alter ist der zweite von zwei gleichartigen und gleich-ursprünglichen, einander zugeordneten Wesen, nicht irgendein beliebiger anderer: alius oder der Fremde: xenos, peregrinus.” 82 Horst Turk. “Alienität und Alterität als Schlüsselbegriffe einer Kultursemantik.” Jahrbuch Internationale Germanistik 22 (1990). 9–31. 11. My trans. Orig. quote: “Sicher ist aber vor allem, daß das Fremdverstehen nicht nach dem Modell von ego und alter ego, d.h. unter Zugrundelegung nur einer Systemreferenz erklärt werden kann.” (11)

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necessary constraint, temporarily upholding the impression of shared, collective characteristics.83 In the narratives under discussion, thus, anarchist alterity is to offer stabilisation of what Pnina Werber calls “modernist theories that analyse society as if it were bounded and ‘structured’ by ethical, normative dos and don’t’s and by self-evident cultural truths and official discourses.” This is at the expense of a disavowal and misrepresentation of radical politics as that which is excluded from the ‘bounded’ sphere.84 This relational model also aligns the postcolonialist analyses of the function of alterity with discourse analysis. Specifically, for this first model of demarcation, the analysis will proceed from Foucault’s assumption that “[e]very relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and its results.”85 Ensuring that not only collective identity, but even a residual, personal ‘identity-effect’ is dependent on such preceding differentiations is an ‘anti-humanist’ concern shared by early modernist political narratives.86 The novels will, indeed, be shown to preclude insight into the relational construction of “those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognized from the outset.”87 Not having to ‘look closely’ at the way in which identity and alterity are demarcated emerges as the precondition for a bounded sphere. Maintaining rather than dismantling perceptible, stabilising instances of social order is presented as indispensable for collective and personal identity alike. What is more, both levels are consistently interrelated. That is, protagonists internalise the authority invested in supposed representatives of collective order. As a result, the individual self becomes an “agency, a despot of social norms” that combines the constitution of the subject, psychogenesis, and social regulation/power in the service of the stabilising “integration of individuals into a self,” as Winkler’s account of discursive economy puts it.88

83 Cf. Helmut Spinner. “Der Mensch als Orientierungswesen: Identität und Alterität aus der Sicht der Doppelvernunft.” Wir, ihr, sie: Identität und Alterität in Theorie und Methode. Ed Wolfgang Eßbach. Würzburg: Ergon, 2000. 39–68. 53. 84 Pnina Werber. “Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity.” Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. Ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood. London: Zed, 2015. 1–28. 1. 85 Michel Foucault. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982). 777–795. 792. 86 Cf. Elizabeth Kuhn. “Toward an Anti-Humanism of Life: The Modernism of Nietzsche, Hulme and Yeats.” Journal of Modern Literature 34 (2011). 1–20. 87 Foucault, Archaeology, 24. 88 Hartmut Winkler. Diskursökonomie: Versuch über die innere Ökonomie der Medien. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. 184.

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The necessity of imposed demarcations of alterity for the sake of diegetic order and narrative stability (continued eventfulness, narrativity) takes up analytical threads from D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police. Miller rightly cautions against a ‘subversion hypothesis’ according to which the 19th century novel sets out to present a stable, centred subject only to work out the ways in which such a project (necessarily) fails.89 Miller instead traces an entanglement of the novel and policing power that will also be demonstrated for strategies of demarcation.90 Modes of social control and the production (and attendant normalisation) of anarchist deviancy are co-created rather than subverted by the novels, however sophisticated their presentation of alterity-based governance.91 The texts’ affirmation of ideological cohesion is motivated by the catastrophic consequences that ensue once the contingency of foundational norms is exposed. Thus, the differentially coded auto- and heterostereotypes that Annegreth Horatschek has analysed as structuring principles of colonialist discourse formation specifically and occidental epistemology and metaphysics more generally will be shown to find a counterpart in the production of anarchist Otherness.92 However, despite this similarity, the epistemological

89 D. A. Miller. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. xi. 90 Miller. The Novel and the Police, 2. Cf. also Joachim Linder and Claus-Michael Ort. “Zur sozialen Konstruktion der Übertretung und zu ihren Repräsentationen im 20. Jahrhundert.” Verbrechen – Justiz – Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900 bis zu Gegenwart. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999. 91 Despite following Miller in a rejection of the ‘subversion hypothesis’, the corpus will be associated with such an interdiscursive function. Cf. Jürgen Link and Rolf Parr. “Semiotik und Interdiskursanalyse.” Neue Literaturtheorien: Eine Einführung. Ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. 108–133. According to Link, a functional differentiation leading to discursive specialisation is compensated for by reverse ‘mechanisms of discursive integration’. Interdiscursive mechanisms of this kind allow for a selective representation of special discourses, by means of succinct formulations and ‘images’. “In the process (in its ideal, simplified form), only those units become part of the interdiscourse which have been ‘turned polyphonic’ (expanded paradigmatically) by means of discursive interferences or discursive associations.” (123–124.) My trans. Literature can process pre-literary collective symbols generated in specialist discourses, yielding a ‘discursive position’ of its own. Such processes (not necessarily inimical to the collective symbols that are subject to interdiscursive ‘polyphonic’ diffraction) are displayed in the novels’ interdiscursive treatment of anarchism. For an account of “Kollektivsymbolik” as an interdiscursive phenomenon, cf. Jürgen Link. Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. 42. 92 Cf. Annegreth Horatschek. Alterität und Stereotyp: Die Funktion des Fremden in den ‘International Novels’ von E. M. Forster und D. H. Lawrence. Tübingen: Narr, 1998. Horatschek specifically traces the English autostereotype in E. M. Forster’s and D. H. Lawrence’s international novels, which “focus their critique on ‘classical’ axioms of occidental metaphysics

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1 Introduction

mechanisms and psychological motivations that furnish a sense of self against an anarchist (rather than colonial) Other are set apart by their conspicuous instability. Who, precisely, is referred to with the depreciatory label ‘anarchist’ is a matter of contestation, and yields a more tenuous hierarchy than the discursive regime bolstering the ‘Orientalist’ heterostereotype. “Imagined communities” predicated on anarchist heterostereotypes can barely signify their consistency.93 Instead of a stable autostereotype derived against the subordinated Other, the novels trace ephemeral differentiations. It is a mere ‘medley’ of traits (to anticipate the name of the titular Princess’ country house ‘Medley’ in Casamassima) that is invested with a temporarily fenced-off illusion of shared values. The best that can be hoped for from autostereotypes (self-images) and anarchist heterostereotypes (images of the Other) is a residual “discourse effect,” in Rapaport’s terms, rather than a permanent arrangement of power/knowledge.94 Critical accounts of the representation of anarchism in fiction broadly treat this strand of radical politics as a thematic concern, or foreground its association with violence and terrorism. While both of these aspects are taken up in my analysis of political demarcation, this study will focus on the construction of an anarchist theme in the novels. That is, each text presents strategies of evoking anarchism as the result of a contingent demarcation. This boundary can only be treated as a theme within the diegesis as a result of a preceding discursive construction. Similarly, rather than emphasising the disruptive potential of anarchism, the texts will be investigated regarding the modes of containment that allow for a heterostereotypical anarchist to emerge as a controlled arbiter of violence, safely cordoned-off to an exterior. Rather than featuring bombthrowing ‘radicals’ from the outset, it is upon the failure of constructing ‘anarchists’ that the texts delve into imagery of unconstrained violence. Regarding the first, thematic strand of the anarchist theme, Raimund Schäffner’s Anarchismus und Literatur in England is still an indispensable resource, especially its typology of literary anarchism. The specific negotiation of the

and epistemology. The autostereotype is constructed as a representative of paradigms of thought constitutive of occidental identity, exposing its tendency towards stereotypisation, hierarchisation and hermetic closure in confrontation with national-cultural alterity.” In the “worldview monologically constructed in this way, put succinctly, reality and truth become inextricable” (786). My trans. 93 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1983. 94 Herman Rapaport. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. 81.

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subcategory Schäffner calls ‘anarchism as a symbol of social, cultural, and moral deterioration’95 in early modernism, however, requires elaboration, especially concerning the identitarian affinities made possible by each iteration of the anarchist Other (cf. chapters 3.1, 4.1). The 2005 collection To Hell with Culture (ed. by H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight) features a number of case studies that trace a tradition of perceiving, but especially of strategically misperceiving anarchist aims in an ideological terrain in which the ‘representation of law and order’ depends on the revival of the spectre of anarchic breakdown.96 Redding (1998), Houen (2002), Phillips (2003) Cole (2012), and Ó Donghaile (2011) have offered productive accounts of the interaction of anarchism, terrorism, and violence. Arthur Redding in particular makes a convincing case for modernist aesthetics as a mode of “cultural control” of anarchism, which, at one and the same time, registers and expresses a fascination with violent, insurrectionary upsurge.97 Regarding the notion of destructiveness, Sarah Cole traces the emergence of a popular imaginary of indiscriminate violence contributing to the “sense that the political movement of anarchism signaled the unleashing of anarchy.”98 According to Cole, James’ and Conrad’s novels both partake in and disavow this ‘unleashing’ by dint of conventions of melodrama and romance in an “accordion-like movement in and out of history.”99 This association of the violence of imagined anarchism and a fragmentation of literary form will be taken up in the analysis; however, since the following chapters are concerned with the production of anarchism as a heterostereotype, they will focus on the presentation of the anarchist figures as always already artificial, discursively constructed arbiters of Otherness, which the novels expose as barely contained stereotypes from the outset. Accordingly, compared to these studies of the anarchist imaginary in modernism, the analysis will de-emphasise the disintegrative and violent features of the anarchist stereotype. After all, the focus of this reading is the functionalisation of anarchism as a disavowed alterity — a process which is shown to require a differential position of anarchism. What is more, rather than bringing to a close the search for a residual foil by restoring

95 Cf. Raimund Schäffner. Anarchismus und Literatur in England: Von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997. 188. 96 H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight. Introduction. ‘To Hell with Culture’: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature. Cardiff: University of Wales P, 2005. 1–10. 5. 97 Arthur Redding. Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1998. 98 Sarah Cole. At the Violet Hour. Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 89. 99 Cole, Violet Hour, 89/112. Cf. also Alex Houen. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. / Deaglán Ó Donghaile. Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2011. 10.

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essentialist images of a terroristic Other, the novels will be shown to both confront and ward off insight into the contingency, constructedness, and functionality of the anarchist heterostereotype.100 An analysis of the ambivalent stance regarding political Otherness as both a limitation of possible identities and a necessary precondition for models of identity should also avoid a teleology towards modernism, in which the diegetic ‘fragmentation’ of anarchism always already prefigures the explosive rhetoric of BLAST and a poetics of “resistance to representation.”101 Instead, the early modernist presentation of simulated foundationalist certainties – which counter fragmentation by projecting it onto a radical exteriority – will be seen to grant relative autonomy to the corpus of political literature.102 What is the trajectory of the politics of demarcation in the individual novels from 1886 to 1911? To begin with, the analysis of The Princess Casamassima will take its cue from those critical accounts that expose any conflict between culture as “high aesthetic civilizational accomplishment” and ‘anarchy’ as contingent from the outset.103 Notably, Erik S. Roraback (2007) argues that the choice between ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’ already presents indeologically fraught alternatives.104 As long as this antagonism is maintained, anarchism can be invested with the blame for a loss of cultural value. Conversely, culture can be set apart as a repository not only of aesthetic appreciation, but of the very possibility of order and hierarchy, despite the ample indications to the contrary also provided in the text. Regarding James’ ‘contestatory engagement’ with anarchism, Sara Blair’s 1996 Writing of Race and Nation has laid important groundwork for an analysis of the “volatilizing” representation of “the fictions of identity, class, nation, and community” in Casamassima.105 Further, Robert

100 Cf. James English. Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994. The concern of the analysis, hence, “is not any particular class of criminals (or victims) but the cultural apparatus by means of which criminal classes are constructed in the first place – and, by implication, the group of people [. . .] who accept these mythological constructions as reality.” (11) 101 David Kadlec. Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 2. Cf. also Ó Donghaile, Blasted, 129. 102 That is, the texts display what Titzmann calls “systemic rationality within partial functional systems” (My trans. Orig quote: “Systemrationalität innerhalb der kulturellen Teilsysteme”), allowing us to treat them as distinctive modes of negotiating the possibility of political order. Michael Titzmann. “Konstanz und intraepochaler Wandel im deutschen Barock.” Europäische Barock-Rezeption. Ed. Klaus Garber. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991. 63–83. 73. 103 Erik S. Roraback. The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 115. 104 Roraback, Dialectics, 113. 105 Sara Blair. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 6.

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Pippin’s account of Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2000) presents a convincing account of the fractured modernity in which these attempts to reconstitute ideologies of certainty take place. After all, the Jamesian version of demarcation has to be established in an “increasingly anomic and disunified social world” deprived of “much of a basis for interpretation and assessment.”106 Regarding that basis, David Weir (1997) offers the most extensive account of the strategy of setting up a ‘classless’, homogenizing concept of ‘culture’ as a means of countering such a sense of impending anomie, a process also laid out by Eagleton.107 This study bears out the political constellation that Weir attributes to modernism: anarchy is the negation of culture and, conversely, “culture exists only when anarchy is absent.”108 Only on the basis of this chiasm can both sides form the complementary pair that serves as the very ideological ‘basis for interpretation and assessment’ (in Pippin’s sense). The analysis will show that Casamassima makes a stronger case for the possibility of maintaining culture as a stabilising ideology than any of the remaining texts in the corpus. What results is a veritable ‘ideology of culture’ (O. P. Grewal) that defines itself against “democracy, socialism, anarchism,” all of which are lumped together as distinctly ‘modern’ tendencies.109 Regarding James’ negotiation of a post-foundational reassertion of stabilising alterity amidst an impending collapse of foundational certainties, Scanlan (1992) draws attention to the consequences for literary form. The transformation of anarchy (in the pejorative sense of anomie as described by Pippin) into anarchism (a set of stabilising heterostereotypes) will, accordingly, also be figured as an attempt to ‘revolutionise’ the ‘baggy monster’ of the Victorian novel.110 Despite the important work by the critics mentioned, the deployment of anarchism as a political Other has not so far been explored systematically in considerations of James’ literary politics. Scott McCracken (2014) indicates the direction of such an inquiry with his convincing account of the range of artistic responses (restoration, reconstruction, and obliteration) mobilised whenever

106 Robert B. Pippin. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 5. 107 Terry Eagleton. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 1. “[I]t was probably not until Matthew Arnold that the word dropped such adjectives as ‘moral’ and ‘intellectual’ and came to be just ‘culture’, an abstraction in itself.” (6) 108 David Weir. Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 42. 109 O. P. Grewal. The Ideology of Culture: A Critical Study of The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima and The Tragic Muse. Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1990. 79. 110 Margaret Scanlan. “Terrorism and the Realistic Novel: Henry James and The Princess Casamassima.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992). 380–402. 382.

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James turns to a revolutionary theme.111 For the purposes of this analysis, this concern with revolution will be adapted to the narrative strategies of recasting anarchism as alterity. This is especially relevant regarding the 1871 Paris Commune, which was conceived as a social revolution by federalists and antiauthoritarian internationalists112 yet cannot be encompassed by the heterostereotype constructed in the novel. After all, for all its deprecation of an anarchist conspiracy, broadly ‘socialist’ concerns are not dismissed out of hand by The Princess Casamassima. More than the other novels in my corpus, James’ text (as per Markels 2000 and Graham 1994) will be analysed as “honoring socialism as its protagonist’s desire,” impelling James to at least recognize class as a ‘narrative’ of modern history.113 In the context of the model of demarcation, this is a process of projection: collective material conditions are transformed into an ethical question of how to maintain fidelity to a revolutionary lineage and absent parental figures alike. Revolution begets responsibility in Casamassima — as long as that obligation can be individualised. Anarchism is conceived as a matter of private negotiation, divorced, from the protagonist’s bourgeoning insights into expropriation and inequality. Once attached to a vague maternal lineage, revolutionary thought is transformed into a reckoning with the imagined ‘face’ of long-dead interlocutors. The ensuing colloquy leads to a sophisticated interpretative process, which, however, interrupts and deflects the narrative’s moments of political-economic critique. In presenting these consequences of responsibility to an imagined Other, James’ is the only novel in the corpus that provides the occasion for a concept of alterity in Levinas’ sense of a “relation whose terms do not form a totality,” and which “can hence be produced within the general economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face, of delineating a distance in depth – that of conversation.”114 As per the model of demarcation, however, the novel will be shown to ultimately render such residual ‘conversational’ approaches impossible, inculcating instead the decisive drawing of a difference — and the construction of a controllable image of the Other.115 111 Scott McCracken. “The Author as Arsonist: Henry James and the Paris Commune.” Modernism/Modernity 21 (2014). 71–87. Cf. also George Woodcock. “Henry James and the Conspirators.” The Sewanee Review 60 (1952), 219–229. 219. 112 Cf. Graham, The First International, 148. 113 Julian Markels. “Socialism-Anxiety: The Princess Casamassima and Its New York Critics.” College Literature 27 (2000). 37–56. 38. / Wendy Graham. “Henry James’s Subterranean Blues.” Modern Fiction Studies 40 (1994). 51–84. 61. 114 Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. 39. 115 Cf. Francis Blesington. “Politics and the Terrorist Novel.” Sewanee Review 116 (2008). 116–124. 117. This also occasions the return of a representable choice between political

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The ur-text for analyses of Joseph Conrad’s representation of political radicalism is Howe’s Politics and the Novel, which traces the role of socialists and revolutionaries in the emergence of the “sense of a They – whatever in the outer world imperils and destroys human life.”116 Conversely, Howe also demonstrates the concomitant ‘sense of a We’ – “whatever in ourselves can resist this enemy.”117 Taking this constellation as a starting point, the following analysis of demarcation in Conrad’s fiction will emphasise a proliferation of such ‘We’s’: competing identities jostle for hegemony in these narratives. Proceeding from Howe, it becomes clear that Conrad’s novels demonstrate a pressing need for political difference. After all, what results from a breakdown of a scheme of ‘They/We’ is “a great and chilling distance” and “growing alienation from the modes and assumptions of modern society.”118 This is (contra Howe) however not a default ‘Conradian’ perspective, but an increasing loss of a determinable sense of self traceable throughout the narrated world and impinging on the very modes of narrative transmission. Similarly to Howe, Eloise Knapp-Hay has contributed to a rereading of Conrad as a wide-ranging political author. Her analyses have paved the way for a post-foundationalist reading in which, with Marchart, a fabricated political Other ensures that “society receives a mirror-image of its unity, rendering intelligible the sense of belonging to the same space.”119 Her seminal Political Novels (despite offering a foundationalist account of a ‘political imperative’ resulting from Conrad’s Polish background) emphasises the degree to which the political novels deny a view of “politics as an external milieu.”120 Instead, the narratives demonstrate the impossibility to “think of men at all without thinking of the individual’s immediate reliance upon, and obligation to, a politically

ideologies which, for Blesington, places Casamassima in the genre of ‘terrorist novel’. This genre “concentrates on the dilemma of a character who is trapped among often negative alternatives” (117). This ‘dilemma’ is not only presented by the overarching choice between culture and anarchy, but also maintained by the distinction between modes of consumption (the notion of being ‘swallowed’ by the Princess distinguished from the urban consumption characterised by Hyacinth’s working class companion, Millicent). Cf. also Miranda El-Reyess. Henry James and the Culture of Consumption. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 116 Irving Howe. Politics and the Novel. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. 95. 117 Howe, Politics, 95. 118 Howe, Politics, 95. 119 Oliver Marchart. Die Politische Differenz: Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 336. 120 Eloise Knapp-Hay. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1963. 3.

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defined community.”121 In building on this approach, my analysis will stress that the political no longer constitutes a domain for ‘men’ in Conrad’s fiction. The novels feature a contestation of the ‘a-political’ nature of women’s spaces. In addition, a further qualification is required: ‘reliance on community’ does not apply equally to all political positions in the texts. That is, the narratives feature characters who uphold a ‘defined community’ for the sake of those shown to depend on it, thus shielding its beneficiaries from the collapse of their collective identities. Figures of paternalistic boundary-work impose contingent demarcations from a position temporarily neither inside nor outside the ensuing, ordered sphere. Such paradoxical topologies have been traced by Christopher GoGwilt, whose work demonstrates the assertion of a ‘Western’ tradition of national identity against the anarchists as “racialized European otherness.”122 This process connects The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes as conjoined attempts to derive clearly delineated political traditions from the “confused racial, national, and cultural origins of contested European political traditions.”123 It is the provision of an antagonism of this type (however invented) that will be shown to underlie the model of demarcation, and to be registered as an absence as soon as the anarchic fails to yield determinate figures of Otherness. In Conrad’s political imaginary, as long as the demarcation of identity and alterity is upheld, the ensuing border can, intermittently, be crossed. As a result, anarchism allows for momentary escapes from restrictive social roles. While radical politics are shown to be beyond the pale, the novels do allow for controlled experiments in temporary ‘anarchic’ re-negotiation of the self. This “evil freedom” (109) of brief excursions into the abjected is, however, offset by a renewed bolstering of demarcations and the re-entry of a controlled version of anarchist discourse into reified places of identity.124 My analysis of “functional arrangements,”125 which in Conrad’s fiction ensure the regularised production of alterity, is influenced by Avrom Fleishman (1967), who productively moved critical

121 Knapp-Hay, The Political Novels, 3. 122 Christopher Gogwilt. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. 160. 123 Gogwilt, The Invention of the West, 160. 124 Cf. Paul Hollywood. “Conrad and Anarchist Theories of Language.” Contexts for Conrad. Ed. Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, and Wieslaw Krajka. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 243–264. 256. Hollywood has traced the amenability of anarchist ideas (in their non-stereotypical, philosophical iteration) to Conrad’s aesthetic programme. For the anarchist author Henry Brewster, “as for Conrad, man’s conscious activity is a confrontation with all of the contradictions and confusions (Conrad’s ‘irreconcilable antagonisms’) inherent in his condition.” 125 Avrom Fleishman. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. 192.

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accounts of literary politics away from a then-prevalent restriction to autobiographically ‘certified’ authorial positions. This enables a more precise account of the relationship between the political novels and changing ideologies of ‘organic’ community.126 Against Fleishman’s recurring notions of a “threat of modern anomie” in the novels, the analysis will, however, stress the represented necessity of evoking such anomie in the first place.127 The imposition of an anomic effect – what Erdinast-Vulcan terms the “death of the Absolute”128 – is itself the result of political power rather than an ineffable trajectory towards modernity. Indeed, as Robert Hampson has shown, any perception of a modern breakdown of certainties is interrelated with the “direct or indirect assertion of power as the basis of individual identity.”129 Alternatively, that basis is withdrawn, resulting in an impossibility of containing anarchic anomie that initiates the second model undergirding this study, namely the state of exception.130 Critical accounts of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (cf. for example Schäffner 1997; Phillips 2003131) have restricted the radical theme to a satirical transfer of ‘anarchy’ to society as a whole. This study will, instead, present

126 In this tradition of a concern with the communal in Conrad’s fiction, Yamamoto draws attention to the destabilisation of the Western subject by Conrad’s ‘fraternities’. Kaoru Yamamoto. Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 127 Cf. Avrom Fleishman. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. 214. 128 Cf. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Cf. also Daphna Erdinast Vulcan. “Some Millennial Footnotes on Heart of Darkness.” Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. Ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 55–66. In this reading, Erdinast-Vulcan lays out “the various mechanisms of displacement, projection, or denial through which the truth transforms into a verbal or behavioral symptom” in Conrad’s fiction. “[T]he lie is a symptom of the desire to remain within the patriarchal system of the law.” (64) 129 Robert Hampson. Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1992. 166. 130 A methodological caveat for such readings is offered by Gibson, who stresses that the discourses presented in the novel should not be “identified with single characters,” since to do so “would precisely be to begin to construct the ethics of Conrad’s text around two persons understood as essences or homogenous entities.” Andrew Gibson. “Ethics and Unrepresentability in Heart of Darkness.” Conrad and Theory. Ed. Andrew Gibson and Robert Hampson. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. 113–137. 120. 131 Cf. William M. Phillips. Nightmares of Anarchy: Language and Cultural Change, 1870–1914. Lewisburg, PA and London: Bucknell UP, 2003. “G. K. Chesterton divorced anarchism from its explicit political context and expanded it into a comprehensive vision of social reality, embodying both the nihilism and the comic absurdity of modern culture.” (17–18)

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Chesterton’s work as a final restitution of a political demarcation. With Under Western Eyes and its autocratic state of exception, the corpus has reached an end point — an impossibility of demarcations that precludes identity and alterity alike. Thursday draws the opposite conclusion. Specifically, upon the disclosure of a deep-structure underlying the contingent demarcations between the “bearded, bomb-carrying nihilist”132 and the police, political contestation can proceed anew. It does so on the basis of an acceptance of the contingency of any demarcations drawn. This reconstitution of identity and alterity depends on each side being exposed to a position of absolute, non-relational Otherness that will be described as alienity.133 The model of demarcation, namely a distinction of culture and anarchy, is thus subtended by a brief, epiphanic suspension of those very distinctions.

1.3.2 Politics of Exception For all their concern with demarcation, each novel presents the point at which anarchism can no longer be abjected in order to produce a political distinction. This loss of demarcation manifests itself on two levels: with regard to politics, “strategic and conflictual struggles” no longer find an appropriate target in identifiably aberrant radicals.134 More importantly, however, the political as the very “‘rationality of a polity” recedes.135 That is, each narrative traces the loss of a transcendent ground from which, as Oliver Marchart puts it, “the functioning of politics is claimed to be derived.”136 In other words, not only do the contours of the political enemy become blurred, but the very essence of the polity – the determination against anarchy – can no longer be discerned. The resulting post-binary condition will be read as a ‘state of exception’. The analysis adapts this concept from philosophical and legal discourses to trace the loss of a sphere “governed by principles, laws of objective realities resistant to revi-

132 Helen Worthington. “Anarchy in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.” To Hell With Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature. Ed. H. G. Klaus and Stephen T. Knight. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005. 21–34. 133 Cf. Richard Rottenburg. “Social Constructivism and the Enigma of Strangeness.” The Making and Unmaking of Differences: Anthropological, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006. 27–42. 134 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 38. 135 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 38. 136 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 12.

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sion and unamenable to further social or political renegotiation.”137 Put another way, while the anarchist foil is merely a manufactured Other, it does provide the “binary opposite that the self needs in order to assert itself.”138 In the early modernist imaginary, power without such comforting assertions makes both (1) politics and (2) the political impossible. The resulting state of exception, instead, makes protagonists vulnerable to modes of control which no longer alleviate the resulting loss of agency with any imagined identity. As heterostereotypes are dissolved, they become readily apparent as discursive constructions — with the result of the erstwhile, excluded features of anarchy recurring throughout the previously stabilised collective identities. This process is initially figured as dissolution of order; yet, Seltzer (1981) is right to point out that at least in James’ fiction any unconstrained sphere of anarchy coincides with an expansion of authority. The resulting post-binary mode of coercion, however, is not a matter of direct injunctions, but rather consigns subjects to ‘self-disciplining’ in accordance with a set of implicit demands.139 Thus, as a result of the loss of political difference, what emerges is a mode of power that will be analysed as a state of exception,140 mainly following Giorgio Agamben’s adaptation of a concept derived from Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. With this juridico-political term, Agamben describes a “structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension”141 (cf. 2.2). In contrast to the first model of politics, which reasserts a topology of inside (identity) and outside (anarchist alterity), this second mode of power relegates protagonists to “[b]eing outside, and yet belonging.”142 As a result, the more a determinate position in a scheme of ‘Us vs. Them’ is suspended, the more unconstrained and

137 Marchart, Die Politische Differenz, 15. 138 Rainer Emig and Oliver Lindner. Introduction. Commodifying (Post)colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. 3–22. vii-xxiv. vii. / Cf. Jeffrey Nealon. Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998. 9. 139 Mark Seltzer. The Princess Casamassima and the Fantasy of Surveillance. NineteenthCentury Fiction 35 (1981). 506–534. For an account of self-disciplining as a mode of power, cf. Edward Wray-Bliss. “Ethical Philosophy, Organization Studies and Good Suspicions.” The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies. Ed. Raza Mir et al. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. 66–84. Practices of subject formation are “folded back from the outside into the interior of the subject. [. . .] The individual comes to internalise the ideal of the self and the concomitant ethical values, engaging in a multitude of self-disciplining practices.” (61) 140 Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 141 Agamben, State of Exception, 3. 142 Agamben, State of Exception, 35.

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absolute the concomitant reach of executive power. In the novels’ version of such production of undecidability, characters are reduced to ‘bare life’ at the end of a process that deprives them of any residual political identity. Precedent for the reading of literary texts in terms of such deprivation of an identity/alterity split is provided by Agamben’s own texts, which level discursive hierarchies between the philosophical and the literary, as Monroe (2009) has demonstrated.143 In a similar vein of literary complements to states of exception, De Boever (2012) makes a compelling case for “aesthetic decisions” that mirror an undemarcated, extralegal space as presented in the narrated world.144 Expanding the state of exception to a postcolonial context, Keya Ganguly (2001) has traced situations in which “value inheres, or more precisely, is remaindered in, the distance between the two: norm and exception.”145 Similarly, this study will argue that the early modernist manifestation of such ‘remainders’ consists in the production of undecidability, as a result of which protagonists are perennially unsure whether they are included or excluded from a legal framework. Both within and outside of the law, the ‘distance’ that Ganguly analyses manifests itself as a paradoxical topology, in which the outside is included as an occluded, extralegal supplement, as a result of which protections assumed by protagonists turn out to be under erasure. Tracing such constellations, Haines (2012) and Atkinson (2015) draw on Agamben’s limit figures to offer biopolitical readings of Conrad’s fiction. Both critics trace the ‘distance between norm and exception’ and the paradoxical topology of inclusion and exclusion represented in the novels.146 Whereas Haines’ focus, however, is on

143 Jonathan Monroe. “Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis.” The European Legacy 14 (2009). 599–611. 604. By means of their “elliptical, paratactic strategies,” Agamben’s texts enact “a refusal to become anyone’s or any ideology’s, any Idea’s example.” This is a necessary corollary to Agamben’s own theories of the ‘example’. In his oeuvre, the exemplary is isomorphic to the ‘inclusive exclusion’ that characterises Agamben’s figures suspended in extralegal states of exception: “Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity [. . .] [T]he proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds.” Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 9. 144 Arne De Boever. States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel: Martel, Eugenides, Coetzee, Sebald. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. 4. 145 Keya Ganguly. States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 120. 146 Christian Haines. “Life in Crisis: The Biopolitical Ambivalence of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Criticism 54 (2012). 85–115. / William Atkinson. “The Elephant in the Text: Toward a Post-Humanist Reading of Heart of Darkness.” Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad. Ed. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2015. 59–70.

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the narratives’ imagination of “forms of social life irreducible to entropic dissipation,”147 this study will trace the reduction of characters to the status of bare life, with no discernible ‘form of life’ remaining. To pinpoint the emergence of the state of exception from waning political difference, post-anarchism offers an instructive theoretical framework. Saul Newman and the tradition of thought loosely organised under this moniker offers some helpful specification of the ways in which a “place of power” – an affirmation of “essentialist ideas and political categories”148 – is erased in the political novels. For Newman, as well as May (1994) or Rousselle/Evren (2011), such a ‘place’ is constituted by the notion that “beneath surface differences, there lies one true identity or character.”149 According to post-anarchism, this place-bound, essentialist ascription has to be dismantled in order to facilitate collective action “more local and diffuse than the large-scale politics that is better suited to grand narratives.”150 Such a ‘diffuse’ politics and its diffraction of ‘grand narratives’ is, however, shown to be far from liberating in the political novels. While post-anarchism anticipates the emergence of a non-essentialist politics, early modernist narrative can only account for such a shift as a loss of certainty on the part of individuals who are subsequently all the more amenable to control. In the wake of a collapsing ‘place’ of power – literalised in the texts as topographical settings of stabilised identity – characters are divested of their autonomy. Figures such as Muniment in Casamassima, Vladimir in The Secret Agent, and the entire autocratic regime in Under Western Eyes are shown to depend on such dissolution of ‘places of power’. They replace the illusion of essentialist verities upheld in demarcated places with open, undetermined spaces in which no difference can be drawn whatsoever. The post-anarchist position, when mapped onto the novels’ political imagination, thus yields a precise account of a loss of certainty. This is not, however, presented as a necessary modern loss of ‘grand narratives’, but is induced and accelerated from undisclosed authoritative positions. Post-anarchist thought, thus, allows us to trace the movement from an imposition of boundaries to a state of exception in which a position (a ‘place’) eludes determination.

147 Haines, “Life in Crisis,” 87. 148 Saul Newman. From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Plymouth: Lexington, 2007. 2. 149 Newman, Anti-Authoritarianism, 13. / Todd May. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. 61. / Duane Rousselle and Süreyyya Evren (ed.). Post-Anarchism: A Reader. London and New York: Pluto, 2011. 150 May, Poststructuralist Anarchism, 95.

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As the state of exception dispenses with order, anarchy, and the border separating the two, the analysis will pay particular attention to the possibility of narrating the ensuing borderlessness. Specifically, the post-binary mode of power will be shown to suspend what Bruner has analysed as the necessity of ‘canonicity and breach’ for the presentation of narrative events.151 In other words, if no border between ordered and anarchic spaces is crossed, eventful progression of the plot stalls. What is more, ‘literary impressionism’ (cf. Watt 1979; Peters 2004) will be shown to emerge in the context of the state of exception as a “zone of anomie in which all legal determinations – and above all the very distinction between private and public – are deactivated.”152 It is the failure of political demarcation that leads to impressionist form, in which, as per Peters, “individuality or heterogeneity cannot exist, and boundaries between self and Other not only blur but become essentially nonexistent.”153 The question of narrative transmission, thus, is not neutral, but rather conditioned by the status of the transition from the first (demarcationbased) to the second (exceptional) mode of power. Whereas occasional ‘zerofocalised’154 interludes in each novel preserve the possibility of a classificatory differentiation between arbiters of identity and anarchist alterity, the emergence of post-binary power coincides with an impending uncertainty regarding the question ‘who sees’.155 The reader, that is to say, shares in the characters’ inability to survey the political field. As a result of this narrative equivalent to exception, the diegetic reality of the anarchist sphere can no longer be ascertained. Anarchism hovers between limitation (as a failing conspiracy, a charade of revolutionary chic, or pseudo-anarchist discontents) and expansion. In the latter sense of anarchism out of bounds, the characteristics previously consigned to an anarchic outside become dispersed throughout the respective storyworld and narrative as a whole. The analysis can, thus, not restrict itself to the diegetic state of exception, but will investigate the degree to which the reader is enabled to reconstitute the certainties that are suspended in the narrated world.

151 Jerome Bruner: “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991). 1–21. / Jurij Lotman. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. / Wolf Schmid. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 17–35. 152 Agamben, State of Exception, 50. 153 John G. Peters. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 68. 154 “Zero focalisation refers to the heterodiegetic narrator who does not limit him or herself to the ‘real-life’ and ‘at the time’ restricted view and knowledge of the agents.” Alun Munslow. Narrative and History. London: Springer, 2019. 155 Gérard Genette. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. 186.

2 Political Literature and the Demarcation of Alterity Whether it is conceived as a collapse of transcendental order, a loss of a teleological model of time, or a sense of accelerating social change: the transition from Victorianism to Modernism has frequently been presented as a shift from residual certainties to a sense of crisis. While the terms of this change differ, the overall effect, in Erdinast-Vulcan’s terms, is the replacement of a “cosmos made to man’s measure” with a “universe which is alien, meaningless, and indifferent.”1 A collapse of social order and an accompanying loss of an interpretable world indeed loom large in the fiction of Conrad, James, and Chesterton. Rather than taking a side in a gigantomachy of competing myths of ‘order’ and their ‘dissolution’, however, their political fiction in the late 19th and early 20th century presents and evaluates the possibility of establishing and maintaining such a distinction in the first place. Rather than responding to a shock of change (modernity) with a turn to innovative literary forms (modernism), this strand of ‘early modernist’ fiction ascertains whether a sphere of historicity and certainty can be set apart from a condensed sphere of fragmentation, dispersal, and accelerated social change. That is, these narratives feature both elements of the cultural expression of modernity singled out by Armstrong: as a “protest at the reign of instrumental reason and market culture,” they feature attempts to “preserve or create a space for individuality, creativity and aesthetic value.”2 The texts that will be analysed under the moniker of ‘early modernist political fiction’ accomplish this by making the differentiation between both responses – ‘preservation’ and ‘creation’ – the feature around which both their plots and their narrative strategies are organised. The narratives are concerned with the possibility of ‘preserving’ an anti-modern sphere rooted in a semblance of the past, which features conspicuously interpretable signs of the world ‘made to man’s measure’. At the same time, this preservation cannot be accomplished without the ‘creation’ of an “alternative ideological space.”3 That is, each of the novels features the attempt to set apart a contingent ‘preserved’ order against a shock of change — which, by being abjected from the contained, ordered, anti-modern sphere becomes controllable and localisable. If, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, ‘all 1 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. 1. 2 Tim Armstrong. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2005, 4. 3 Armstrong, Modernism, 4. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-002

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that is solid melts into air’, such dissolution of “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices” is projected onto an anarchist exterior. This allows for forms of social organisation and forms of narration to be exempted from the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”4 In its deployment as the outside of order, literary anarchism can take on the very characteristics opposed by its historical movements and philosophies.5 It is this recasting as an outside, functioning both as a foil for the determination of identity and the occasion for experimental ventures into the diegetically radical and formally diffractive, that is associated with anarchism and the radical theme in each of these texts. As an encapsulation not only of a set of explicit radical programmes, but also of a more general sense of fragmentation and crisis, both of narrative representation and represented social forms, anarchism is, however, not presented as a straightforward ‘objective correlative’ to this loss of order. Rather, each of the novels presents multiple, intersecting strategies of constructing anarchism as a bearer of the shock of change. What is at issue is not the containment of anarchy, but the possibility of producing a communicable image of Otherness in order to disavow the fragmentation at the heart of the topographical (London, the domestic), topological (inside), and semantic (cultural and aesthetic) spaces of identity. Thus, at the same time as it tracks how such a distinction can be drawn and represented, political fiction foregrounds the contingency and ideological presuppositions of a split of order and its obverse. This chapter will present the theoretical and methodological background that is required to account for this redoubled strategy. Instead of relying on a recoverable ordered ‘cosmos’, early modernist political fiction presents attempts to establish a residual, materially reified space in which truth claims can be made at all. Only within the confines of a cordonedoff space is it possible to conceive of a cohesive social order. As a metonymy of residual certainties, a temporary sphere of this kind enables those included

4 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Trans. and ed. Frederick Engels. Chicago: Kerr, 1910. 16. 5 Cf. David Graeber. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh, Oakland, and Baltimore: AK, 2009. According to Graeber’s working definition, “‘anarchism’ is best thought of, not as any one of these things – not as a vision, but neither quite as an attitude or set of practices. It is, rather, best thought of as that very movement back and forth between these three. [. . .] It’s when the three reinforce each other – when a revulsion against oppression causes people to try to live their lives in a more self-consciously egalitarian fashion, when they draw on those experiences to produce visions of a more just society, when those visions, in turn, cause them to see existing social arrangements as even more illegitimate and obnoxious – that one can begin to talk about anarchism.” (215)

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within it to assume its contiguity with a collective identity. In view of the tenuousness of such models of order, each of the novels presents a rationale for valuing social utility over epistemological validity. Any act of drawing a distinction between order and an inchoate environment is exposed as contingent. At the same time, the function of this boundary as the outer limit of social cohesion is privileged over a dismantling of its foundational assumptions. For those shown to depend on collective identity, maintaining certainty requires obfuscation: of the material conditions on which that certainty rests, of the interests it serves, and of the power imbalances upon which it relies. Hence, to use T. E. Hulme’s early modernist formulation, the novels are concerned with the possibility of preserving “doctrines, which are thought of not as doctrines, but as FACTS.”6 Such doctrines, however a-political their eventual formulation, are presented as distinctly political. The ensuing model is broadly oriented towards what Marchart calls the ‘dissociative’ strand of political theory. According to this style of thought, what serves as a “constitutive political principle of a given community (of any association) is a dissociative operation: antagonism.”7 Rather than grand conflicts between large-scale political units (nation states, empires, coalitions etc.), this dissociation emerges from within such entities. The seeming consistency of a state, for instance, is striated by internal antagonisms, which fold “the statal or outward friend/enemy distinction into the inner sphere of a given unity.”8 For the narratives, this means that characters who are immersed in stabilising myths of social coherence are shown to take for granted variations of essentialist ‘identity’. At the same time, the reader is made privy to the ‘dissociations’ that undergird such a shared set of social norms. After all, a communal ‘inside’ cannot function in isolation — it requires the expulsion and abjection of a set of characteristics that cannot be accepted within its boundaries.9 In all of the texts under consideration, this ‘constitutive outside’ is marked as radical, revolutionary and, in particular, anarchist. The choice of anarchism as an exteriority beyond the pale constrains the range of truths that can be asserted within the bounded sphere from which it is excluded. After all, despite the self-conception of splendid isolation, any construct of identity has to

6 T. E. Hulme. “A Notebook.” Collected Writings. Ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 419–456. 446. 7 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 41. 8 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 42. 9 Cf. Caroline Levine. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2015. 26. For an account of ‘antiformalist’ theories concerned with the “political implications of unity and totality,” cf. ibid., 25.

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refer to its disavowed outside, in a process of constantly reiterating its difference from the broad range of characteristics associated with supposed anarchy beyond the pale. The dissociative political model traced in the novels conceives of demarcation relationally.10 That is to say, in order to disavow its contingent character and assert its foundational certainty, the identity-based community emerges less as a difference than a process of constant differentiation. Accordingly, as Jeffrey Nealon puts it, identity is structured like a language: “we can only recognize the so-called plenitude of a particular identity insofar as it differentiates itself from (and thereby necessarily contains a trace of) the ostensible nonplenitude of difference.”11 Hence the crucial status of alterity: the identitarian sign “does not have meaning, but receives meaning in its contradistinctive relation with other signs.”12 In the following, this recursive semiosis, by means of which alterity is required to bring forth identity, will be aligned with postfoundational political theory. This strand of political thought recognises the necessity of foundational claims while simultaneously laying bare the contingency of any structure of justification – ‘grounds’ – instituting social order. As communal identity is established, thus, any “supplementary ground withdraws at the very ‘moment’ in which it institutes the social. As a result, society will always be in search for an ultimate ground, while the maximum that can be achieved will be a fleeting and contingent grounding by way of politics – a plurality of partial grounds.”13 In my analysis, I propose a model of demarcation in which such ‘partial grounds’ depend on the production of figures of disapprobation, and on the continued gesture towards stereotypes of ‘the anarchist’. From a post-foundational perspective, such reduction of complexity is unavoidable if what is at stake is the continued possibility of internal “attempts to

10 Keller, Catherine. “Undoing and Unknowing: Judith Butler in Process.” Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion. Ed. Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Deena Lin. Lanham/ Boulder/New York/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2012. 43–60. As Catherine Keller puts it (in an analysis of relationality in Judith Butler): “Relationality is not just the sum of relata. The ‘you’ and the ‘I’ can be differentiated from each other only in their relation. Ontologically speaking: difference is relation.” (49) 11 Jeffrey Nealon. Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998. 4. 12 Ernst van Alphen. “The Other Within.” Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others on Society and Scholarship. Ed. Raymond Corbey and Joep Leersen. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1991. 1–16. 2. 13 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 8.

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establish foundational norms that lie beyond power.”14 The narrated attempt to enable the continuation of this process, with Bleiker, “is not to do away with foundations as such, but to acknowledge their contingent character, to illuminate what they authorize, exclude and foreclose.”15 One of the crucial features of anarchism as alterity is its ephemeral status. Since the radical stereotype spans a discursive field from the individual degenerative body to world-spanning conspiracies, anarchist alterity poses a problem of disavowal. The sheer scope attributed to a radical movement which (historically) remained a marginal phenomenon in Britain leads to fears of its ubiquity.16 The resultant notion of breakdown can be described as ‘anarchy’, wresting the term from its positive usage as the ‘highest form of order’ and emphasizing instead its negative connotations of disorder and chaos.17 This emergence of uncontrollable anarchy once controllable anarchist stereotypes are relinquished shows the difficulties of maintaining the ‘dissociative operation’. Despite the clichés established about it, anarchism threatens to exceed the friend/enemy distinction within which it was to be confined. As a result, the transfer of this distinction to other domains, such as morality or aesthetics, likewise becomes tenuous whenever anarchism fails to remain consigned to the side of the ‘enemy’.18 If “[e]ssentialism is how a network works when it protects its foundations,” as Fuchs puts it, the novels place an expiry date on any “closure of a network to isolate and shelter its basic certainties and natural kinds.”19 The demarcation setting apart the ‘plenitude’ of communal identity is perennially on the verge of collapse. The result of anarchism losing its purchase as an expedient foil, however, is not figured as a mere descent into disorder. Instead, the disruption of the demarcation of identity and alterity allows the novels to conceptualise modes of power that no longer provide communal certainties at all. What appeared as a shared sense of self is exposed as diffracted interests that only temporarily came into alignment. At this point, a surprising twist occurs: rather than descending

14 Roland Bleiker. “Globalizing Political Theory.” What is Political Theory? Ed. Stephen K. White and J. Donald Moon. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage, 2004. 124–144. 133. 15 Bleiker, “Globalizing Political Theory,” 133. 16 Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, 9. 17 As Goodway puts it regarding William Godwin: “Like many anarchists to come, he considered anarchy to be the highest form of order, contrasting it with the disorder and chaos of the present.” Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, 6. 18 Cf. Marchart, Post-Foundational, 41. 19 Stephan Fuchs. Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2001. 17.

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into chaotic anarchy in the manner anticipated under the conditions of political difference, the exertion of power continues after the end of the friend/enemy distinction. Such a mode of power after the political functions in the manner of a ‘state of exception’. This concept combines the dissolution of certainties with a loss of agency and new scope for coercion. Specifically, as a result of the suspension of identitarian assurances, protagonists are forced to act in accordance with implicit injunctions that never come to the fore as laws, norms, or explicit commands. Coercive power amidst the ruins of delimited identity, what is more, makes it impossible to identify a distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. In other words, the subject fails to determine who he or she is not. The result is an indeterminate status in which traits that previously (just barely) allowed for salvaged identity are exposed to the permanent possibility of being suspended. This chapter will delineate both models – (1) post-foundational demarcation and (2) the state of exception – with particular reference to changing conceptions of anarchist alterity. Political theories do not, however, furnish a template to be imposed on the novels. The aim is, in Becker-Leckrone’s terms, “to regard the relationship between theory and literature as one not of application, but of implication.”20 Keeping this co-implication in mind is already advisable in view of the areas in which literature and theory overlap: the philosophical models are concretised in micro-narratives while, conversely, the novels offer implicit and explicit political models. What is more, attending to the interconnection of theory and literature also allows for an analytical approach to another type of ‘implication’. After all, although the political novels self-reflexively expose the threatening ‘anarchist’ as an expedient invention, they also contribute to the perpetuation of those very stereotypes. The narratives, thus, participate in the ‘regulated practice’ of foreclosing on alternative forms of politics.21 At the same time, the narrative mediation of political alterity marks the limits of what, in Nussbaum’s terms, can be “represented as something” — with the ‘as’ not exhausted in the “paraphrasable” content of the respective political model.22 Political models and literary style diverge on this point: the novels stage the continued necessity of demarcation, yet, at the

20 Megan Becker-Leckrone. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2005. 16. 21 ‘Regulated practice’ is part of Foucault’s triadic definition of discourse, “treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.” Foucault, Archaeology, 90. 22 Martha Nussbaum. “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature.” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. 3–53. 5.

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same time, associate its collapse with aesthetic innovation. The end of differential politics may be catastrophic in the storyworld, but it also occasions what we might call ‘modernist’ form, namely narrative fragmentation and impressionist style. Throughout, the following elaboration of the two major political models in early modernism (demarcation and the state of exception) will pay particular attention to such connections between political theory and narrative mediation.

2.1 Post-Foundational Demarcation In 1894, a judge found an argumentative loophole to rule in favour of the extradition of the French anarchist Théodule Meunier, who was accused of bomb attacks on the continent. Whereas British extradition treaties had a “clause in them specifically exempting political crimes,” that “little difficulty was easily overcome by a clever judge who ruled that because anarchism was against all politics, it could not in logic be called a political creed.”23 This footnote in legal history hints at a recurring function assigned to the political radical in the late 19th and early 20th century: it exempts anarchism from political contestation. Rather than a position in a narrowly antagonistic conflict between competing interests, the anarchist opposition to coercive authority as such cannot be couched in the legal framework for political refugees and, especially, political crime. Anarchists, that is to say, are detached from any recoverable political standpoint.24 Whereas historical anarchism put forward elaborate theories of political change, the judges allege irrationality and resentment, an almost ‘motiveless malignity’.25 It is in this sense that libertarian socialism stands in for radical politics tout court: the term can be seen to “indicate an unbridgeable gap between two levels which cannot be mediated or dialectized via the logic of

23 Cf. Bernard Porter. Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1992. 116. 24 As Pyle shows, “[t]he ruling denied benefit of the political offense exception to a terrorist – one who deliberately killed and injured innocent people for symbolic reasons. [. . .] However, the wantonness of the bombing was not what the court focused on. Rather, the justices defined opposition to all government as ‘non-political’.” Christopher H. Pyle. Extradition, Politics, and Human Rights. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. 107. 25 To use Coleridge’s influential description of Shakespeare’s Iago: “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity – how awful it is.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Notes on Othello.” Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare & Some Other Old Poets & Dramatists. London: Dent, 1914. 169–176. 172.

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either level.”26 In Marchart’s terms, anarchism is positioned against ‘politics’ (in the sense invoked by the 1894 ruling) not “in a relation of exteriority but in a relation of radical exteriority.”27 It is this non-negotiable position of alterity, defined as it is by a simultaneous removal of traits (‘anarchists are not political’) and an expansion of its scope (‘they oppose governmental authority’) that makes it possible for anarchism to stand in for other forms of dissent. Upon being defined as ‘radical’, Fenians, Russian nihilists, feminists or anti-colonial activists can be tarred with the same brush.28 The result is an equivalence of ‘radical exteriority’. The judge’s ruling thus points to the crucial function of demarcation in the political discourses of the late 19th and early 20th century. An acceptable political antagonism can be defined only against the background of a political Other beyond contestation. Not only is anarchism excluded from a hegemonic conception of politics, but it also has to be assigned a form that brings to the fore its resistance to normal procedures. Consequently, what is required to refashion anarchism as a radical Other is, paradoxically, a symbolic manifestation of its unsymbolisable status. It is the possibility of a distinction of this kind, between a set of norms and its outside, that forms the first model of politics negotiated in the early modernist texts.

2.1.1 Demarcating Alterity Models of demarcation raise the question by which criteria we can distinguish “matters that are political or public and those that are non-political or private”29 in the first place. This study proceeds from the hypothesis that it is political difference that gives rise to the notion of de-politicised ‘matters’.30 That

26 Oliver Marchart. “Politics and the Ontological Difference: on the ‘Strictly Philosophical’ in Laclau’s Work.” Laclau: A Critical Reader. Ed. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 54–72. 58. 27 Marchart, “Ontological Difference,” 58. 28 Mulry notes that Conrad’s mixing of ‘radical’ groups “ is entirely consistent with his fellow novelists.” Like them, “he conflates and confuses the iconography of the political groups he is writing about.” Mulry, Joseph Conrad, 86. 29 Terence Ball. Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Thought. Oxford: Clarendon, 2003. 43. 30 Depoliticisation broadly means “a transformation of distinct political ideologies into a set of more or less distinct administrative technologies based on widespread consensus as to what kind of goals one should attain.” Cf. Ulf Himmelstrand. “A Theoretical and Empirical Approach to Depoliticization and Political Involvement.” Acta Sociologica 6 (1962). 83–110. 83. Johan van der Walt describes as the main function of the friend-enemy-decision its fantasy of

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is, only if contestation and antagonism have been expelled and become a matter of irrational, radical, or otherwise disavowed anarchists can a communal sphere be adumbrated against this outside. Defined negatively as the obverse of anarchy, that community need not foreground its political tenets. To sustain the manufactured common sense, it suffices if morality, order, or even aesthetic appreciation give rise to ‘identity’ as opposed to determinate interests pursued in a contested terrain. By placing the overall alterity of libertarian socialism front and center, anarchist alterity is, thus, conceived as a crucial component of the effacement of antagonisms. What emerges from these strategies is a semi-autonomous sphere – often a concrete place reified by topological and topographical boundaries – imagined as a bulwark against encroaching anarchy.31 According to Marchart, such a drawing of a difference necessitates “symbolic gestures which power performs as against its outside. And if this institution/foundation of society takes place on the symbolic level, then it necessarily has to be staged.”32 The impending dissolution of order presented in the novels – and recurring in journalistic and popular literary accounts – is connected to impasses in this ‘staging’ of anarchism, rendering it a limit case for the demarcation of alterity. In presenting the differential ‘institution/foundation of society’, the novels take up and negotiate a broader discourse. In Michael Titzmann’s terms, the narratives perpetuate, yet also question a “system of thought and argument abstracted from a set of texts which is characterized firstly by an object of speech, secondly by regularities of speech and thirdly by interdiscursive relationships

imposing control upon a plurality of political contenders: “But the friend-enemy-decision is in another evident respect also exactly that which sustains unitary political totalities. The friendenemy decision effects an externalisation of plurality that sustains internal unity. [. . .] It is the enemy that unites a people.” Johan van der Walt: The Horizontal Effect: Revolution and the Question of Sovereignty. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 314. 31 Cf. Wolfgang Eßbach. “Gegenwart, Epoche, Felder und Legitimität: Modi moderner und postmoderner Anschauungen.” ‘Nicht außerhalb der Welt’: Theologie und Soziologie. Ed. Magnus Striet. Freiburg, Basel and Wien: Herder, 2014. 33–60. 41. Eßbach presents demarcation as a specifically modern requirement. Modernity coincides with an incapacity of determining any one foundational category; as functional areas are decoupled, “partial systems are differentiated, which know their specific view and hear only noise outside of their confines.” My trans. (41) 32 My trans. Orig. quote: “Dieses Enigma des Chiasmus zwischen innen und außen eröffnet sich in den symbolischen Gesten, welche die Macht gegenüber dem Außen vollzieht. [. . .] Und wenn die Instituierung/Fundierung von Gesellschaft auf der symbolischen Ebene vonstatten geht, dann wird sie notwendigerweise inszeniert werden müssen.” Oliver Marchart, Differenz, 131.

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with other discourses.”33 Accordingly, this study is concerned with a system of depreciating anarchism in accordance with the cultural knowledge of early modernism; with the discourse-specific epistemological premises organising its use as a marker of Otherness; and, finally, with the role of this ‘regularity of political speech’ amidst other discourses in the cultural system.34 In the corpus of novels analysed, this last aspect of its interrelation with other, non-literary discourses is crucial, since the position of the anarchist Other shows considerable variation depending on the cultural knowledge deployed. After all, political alterity enables a whole host of strategies of disapprobation. These range from the organising distinction of culture and anarchy (James) through theories of autocracy and degeneration (Conrad), to, ultimately, quasi-theological recuperations of anarchic disorder and divine law (Chesterton). In each of these strategies, the construction of a bearer of radical alterity is paramount. As Chantal Mouffe argues, a “world where the we/they distinctions would have been overcome,” by contrast, is “based on flawed premises.”35 The narratives, for one, provide an exacerbated version of the contention that politics require antagonism. Ultimately, for James, Conrad, and Chesterton any levelling of distinctions would lead to identity inertly assumed rather than actively constructed. A ‘world’ of impartial procedures, deliberation, and political projects peacefully vying for hegemony can be granted to limited, demarcated spheres, which (with latent paternalism) are seen to require such post-political, non-antagonistic eradication of the “conflictual dimension in social life.”36 This stabilisation, however, requires a distinction drawn between such a sphere and its outside, as well as a re-entry of controllable signs of alterity into the spaces assigned to identity. An emblematic instance of a marker of controlled Otherness re-entering a place of collective selfhood in this way is provided by the unthreatening, saintly anarchist ‘ticket-of-leave apostle’ in The Secret Agent, who can safely preach class struggle, ensconced in a salon that prides itself on its deliberative openness. This liberal sense of a superseded

33 My trans. Orig. quote: “Diskurs ist ein System des Denkens und Argumentierens, das von einer Textmenge abstrahiert ist und das erstens durch einen Redegegenstand, zweitens durch Regularitäten der Rede, drittens durch interdiskursive Relationen zu anderen Diskursen charakterisiert ist.” Michael Titzmann. “Skizze einer integrativen Literaturgeschichte und ihres Ortes in einer Systematik der Literaturwissenschaft.” Modelle des literarischen Strukturwandels. Ed. Michael Titzmann. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991. 395–438. 407. For an account of gendered conflict as an interdiscursively effective image domain in Henry James’ ‘realism’, cf. Jutta Zimmermann. Dialog, Dialogizität, Interdiskursivität: Die Geschlechterfrage im amerikanischen realistischen Roman. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006. 34 Cf. Titzmann. “Skizze,” 407. 35 Chantal Mouffe. On the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 2. 36 Mouffe, Political, 4.

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we/they opposition, however, is dependent on a more fundamental, antagonistic dimension negotiated outside its bounds.37 Thus, the perceived supersession of the ‘dissociative’ dimension of politics hinges on ideological mystification and the occlusion of the conflictual lines manifestly drawn. It is thus relational alterity – the Other seen from the vantage point of the normative – that will be shown to form the thematic centre of the novels under consideration. With Bröckling et al., a “heuristic of the Other of order” thus placed outside of political rationality “implies the recursive instruction to analyse statements regarding the order they entail and to recover their respective Other. What is posited as order, in which way is it posited as such, and what type of linguistic devices evoke it?”38 In a similar vein, the analysis will show that the novels offer second-order evaluations of the first-order differentiations asserted by the protagonists. This is made possible by a position outside the confines of an extant, yet failing, mode of ‘positing order’, an overview which political fiction reserves for exceptional protagonists or, intermittently, the narrator. It is a disclosure of the confines of a given order, an understanding that said order is at one and the same time contingent and stabilising, that initiates the literary equivalent to Bröckling’s ‘heuristic of the Other of order’. From a vantage point of this kind, the disavowed sphere of Otherness can briefly be associated with alternative modes of identity formation which are unconstrained by conventions, propriety — and by the very identity early modernist characters otherwise profess. This revelling in political alterity finds a whole host of complements in the narratives: from James’ Princess engaging in radical ‘slumming’ to Conrad’s policeman dressing up as a man of the people or Chesterton’s hero revelling in the anarchist underground. This, to take up Bröckling’s last point, involves a set of linguistic (and non-linguistic, material) ‘devices’ which offer an alternative to the staid certainties of a normative sphere. Such thought of the Other, however, is limited to the duration of a ‘temporary autonomous zone’. According to Hakim Bey, a zone of this kind, which diffracts dichotomies of self and Other, “unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control.”39 In early modernism, this thought from the outside is

37 Cf. Mouffe, Political, 14. 38 Ulrich Bröckling, Christiane Dries, Matthias Leanza, and Tobias Schlechtriemen. “Das Andere der Ordnung denken: Eine Perspektivverschiebung.” Das Andere der Ordnung: Theorien des Exzeptionellen. Ed. Ulrich Bröckling et al. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. 9–52. 19. My trans. Orig. quote: “Die Heuristik des Anderen der Ordnung impliziert die rekursive Anweisung, Aussagen auf ihren auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen liegenden Ordnungsgehalt hin zu lesen und dabei nach dem jeweils Anderen zu fragen: Was wird als Ordnung, als geordnet postuliert, auf welche Weise und mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln?” 39 Hakim Bey. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Seattle: Pacific, 2011. 71.

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only ever a limited indulgence. Each novel ultimately renounces the liberating excess of the radical sphere. Immersion in the ‘rejectamenta’ of bounded identity is only ever temporary. Apart from these limited excursions into the denigrated sphere of radical politics, the dissolution of boundaries is presented as a perpetual risk in this strand of literary political thought. The consequences of failing distinctions are shown to go beyond the loss of markers of collective identity. Rather, the breakdown of collective identity affects the very possibility of speech and interpretation (in the storyworld) and description (on the level of narrative transmission). As a consequence of the inability to project unwelcome characteristics upon disavowed radicals, protagonists are thrust into recursive attempts to reconstitute order. Since this pursuit of an organising structure is figured as hierarchical, it involves an appeal to a purported figure of sovereign authority, imaginatively invested with the capacity to reconstitute a sense of self. This desire for an authoritative restoration of order, however, remains unfulfilled. Instead of finally being assigned a place from up on high, the characters are confronted with the absence of the imagined “plenitude of a particular identity.”40 In seeking an authoritative reconstitution of demarcated identity, protagonists are instead deprived of their vaunted sense of self. Whoever seeks hierarchy as a ground of communal belonging, then, “assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”41 It is against the background of this coercive indeterminacy that the novels motivate and justify attempts to maintain “regularities of speech”42 about anarchism that make it a determinate ‘object of speech’.43 At least the anarchist can be figured as a force impinging from the outside. However elusive identity proves, anarchism still allows for the the outer limit of a collective self to be adumbrated. ‘Anarchism’ – as a set of externalised stereotypes guaranteeing a bounded identity – is, thus, presented as a necessary component of classificatory order. It is maintained particularly against the backdrop of alternative models of nonbinary power which, while no longer requiring alterity, are far more coercive than any differential polity could ever be. At the same time, however, the loss of demarcation gives rise to what Marjorie Perloff has termed the ‘poetics of

40 Nealon, Alterity Politics, 4. 41 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage: 1995. 202. 42 Titzmann, “Skizze,” 407. “Regularitäten der Rede.” 43 Titzmann. “Skizze,” 407. In the original a “Redegegenstand.”

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indeterminacy’ of modernism. More than a thematic motif, indeterminacy becomes a “compositional rather than referential” concern, a shift “from signification to the play of signifiers” in which the “referent becomes increasingly inaccessible.”44 In early modernist fiction, it is a poetics of this type that is warded off by dint of its association with the anarchist theme. If, in other words, the ‘play of signifiers’ can be consigned to a threatening Other, indeterminacy can be taken to refer to one radical ideology rather than modernity as a whole. Such a ‘compositional rather than referential’ poetics is, for instance, invoked in descriptions of the radical underground in Casamassima, which culminates in images of revolution offering a veritable anarchist counter-aesthetic. By constituting anarchism as alterity, thus, artistic experiments can be contained in a depreciated aesthetico-political outside. In addition to being beyond the understanding of protagonists dependent on identity, this containment of indeterminacy allows the novels to delve into a ‘poetics of indeterminacy’ while maintaining plausible deniability: after all, according to this strategy, it is only anarchism that gives rise to disorienting, radically new aesthetics — not society as a whole.

2.1.2 Instituting Foundations Approaches that share a post-foundationalist outlook provide an apt theoretical framework for the analysis of such demarcation of a contingent, yet necessary sphere of cultural identity. The underlying structure of post-foundationalism can be formulated negatively, since its outlook is defined against a foundationalist and an anti-foundationalist perspective, respectively. The structural affinities with the literary acts of demarcation can be demonstrated on the basis of a brief recapitulation of these rival terms. As per van Huysteen, a foundationalist approach, to begin with, proceeds from the “thesis that all our beliefs can be justified by appealing to some site of knowledge that is self-evident or indubitable.”45 Such reliance on ‘evidential support systems’ is decisively withdrawn in each of the novels. As The Secret Agent will show, foundationalist certainty can be performed initially. After all, the narrator provides an assured taxonomy of anarchist deviance: the “ticket-ofleave apostle” or the “old terrorist” (32) are presented as types adhering to their allotted roles. These knowledge claims, however, are destabilised immediately.

44 Marjorie Perloff. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999. 23. 45 J. Wentzel van Huysteen. Introduction. Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmanns, 1997. 1–8. 2.

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Instead of self-evident traits written on the body of the protagonist, the alleged anarchist features are brought into circulation, appearing throughout the novel in an aleatory manner. At the same time, no new grounds for the identification of aberrant political Otherness become readily apparent to compensate for that loss of taxonomical certainty. If foundationalism is brought up short, neither is non- or anti-foundationalism presented as a viable alternative. This second perspective denies the possibility of grounding belief-systems in unassailable foundations at all. It proceeds to “argue instead that all our beliefs together form part of a groundless web of interrelated beliefs.”46 While closer to the early modernist outlook than the mere assumption of an underlying, foundational truth claim, political fiction cannot quite be aligned with a wholesale “incredulity towards metanarratives” and a dispersal of the “metanarrative apparatus of legitimation” in “clouds of narrative language elements.”47 On the contrary, to refer to Conrad once more, his novels trace the intricacies of an entire ‘apparatus of legitimation’ designed to construct the anarchist as a political criminal. This naturalisation of the self-created stereotype, crucially, also applies to the very figures involved in setting it up in the first place. Those maintaining the ‘apparatus’ of alterity, in turn, engage in acts of recursive selfinterpellation. Stanley Fish specifies that according to the anti-foundationalist hypothesis, it “is not that there are no foundations, but that whatever foundations there are (and there are always some) have been established by persuasion, that is, in the course of argument or counter-argument on the basis of examples and evidence that are themselves cultural and contextual.”48 This, too, falls short for early modernist literature, especially the claim to a development by means of argument and deliberation. In the political imaginary of James, Conrad, and Chesterton, successful foundations are no longer up for debate after they have been posited and materially reified. It is true, then, that the establishment of alterity and its identitarian obverse cannot take recourse to non-inferential justifications in early modernism. At the same time, however, the act of drawing a distinction between two radically unequal political spaces allows for the simulation (rather than Fish’s argumentative deliberation) of foundational claims — but only and exclusively on the side of identity. As long as the demarcation holds, belief in a privileged epistemic status can be sustained. It is this institution of foundations that allows, firstly, for

46 Van Huysteen, Postfoundationalist, 3. 47 Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979. xxiv. 48 Stanley Fish. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1989. 29.

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“beliefs which are justified independently of any inferential relationship to any other beliefs,” and on which, secondly, “all other justified beliefs are ultimately dependent.”49 This demarcation, however, is fraught. It follows that ‘independently justified beliefs’ are themselves not independent: they can only be inculcated as long as they are, in turn, set off against a relational outside in which justifications are not different, but rather suspended altogether. To use the example of Casamassima: on the side of identity, the process of gradually unveiled foundational terms – associated with ‘culture’ in an emphatic sense – is only kept up as long as its obverse is provided by the ‘anarchy’ of “the idea of redistribution” (397). Such redistribution is imagined at some length: we are told that a dispersal of cultural artefacts would not only reduce their value, but dispense with the very possibility of ascertaining value at all. In an act of cutting up and distributing the cultural artefacts of Venice (a desecration imagined by the protagonist with horror), the anarchists would not only destroy culture, but also suspend the very connoisseurship by means of which ‘culture’ is imputed in the first place. This breakdown is kept at bay merely because James’ exceptional working-class hero feels “a deep mistrust of that same grudging attitude – the intolerance of positions and fortunes that are higher and brighter than one’s own” (397). The example of ‘culture’ shows that maintaining foundationalism is presented as a process that requires re-entry: “The difference system/environment occurs twice: as the difference produced by the system, and as the difference observed inside the system.”50 That is: firstly a difference is drawn between a space of (at least potentially) foundational beliefs and an anarchic environment inimical to such beliefs. Secondly, that distinction is observed on the side that has been set apart, namely from within the sphere of foundational beliefs. As a case in point, in the above case the distinction culture/anarchy is elaborated, commented on, justified, and exalted from within spaces of ‘culture’. By means of this “re-entry of a distinction into that which has been distinguished,”51 the erstwhile environment (against which the possibility of foundational terms has been defined in the first place) can be reconfigured as a concrete anarchist protagonist and equally concrete radical programmes that disrupt the allocation of cultural value. As a

49 Steven L. Porter. Restoring the Foundations of Epistemic Justification: A Direct Realist and Conceptualist Theory of Foundationalism. Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2006. 43. 50 Niklas Luhmann. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. 45. My trans. Orig. quote: “Die Differenz System/Umwelt kommt zweimal vor: als durch das System produzierter Unterschied und als im System beobachteter Unterschied.” 51 Luhmann, Gesellschaft, 45. My trans. Orig. quote: “Abstrakt gesehen handelt es sich dabei um ein ‘re-entry’ einer Unterscheidung in das durch sie selbst Unterschiedene.”

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result of this elaboration, anarchists can be imagined to be opposed not only to culture, but (upon their re-entry) to the very process of distinguishing culture and anarchy. The process of maintaining a temporary, conditional ‘foundation-effect’ can, thus, by no means rely on self-evident truths. Instead, the possibility of demarcating foundations has to be actively asserted from within a demarcated sphere arrogating to itself the possibility of foundational truths. In this way, rather than positing justified beliefs, the texts are concerned with ways in which justifications can be manufactured and observed, in full view of the contingency of any selfevident site of knowledge. By means of this process of re-entry, the demarcated system can avoid tautology. To return to the example of Casamassima once more, re-entry makes it possible to avoid a confrontation with the contingency of foundational terms, any awareness of which would expose protagonists to tautological reiterations of the type ‘inequality is unequal’. Against such impasses, demarcation and re-entry allow for justifications on the basis of difference from the anarchist ‘grudging attitude’. The novels salvage the value of inequality by setting it apart from the violent equalisation attributed to radicals. By making anarchists the antagonists of the very concept of classificatory boundaries, demarcation makes foundational knowledge thinkable and communicable. Such instantiation of certainty is defined against a figure of alterity which, in turn, is communicable only as the transgressive signifier evoking a foundational signified. Rather than positing an inchoate environment (Lyotard’s ‘clouds of narrative elements’, de Huysteen’s ‘groundless web’ of beliefs), the novels inquire into the possibility of simulating foundations in contradistinction to an anti-foundational Other. How does this positing of contingent foundations function in a more explicitly political context? According to Marchart, what is required is, once more, a distinction. In this case, this refers to a difference drawn between politics and the political. In such post-foundationalist boundary work, [p]olitics refers to the practices that institute society and create social order. For social order to arise, politics necessarily implies the instauration of social differentiation, which establishes societal hierarchies between class, race, gender or any other imaginable classification. However, a crucial insight of post-foundationalist political thought [. . .] is the impossibility of any social order to sustain itself in the same form indefinitely. Since there is no ultimate ground for society and the hierarchical differences on which it rests, any social order is open to disruption by those who happen to be excluded and marginalized by it.52

52 Nicolas van Puymbroeck and Stijn Oosterlynck. “Opening Up the Post-Political Condition: Multiculturalism and the Matrix of Depoliticisation.” The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics. Ed. Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. 86–109. 86.

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In such “moments of disruption,”53 an unbridgeable gap comes to the fore, opening up between the institutionalised concepts of collective identity on the one hand and the “impossibility of a final ground – an ultimate foundation – for society”54 on the other. It is especially this emphasis on disruption as the prerequisite for the institution and reproduction of politics that renders postfoundationalism a useful analytical matrix for the early modernist political imaginary. The novels, after all, share a concept of relational alterity as the necessary obverse of any contingent political identity. This manifests itself in the shared radical theme. That is: the texts raise the question of how anarchists can be made to incarnate a whole host of disavowed characteristics. To put this in Marchart’s terminology, anarchism provides the disruptions which enable the ‘social order’ to occlude the absence of a ‘final ground’. As indicated above, however, the early modernist political imaginary is just as concerned with the failure of establishing a stabilising heterostereotype. The novels stage the difficulties of assigning characteristics to the radical Other. Increasingly, in each narrative, political radicalism becomes protean, threatening the very “instauration of political differentiation”55 which enables politics in the limited, ‘ontic’ sense. Here, a crucial difference in emphasis between the literary political imaginary and the post-foundational theories needs to be considered. While both concepts share what Critchley calls “naturalizing or essentializing politics [which] tries to render its contingency invisible by attempting to suture the social into a fantastic wholeness,”56 the range of options in the face of this suturing differs. In its literary incarnation, the ‘fantastic wholeness’ is not just a function of ascribing essentialist validity to identity; instead, the disavowed Other is also presented in terms of a threatening ‘wholeness’. That is to say, protagonists acting on the assumption of well-delineated identities are time and again confronted with epiphanic disclosures of an anarchic masssociety which renders their ‘meaning making’ not just contingent, but insignificant. Whether the protagonist of Casamassima evokes an image of every strata of society being connected by “impalpable wires” (330), or the Professor in The Secret Agent experiences sudden visions of the masses acting in unfathomable

53 Van Puymbroeck, “The Post-Political and Its Discontents,” 86. 54 Randi Gressgård. “Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality.” Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics. Ed María do Mar Castro Varela et al. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 25–43. 34. 55 Van Puymbroeck, “The Post-Political and Its Discontents,” 86. 56 Simon Critchley. “Is there a normative deficit in the theory of hegemony?” Laclau: A Critical Reader. Ed. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004. 113–123. 117.

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lockstep — the attempt to essentialise politics runs up against images of the erstwhile Other exceeding its bounds and re-entering the spaces of identity. Postfoundationalism can be seen as a “normative critique of much that passes for politics insofar as much politics tries to deny or render invisible its contingency and operations of power and force.”57 In view of their recurring images of hypertrophied, mass-cultural modernity, however, the narrative texts under consideration – contrary to this call for critique and dismantling of contingency – are more concerned with the question of how to stabilise and maintain ‘what passes for politics’. Thus, the novels are not so much occupied with dismantling the claim to unalienated “fullness of society.”58 Instead, upon presenting its impossibility, the narratives evaluate ways to suggest such ‘fullness’ nonetheless. A successful political act, as in post-foundationalism, is a “non-naturalizable, non-essentialist contingent articulation that just temporarily fixes the meaning of social relations.”59 This temporary stabilisation, however, is shown to be necessary, particularly in view of the alternatives — chief among them the state of exception that is disclosed once ‘fantastic wholeness’ can no longer be simulated.

2.1.3 Constituting Authority Early modernist narratives, rather than revelling in the sceptical dismantling of political institutions, err on the side of stabilising ideologies. The essentialist validity of social order may be a sham — yet, this pretence is also presented as a necessary precondition for maintaining identity. Since protagonists and entire social spheres are unable to cope with the loss of authorities making decisions on their behalf, the novels plead the necessity to at least partially compel the illusion of the continued existence and justification of these arbiters of supposed order. This justification is predicated on relational alterity: politics in the early modernist political imaginary “can never overcome conflict and division. Its aim is to establish unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is concerned with the formation of a ‘we’ as opposed to a ‘them’.”60 Chantal Mouffe proposes to designate “[t]his antagonistic dimension” as “the political.’”61 Where the novels’

57 Simon Critchley, “Normative Deficit,” 114. 58 Simon Critchley, “Normative Deficit,” 114. 59 Simon Critchley, “Normative Deficit,” 114. 60 Chantal Mouffe. “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy.” Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Ed. Chantal Mouffe. 1–13. 8. 61 Mouffe, “Deconstruction,” 8.

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version of antagonistic politics differs is merely in its abiding pessimism regarding a “democratic politics [which] requires a coming to terms with the dimension of antagonism that is present in social relations.”62 That is, a fully-fledged collective identity requires neither democratic legitimacy nor the polity’s engagement in the process of ‘coming to terms’. After all, figures of exceptional political agency inculcate such ‘final vocabularies’, while shielding others from realising the contingency of the terms that sustain identity.63 Like Laclau/Mouffe, political fiction is concerned with the question of how hegemony can be ensured — and how the novel can narrate such a “decision taken in undecidable terrain.”64 The narratives also share a distrust of any allegedly non-political position ‘uncontaminated’ by politics: a Habermasian “prioritization of a capacity for rational agency” and the associated “reconciliatory aspects of his model of deliberative politics”65 are untenable in any of the texts. Instead, a functioning polity is shown to be best off if deliberation regarding its foundations is discouraged. In contrast to ‘rational agency’, one of the few explicitly a-political figures instituting a political sphere – Sunday in Chesterton’s Thursday – is characterised by the inscrutability of his injunctions: the final model of political discourse issues forth from a position which is markedly non-rational. Sunday proves particularly instructive for the early modernist concept of authority. Whenever a collective identity is inculcated in modernist political fiction, this reconstitution is performed by arbiters of containment who are neither fully inside nor entirely outside of the symbolic framework they stabilise. While from a position of this kind, a model of identity and alterity can be assured and reified for others, these confected differentiations are increasingly not applicable to and accepted by their guarantors. We are initially (both at the beginning of each individual narrative and in the chronologically earliest novel, James’ 1886 Casamassima) still confronted with figures who, to adapt a concept by Lee Edelman, ‘retroactively posit’ an identity.66 To begin with, these authoritative figures establish a place of communal belonging. Afterwards, they essentialise that very self-created identity, treating it as if it pre-existed

62 Mouffe, “Deconstruction,” 8. 63 Richard Rorty. Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 77. 64 Mouffe, “Deconstruction,” 8. 65 Maeve Cooke. Re-Presenting the Good Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 76. 66 Cf. Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004. 8. For Edelman, “retroactive positing” describes a process by means of which a selfcreated dichotomy is presented as a pre-existing status, which merely requires a decision rather than constructive efforts.

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their own founding acts. In Slavoj Žižek’s terms, this involves a substitution: “instead of endlessly pursuing the hopeless search for some positive common denominator, I presuppose this denominator as already present – and the price to be paid is the virtualization of this denominator.”67 For a symbolic order to be effective, the strategies of deriving it have to be opaque — even to the authorities adjudicating its bounds and excluding those groups that cannot be countenanced within it. It is this retroactive naturalisation of contingent order that structures politics in the novels. That is, as far as their explicit political themes are concerned, the narratives remain concerned with what Wendy Brown terms “stable sovereign entities – states or subjects”68 organised as “enduring collectivities”69 and institutional frameworks. A narrow definition of politics in this manner – ‘practices that institute society and create social order’, in Marchart’s distinction of such ‘politics’ from the ‘political’ – is still a matter of some concern in the novels. We can align these texts with Irving Howe’s definition of ‘political fiction’, which emphasises “the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society.”70 From this perspective, political fiction can be subsumed under a generic form in which “political ideas play a dominant role or in which a political milieu is the dominant setting [. . .]. Perhaps it would be better to say: a novel in which we take to be dominant political ideas or the political milieu.”71 Such an explicit treatment of politics, in which, as Sharon Harris points out, “‘political’ is defined [. . .] only in self-referential terms and never outside the assumption of finite meaning,”72 can, indeed, be identified in all of the novels under discussion. Politics in this sense, however, appears mostly in connection with an escalating ironic treatment bathetically undercutting its significance, be it the revolutionary theme in The Princess Casamassima and Under Western Eyes or the parliamentary milieu in The Secret Agent. In the post-foundational terms set out above, the explicit treatment of institutional and state-bound politics would accord with the part of the ‘political difference’ concerned with “politics – at the ontic level – [which] remains a specific discursive 67 Slavoj Žižek. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London and New York: Verso, 1996. 141. 68 Wendy Brown. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2005. 77. 69 Brown, Edgework, 75. 70 Howe, Politics, 21. 71 Howe, Politics, 21. 72 Sharon M. Harris. Introduction. “Literary Politics and the Political Novel.” Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797–1901. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995. vii-xxiii. ix.

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regime, a particular social system, a certain form of action.”73 Such an account of politics retains the need for a foundational arché to ground it. By this term (defined in contradistinction to the an-archic concerns of libertarian socialism) Sylvan means “centralized coercive forms” determined by the minimal conditions of “a top or centre” as well as “control or dominance flowing from this top.”74 In early modernism, such authoritative top-down structure is crucial, since the assurance of a defined, collective identity and its relational Other is inculcated from outside, by founding figures straddling the line between normative interiority and anarchic exteriority. This model may seem superseded in the wake of models of power that deemphasise authoritative, sovereign power in favour of disciplinary mechanisms. However, Foucault already cautions against the notion of a linear movement from sovereign power through disciplinary power to a teleological end point of biopolitics. A residue of sovereign thought can (and does) remain, as The History of Sexuality makes clear: “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty.”75 Similarly, in political fiction, protagonists can try to dispense with a certain image of “power-law, of power-sovereignty,”76 yet the novels inevitably feature attempts to reconstitute rather than disassemble such a hierarchical image of power. Granted, such a desired authoritative injunction is never quite attained, as character after character invested with sovereign plenitude fails to fulfil their remit. However, the very supposition that an authority could reconstitute order on the basis of extant foundational truths is shown to inform the characters’ appeals to absent sovereign figures. Consequently, while James sets up a topologically uncertain carceral space and Conrad presents a city policed obliquely, these attempts are still geared towards maintaining the illusory effect of a foundational arché.

73 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 8. 74 Richard Sylvan and Robert Sparrow. “Anarchism.” A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Ed. Robert E. Goodin, Phillip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge. Chichester: Blackwell, 2007. 257–284. 261. Cf. for a more etymologically oriented account of the multiple meanings of arche, Nina Gourianova. The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 2012. 23. “Initially, archē signified beginning, or origin: that which was in the beginning; [. . .] However, the meaning of archē increasingly changed to accommodate related issues, raised by the idea of origin: ideas of foundations and principles.” (23) 75 Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. 89. 76 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 90.

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An-archic ‘critique of power’77 is shown to be incompatible with the “affective investments”78 of protagonists who, firstly, depend on a location of culture to be defined against its obverse; and whose sphere of identity is, secondly, subtended by a figure invested with the capacity to guarantee its boundaries.79 The novels represent and evaluate attempts to reconstitute authority “on the one hand, as the legitimate rights of sovereignty, and on the other, as the legal obligation to obey it.”80 Instead of exacerbating the ever-present possibility of a dissolution of such ‘rights and obligations’, thus, the arbiters of political differentiation ascertain the possibilities of performatively (and temporarily) recentering power. We cannot, thus, quite dispense with the image of ‘power-law’ criticised by Foucault — as long as it is specified as the result of limited performative acts asserting hierarchical authority. This aligns the notion of authority with the postfoundational demarcation and its requirement of an obverse in which that same authority can be seen as absent. In the terms established above: an ‘arché’, (in the sense of a “‘beginning’, ‘origin’ or ‘first cause’”81) requires a constitutive outside associated with the an-archic. This chaotic, unordered sphere is seen to be beyond the purview of authority, since it appears as the “refusal of ‘arche’ or of the origin” and, as per Mario Aquilinia, puts up a “resistance to being rooted

77 James Horrox. “Reinventing Resistance: Constructive Activism in Gustav Landauer’s Social Philosophy.” New Perspectives on Anarchism. Ed. Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl. Lanham/ Boulder/New York/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2010. 189–208. 189. James Horrox attributes a critique of this kind to Gustav Landauer, who “presents a dispersal of power relations that moves beyond the strictly class-based analysis prevalent among his contemporaries. The capitalist state ceases to be an extra-societal entity explicable by rigid scientific theorems and governed by teleological historical forces, and becomes instead a delicate and infinitely complex living organism woven from a vast multiplicity of living relationships between individuals.” (192) 78 Lawrence Grossberg. We gotta get out of this place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 83. With this term, Lawrence Grossberg attempts to “explain the power of the articulation which binds particular representations and realities. It is the affective investment which enables ideological relations to be internalized and, consequently, naturalized.” 79 Following Wendy Brown, this foundational, authoritative and hierarchical image of power persists despite the fact that the novels feature a whole host of alternative modes of power, presented in “imagistic and discursive representations, in psychic subjection, in spatial organization, in the disciplining of bodies and knowledges.” Brown, Edgework, 66. 80 Michel Foucault. “Two Lectures.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 95. 81 Mario Aquilinia. The Event of Style in Literature. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2014. 4.

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in any appeals to origins or determining authority.”82 Increasingly, however, this resistance cannot be contained by its association with the political radical as a communicable figure of otherness. As a result, the very differentiation between anarchic alterity and ‘archic’, state-bound identity is threatened by imminent collapse. The very status of the state becomes increasingly abstract in these novels; like any other unit of politics, it emerges as the temporary result of political differentiation rather than a timeless structure undergirding collective identity.83 Authority is, thus, presented as an absent ordering principle in political fiction, brought to the fore as a matter of limited, performative differentiations against an unordered outside. The narratives defamiliarise essentialist notions of political actors, opting instead for the representation of acts of demarcation that maintain the illusion of state order for a limited group (rather than ‘society’ as a whole), for a limited amount of time. The analysis, thus, cannot follow Habermas in his restriction of political imagination to those instances in which we may assume that “[w]e speak of the political public sphere in contrast, for example, to the literary one, when public discussion deals with objects connected to the activity of the state.”84 After all, the ‘state’ does not emerge as a political actor whose ‘activity’ could be assessed either way. Rather than assuming a statist framework from the outset, the novels are concerned with the performative act of establishing such a political unit in the first place. Which actor can determine collective identity against an assumed dissolution of order? What are the conditions of this political performative? Who is included and who is excluded from the ensuing political sphere? In the novels, these questions cannot be answered with recourse to authoritative order.85 Instead, they require a genealogy of fabricated threats and of the myths of authority that derive their raison d’être from supposed radical enemies.

82 Aquilinia, The Event of Style, 4. 83 Joel S. Migdal. State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 18. For Migdal, the “definition of state is practices. The routine performance of state actors and agencies, their practices, may reinforce the image of the state or weaken it.” 84 Jürgen Habermas. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” New German Critique 3 (1974). 49–55. 49. 85 Wendy Brown. “Power After Foucault.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. Ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 65–85. 74. For Brown, according to a myth of that kind, the state “is a containing and negating power, one that does not begin to capture the ways in which subjects and citizens are produced, positioned, classified, organized, and, above all, mobilized by an array of governing sites and capacities.”

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2.1.4 Constructing Anarchist Alterity To specify the concrete functioning of the post-foundationalist demarcation, the consequences of selecting ‘anarchism’ as the marker of alterity still requires some specification. In other words, how is the sense of collective self inflected by its definition against this specific type of political alterity, as opposed to, for instance, the structure of an ‘Orientalist’ Other demonstrated by Edward Said? This matters because the choice of alterity constrains the initial political distinction between identity and its constitutive outside as much as the manner in which that distinction is observed from within stabilised collective identities. Which distinctions and re-entries does anarchist alterity make possible? Heuristically, rather than being understood as an “idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence,”86 the anarchist Other is treated as a means of setting aside a sphere without history, inimical to thought and imagery and eliciting a vocabulary of abnegation. What is more, in the case of anarchism, its ‘reality and presence’ are presented as constitutively unstable. In this discourse of political Otherness, it is not a contradiction to treat anarchism as both a psychological deviation and a potentially global revolutionary movement. As a result of this instability, the anarchist heterostereotype cannot be consigned to distant, nonBritish spaces. Instead, first and foremost, anarchism is invoked as a domestic phenomenon — the anarchist is already at the heart of the metropolis, indistinguishable from the crowds and metonymically aligned with fears of ungovernable mass society.87 The ‘alien’ radical infiltrates the nation. This topological uncertainty is an example of the representational problem posed by anarchism: how can a protean array of heterostereotypical traits be reworked so that it occupies the specific position of a ‘constitutive outside’? After all, while the features of this stereotype are changeable, the requirements for such alterity are rather specific. These particular (1) functions of the constitutive outside have to be laid out briefly before we can relate them to the concrete (2) features of the anarchist Other. In this context, the notion of an ‘outside’ is particularly amenable to the analysis of narrative texts, in which the conceptually external is also figured as a literal topological and topographical exteriority. The concept of an ‘outside’ is developed by Ernesto Laclau on the basis of the Saussurean notion “that language (and by extension all signifying systems) 86 Said, Orientalism, 5. 87 This despite the fact that “mass, proletarian anarchism failed to erupt in the British Isles,” where there was “a distinguished minority intellectual, overwhelmingly literary, anarchist [. . .] tradition.” Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, 9.

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is a system of differences.”88 To enable the delineation of a system (without which no signification would be possible), these differences require an outer limit which cannot itself be a mere, ‘neutral’ difference like all others; a limit of that latter kind would simply be continuous with the range of differences established within the system, constituting just another link in a differential chain. Instead of ‘one more difference’, thus “if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot be themselves signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification.”89 The system, in other words, requires a radical exclusion at its margins. Only on the basis of this outer limit of signification as such can a set of included elements be thought of as equivalent. Their equivalence, in turn, results from the sheer fact that they are all on the internal flipside of the radical (or constitutive) outside. What is required, then, is a limit that is different from ‘regular’ semantic difference, and, on that basis, renders the included elements equivalent despite their differential functioning. According to this logic of inclusion and exclusion, “given that there is only system as long as there is radical exclusion, this split or ambivalence is constitutive of all systemic identity.”90 Not every difference can be considered a candidate for such radical exclusion. As Marchart glosses Laclau’s account, “it must be understood as something ‘radically’ different, incommensurable, threatening, and exclusionary, in so far as it negates the positive identity of the internal differences.”91 It is for this reason that the choice of alterity is so crucial: in order to function as a ‘constitutive outside’, the Other must be capable of appearing as a genuine interruption of the signifiable, never fully recuperated by the signs offered within the very system it makes possible. This requirement makes anarchism such a peculiarly unstable candidate for radical alterity. As the court proceedings against the French anarchist Meunier have indicated, in the 1890s it is not self-evidently the case that anarchists can be functionalised as the outer limits of a political order. The radical figure is always on the cusp of becoming, in Laclau’s terms, “one more difference” rather than the “signifier of pure threat, of pure negativity, of the simply excluded” that is required so that the system (in this case the legal system) can

88 Ernesto Laclau. “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso, 2007. 36–47. 38. 37. 89 Laclau, “Empty Signifiers,” 37. 90 Laclau, “Empty Signifiers,” 38. 91 Marchart, “Ontological Difference,” 59.

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form its ‘chains of equivalence’.92 If the legal case stretches the discursive limits of what is considered ‘political crime’, contemporary accounts stress the degree to which it could revert to that well-worn legal category. In other words, while the “justices defined opposition to all government as ‘non-political’,”93 this assertion of unaccountable violence and fundamental opposition threatens to become just another category in legal and political systems. In that case, the ‘anarchist’ could no longer stand for an excess, an unaccountable violence determined by its fundamental opposition to the authority vested in the judiciary. The anarchists’ function, in short, depends on preventing them from becoming ordinary “political offenders, because to be ‘political’ in the liberal view meant believing in government enough to want to supplant one with another.”94 This ‘becoming-political’ of anarchism is avoided, but only just. The final ruling, namely that Meunier is outside of the established categories of politics, institutes the anarchist perpetrator as a representative of a constitutive outside — yet this status is, initially, far from assured. As an 1894 article explains, the explosion at the barracks was a political offence, and so excluded from the scope of extradition, inasmuch as it was directed against a Government building, and was expressive of the hostility of a body of French citizens against the Government of the Republic. The atrocity of the offence is, from this point of view, an irrelevant consideration. Political crimes may notoriously be much more atrocious than non-political. Again, the fact that wholesale destruction of persons who had no warning of the attack does not prevent the crime from being political.95

The article reflects the emerging “refusal to consider anarchical acts as political crime,” particularly if that refusal is based on the perpetrators’ alleged aim of destroying “fundamental social institutions.”96 However, the Bristol Mercury reminds its readers that an ‘explosion at the barracks’ is directed against a specific government property, as a metonymy of the particular ‘Government of the Republic’ rather than government as such. This summary of the case attenuates the charge that “the general body of citizens” can be generally specified as the target of the “party of anarchy,” as the judge’s ruling would have it.97 While the

92 Laclau, “Empty Signifiers,” 38. 93 Christopher H. Pyle. Extradition, Politics, and Human Rights. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001. 107. 94 Pyle, Extradition, 108. 95 “Anarchists and Extradition.” Bristol Mercury 19 May 1894. 6. 96 Jean-Gabriel Castel and Marlys Edwards. “Political Offences: Extradition and Deportation. Recent Canadian Developments.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 13 (1975). 98–148. 98. 97 In re Meunier. United Kindom: High Court (England and Wales), 11 June 1894. Refworld. org. Last acc. 09/19/2019.

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legal decision distinguishes between ‘political’ crime against governments and ‘anarchical’ crime against private citizens, the Mercury draws attention to the difficulty of ascertaining such demarcation. After all, the review of the case compares Meunier’s actions to the “English Gunpowder plot,” which aimed at “wholesale destruction” — “yet no historian would say that Guy Fawkes was not a political offender.”98 Is the anarchist, then, a political figure at all? Or should he be extraditable precisely because he cannot be understood in accordance with an agreed-upon antagonism, thus doubly removing him from the English sphere of recognised political actors? The inconclusive debate shows that rather than a default ‘atrocious’ figure outside of politics, it is not yet quite possible to place the culprit and his (alleged) crime beyond the pale of existing measures. Discursively, the anarchist skirts the limits of politics rather than marking its radical exteriority, and, in this way, becomes subject to a set of increasingly regularised procedures of legal, political, and journalistic signification. The painstaking discursive strategies brought to bear upon the anarchist demonstrate a crucial feature of the radical stereotype: it is unstable. Rather than furnishing a straightforward, essential marker of a radical outside, anarchist features can appear as threateningly familiar and subject to well-established modes of discursive control. Any demarcation of anarchism as the sign of unwanted characteristics – in this case a-political and extralegal violence – emerges as a fraught and temporary procedure. It is precisely this instability of the radical Other, and the ever-impending dissolution of its function as a constitutive outside, that is at issue in James, Conrad, and Chesterton. Rather than offering straightforwardly essentialist alterity, the process of creating a radical Other requires essentialising procedures. In contrast to the legal system’s rigid distinctions between “political offence” and “anarchist offences,”99 the narrative elaboration of radicalism lays bare the process of setting up anarchism as a relational obverse of collective identities. Specifically, in their literary iteration, the difficulties of constructing and maintaining alterity as a determinate outside are provided with a topographical equivalent at the very beginning of the respective plots. James’ protagonist is confronted with a carceral space that mingles inside and outside; the description of the domestic sphere in The Secret Agent presents it as a permeable place, already suffused and destabilised by the dissolving urban realm; and Razumov in Under Western Eyes is divested of state ideology the moment a revolutionary intrudes into his room. In each case, in Derrida’s terms, “[t]he

98 “Anarchists and Extradition.” Bristol Mercury 19 May 1894. 6. 99 In re Meunier, 11 June 1894.

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outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa.”100 While identity and alterity are, thus, entangled from the outset, the novels show how insight into this mutual implication of inside and outside can be forestalled. The more vague the myth of a looming, anarchist deep-structure, the more entrenched does the belief in the simple exteriority of anarchism become. As a case in point for such beliefs, Morehead shows that the eager reporting on anarchist terror on the continent and asylum laws at home yielded two recurring hypotheses: “1) all anarchists were foreigners, and 2) all anarchist plots originated abroad.”101 This function of a twice-removed Other, however hard-won, is the result of post-foundationalist demarcations which the novels not only expose in their contingency, but also present as short-lived suggestions of order and disorder. Such acts of differentiation also tie anarchism to the question of narrative progression. On this point, the possibility of a an ‘event’ coincides with the postfoundational search for political difference. For discourses of criminality, such interrelation of differential semantics and the narratological concept of ‘eventfulness’ has been demonstrated by Ort/Linder: “‘Crime’ as ‘transgression’ becomes an ‘event’, which functions not only as the sujet of successive non-literary processing as a ‘case’ but also of sequences of associated literary [. . .] narratives.”102 Similarly, anarchism is rendered an object of literary communication whenever it signifies the very social order which it is purported to have breached in the first place. Narratively, that is to say, the transgressions of radicalism function as an affirmation of whichever actor imposes a hegemonic event structure on the breach, indicating discursive control in the process. Yuri Lotman provides analytical terminology for this play of transgression and containment. A sujet, in Lotman’s terms, requires (1) a semantic field divided into complementary subsets; (2) a border between these subsets which under normal circumstances remains impermeable; and, finally, (3) a “concrete action” of border-crossing.103 Crucially, all three elements function in conjunction – that is to say, the sujet is

100 Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 35. 101 Craig Res Morehead. “Cosmopolitan Criminality in Modern British Literature.” Diss. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2015. 138. 102 Linder and Ort. “Übertretung,” 35. My trans. Orig. quote: “‘Verbrechen’ als ‘Übertretung’ wird zum ‘Ereignis’, das als sujet sowohl nicht-literarischer Anschlußverarbeitung zum ‘Fall’ als auch literarischer oder filmischer Anschluß-Erzählungen fungiert.” 103 Lotman, Structure, 240.

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constructed on the basis of a sujetless state. To demonstrate this, Lotman uses the example of a route “traced on a map–not a general route, but that of a single vessel,” by means of which “new evaluative coordinates are introduced.”104 Order and the revolutionary event, then, should be seen as interdependent. Not only does the movement of the plot disrupt the “normalized, regular actions”105 of a plotless, classificatory text, but this ‘sujetless’, unmarked state can also only be marked upon its disruption. An order without transgression, in other words, generates no stories about itself. To be brought into representation, norms have to be breached, and prove their continued existence by processing the infraction on their terms. After all, “if the hero’s essence coincides with his environment, if he is not invested with the capacity to distinguish himself from that environment, the development of plot is impossible.”106 It is for this ‘distinction from the environment’ that the anarchist Other is required. Without simulating some manner of transgressive act in which the classificatory order is disturbed, the underlying order cannot be signified. Society without anarchy emerges as an undifferentiated environment without the possibility of an eventful change. In Jerome Bruner’s terms, without an anarchist ‘breach’, the preceding existence of ‘canonicity’ exceeds signification.107 Topologically, to demonstrate that a border separates an identity-stabilising sphere from anarchic spaces outside, that same boundary has to be crossed; a minimal, transgressive event is required to bring to the fore the fact that a classificatory border exists in the first place. Not every event will do in this process of transgressing and strengthening boundaries. In the case of anarchism, there is an added necessity for what Schmid calls an “exegetic event on the level of narrative transmission and its attendant commentary, explanations, reflections and metanarrative comments on the part of the narrator.”108 An event of this type manifests itself in ‘axiological peripeteia’, such as an unexpected reinterpretation of border-crossings by protagonists or the narrator.109 In the political narratives, such an exegetic delineation of an event as

104 Lotman, Structure, 239. 105 Lotman, Structure, 239. 106 Lotman, Structure, 240. 107 Jerome Bruner: “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991). 1–21. 12. “The ‘breach’ component of a narrative can be created by linguistic means as well as by the use of a putatively delegitimizing precipitating event in the plot.” (ibid.) 108 Wolf Schmid. Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2005. 14. My trans. Orig. quote: “Ein solches Ereignis kann im Erzählwerk auf zwei Ebenen erscheinen, als diegetisches Ereignis in der erzählten Geschichte und als exegetisches Ereignis auf der Ebene des Erzählens und der begleitenden Kommentare, Erläuterungen, Reflexionen und metanarrativen Bemerkungen des Erzählers.” 109 Wolf Schmid. Elemente, 14.

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an anarchist event is precisely what is at stake. Thus, protagonists try to understand the role of anarchism in society in ever-renewed exegeses. Whenever such processing of transgression as ‘anarchist’ fails, however, the aforementioned instability of the radical stereotype comes to the fore. The narrative equivalent to this volatility – emerging whenever transgressions fail to yield inexplicable, apolitical violence – is ‘delayed decoding’.110 The binary code ‘order/transgression’ breaks down as the breach of a norm cannot be pinned on an anarchist culprit. Meanwhile, the longer the delay before an anarchist cause of disorder is found, the less able is the respective system to signify its stability and interpretative control. Without regular ‘axiological peripeteia’, then, delayed decoding attenuates the post-foundationalist distinction of self and Other. By contrast, as long as the demarcation of alterity proceeds apace, there does not have to be an appreciable delay in the understanding of the event. In ordered spaces, transgressive events can be tied to anarchists at once. In the case of Conrad’s police protagonists, it is even a procedurally recognised ‘axiological peripeteia’ that furnishes reliable anarchist border-crossings. Upon its transfer into a communicable story form, an attempted anarchist act “can become ‘transgression’ or ‘crime’, and thus a sign of the social order it has disturbed.”111 In other words, the anarchist plan becomes a communicable transgression, expressible as what Ort/Lindner call a ‘micro-narrative’.112 In its basic form: ‘the anarchist planned A but was intercepted by B’. This barebones structure is, then, elaborated by associated discourses accepting its premise of normative order and transgressive radicals. Who gets to tell this story, and thereby determine identity and alterity, however, is contested. Candidates for the reinstatement of ‘canonicity’ against a radical ‘breach’113 proliferate, just like the versions of the anarchist transgressions that can be reassembled in the first place. Regarding its narrative form, too, anarchism emerges as a particularly unstable marker of alterity. Rather than settling on a ‘case’ through recursive semiosis, and thus reinstating demarcation of a radical Other, the novels perpetually open up the possibility that no such determinate, final sujet may be forthcoming at all. The radical theme elicits a double position: as the foil for constructs of the self, it also

110 Ian Watt. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1979. 175. 111 Linder and Ort. “Übertretung,” 32. My trans. Orig. quote: “Wird eine Handlung zur ‘Übertretung’ oder zum ‘Verbrechen’, also zum Zeichen der durch sie gestörten sozialen Ordnung, muß sie zugleich auch Gegenstand von Kommunikation geworden sein.” 112 Linder and Ort, “Übertretung,” 32. 113 Bruner, “Narrative Construction,” 12.

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evades interpretative authority. The attempt to impose a micro-narrative structure on anarchist transgression, thus, entails the unique problem demonstrated in the context of the Meunier case: if he is neither a criminal nor a political criminal, how can such a figure be narrated as a radical Other at all? It is at this point that analyses of political fiction take recourse to two recurring critical strategies which attempt to impose a final interpretation on the literary anarchist. To take the example of The Secret Agent, the first mode resorts to the authorial, associating the narratives with Conrad’s political convictions. This proceeds either by ascribing a general political outlook or by claiming a hidden affinity between the artistic and the anarchist project. This strategy is invited by Conrad’s stylisation of his writing process, since, in a quote featured in several monographs on the novel, there “were moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist.”114 This claim to artistic radicalism should, however, be measured against the critique of the avant-garde and supposedly radical aesthetics in the novel itself. After all, the most obvious analogue to the writerly ‘extreme revolutionist’ is the Professor — “the perfect anarchist” (70). While he reiterates his revolutionary authenticity, this figure of aesthetico-political upheaval never acts at all, making him appear not only as a merely potential terrorist but also a failing artist. If the strategy of authorial ascription does not close off alterity, neither does the second mode of closure, namely the reinscription of revolutionary authenticity in the novel. Analyses of this kind are particularly virulent after mass-mediated, extraliterary acts of terror such as the ones perpetrated by the so-called ‘Unabomber’, who used ‘Konrad’ as an alias.115 Such actions, on this second reading, are explained by political fiction. The literary representation of anarchism, specifically, is understood as a blueprint for terrorism and ‘radicalism’ alike. In a recuperation of this kind, the aforementioned ‘perfect

114 Joseph Conrad. “Author’s Note.” The Secret Agent. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 228–24. 233. Cf. also Richard Ruppel. A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad. Lanham/Boulder/New York/ London: Lexington, 2015. 86. According to Ruppel, “[t]hough all three works condemn early twentieth-century socialists and anarchists, they all attack the French and British class systems more sharply and unequivocally.” (86) In Nathan Waddell’s incisive account it “is only a short distance between recognizing this similarity between author and creation, and seeing Conrad’s authorial perspective as one that courts ‘anarchic’ indeterminacy and liberty from the constraints of definitive authorial commitment.” Nathan Waddell. Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2012. 150. 115 The link to The Secret Agent, however, is inconclusive, as Margaret Scanlan has shown. Margaret Scanlan. Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 2001. 160.

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anarchist’ in The Secret Agent (or indeed Muniment in Casamassima, or Haldin in Under Western Eyes) provides privileged insight into the terrorist state of mind.116 This strategy, however, is also precluded from a post-foundationalist perspective — and, arguably, by the novels themselves. The narratives bear out Marchart’s injunction to accept “that the impossibility of becoming ‘ground’ must hold for all contingent foundations [. . .] and so its status is stronger than the status of each of those plural foundations: the impossibility of ground is a necessary impossibility.”117 This absence of a ground – foregrounded by the failing attempts of refiguring anarchists as Other – cannot be contained by taking recourse to authorial politics or to an unchanging terrorist mental disposition.118 After all, the narratives present anarchist direct action as rare, the legal status of political radicals as inconclusive, and their organisation as alternately nonexistent or vastly conspiratorial. What is more, the few acts of political violence that do take place remain largely unrepresented. Under these conditions, it is perpetually in doubt whether the chain of narrative ‘processings’ can yield a bonafide signifier of transgression capable of bolstering a relational, normative signified.119 Although the novels treat anarchism as a discursive construct rather than providing insights into real-life theories or movements, this still begs the question which concrete characteristics can be projected upon anarchism as the bearer of disavowed characteristics. Why, after all, select libertarian socialism – which, in its philosophical incarnation, is a “discourse about revolutionary practice”120 – as the radical outside of various identities? Anarchists’ own formulations of their

116 For Griffin, the “uncompromising, arrogant, totalizing nature of the terrorist mindset” presented by the Professor is comparable to the “subjectively ‘world-shattering’ effect that was achieved to an unprecedented degree on a global scale by the 9/11 attacks.” Roger Griffin. Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2012. Cf. also David Miller. “Joseph Conrad and Contemporary Writers.” The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge UP, 2015. 160–171. 163. “Conradian echoes are heard elsewhere – one is tempted almost to say everywhere in writing about certain contemporary themes and topics.” (163) 117 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 18. 118 Cf. Kinna, The Government of No One, 37. Transhistorical accounts of terrorism not least overlook the historical context in which the “negative stereotype of the anarchist as the state’s most determined enemy emerged” (37). As Kinna puts it, the response to the Commune or the Haymarket attack tells us more about the “unconcealed alarm of the bourgeoisie” (37) than about a transhistorical category of ‘terrorist’. 119 Cf. Linder and Ort, “Übertretung,” 32. 120 David Graeber. “The Twilight of Vanguardism.” Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire. Oakland and Edinburgh: AK, 2007. 301–312. 304.

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project, after all, only very rarely amount to outright advocacy of violence. As Kropotkin puts it, anarchism can be considered the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.121

In accordance with its etymological roots (“The word derives from the Greek anarkhia meaning without a ruler”122) anarchy as the enactment of such ‘theory of life’ is a form of organisation without coercive authority or sovereign rule.123 Anarchism, in this sense, does not refer to chaos but to an opposition to hierarchical power relationships, with antagonism to state and capitalism featuring as “incidental byproducts of this primary rejection of hierarchy, of divisions between those who command and those who are compelled to obey.”124 As Darlington points out, libertarian socialism historically is a response to the French Revolution. Specifically, the anarchists’ answer to the question ‘what went wrong’ with the revolution set them apart from Marxist explanations. Anarchists advanced a critique reiterated after the violent suppression of subsequent revolutionary moments such as the Commune or the October Revolution: not only were “the workers and peasants [. . .] betrayed by the seizure of centralized state power by a new class of politician who had no hesitation in applying violence and terror, a secret police and a professional army to maintain themselves in power.”125 What is more, “[t]he institution of the STATE was itself the enemy.”126 This question of the state and, more specifically, its monopoly on violence has been the main dividing line between anarchism and Marxism. Conversely, use of anarchism as a negative stereotype coincides with support for such a monopoly of state power, its justifications, as well as the structures 121 Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” 108. 122 Ward, Colin. “Anarchism.” Dictionary of Ethics, Theology, and Society. Ed. Paul A. B. Clarke and Andrew Linzey. London, New York: Routledge, 1996. 21–25. 21. 123 Cf. also April Carter. The Political Theory of Anarchism. London: Routledge, 2010. “Anarchy means literally ‘without government’, and the lowest common denominator of anarchist thought is the conviction that existing forms of government are productive of wars, internal violence, repression and misery.” (14) 124 Justin Mueller. “Anarchism, the State, and the Role of Education.” Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections of Education. Ed. Robert H. Haworth. Oakland and Dexter: PM, 2012. 14–31. 15. 125 Ralph Darlington. Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 68. 126 Ward, “Anarchism,” 22.

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of authority supporting it.127 Each anarchist strand – communist, communitarian, individualist, syndicalist, ecological, feminist, to name only a few – prescribes different strategies of rejecting such coercive authority and its justifications. Defined positively, a recurring organisational commonality is constituted by the ‘prefigurative politics’ already mentioned in the chapter on ‘drawing distinctions’ (1.1). This, in short, describes the principle of “effecting social relationships and organizing principles in the present that attempt to reflect the future society that we seek.”128 At the same time, it is such prefigurative, horizontal organisation that is implicitly or explicitly rejected by any discourse that demonises anarchism in a bid to justify its own conception of order. The self-definition of anarchists is of some importance for the analysis, despite the novels’ focus on the possibility of constructing and maintaining an anarchist stereotype which – and this cannot be stressed enough – bears little resemblance to the self-image, aims, strategies and aspirations of the movement. Firstly, it is the very heterogeneity of historical anarchism that makes it all the more effective as a ‘floating signifier’ of Otherness.129 As Phillips puts it, the attacks it received from all sides in contemporary political debates reveal the “symbolic role that the anarchist movement [. . .] played in the cultural dialogue. Anarchism was perceived as a threat far out of proportion to its power and characterized as a far more alien doctrine than it actually was.”130 Secondly, the ideal of a ‘society conceived without government’ mentioned in Kropotkin’s definition looms large in discursive constructions of anarchist alterity. In the political imaginary of the novels, for one, politics without government, without some authoritative and hierarchical order, is both a matter of fascination and revulsion. Upon the absence of governance – specifically of a figure of authority or a recoverable set of injunctions – the ensuing visions of dissolution are presented with horror. Thus, Kropotkin’s ‘society without

127 Simon Springer. “Anarchism! What Geography Still Ought to Be.” Antipode 44 (2012). 1606–1624. 1610. 128 Simon Springer. “Radical Political Geographies.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography. Ed. John Agnew et al. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. 206–220. 213. 129 Cf. Ernesto Laclau. On Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso, 2005. “It is no longer that the particularism of the demand becomes self-sufficient and independent of any equivalential articulation, but that its meaning is indeterminate between alternative equivalential frontiers. I shall call signifiers whose meaning is ‘suspended’ in that way ‘floating signifiers’.” (131) The “‘floating’ dimension becomes most visible in periods of organic crisis, when the symbolic system needs to be radically recast.” (132) 130 Phillips, Nightmares of Anarchy, 14.

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government’ finds its literary equivalents in the ‘interruption or breakdown of the process of signification’ associated with the radical outside by Laclau.131 Such states of disorder, designated as ‘evil freedom’ in The Secret Agent, cannot last, however. Either a demarcation is established with the aim of reconstituting the notion of ordered spaces for the privileged few who are granted markers of ‘identity’; or else, if that distinction fails, the novels present a negative version of anarchy as the result. Nothing remains of anarchy as “the ideal of free and spontaneous agreement consistent with the anarchist principle of communal individuality.”132 Instead, non-governmental spaces in the novels are correlated with a mode of power in which not even the ‘submission to law’ criticised by Kropotkin is possible. What emerges is a state of exception: unrestricted coercion without an identifiable sovereign authority to which it can be attributed. According to this political imaginary, an anarchic sphere without governance can, thus, ultimately only be imagined in terms of an even more inescapable mode of power. Such exceptional authority, in a final turn of this mechanism of projection, is again associated with diegetic anarchists. Once ‘anarchism’ is unmoored from containment as relational Other, James especially imagines a spectral anarchist authority which compels the protagonist without coming to the fore as a representable bearer of political agency. In short, anarchist doctrine is distorted, mischaracterised, and functionalised in early modernist political fiction. The novels mobilise genuine aspects of historical anarchism – its heterogeneity and principle of society without governance – as markers of Otherness. In the process of positioning anarchism as the signifier of a disorder beyond the pale, the novels take up and inflect a set of discourses already dedicated to classifying and maligning libertarian socialism. Since anarchism calls into question the very possibility of providing an essentialist justification of rule, this anti-anarchist cultural knowledge serves to argue the opposite: that authoritarian power can claim essential legitimacy.133 As a result of its deployment as the Other of such authoritative essentialism, anarchism is sundered 131 Ernesto Laclau. “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity.” Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso, 2007. 20–35. 29. 132 Laurence Davis. “Individual and Community.” The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 47–70. 58. 133 Anarchists do not, however, necessarily deny that authority can be justified; Bakunin elaborates on “the authority of special men [. . .] imposed upon me by my own reason” and “continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination,” which does not allow for any individual or group to “recognize a fixed, constant and universal authority.” Mikhail Bakunin. God and the State. Ed. Paul Avrich. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1970 (1882). 33.

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from any attempt to achieve “the highest form of order” encapsulated by Proudhon’s assertion that “[a]s man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.”134 Instead of ‘order in anarchy’, these discursive procedures make anarchy a variable synonym of disorder. In what follows, three features will be shown to add to this construction of destructive anarchism: (1) its association with degeneration, (2) its blurring with colonialist discourses, and (3) its reduction to violence. What emerges from these interlocking discursive procedures are “complex grammars of selfing and othering,”135 which the novels both reproduce and evaluate critically. 2.1.4.1 Degeneration The interdiscursive radical theme is, firstly, associated with degenerative breakdown.136 Anarchy, that is to say, is conceived as a bodily pathology. This corporeal display literalises a cultural imaginary that conceives of the anarchist as an undetected foreign element located in the British body politic, seen to be circulating through urban crowds. This topographical background of internalised Otherness is a matter of historical contingency, since in the 1890s London briefly served as a refuge for anarchist activists from Germany, France, or Italy during periods of increased reactionary state violence.137 By recasting it in biologist terms, a sense of modern crisis is, however, set apart from political and legal contexts. The actors in this process are impersonal and apolitical, with the pathology of anarchism infecting a ‘natural’ social body. As Max Nordau puts it in Degeneration: “In order that the collective organism may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its interior is disease and leads rapidly to death.”138 Nordau’s

134 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. What is Property? Ed. And trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge UP, 1993. 209. 135 Baumann, “Grammars of Identity/Alterity,” 19. 136 Cf. Jürgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer. “Diskurs/Interdiskurs und Literaturanalyse.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 77 (1990). 88–99. 92. Link and Link-Heer define historically specific, discursive formations as ‘special discourses’ while interconnections between several specialized discourses qualify as ‘interdiscursive.’ Orig. quote: “Wir schlagen vor, jede historischspezifische ‘diskursive Formation’ im Sinne Foucaults als ‘Spezialdiskurs’ zu bezeichnen und dann alle interferierenden, koppelnden, integrierenden usw. Quer-Berziehungen zwischen mehreren Spezialdiskursen ‘interdiskursiv’ zu nennen.” 137 Cf. For a reconstruction of the English anarchist scene, especially its interrelation with literature via the Rossetti sisters and Ford Madox Ford, cf. Robert Hampson. Conrad’s Secrets. Basingstoke and New York: Routledge, 2012. 91–93. 138 Max Nordau. Degeneration. London: Heinemann, 1898. 409.

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diagnostic account proliferates similarities, producing the ever-same distinction of organic, hierarchical unity and incipient degenerative dissolution. The resulting “formative idea of future organic development”139 is brought to the fore by science and art alike. In this production of knowledge, the tertium comparationis uniting the manifestations of the movement towards degeneracy – “anarchism, a craving for revolt and contradiction”140 – remains constitutively unspecific. The source of the anarchic deviation from ‘organic development’ is variously located in the body, in an artist’s disposition, in works of art, and society at large. In the case of the above characterisation of ‘anarchy in its interior’, the rapid shifts between these strata of degeneration range from Ibsen’s concepts of the self to the individual cell promoting anarchic self-regard. The causal relationship between these ‘devolutionary’ indicators is frequently subordinated to their similarity as perceived by the diagnostician-cum-critic. Symptoms of breakdown in cultural artefacts, for instance, can be corroborated by “careful physical examination” which uncovers “one or more stigmata.” These, in turn, “betray their fellowship by the similarity of their mental physiognomy” — which show “the same irregularity that we have observed in their physical growth.”141 From the vantage point of this semantics of similarity, degeneration produces ever-new ‘analogies’, “for the similitudes of which it treats are not the visible, substantial ones between things themselves; they need only be the more subtle resemblances of relations.”142 The sprawl of ‘secret marks’ asserting a similar relation of atavistic recursion in culture, the body, the mind, and the political projects of the modern “dégénerés supérieurs”143 ensconces the anarchist deviant in an expandable network of relations extending from cultural artefacts to the lower phyla of the animal kingdom. Its association with modernity allows for a circular logic: thrown up by the failure of adaptation to the “stormy stride of modern life,”144 degenerate signs contribute to the modern condition as much as they are symptomatic of it. In this process of both recognising anarchist traits in cultural artefacts and concurrently naturalising them, anarchism is figured as a latent potential of atavistic relapse. The degenerate radical evinces traits of “the branchiae of the lowest

139 Nordau, Degeneration, 334. 140 Nordau, Degeneration, 171. 141 Nordau, Degeneration, 17–18. 142 Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994. 21. 143 Nordau, Degeneration, 18. 144 Nordau, Degeneration, 40.

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fishes”145 in what Lombroso deems “the most favourable case, [since] as a higher degenerate, he renews intellectually the type of the primitive man of the most remote Stone Age.”146 Such notions of a return of the surpassed are taken up almost verbatim in the novels under discussion. The killing concluding The Secret Agent, most notably, is perpetrated with “all the inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns” (193). Even where the connection is not as direct, however, the degenerative connotations of anarchism pose a unique challenge in the cultural imaginary of the late 19th and early 20th century. As an Otherness emerging from within the self, anarchy constantly threatens to become a description of the deficient state of cultural identity, in which case deviance becomes coextensive with the phenomena from which it stems. As the progenitor of criminal anthropology, Cesare Lombroso, indicates in 1891, the distinction between the healthy self and pathological anarchy is not hard-and-fast, but requires a whole host of modes of observation. These include statistical proof; photos of the Paris Communards showing “the criminal type among these in the proportion of 34 per cent;”147 phrenological close-readings of examples of “anomaly, very frequent in normal men as well;”148 race theory, as in descriptions of the “Mongolic cast of feature”149 in selected anarchists; and a “moral anomaly” leading to a suppression of natural “misoneism, the horror of novelty.”150 This latter factor is alleged to underlie an anarchist desire for rapid change that uncouples the radical from “humanity as a part of nature,” which (in Lombroso’s increasingly mixed metaphors) “cannot progress at a gallop, non facit saltus.”151 Proceeding from such biologistic premises, anarchists as indications of an ever-imminent devolution pose a particular challenge for any political model predicated on demarcation. In Zahavi’s terms, thought based on the idea of “alterity in myself” – the inextricability of breakdown from the very conception of collective identity – requires its constant transformation into the “radical alterity of the Other.”152 That is, in order to preclude anarchist traits from becoming

145 Nordau, Degeneration, 556. 146 Nordau, Degeneration, 556. 147 Cesare Lombroso. “Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology III: The Physiognomoy of the Anarchists.” The Monist 3 (1891). 336–343. 337. 148 Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 338. 149 Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 337. 150 Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 339. 151 Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 341. 152 Dan Zahavi. “Alterity in Self.” Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity. Ed. Shaun Gallagher. Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 2004. 137–152. 139.

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ubiquitous under the degenerationist’s paranoid gaze, they require a bearer, an identifiable arbiter of Otherness subject to the hermeneutics of detection developed by Lombroso and Nordau. The more anarchism appears as the deviant form of ideologies of development, the less certain does the availability of such determinable radicalism appear.153 Accordingly, the novels present attempts to project the impending, universal and, crucially, internal deviance upon describable, disavowed deviants. It is this containment of the proliferating anarchy suspected at the heart of modernity that is at issue in degenerationist studies. The novels, in turn, represent such construction of anarchist specimens. However, they expose the fatuousness of any such overaching interpretative scheme instead of straightforwardly validating it. More crucially still, they evaluate whether such techniques of manufacturing alterity indeed serve to ward off social dissolution. 2.1.4.2 Colonialism In addition to its extrapolation from degeneration within the ‘social body’, the trajectory of the anarchist stereotype can also be reversed: anarchists are imagined in terms of colonial Otherness. This transferral from the distanced collective alterity of the colonial subject to the domestic anarchist is a staple of 1880s media. For instance, in an 1884 Punch cartoon, a wax figure featuring the accoutrements of the anarchist stereotype (including dynamite and a convenient label of ‘Anarchy’ attached to his hat) is placed in an exhibition next to three caricatures of non-Western peoples.154 All of the figures are transformed into specimens for the delectation of the observer, who is equipped with a catalogue. In the implicitly devolutionary series of waxworks, the anarchist, as the caption specifies, features as the newest exhibit in a ‘chamber of horrors’. While the immediate context is the Irish dynamite campaign from 1881–1885, the caricature displays a simultaneous expansion and abstraction of the historical context underlying those acts of symbolic violence. Any discernible aims are already trivialised by the bundle under the mock-anarchist’s arm, conveniently labelled “DYNAMITE.” What is more, the figure assumes characteristics of the racist, ‘African’ stereotype placed next to it. Its lips and dark skin associate the political heterostereotype with racist assertions of a

153 Lombroso’s struggles with the differentiation of anarchists, in addition to the proliferation of concurrent methods of identifying them, are shown by his advocacy of socialism “as a preventive measure against anarchism,” i.e. as a countermeasure against a movement which itself has from its inception been conceived as a form of (libertarian) socialism. Cf. Trevor Calafato. “Gli Anarchici and Lombroso’s Theory of Political Crime.” The Cesare Lombroso Handbook. Ed. Paul Knepper and P.J. Ystehede. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 47–71. 65. 154 John Tenniel. “Time’s Waxworks.” Punch 31 Dec. 1881.

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pre-civilised state.155 The chamber of horrors, thus, replaces the colonial with the anarchist Other, in a devolutionary downward trajectory. Characteristics of the imperialist stereotype are detached and transferred to an allegorical figure of ‘disorder’ as such. The visual shorthand in this respect overlaps with the representation of anarchism in the early modernist novels. In the case of The Secret Agent, as Graham MacPhee has shown, the narrative transfers characteristics of historically Fenian symbolic violence to anarchist acts. The caricature indicates the function of such shifts from colonialism to the generalised ‘radical’ stereotype of anarchism: the re-branding of the enemy of Britain combines depoliticisation, racialisation, and Social Darwinism to create an overall impression of individual figures embodying a far-reaching, macroscopic threat of decline, far removed from political contestation.156 As Conrad’s novels show most clearly, this expansion and abstraction does not preclude authority figures from bringing to bear specific techniques of colonial policing on the selfcreated threat of depoliticised anarchists.157 2.1.4.3 Interaction of Stereotypes Both of the processes considered so far – the degenerationist internalisation and the colonial expansion of the stereotype – contribute to the denial of anarchism as a political doctrine to which, as Basson puts it, “people voluntarily adhered.” Radicalism becomes instead “an aberrant, racialized trait that placed its adherents outside the ascriptive boundaries of the nation.”158 The wide range

155 Cf. re: this racialisation, Vincent C. Cheng. Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 32. 156 Graham MacPhee. “Under English Eyes: The Disappearance of Irishness in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Empire and After. Ed. Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar. Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2007. 101–121. 109. “The overall effect of Conrad’s decision to figure political violence in terms of anarchism rather than in terms of the Fenian response to the British rule in Ireland is to abstract violence from politics and present it, in the words of ambassador Vladimir, as purely destructive.” 157 Japhy Wilson. “Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political.” Politics and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics. Ed. Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw. Edinburgh UP, 2014. 1–24. 5. As Wilson summarises present-day literature on the term, “forms of depoliticisation are characterised by the erosion of democracy and the weakening of the public sphere, as a consensual mode of governance has colonised, if not sutured, political space. In the process, agnostic political disagreement has been replaced by an ultra-politics of ethnicised and violent disavowal on the one hand, and the exclusion and containment of those who pursue a different political-economic model on the other.” 158 Lauren L. Basson. White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State or Nation. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2008. 143.

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of this marker of genetic, economic, or imperial deterioration is exacerbated by two added signs of the anarchist’s uncontainable status. Firstly, according to these discourses, the radical does not, strictly speaking, want anything: the tenets of an anarchist are shrouded in mystery, imported as they are from the continent, if they do not stem from unconscious ressentiment in the first place. This individualises political antagonism, as James English has shown: “modernist writers have tried to account on a psychological level for phenomena of mass resistance (such as anarchism) which they cannot or will not address on a material level.”159 Secondly, this lack of a political programme is complemented by a material reification of its merely destructive impetus, namely dynamite. All of the novels in the canon feature a permutation of the explosive potential of the anarchist stalking the urban realm. While the threat of explosive scientific development is still subdued in Henry James’ Paul Muniment, notably a worker in a chemical plant, the motif recurs in the Professor’s explosive device in The Secret Agent as well as Haldin’s dynamite attack in Under Western Eye. In Chesterton’s novel, the explosive potential of anarchism is already treated as a well-worn motif, a metonymy of anarchism that makes its connection to popular literature explicit. Even though modernist cultural knowledge constructs a taxonomic gaze of the kind exhibited by the observer of the anarchist waxwork in the Punch caricature, this certainty throws up a recurring anxiety: all the categorising work could fail to bring into visibility a figure of radical deviance. After all, the anarchist could be anyone in the anonymous metropolis. This lack of discernibility is only confounded by dynamite as the weapon of choice. Not least since Émile Henry bombed the Café Terminus and justified his attack by asserting the collective guilt of the bourgeoisie in a much-publicised speech,160 the anarchist can be imagined as a figure associated with the urban masses granting him anonymity. This sense of the Other emerging from within (in addition to impinging from outside in the manner of anarchist asylum seekers) leads to figurations of a specifically domestic threat in an added sense: women make up a historically important contingent of anarchist activists and feature as figures of Otherness in

159 English, Comic Transactions, 44. 160 Cf. for an introductory account of Henry’s attack as a template for 19th century understandings of anarchist terror: Olivier Hubac-Occhipinti. “Anarchist Terrorists of the Nineteenth Century.” The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. Ed. Gerard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin. Trans. Edward Schneider, Kathryn Pulver, and Jesse Browner. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 2007. 113–132. 129.

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the households and more literally domestic settings explored in the corpus of political narratives.161 Although the novels reproduce these mischaracterisations of anarchism, their range of representation does go beyond bomb-wielding, terroristically inclined radicals. In spite of the conservatism that critics have variously gleaned from them,162 the narratives represent a much more nuanced concept of anarchism than they are given credit for. It is not sufficient to simply accept the narrator’s sudden anti-anarchist invective in The Secret Agent as an overall analytical template for the function of the “dazzling and sophisticated array of anarchist stereotypes”163 assembled in the novel. The piling-on of adjectives (work, for the degenerate anarchist, is a price “monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable” 39) should not detract from the limitation of such intermittent, apodictic outbursts. Not only could this characterisation be applied to almost any protagonist in the novel but, what is more, in its adjectival excess the narrator’s judgment already hints at the danger of an anarchist who exceeds description. The narrative instance destabilises what it sets out to curtail. In related fashion, all of the texts negotiate the possibility of relegating anarchists to alterity against the background of a looming failure of differentiation. Like Conrad’s escalating adjectives, anarchists exceed their

161 Cf. Sandra Jeppesen and Holly Nazar. “Genders and Sexualities in Anarchist Movements.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism. Ed. Ruth Kinna. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. 162–192. 168. Like the colonial Other, the ‘anarchist woman’ cannot be held at bay in this discourse. As Jeppesen and Nazar note, historically, anarchist women tended to transform the private domestic space of their homes into quasi-public spaces, a particularly transgressive act when the “bourgeois, patriarchal household is structured around the privacy of the family” (168). 162 For an account of the critical tradition ascribing to Conrad an “odd combination of radical critique and ultimate conservatism,” cf. Peter Lancelot Mallios. “Conrad’s Reception.” The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge UP, 2015. 116–131. 124. Schloss argues for the “inner motivation of James’ cultural conservatism.” Dietmar Schloss. Culture and Criticism in Henry James. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1992. 5. Contemporary reviews of Casamassima, however, were far less certain: in 1886, Julia Wedgwood states that the novel is without “a glimmer of a conviction or a moral standard.” While James’ ‘wit’ is conservative, it “ought to have something to conserve.” Julia Wedgwood. “Review of The Princess Casamassima.” Henry James: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Roger Gard. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. 173–174. 173. For Ó Donghaile, Chesterton’s construction of anarchism as an “‘intellectual crime’ [. . .] posed his own conservative catholic imagination with a number of contradictions as its ‘visions from the verge’ [. . .] appear to inspire rather than confuse the modern mind.” Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 105. 163 Richard Porton. “Film and the Anarchist Peril.” Terrorism, Media, Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. 37–56. 43.

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bounds. While all of the texts revolve around the possibility of casting out ‘the radicals’ as arbiters of alterity, the well-worn stereotypes increasingly do not reliably coalesce into a figure of Otherness. As a result, whenever the anarchist catch-all figures of radicalism appear, they are firstly the focus of attempts to recover a relational system of self and Other and, secondly, elude the very categories provided by this order. The anarchist becomes a hermeneutic problem that is gradually shown to be insoluble. It is this increasing intractability and an impending loss of differentiation that characterises all of the representations of anarchists in the corpus. Following Rancière, the determination of anarchism as a political Other can be summarised as a form of ‘policing’, a role which in the novels is far from constrained to the diegetic police protagonists. Indeed, the police function can be taken over by protagonists from all walks of life as much as the narrator, as long as they contribute to “police” in the sense of “a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement. The police are not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social.”164 By contrast, Rancière’s concept of the ‘political’ emerges as a demonstration of equality that breaks with the police order and “in the process demonstrates its contingency.”165 Regarding Rancière’s terms – police and politics – political fiction first and foremost concerns itself with the former. The novels, after all, revolve around the possibility of instituting and bolstering rather than dismantling an existing “distribution of the sensible.”166 At the same time, however, the narratives present the ever-present possibility of the failure of the demarcation of identity and its anarchic obverse. Anarchism as a foil is tenuous, not least because it is enacted by characters not otherwise inclined towards radical change: it allows for periods of increased political and spatial agency in Casamassima; it affords ‘evil freedom’ in The Secret Agent; and it prompts policemen to play-act the role of radicals in The Man Who Was Thursday. In each case, what these novels dramatise is not the threat of an anarchist attack, but, instead, the protagonists’ escape from a constricting ‘distribution of the sensible’ into liberating anarchic spaces. As a result of such escapist forays into radical chic, the anarchist sphere can no longer be imagined as wholly unknowable. It is in this sense of a loss of demarcation that, with Critchley, anarchism is associated with the “deconstitution of the political field based on the

164 Jacques Rancière. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. 36. 165 My trans. Orig. quote: “Wahre Politik hingegen stellt einen Bruch gegenüber der Ordnung der Polizei her (womit nicht zuletzt deren Kontingenz demonstriert wird).” Marchart, Differenz, 179. 166 Marchart, Differenz, 179.

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primacy of an arche (a first principle, a supreme power, an act of sovereignty or dominion).”167 At least temporarily, protagonists cross the line into the anarchic, an intermittent blurring of oppositions that finds its literary correlative in shifts towards uncertain perspectives or impressionist interludes. A ‘deconstitution of the political field’ appears imminent in each of the novels, threatening not just the intrusion of anarchist traits upon the sphere of identity, but also retroactively disclosing the initial separation of self and Other as always already contingent.168 The distinction between norm and anarchism runs up against a potential paradox. That is, the respective binary differentiation to be established – such as ‘culture vs. ‘anarchy’ in The Princess Casamassima or ‘order’ vs. ‘anarchism’ in The Secret Agent – becomes inconsistent “if its oppositional elements are thought of as simultaneously coequal, thus technically rendering the distinction inoperative.”169 In the early modernist political imaginary, this occurs whenever the norm and its radical obverse can no longer be told apart, a state of affairs made explicit in The Secret Agent when the figure of the “perfect anarchist” (70) explains that “[t]he terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game” (52). In laying bare this ‘mesh’ of law and its Other, the Professor exposes the perceived alterity of culture as “its own disavowed underside, its own obscene supplement.”170 This exposure of self-reference – i.e. of ‘anarchists’ as the result of a systems-internal differentiation between self-reference and external reference rather than any actual access to a radical environment – is validated in the novel.171 Ultimately, political fiction features constructions of anarchism in the

167 Simon Critchley. Introduction. The Anarchist Turn. Ed. Jacob Blumenfeld, Chiara Bottici and Simon Critchley. London: Pluton 2013. 1–7. 3. 168 Cf. Slavoj Žižek. “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics.” The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. Ed. Chantal Mouffe. London and New York: Verso, 1999. 18–38. This exposure would bring to the fore that “the rule of law ultimately hinges on an abyssal act of violence (violent imposition) which is grounded in itself; that is, every positive order to which this act refers, to legitimize itself, is self-referentially posited by this act itself.” (18) 169 My trans. Orig. quote: “Eine binäre und antinomische Unterscheidung [. . .] wird dann zur Paradoxie, wenn ihre oppositionellen Glieder als simultan gleichrangig gedacht werden, die Unterscheidung also damit eigentlich außer Kraft gesetzt wird.” Claus-Michael Ort. Medienwechsel und Selbstreferenz. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2003. 5. 170 Slavoj Žižek. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. 365. 171 Cf. for this use of self-reference, Werner Scheibmayr. “Zeichen, Bewußtsein und Kommunikation.” Bewußtsein – Kommunikation – Zeichen: Wechselwirkungen zwischen Luhmannscher Systemtheorie und Peircescher Zeichentheorie. Ed. Oliver Jahraus and Nina Ort. Tübigen: Max Niemeyer, 2001. 101–128. 112. Self-reference here refers to represented self-reference in the diegeses. Demarcation as an operative border develops out of the selfreference of a sign system, since it can only reproduce signs in recursive processes. It is

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service of a self-created political orthodoxy: there is no radical ‘there’ there. Such dismantling of the ways in which a closed system makes meaning is, however, shown to be unsustainable. While the reader becomes privy to the perspective of a select few characters who see through such self-serving political alterity, any stable social system is shown to require the belief in an anarchist ‘outside’ to generate a normative ‘inside’. Such disavowal is all the more necessary for James, Conrad, and Chesterton, as they consistently represent the incapacity of their protagonist to subsist under conditions of self-referential deadlock. Thus, self-reference is not, in Luhmann’s terms, “something bad, prohibited, to be prevented [. . .]; but if self-reference leads to paradoxes, additional measures have to be taken to ensure successive operations.”172 One way of re-establishing the validity of the political differentiation is the evocation of a “re-entry of the system/environment distinction into the system side of the system/environment distinction,”173 a process that enables ‘reflection’. Demarcating radical alterity is, in each of the novels under discussion, presented as the requisite operation not only to establish a political norm in the first place, but also to re-establish it whenever norms and anarchy threaten to become indistinguishable. Thus, figures of radicalism guarantee a political ‘reality effect’. They sustain the illusion of a constitutive outside of anarchy. By contrast, the dissolution of such clearly identifiable stereotypes does not lead to productive renegotiation of the terms of the political. Instead, without radical figures of alterity yielding residual foils, a type of power takes hold which not only dispenses with defined collective identities in the diegesis but, what is more, is shown to increasingly preclude the possibility of border-crossings between differentiated semantic spaces. This study will describe such ensuing loss of demarcations as an impending state of exception.

only by means of these signs that a system can observe itself. Since direct reference to the environment of the system is not possible, the differentiation of self-reference and external reference takes its place. Cf. ibid. 172 Niklas Luhmann. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984. 59. My trans. orig. quote: “Selbstreferenz ist demnach an sich nichts Schlimmes, Verbotenes, zu Vermeidendes [. . .]; aber wenn Selbstreferenz zu Paradoxen führt, müssen Zusatzvorkehrungen für Anschlussfähigkeit getroffen werden.” 173 Christian Borch. Niklas Luhmann. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. 54.

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2.2 The State of Exception In a diegetic world that depends on a split between an ordered inside and an anarchic environment, the failure to create, maintain, and reproduce such demarcation proves disruptive to collective and personal identities alike. Early modernist fiction features protagonists whose self-image depends on their fidelity to notions of an ordered society (or else its metonymic stand-ins), which are to be preserved against the encroachment of opponents broadly conceived as ‘anarchist’. Its beneficiaries hold on to that self-image long past the point at which it is exposed as a contingent construct. After all, politics, to put it in Edelman’s terms, “names the space in which Imaginary relations, relations that hark back to a misrecognition of the self as enjoying some originary access to a presence (presence retroactively posited and therefore lost, one might say, from the start), compete for symbolic fulfilment.”174 That is, the constructed differentiation of identity and alterity can be retroactively believed to always already have been in place, so that the arbiters of order can misrecognise themselves as merely conserving (rather than actively instituting) the classificatory order of the narrated world. None of the novels presents the maintenance of collective identity as a given: setting residual certainties apart from the dissolution of a putative, anarchic outside is in each case presented as an active, constructive endeavour in which the individual cannot rely on an ordered constitution — but, on the contrary, has to institute that order in acts of drawing and naturalising boundaries. Upon the loss of this demarcated alterity, political fiction presents the increasing difficulty of setting apart identity and alterity at all. What results from this cancellation of boundaries is an exercise of power which no longer relies on a differential scheme of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Such suspension of hard-and-fast distinctions between ordered identity and anarchist alterity does not, however, allow for new constituent powers that would dispense with the need for disavowed radical figures. Instead, an entire alternative mode of regulation is shown to emerge as soon as stabilising dichotomisation falters. It is this suspension of distinctions – and the exercise of power it makes possible – that will be analysed as a state of exception. The model of ‘exception’ enables us to conceive of the shift of the political in each novel. To recap: the model of demarcation is concerned with the determination of a differential space and the internal elaboration of its distinguishing characteristics on the set-apart side of identity. ‘Politics,’ then, can be said

174 Edelman, No Future, 8.

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to describe the process of distinguishing a collective self from a disavowed Other, with ‘the political’ specifying the underlying principles and assumptions on which those differentiations are based. In the state of exception, by contrast, “the very idea of politics is about the possibility of the rule of law becoming suspended.”175 Instead of simulating identifiable qualities that might indicate ‘belonging’ or ‘expulsion’ from either a cultural interiority or an anarchic exteriority, exception makes it impossible to distinguish two distinct spheres, let alone to indicate one of them as a juridico-political order and the other as anarchic breakdown. Thus, the exercise of exceptional power is not predicated on authoritative, hierarchical injunctions, but functions on the basis of a permanent ‘suspension’ of any existing legal (or more generally normative) framework.

2.2.1 The Structure of Exception The difference between this second model of power and the strategies of demarcation is demonstrated by the central term of ‘exception’. To except an element of a set is different from excluding it, and thereby placing it in a constitutive outside. According to Giorgio Agamben, an exception maintains a relation to the norm from which it is set apart instead of sustaining hard-andfast distinctions. This continuing connection is one of “inclusive exclusion (which thus serves to include what is excluded).”176 That is to say: as an exception is determined, the resulting sphere is not entirely disconnected from the rules which ostensibly no longer apply to it. In order for any rule to maintain its power over the exception from the rule, it has to suspend its own, explicit application: “The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it.”177 That is, the relation of exception creates a space in which norms are no longer applicable. Once they withdraw, however, the area formerly governed by those norms is subjected to whichever power remains effective. The unconstrained exercise of that power becomes possible precisely at the point at which underlying rules are withdrawn. Rather than determining a social order against a sphere of relational alterity, both sides of the relation of exception are suspended: the rule because it no longer applies and the exception because it remains bound to what it is the exception of. This constellation 175 Alex Murray. “State of Exception.” The Agamben Dictionary. Ed. Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 185–186. 185. 176 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21. 177 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18.

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does away with the very topology of inside and outside. The rule is in force without being explicitly applied, whereas the exception is excluded, yet subject to modes of regulation unconstrained by explicit rules. We are, in other words, confronted with a relation between norms, which lay bare their underlying power structures upon being suspended, and the exception, which becomes the object of this self-suspending order. Rather than anarchy, which furnishes the relational obverse of political order in the first model, the state of exception is, thus, geared towards anomie. Such “improper operation or relative absence of normative regulation”178 is not excluded from the regular functioning of rule, but rather becomes the very basis upon which authoritative power can effect the suspension of its own normal functioning. Rather than the exclusion of demarcated anarchism, thus, the state of exception is “founded on the essential fiction according to which anomie (in the form of [. . .] the force of law) is still related to the juridical order and the power to suspend the norm has an immediate hold on life.”179 That is, what appears exceptional, a deviation from the normal state of affairs, is the very basis of governance. Modes of rule, then, are determined by the possibility of suspending themselves, by their capacity to create a zone in which they no longer regulate according to a determinable law. By no longer applying to determinate legal subjects, explicit laws give way to the indeterminate ‘force of law’, which applies to de-politicised subjects.180 These targets of the ‘force of law’ can no longer be associated with a political identity. Their political status is placed under constant erasure, since any protection by explicit norms can potentially be suspended at any time. Consequently, under the conditions of the state of exception, the presumption of a stable identity is replaced with the reduction to ‘bare life’. Or rather, following Prozorov, “‘bared life’ would be a better term for the object caught up” in the state of exception “since it would emphasize the violent aspect of being stripped of all protections and abandoned to the force of law whose positive content has been suspended.”181 Agamben offers a number of examples for this predicament, in which exposure to violence is predicated on the dissolution of norms. For all their individual differences, these paradigmatic figures share a position on a “threshold of

178 Sanjay Marwah. “Anomie.” Encyclopedia of Social Problems. Ed. Vincent N. Parrillo. Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore: Sage, 2008. 45–47. 45. 179 Agamben, State of Exception, 86. 180 Agamben, State of Exception, 39. 181 Sergei Prozorov. Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. 102.

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indistinction”182 which precludes the possibility of determining a boundary between the included and the excluded, let alone a transgression of the border separating both sides. Rather than by explicit rules, the status of a given political system is best described by its capacity to suspend their application, to withdraw political identities, and to exert coercive power without reference to explicit norms. A central example for the state of exception is provided by situations in which the power of the government is expanded, with the effect of a “conferral on the executive of the power to issue decrees having the force of law.”183 In the historical examples provided in State of Exception, extraordinary situations are invoked which require the suspension of a constitution in order to safeguard it. In this state, power positions itself as the response to a period of disorder, suspending legal protections in order to safeguard the continued validity of the rule of law. The law may be temporarily deactivated, the argument goes, but the spirit of the law remains in force. Agamben traces theories of this exceptional case to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. For Schmitt, the decision on the exception compensates for an absence in the formulation of a rule of law: the existence of a legal order cannot be derived from the norms presented by that order. What is required to ground the law, then, is an extra-legal position of authority that can decide on normalcy, guaranteeing a regulated state in which laws attain continued validity: “For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”184 That is, for Schmitt the authoritative decision separating norm and exception emerges as the very foundation of a sphere in which norms can be applied. While Agamben takes up the importance of the exception for the possibility of suspending an extant set of norms, he refutes this emphasis on decisive differentiation. In a re-reading varied throughout the Homo Sacer series,185 Agamben counters Schmitt’s linear account of a sovereign figure authoritatively ordaining when the law is in force and when it has to be suspended in order to re-establish a “normal situation.”186 Rather than allowing for a sovereign that authoritatively reinstates order, Agamben traces a movement in the course of

182 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 27. 183 Agamben, State of Exception, 5. 184 Carl Schmitt. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1985. 13. 185 Cf. Giorgio Agamben. The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford UP, 2017. 186 Carl Schmitt. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1985. 13.

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which there is an increasing “undecidability of norm and exception,” a state of exception “wholly confused with the rule.”187 This is far from the ineffable decision on which Schmitt stakes the legal sphere. That decision, after all, has an almost narrative logic to it: a sovereign actor decides when a law is in force and can be crossed in a classically eventful manner.188 Instead of such separable states, strategies of governance in Agamben’s account are predicated on permanent indecision, in which a set of norms is no longer decisively applied at all. Rather than preceding the restitution of legal order in the wake of a sovereign decision, the exception is an ongoing relation. In this uncertain zone, there is no decisive emergency in which the rule of law is temporarily suspended to restore order. Instead, the potential to be withdrawn is the negative foundation of any political order, leading to a mode of governance predicated on the constant threat of explicit laws being rescinded. The object of power excepted from law is not a citizen or a legal subject, but ‘bare life’ without recourse to a determinable legal status. In this constellation, “[t]he exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.”189 As a result, there is no possibility of asserting a linear progression from a state of pre-juridical, pre-normative anarchy to a subsequent state in which order is assured. Against such a development, be it associated with a sovereign decision or with a state of nature supplanted by a social contract, Agamben positions the topology of a “Möbius strip.”190 On a surface of this kind (with only one side and one edge) an inside cannot be distinguished from an outside; accordingly what seems opposed from the position of binary difference cannot be cast out. In this looped model, the pre-existence of a state of nature is, thus, an obsolete fiction. The inside of the law and its putative outside are indistinguishable, the formulation of norms and the possibility of their suspension dependent on each other. There is no narrative to be gleaned here: the state of nature is a potential within the very order that appears to supplant it, a mode of power only a twist of the Möbius strip away. Under these conditions, the projection of anomie onto a constitutive outside – so important for the model of demarcation – becomes impossible.191

187 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 58. 188 Cf. Hühn, Peter. “Event and Eventfulness.” Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 80–98. 92. 189 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18. 190 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37. 191 In Frankenberg’s terms, the state of exception is “purpose-free power, in the ‘emptiness of law’, in an ‘anomic space’, a ‘space without law’.” Günter Frankenberg. Political Technology and the Erosion of the Rule of Law: Normalizing the State of Exception. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 113.

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Understood in this way, as Prozorov points out, the state of exception does not have to be explicitly invoked at all: “Even when exceptional or emergency measures are not actualised in politics, they remain potentialities of state action and may indeed be more effective as potentialities, capable of regulating conduct by the sheer threat of their actualisation.”192 It is this replacement of a linear trajectory from suspension to a reinstatement of norms that is structurally mirrored by Agamben’s reinterpretation of a number of concepts of political philosophy. Most notably, as shown above, the very passage from a state of nature to a social contract is deprived of its eventful, narratable trajectory. As per a relationship Agamben terms ‘inclusive exclusion’, instead of a “passage from nature to the State,” the “State tie, having the form of a ban, is always already also non-State and pseudo-nature.”193 What this means for early modernist political fiction is that instead of casting out anarchist alterity, governance itself becomes imbricated with the potential to efface the boundary between a violent, natural state and the rule of law. The “indistinction between the human and the animal”194 that follows from this suspension of boundaries is not presented as (temporally) pre-juridical, nor as (spatially) tied to political radicals. Instead, it emerges as a condition of unconstrained rule, in the course of which any political identity can be rescinded and “consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it.”195 The instance ‘doing’ the rescinding, in turn, is not a fixed, sovereign power to be opposed in an antagonistic struggle, but is itself placed under erasure. Accordingly, the novels will be shown to be replete with putative representatives of the law who dismiss their own status, act from indistinct positions neither associated with certain norms nor given over to anarchy, and refuse explicit injunctions. However insistently the protagonists in political fiction desire a restitution of fixity, a boundary keeping at bay anarchy and an authoritative figure instituting certainty, variations of this permanent potential for a suspension of differential order will be shown to constitute the end point of strategies of demarcation. Instead of a boundary between collective identity and a disavowed, anarchic outside, the novels present what Agamben describes as a “zone of indistinction” marked by the “impossibility of distinguishing between inside and outside, nature and exception, physis and nomos.”196 This indistinction is extended to the narrated political subjects, who are confronted

192 193 194 195 196

Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 101. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 149.

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with the possibility of any political self-ascriptions being suspended at any time. Overall, in the state of exception, a relation is maintained between the normal functioning of laws (which display the ever-present possibility of their suspension) and its excepted individuals or groups to whom these laws no longer apply. But the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule. On the contrary, what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension.197

That is, a given order is determined less by its explicit rules and their application than by the processes by means of which it suspends its own functioning. It follows that the exception is not a rupture in an undisturbed functioning of laws, but rather presents the main “space in which the law is able to have validity.”198 Any appeal to a normative order or trust in legal protections is misplaced in view of the dependence of any ordering system on its potential suspension. Thus, even if an explicit proclamation of the state of exception is not provided, the very possibility of suspending laws and withdrawing protections can furnish a model of coercive power. The spaces emerging in the process, then, differ in the types of suspension on which they are predicated and the types of procedures made possible by the respective ‘force-of-law’ freed up as a result. What these spaces of exception share is normative power placed under erasure and the oblique nature of that deletion: instead of a decisive, sovereign speech act pronouncing the temporary suspension of laws, political subjects act in accordance with the ever-imminent withdrawal of communicable rules.

2.2.2 Literature of Exception The state of exception makes it impossible to derive an ordering principle “in the shape of the symbolic order guaranteeing meaning to the historical contingency.”199 Faced with this prospect, each novel stages attempts to reconstitute a stabilising distinction. A differential political order is shown to be preferable

197 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 17. 198 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19. 199 Slavoj Žižek. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 68.

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even for those characters who, in the event of redrawn boundaries, incur their placement on the side of alterity. Transgression, with a communicable form as ‘political crime’ or ‘radicalism’ and a subsequent expulsion, is imagined to provide a stabilising ideology of order, even for those running afoul of it.200 Becoming Other, on this view, is preferable to a wholesale collapse of a differential semantic field — and to the state of exception that takes hold as a result of that collapse. In the course of the respective narratives, that determinate position, however, moves out of reach. Neither identity nor alterity can, ultimately, be localised, let alone enacted or materially reified. The state of exception, in turn, develops precisely from this permanent uncertainty regarding the extension and boundaries of any given ordered space. Rather than an opening for a new politics unrestrained by the binary logic of “fixed boundaries and defined territorial edges,” the state of exception “has ‘no outside’.”201 Concomitantly, it also offers no ‘inside’ in which norms would apply, or a means of signifying the distinction between inside and outside in the first place. As a consequence, this model of power is characterised by the impossibility of determining whether a transgression has occurred at all. No authority discloses itself to decide on boundaries and their breach. The result is perpetual ambiguity regarding the protagonists’ position vis-à-vis an absent, implicit power. Following Hayden, “the domain of decisionist sovereign power consists in making authoritative distinctions as to what divides one particular social order from another in terms of who, or what, is to be included as the norm and excluded as the exception.”202 In the state of exception, such a decision is sought, yet postponed indefinitely. In tracing the loss of demarcation and the incursion of a state of exception, however, this study cannot seek direct equivalents to Agamben’s examples in the novels, as if the narratives merely disclosed a grand narrative already identified by the set of texts assembled in the Homo Sacer series.203 Not only does the literary negotiation of similar concepts present formal complements to the political model expounded by Agamben, but,

200 Even inscription on the disavowed side of identitarian certainty would affirm the functioning of a ‘big Other’ which, inconsistent and ‘barred’ as it may be, can be reconstituted in its consistency. Cf. Slavoj Žižek. “Da Capo senza Fine.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 213–263. 253. 201 John Allen. “Power.” A Companion to Political Geography. Ed. John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell and Gerard Toal. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 95–109. 104. 202 Patrick Hayden. Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory. New York: Routledge, 2009. 68. 203 For the purposes of this study, the series involves the texts assembled in: Giorgio Agamben. The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2017.

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what is more, the narrative enactment of the state of exception will also be shown to modify some of the philosophical arguments. These departures will be briefly sketched with reference to three characteristics of the state of exception presented in Agamben’s The Time That Remains.204 Firstly, in this model of political power, “there is an absolute indeterminacy between inside and outside.”205 As a result of this (1) indeterminacy, neither is a sphere outside of the law specified in the state of exception, nor is there an attempt to pinpoint a transgressive event by means of which the law could be seen to apply to ‘extrajuridical reality’.206 If, however, there is no “‘outside’ of the law,”207 there is also no distinction between the political subjects and the mode of rule applied to them. Any technique of regulation undertaken in the course of the suspension of norms is, thus, immediately applied to an individual whose identity has, analogously, been suspended. As a result, coercive authority is exerted without representable, interceding steps of mediation. What results is a “zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide.”208 In literary terms, this status will be shown to find its complement in the loss of the narrative event. By creating conditions of ‘indistinction’ in which the protagonists can no longer ascertain identity nor alterity, the possibility of an eventful crossing of a border between complementary semantic spaces is, likewise, withdrawn. The eventlessness which ensues in the wake of the suspension of demarcation is, thus, intimately tied to the state of exception and the mode of rule which it enables. Following Jerome Bruner, an event requires both canonicity and breach, “[f]or to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from in a manner to do violence to [. . .] the ‘legitimacy’ of the canonical script.”209 The absence of ‘breach’ – a crossing over into an anarchist sphere, say, or the anarchist entering a normative space – conversely makes canonicity unrepresentable. Norms, after all, are determined differentially: if the relational Other is lost, what results according to the early modernist political imaginary is a concomitant failure to determine a

204 Giorgio Agamben. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005. Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 102 gives a brief overview over these characteristics of a law which “remains in force without significance.” 205 Agamben, Time, 105. 206 Cf. Agamben, State of Exception, 26. 207 Agamben, Time, 105. 208 Agamben, State of Exception, 26. 209 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction,” 11.

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sense of self. Hence, whenever protagonists succumb to the state of exception in political fiction, this is not figured as the consequence of an eventful border-crossing between complementary spaces but, instead, as an inability to establish demarcations. That is to say: the absence of alterity is represented both as a loss of political order and as an attenuation of narrativity. The state of exception, by dispensing with the transgressive potential of political radicalism, tends towards the eventless: without the possibility to ‘draw a difference’, characters are suspended in undifferentiated spaces. Under those circumstances, neither the foundationalist appeal to “some overarching theory of the good and right”210 nor the post-foundationalist simulation of such a theory can proceed. After all, in the differential terms established by the model of political demarcation, ‘good and right’ could only emerge against the foil of the anarchist ‘evil and wrong’. Accordingly, as the state of exception dispenses with such assurances, each novel features an epiphanic disclosure of a “zone of indistinction”211 in which differentiations are made impossible. While characters fail to uphold the distinction between self and Other in the story, the narrative discourse also offers correlatives to the absence of distinctions. Most notably, increasingly setting and perceiver cannot be told apart, leading to what McCarthy identifies as the “interaction – the mingling – of person with place,”212 in the course of which the ‘focaliser’ becomes indistinguishable from his or her environment. Thus, in presenting the impossibility of creating a differential signifier (the law, culture, or norms) that organises an aberrant signified (the anarchist, the deviant, the grotesque radical body), narratives of exception will be shown to be predicated not on the “act of tracing boundaries, but their cancellation or negation.”213 The state of exception, then, finds its complement in the readers’ uncertainty as to whether a transgressive breach of a classificatory border has taken place at all. What results is the “issueless, repetitive temporality that comes of anti-evental narrative,” which, as Michael Sayeau argues, experiments “with the ‘tellability’ of the seemingly untellable – the eventless, that which defies the fictional mandate for development that provokes recognition of some sort.”214 Instead of the assumption

210 Don Herzog. Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. 221. 211 Agamben, State of Exception, 26. 212 Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy. “‘A Choice of Nightmares’: The Ecology of Heart of Darkness.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 55 (2009). 620–684. 637. 213 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 85. 214 Michael Sayeau. Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Narrative. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 45–46.

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that social order has to be determined against an anarchist outside, this eventlessness erodes the differences between both sides of the distinction. The result, to take the example of The Secret Agent, are images of a ‘mechanism’ or ‘circularity’ taking over for any eventful (and, from the perspective of social order) teleological progress. The state of exception, thus, suspends narrative progression and, more broadly, a sense of historical change. What remains is an enforced ‘Now’, as dehistoricised as it is depoliticised. The second feature of the state of exception in The Time That Remains is the impossibility “to distinguish observance [osservanza] and transgression of the law.”215 Under these conditions, “no matter what mode of behaviour appears to be in line with the law in a normal situation,”216 any action can be revealed to have constituted an unspecified (2) transgression. The precise norm that has been breached – or, in narratological terms, the semantic border that has been crossed – is, however, not made explicit. This characteristic, too, is foregrounded in the narrative transmission. After all, if “unobservability [inseguibilità]”217 forms the basis of the state of exception, it finds its equivalent in restrictions of focalisation, i.e. of the question ‘who sees?’.218 While, for instance, James’ protagonist initially assumes a panoramic overview over the anarchist conspiracy, the state of exception coincides with a restriction of his perspective. Or rather: as he is placed in a position of uncertainty regarding the ontological status of a determinative power structure, the reader is, likewise, precluded from recovering the degree to which the character acts in accordance with a set of decrees. Observation (and the lack thereof) are, thus, productively literalised in the novels. This offers the possibility to narratively perform the gradual emergence of a state of exception, as the assumption of ocularcentric control – and the attendant internally focalised certainties of a well-ordered social sphere – is suspended. As a third component of the state of exception, Agamben describes (3) places in which “the law is absolutely unformulable [informulabile]. It no longer has, or does not yet have, the form of a prescription or a prohibition.”219 Here, the early modernist equivalents to the state of exception will be shown to offer a different emphasis than Agamben’s focus on spaces in which the unformulability of laws is already in force. Whether it is the medieval ban,220 the iustitium (a ‘standstill’ of

215 Agamben, Time, 105. 216 Agamben, Time, 105. 217 Agamben, Time, 105. 218 Genette, Narrative Method, 186. 219 Agamben, Time, 106. 220 Cf. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104.

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the Roman law221) or, most controversially, the camp:222 Agamben sifts through a whole host of paradigmatic spaces in which one set of laws has been withdrawn, while “new prohibitions and new duties”223 are withheld. As opposed to this notion of a fully-fledged state of exception already (and quite literally) in place, the analysis of political fiction will trace the emergence of this mode of power against the background of an expectation of explicit, ordering norms. That is, characters attempt to hold on to the certainty provided both by their legal status and their sense of identity. It is precisely this assumption of continued normativity, however, that turns out to be self-defeating. The more figures of authority are appealed to, the more are they shown to disturb any semblance of certainty rather than restoring it. Thus, the literary version of suspended laws is, in the case of Conrad, James, and Chesterton, shown to develop out of attempts to restore determinate identity and alterity. In the narratives, the state of exception is less a place than a performative effect of these appeals to absent laws and lawgivers. In other words, the very desire to be acknowledged by figures guaranteeing discernible norms is shown to lead to an exposure to uncertain authority. What results is a perpetually absent instance of power, the aims of which become the more ‘unformulable’ the more an ordering injunction is sought. The material effects of this oblique mode of rule, however, are presented as more immediately determinative than any imagined anarchic enemy could ever be. Variations of the state of exception will be shown to be disclosed whenever the demarcation of alterity fails. Whereas in The Princess Casamassima, the ‘zone of indistinction’ is the result of a faltering differentiation between culture and anarchy, in The Secret Agent the breakdown of demarcation is presented as a systematic ‘dislocation’ — a process of stripping selected figures of their selfimage and relegating them to a threshold state in which they are reduced to ‘bare life’. In Under Western Eyes, the state of exception coincides with a breakdown of state sovereignty, leading to the emergence of a spectral autocracy. The state of exception in this novel is an elliptical mode of rule to be completed by the very figures whose self-images have been suspended along with the certainty of who their political antagonists are. The Man Who Was Thursday, finally, presents an attempt to come to terms with the loss of demarcated alterity. After setting up a farcical version of the loss of differentiation between self and Other, the novel introduces a renewed deep-structure: an unknowable entity that

221 Cf. Agamben, State of Exception, 41. 222 “When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp. The camp – and not the prison – is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 20. 223 Cf. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181.

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combines anarchism and order in one and the same, divine position. With its two final iterations, the corpus, thus, presents polarised end points for the movement from demarcation to exception. Whereas for Conrad, the state of exception becomes an inescapable mode of rule precluding any determination of self and Other, Chesterton’s novel presents the possibility of salvaging politics by dispensing with hard-and-fast demarcations altogether.

3 Demarcations of Culture and Anarchy in The Princess Casamassima Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima cannot be considered an accurate account of political dissent in the 1880s.1 George Woodcock rightly points out the absence of any semblance of “authentic radicalism” in the novel. He attributes to James the “detachment of the drowning,” a recounting of the values of a doomed aristocracy against the background of a “shadow play” of revolutionary fervour.2 In this chapter, rather than dismissing The Princess Casamassima due to this lack of convincing historical hetero-reference,3 it is precisely the notion of revolution as a ‘shadow play’ that will be considered the very basis of the political imaginary of the novel. From this perspective, the “detachment of the drowning” should not be attributed to the alleged aristocratic predilections of the author. Instead, such detachment is precisely the hard-won status sought within the diegesis. Its correlative is ‘culture’, in the sense of individual recuperation and communal discernment of immaterial value. Accordingly, an ideology of culture furnishing a sense of collective identity is achieved as a result of a demarcation against the ‘shadow play’ of anarchism, the diegetic reality of which is perpetually called into question. Thus, while the novel bears out the late-Victorian notion that a “society without cultural bonds has no cohesion and falls into anarchy,”4 that same anarchy will be shown to be required as much as it is disavowed. Only on the condition that a literal, revolutionary movement is imagined as a political antagonist on the verge of redistributing cultural accomplishments can an attribution of value proceed in the first place. Conversely, as soon as a determinable position of

1 Cf. Eric Haralson and Kendall Johnson. Henry James: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2009. 122. 2 George Woodcock. “Henry James and the Conspirators.” The Sewanee Review 60 (1952), 219–229. 219. 3 Defined here as “reference to the lifeworld or an imaginary reality over and above the semiotic system or its actualization.” My trans. Orig. quote: “Charakteristisch für Heteroreferenz ist, dass hier über das semiotische System bzw. dessen Aktualisierung hinaus auf die Lebenswelt oder eine imaginäre Realität Bezug genommen wird.” Werner Wolf. “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen: Ein Systematisierungsversuch metareferentieller Formen und Begriffe in Literatur und anderen Medien.” Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien: Theoretische Grundlagen, Historische Perspektiven, Metagattungen, Funktionen. Ed. Janine Hauthal et al. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 25–65. 31. 4 Schloss, Culture and Criticism, 11. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-003

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anarchist Otherness is lost, the protagonist is unable to uphold the temporary identity effect achieved by imagining his involvement in a community united by standards of taste. Consequently, rather than offering simple exaltation of aristocratic refinement, the containment of an imagined dissolution of order is presented as the result of political differentiation. Only by drawing a distinction can a concept of culture be set apart from the anarchy beyond its pale. Schloss is correct in his assertion that such an ideal of ostensible ‘culture’ is defined in opposition to Enlightenment successors of utilitarianism, positivism, or naturalism, which argue that “[o]nly a mind divested of prejudice and custom could be truly in tune with natural laws and gain reliable knowledge.”5 Casamassima partakes in a tradition of Victorian cultural criticism that attempts to ward off the ‘stripping away’ of cohesive prejudices. Culture, in a tradition of Arnold’s ‘disinterested’ criticism, is supposed to suspend any “practical consequences and applications,” emerging instead as the “business [. . .] simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world.”6 The necessity to wrest such a cultural sphere from an everencroaching set of decidedly practical interests already indicates the degree to which this recovery of culture proceeds as a matter of differentiation rather than an essentialist store of ineffable truths. For all its claims to universality, culture is relational. It follows that in order to derive such a notion of culture, the protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, requires a position of alterity. For James’ working-class hero, a disavowed radical sphere provides a foil upon which disavowed characteristics of modernity can be projected. Only by extricating his own subjection and impoverished status from his material conditions – and relegating these features to the anarchist outside – can the novel attend to the ‘business’ of imagining a cultural hierarchy of the “best which has been thought and said in the world.”7 Thus, rather than a static set of features, culture is presented as a temporary distinction.In Greenblatt’s terms, while culture, thus understood, “functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the regulator and guarantor of movement.”8 And indeed, what little ‘movement’ there is in the plot of Casamassima is enabled by the discernment its protagonist seeks. The narrative’s central dynamics are tied up both with the upward trajectory of the “little bookbinder” (23), who aspires to the Princess’ cultural sphere, and the literal,

5 Schloss, Culture and Criticism, 11. 6 Arnold. “The Function of Criticism,” 40. 7 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5. 8 Stephen Greenblatt. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 82–86. 82.

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topographical movement of a (rather small) grand tour, which enables the protagonist to expound cultural value in a decisive decision against the anarchist transvaluation of values. The novel, thus, presents and evaluates the possibility of deriving a residual sphere of culture in opposition to anarchism, which, conversely, has to be identified with disorder and breakdown in order to furnish a complementary foil. That is, the narrative concerns itself with the possibility of setting up a heterostereotypical anarchist alterity against which a tenuous self can be defined. This possibility of a residual cultural identity will be shown to undergird the Bildungsgang of the workingclass protagonist prevaricating between his allegiance to a radical cause and his desire to inscribe himself in a cultural space. In this attempt to ensure demarcation of a valued collective identity, the protagonist has to make do without an authoritative figure spelling out and upholding its boundaries and properties. In the absence of a sovereign instance to which the establishment of a well-regulated cultural interiority could be entrusted, the construction of autostereotypes set off from anarchist heterostereotypes falls to the protagonist himself. This means that for the aspiring culture aficionado, the creation of a culture/anarchy split cannot proceed from any presumption of essential value. Such construction of culture attempted by Hyacinth has to contend with the appeal of anarchism. After all, while the titular Princess is re-interpreted as the bearer of values, she herself is shown to desire the renegotiation of social roles that is possible only on the radical outside, in the sphere of anarchist activism. She seeks, to put it in Lionel Trilling’s terms, “irrefrangible reality,”9 while the main protagonist – Hyacinth Robinson – attempts to define culture against the incursion of such an uncontrollable anarchist ‘reality’. In the process, he attempts to draw a differentiation in order to assert for the Princess’ side the illusion of an anti-modern sphere, its essentialist order aestheticised as “nobility, beauty, and dignity.”10 The Princess – as the representative of these values – conversely aspires to an avoidance of differentiation altogether, seeking as she does a revolutionary moment in which any social norm is open to re-interpretation. However, her attempt to revel in the supposed contingency of class, to redistribute wealth and re-negotiate the bounds of female identity runs counter to the illusion of a cohesive culture. Her trajectory, thus, defies the novel’s presentation of imagined cultural cohesion as the

9 Lionel Trilling. “The Princess Casamassima.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking, 1950. 58–92. 91. 10 Cf. Eßbach, “Gegenwart,” 52. Eßbach ascribes these categories to the ‘losers of modernization’: “Letztere haben nicht aufgehört, die Legitimität der Moderne anzuzweifeln, sei es, dass sie Modernisierungen als Dekadenz beschrieben haben [oder] dass sie ihrer Trauer über den Verlust von Adel, Schönheit und Würde Ausdruck gegeben haben.”

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key to any collective identity. For any imaginary sense of self to function, shared, immaterial value has to be removed from undue contestation. Hyacinth’s cultural identity, thus, requires a differentiation between (1) a refined sphere of discernment on the one hand; and (2) a radical sphere of incipient anarchic upheaval by means of which the very notion of antagonistic deliberation can be consigned to the constitutive outside.11 Such depoliticisation of the cultural sphere, made possible by a grounding political difference, requires material signs which prompt ever-renewed processes of interpretation. The perpetual hermeneutic engagement with polyvalent signifiers opens up a “representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History.”12 Scepticism of that relation, meanwhile, can be subordinated to the appreciative observer’s ever-renewed approach to culture imagined as a cohesive whole. Hence, rather than opting for a side in a pre-existing political struggle between culture and anarchy, Casamassima considers how to set apart the fiction of a meaningful sphere of refinement from an equally fictive sphere of radicalism. Regarding the necessity of this demarcation of cultural identity and radical alterity, the novel prefigures the anarchist theme in Conrad and Chesterton, although its radicals are not described as ‘anarchists’ exclusively. As long as culture and anarchy are successfully demarcated, a distinction of this type offers two opposed models of space and time as well as two contrasting types of signs. That is, rather than a novel representing anarchism, The Princess Casamassima negotiates the type of order that can be claimed if its obverse is successfully made to appear as an unassimilable Other. Both protagonists have a stake in this naturalisation of anarchism: Hyacinth requires the radical sphere as a foil to his cultural pursuits, while the Princess requires an anarchist sphere as a testing ground for her political agency.13

11 Cf. Michael G. Salter. Carl Schmitt: Law as Politics, Ideology and Strategic Myth. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012. 71. Though Schmitt evinces a similar concern with depoliticisation, the emphasis is different. Salter argues convincingly that Schmitt takes liberal depoliticisation seriously as a manner of “instrumental effectiveness in promoting and consolidating its own political agenda of possessive individualism and the security of private property” (72). 12 Jameson, Unconscious, 6. 13 Regarding naturalisation, cf. Tom Brass. Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000. 11. In Casamassima, it is thus on the side of alterity that the “politico-ideological object” of the novel is located in order to effect “the legitimization of an existing or rapidly vanishing social order.” The “core institutional elements” of “religion, family, gender, ethnicity, nation, hierarchy, and Nature itself,” by contrast, emerge as far less secure and are subordinated to the work of construction that marks ‘culture’ in the novel.

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Although the distinction between culture and anarchy is paramount, the novel exposes the material interests underpinning it. Specifically, the sense of self afforded by a set-apart order is reserved for a privileged group. Since insight into the contingency of the political boundary destabilises its perceived universal validity, the ideology of culture requires intricate strategies of disavowal. Hyacinth, for one, is shown to be in a double-bind: he has to construct a political differentiation and afterwards act as if it were pre-given and essential. A redoubled demarcation of this kind, in Lee Edelman’s terms, “names the space in which Imaginary relations, relations that hark back to a misrecognition of the self as enjoying some originary access to presence (a presence ‘retroactively posited’ and therefore lost, one might say, from the start), compete for Symbolic fulfilment.”14 The protagonist, in other words, has to attempt to create and act in accordance with a ‘retroactively posited’ cultural sphere. Construction and obfuscation go hand in hand. Consequently, whenever Hyacinth Robinson can present himself as confronted with a decision between two reified spheres – “the general fabric of civilisation as we know it” (396) on the one hand and the “invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of redistribution” (397) on the other – this strategy of ‘retroactive positing’ has already been carried out successfully. Such demarcation of order and anarchy takes the form of a dilemma: the characters are confronted with a choice between culture and anarchy. Their decision, however, is secondary to the perpetuation of the notion that these sphere exist in the first place. Thus, as long as cultural identity and anarchist alterity can be imagined to require a choice, they can be maintained as two clearly defined, antagonistic semantic spaces, the difference of which is productively marked and re-marked. Anarchism, then, is not presented as a destructive, radical entity in and of itself, nor are its various associated stereotypes of terrorism, violence, and revolution granted extensive representation. Instead, The Princess Casamassima contrasts the possibility of a distinction between culture and anarchy with a second model in which both concepts can no longer be told apart whatsoever: a state of exception. Once the “binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity”15 breaks down, the protagonists do not gain scope to redefine their identities with radical abandon. Instead, the emerging post-binary mode of power is shown to take hold as soon as the “shadow play”16 of radicalism collapses. As a result, anarchic selffashioning is replaced with a wholesale effacement of individual agency. Once

14 Edelman, No Future, 8. 15 Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Volume Two. Trans Quintin Hoare. New York and London: Verso, 2006. 5. 16 Woodcock, “Henry James and the Conspirators,” 219.

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anarchy fails to yield representable signifiers of difference, its demarcation against culture collapses. The state of exception resulting from this impending absence of clearly distinct cultural and anarchic spheres leaves the protagonists bereft of a political position, and subjects them to modes of coercion that they cannot trace to any one source. The political imaginary of the novel, thus, hinges on the possibility of a second-order distinction: rather than simply a boundary between essentialist spaces of order and breakdown, the narrative negotiates the possibility of sustaining the distinction between culture and anarchy against a state of indeterminacy in which culture and anarchy cannot be told apart.

3.1 “Illuminated Ignorance” – Demarcating Cultural Identity Rather than a repository of essential truths, culture in The Princess Casamassima is only just determined against encroaching anarchy. As indicated above, this salvaging of collective identity requires temporary demarcations. On the cultural side, these topological, topographical, and semantic boundaries permit the invention of a tradition. Specifically, they require each individual to affirm what Harvey dubs the “identity of place” in the midst of the “growing abstractions of space.”17 In order to accomplish this, instrumental quantification of value has to be projected onto the outside of the ‘place’ of cultural worth. The ‘growing abstractions’ of modernity, then, are contained by imagining them as attributes of a latent radical outside rather than the very precondition for the high cultural artefacts so admired by the novel’s protagonist. To escape the imbrication of culture and abstract human labour, a latent radical sphere of uncertain value serves to, conversely, mark the cultural inside as concrete and real. This strategy of demarcation is associated with a largely implicit mode of ‘doing order’, one that is presented as no less political for its association with the arts, artisanal practice, and, first and foremost, with a process of ensuring “hermeneutic dynamism.”18 Hyacinth, as opposed to the dislocated and boundless sphere instituted by ‘radicals’ at the end of the story, is associated with the possibility of establishing a bounded sphere in which multivalent signs require continuous interpretative engagement. This task of understanding requires an equivalent to ‘culture’ as popularised by Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). The novel, however, modifies Arnold’s model.

17 David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 272. 18 Avner Ben-Zaken. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 74.

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Chiefly, the vaunted study of “perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances” fails to be associated with any default object.19 That is, The Princess Casamassima presents the necessity of ‘having something’ – and ‘making something’ of it – as the condition of the successful demarcation of culture. What this (literal and material) object of inquiry consists of is beside the point. Rather than engaging in a general ‘course of perfection’, what matters is that the protagonist barely wrests interpretable signifiers of cultural identity from scattered material objects, short voyages, theatrical performances, or even popular mass media. The ultimate representative of culture in this line of stand-ins for an everelusive sphere of culture is, however, the Princess herself. As per Eagleton’s concept of the ‘idea of culture’, the protagonist attempts to revere her as a “substitute for a fading sense of divinity and transcendence.”20 This attempt encounters a redoubled difficulty. Not only does the Princess herself resist such ascriptions, not least by re-fashioning herself as a revolutionary; what is more, the novel consistently denies this sought-after reification of ‘cultural truths’ altogether. In Arnold’s political writings, it is the state that ultimately assures the “ideal of high reason and right feeling, representing its best self, commanding general respect, and forming a rallying point for the intelligence and for the worthiest instincts of the community.”21 James’ novel harbours no such hope for the state and its institutions. Indeed, the protagonists cannot overlay cultural identity with a statist form at all. They are, thus, cut-off from a guarantor of value that promises, as Eagleton puts it, “a sort of premature utopia, abolishing struggle at an imaginary level so that they need not resolve it at a political one.”22 Thus, Casamassima denies the protagonist any hierarchical validation of his attempts to contain the necessity for radical political change, emphasising instead the perpetual threat of a failure of his ephemeral ‘identity-effect’ maintained in contradistinction to an anarchist Other.23

19 Matthew Arnold. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. Jane Garnett. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 37. 20 Terry Eagleton. The Idea of Culture. Malden/Oxford/Melbourne/Berlin: Blackwell, 2000. 2 21 Matthew Arnold. “Democracy.” Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 22 Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, 7. 23 Cf. Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. As per Butler, “the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up the possibilities of ‘agency’ that are insidiously foreclosed by

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What is more, the attempt to establish a distinction between culture and anarchy is figured as a circuitous process. The desired reification of order can only be approached obliquely, in a “mode of indirectness.”24 The hermeneutic challenge of culture, then, has to be upheld as an approach towards ‘the best that has been thought and said’ — without ever reaching that goal, since arriving at a stable inventory of cultural signs would bring to a close such an interpretative approach. This processual hermeneutic mode, firstly, establishes its distance from desired cultural coherence, only to, secondly, set about bridging the gap in ever-renewed interpretative endeavours. By contrast, the complementary anarchist Other is figured in starkly dichotomous terms of presence or absence. That is, while the cultural side of the distinction allows for gradations, anarchy is imagined as either eluding the protagonist entirely or disclosing itself as a sudden, epiphanic totality. The novel, thus, presents the distinction between culture and anarchy as a difference of interpretability on each side as much as a set of hard and fast, differential features. Rather than levelling criticism at the contingency of culture in an effort to “reveal its metaphysical illusions,”25 the novel is concerned with strategies of restoring and maintaining illusions of cohesive culture negotiated within the context of a collective identity.26

3.1.1 Fashioning Culture In The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson is confronted with a problem of immediacy. Pinnie, the working-class woman who has raised him, presents

positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary.” (187) Casamassima conjoins both: agency depends on the transitory simulation of fixity. 24 Ralf Konersmann. “Kultur der Philosophie und Kulturphilosophie.” Grundlagentexte Kulturphilosophie. Ed. Ralf Konersmann. Hamburg: Meiner, 2009. 7–22. 19. “The mode of indirectness, in which we encounter the cultural as well as the precarious givenness of cultural facts points to a further characteristic of this thematic field, given particular plasticity by the metaphor of the detour. The poignancy of the cultural is this dependence on detour and [. . .] all culture is a culture of detours.” My trans. 25 Andrew M. Koch. “Post-Structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism.” PostAnarchism: A Reader. Ed. Douane Rousselle and Süreyyya Evren. London: Pluto Press, 2011. 23–40. 28. 26 Cf. Jean-Michel Rabaté. “Tradition and T. S. Eliot.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 210–222. 210. If, as Rabaté puts it, “the notion of a systematic order, of an organic unity is now identified as a dominant aspect of modernism,” in the novel this systematicity is a processual and perspectivally inflected one. Culture and anarchy function as relational terms, associated with the possibility of seeing one through the lens of the other.

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him as a born gentleman. She has reason to do so, since his mother has killed an aristocrat presumed to be his father. Indeed, his higher birth is shown to be readily apparent in his features and demeanour, which are placed in stark contrast to the squalor of the East End. Hyacinth’s presumed father is perceived to manifest himself in the boy’s very disposition. This notion of a secret aristocratic identity can, in turn, be traced back to a small inventory of textual and iconic sources, namely “romances in the Family Herald and the London Journal” with “obligatory illustration in which the noble characters (they were always of the highest birth) were presented to the carnal eye” (54). This popular image of high status leads to a model of direct representation, in which the protagonist’s every feature cannot but confirm his lineage. Mr Vetch, Pinnie’s neighbour and otherwise an arbiter of largely unchallenged conservative ‘commonsense’ in the novel, takes the opposed position by divesting Hyacinth of pretensions to an aristocratic heritage. Arguing in favour of confronting the child with his incarcerated mother, Vetch frames the question of identity as a matter of countering Pinnie’s imaginative reconstitution of her protégé: “I would say anything you like, if what I say would help the matter. He’s a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more of life than he will find in it. That’s why he won’t be happy.” (72) Vetch’s framing of Hyacinth’s position, as opposed to the immediacy of Pinnie’s attribution of aristocracy, imputes a reality of poverty of which the protagonist has to be made aware. The expectation of “a good deal more of life than he will find in it” sets up a twofold lack: Vetch asserts that Hyacinth is barred from achieving “more” due to his social position, but, at the same time, he implies that there might be nothing to be ‘found’ in the first place. The exalted sphere of culture which Pinnie projects on her protégé, on this second reading, is not only out of reach but also non-existent. Hyacinth, in other words, has to be barred from exposure to the aristocracy in order to preserve the very notion that there is a sphere of ineffable values in the first place. Disentangled from actual nobility, ‘culture’ can be imagined as universal. By denying direct links to a privileged sphere of cultural cohesion, cultural identity becomes a matter of active engagement with multiple signs, a practice which disavows their association with a pre-existing class position, aristocratic or otherwise. This alternative model of identity – adopted by Hyacinth himself – is positioned in its entirety against a static, unchangeable opposition of identity and alterity. It allows for ‘culture’ to emerge as a process of drawing and re-drawing boundaries, separating over and over an ideal order from its anarchic outside. After disavowing the material underpinnings of the cultural sphere, its value becomes subject to individual renegotiation.

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Hyacinth’s demands are not presented as a question of discovering his origins, but, as Butler suggests regarding ‘fantasmatic activity’, as an act of creating a productively split identity.27 Hyacinth is presented in terms of such a split from the outset. His identity is ruptured when he is confronted with an account of his uncertain origin as the illegitimate son of the very aristocrat whom his mother has stabbed to death. While this split identity as a “refined and interesting figure” (63) in Pentonville is already overdetermined in the opening childhood vignette, it is, however, not shown to constitute an inescapable determining condition in the manner of French naturalism.28 Instead, the split – its contours, its relationship to either side of the rift, the degree to which it determines the protagonist – is reconfigured as an interpretative task. Identity is imagined as a hermeneutic project rather than a set of fixed assumptions to be verified or falsified. In this way, cultural identity as a performative distinction – a ‘doing’ rather than an itemised ‘having’ – ensures the ongoing evocation of polyvalent signs that require interpretation by the protagonist. The imagined split between the culture attributed to the father and the anarchic impulses imputed to the mother can be interrogated — in the interests of an ongoing identity formation, however, the divide is not to be overcome. Instead, what Hyacinth is shown to accomplish is the construction of a contingent sphere of identity against the background of its ever-imminent dissolution. It is precisely the protagonist’s anarcho-cultural split that renders the novel’s politics productively ambivalent. If, as Mackenzie suggests, Casamassima presents a model in which, “[a]s in art, ‘differences’ are eternally true, and equality eternally untrue,” this concern with the validity and properties of hard-won gradations of truth is tenuously upheld, in the face of modes of power which suspend the proliferation of differences on which the protagonist is shown to depend.29 Cultural, identity is not, as the protagonist initially suspects, solely the “benefit of metropolitan culture” (135). Rather than granting a stable set of characteristics (the “best and most profound productions of some artistic,

27 Such unmediated self-inscription departs from the assumption that beneath radical speech there is an uncontested discursive domain capable of conferring on a “given indication the force of an ontological designator.” Judith Butler. “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess.” Differences 2 (1990). 105–125. 109. 28 Simone Francescato traces James’ critical interrogation of the pseudo-scientific deterministic rigor of Émile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt and Alphonse Daudet. Cf. Simone Francescato. Collecting and Appreciating: Henry James and the Transformation of Aesthetics in the Age of Consumption. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. 72. 29 Manfred Mackenzie. Communities of Honor and Love in Henry James. London: Harvard UP, 1976. 18.

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literary, or philosophical elite”30) it emerges as a drawing of distinctions. Within these demarcated bounds, the characters can establish temporary places in which they aspire to the illusion of a coherent cultural identity, yet never encounter it in its imagined plenitude. Accordingly, the apotheosis of a cultural sphere is the goal of a whole host of medially specific practices ranging from theatre and mass entertainment to the purported realm of high culture at the Princess’ estate; yet, whenever a self seems to be in reach as a result of these efforts, it has to be disrupted. After all, it is only by its deferral that cultural identity can be dramatised as a perpetual task. As a consequence, once the protagonist purports to understand a phenomenon and to have found an adequate mode of ‘hetero-reference’ for its description, this conclusion is productively undercut by a self-referential evocation of its gaps, insufficiencies, and – consequently – inducements to further interpretative work. In short: the dynamics of this system are ensured by an ever-renewed delay of its closure. Although cultural identity is explicitly sought, ultimately the novel inculcates the necessity to forestall a describable ‘culture’. The formation of a sphere of shared values instead hinges on precluding what Iser calls “the necessary function of finishing off the system.”31 The deferral of this function is almost programmatically formulated during one of Hyacinth’s forays through London with his childhood friend: “The sense of privation, with her, was often extremely acute; but she could always put her finger on the remedy. With the imaginative, irresponsible little bookbinder the case was very different; the remedy, with him, was terribly vague and impracticable.” (163) The “remedy” for the melancholic longing for cultural identity is presented as perpetual privation. This ‘vagueness’ is a feature, not a bug: it withholds external reference to an object, which, in signifying culture, would render the model static.32 It is only by upholding cultural fulfilment as “terribly vague and impracticable”

30 For Graeber, this definition of culture forms a two-sided model in conjunction with a notion of culture as ‘everyday practice’. This enables “constant blurring of the line between textual traditions and forms of everyday practice,” which allows for circular formulations of the (illusory) exceptional status of ‘the West’. David Graeber. “There Never Was a West.” Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007. 329–374. 337. 31 Wolfgang Iser. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 219. 32 Cf. Harro Müller and Larson Powell. “Luhmann’s Systems Theory as a Theory of Modernity.” New German Critique 61 (1994). 39–54. 49. This suspension allows for the respective system to “refer to itself and practice multiple forms of self-referentiality by making use of the relation of medium and form, or it may even be self-referential vis-à-vis the relation of external reference and self-reference itself.”

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that the narrative can maintain the notion of culture just out of reach. By thus reformulating cultural identity as a task (accomplished by the demarcation of a contingent sphere in which to engage in ever-failing attempts of achieving it), the novel presents a strategy of upholding “an infinite regress of foundational questionability.”33 If this is a hermeneutics, it is one that, in Dieter Mersch’s terms, is resolutely opposed to criteria of adequation, refusing as it does both a ‘sayable’ proposition encompassing culture and the form of reference.34 The realm of culture is, then, only achieved intermittently. The distinction of a cultural place – and the assurance of ever-renewed interpretation of multivalent signs within it – is temporary. Upon its breakdown, calculation of value is shown to take the place of interpretation. The logic that dispenses with the hermeneutic challenges of cultural identity is decidedly instrumental, as well as indifferent to the protagonists’ own accounts of their identity and interpretative struggles. Although culture offers a temporary alternative to this explicit calculus, it is not subsumable under ‘right reason’ in an Arnoldian vein. Instead, the novel bears out James Clifford’s assessment that amidst a new plurality of cultures in the nineteenth century, “[t]he ideal of an autonomous, cultivated subject could appear as a local project, not a telos for all humankind.”35 For an analysis of Hyacinth Robinson’s Bildungsgang, this ‘local project’ requires close attention to the spaces and media involved. Spatially, identity of this kind is associated with a topology of ascending truth, in which epiphanic metaphors occupy a higher sphere, just out of reach yet subject to ever-renewed interpretative efforts — a ‘project’, in Clifford’s terms. Medially, cultural identity requires reversible signs that postpone representability. That is, the distance granted by media assures a modicum of political agency, whereas immediacy is associated with non-negotiable subjection and determination.36

33 Horace L. Fairlamb. Critical Conditions: Postmodernity and the Question of Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 8. The above is Fairlamb’s term for hermeneutic antifoundationalism, specifically its insistence on “the historicity of all argument, i.e. philosophy’s dependence upon a context of questions which – through the assumptions that underlie doubt and belief – structure the authority of the given with precritical prejudices.” 34 Cf. Dieter Mersch. “Posthermeneutik: Einige Überlegungen zu einem vorläufigen Programm.” Identität und Unterschied: Zur Theorie von Kultur, Differenz und Transdifferenz. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. 73–85. 74. 35 James Clifford. “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski.” Konteksty 1–4 (2000). 80–105. 80. 36 Jennifer J. Sorensen. Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007. 31. Sorensen presents the anti-immediate effect of novelistic prose as the feature of “un-illustrability” that “asserts the special abilities of the verbal and the literary as offering something different from the threatening visual

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3.1.1.1 Journalistic Mediation The template for cultural identity as a process of multiple mediation in The Princess Casamassima is provided by print media. Specifcally, the novel gages the possibility of utilising newspapers and popular literature for the demarcation of cultural identity. To this end, the reception of the mass media “context within which people lived and worked and thought, and from which they derived their (in most cases quite new) sense of the outside world”37 is shown to require a process of individual re-interpretation. This allows for cultural identity to be adumbrated, even if, at the same time, culture remains processual and precludes the allocation of a fixed, expressible identity. It falls to the protagonist as reader to imbue journalistic copy with a latent significance it does not manifestly possess — and, by extension, to the novel to trace this sophisticated reception of a medium prone to reduction of complexity. In the process, Hyacinth appears as a reverse detective figure who, rather than arriving at a coherent origin story and an allocation of guilt, interrogates Pinnie in order to construct an account sufficiently ambivalent to allow for an ongoing process of interpretation. This, firstly, requires an acceptance of the fact that no acknowledgment by his father’s aristocratic family is forthcoming. This insight, however, does not, in the manner of Mr Vetch’s model, consign Hyacinth to an inescapable working-class reality. Rather, the disavowal of the factual claim becomes the basis for a fantasy of potential cultural identity. If the ‘fantasmatic’, as Brett Farmer argues, “functions structurally to produce and position the subject within paradigms of desire and meaning that pre-exist and transcend the individual subject,”38 Hyacinth’s constructive task consists in constructing such preexisting categories of cultural identity before positioning himself within them.39 In order to allow for a processual account of culture, this double task is figured as open-ended. In this way, the economic and political deprivation which bars Hyacinth from his purported paternal sphere can be refigured as a hermeneutic problem rather than a matter of unmediated inclusion (as in Pinnie’s model) or exclusion (as in Vetch’s denial of “a good deal more of life”). media.” (ibid.) While this distinction cannot be exactly mapped onto Casamassima, concerned as the novel is with bookbinding as another crucial medium in-between the visual and the specifically literary, the projected epiphany of anarchist revolution is, ultimately, presented in terms of a sudden, visual epiphany. Its immediacy coincides with its coercive political effect; cf. chapter 3.2. 37 Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff. Introduction. The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1982. xiii-xix. xiv. 38 Brett Farmer. Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorship. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2000. 65. 39 Cf. Farmer, Spectacular Passions, 64.

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Why should they have provided, when it was evident that they refused absolutely to recognize his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie had to admit this, under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she could not pretend, with any show of evidence, that Lord Whiteroy and the other brothers (there had been no less than seven, most of them still living) had, at the time of the trial, given any symptom of believing Florentine Vivier’s asseverations. That was their affair; he had long since made up his mind that his own was very different. One couldn’t believe at will, and fortunately, in the case, he had no effort to make; for from the moment he began to consider the established facts (few as they were, poor and hideous) he regarded himself, irresistibly, as the son of the recreant, sacrificial Lord Frederick. (167)

Pinnie’s account is presented as insufficient because of its reliance on popular literary conventions, ill-placed admiration for a hierarchically stratified society, and extrapolation from snippets of visual culture. Hyacinth’s development of a narrative in this passage, however, does not purport to offer a competing truth claim. Instead, he is involved in a creation of a more variable fantasy of belonging that makes use of “the established facts (few as they were, poor and hideous)” (167) in the service of an adaptable identity.40 While his version of a claim to aristocratic culture proceeds from the assumption that any recognition by his presumed father’s family is prima facie impossible, it features an inversion of normative claims to truth. Specifically, his “cross-questioning” dismisses the process by means of which facts were established during the original trial. That legal process, as the passage indicates, is a matter of observers noting the absence of a “symptom” evinced by the brothers regarding “asseverations” which, in turn, are not recoverable — and, hence, constitute a second absence. These first two lacunae fail to account for the third semantic void of the precipitating act of violence itself, the killing of the father by Hyacinth’s mother, Florentine Vivier. The degree to which this passage is focalised through Hyacinth’s eyes varies. In a brief, negative epiphany attributable to his consciousness, however, he comes to the conclusion that there is no place for him in these layered gaps around which the hermeneutic practices of the courtroom (as reported by the newspapers) revolve: “He had nothing to ask of them, and he wished to prove to himself that he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat) as completely as they ignored him.” (169) The official account, as recovered from Pinnie and the newspaper articles about the erstwhile scandal, feature Hyacinth as one absence among many. However, as opposed to the officially recognised difference between

40 Butler, “The Force of Fantasy,” 108. “Wielded within political discourse, the real is a syntactically regulated phantasm that has enormous power and efficacy. Fantasy postures as the real, it establishes the real through a repeated and insistent posturing, but it also contains the possibility of suspending and interrogating the ontological claim itself, of reviewing its own productions, as it were, and contesting their claim to the real.”

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the act of killing and its courtroom reconstruction, his is an unattributed lack not deemed worthy of discursive closure. This extends to the protagonist’s own perspective: by presenting an interruption of free indirect thought, Hyacinth excludes himself from his own account of the proceedings. In his very reconstruction of the threefold interpretative structure, then, Hyacinth is (literally, typographically) bracketed, rendered a lacuna unaccounted for by the symbolic practices of the courtroom. In the terms of Jacques Rancière, Hyacinth is included in “the class of the uncounted that only exists in the very declaration in which they are counted as those of no account.”41 This exclusion is not so much the result of a declaration as it emerges from interlocking acts of interpretation that feature him as an invisible and unacknowledged supplement. These, then, are the stakes of the strategies of demarcation. The protagonist is figured both as a “rat” and as bereft of symbolic significance. As in Agamben’s analysis of figures reduced to a status “neither man nor beast,” Hyacinth, as per the official accounts, “dwells paradoxically between both while belonging to neither.”42 That he can be relegated to the non-symbolic – neither placed in a punitive apparatus like his mother nor definitely dead like his father – constitutes an exertion of power predicated on indeterminacy. He is not even explicitly barred from a normative sphere. Exclusion, after all, would still make him a part of a process of staking out “the field of possible actions, and this staking out, determining, and limiting of possibilities is itself a normative matter.”43 Such ‘limiting’, then, would only bolster his status as a figure of alterity. Instead, Hyacinth is unaccounted for. In the face of this abandonment and the concomitant absence of distinctions, Hyacinth is compelled to establish a countervailing strategy: he refuses to be assigned an identity. This scheme is presented as a practice of mediation in its own right, since it opposes “the image of his father” (168) to the diegetically real, historical father. Negotiating his identity in this way requires a reckoning with the “recreant, sacrificial Lord Frederick” (167). The status of the “sacrificial” in this descriptive vignette, however, remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the adjective assigns to the paternal figure the role of the one who sacrifices. On this reading, Lord Frederick is a sacrificial agent who establishes his logic of domination as against Hyacinth’s mother, who is the sacrifice. At the same time, and complicating this notion of a paternal figure performing the sacrifice, “sacrificial” can also designate the father as a scapegoat figure in an

41 Jacques Rancière. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans Julie Rose. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 38. 42 Agamben. Homo Sacer, 105. 43 Cf. Rahel Jaeggi. “Rethinking Ideology.” New Waves in Political Philosophy. Ed. Boudewijn de Bruin and Christoper F. Zurn. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2009. 63–86. 72.

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act performed by the mother, who would, by means of this symbolic gesture, be designated as ‘Other’ by the courtroom proceedings.44 The ‘sacrificial’ status functions as a reversible figure in which identity and alterity can be placed in a dynamic interaction: as a multistable sign, it allows for aspect changes between interpretations “that are neither stable nor totally unstable, but that alternate between two or more mutually exclusive states over time.”45 The multistable ‘sacrificial’ enables Hyacinth to switch back and forth between two competing interpretations of one and the same past act.46 Instead of the unalterable place of his parents in the “cold light of the penal system” (55), signs become interpretable by means of this strategy.47 The multistable ‘sacrificial’, “flickering phenomenally between figure and ground,”48 offers an alternative to the normative legal system in a manner not provided by Pinnie’s and Mr Vetch’s univocal identifications. What is more, Hyacinth’s method dispenses with the nonreversible journalistic interpretations of the mother’s “asseverations.” In this way, his strategy opens up practices beyond the normative production of nonnegotiable Otherness which had rendered him a “rat,” a supplement unaccounted for by any side of the distinction. The novel, thus, introduces a processual template of mediation. The protagonist attempts to reorganise the stark differentiations of identity and alterity on offer by deriving negotiable signs.49 In

44 Murphy draws attention to the importance of identification in René Girard’s theory of sacrifice: “Sacrificing the scapegoat thereby functions to rid the community of its own destructive impulses. The scapegoat is generally selected because its appearance is similar enough to the original two competing groups to enable their identification with the scapegoat.” Michael P. Murphy. A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Community. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 187. 45 Stephen Walker and Helen Chadwick. Constructing Identities between Art and Architecture. New York: Tauris, 2013. 86. 46 An example of literary multistability is provided in Heart of Darkness; at the conclusion of Marlow’s lie closing the frame narrative, reversibility is achieved regarding the Intended and Kurtz: “I saw her and him in the same instant of time – his death and her sorrow – I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together – I heard them together.” (73) 47 They can, thus, be seen as allowing for “negotiability of the frame, its non-absolute or situational character.” Shane Denson. “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective.” Transnational American Studies. Ed. Hugo Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 561–580. 572. 48 Denson, “Frame,” 572. 49 As Holzhey puts it, multistability “can thus function in more complex and contradictory ways than the initial scenario of conflict resolution may suggest.” Christoph F. E. Holzhey. Introduction. 7–22. Multistable Figures. On the Critical Potentials of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing. Ed. Christopher F. E. Holzhey. Wien and Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2014. 8.

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the process, Hyacinth renders the status of his parents indeterminate and the ongoing task of interpreting (and narrating) his genealogy a matter of multistability. Assigning a ‘sacrificial’ status in this process of productive ambiguation subverts the discourse of the newspaper and the courts, which assign guilt and re-constitute simplistic delineations of male, upper-class identity and female, delinquent alterity.50 3.1.1.2 Theatrical Mediation What is still absent from the protagonist’s attempts of delineating a position exceeding immediate identification is a suitable medium. Hyacinth is initially suspended between his own penchant for tragedy and Pinnie’s production of farce: “When she tried to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on the glory of the Purvises, and reminding him that he was related, through them, to half the aristocracy of England, he felt that she was turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce.” (169) This replacement of one (tragic) interpretative frame by another (farcical) one threatens to fix Hyacinth’s identity in one fell swoop of generic ascription. Against this immediacy, the protagonist has to repeat his tactics of creating ambiguous signifiers in the manner of the ‘sacrificial’ multistability. Such a mediation of identity beyond ‘tragedy or farce’ is enabled by the theatre, where Hyacinth’s companion, Millicent Henning, “had composed herself in season for the rising of the curtain upon the farce which preceded the melodrama and which the pair had no intention of losing” (177). Faced with theatrical, literal farce – contrary to the generic transformation performed by Pinnie – Hyacinth can assume variable degrees of detachment from the proceedings. Most notably, he observes Millicent’s “pretension” (178), which causes him to “feel that he had missed a thousand characteristic points, so different were most of her interpretations from his, and so very bold and irreverent” (178). It is only in this context of shifting degrees of mediated distance that Hyacinth is shown to indulge in immersion in the “sweet deception” (177) of the fictional world presented on stage.

50 Delinquency, according to the Foucauldian definition by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, is produced by “material forms (for instance the prison-form) which came along with expressive forms like delinquency (which is not a signifier, but part of a set of statements reciprocally presupposing the material form of the prison).” Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. “Interview with Quentin Meillassoux.” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ed. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012. 38–47. 76.

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[His] imagination projected itself lovingly across the footlights, gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered accessories, and lost itself so effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however long, or however short, brought with it a kind of alarm, like a stoppage of his personal life (178).

As in the case of the reconstituted family history, what is at issue in the popular theatrical experience is the possibility of distinguishing between different types of mediation. This accords with Schröter’s contention that the specific character of a medium “requires the differential demarcation from other media.”51 Accordingly, even an ‘essentialist’ definition of the theatre, as in this case, requires media comparisons. However ‘purist’ the definition of a medium, paradoxically, it will nevertheless contain the descriptions of other media within it as a “trace.”52 Precisely along these lines, Hyacinth’s “sweet deception” is not an immediate consequence of an ineffably theatrical illusion, nor less the result of the specific farce he is watching. Rather, the effect results from a succession of distinctions specific to this observer. The enjoyment of the play (which he finds “less amusing”) is substituted for the medium of the “theatre,” which, in turn, is not monolithic but the result of a process in which the “battered accessories” are as significant as the “fictive world.” This “world,” in turn, is differentiated from the dramatic plot, which is defined by the reaction of his companion (who is “moved to tears in the third act”) and determined in contrast to her previous practice of “narrating observations of the most surprising kind” (178) about the other audience members. Rather than imparting generic closure, Hyacinth draws distinctions: between farcical form and theatrical medium, between audience behaviour and audience, between theatrical diegesis and stage, as well as between observation and immersion. The protagonist, thus, defines a set of forms (tight couplings) within the constitutively loose couplings of the medium ‘theatre’, “which leaves room for multiple combinations.”53 As a result, the theatre allows the protagonist an indirect stance rather than merely subjecting him to ‘farce’. Likewise, the narrative’s third-order rendering of Hyacinth’s second-order distinctions allows the story to veer away from the restricted options of tragedy and farce previously allotted to the protagonist. This mediated negotiation is set against the direct allocation of a place by his guardians (and a non-place by the newspaper): Hyacinth can remain unfixed between several positions rather than being identified as de-facto aristocrat or

51 Jens Schröter. “Discourses and Models of Intermediality.” Comparative Literature and Culture 13 (2011). 2–7. 5. 52 Schröter, “Discourses,” 5. 53 Niklas Luhmann. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 104.

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rat-like supplement.54 This unfixed space of possibility is made possible by ‘mediality’ in the sense of a determination of contingent forms rather than any one, essential ‘medium’.55 The theatre in and of itself is not a homogenous entity in The Princess Casamassima, but at best perceived as a ‘conventionally distinct’,56 recognisable set of characteristics which, quite simply, the protagonist knows when he sees it. This requires an active drawing of differences between ‘form’ as a tight coupling of elements on the one hand and the medial substrate of loosely coupled elements on the other. Or, in Ernst’s succinct terms: “the form is a selection from a horizon of possibilities. Conversely, the medial substrate offers a horizon of possibilities for the development of forms.”57 This perspective on the medium as a selection of elements from the possibilities offered by the media substrate provides the basic structure for the differential definition of culture in The Princess Casamassima. The novel shows that any medium to be claimed for ‘culture’ consists of a vast set of loosely coupled elements, none of which are in themselves meaningful. The protagonist’s challenge consists in processually differentiating medium and form — creating ‘relative order’ in the process.58 In the theatre, this strategy allows Hyacinth to either select immersion in a performed diegetic world or to focus on the audience instead, thus temporarily relegating other potential forms to the medial substrate. The media practices of culture, then, are defined by partitioning off a marked inside from an unmarked outside.

54 Media “impose limits on what one can do with them. Since they consist of elements, media are nonarbitrary. But their arsenal of possibilities is generally large enough to prevent fixation on a few forms.” Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 105. 55 Lukas Wilde. “Was unterscheiden Comic-‘Medien’?” Closure 1 (2014). 25–50. 25. 56 Cf. Irina O. Rajewsky. Intermedialität. Tübingen and Basel: Francke 2002. 157. For Rajewsky, intermediality involves “phenomena traversing media boundaries involving at least two media perceived as conventionally distinct.” My trans. Orig. quote: “Mediengrenzen überschreitende Phänomene, die mindestens zwei konventionell als distinkt wahrgenommene Medien involvieren.” 57 Christoph Ernst. “Von der Schrift zum Bild: Postkonstruktivistische Motive in der Diskussion um Medialität.” Konstruktion und Geltung: Beiträge zu einer postkonstruktivistischen Sozial- und Medientheorie. Ed. Joachim Renn, Christoph Ernst, and Peter Isenböck. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012. 205–232. 215. My trans. Orig. quote: “Eine Form steht also als feste Koppelung in Abhängigkeit zu einem medialen Substrat als loser Koppelung; die Form ist eine Auswahl aus einem Möglichkeitshorizont. Umgekehrt stellt das mediale Substrat einen Möglichkeitshorizont für die Formenbildung bereit.” 58 As Denson specifies this, “while substrate and form consist of “the same basic ‘stuff’,” they are organised differently: “a substrate is a loose coupling, i.e. a relatively unordered mass of particles, while forms are tight or strict couplings, that is, relatively ordered combinations of elements.” Shane Denson. Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. 314.

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A medium of culture, consequently, consists of an infinite number of possible forms. Its concrete iteration as a form, by contrast, “remains bound by its own constitution, by its particular play of elements,” thus functioning as a “bound infinity.”59 The theatre in Casamassima, as popular and ramshackle as it may be, offers formal ‘bound infinities’ in precisely this manner. Its loosely coupled elements (footlights, actors, audience, diegesis and all) prefigure culture as a “horizon of possibilities (media substrate)”60 that can be processually actualised. Rather than an inventory of vaunted traits awaiting discovery, culture emerges as a constructive media practice. It is this conspicuous mediation which is at stake in the demarcation of cultural identity in The Princess Casamassima. Hyacinth salvages a processual account of selfhood that requires a continual observation of minute differentiations. Rather than the choice between biographical tragedy and farce offered by Pinnie, Hyacinth’s reception of theatrical farce enables him to proliferate the number of observations available to him, each of which pivots on the drawing of a distinction. As opposed to the normative determinations which open the novel, Hyacinth is, thus, shown to constantly draw and re-draw the boundaries of selfhood and Otherness, replacing any claim to identity with successive cultural identifications. As a counter-model to the immediate status (as aristocrat, as expendable life) foisted on him, Hyacinth’s practices of media proliferation demonstrate that “[t]here is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.”61 In this manner, James’ account of theatrical practice is geared precisely towards ‘various eyes’ for the ‘same thing’. Culture, rather than a static set of signifiers, is a gleefully perspectivist set of distinctions.62

59 Daniel Coffeen. Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense. Alresford: Zero, 2016. 60 Ernst, “Von der Schrift,” 216. 61 Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. Keith Amwell-Pearson. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 87. 62 This extends to the level of discours: Pinnie’s generic template necessitates a quantification of thought as Hyacinth’s origin is a “matter which he spent nine-tenths of his time in brooding over” (169); simultaneously, it is the authority of the narrator which informs us of Hyacinth’s state of mind with a plethora of verba credendi and dicendi (“it came over him”; “he had to remember”; “he felt that”; “he continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born”). In contrast to these determinations by the narrator, the protagonist’s self-made mediated distance effects a shift in perspective: the surfeit of media allows for free indirect discourse to be established as the template for representing the diegesis.

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3.1.1.3 Material Mediation That Hyacinth’s processual identity is, at the same time, a conspicuously mediated one, is indicated by a further instance of spectatorship. Whereas Pinnie immediately projects popular narrative templates upon her ward, Hyacinth’s own engagement with mass-market literature is marked by its refusal of straightforward immersion. Instead, he gazes at “periodical literature,” “song-books and pictorial sheets” through a “small-paned, dirty window” (54): He used to stand there for half an hour at a time, spelling out the first page of the romances in the Family Herald and the London Journal, and admiring the obligatory illustration in which the noble characters (they were always of the highest birth) were presented to the carnal eye. When he had a penny he spent only a fraction of it on stale sugar-candy; with the remaining halfpenny he always bought a ballad, with a vivid woodcut at the top. (54)

This deployment of popular literature constitutes an instance of conspicuous mediation which, like Hyacinth’s distinctions of medium and form in the theatre, refuses identification with a determinate position. These media practices place the protagonist in a superposition between viewing images and reading, between gazing and consuming, as well as between popular conceptions of aristocracy and the purported reality of his origin.63 This in-between state contrasts with the deflationary reading of Hyacinth by the prison warden, who, in the beginning of the novel, passes as a representative of the law. The account of the prison employee, Miss Bowerbank, like Pinnie’s creation of an opposition between tragedy and farce, turns Hyacinth into a sentimentalised vanishing mediator. Recast as a generic accoutrement, he is to imbue his mother’s death with the emotional resonance of popular romance.64

63 This superposition also places Hyacinth in a persistent ‘opposition discourse’ specific to early modernism, which “consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities.” Andreas Huyssen. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Media Studies: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett, and Paul Marris. New York: New York UP, 2009. 124–137. 126. In embarking on a project of constructing culture, Casamassima refuses any privilege to ‘high art’. While the novel bears out Huyssen’s point that “the traditional mass culture/modernism dichotomy has been gendered since the mid-19th century as female/male” (ibid. 127), the construction of culture as a multiply mediated negotiation is overwhelmingly associated with the former rather than the latter. 64 As Sara Blair puts it, this exposes “his fantasy of self-determination as such, painfully pressing the continuity of his exquisitely attuned sensibility with the organs of a mass culture.” Sara Blair. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 112.

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In the act of staring at the display, by contrast, Hyacinth can evade classification.65 Window shopping is associated with the respite of conspicuous mediation: it enables the protagonist to evade the warden’s normative gaze.66 In keeping with this productive indecision, when Hyacinth reads about “noble characters,” the result is not presented as immediate identification. Instead, the fact that he is separated from the books by the “small-paned, dirty window” fulfils a similar function to the theatrical environment: it enables him to switch back and forth between outside and inside, rendering the purchase of the literary texts an afterthought. To engage with his origin without being overdetermined by it, Hyacinth’s version of the medium as message requires distance, literalised by an oblique approach from “the other side of the street” (54).67 This transformation of experience depends, like the multistable theatrical farce which Hyacinth opposes to Pinnie’s farce, on the absence of a direct claim to identification. The childhood vignette, thus, shows that upholding residual identity in the novel depends on a double tactics: firstly, the subject has to establish distance, ensuring reversible mediation in-between his position and the desired recognition “nine-tenths of his time” (169). From this point of view, secondly, the subject embarks on a chain of conspicuously mediated acts of interpretation, none of which ever lay claim to an accomplished expression of the sought-after concept of self. Just as the character can switch between immersion in the dramatic illusion and attention to theatrical props, his consideration of popular literature establishes mediated distance between his aristocratic ‘origin’ and the position in front of the display window. As a means of delaying identification, this strategy prefigures Hyacinth’s later bookbinding trade, geared as it is towards the production of objects which “would

65 Cf. Hans-Ulrich Seeber. “Zur Rolle von Klischee und Stereotyp in der englischen Literaturkritik und Literaturtehorie des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur. Ed. Günter Blaicher. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1987. 260–271. 270. 66 As Mark McGurl notes, “James places Hyacinth’s act of reading at a threshold between an interior and an exterior space.” Mark McGurl. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001. 67. 67 Miranda El-Reyess. Henry James and the Culture of Consumption. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 34. El-Reyess identifies the “mediatory significance of the window, which can be seen to symbolise the transformatory power of consciousness” (34). She traces the motif of the window display through James’ oeuvre, extending to the autobiographical A Small Boy and Others, where the shop window becomes a privileged site for memory and an objective correlative for things he must ‘go without’. “He also sets up an opposition between the two sides of the glass (‘showy’ and shown, spectacle and spectator), which implies a fundamental link between human ‘action’ and ‘acting’ in the formulated, performative sense.” (33)

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be passed from hand to hand as specimens of rare work, while connoisseurs bent their heads over them, smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately” (473). Bookbinding is presented as a liminal endeavour, both functioning as extraction of labour power and an aesthetic pursuit in its own right. In relation to this line of work, the novel presents the protagonist’s attempt to bring into agreement a projected imaginary relation with the real conditions of his existence.68 This stabilisation, further, has to be given “material existence” by “material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of the subject.”69 These strategies are to compensate for a lack of ideological certainty: in effect, Hyacinth is shown to embark on a process of interpellating himself. To this end, he assembles the elements of his work so as to ‘invest the real relation in the imaginary relation’ and express “a will [. . .], a hope or a nostalgia rather than desiring a reality.”70 In order to conceive of his craft in these terms, Hyacinth has to resist being reduced to his role as worker or to the commodities he creates. After all, whenever he is challenged to commit to his trade, that interpellation coincides with false equivalences. Paul Muniment, for instance, disparages Hyacinth’s “epicurean tendencies” (392). His question whether Hyacinth “hadn’t [. . .] better take up [his] tools again” (392) attempts a mocking identification of Hyacinth with a narrow work ethos. The narrator’s judgment “of our little hero’s being a genuine artist” (403), however, misses the mark as much as the label ‘worker’: it neglects the material specificity of Hyacinth’s work as well as the novel’s indications of the limits of artistic expression under the condition of wage labour. In order to construct his craft in terms of a multistable negotiation of culture, Hyacinth has to resist both the facile identification with his role as a worker and the ‘aesthetic’ status of the commodities he creates.

68 Althusser adds the caveat that the ideological project cannot be conceived as the imposition by a “small number of cynical men” (110) nor as a pre-existing alienation causing “imaginary transposition” (110) of value: “it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there.” Louis Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 85–126. 111. No essential character – such as a de facto alienation – of the artisanal trade can be inferred from Casamassima. The novel is concerned with the injunction to work, as well as the way the process and object of work contributes to different constraints on subjecthood. It is, for instance, not possible to represent a commodity commissioned by the Princess as a an immediate decommoditised transfer of cultural value — Hyacinth’s bindings are met with indifference. 69 Althusser, “Ideology,” 114. 70 Louis Althusser. For Marx. Trans Ben Brewster. London and New York: Verso, 2005. 234.

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To negotiate these competing interpellations, the character is shown to wrest an ambiguous position from the medial specificity of his labour. This liminal practice is initiated by the accumulation of impressions during his sojourns into cultural spaces, which afterwards “confound themselves with the very sources of his craft” (403). How, then, does the narrative go about redeeming ‘work’? Hyacinth’s “handling [of] his tools” (403) cannot be taken as self-evidently meaningful, but gains its importance as a marker of ‘culture’ only in conjunction with three components: a “pleasant swarm of ideas” (403), the finished book as their material equivalent, as well as an interpretative gap separating ideas and objects. The protagonist’s intermediate position between ideas, tools, and well-wrought books is achieved by maintaining the gap that separates the object from becoming either fully commodified or merely aesthetic. However, this indeterminacy is fraught: different characters take turns to replace the gap by ascribing immediate value to Hyacinth’s practice. As a result, the protagonist is reminded that for all its artisanal veneer, the value of his work is expropriated. The ostensible compromise, whereby intrinsic value is generated to prevent the British worker from an “artisan response to industrialization” so common to the “anarchist cultures” of France and Italy, appears fragile.71 Nevertheless, Hyacinth also resists the ‘anarchist’ dismissal of what he continues to perceive as “the most exquisite ‘tooling’” (124). Both positions have to be resisted in the novel’s cultural imaginary, since only then can its representation of labour remain simultaneously alienated and aesthetic, exploitable and self-directed. Under these carefully calibrated and infrequent conditions can a threadbare ideology of worthwhile work emerge and self-interpellation take place, allowing the protagonist, in Althusser’s categories, to hold on to the “material rituals” that determine his position.72 In other words, since no overarching ideological framework pre-exists the subject in Casamassima, the protagonist assembles one for himself. Throughout, The Princess Casamassima connotes ‘disinterestedness’ with a medium that belongs to neither of the sides it negotiates.73 In this context, it becomes clear that ‘collective identity’ is a matter of imagined communities. Hyacinth anticipates a future state in which aesthetes allocate value freely, set loose from material considerations. In this reverie of communal accord, aesthetic objects will prompt “that disinterested sympathy which, under favouring circumstances, establishes itself between the artist and the connoisseur” (115). Such a notion of “disinterested sympathy” (115) provided by the valued artefact 71 Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, 10. 72 Althusser, “Ideology,” 114. 73 Cf. Bernd Herzogenrath. “Media/Matter: An Introduction.” Media/Matter: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 1–18. 1.

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evokes Matthew Arnold’s plea for “disinterestedness” achieved by criticism capable of “keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’ [. . .] [b]y steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas.”74 In post-foundationalist terms, Arnold here proposes a political difference, on the marked side of which material conditions are disavowed in a bid to embody an ‘aloof’ set of values. In its Jamesian iteration, this strategy requires a foil incapable of doing away with ‘ulterior considerations’. Hence, the disinterestedness peculiar to culture emerges in sharp contrast to the explicitly political practice associated with the assorted revolutionaries, democrats, and “disinterested reformers” (366) populating the novel. Bereft of ‘disinterested sympathy’, revolutionary endeavours are associated with attempts to relinquish mediation and attain a direct, unmediated access to ‘the people’. In the wake of this attempt, they set out to do away with the conspicuous mediation by means of which Hyacinth attempts to redeem the theatre, texts, and his trade. The novel, thus, negotiates political difference as a conflict of media strategies. Whereas the well-bound book offers gradations of alienation and aesthetics alike, radical positions are shown to tend towards immediacy. In the case of the charitable Lady Aurora slumming amidst the poor, for instance, this notion of unmediated immersion allows for only two sharply delineated states: either idealisation of the working-class in philanthropic selfabnegation or a wholesale return to her own sphere of origin. Thus conceived, radical politics lack the possibility of containment by dint of mediation. In the conservative vision promulgated by The Princess Casamassima, maintaining an ideology of value exempt from labour and exploitation emerges as a last guarantor of residual order, uniting the few appreciative protagonists in a common critical pursuit centred around material media.75 This redefined culture comes with a caveat: there is no essential value associated with such material signifiers of cultural order. The challenge is consistently presented as the simulation of an order to forestall the ‘immediacy effect’ of the revolutionary sphere. Material mediation, to adapt Ian Watt’s term, allows for a residual signifier of centripetal narration, in which “the story, the narrative vehicle, is the

74 Arnold, “The Function of Criticism,” 39. 75 This is similar to the critical endeavor – amongst others by Arnold, Eliot, Richards, and the Leavises – that Baldick identifies as ‘the social mission of English criticism’. “Order or harmony becomes the key term uniting these critics against the disturbing or anarchic implications of science, theory, literacy, controversy, and history; and its weight is constantly reinforced by the attention given to such centrifugal forces propelling the world to chaos.” Chris Baldick. The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. 212.

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shell, the larger outside sphere” enclosing an “inner kernel of truth.”76 That this kernel can only ever be deferred is shown to be conducive to ‘disinterestedness’, since it is the process of ascertaining what a cultural object might mean that emerges as the only imaginable source of communal agency. The protagonist maintains a momentary threshold status between opposed categories; poised between medium and message and, as regards production, commodity and connoisseurship, the well-bound book emerges as the metonymic condensation of a view of culture which, rather than contributing to a stagnant catalogue of vaunted styles, requires a constant renewal of interpretative engagement. The more the search for a revolutionary reality proceeds, conversely, the more irrelevant does this multistable negotiation appear. Cultural mediation, after all, contrasts with centrifugal narratives of anarchism, since the “circumambient universe of meanings” (370) has no truck with processual interpretation of ambivalent media. In other words, it occurs to Hyacinth that “democracy wouldn’t care for perfect bindings” (478). That fear is not unfounded: during her anarchist phase, “[t]he Princess gave up these things in proportion as she advanced in the direction she had so audaciously chosen” (478). Contrary to such levelling of value, Hyacinth is shown to switch back and forth: he embarks on a process of multistable reversibility focused on ambiguous material signifiers unamenable to straightforward classification.

3.1.2 “Illuminated Ignorance” – Differentiating Culture So far, culture has been shown to consist of a process of multiplying media rather than accepting an unmediated ascription of identity. In order to exert this cohesive function, however, a second strategy is required: the cultural sphere can only be associated with residual hierarchies and stability if it is differentiated from ‘anarchy’ set against its mode of organisation. In what follows, this requirement of a political Other upon which to project disavowed characteristics will be shown to rely on three strategies. Firstly, revolutions of the past are de-politicised. Specifically, during the protagonist’s travels, the French radical tradition is contained by rendering it a matter of the protagonist’s individual development. Secondly, the anarchist conspiracy has to be abjected from the cultural spaces into which Hyacinth is introduced by the Princess. Thirdly, the protagonist is shown to re-interpret ethical demands issued by his mother and father in a manner that avoids an immediate inscription into the anarchist

76 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth, 180.

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sphere to which he has pledged himself. These three strategies of demarcation show an ambivalent relation to anarchism. While the radical sphere is to be expelled, at the same time the protagonist attempts to reintroduce a selection of revolutionary signs into the spaces bolstering his emergent self-image. As a result, elements of the anarchist outside re-enter the putative cultural inside in order to allow for ongoing self-determination. 3.1.2.1 Demarcation of Revolutionary Space The process of interpretation enabled by mediated identity serves as a counterpoint to readings of The Princess Casamassima in terms of a determinist version of French naturalism.77 When the narrator informs us that regarding his parentage Hyacinth “had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded and testified” (167), this does initially seem like laws of heredity finding physiological expression. Even though the narrative emphasises Hyacinth’s instinctive knowledge, however, the presentation refracts what Zola puts forward as a principle of the experimental, naturalist novel: the “absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena” for “the living as for the inanimate bodies.”78 Along these lines, the response of the protagonist’s nerves can, firstly, be read as diegetically real, a literal determinism expressed by Hyacinth’s body. Secondly, however, it is equally plausible to read the ‘nerves and pulses’ as a metaphor for the unquestioned status of “Hyacinth’s article of faith” (168), repeated and internalised until they form a self-enclosed fantasy of belonging. Thus hovering between the deterministic and the rhetorical, the result of the somatic pleading of “nerves and pulses” is another reversible image. For all their inscription in the body, the ‘plea and testimony’ function analogously to the mediated identity of the “sacrificial” father, the theatre, and the bookbinding. Like those practices, Hyacinth’s felt origin also defers straightforward identification rather than solving the protagonist’s identity crisis. Considered as another case of multiple mediation, Hyacinth is shown to evade identification, placing heredity at a remove:

77 Cf. for example Angus James Wrenn. Henry James and the Second Empire. London: Legenda, 2009. viii. “[F]or the younger generation of the naturalist school – Zola, Daudet, the Goncourts, and de Maupassant – James felt initially aesthetic and indeed moral disdain. James later performed a volte-face, emulating the methods of the naturalists in the 1880s.” 78 Émile Zola. “The Experimental Novel.” The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans Belle M. Sherman. New York: Cassell, 1893. 3.

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but on the other side it took an English aristocrat – though a poor specimen, apparently, had to suffice – to account for him. This, with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of faith; the reflection that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable manner the reflection that he was a gentleman. He was conscious that he didn’t hate the image of his father, as he might have been expected to do; and he supposed this was because Lord Frederick had paid so tremendous a penalty. (167)

The protagonist is shown to recreate his position by, once more, placing himself in a position of indeterminacy which encourages further interpretation but does not entirely suspend him in uncertainty. While he has no direct access to his parents’ situation, they are framed in such a way as to prompt renewed hermeneutic endeavours. This approach can only ever be an oblique one. After all, it is already with the “image of his father” (168) that this reassembled account contends, a visual representation rather than an essentialist claim. Thus sufficiently distanced from the unsymbolisable reality of the past, the free indirect account introduces the crucial reversible sign: “He was the one to have been killed” (168), Hyacinth concludes. The italicised pronoun finally introduces a direct explanation for his mother’s action — albeit an ambiguous one that could refer both to Hyacinth and his father. In the above quote, this double reference is couched in five layers of mediation: a (1) “living sign” stands for (2) an “episode” implying (3) “moral proof” of the (4) “penalty” exacted on the (5) “image of his father.” This five-fold distancing provides the commensurate layers of mediation necessary for upholding the “article of faith.” It is only as a result of such multiplied distance that Hyacinth’s identity as a ‘bastard’ and the “reflection that he was a gentleman” become coterminous. While normative judgments govern both ascriptions, Hyacinth negotiates his dual status as a predicament not determined by either pole of this residual distinction. The protagonist’s prevarications here fabricate a functional version of what Eliot can only lament: Hyacinth constructs a “dissociation of sensibility.”79 Instead of any simple “longing for an ordered world of community to contrast with the fragmented, liberal and individualized world,”80 in Casamassima

79 T. S. Eliot. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Essays: 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932. 241–250. 247. Susan McCabe, who applies this concept to a range of early 20th century writers, comments that authors “grapple with what amounts to a cultural ‘dissociation of sensibility,’ where poetry does not seem capable of conveying immediate sensation or ‘felt thought’.” Susan McCabe. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 226. Since Casamassima, conversely, presents an overdetermination by discursive regimes which purport to convey and control relevant ‘sensations’, dissociation can be recast as a mode of evading these instant ascriptions. 80 Gabriel Josipovici. What Ever Happened to Modernism? New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2010. 18. For Josipovici, this disenchantment is a crucial modernist feature, which, as a

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order and anarchy are temporarily aligned as negotiable, multistable signs. Accordingly, the longing for aristocratic identity is as much determined by its impossibility as, conversely, a radical identity is precluded by a covert aristocratic (or at least non-proletarian) class identity imputed on the basis of Hyacinth’s face, body, and demeanour. Instead of teleological development in either direction (becoming radical, becoming aristocrat), or else a stable dialectic, the distance between the two supposed extremes is upheld and multiplied: culture and anarchy (in the form of their metonymical complements of aristocracy and revolution) are co-implicated.81 Conversely, whenever closure is offered in the novel, and Hyacinth is interpellated as a paragon of either ‘high culture’ or anarchist action, this multiple mediation is interrupted, leading to the protagonist becoming determined by interests beyond his control and understanding. To avoid such destructive certainty, any exaltation of his aristocratic origin has to be bound up with his illegitimate status and vice versa. Instead of becoming a ‘gentleman’ or a ‘radical’, this switching back-and-forth between both positions enables a reinterpretation of the entire chain of signification outlined above. In this manner, Hyacinth also exerts interpretative control over the paradigmatic status of his parents. The position of the father, particularly, is complicated by his status as a “poor specimen” of the “English aristocrat.” The protagonist arrogates to himself what Agamben calls the “analogical logic of the example,”82 which makes possible an evasion of the principle of dichotomy: “Against the drastic alternative ‘A or B,’ which excludes the third, analogy imposes its tertium datur, its stubborn ‘neither A nor B’.”83 Following this logic, recasting the father as a “poor specimen” allows for “disidentification.”84 Neither is the subject of Hyacinth’s self-created paradigm fully a part of his aristocratic class, nor is he

“cultural critique,” should be separated from the “nostalgia and prescriptiveness of how a once-lost unity can be found again.” In Casamassima, the ‘culture’ to be ‘critiqued’ is only ever a momentary self-created effect of interpretative strategies in the first place, rather than a store of essential values to be unearthed. 81 Cf. Jason W. Alvis. Marion and Derrida on The Gift and Desire: Debating the Generosity of Things. Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer, 2016. 170. The distinction between a “clean-structured, and stable dialectic in which the two supposed extremes never meet” and the structure of culture, i.e. ‘co-implication’ of aristocracy and radicalism, is adapted from Alvis’ account of Derrida’s Given Time (in which this shift is attributed to ‘the gift’ and ‘economy’). 82 Giorgio Agamben. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell. New York: Zone, 2009. 18. 83 Agamben, Signature, 20. 84 Agamben, Signature, 18.

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entirely excluded from it.85 This procedure poises the paternal figure between generality and particularity and makes him inaccessible to the straightforward, idealised identity attributed to him by the media and popular narrative. What is more, the reversibility of Hyacinth and his father (“He was the one to have been killed”) that closes the series of distancing devices hints at the possibility of extending this disidentification to Hyacinth himself. In other words, by presenting his father as a poor specimen, the protagonist keeps open the possibility that he himself might be a bad example, too. As per Agamben, on the “one hand, every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity.”86 In the course of the novel, Hyacinth is repeatedly confronted with the demand to be a simple representative of his class condition. As the ‘collector’ of radicals, Captain Sholto, puts it: “he wanted a favourable specimen, one of the best” (225); “should you call it a fair specimen of a tenement of its class?” (227). It is this identification as a specimen that is countered by Hyacinth’s practice of determining the paradigmatic validity of class representatives himself. The exemplar creates dubious examples which prompt, rather than close off, further inquiry. That Hyacinth is spared a decision on his identity by the construction of a “personal iconography”87 has already been shown to be predicated on the exchangeability of father and son. The ‘He’ in ‘He was the one’ remains indeterminate, preserving Agamben’s principle of ‘neither A nor B’. In order to maintain a multistable position, however, Hyacinth is shown to require an account of political radicalism that is just as oblique as the multistable sign of aristocratic belonging. That is, in addition to constructing an ambivalent stance towards the father, the novel presents the attempt to demarcate revolutionary alterity in an equally undecided manner. Only refashioned in this way can ‘anarchism’ be imagined as the relational Other to ‘culture’. A suitably multistable radical sphere, then, requires a re-interpretation of Hyacinth’s mother through another instance of multiple mediation. For the maternal, radical origin, this is accomplished by oral history. In particular, the determination of radical alterity is 85 Cf. Steven DeCaroli. “Paradigm/Example.” The Agamben Dictionary. Ed. Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. 144–147. 145. 86 Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community. Trans Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 11. 87 William W. Stowe. Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. 93. This is Stowe’s term for Hyacinth’s process of representing his past. Stowe goes on to deem Hyacinth a “passive and somewhat overawed receiver of representations, doing his frantic best to keep pace with the demands these representations place on his understanding” (94). Contrary to this depreciation of the tactics ascribed to Hyacinth, the above account places the protagonist in a more active position of negotiating incompatible demands.

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shown to require an account of the revolutionary past; or rather, pasts in the plural, since the novel combines three timeframes into a tenuous signifier of ‘radicalism’. In this process, the (1) act of violence perpetrated by the mother is projected backwards in time to the (2) revolutionary activities of Hyacinth’s grandfather, as well as forwards to the (3) more recent event of the 1871 Paris Commune. To begin with the last element, according to McCracken’s account of the Commune and anarchist space in James’ fiction, “[f]or the modernist artist, the remnants of the past offer three different aesthetic responses: restoration, reconstruction, or final, complete obliteration of the event.”88 Of these options, The Princess Casamassima predominantly stages a process of reconstruction, albeit one that is largely unconcerned with the way events transpired historically. The recreation of the mother as a revolutionary actor has to proceed by the same strategy of oblique indirection the protagonist has already evinced in relation to his material and mediated practices.89 This process is all the more crucial since the reconstruction of a revolutionary signifier is set against the dominant account of Hyacinth’s mother, which, from the moment she is incarcerated, resembles McCracken’s third category, namely obliteration — which leaves “traces around which the work of memorialization can be done.”90 To assemble a multistable revolutionary past, Hyacinth is shown to select one of these traces and privilege it over official accounts. By expanding on an offhand comment by Pinnie, who imputes a vague revolutionary heritage to his mother, Hyacinth can re-frame her violent act in the context of a narrative of collective revolutionary action. In this story, that the mother “armed herself” (168) against his father recalls the micro-narration of revolution associated with her father: He had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded and testified. His mother had been a daughter of the wild French people (all that Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father had fallen, in the blood-stained streets of Paris, on a barricade, with his gun in his hand). (167)

The sense of belonging to the “wild French people,” rather than serving as an immediate self-characterization, is suitably removed to enable similar interpretative

88 Scott McCracken. “The Author as Arsonist: Henry James and the Paris Commune.” Modernism/Modernity 21 (2014). 71–87. 73. 89 This ensures what Mariam Fraser calls “Event-thinking,” which “can be understood to be part of an anti-reductionist project that seeks to describe the relations between actual things, bodies and happenings, and the independent reality of these events in themselves.” Mariam Fraser. “Event.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006). 129–132. 129. 90 McCracken, “The Author as Arsonist,” 73.

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processes to the ones made possible by turning his father into a multistable – “sacrificial” – sign in need of constant re-interpretation. Like the representative of aristocratic culture, the image of the mother is once more characterised by the simultaneity of a gap and an indication of the process by means of which it is to be bridged. The distancing device in this case is an account of the July Revolution of 1830. As in the case of popular literature, the theatre, and bookbinding, the oral history of revolution is the more amenable to the construction of cultural identity, the more conspicuously mediated, indirect, and inauthentic its presentation appears. The 1830 revolution is alluded to but not specified regarding its goals or results. It survives as an account narrated thrice over, by the grandfather, the mother, and Pinnie. On a final level, it is related to the reader. As shown above, this final narrative situation is furthermore rendered ambiguous by the specification that “[h]is nerves and pulses pleaded” (167), which immediately precedes the account of Hyacinth’s French heritage. Once more, in the manner of multiple mediation, this uncertainty is functional, since it precludes any imposition of a permanent identity. The revolution as absence makes possible a reconfiguration of the “facts (few as they were, and poor and hideous)” (167) in a manner which allows for a set of interlocking metonymies: the “barricade” and the “blood-stained streets” can take the place of ‘revolution’, obliquely referring to it whilst eliding concrete demands associated with the insurrectionary event. The absent revolution can, thus, be connected with material signifiers lacking in the case of his mother, whose actions are, precisely by means of layering mediation upon mediation, furnished with motivations by proxy. Already loosely connected to the revolutionary acts of the grandfather, Florentine’s deeds are placed at a remove in order to render them an oblique hermeneutic task in the manner of the ‘sacrificial’ multistability of the father. To this end, it is only by means of threefold layers of distance – the series of narrations conveyed ambiguously by the narrator, the metonymical objects pointing towards an absent revolution, and the traces of a revolutionary narrative transferred to the mother – that Hyacinth can develop an account with sufficient interpretative leeway. Berman imputes to the nineteenth-century experience of modernity the “atmosphere – of agitation and turbulence, psychic dizziness and drunkenness, expansion and experiential possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement, phantoms in the street and in the soul.”91 In the ongoing process of identity formation in Casamassima, these characteristics are projected upon ‘revolution’ and

91 Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London and New York: Verso, 1983. 18.

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refigured as an unreachable, collective event of the past in order to become operative as a means of individual self-determination in the present. The ‘phantoms’ in the street, “blood-stained” (167) as they are, have to retain their spectral status as traces of ‘agitation and turbulence’ to be approached by successive interpretative strategies in the narrative present. Any attempt to supersede this oblique approach and to directly inhabit a revolutionary role in present-day Britain is presented as an erasure of these series, eliding their hermeneutic challenge. Multiple mediation, then, forestalls a straightforward story of the maternal family history and preserves the possibility of drawing and redrawing the boundaries of culture and anarchy. This constellation of creating an uncertain status in-between “the wild French people” (167) and an “English aristocrat” (167) is presented as the only possibility of allowing Hyacinth the negotiation of cultural identity. In order to uphold a processual sense of self, he can identify with neither side, but is required to keep up the possibility of a shift between the revolutionary and the aristocratic. It is this split status that grants the protagonist the “illuminated ignorance [in which] he had fashioned forth an article of faith” (166). This strategy of ‘illuminated ignorance’ not only functions negatively, as an inhibition of the “potential identification of tenor and vehicle,” which, with de Man, “stresses the possible recuperation of a stable meaning or set of meanings.”92 ‘Stable meaning’, after all, is the hallmark of the courts in the novel, an outgrowth of institutional procedures that confirm class boundaries and fix Hyacinth’s lot in life. Hence, the deferral of a recuperated, ‘illuminated’ tertium comparationis is presented as the very condition for Hyacinth to emerge as a narrator of his past. In developing a mode of interpretation, the protagonist is shown to avoid two types of hermeneutic impasse: a surfeit of interpretative possibilities that furnishes “a hundred different theories of his identity” (166) is as detrimental as a monologic account that would impart fixity on the character’s identity. To avoid the latter, i.e. interpretative closure, the desire to “disinter” (167) the past is accompanied by the constitutively unsolvable question why “the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly” (166). It is this self-reflexive deadlock that enables the protagonist to retain the “haunting wonder, which now, as he looked back, appeared to fill his whole childhood” (166). In other words, Hyacinth wonders why he ever began to wonder about his origin in the first place. The reasons for the absence of knowledge are themselves absent — a second-order interpretative conundrum that precludes a complete account of the past and, in this way, allows for a productive

92 Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979. 46.

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deferral of his origin story. In short, he need not come into his inheritance as long as his ‘illuminated ignorance’ can be sustained. The aporetic nature of his mother’s past and its disconnection from any certain revolutionary destiny transferred to Hyacinth is presented as liberating. In Luce Irigaray’s terms, by shrouding revolutionary history in oxymoronic ‘illuminated ignorance’, the narrative “triggers the play of rhetorical reversals and allows them the freedom of their play without being hampered by the referential constraints of meaning.”93 The modicum of freedom enabled by this strategy retroactively provides the template for the type of mediation which Hyacinth is shown to exercise in the theatre or in the reconstruction of his father. Instead of ‘casting light’ on his circumstances, ‘illuminated ignorance’ allows him to assume an oblique position in which the fashioning of a “faith” (166) depends on the creation of ambiguous signifiers. These are ‘illuminated’ only by allowing for at least two positions to be assumed simultaneously as the subject embarks on a process of interpretation.94 This recuperative structure of ‘illuminated ignorance’ also applies to the presentation of the class system and the revolutionary potential of the working class. We learn that whenever the protagonist is in the throes of doubting the revolutionary spirit of his fellow Londoners, “their function then was to represent in massive shape precisely the grovelling interests which attracted one’s contempt, and the only acknowledgement one owed them was for the completeness of the illustration” (164). At the same time as he denigrates the political potential of ‘the people’, his description of the “upper ten thousand” (164), likewise, imputes “dense layers of stupidity” (165) which render them unworthy bearers of the privileges bestowed on them. Both strata function analogously: while the arbiters of culture are imagined as unable to produce aesthetic worth, his “brothers of the people” (164) fail to change their circumstances. This impasse provides the very basis for ongoing hermeneutic engagement with

93 De Man, Allegories of Reading, 47. 94 There is a gendered component to the revaluation of darkness and obscurity as a model of interpretation. Hyacinth, a man consistently associated with femininity, temporarily recasts chromatic metaphors in a way not granted to the Princess. As Irigaray shows, in the “photological metaphor-system of the West,” while “[p]roviding the basis for the wise man’s auto-logical speculation, she lives in darkness. At/as back of the scene of representation which she props up by not/without knowing it. She makes no show or display. For if she were to shine, then the light would no longer, simply, belong to sameness. The whole of the current ecological system would have to be recalculated.” Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 345. The Princess, née Christina Light, is not afforded this possibility, ultimately being calculated according to the anarchist ‘economic system’ (cf. 3.2.3.). For Hyacinth, by dint of illuminated ignorance, such a recalculation is intermittently possible.

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both sides, none of which grant a straightforward collective identity to the protagonist.95 ‘Illuminated ignorance’ depends on structural incompleteness: neither the rich nor the poor can be grounded in any founding principle, nor can either side be straightforwardly associated with culture or anarchy. By stressing the failure of either class to provide “completeness of the illustration,” Hyacinth, thus, affirms the “differential nature of the political difference – implying the constant deferral of any stabilisation.”96 The people and the rich fail to embody the characteristics of revolutionary activity or aesthetic appreciation that Hyacinth expects. Instead, exceeding his “illustration,” they escape complete signification by any one feature, one trait, or one political demand. It is precisely this non-identity of both sides with themselves that makes them a suitable basis for Hyacinth’s self-presentation as constitutively split: “There were times when he said to himself that it might very well be his fate to be divided, to the point of torture, to be split open by sympathies that pulled him different ways” (165). Rather than a dilemma to be overcome, this is presented as a viable position — one which constitutes the basis for the re-writing of his parental past and his political position alike.97 Only by means of maintaining this distinction is the protagonist able to negotiate simultaneously two incomplete parts of an ever-redrawn political demarcation, thus not only presenting himself as torn, but also presenting each of the sides of this split as internally divided. It is with regard to this processual demarcation of identity and alterity that The Princess Casamassima parts company with the delineation of culture and anarchy outlined by Matthew Arnold. As Chris Baldick has shown, the purportedly disinterested project of criticism propounded in Arnold’s cultural project obfuscates determinate ideological interests. ‘Anarchy’ as the negative term in Arnold’s juxtaposition – a broad radical signifier that includes “the anarchy of Romanticism on the bookshelf or of demonstrations on the street” – motivates

95 Putting this project in terms of modern theoretical radicalism, which, as Wolfgang Eßbach puts it, insists on the question of the form of modern society, the project of delineating a distinction between culture and anarchy can be understood as the attempt to “get a radical grip on the problem of form of modern society, its disconnectedness and the falsehood of its forms.” My trans. Wolfgang Eßbach. “Das Formproblem der Moderne bei Georg Lukács und Carl Schmitt.” Metamorphosen des Politischen. Ed. Andreas Göbel, Dirk van Laak and Ingeborg Villinger. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995. 137–155. 149. 96 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 6. 97 As Wendy Graham puts it, “[t]he protagonist’s identificatory dilemma signals the instability of the regulatory norms governing class hierarchy.” It has the same effect, Graham argues, on “heterosexual hegemony.” Wendy Graham. “Henry James’ Subterranean Blues: Rereading The Princess Casamassima.” Modern Fiction Studies 40 (1994). 51–84. 52.

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culture as a generalised “recourse to the authority of the State as a higher agency of restraint.”98 Culture, authority, and the state become coterminous once they are positioned against the anarchic obverse. By contrast, Casamassima ascribes equal significance to both sides, already attenuating the ‘authority’ undergirding Arnoldian class essentialism. What is more, Culture and Anarchy presents an internalisation of distinctions, since “under all our class divisions, there is a common basis of human nature, therefore in every one of us, whether we be properly Barbarians, Philistines, or Populace.”99 Each of these groups is presented as an illegitimate impoverishment of exalted, essential ‘human nature’, particularly when they pursue their respective, particular interests. Class-based social practice presents the communal version of a rampant individualism of ‘doing as one wants’. In order to transcend narrow interests in favour of the corporate inclusiveness of the state, however, Arnold’s essay “depends on the very individualism he has set out to contest.”100 As Levenson points out, the principle for transcended interests, after all, continues to be located in the self, understood as the ‘best self’ of each class and each individual. This best self, as opposed to narrow interests, can be brought forth and integrated into the state. The resulting ambiguity – “[t]he check he proposes for the self remains within the self”101 – is compounded by the importance accorded to each of the classes. While he may initially seem to propose a tripartite equivalent to James’ split, Arnold’s categories are internally riven. The ‘Populace’, broadly the urban working class, features as the most notable manifestation of anarchy: “raw and half-developed,” it “has long lain halfhidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding place [. . .] to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.”102 This identification of the “vast residuum”103 of the people and anarchy is not all, however: the Populace returns in another category. That is, the working class, following its ‘ordinary self’, will only ever support the bourgeois ‘Philistines’, whose interests, in turn, generate “a machinery, an industrial machinery, and power and pre-eminence and other 98 Chris Baldick. The Social Mission of English Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. 14. Culture, in Baldick’s reading, is to exert “[a]n influence capable of elevating and ‘moralizing’ the masses, to replace the old monarchical and imperial ideals, [. . .] with strong hints that the ‘literary order’ would form part of it.” (15). 99 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 78. 100 Michael H. Levenson. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 27. 101 Levenson, Genealogy, 27. 102 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 78. 103 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 78.

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internal goods which fill its thoughts, and not an inward perfection.”104 The ‘anarchy’ of the people, then, appears twice in Arnold’s class imaginary. The Populace either contributes to general disorder or else emerges as a specifically modernising force, precluding any further approach towards ‘sweetness and light’.105 This argument allows for workers to be turned from a distinct class into a generalised principle of anarchy whenever the evocation of more deep-seated disorder is called for. As a result, traces of the Populace appear in human nature more generally, where they manifest as a sudden upsurge of violent passion. Never, for instance, is the need to turn away from the ‘ordinary self’ to the ‘best self’ more pressing than at those times when revolutionary fervour is detected within the educated reader. Who amongst Arnold’s readership could, after all, “look at them without sympathy” when introspection discovers the Populace close to home: “every time that we [. . .] long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, every time that we are envious, every time that we are brutal, [. . .] every time that we trample savagely on the fallen,”106 we (the implied educated readers) remember that we, too, contain the multitude — and would do well to suppress it. How does this model compare with the Jamesian version of culture and anarchy? The novelistic equivalents to the ‘Populace’ show no comparable trajectory of “drifting towards anarchy.”107 After all, the narrative offers ample strategies of containment, not least Hyacinth as an aesthetically minded working-class exemplar and an anarchist conspiracy as a radical supplement to depoliticised masses. On the other side of the distinction, the novel denies the very recourse offered by Arnold, for whom ‘Culture’ is grounded in “the State – the nation, in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage.”108 Consequently, both certainties offered by Culture and Anarchy – working-class disorder or state-guaranteed culture – are unavailable in the novel. Instead of the ‘sheer violence’ of the Populace excoriated by Arnold, the people in Casamassima take on the character of an empty signifier. Their “massive shape” (164) defies visualisation, yet requires interpretative engagement aimed at a ‘complete illustration’ which is ever out of reach. Conversely, culture does not make an appearance as a “pursuit of our

104 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 78. 105 Paul Muniment’s steady rise in the factory and his envious gaze at the Princess’ lowerclass abode seems to indicate a similar conservative distrust of the worker. He seeks external rewards from an alienated modernity while claiming to work for its dissolution. 106 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 78. 107 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 56. 108 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 56.

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total affection,”109 nor is it incarnated in any recognisable state form. In short, the novel presents both sides of the political distinction as elusive standards of value. Instead of certain diagnostics on different scales, like Arnold’s general and class-based anarchy, in the narrative both culture and anarchy have to be wrested from their largely indifferent class representatives. ‘Illuminated ignorance’, then, is applied to both spheres through which Hyacinth moves. That is, both regarding ‘the people’ and ‘the aristocracy’, he (1) distances himself by means of multiple mediation and (2) approaches them anew from a position of detachment. Instead of hard-and-fast analytical categories, culture and anarchy, then, are presented as the result of arduous interpretative strategies geared towards increasing rather than resolving the difficulties posed by the distinction. The protagonist’s voyage to Paris provides a condensed correlate to this model of residual identity. During Hyacinth’s grand tour, culture and anarchy finally reach a reciprocal relationship — an alternation of one position seen through (and refracted by) the other. In this, the novel denies a vertical arrangement in the manner of Arnold’s suppressed potential of the Populace or the elevation of culture to state power. It opts instead for a horizontal differentiation, a contingent difference drawn between culture and a revolutionary sphere that ensures their amenability to Hyacinth’s interpretative efforts. In the process, the working-class traveller is not accorded a fixed relationship with a defined position of alterity against which an equally immutable identity could be shored up. In Marchart’s terms, what Hyacinth acknowledges is not a “supposed ‘Other’ (or whatever settled distance I think sets it apart from me) but that Other who I am to myself, insofar as my self is constituted by a split in the first place.”110 It is precisely the negotiation of a constitutive ‘split self’ in this sense that is the outcome of the trip to Paris. Hyacinth becomes capable of representing to himself not only the divide of his identity but also the internal divisions of both spheres. What he gains in this way is an image of a populace barred from collective identity by its “resignation” (164) and an aristocracy deprived of discernment by its “stupidity” (165). By compounding these collective divides as much as his own, the protagonist can imaginatively inhabit culture and anarchy, even as he remains materially bound to the ‘Populace’.

109 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5. 110 Marchart, Differenz, 360. My trans. Orig. quote: “Was aus dieser Perspektive anerkannt werden müsste, wäre, simpler formuliert, nicht der vorgeblich ‘Andere’ (oder seine wie auch immer positivierten Differenzen mir gegenüber), sondern jener Andere, der ich mir selbst bin, sofern mein Ich zuallererst von einer Spaltung konstituiert wurde.”

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Culture as the effect of this flexible demarcation is denied essential value. The novel is unambiguous in its representation of the nexus of wealth and aesthetic objects as “a spectacle which rested on hideous social inequality” (165). Against the “dense stupidity” (165) of the privileged, the text relegates the redemption of cultural identity to the allocation of value by its protagonist. The same goes for revolution. Insurrectionary change is marred by fears of an anarchic devaluation of the aesthetic, so that any positive connotations have to be imparted by ambivalent, open-ended approaches to the radical past. During Hyacinth’s barely financed working-class grand tour, this redemption of history is enabled by an uneasy rapport between culture and revolution. Specifically, the protagonist reframes culture through the lens of revolution — or rather through a multiply mediated, distanced notion of a radical past. The ensuing demarcation does not provide what Marchart calls “any stable ground, any guiding principle (of ultimate values, rational truth, and so on), any certainty regarding our social affairs.”111 However, for the brief instance in which a place of revolutionary signifiers can be set up amidst the Parisian scene, the protagonist is shown to embark on a post-foundational project. During his travels, “the quest for grounds is not abandoned (like in the case of a simple-minded anti-foundationalism), but is accepted as a both impossible and indispensable enterprise.”112 That is: during Hyacinth’s post-foundational foray into Paris, traces of an alternative past are traced in urban spaces that have expunged their history. This ‘impossible and indispensable enterprise’ – with its attendant associations of an alternative genealogy connecting him to his mother and grandfather – can be performed only in a temporary act of demarcation in which an imagined past is grafted on the present. The negotiation of his identity in Paris initially appears as a heightened version of the conspicuous mediation already employed in London. The city is ‘seen through’ several interceding media: the urban experience consists of the “dazzle of shops and cafés seen through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates” (379), while the theatres Hyacinth aims to visit “blazed through intermediate lights and through the thin foliage of trees not favoured by the asphalt” (379). These impressions are, in a second step, to be deferred. Accordingly, the reader is told that the protagonist “took stock of his impressions” (379); or else, elliptically, “the impression of Chaumont – he relinquished that, for the present; it added to the luxury of his situation to reflect that he should still have plenty of time to see the succès du jour” (379). This ‘illuminated ignorance’, however, can

111 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 104. 112 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 9.

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be conceived as a more narrowly political strategy in Paris. After all, we are obliquely reminded that the city seen by the protagonist has been enabled by the violent effacement of revolutionary traces. Hyacinth’s strategies, thus, subtly contest the erasure of revolution and state violence, including the suppression of the 1871 Commune. However hypermediated and tentative such recovery of anarchist traces may be, this practice of memorialisation nevertheless cuts against the grain of a public amnesia regarding the two-month revolutionary sphere and its obliteration.113 In contrast to this violent erasure, culture (popular and consumer culture as much as high-cultural sites) is shown to be inextricably bound to spectres of its revolutionary past. The notion of a “civilisation that had no visible rough spots” (380) is countered by ineradicable intimations of past dissent. This detour from Paris as a largely dehistoricised space of leisure takes place almost unwittingly. While Hyacinth does not avail himself of the letters of introduction to surviving Communards that his British émigré comrade has given him, he imagines “the vague and vivid personage” of his grandfather exploring the “ancestral city” (382). As a result, the protagonist engages in a brief reckoning with the erased traces of revolutionary history, with the ‘hauntological’ figure of his grandfather offering, in Mark Fisher’s terms, “the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.”114 The spectral ancestor can function as a virtual agent precisely because he allows for the collective and the personal to be negotiated together. Mediated by this figure, revolutionary traces point not to one event of political change, nor less to the glorified idea of the Commune invoked by the anarchist diaspora he encounters in Britain. Instead, at least two revolutionary moments begin to blur together, just as Hyacinth can escape oppressive self-presence by dint of his ancestral double, appropriately named ‘Hyacinthe’. “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept,”115 as Derrida puts it — and the spectre, in this fashion, offers an ongoing ‘construction’ of collective revolutionary and personal identity alike. That the radical past and the self are both diffracted, thus, aligns with the strategy of ‘illuminated ignorance’; once more, the protagonist can evade univocal identification. The establishment of an alternative temporality in modern-day Paris resists revolutionary nostalgia. It also runs counter to the inscrutable strategies of the

113 Cf. Colette Wilson. “Memory and the Politics of Forgetting: Paris, the Commune, and the 1878 Exposition Universelle.” Journal of European Studies 1 (2005). 302–322. 114 Mark Fisher. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester and Washington: Zero, 2014. 18. 115 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202.

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anarchist conspiracy Hyacinth has encountered in contemporary London. To achieve this, the protagonist once more has to preclude immersion in his immediate environment. Just as the imagined audience for his well-bound books offers a virtual future in which the commodified object will be appreciated, the ancestral haunting (notably by another artisan: a “revolutionary watchmaker” 380) allows for a respite from constrictive identification. The ensuing ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of spectral Paris,116 according to Coghlan, “points, however fleetingly, to the possibility that two contents can occupy one space.”117 This allows for a multistable switching back-and-forth between Paris past and present, revolution and consumption, Hyacinth and Hyacinthe — a layering of multiple identifications that keeps at bay a sense of singular selfhood. Specifically, this “great sense that he understood and sympathized” (380) with a self-created double is made possible by barricades. These include imagined traces of diegetically real barricades as much as the literal, textual space cordoned-off by two mentions of ‘barricades’: the “ecstasy of the barricade” (380) opens an embedded narrative, while the localisation of the “barricade on which his grandfather fell” (381) concludes it. Due to this barricade imaginary, the flows of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition characterising the hegemonic city without ‘rough spots’ can be momentarily arrested.118 Imagined barricades allow for a zone of revolutionary signs to be reconstructed in the interstices of the capital by means of a resurrected figure from the past.119 According to Andy Merrifield, the “Paris Commune exposed the fragility and unsustainability of Haussman’s urban vision,”120 as the very boulevards cut into the urban fabric to prevent revolutionary blockades were barricaded. In contrast to the “carnival and pranks (like the tearing down of the Vendôme

116 Cf. Bey, T.A.Z., 71. 117 J. Michelle Coghlan. “Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James’s Paris.” Transforming Henry James. Ed. Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou, and Donatella Izzo. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2003. 77–94. 83. 118 Cf. Bill Brown. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001). 1–22. 4. 119 This resembles the function James’ father assigns to metaphorical barricades of the self in an autobiographical sketch: “Our selfhood, or proprium, is all we have got to dike out the inflowing tides of the spiritual world, or serve as a barricade against the otherwise overwhelming influence of heaven and hell.” Henry James. “Immortal Life: An Autobiographic Sketch.” The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James. Ed. William James. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1884. 179. 120 Andy Merrifield. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. 65.

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Column, which commemorated Napoleon Bonaparte’s military conquests”121), the afterimages of such temporary revolutionary zones in Hyacinth Robinson’s imagination can seem like depoliticisation of the original context of revolt. And indeed, the political does return as the personal here, the collective as an individual process of interpretation. Even if, however, popular revolution is replaced with an imagined ancestor, and revolutionary community with homosocial intimacy, the protagonist’s practice harbours latent revolutionary potential. At the very least, it makes visible traces of an alternate history. In keeping with the potential already established for multistable signs, this strategy is successful because it eschews unitary demarcation. The imagined revolutionary sphere is decidedly impure, and always already striated by the consumption and commodification of presentday Paris. Accordingly, the very signs of “central-city embourgeoisement”122 recur in the temporary revolutionary zone, whereas, conversely, effaced revolutionary sites are sought in the seamless space of capitalist modernisation. There can be no pristine, set-apart place of revolutionary nostalgia during this interlude. Instead, its demarcation hinges on the use of the very novelties made possible by the urban restructuring in the interest of state and capital.123 In other words, any memory of the revolutionary past has to take into account its reconstruction from a present vantage point, and the intermingling of cities and perspectives that results from these intersecting perspectives. This dialectical imaginative reconstitution of the city allows the protagonist to, momentarily, have the “history of the French Revolution at his fingers’ ends” (161), and to turn the structural absence of revolutionary signs into gages of their momentary presence. Although such suturing of the revolutionary zone and the boulevards is temporary, it is, nonetheless, presented as the apex of the protagonist’s efforts of mediated demarcation. If, as Graham shows, the “surviving Communards and internationalists came to agree with Bakunin that there was an abyss between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, including liberals and republicans,”124 James offers a brief, cross-temporal assemblage in which this rift can be bridged — or rather treated as if it had never become overt through state 121 Merrifield, Metromarxism, 66. This act of urban reconstitution stands in for a broader project of prefigurative politics enabled by the “zone of people power.” 122 Merrifield, Metromarxism, 65. 123 This is all the more necessary since Haussman’s Paris itself resists the ascription of monolithic traits: “Hausmann’s urban reality is romantic and magical; private joys spring from wide-open public spaces. One can henceforth be private in the crowd, alone yet amidst people; one can be inside while outside, outside while inside. There are walls and there is transparency. There is social closure and physical openness. There is public invisibility and private visibility.” Andy Merrifield. The New Urban Question. London: Pluto, 2014. 86. 124 Graham, The First International, 148.

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repression, massacres, and deportation in the first place. As the political becomes the personal, this reprieve of metonymical stand-ins – revolution for Commune, grandparents for parents – simultaneously allows Hyacinth to act as if his mother, likewise, had never fallen victim to unaccountable, classbased authority. Hyacinth’s strategy of demarcation hinges on the seamless “proofs of a civilisation” (380) in post-Commune Paris being supplemented by the ‘rough spots’ of a spectral evocation of radical politics.125 This, specifically, is where the barricades come in. To achieve a negotiable distinction between culture and anarchy, barriers – real and imagined – are required. For Hyacinth, it is the barricade that serves as the objective correlative to his negotiation of identities; or rather, lest the revolutionary experience appear as unmediated reality, Hyacinth reconstructs “the ecstasy of the barricade” (380): Wondering, repeatedly, where the barricade on which his grandfather fell had been erected, he at last satisfied himself (but I am unable to trace the process of the induction) that it had bristled across the Rue Saint-Honoré, very near to the church of Saint-Roch. The pair had now roamed together through all the museums and gardens, through the principal churches (the republican martyr was very good-natured about this), through the passages and arcades, up and down the great avenues, across all the bridges, and above all, again and again, along the river [. . .]. (381)

While barricades and boulevards are “conflicting regimes of materials, spaces and performances,”126 it initially appears as if this conflict were already decided in favour of boulevards and their unimpeded circulation of consumer goods within the restructured urban space. The anarchist alternative posed by the Commune has been effaced by what Hahn describes as “the presence of a huge volume of urban stimuli, much of it commercial, [which] meant that it was the modernity as a stream of stimuli that boulevard culture came to symbolize.”127 In order for barricades to disrupt this hegemonic spatial organisation of the city and to reinstate traces of the insurrectionary disturbance of civic order, the protagonist has to engage in an imaginative act of demarcation. If “in Haussman’s

125 This serves to inculcate what Felman calls a “new mode of reflexivity which necessarily incorporates a passage through the Other, not as reflection of the self, but as a radical difference from the self.” Shoshana Felman. “The Originality of Jacques Lacan.” Postmodernism: Critical Concepts. Ed. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 87–101. 93. 126 Carl Douglas. “Barricades and Boulevards: Material Transformations of Paris, 1795–1871.” Interstices 8 (2007). 31–42. 32. 127 H. Hazel Hahn. Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 219.

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Paris, the bourgeois subject of the boulevards is opposed to the placeless labourer,”128 the narrative presents the possibility to reinstate a place for the placeless, in which identity can be negotiated anew. In the political imaginary of the novel, this counter-hegemonic impulse cannot simply consist in the transformation of revolutionary absence into revolutionary presence. Instead of achieving authentic immersion in a reconstructed version of the Commune, Hyacinth deploys the technique of conspicuous mediation. The revival of ‘illuminated ignorance’ allows him to mark a place for an elided counter-history. However briefly, this disturbs the immersive circulation of consumers and commodities which has replaced any trace of revolutionary history generally, and of the 1871 massacre of anarchists, revolutionaries and civilians more specifically. That is, the narrative troubles the ideological closure imposed by the discursive transformation of counterrevolutionary violence into a ‘cleansing’ or ‘cure’ of the urban environment.129 For a brief interim, Hyacinth impedes the ahistorical, smooth flows of consumption in boulevard Paris by establishing a tenuous revolutionary lineage. In this, the innocuous protagonist counters an effort of urban neutralisation which is, as per Walter Benjamin, “designed to make the erection of barricades impossible” whilst “new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the barracks and the workers’ districts.”130 By speculatively positing impediments to urban circulation, Hyacinth’s reconstitution of barricades allows for a temporary suspension of the present-day city. The ‘shortest route’, at least, is replaced with circuitous ambling. It is by means of defining a temporary “practiced place”131 of the revolutionary past that the protagonist can preclude immersion in an unmediated and undifferentiated environment. This accords with de Certeau’s contention that “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers,” just like “an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place.” In order to contest the “univocity or stability of ‘the proper’,”132 then, spatial and semiotic practices have to interlock. To define new vectors of movement and temporality, Hyacinth makes tactical use of

128 Douglas, “Barricades,” 33. 129 Cf. Alex J. Bellamy. Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 59. Bellamy applies the category of “state terror.” 130 Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. 12. 131 Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 2011. 117. 132 De Certeau, Practice, 117.

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space and his meagre information about the past. Both are required to refashion the city as a ‘temporary autonomous zone’.133 This reorganisation does not yield a ‘pure’ revolutionary sphere. The semipermeable barricades infuse the radical interiority with a heightened version of the same consumption operative in the surrounding space, albeit inflected by the imagined figure of Hyacinth’s grandfather, the revolutionary watchmaker, who “finished the bottle with him, made the bill a little longer” (381). In this fantasy of plenitude, incompatible features can be combined. This possibility within the temporary zone of personalised revolutionary romance is placed in stark contrast to the depiction of the modern-day, anarchist space which immediately follows it. Hyacinth’s performance enables the past to spill into the present — the “barricades on which his grandfather fell” enable conspicuous consumption in a revolutionary sphere. By contrast, the appearance of the contemporary anarchist is marked by ‘hygienic’ distinctions: “Muniment’s absence of passion, his fresh-colored coolness, his easy, exact knowledge, the way he kept himself clean (except for the chemical stains on his hands), in circumstances of foul contact, constituted a group of qualities that had always appeared to Hyacinth singularly enviable” (391). Against this ‘hygiene’ of anarchist activism, the temporary autonomous zone is marked by the “vague yet vivid personage” (381) presenting a repetition with a difference of Hyacinth in the form of his grandfather, Hyacinthe. The performance of this improper area, which opposes the “long perspectives down broad straight thoroughfares”134 of boulevard Paris, depends on the reintroduction of signifiers of the past into the urban present. In Sara Ahmed’s spatial phenomenology, “[t]o go directly is to follow a line without a detour, without mediation. Within the concept of direction is a concept of ‘straightness’.”135 In Casamassima, deviation from the commitment to a ‘direct line’ is accomplished precisely as the ‘mediation’ of the city through revolutionary history, male intimacy, and a redoubling of the self. It is the combination of these factors that allows for departures from the boulevard regime. By setting up a temporary zone reified by imaginatively reconstituted barricades, the city can be “seen through” (379) remnants of revolution that have otherwise been erased.

133 Bey, T.A.Z., 71. 134 Benjamin, Arcades, 12. “Such an ideal corresponds to the tendency – common in the nineteenth century – to ennoble technological necessities through artistic ends. The institutions of the bourgeosie’s worldly and spiritual dominance were to find their apotheosis within the framework of the boulevards.” (12). 135 Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006. 16.

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He had his perplexities, and he had even now and then a revulsion for which he made no allowance, as when it came over him that the most brilliant city in the world was also the most blood-stained; but the great sense that he understood and sympathised was preponderant, and his comprehension gave him wings – appeared to transport him to still wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations. (380)

Notably, the city as focalised by the protagonist was blood-stained in the diegetic present, rather than having been so in a distant past. Hyacinth’s urban experience figures violence topographically, with brilliance and violence merely a perspectival shift apart. That is, the revolutionary imaginary is presented as insistently synchronous. While the radical theme is precipitated by the historical context of the July Revolution, this insistently present-day bloodstain cannot but evoke the state massacre that ended the Commune. After all, the diegetic present of the urban sphere still contains the signs of unspecified violence synchronously extended in space. As ‘brilliance’ cannot be severed from the bloodstains, the “revulsion” attributed to the protagonist becomes ambiguous. Rather than presenting opposition to the very idea of revolution, the term can also refer to the authoritarian erasure of the traces of failed revolutions. From this perspective, it registers the protagonist’s reaction to the hiddenness of the cycle of insurrection and statist reaction in recent history. Hyacinth’s ‘perplexities’ show that, “[t]he meaning of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence is not immediately obvious.”136 Hovering between revolution and reaction, between 1830 and 1871, the status of residual revolutionary signs cannot be contained. As Scott McCracken has argued, the events associated with the anarchist past are presented as a perpetual lack in James’ writing. This “registration of the Commune as absence” is “sharpened by the reaction that followed its defeat, when massacres, deportations and censorship compelled an active forgetting.”137 In contrast to that erasure, the identity reconstructed by Hyacinth’s attempt to reclaim the “seat of his maternal ancestors” (380) does not lay claim to essentialist validity. After all, as we are told that “the great sense that he understood and sympathized was preponderant” (380), this sense refers neither exclusively to the present city of consumption nor to a simple revolutionary ideal. Rather, sympathy is expanded to a layered determination of Paris, in a movement towards a synthesis that remains constitutively withheld. The approximation of a permanently receding city, in which the past is brought to the fore without either erasing or sanctioning the present urban regime, is

136 Walter Benjamin. “Critique of Violence.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. 277–300. 279. 137 McCracken, “The Author as Arsonist,” 72.

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presented as the attempt to achieve “still wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations” (380). Although the character finally renounces revolutionary endeavours as a result of his travels, in the liminal sphere set up in Paris he reconstructs a space in which multiple temporalities are congealed.138 For Jacques Rancière, the function of what he deems the ‘police’ – a “symbolic constitution of the social” – consists in “a partition of the sensible that is characterized by the absence of a void or a supplement. [. . .] It is this exclusion of what ‘is not’ that constitutes the police-principle at the core of statist practices.”139 Against such hegemonic determination of the seen and known, Hyacinth’s imaginative barricading facilitates the intermittent presence of ‘what is not’, introducing a supplemental, revolutionary figure into the modern city. This return of the repressed revolution opens up a zone in which an erased personal and urban revolutionary history can be conjoined. The addition of the revolutionary to the catalogue of Parisian enjoyments, thus, adduces external reference where previously there has been only a self-referential gaging of “sensation no less delicate” (380).140 In order to resist wholesale co-optation by the reigning paradigm of urban consumer culture, however, Hyacinth’s spatial imaginary has to be extended one step further. Specifically, his point of view shifts to an imaginative assumption of his grandfather’s perspective. These “reveries” of identification, which “had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that he knew next to nothing about him” (380), are presented as a catalogue of qualities which, in their paratactic structure and anaphoric repetition of the third person pronoun, efface the difference between auto-characterisation by means of free indirect thought and qualities assigned to the maternal ancestor: But he was reckless, and a little cracked, and probably immoral; he had difficulties and debts and irrepressible passions; his life had been an incurable fever and its tragic termination was a matter of course. None the less it would have been a charm to hear him talk, to feel the influence of a gaiety which even political madness could never quench. (381)

This ambiguous characterisation shows how identification with the revolutionary begins to turn into identification as a revolutionary. ‘Political madness’ could, after all, refer to statist violence as much as it is an indictment of radical 138 Cf. Bill Brown. “The Refabrication of Things.” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010). 183–217. 188. 139 Jacques Rancière. “Ten Theses on Politics.” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London/ New Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015. 34–56. 44. 140 In Walter Pater’s terms, Hyacinth’s perambulations during his tour serve to provide a “tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream [. . .] It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off.” Pater, Renaissance, 188.

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fervour. The ambiguity is, once more, constitutive: the imagined, barricaded sphere is not designed to yield the certainty of a revolutionary self. Instead, it allows for consideration of the “cracked” and “probably immoral.” The “difficulties” posed by Hyacinth’s imagined forebear are the very basis for rather than an impediment to this temporary revolutionary sphere. What is more, they reflect ‘difficulties’ posed by any interpretation of the Commune itself, resulting from the fact that its class composition, aims, prefigurative politics, and failure are a matter of perennial dispute. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici has argued, “[r]epresentational uncertainty remains about whether it should be understood as an urban revolt, a socialist revolution, an anarchist rebellion, a municipal revolution, or a civil war.”141 The resulting unavailability of a simple, revolutionary event structure, then, is a characteristic of the uncertain discursive afterlife of the Commune. The novel stages these disputed interpretations in its very refusal to assign any explicit political connotations to the absent barricades in the ‘Hausmannised’ metropolis, while also featuring a character who imagines and traces barricades in terms of a personal revolutionary history. As Ross puts it, the Commune can be interpreted in terms of its sheer “‘working existence’: in its displacement of the political onto seemingly peripheral areas of everyday life – the organisation of space and time, changes in lived rhythms and social ambiences. The insurgents’ brief mastery of their own history is perceptible, in other words, not so much on the level of governmental politics as on the level of daily life.”142 From this angle, the Commune had a strong claim to prefiguring social relations in anarchic fashion, since it featured attempts to instantiate “the new society before it is fully in place.”143 Rather than merely a depoliticisation of this anarchist prefiguration, it is this space of alternative “work, leisure, housing, sexuality, family and neighbourhood relations”144 that is individually reenacted in Hyacinth’s archaeological foray. His brief respite from London (and from the attempts to assign him a unitary aristocratic or anarchist identity), thus, maintains traces of a radical alignment of means and ends.145 141 Cf. Robin Wagner-Pacifici. What Is an Event? Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 106. 142 Kristin Ross. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 33. 143 Cindy Milstein. Anarchism and its Aspirations. Oakland, CA: AK, 2010. 67. For a full account of the anarchist “idea that there should be an ethically consistent relationship between the means and ends,” cf. Milstein, Anarchism, 67–75. 144 Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 1988. 33. Ross follows Marx’ acount of the Commune in this assessment. 145 Cf. Graham, The First International, 255.

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The practice of seeing Paris through the figure of the grandfather functions as conspicuous mediation that temporarily supplants the ‘univocity or stability’146 of the city proper, which is itself “seen through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates” (379). These nested processes of ‘seeing through’ culminate in one of the few instances of homosocial companionship in the novel. In contrast to the clipped catalogue of the interlocking characterisations of Hyacinth and his grandfather (381), this brief interlude establishes its scene of intimacy with hypotactic profusion. The grandfather, imagined as a young man, gazed at him with eyes of deep, kind, glowing comprehension and with lips which seemed to murmur that when one was to die tomorrow one was wise to eat and drink today. There was nothing venerable, no constraint of importance or disapproval, in this edifying and impalpable presence; the young man considered that Hyacinthe Vivier was of his own time of life and could enter into his pleasures as well as his pains. (381)

Identification with his revolutionary forebear does not lead to a wholesale rewriting of the urban sphere in terms of political upheaval, but rather allows for the protagonist to split his identity. As a consequence, he can perform the imaginative (and open-ended) work of establishing consonance between ‘Hyacinth’ and ‘Hyacinthe’. Previously, when his French co-worker Poupin “said ‘M. Hyacinthe,’ as he had often done before, he didn’t altogether enjoy it; he thought it made his name, which he liked well enough in English, sound like the name of a hairdresser” (127).147 Poupin, as opposed to the anarchist cabal otherwise laying claim to London, is an unabashed purveyor of the romance of revolutionary action, holding forth on the Commune experience with rhetorical excess. It is this remembrance of conspicuous revolt that the protagonist is shown to summarily eschew when, once in Paris, he neglects to present himself to Poupin’s old revolutionary contacts. By affirming ‘Hyacinthe’, instead, the protagonist takes up previously repudiated signs and submits them to a practice of repetition. As per Amy Hollywood, the “gaps and fissures in

146 De Certeau, Practice, 117. 147 The French name spoken aloud also associates Hyacinth with a queer self he wishes to disavow. This is particularly shown during a confrontation with a hairdresser in the revolutionary meeting-place, who, as Graham shows, accords explicitly with Victorian homosexual stereotypes. By stressing the preference of the British pronunciation of his name during that meeting, Hyacinth repudiates that stereotype as well as his French origin, negatively defining Frenchness, queerness, and his mother’s radicalism as a disavowed counterpoint to the markedly British masculinity attaching to Muniment’s revolution; it is, thus, a more narrowly political identification that Hyacinth dismisses together with “those signs or traits that would link him to a newly constituted homosexual identity.” Wendy Graham. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 194.

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that citational process – the ways in which repetition both repeats the same and differs and defers from it – mark the multiple sites on/in which the contestation of regulatory norms occurs.”148 In an analogous manner, Hyacinth cites the French name, attaches it to a double of his own creation, and ranges between barricades that result from the citation of half-remembered statements about his familial past. These practices jointly allow for a temporary contestation of classification — both of the city and the identities otherwise foisted on the protagonist. In stark contrast to the presentation of the modern-day London anarchists, this endeavour of citation and mediation is marked by the same abundance of signifiers that already characterised the strategy of ‘illuminated ignorance’: the grandfather is “vague yet vivid” (381), “edifying and impalpable” (381), both a historical figure and a direct interlocutor to be “gazed” (381) at. As in the case of previous negotiations of identity, this surfeit of description does not imply a final, more authentic revolutionary essence, nor less a perspective from which Paris would be finally understood. The point of view of the grandfather does allow for the disavowed radical past to impinge on the city as a space of conspicuous consumption, overlaying the immersive environment with a fleeting counter-hegemonic model in which revolutionary signifiers can be temporarily simulated. This spectral second city, however, is presented as a model just as fractured and unassimilable as the “strange composite odour, half agreeable, half impure, of the boulevard” (380). Rather than a harmonious sense of self, the protagonist imagines two sides of a distinction which can be inhabited alternately and, once assumed, produce interpretative dilemmas, fractured signs, and irresolvable contradictions, disallowing any notion of coherence and stability. Considered, in Sedgwick’s terms, as “reparative practice,” Paris offers the “prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products.” This allows for “the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquist experimentation” and “juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture.”149 In Casamassima, it is this momentary, experimental combination of culture and anarchy which, ventriloquised through the imagined revolutionary, enables a temporary sense of identity.

148 Amy Hollywood. “Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization.” History of Religions 42 (2002). 93–115. 94. 149 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Ed. Michèle Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, and Michael Moon. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 123–151. 149.

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This in-between phase, finally, also constitutes one of the few instances of Hyacinth posing an interpretative conundrum for the narrator: “[w]ondering, repeatedly, where the barricade on which his grandfather fell had been erected, he at last satisfied himself (but I am unable to trace the process of the induction) that it had bristled across the Rue Saint-Honoré, very near to the church of Saint-Roch” (381). For most of the novel, focalisation alternates between the narrator and the organising consciousness of the protagonist, without explicit signals for the transition from one to the other. By contrast, during the Parisian interlude, the narrator is uniquely identified in the first person at the very point of his incomprehension. The inability to “trace the process of the induction” (381), furthermore, coincides with the protagonist cordoning off an experiential place from the surrounding urban space.150 It is by means of Hyacinth’s self-fashioned placement in a temporary in-between place, then, that the economy of gazes – which in Seltzer’s reading of the novel effortlessly move from the reciprocal observation of the protagonists to “the policing of the real that is the realist project”151 – is temporarily suspended. As the “panoptic ‘eye’ of the narration”152 cannot trace Hyacinth’s mental process, he is temporarily granted interpretative control over his surroundings. In Derrida’s terms, Hyacinth’s imagined barricades thus allow for the “very place of spectrality.” This place features a ghostly “arrivant” suspended between past and present, who “will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity).”153 The reconstructed revolutionary figure, recoverable only as a rupture in the seamless urban present, sets this revolutionary zone apart from what the narrative elsewhere presents as “that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution” (397). Indeed, it is only in this zone that the more recent, anarchist past can at least be made to appear as an erasure. As a result of these spatial tactics in Paris, Hyacinth briefly evades what otherwise appears as a stark choice. In other words, he neither has to dedicate himself to a stereotypical

150 As per the terms of cultural geography established by Yi-Fu Tuan, the movement from “‘space’, a blurred image” to the “geometric personality” of place is to be understood as a progression from “inchoate feelings for space and fleeting discernments of it in nature to their public and material reification.” Yi-Fu Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. 17. 151 Mark Seltzer. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1984. 51. 152 Seltzer, Art of Power, 51. 153 Jacques Derrida. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. 81–82.

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anarchist cause (pursued by those who “think it’s useful to throw bombs into innocent crowds, and shoot pistols at their rulers” 243), nor, alternatively, accept the culture erected on top of “despotisms” (396). In the temporary autonomous zone, the barricades ensure a modicum of interpretative agency. While for Seltzer instances of resistance in James’ fiction “turn out to be versions of the very technologies of power that he ostensibly disavows,”154 the Parisian scene indicates a final effort of contesting the status quo, offering ‘undisciplined’ imaginary community in a self-styled revolutionary sphere. 3.1.2.2 Demarcation of Cultural Space Paris remains an exception. Throughout the novel, Hyacinth is shown to be dependent on arbiters of culture not as easily reconfigured as the French boulevards. This is especially the case for the interpretation of the Princess, whom Paul Fry presents as a target of misguided expectations. “Poor Hyacinth Robinson,” according to this reading, “ends up on the wrong side in politics, confusing socialism with anarchism like a character out of Conrad, and on the wrong side of love, the mercuric Christina Light being a decidedly inaccessible Big Other.”155 The analysis of the model of distinction in the novel, which enables the demarcation of a space of cultural identity, however, bestows a function on this misrecognition. If we are to describe the Princess in terms of the transindividual order of the ‘Big Other’,156 this position is not shown to be bolstered by a defined ideological apparatus. In The Princess Casamassima, there is no homogenous cultural identity to be inertly assumed and demarcated against its constitutive alterity. The protagonists are, instead, confronted with the possibility that there is no ‘big Other’ to begin with. Both “variations of the question of the big Other” provided by Žižek (“Is there an agency which guarantees the consistency of our speech? Can we reach certainty about the rules of our speech?”157) have to be answered in the negative.158 Instead

154 Seltzer, Art of Power, 146. 155 Paul H. Fry. Theory of Literature. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2012. 201. 156 Lacan’s seminars of the 1950’s “emphasize the importance of this transindividual order, this big Other whose mediation confers upon the individual both subjectivity and an unconscious. The multiplicity of horizontal intersubjective relationships is reified into a totality vertically hovering above this mere aggregate.” Adrian Johnston. Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005. 312. 157 Slavoj Žižek. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London and New York: Verso, 2012. 2. 158 The Princess is reinterpreted, following Žižek, as the “subject’s presupposition – the (presup)position of an immaterial, ideal order, i.e. of Another Place that guarantees the ultimate meaning and consistency of the subject’s experience.” Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 58.

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of an agency guaranteeing culture, Hyacinth is tasked not only with (1) fashioning a sphere of culture and its representative, but also with (2) subsequently treating this ‘culture’ as if its consistency preceded his constructive efforts. In Edelman’s terminology established above, Hyacinth is shown to perform a ‘retroactive positing’ of his own, painstakingly delineated places of cultural identity.159 To perform this strategy, he is required to disavow his own constructive efforts and presume that he is merely rediscovering rather than actively creating a cohesive cultural sphere. Internally, this definition of a culture against its relational alterity requires a model in which signs pose a constant interpretative challenge without, however, yielding a definite cultural signified. In order for culture to exert its cohesive effects, it has to present itself to the individual observer as a set of interrelated signs, all of which point to a sphere of cultural coherence which none of them incarnates individually. Thus, when during his first visit to the Princess’ apartment, Hyacinth murmurs “that it would take hours to do justice to such treasures” (245), his mode of seeing is predicated on an assumption of absent cultural coherence, in comparison to which any gesture of appreciation falls short. It is this deficit, however, which, in Martin Heidegger’s terms, upholds the ideology of a standard of interpretation, on the basis of which “the interpretation can draw the conceptuality belonging to the beings to be interpreted from these themselves, or else the interpretation can force those beings into concepts to which they are opposed.”160 Only by constantly adjusting his interpretative frame in the search for an adequate ‘conceptuality’ of this kind, can the notion of ‘doing justice’ to the cultural place be perpetuated. If in James’ “increasingly anomic and disunified social world” there is a lack of “a basis for interpretation and assessment,”161 it is nonetheless through interpretation ‘without basis’ that the subject can aspire towards a cultural identity, whilst relegating unwanted characteristics to the outside.162 To ‘posit retroactively’ the cultural sphere, the protagonist has to perceive the syntagmatic arrangements of material signs as indicative of a paradigmatic axis of selection — without this repository of cultural worth ever becoming fully recoverable. According to this semio-material strategy, Hyacinth attempts to set up culture out of reach, the distance of which is to be bridged in recurrent,

159 Edelman, No Future, 8. 160 Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. 145. 161 Robert B. Pippin. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 5. 162 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 8. This interpretation, in postfoundational terms, proceeds on the basis of a constitutive absence of a determining ground.

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unresolved hermeneutic practice, with a “metaphorical ‘identity’ kept at a metonymical remove.”163 Such “reality of the vision” (245) attributed to supposed high culture is already shown by the attempt to correctly appraise the Princess’ “bibelots” (244) during Hyacinth’s first visit to her apartment: Hyacinth had time to count over the innumerable bibelots (most of which he had never dreamed of), involved in the personality of a woman of high fashion, and to feel that their beauty and oddity revealed not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind, and – almost – terrible depths of character. (244)

In his state of suspense before the arrival of the Princess, the protagonist can establish at least three interlocking paradigms — to wit, “interchangeable systemic units” prompting selection.164 The first relates to the (1) hierarchy of objects themselves. The bibelots in this category are not only valued more highly than objects bearing the stigma of exchange value but, on a cultural scale, rate higher than previous cultural signifiers the protagonist has appraised. Indeed, the notion of such a scale only ever emerges in confrontation with these purported guarantors of higher value. As a result, even “[t]he splendours and suggestions of Captain Sholto’s apartment were thrown completely into the shade by the scene before him” (244). This intersects with a second paradigm, namely the (2) “provinces of art” (244) metonymically indicated by the individual objects which have been co-selected by the “woman of high fashion” (244) to whose “personality” (244), in turn, they attest. The third paradigm is associated with the judgment of (3) personalities, again imagined in terms of a vertical arrangement in which the objects suddenly disclose “terrible depths of character” (244). The circular co-determinations between these imaginaries of paradigmatic organisation – objects signifying art, art indicating choice, choice suggesting depth as well as a position on a scale of personality in which objects are, in turn ‘involved’ (244) – are not just presented as the overawed reaction of a besotted naïf.165 Rather, the simultaneity of representation, contestation, and inversion is the key

163 It is, hence, not just the Princess whose interest is maintained by seeking a “manageable typology” of the people, held in a state of “hypostasized difference, a metaphorical ‘identity’ kept at a metonymical remove.” Ben Nichols. “Queer Footing: Pedestrian Politics and the Problem of Queer Difference.” The Henry James Review 34 (2013). 98–111. 100. 164 Daniel Chandler. Semiotics: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 98. 165 It is, instead, a strategy of demarcating a place which, in Foucault’s terminology, can be defined as ‘heterotopia’ – “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1986). 22–27. 24.

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component of the demarcation of a cultural sphere. As long as the boundaries between the “effectively enacted utopia”166 and its surrounding space are assured, the cultural sphere can be afforded a semi-autonomous status. At the same time, the very inequality and expropriation in which this culture is implicated can be projected on the constitutive outside beyond its boundaries. This strategy of setting apart a place from its environment renders the Princess’ places examples of what Foucault calls heterotopias of compensation, which “create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.”167 In keeping with such interlocking illusions, even the protagonist’s increasing awareness that cultural sophistication occludes conditions of labour does not cancel out the endeavour of ascertaining essentially valid standards of judgment. The monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will, upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less impracticable and life more tolerable. (396)

Notably, it is the ‘impracticality’ of “learning and taste” which occasions Hyacinth’s choice of a self-defined culture over revolutionary activism. His “pathos of distance,”168 after all, is geared towards delaying any straightforward, ‘practical’ meaning. Particularly, ‘impracticality’ prevents an evaluation in terms of utility. Conversely, it is a ‘practical’ standard of appraisal which the novel consistently associates with unmediated ascriptions of self-same identity. It is little wonder, then, that the protagonist adapts the tactics of ‘illuminated ignorance’: he contributes to a compensatory sphere of culture by ensuring the intercession of media. The main example of these distancing devices is, ultimately, provided by the book Hyacinth prepares for the Princess. In order for this item to exceed its status as mere product of his labour, Hyacinth synecdochically imbues it with characteristics of the Princess, thus barely transferring it to the realm of culture: “at the end of three months it almost appeared to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe” (254). Subsequently, the book manifests “[r]are sensations and impressions” (279) which “turned into a

166 Foucault, “Other Spaces,” 24. 167 Foucault, “Other Spaces,” 27. 168 Saul Newman. “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment.” I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Ed. John Moore. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. 107–126. 108.

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kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic” (254). Here Hyacinth, after previously having derived paradigms of discernment from scattered bibelots, re-materialises this imputed value in an artefact of his own. The “material link” (254) which he purports to have achieved in this way does not point directly to the Princess but to a “ghost,” which could alternatively be a metonymical trace of its intended recipient – refigured as the source of the cultural item – or else metaphorically resemble Hyacinth himself during his ‘ascension’ to the cultural sphere. This ambiguity of the “ghost” is not to the detriment of the cultural sphere; indeed, its dual signification emerges as the only way of defining the spectre as a temporary marker of the compensatory heterotopia of culture in the first place. Like the spectral colloquy with the revolutionary grandfather in Paris, this “proof and gage” offers a productive impediment to interpretation and, thus, enables Hyacinth to maintain distance from the metonymies of culture. In a literalisation of this need for intermediates between the protagonist and the desired cultural plenitude, upon delivering the book, the butler “erected himself as an impenetrable medium” (254). This blockage has the effect of occasioning anew the search for an ultimate experience of culture to be recovered from the uncertain “palpable relic” (254). Only by means of a separation from the experience of culture can the existence of such a sphere (in which exploitation is redeemed and value organised on a vertical scale of worth) be retroactively posited in the first place. That this ultimate synthesis is perennially out of reach and Hyacinth is himself placed among the curios assembled by the Princess does not render the attempt moot. The protagonist displays what with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick can be called a “reparative impulse,” emerging out of the fear “that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”169 In the case of Casamassima, this ‘assemblage of plenitude’ functions by simultaneously positing an interpretative gap and gesturing towards the possibility of overcoming it — without ever quite doing so. Every item subject to aesthetic valuation is seen as a potential indication of a cultural paradigm, which may just yield (in Derrida’s terms) “the production and recollection of beings in presence, as knowledge and mastery.”170 This ideology of cultural vocation is, ultimately, even transferred to

169 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 149. 170 Constituting, in Derrida’s terms, “absolute presence in consciousness [as] the infinite vocation of full presence.” Jacques Derrida. “Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Ed. David B. Allison and Newton Garber. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. 17–106. 102.

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the class structure and the extraction of surplus value through work. In order to uphold the illusion of an unquantifiable sphere of worth, Hyacinth applies the principles of Medley and the redemption of individual bibelots to the social conditions he observes during his European foray: It is not that it has not been there to see, for that perhaps is the clearest result of extending one’s horizon – the sense, increasing as we go, that want and toil and suffering are the constant lot of the immense majority of the human race. I have found them everywhere, but I haven’t minded them. Excuse the cynical confession. What has struck me is the great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of them – the splendid accumulations of the happier few. (396)

This ‘splendid accumulation’ can only be inferred, whereas the “toil” which makes it possible is immediately visible: this fissure between what is seen and what is imputed supersedes any immediate immersion in a sphere of present cultural worth. The “great achievements” can be registered as difference, defined as they are against the conditions of labour disclosed to Hyacinth’s touristic gaze.171 It is at this point, then, that the ideology of forthcoming cultural ‘mastery and presence’ makes this gap appear necessary. As a result of this ‘cynical confession’, the protagonist does not inertly assume the validity of a sphere of ‘accumulation’ (396). Rather, culture is conceived as a redemptive epiphenomenon which has to be actively wrested from its material conditions. The “achievements of which man has been capable” emerge as a barely recovered semiotic surplus over the universal material expropriation of “the human race.” The redemption of culture, in other words, is turned into an individual task, involving the aesthete in the active co-creation of an elaborate false consciousness, the illusory nature of which is recognised, but deemed more important than any critical unveiling. In other words, the logic at play here is one of fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well, but nonetheless . . . ”172 The novel leaves no doubt that Hyacinth understands that an accumulation of cultural value pressuposes accumulation of surplus value. Yet, by

171 In Gadamer’s terms, ensuring this distance (like the works of art Hyacinth attempts to redeem during his foray) requires understanding as “self-encounter. But as an encounter with the authentic, as a familiarity that includes surprise, the experience of art is experience in a real sense and must master ever anew the task that experience involves: the task of integrating it into the whole of one’s own orientation to the world and one’s own self-understanding.” Hans-Georg Gadamer. “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics.” The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of Later Writings. Ed. Richard E. Palmer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007. 123–132. 129. 172 Octave Mannoni. “Je sais bien, mais quand meme.” Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Vol. 1. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 125–144. 125. “While the fetishist knows perfectly how things really are, he suspends the symbolic efficiency of this knowledge and acts as if he does NOT know it.” (ibid.)

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sheer dint of the task of interpretation offered by the former, the latter can only appear as immediate acceptance of his lot in life. If, according to this justification, culture is to function as the basis for ever-renewed self-fashioning of identity, it cannot be conceived in a trans-historical, essentialist manner. Rather, ‘splendid accumulation’ can only be conceived as a mediated, distanced set of values, always separated from the interpreting subject by a gap that is to be maintained rather than effaced. The overall effect of such a compensatory heterotopia of culture is encapsulated by the conclusion to the protagonist’s aristocratic role-playing at Medley, the Princess’ appropriately named, rented country house: “he had entered a phase of his destiny where responsibilities were suspended” (318). Although the nature of the disavowed responsibilities is not specified, the reader cannot but refer them to the promise of unquestioning revolutionary action which the protagonist has already made to the anarchists before he enters the cultural realm. The dichotomy is set: on the one hand, the cultural heterotopia of Medley allows for self-fashioning based on the interpretation of polyvalent signs; on the other hand, the anarchist pledge is geared towards a single future action. Thus, the interpretative challenges in the cultural sphere are sharply distinguished from the looming anarchist act. This contrast between culture and an ineffable, radical ‘destiny’ is spelt out when it is observed from within the compensatory place of Medley. Hyacinth narrates his anarchist experiences to the Princess: Hyacinth had a standard, now that he had seen a man who was the very incarnation of his programme. You felt that he was a big chap the very moment you came into his presence. “Into whose presence, Mr Robinson?” the Princess inquired. “I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you! I am speaking of the very remarkable individual with whom I entered into that engagement.” (329)

The “remarkable individual” – Hoffendahl, a German anarchist ringleader who never appears in the novel – stands for an alternative narrative model. In contrast to the multiple mediations of Medley, he incarnates a ‘programme’, both in the sense of a ‘scheme’ and a playbill announcing an entire series of events. Hoffendahl embodies an entire projected narrative structure, condensed so as to lead to a single, projected result.173 The events making up this teleological

173 Adrian Wisnicki. Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. 155. Wisnicki identifies the ‘mastermind’ as a recurring narrative template of conspiracy fiction. In the case of Casamassima, it serves to mark the conspiracy as a “vast, international and potentially earth-shaking affair” — which can, henceforward, be treated with a ‘conspiratorial irony’ by Muniment that is not available to Hyacinth (cf. 157).

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structure of revolution range from the terrorist attacks in which Hyacinth is to partake, to the imagined anarchist ‘blasphemy’ of “cut[ting] up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece” (396). In each case, they share a common feature: the metonymical connection between anarchist conspirator and revolutionary deeds does not require any further interpretative engagement whatsoever. As against the predominance of similarity-based metaphorical procedures in the cultural sphere, which prompt the inference of relationships between objects on a vertical scale of worth, the anarchist mode of signification is ineluctably syntagmatic. It privileges, in other words, “a spatially linear arrangement or temporally irreversible succession of at least two items, which are either both co-present, or of which one is present while the other remains absent.”174 In the above exchange about Hoffendahl, the possibility of ‘coming into his presence’ associates the anarchist with an instant co-presence of the contiguous spatial, temporal, and causal relationships he establishes. These do not have to be inferred or communicated: the entire set of linear-syntagmatic connections is immediately in effect, its presence requiring no further elucidation. It is this immediate presence of anarchism (and the teleology it makes apparent) that has to be consigned to alterity in order to demarcate a cultural sphere against it. The residual sphere of culture can, thus, only emerge in contrast to a relational alterity of anarchist signs. In the process, the alternative model of signification posed by the anarchist Other is further expanded by Hyacinth’s analeptic narration to his audience of one, in which he outlines the induction ceremony. In the process, the successful delimitation of Medley as a place which invites acts of interpretation is confronted with its constitutive outside.175 The protagonist is at pains to exclude the Princess – i.e. the supposed representative of the cultural model residually upheld at the country house – from his “vision” (30) of the anarchists. Hyacinth informs her that she “would have spoiled everything. He made me see, he made me feel, he made me do, everything he wanted.” (330) The protagonist’s description of being in the anachist’s

174 Claus-Michael Ort. Zeichen und Zeit: Probleme des literarischen Realismus. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998. 7. My trans. Orig. Quote: A contiguous connection implies a “räumlich linearisierte Anordnung oder zeitlich irreversible Sukzession von mindestens zwei Größen [. . .], wobei diese entweder ko-präsent sein können oder eine von beiden präsent und die je andere absent sein kann.” 175 In Paul De Man’s terms, the “internally static polarities are put in circulation by means of a more or less hidden system of relays which allows the properties to enter into substitutions, exchanges, and crossings.” Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979. 60.

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thrall appears as an inversion of the impressionist poetics laid out in the 1897 preface to Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.”176 If, as North has suggested, we take this injunction literally as an account of the “laboriously physical process by which dry print becomes a visual and auditory experience,”177 the same poetics actualised within the diegesis take on connotations of coercion. Specifically, as Hyacinth is ‘made to see’, he is impelled to avail himself of a mode of perception which converts the ‘seen’ and ‘felt’ into ‘doing everything he wanted’. This version of the impressionist imperative, thus, emerges as a horror of immediacy, in which mediation – the ‘dry print’ of Conrad’s preface – is circumvented. The resulting nexus of perception and action is threateningly immediate, putting paid to the ‘illuminated ignorance’ of culture. In the cultural sphere, but also as early as the shop window experience and, in particular, during the brief Parisian barricade sojourn, the template of ‘seeing through’ precludes such unmediated confrontations with a reality imposed from without. Similarly, the passage from Conrad’s preface, while it sets apart and italicises seeing, is also syntactically distanced from the task to be achieved: the (1) written word – or rather, to cite another level of mediation, its “power” – the (2) aural, and the (3) experience of the ambiguously literal-haptic or figural-emotional ‘feeling’ mediate between the poetological ‘task’ and the final ocularcentric precedence accorded to the visual. Even the gaze is an affirmation of indirect mediation: “before all” can either be interpreted temporally, presenting ‘seeing’ as an initial impetus which entails a chain of further effects; or else, as a matter of evaluation (‘most importantly’). In their very ambiguity, the impressionist aesthetics articulated by Conrad, thus, shed light on the perpetuation of a sphere of cultural identity in The Princess Casamassima: like the ‘illuminated ignorance’ attained in Paris, the aim of art is not the revelation of essentialist verities but rather to be “difficult – obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature.”178 Such impediments to triumphant conclusions are literalised by Hyacinth’s experience of seeing “everything through a mist” (316) at Medley.

176 Joseph Conrad. Preface. The Nigger of the Narcissus. London: Penguin, 1989. xlvii-li. xlix. 177 Michael North. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 38. 178 Conrad, Preface to Narcissus, li.

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Contrary to these productive obstacles to ‘unveiling’, there are no interpretable obscurities of this kind in the anarchist induction as related from within the sphere of culture. In Hoffendahl’s haunt, perceiving and acting collapse into one another, leaving no room for hermeneutic engagement on the part of the protagonist. That Hoffendahl “made me see, he made me feel, he made me do” (134) is contracted into one undifferentiated moment. Contrary to this direct determination of the sensible and the doable, when Hyacinth attempts to stabilise his waning belief in the Princess as a representative of a privileged cultural sphere, he adopts a rhetoric of interpretative conundrums that prefigures Conrad’s programmatic refusal of “unveiling.” When she moves to the lower middle-class borough of Madeira Crescent and affects a poor imitation of a lower-class lifestyle, Hyacinth assures himself that the Princess remains distant and mediated: “Nature had multiplied the difficulties in the way of her successfully representing herself as having properties in common with the horrible populace of London.” (481) The cultural imaginary stabilised with reference to the Princess necessitates further obliquity, the multiplication of ‘difficulties’ in a hermeneutics of (constitutively impossible) confirmation rather than suspicion.179 Accordingly, crossing over from the space of the anarchist induction through the transitional space of everyday urban life and, ultimately, to Medley, does constitute a set of eventful border-crossings. At the end of these transitions, however, the protagonist attempts to demarcate a sphere which relegates further events to its outside. The accomplished cultural sphere is to privilege ‘difficult’ interpretations of metaphorical value over further, literal and spatial, bordercrossings.180 The cultural place is figured in terms of a prolonged present, as opposed to the anarchist space, in which the protagonist’s present interpretative challenges are of no account in comparison to his future action for the cause.181

179 In Ricoeur’s terms, the restoration of residual faith in culture enables a “hermeneutics as the restoration of meaning. [. . .] It is a rational faith, for it interprets; but it is a faith because it seeks, through interpretation, a second naïveté.” Paul Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1970. 28. 180 Wolf Schmid. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” What is Narratology: Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 17–31. 21. “Descriptive texts are the opposite of texts which are narrative in the broader sense [. . .]. Descriptive texts represent static situations: they describe conditions, draw pictures or portraits, portray social milieus, or categorize natural and social phenomena. They represent a single moment in time and a single state of affairs.” 181 The teleological movement towards a destiny offered by the anarchists is subjected to a ‘final motivation’, defined by Martinez/Scheffel as “taking place in the context of a mythical horizon of meaning in a world controlled by a numinous instance. Plot progression is determined from the beginning; even seeming coincidences are revealed as acts of providence.” My trans. Matias Martínez / Michael Scheffel. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. München: Beck 2009. 111.

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By banishing the anarchist mode of ‘unveiling’ to the constitutive outside of cultural worth, Hyacinth is still able to demarcate identity and alterity: for Hyacinth, a change of heart was, in the nature of things, much more an occasion for a hush of publicity and a kind of retrospective reserve; it couldn’t prompt one to aggression of jubilation. When one had but lately discovered what could be said on the opposite side one didn’t want to boast of one’s sharpness – not even when one’s new convictions cast shadows that looked like the ghosts of the old (553).

Hyacinth’s ‘hushed change of heart’ is an attempt to disavow his immediate determination by an ineluctable anarchist event. The resemblance established in the process is almost impossible to pinpoint. After all, if the ‘shadows’ of the protagonist’s ‘new convictions’ regarding cultural appreciation ‘looked like’ the previous, anarchist convictions, this could be seen as a model of demarcation. On this reading, it is only by means of determining a cultural identity that its obverse is thrown into relief. However, the image is complicated by the assertion of similarity to the “ghosts of the old” rather than to any defined, anarchist agenda. These ghosts are polysemic: they could refer to lingering sympathies for revolutionary upheaval, since the fantasy of social change is still said to harbour “associations that made them venerable” (553). They could also, however, refer to his revolutionary oath, and thus to the “ghosts” of his previous convictions rather than the convictions themselves. This would render them a “virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations,” to use Mark Fisher’s account of such spectral politics.182 The ambiguity of the passage reflects the equally indistinct political imaginary of the novel, concerned as it is with contingent demarcations of culture rather than any essentialist appraisal of what, precisely, might make the cultural sphere worth preserving in the first place. In keeping with this premium placed on distinction over essence, the “shadows” of convictions can be read as a final effort of creating the type of interpretative template which is shown to obtain at Medley. This, then, would render them a last-ditch effort to preserve ‘culture’: the presentation of anarchism as ghostly alterity (“shadow”) of conservative convictions already presages an oblique incursion of an uncontainable anarchist sphere into the demarcated cultural place. It is only the uncertainty of the tertium comparationis, conversely, that emerges as the last vestige of the hermeneutic efforts associated with culture. The polyvalence of the ghosts and shadows haunting the protagonist serves to present anarchism from a cultural point of view: the radical sphere becomes a matter of interpretation rather than an immediately determinative mode of coercion. Instead of accepting the binary logic of obedience 182 Mark Fisher. “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66 (2012). 16–24. 16.

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or apostasy, the novel presents a final instance of images designed to assert “their power to revolve, so that they have sides and backs, parts in the shade as well as parts in the sun” (296) — imagery, in other words, that opposes the teleological linearity of the anarchist plot by interposing open-ended decoding in a protracted present. By placing cultural identity and anarchic alterity in multistable, irresolvable opposition one last time, the immediacy of the anarchist ‘programme’ can be disavowed.183 As Slavoj Žižek puts it, a central topic of “Henry James’ work is the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life: indeterminacy and contingency undermine old reliance on stable forms prescribing how we are to act and to evaluate our own and others’ acts; there is no longer a fixed frame which enables us to find our (ethical) way.”184 The Princess Casamassima, however, does not simply present this process as an unavoidable necessity. The novel offers strategies of containing the dissolution of a “fixed frame.” In this, the narrative casts aspersions on any retreat to “old mores,”185 mainly on the grounds that such ‘mores’ are irrecoverable in the first place. Thus, the value initially attributed to an Arnoldian concept of ‘Culture’ becomes inaccessible. The “best which has been thought and said in the world”186 is shown to be an array of contingent cultural codes, none of which are more intrinsically valid than the radical views attributed to the modern anarchists. Inert certainty of culture as an ordering deepstructural reality is unattainable. More precisely, there is no deep structure unless it is established in a founding performative act — and retroactively posited as always having been in place. What the novel negotiates, then, is the possibility of simulating a consistent principle of value. The more indirect its mediation, the more effectively can it be set apart from its anarchist counterpart of uninterpretable, teleological events. Thus, only as long as a boundary between narrative templates of culture and anarchy is maintained, can the former, to use Henry James’ own preference of showing over telling, be made to yield “processes, periods, intervals, stages, degrees, connexions [which] may be easily enough and barely enough named, may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to the deep discredit of the writer, but

183 Hyacinth’s self-created identity sets up a “spectrally defined non-origin within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity.” Peter Buse and Andrew Stott. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Introduction. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. 1–20. 11. 184 Žižek, Parallax View, 126. 185 Žižek, Parallax View, 126. 186 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5.

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it remains the very deuce to represent them.”187 Within Medley, rather than being subjected to inexorable progression towards a culminating event, the protagonist can still be presented in terms of “successive centres” evoked in a manner in which “the portions of the subject commanded by them as by happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material.”188 The ‘solid’ materiality associated with the representation of centres of consciousness renders the Medley mode of literary impressionism similar to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the attempt to “represent the object, to find it again behind the atmosphere,” with the overall effect of “solidity and material substance.”189 After all, the practices of interpretation in the compensatory heterotopia are centred around tangible things: bibelots, “architectural excrescence” (299), a “grave mechanical servant” (300), a “blur of tender shoots” (301) as well as ostensibly nonWestern, exoticised items, such as “carved cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols” (310), to name just a few of the assorted culture-bearing objects. These have to be made to induce “some exquisite impressions” (301) in spite of their haphazard accumulation and their origin in unequal relations of power. It is these impressions, and their attendant “recognition” (301) based on paradigmatic substitutability with what the protagonist “had been dreaming all his life” (301), that ensure ongoing hermeneutic engagement. That they simultaneously pose a ‘medley’, without any relationship of similarity readily apparent, ensures that the aspired-to objective correlative to the ‘wrought material’ remains a perpetual task rather than an accomplished cultural inventory. 3.1.2.3 Negotiating Culture and Anarchy Even when the protagonist is not afforded a topological and topographical place of culture in the manner of Medley, he is nonetheless shown to be capable of reconstructing a semantics of culture and anarchy. To this end, an internally focalised negotiation of an ethical dichotomy is presented as the last vestige of demarcation. After Hyacinth’s conversion to cultural refinement, the question whether he is to surrender to the “joy of revolt” or rather throw in his 187 Henry James. “Preface to ‘The Tragic Muse’.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. 79–97. 94. 188 Henry James. “Preface to ‘The Wings of the Dove’.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. 288–306. 296. 189 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Sense and Non-Sense. Ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. 12. This “return to the object” (12) contrasts with the alternative, non-material phenomenological mode of impressionism which “submerges the object and causes it to lose its proper weight” (12).

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lot with the groups displaying “care for perfect bindings or for the finest art of conversation” (478) is presented as a final iteration of the efforts at distinction. To uphold the difference of ‘revolt’ and ‘care’, Hyacinth places side by side “the two currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate, plebeian mother and that of his long-descended, super-civilised sire” (479). As long as the novel can provide such a description of a psychological disposition torn between two oppositional spheres, the protagonist is still shown to negotiate his position with some success. In this process, imaginatively upholding the difference between “two currents” is emphasised over and beyond any decision in favour of either one of these currents.190 With his “mixed, divided nature, his conflicting sympathies, his eternal habit of swinging from one view to another” (478), Hyacinth is enabled to regard his environment variably, through different media. He can, in other words, sustain the ‘illuminated ignorance’ analysed above, by means of which interpretation proceeds “in different moods, with different kinds of emotion” (478). These “mental debates” (478) of the “plebeian” and the “super-civilised” are metonymically associated with “oscillations” (478) between two conceptualisations of his parents’ faces. At first, we are confronted with a ubiquitous recurrence of his mother’s face: “but in whatever direction he turned in the effort to find it, he seemed to know that behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded face” (479). The mother’s appeal is, however, not enough. It has to be complemented by the attempt to “construct some conceivable and human countenance for his father – some expression of honour, of tenderness and recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation” (479). Hyacinth’s staging of a confrontation with a “face” and a “countenance” on both sides of the distinction reframes the question of his origins as an ethical confrontation rather than a matter of political justice in the vein of “his first impulses towards social criticism” (479). If there is justice in this confrontation with the parents’ faces, it is a matter of ‘doing justice’ (422) in the vein of Hyacinth’s appreciation of the Princess’ bibelots. In order to achieve this, the protagonist manufactures a situation that allows him to come to terms with incompatible claims:

190 Already before Hyacinth renegotiates the relationship between the aristocratic and the proletarian, the apparent dichotomy is called into question. Thus, the revolutionary ‘job’ ultimately assigned to Hyacinth hinges on the paternal, rather than the revolutionary maternal line, since Hyacinth’s appearance allows him to pass for an English aristocrat. The antagonism is already a matter of entanglement. Cf. Michal Peled Ginsburg. Economies of Change: Form and Transformations in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. 161.

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in whatever direction he turned in the effort to find it, he seemed to know that behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded face. The thought of his mother had filled him, originally, with the vague, clumsy fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but since the problem had become more complex by the fact that many things in the world as it was constituted grew intensely dear to him, he had tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human countenance for his father – some expression of honour, of tenderness and recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation. To desert one of these presences for the other – that idea had a kind of shame in it, as an act of treachery would have had (479)

Emmanuel Levinas uses the notion of the “face” to conceptualize “[t]he way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me.” This “mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image.”191 By internally reiterating his origins as competing demands, Hyacinth is oriented towards the “expression of honour” on the imagined face. This constellation resembles the manner in which, for Levinas, it is the expression of the demand of the Other which “overflows the plastic image it leaves me” and instigates what Totality and Infinity defines as ‘conversation’: “It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.”192 ‘Conversation’ marks the ethical point in Levinas’ system, at which the relation with the Other goes beyond the subject’s adequation, bringing “us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung and thus independent of my initiative and my power.”193 That Hyacinth derives ‘conversation’ of this kind from the demands of imagined faces shows that in this instance receptive openness towards the Other reaches its apex in the novel. In this case, alterity is extended to both claims confronting Hyacinth. To processually define his identity against these competing demands, he is shown to position “them side by side, looking at him with eyes infinitely sad but quite unashamed – eyes which seemed to tell him that they had been hideously unfortunate but had not been base” (480). This account is not only opposed to the gendered alterity put forward by the prison warden in the first chapter – for the jailer, Hyacinth’s mother is “at the very bottom” (57) – but also refutes the hopes of a secret, essential identity associated with his paternal lineage. The protagonist negotiates both competing demands (to a share in his mother ‘baseness’ or his father’s high-born status) simultaneously. That is, he makes the political personal, only to reconsider the personal in ethical terms which, in turn, can

191 Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. 50. 192 Levinas, Totality, 51. 193 Levinas, Totality. 51.

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implicitly be projected back upon the political distinction between his father’s aristocratic origin and his mother’s revolutionary lineage. When Hyacinth, thus, thinks of his father as a “nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness” (479), he is shown to complicate his earlier epiphany regarding the redemption of “the great palaces and properties” (396) by dint of their sheer aesthetic value. The spectrum of possible political positions regarding a cultural sphere predicated on “the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past” (396) is, thus, expanded significantly as the protagonist associates his father with a direct, ethical appeal placed in tension with the mother’s equally demanding ‘face’. His judgments run the gamut from “condonations, excuses for him” to “hot resentment against the man” (479). Vacillation between these perspectives enables a transition between poles of ethical judgment, rather than an achievement of a position which would invariably fix the protagonist’s verdict on his parents in moral, legal, or political binaries. By holding a decision between the faces in abeyance, they can one final time become subject to the perpetual process of interpretation already shown to govern theatrical mediation, popular culture and, not least, the recovery of aesthetic values at Medley. As a result of this oscillation between the competing demands of his parents, Hyacinth refuses integration into the anarchists’ immutable plot structure. His induction into the conspiracy is, after all, preceded by the avowal that he is “ready to do anything that will do any good; anything, anything – I don’t care a rap” (294). The anarchist oath implies an action in terms of a set of simple narrative templates. As a result, the offer to act in accordance with “anything” entails a reduction of possibilities: if interpretative activity – as inculcated by his parents’ faces – keeps at bay the encroaching indeterminacy of anarchism in the novel, the promise of “anything” spells out the end of this residual demarcation. In James’ poetological terms, the anarchists, contrary to the novelistic possibilities enabled by Hyacinth’s imaginative reconstruction of ethical demands, are figures of romance. Romance as the representation of “experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered” falters because “[t]he balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated.”194 This accords with the anarchist narrative, ‘disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered’ as it is by the subjection of the diegetic world to an unknown future event. Such turn from

194 Henry James. “Preface to ‘The American’.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. 20–39. 33.

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experience towards plot function (imposed on the protagonist within the storyworld) goes against the strategies of multiple mediation that have upheld ‘culture’ up to this point. Whereas the ethical demands of the faces are figured as an unsolvable dilemma, acting in accordance with the final anarchist orders threatens ‘unrelated’ narrative closure. Particularly, as Hyacinth is ordered to kill an unnamed aristocrat for the cause, this is a repetition of his mother’s original sin, enacted on a proxy of his aristocratic father. In other words, the event structure offered here would erase the culture-specific negotiation of a whole host of elements — from revolutionary and familial history to reordered space, remediated aesthetic objects and mass-media artefacts. In contrast to these multiple mediations, the act of killing would return Hyacinth to what Sedgwick calls “Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my father’s father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me, it will happen to my son, and it will happen to my son’s son.”195 The anarchist command, then, threatens to induce the iterable plot structure of romance, in its negative, Jamesian sense, and a stultifyingly redoubled family story in one fell swoop. This zero-degree of mediation196 incites an action based on a simple substitution (‘aristocrat’ for ‘institution’) but otherwise remains without clear origin or defined political goal. Concomitantly, the anarchists’ instructions – hidden in an envelope and never presented from Hyacinth’s point of view – furnish an answer to James’ rhetorical question from The Art of Fiction: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”197 If, that is, an incident is mere repetition, excluding any consideration of the vaunted “illustration of character,” such eventfulness emerges as a reduction of complexity and the end of ‘culture’ alike. As a result of such ‘incidence’ without ‘character’, any semantic redundancy – such as the proliferating demands of the parents’ faces – is effaced in favour of a thematically fitting reenactment of the past.198

195 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 147. 196 Cf. J. Hillis Miller. Zero Plus One. València: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans, 2003. In Miller’s Barthesian terms, the anarchist zero-degree can be read as a “a placeholder that has significance without itself meaning anything in particular.” It is “not the absence of signification, but a meta-term that gives the elements of the whole system differentiated meanings without itself having any particular signification.” (57). 197 Henry James. The Art of Fiction. Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1884. 69. 198 Rather than, as Žižek reads Casamassima, resulting from “the impossibility of choosing between the rights of the dispossessed and high culture,” the deadlock is the result of the impossibility of asserting a distinction between those two positions in the first place. Žižek, Parallax, 126.

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Such closure can only be avoided if a space of negotiable identity is upheld, even if that space is a tenuous, internal one. Indeed it is the “loathing of the idea of a repetition” (582) which, ultimately, keeps Hyacinth from committing his terrorist act. The irreducible ethical demand placed on him by the parents’ faces, as an alternative to undifferentiated identification with either his mother or his father, allows for a productively split Other that is “is in no way another myself, participating with me in a common existence.”199 In this way, as Levinas puts it, “[t]he other’s entire being is constituted by its exteriority, or rather its alterity.”200 The encounter with the reconstituted alterity of the parents refuses reduction to the terms of a singular, homogenous self. Recast as faces of a demand which can never be met, the familial alterity – in contrast to the anarchists putting Hyacinth to use – “does not appear ‘for’ the subject in the mode of a tool: the other, as unassimilable and unknowable, cannot be fully integrated into [. . .] worldly intentional projects.”201 The character’s interpretative engagement, thus, productively evades positioning himself in a lineage that would determine his actions, a strategy that hinges on maintaining the same ‘unassimilable status’ for his imagined interlocutors. The effect of this refusal of resolution is indicated as Hyacinth waits for his instructions from the anarchists. Divested of the vacillating interiority that marked his consideration of the parents, narrative perspective switches to largely external focalisation. From this uninvolved vantage point, Hyacinth is reduced to a mere shape: “Our hero stepped out of the shallow recess in which he had been flattening himself [. . .] in the dusky, empty, sordid street.” (554) Against this mono-perspectival ‘flattening’ registered by a disembodied gaze, it is the absence of an injunction to act that makes it possible to present a “view from somewhere,” and to negotiate incompatible ethical mandates from a determinate, embodied perspective.202 It is, thus, interiority itself (and a novelistic mode capable of representing its nonlinear development) that is elided by the anarchist plot. Upon being forced to act, in James’ terms introduced above, the ‘cable is cut’, relegating the protagonist to an ‘unrelated’ state. Bell rightly claims that “Hyacinth remains fixed in potentiality, and even dies rather than realize by action this or any of his conflicted possibilities.”203 In the context of

199 Emmanuel Levinas. “Time and the Other.” Time and the Other (and additional essays). Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duqesne UP, 1987. 39–90. 75. 200 Levinas, “Time,” 75–76. 201 Matthew Abbott. The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. 89. 202 Cf. Philip Weinstein. “The View from Somewhere.” Raritan 32 (2013). 85–101. 86. 203 Millicent Bell. Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. 183.

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the interlude of the parents’ faces it should be added, however, that this ‘potentiality’ is part and parcel with a practice of demarcation varied throughout the novel. By making the strategies of ‘illuminated ignorance’ a matter of ethics, Hyacinth is shown to fix the terms of potentiality himself, negotiating them in a dialectical fashion rather than acceding to any of the plot options offered to him. This establishment and negotiation of distinctions is accorded a spatial equivalent. Specifically, the maintenance of competing demands also forestalls a loss of urban demarcation. After all, a collapse of boundaries is imminent as “London had closed over him again” (480) and the urban space appears as an unbounded “monster” (480) exceeding his understanding: “[h]is horizon had been immensely widened, but it was filled, again, by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams and strange blurred reflections and emanations into a sky without stars” (480). As a response to this urban sprawl, the protagonist is shown to extend the dialectical self-positioning already accomplished regarding his parents, making it a part of his interpretation of space. In the manner of the insoluble ethical demands of the faces, he can oppose a negotiable urban model to the city as a limit of thought, to what Harman describes as “a single shapeless mass with no other role than to undercut human thought and action with its immeasurable depth.”204 To achieve this, “[h]e suspended, as it were, his small sensibility in the midst of it, and it quivered there with joy and hope and ambition, as well as with the effort of renunciation” (480). Neither does the subject here trace the ‘reflections and emanations’ to their source, i.e. “the life of man” of which they are deemed “the richest expression” (480), in order to recover a full understanding of the city; nor does he leave behind the enjoyment of these indexical signs in the direction of the non-semiotic “sky without stars” (480). Instead, bringing to bear the principles of culture upon his personal history, Hyacinth’s position is resolutely intermediate and, hence, allows for a suitably multistable identity. Instead of one hard-and-fast self, the narrative associates him with a series of self-positionings, refiguring London as a semantic space in the process. Consequently, ‘illuminated ignorance’ reappears as an internalised strategy which allows for productive, continued indeterminacy. For a brief moment of introspection, thus, being swept up in a single revolutionary teleology – the undifferentiated immersion in the “sun-touched crests of billows” (478) of anarchism – can be postponed. This forestalling of immersion in any one political project requires an uncertain relationship between two demarcated spaces (“he cursed and disowned

204 Harman, Bells and Whistles, 87. This is Harman’s summary of the withdrawal of presence in Heidegger’s tool-analysis.

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them alike,” “he arrived at conceptions which presented them side by side” 480) whose relationship to their respective classes, let alone their relevance for political action, is equally uncertain. The parents’ faces do not reinstate unambiguous subject positions. Instead, they require (1) interpretative activity and (2) continued obliquity which (3) obviates immediate action and, in this way, allows for an everrenewed negotiation of self-created distinctions. 3.1.2.4 Dissolution of the Anarchist Other So far, the analysis has concerned itself with concepts of the political Other set apart to grant a modicum of consistency to residual culture. However, the anarchist sphere is shown to resist heterostereotypical containment and increasingly impinges on the protagonist’s attempts to negotiate two opposed, binary positions of culture and anarchy. That is to say, while the imaginative ‘barricading’ of Paris or the construction of demarcations between Hyacinth’s parents allow for relational determinations of self and Other, the anarchists presented in Casamassima threaten to exceed differential signification altogether. While the protagonist is shown to set up interpretative challenges to perform cultural identity, the radical politics defined against such hermeneutic endeavours increasingly cannot be consigned to a disavowed outside. James’ representation of anarchists partakes in developing stereotypes of a movement that “emerged in the early 1880s as an integral part of the socialist revival,” though it preceeds the much-publicised wave of assassinations in the 1890s and the attendant popular association of anarchism and terror.205 Accordingly, the figures planning an upheaval of the status quo are rarely called ‘anarchists’ explicitly in The Princess Casamassima. As Lady Aurora puts it, radicals are assumed to concern themselves “with revolutions and changes and all that sort of thing” (140). It is Mr Vetch, a working-class arbiter of conservatism, who uses the term. From his vantage point, described as moderate English common sense, he asks Hyacinth whether “the great lady doesn’t lead you too far” (363). After all, he inquires, “[i] sn’t she an anarchist – a nihilist? Doesn’t she go in for a general rectification, as Eustace puts it?” (363). Vetch, then, participates in a common conflation of anarchism and nihilism, the latter term still connoted with the anti-tsarist revolutionary movements of the 1860s. Such indifferent use of extremist signifiers finds a long discursive afterlife in Britain, particularly with regard to purported radicals seeking asylum in Britain. In connection with the ‘general rectification’, the combined anarchist/nihilist label also prefigures contemporary debates on political violence. As in the Meunier case mentioned above, ‘general’ opposition to state power is seen to 205 Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion,” 487.

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disqualify the Princess’ activities from the realm of the ‘political’ altogether. In this de-politicisation performed by Vetch, both terms work in tandem: the charge of nihilism supplies fears of foreign radicalism, while anarchism provides associations of undirected, irrational resentment.206 In 1886 – despite a long-standing libertarian socialist tradition in Britain, which includes Godwin’s Political Justice as a seminal formulation of its tenets – ‘anarchist’ can still be presumed to carry Arnoldian overtones. Written on the occasion of the 1867 Reform Bill, the version of ‘anarchy’ promulgated in Culture and Anarchy serves as a variable signifier of disapprobation in order to motivate “‘culture’ as a counter to political innovations.”207 The extension of the term, to this end, can be as narrow as an expansion of the franchise. Conversely, however, and crucially for the novel’s political imaginary, anarchy (and its supporting conditions summarised as ‘anarchism’) can be expanded to the status of a far-ranging signifier of alterity: projected on a constitutive outside, it can be refigured as the bearer of a broad “suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness.”208 While culture, in this Arnoldian view, can still provide an ideology of values just out of reach, anarchism can be made to bear the brunt of a modern “school of suspicion” avant la lettre, which allows for the “decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.”209 As long as scepticism is consigned to its outside, culture can appear all the more unquestioned. Casamassima imputes such hermeneutics of suspicion to the Princess in the wake of her turn to anarchist activism: [t]he position made for her among these people, and what she had had to suffer from their family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might be remained vague to her listener), had evidently planted in her soul a lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and democratic and heretical à outrance – lead her to swear by Darwin and Spencer as well as by the revolutionary spirit. (251)

It is this conception of anarchism as dissolution of foundational truths – which, it bears stressing, is a distortion of anarchist thought and practice – that points toward the broad extension of the stereotype. Since The Princess Casamassima evaluates whether diverse projects of scepticism can be subsumed

206 For a detailed account of these terms in Britain, cf. Luke Kelly. British Humanitarian Activity in Russia, 1890–1923. Cham: Palgrave, 2018. 207 Grewal, Ideology of Culture, 46. 208 Paul Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1970. 34. 209 Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy, 33.

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under one rubric and subsequently disavowed, in what follows I use the term ‘anarchist’ for the democratic, revolutionary, socialist, conspiratorial, and anarchist radical signifier — the containment of which as a constitutive outside of culture emerges as the novel’s overriding concern.210 The cultural model of identity, after all, is not self-sustaining. It can only be upheld if it is defined against a space of alterity, in this case one associated with political radicalism. This disavowed alterity is linked to a revolutionary agenda (“changes and all that sort of thing” 140); the interpretative requirements of the cultural sphere, meanwhile, are to adhere to a hard-won version of what Kant calls a “way of presenting that is purposive on its own and that furthers, even though without a purpose, the culture of our mental powers to [facilitate] social communication.”211 Culture as an avowedly apolitical sphere of suspended interests is, thus, itself the result of a political demarcation tacitly depending on its obverse. In order to exert its ordering effects, it has to be set apart from an external sphere of political intent. “It is political struggle which gives rise to political order,”212 as Chantal Mouffe puts it, yet this order – as long as the demarcation of a heterotopia of culture persists – does not present itself as political. Culture emerges from a process of interpretation set apart from an anarchist Other who constitutively exceeds these hermeneutic strategies. Disinterested culture is, thus, the result of a residual gesture of projecting the political itself on a constitutive, radical outside. This drawing of a difference between cultural system and anarchic environment takes place two times: as the distinction produced by the system and as the distinction observed within the system.213 Hence, it is on the basis of a selfreferential observation of his relationship with the Princess – noting “that their acquaintance would be a solid friendship or it would be nothing at all” (326) and resolving to “never again entertain such trumpery idea as that she might be an agent on the wrong side” (327) – that the protagonist is able to distinguish culture and anarchy. Without this “systems-internal distinction” between self-reference

210 Cf. Paul McLaughlin. Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 1. Since anarchism is treated as alterity, the novel disregards serious consideration of “its questioning of the claims made for such normative power” (1) and its challenge to those ‘authoritative’ powers that cannot justify their claims and which are therefore deemed “illegitimate or without moral foundation” (1). Instead, the focus is on the use of an anarchist stereotype for the bolstering of a residual sense of norms. 211 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. 173. 212 Chantal Mouffe. “Schmitt’s Challenge.” Introduction. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. Ed. Chantal Mouffe. London and New York: Verso, 1999. 9. 213 Cf. Niklas Luhmann. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Franfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 45.

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and external reference, “the terms ‘self’ and ‘other’ would lose their meaning.”214 To supplement his self-referential positioning, the protagonist, then, has to evoke a countervailing image of what lies beyond the boundaries of this residual cultural sphere. To achieve this, the radical Other whom Hyacinth describes in a lengthy monologue fulfils one central function: the anarchist sphere is to be imagined as a deep-structural totality which itself does not allow for any further demarcations. It is more strange than I can say. Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there is an immense underworld, peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it is organised is what astonished me; I knew that, or thought I knew it, in a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it all, society lives! People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and suspect nothing and think of nothing; [. . .] All that is one-half of it; the other half is that everything is doomed! In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It is a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery is complete, there will be a great rehearsal. That rehearsal is what they want me for. The invisible, impalpable wires are everywhere, passing through everything, attaching themselves to objects in which one would never think of looking for them. What could be more strange and incredible, for instance, than that they should exist just here? (330)

In this panoramic extension of the radical sphere, its scope is beyond individual pathology or class interest. Rather, anarchy is already immanent in the social and only one performative act away from eliding its status as a hidden ‘underground’. In this imagined revelation, the manifest life of those who “know nothing and suspect nothing” and the latent “revolutionary passion and devotion” are about to collapse into one. Or rather: they are shown to always have been indistinguishable in the first place. After all, the “rehearsal” (330) is not the emergence of an entirely new order, but brings forth the latent potential incarnated “just here,” in the already-manifest everyday. Kent Puckett answers his own exasperated questions about this passage – “[w]hat is he talking about? What exactly has he seen in this one, brief encounter with Hoffendahl?” – with the conclusion that it is to demonstrate a “maddening vagueness.”215 There is, however, a method to the vagueness: it marks the point at which the techniques of processual identity that have been shown to make up the realm of culture break down. No amount of mediation – of the type enabling the theatre, the Parisian barricades, or Medley itself – can account for the machinic totality sketched by Hyacinth’s epiphany. After all, in the

214 Niklas Luhmann. “Modernity in Contemporary Society.” Observations on Modernity. Trans William Whobrey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 10. 215 Kent Puckett. Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 143.

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case of the barricades or the shop window, it is the establishment of a boundary and the increase of distance that makes possible the notion of an absent standard of value towards which interpretations can gesture. Though culture requires “vagueness,” it is a bounded vagueness that prompts an interpretative engagement. By contrast, the anarchist sphere, as it emerges in Hyacinth’s monologue, dispenses with such bounds; or, to stay with the terminology established above, it resists the form of culture established by a two-sided distinction. As the revolution elides differences between undergund and surface, it hovers between a machine, an aesthetic endeavour and a communicative network of “invisible, impalpable wires.” Both sides of the distinction between society and its hidden deep structure are subjected to a loss of distinctive properties. Initially, the topological difference of ‘high’ (“on top of it all, society lives”) and ‘low’ (“an immense underworld”) appears to be one between the variety of the former and the mechanical regularity of the latter. In this initial distinction, the multiplicity of social pursuits only expressible by an expandable enumeration of examples – “People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance” – appears to be distinguishable from the certainty of “machinery.” However, the signified of this ‘revolutionary machine’ is distributed across “objects in which one would never think of looking for them.” These objects, in turn, ostensibly, belong to the unorganised, enumerated surface sphere that has just before been evoked as variegated social fancies about to be replaced. Thus, in the course of this description, the revolutionary machine increasingly assumes characteristics of the very “surface” it opposes: it becomes similar to life “on the lid.” After all, the machine “lives and works” just as the people above, characterised as they are by their unthinking efforts to “make money and make love.” As the machine gains vital characteristics, the erstwhile surface signifiers can, ultimately, only be brought together on the basis that “everything is doomed” by the underlying machinery. The revolution binds “everything” on the surface, extending its vital mechanism to (and indeed becoming coextensive with) the very society it is designed to replace. Hyacinth’s reverie, thus, enacts a reciprocal exchange of characteristics: the revolutionary machine takes over the characteristics of surface life while the “[p]eople” are organised machinically. The fact that “[i]t is more strange than I can say” (330) – the reference of the “it” already uncertain – as well as “strange and incredible” (330) makes it increasingly difficult to set apart revolution and society, let alone chart a course for revolutionary teleology. A narrative event structure is irrecoverable under the conditions of a transfer of traits from the surface to the machine and vice versa. As a result, the status of the revolution becomes radically indeterminate. Since the anarchist revolution is both the order of surface phenomena and an alternative organisation which both underlies and

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reproduces the very social structure it is on the cusp of transforming, the border separating these semantic spaces is eroded. This elision of distinction leads to a version of anarchism that threatens undifferentiated violence by an equally undifferentiated set of actors against an undifferentiated social sphere. It is this anarchist outside narrated from within the place of cultural identity that has to be disavowed if cultural differentiations are to appear as redemptive alternatives. What is projected outwards emerges as a “confluence of aesthetic and political change”216 that enables a social surface structure and a revolutionary machine to exchange characteristics until they can stand in for each other — the tertium comparationis dwindling to zero as their initial difference is subsumed under the boundless aesthetic-revolutionary project. Hyacinth’s vision of the anarchist ‘machine’ is contrasted with the description of the anarchist conspirators that follows it. In a deflationary ‘reality effect’,217 what he recalls are “two chairs in the dirty little room” and a “queer old battered, hair-covered trunk” (331). The focus on assorted objects hardly evokes the “sublimity” (331) asserted for the revolutionary underworld. While the residual demarcation of culture enables the interpretation of objects as placeholders for an imagined scale of value, the anarchist space uncouples material things from further hermeneutic efforts: the “dirty little room” (331) and the impression of an “immense underworld” (330) are juxtaposed in a disjointed montage, in which the fact that the “reality was a revelation” (330) offers several plausible referents. To wit: this could refer to a “reality” underlying the phenomenal appearance of the room, the “reality” expressed by the room, a reality inferred from the room or a reality suggested to an impressionable young worker by unreliable homodiegetic, anarchist narrators. As a result of this uncertainty, the conspiratorial realm takes on the incompatible traits associated with anarchism in the late 19th century political imaginary. It is attached to individual, disconnected objects as well as grand conspiracies. At the same time, anarchism

216 Russell A. Berman. Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1989. 105. Berman shows that this confluence is a key distinction whenever a category of the modern is defined against a “nonmodern foil” (ibid.). The nonmodern Others against which modernism defines itself include developmental teleology, identity construction, and an “aesthetics of fictionality” ensuring a separation from “life-practical concerns” (ibid.). In this generic distinction, Berman, thus, includes central elements of the cultural sphere to be shored up in Casamassima. However, it nonetheless makes the “foil” its central focus. Conversely, James’ early modernism is an aspiring anti-modernism in need of an arbiter upon which the capacity for a loss of distinction can be projected. 217 Cf. Roland Barthes. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989. 141–148.

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emerges as both an individual pathology and a process supervised by a mastermind. As Cole puts it, “the anarchist was understood to be so embroiled in layers of secrecy, and in organizations beneath organizations, as to have virtually no reality.”218 In Casamassima, these nested inconsistencies become the defining feature of radicalism: in what will become the template for anarchism-centric conspiracy theory, this uncertainty of reference is not, as in the presentation of ‘culture’, accompanied by multiple mediation and interpretation. Instead, anarchist ambiguity prompts direct and unmediated determinations of what is to be said and done: “There was no sublimity about it – I simply couldn’t help myself.” (331) The heterostereotype of anarchism is, hence, characterised by a realm of absolute determination which is predicated on signs lacking an overarching ‘sublime’ meaning. The absent “sublimity” (331), in turn, is imputed to “a wonderful, immeasurable” (331) conspiratorial authority, the ontological status of which cannot be ascertained. Hyacinth’s final question in the revolutionary vision – “[w]hat could be more strange and incredible, for instance, than that they should exist just here?” – completes the indeterminate anarchist vignette. Firstly, the line appears as a simple rhetorical question. Understood in this way, it unites surface and deep structure in one statement, implying that, “strange and incredible” as it may seem, “here” is the place where both sides of a suddenly bifurcated reality unite. On this reading, “one half” is aboveground, the other half below, with the underground furnishing the secret signified of the surface “antics” — and the question itself, consonant with this harmonious conclusion, functioning as an example of “powerful and consecrated images of the continuity from part to whole that makes synecdoche into the most seductive of metaphors.”219 The convergence promised by the question is, however, disrupted if taken literally. That is, Hyacinth can also be understood to ask what could be more ‘incredible’ – unbelievable for him, that is – than a conspiracy emanating from the non-place of anarchism. Having been apprised of Hyacinth’s credulity, the question may prompt the reader to harbour more fundamental doubts. What is more strange and incredible than “invisible, impalpable wires” holding together an atomised society in an invisible network? Only the alternative premise that there is no such organisation in the first place. Approached from this angle, nothing can be more ‘incredible’, since the story is, quite simply, not credible, leaving the reader, like the Princess, appropriately incredulous. Understood literally, thus, the question rephrases rather

218 Cole, Violet Hour, 94. 219 De Man, Allegories, 11.

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than answering the Princess’ query: “Then it is real, it is solid?” (330). Following Paul de Man, the two readings of Hyacinth’s concluding question – (1) nothing could be more incredible or (2) anything else would be more credible than the tall tale of anarchist ‘machinery’ – “have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it.”220 In this constellation, the “perfectly clear syntactical paradigm (the question) engenders a sentence that has at least two meanings, of which the one asserts and the other denies its own illocutionary mode.”221 Hyacinth’s selfdefeating question, then, emerges as a correlative to ‘anarchism’ as an undecidable sign unamenable to individual hermeneutic endeavours. The radical sphere appears as a representational impasse eliciting redoubled speech, in which the literal meaning denies the plenitude of an ‘incredible’ anarchist presence simultaneously affirmed by its rhetorical meaning. This vacillation aligns the anarchist sphere, as recounted by Hyacinth, with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘potentiality’. Proceeding from Aristotle’s account of the relationship between potentiality and actuality, Agamben’s model gives the former its due.222 Rather than preceding actuality and disappearing the moment it is actualised, “potentiality maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension.”223 Thus, if any one individual has the potential to do something – build houses, play an instrument, write a poem – this potential is not dissolved once it manifests itself in concrete activity, nor is its uninterrupted exercise necessary to conclude that they have the capacity, skill, or aptitude for building or playing. Accordingly, potential is defined by not being expended in actuality. Applied to social questions, this concept refutes the privileged status of actuality in approaches that judge a legal, economic, or political framework primarily according to the type and range of actions it enables.

220 De Man. Allegories, 12. 221 De Man. Allegories, 12. 222 Agamben’s argument refers specifically to the second of two types of potential distinguished by Aristotle: the first is generic potentiality, exemplified by the statement that “a child has the potential to know”; more relevant to sustained potential is the “potentiality that belongs to someone who, for example, has knowledge or an ability.” It is this second sense of an existing potentiality that forms the basis of Agamben’s reconceptualisation of potential not supplanted by a passing-over into actuality. This interpretation begins with the simple observation that the “having” of a potential can only be attributed to whoever “can also not bring his knowledge into actuality (mē energein) by not making a work, for example.” Giorgio Agamben. “On Potentiality.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford. Stanford UP, 1999. 177–184. 179. 223 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 44.

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By contrast, the actuality-based approaches that Agamben opposes maintain that “[i]f one in fact cannot actualize one’s potentiality, then the very notion of potentiality stops making sense.”224 In such an account, potential is erased by what is done on its basis. In Casamassima, such a preference for concrete acts over underlying potential would at least provide criteria for an assessment of the anarchist sphere and its suggested politics. Radical politics could be measured according to the range of possible actions they open up. Following Amartya Sen’s capability approach, for instance, the effects of anarchy would be judged “by a person’s capability to do things he or she has reason to value,” i.e. a “freedom that a person actually has to do this or that.”225 Following a capability-based model of this type – in which potentiality is subsumed under a particular instance of action – we could ask which events the ‘incredible’ potential of the underground can precipitate in this particular diegesis. However, Hyacinth’s revolutionary vision and his paradoxical question have already indicated that James’ version of anarchism cannot be judged by the changes of state it occasions. Indeed, radicalism in Casamassima is a marker of potential. To reverse Sen’s dictum, the narrative concerns itself with what, precisely, it allows the protagonist not to do. Agamben, likewise, contends that an account based on actuality loses sight of any potentiality that does not disappear in practice. To avoid a 1:1 conversion of the potential into the actual, his writings return to the concept of irreducible potentiality. This focus on the unsaid and undone reverses the trajectory from potentiality to actuality, stressing instead the irresolvable interconnection of potentiality and impotentiality (impotenza): in its original structure, dynamis, potentiality, maintains itself in relation to its own privation, its own stēresis, its own non-Being. This relation constitutes the essence of potentiality. To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity.

224 Rasmus Ugilt. Giorgio Agamben: Political Philosophy. Prenrith, CA: HEB, 2014. 55. As Ugilt points out, this line of placing actualisation above potential has been elaborated by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen and the focus on capabilities. As Nussbaum summarises this approach, it replaces question of satisfaction or resources with primary consideration of what a person is ‘able to do and to be’: “Taking a stand for political purposes on a working list of functions that would appear to be of central importance in human life, we ask: Is the person capable of this, or not? We ask not only about the person’s satisfaction with what she does, but about what she does, and what she is in a position to do (what her opportunities and liberties are).” Martha C. Nussbaum. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 71. 225 Amartya Sen. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2009. 231.

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Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential.226

What is crucial about potentiality is not its conversion into actuality – and subsequent annulment – but its preservation in any act. Potentiality, rather than passing over into actuality, abides. Any actuality, from this perspective, can be understood as potentiality that suspends itself, yet remains operative in this state of ‘impotentiality’. By suspending its potential not to be, potentiality passes over into actuality — but, in Agamben’s characteristically paradoxical formulation, the part of the equation that has been set aside still maintains a relation to what is perceived as the actual.227 Potential is thus carried over into any specific action and undercuts the will to order associated with extant codes and ordering systems. The challenge lies in neither affirming nor rejecting the categories on offer, and rejecting any “principle that makes it possible to order the undifferentiated chaos of potentiality.”228 The anarchist sphere as described by Hyacinth avoids order in just this way, precluding any determination of its adherents in terms of “what you want to do or must do.”229 After all, any retrospective description of the anarchist epiphany evades specification of the way in which the potential “immeasurable trap” (330) might be brought into the actuality of a “rehearsal” (330). By promising and suspending the possibility of an event, then, anarchism is presented as permanent potentiality. As a revolutionary potential, the anarchist sphere is unamenable to attempts (particularly by the Princess) to take “things for granted” (307). These, after all, involve practices of “ignoring difficulties, of assuming that her preferences might be translated into fact” (307). Thus, the Princess’ attempt to convert anarchism into ‘fact’ is shown to “avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity.”230 Contrary to such revolutionary facticity, the mutually exclusive readings shown for Hyacinth’s question (“[w]hat could be more strange and incredible, for instance, than that they should exist just here?”) introduce the indefinite extension of a potentiality never actualised. Framed by this question, the “dirty litte room” (331) and its group of questionable revolutionary figures remain associated with permanently deferred revolutionary possibilities. For this narrated version of anarchism, “it is necessary that potentiality be able not 226 Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 182. 227 “What is potential can pass into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be (its adynamia).”Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46. 228 Giorgio Agamben. “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford. Stanford UP, 1999. 243–271. 254. 229 Agamben, “Bartleby,” 254. 230 Agamben, “Bartleby,” 254.

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to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be).”231 Thus, in the reconstruction of the underworld epiphany, the recounted anarchist sphere is predicated on the sustained impossibility of turning its ‘incredible’ latency into an actual, manifest revolution. An eventful change – actuality – is consigned to the past, to the traces of revolutionary history and the Commune (cf. 3.1.2.1). From this angle of unactualised potentiality, Hyacinth’s description is a fitting encapsulation of a mode of power that refuses disclosure, but subsists in wires that are “everywhere” (330) — and nowhere, in the literal reading of the question shown above. If everything is a revolutionary sign, nothing is, or rather, with Agamben, anything is (potentially) revolutionary. In response to Hyacinth’s description of the revolutionary sphere, the Princess is shown to emphasise its indeterminate state: and it occurred to her presently to suggest to him that perhaps Hoffendahl would never give him any sign at all, and he would wait all the while, sur les dents, in a false suspense. He admitted that this would be a sell, but declared that either way he would be sold, though differently; and that at any rate he would have conformed to the great religious rule – to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last. (335)

In this account, the anarchist sphere is suspended in anticipation of an undefined potential event. Hoffendahl’s conspiracy refuses conversion into actuality as much as a defined set of propositions. In the process, the expectation that Hyacinth will receive orders to perform some manner of ‘direct action’ is particularly important. The task that might never come (but could, potentially, be issued at any time) becomes the determining element of the protagonist’s identity. It is, conversely, in its indeterminate state that the potential sign becomes all the more coercive. As Agamben puts it: “something is divided, excluded, and pushed to the bottom, and precisely through this exclusion, it is included as archè and foundation.”232 Likewise, it is on the basis of being ‘sold’ access to a potential anarchist sphere that the protagonist is, as per the above quote, “sold, though differently.” Such inclusion of the excluded also holds for the sort of story Hyacinth’s intradiegetic narrative has turned out to be: his one-woman-audience criticises its “false suspense.” With this evaluation, she avails herself of a category taken up in the preface to The Princess Casamassima. There, Henry James’ authorial persona quotes the ‘common reader’ as a devil’s advocate, who objects that characters with too much reflexive capacity detract from a suspenseful plotline: “‘Give

231 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 45. 232 Giorgio Agamben. The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV, 2. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2016. 264.

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us in the persons represented, the subjects of the bewilderment (that bewilderment without which there would be no question of an issue or of the fact of suspense, prime implications in any story) as much experience as possible, but keep down the terms of that experience, because we only understand the very simplest.’”233 After some deliberation, James rejects this scheme outright. To such reduction of complexity, the preface opposes the necessity of the painterly; the ‘affair of the painter’, contrary to the proclivities of the suspense-bound – and, implicitly, plot-driven – narrative “is not the immediate, it is the reflected field of life, the realm not of application but of appreciation.”234 The Princess’ question emphasises the ‘fact of suspense’, privileging the question of the reality of the anarchist conspiracy over Hyacinth’s subjective account — the ‘terms of his experience’. In James’ categories, anarchy is the plot-bound ‘realm of application’ which, while evoking suspense in the Princess’ case, diminishes Hyacinth’s ‘reflexive capacity’. Suspense, thus, connects anarchism to a flawed readership (or, in this case, listenership). Carrying with it the expectation of immediate ‘application’, it links the political project of James’ literary anarchism to the writerly project of an ‘unreflected’ plot. The political crisis to be warded off at Medley is thus, at the same time, a crisis of narration, in which the very possibility of a subjective reflector figure235 is imperilled. Although the destabilising potentiality of anarchism is prefigured in Hyacinth’s intradiegetic vignette, the Princess’ countryhouse (where he recounts his experience) does allow for a final reprise. Against the borderlessness of radical potentiality, Medley offers residual demarcation. To barely forestall the dissolution of anarchist alterity, what is required, once more, is a wholesale projection of the threatening anarchist potential onto a constitutive outside set apart from such cultural places. This is, finally, also a contrast of media: against demarcation by dint of visual culture, anarchy is presented as an auditory phenomenon, culminating in an orchestral imagery of revolt. Regarding culture, meanwhile, portrait painting provides the metaphor for the process by which Hyacinth establishes mediated distance in order to embark on interpretation. This was especially the case when his senses oscillated back from the objects that sprung up by the way, every one of which was a rich image of something he had longed for, to the most beautiful woman in England, who sat there, close to him, as completely for his benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to make her portrait. (316)

233 Henry James. “Preface to ‘The Princess Casamassima’.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. 59–78. 64. 234 Henry James, “Preface to ‘The Princess Casamassima’,” 65. 235 Herman, Basic Elements, 58.

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In keeping with the processual definition of cultural identity, neither is its consistency an essential given, nor less can an inventory of aesthetic signs be taken for granted. Despite the ultimate ‘benefit’ redounding to the protagonist, portraiture is described as a multiple mediation of phenomena which are already presented as a “rich image of something” from the outset — they are always already coded. Such images are, in turn, imagined in terms of a potential painting of their subject, the Princess, rather than apprehended directly. These multiple mediations stand in stark contrast to the totality of the anarchist “great symphonic revolt” (334). According to this orchestral image, Hyacinth, once he will “feel himself touched by the little finger of the composer, would become audible (with a small, sharp crack) for a second” (334). The auditory revolution contracts composer, piece, instrument and musician into a single image. It renders Hyacinth an ephemeral tone rather than allocating any hermeneutic agency to him in the manner of a “painter engaged to make her portrait.” The distinction of media is placed in stark relief by the difference between feeling himself “touched by the little finger” (334) of the anarchist orchestrator and being “touched” (337) by the Princess’ exclamation. Whereas the “crack” in the symphonic revolt expends the protagonist in one fell metonymical swoop, recounted in the residual sphere of cultural identity, it enables an explicit instance of self-reflection. That is, the Princess’ words succeed in “giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy and putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait” (337). This multistable picture can, in turn, be subjected to further interpretation without prescribing a fixed identity once and for all. Whilst the audible note, then, involves him once, the image allows Hyacinth to multiply his identity — he appears as subject, originator, and interpreter at one and the same time. Identity can only be assured in the heterotopic space of culture as long as it is set against an alterity which, for its part, renders impossible the very act of drawing distinctions.236 Only by means of this indistinct anarchist Other can the narrative display a compensatory project of value. In the terms of The Princess Casamassima,

236 What is consigned to alterity is a type of power in which potentiality and actuality cannot be told apart: whether the image of the machine describes a growing revolutionary potential or a preordained revolutionary teleology cannot be discerned. For Agamben, this refusal of disclosure and its status of permanent potentiality is a characteristic of the operation of sovereign power: “potentiality, suspends itself, maintaining itself in a relation of ban (or abandonment) with itself in order to realize itself as absolute actuality (which thus presupposes nothing other than its own potentiality). At the limit, pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable.”Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47.

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the dissolution of order is projected in bulk onto the floating signifier of anarchism.237 This creation of political alterity, in turn, leaves cultural interiority free to be recast as a residual place of individual hermeneutic endeavours. This distinction is, however, only ever temporary. In the following, the analysis will turn to the representation of anarchism once its potential revolutionary status – combined with its indefinitely suspended actualisation – cannot be contained to a political outside. As soon as the already limited and subjective boundaries of ‘culture’ are suspended, the result is presented as an anarchic sphere in which the differential definition of self and Other can no longer proceed.

3.2 “No smashing, no smashing” – The Anarchist State of Exception In Ulysses, Order and Myth, T.S. Eliot lauds the mythic structure of contemporary literature in the following terms: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.238

The organising distinction in this passage resembles the one negotiated in Casamassima: “shape and significance” (as associated with Jamesian culture) is differentiated from “futility and anarchy.” In James’ novel, however, the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” is not accompanied by a concomitantly panoramic authorial vision organising it for the protagonist. Neither the narrator nor an authoritative figure within the novel is prepared to impose the “shape and significance” which are presumed to be lacking. For all the efforts to identify a figure who can impose a distinction, reify it materially, and associate it with topological validity of inside and outside, the protagonist is relegated to his own demarcation of “shape,” on the one hand, and “anarchy” on the other. If it does not allow him to establish a “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” in the sense of a stable, recoverable, ‘mythical’ deep-structure, this differentiation does

237 Cf. Ernesto Laclau. On Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso, 2005. 238 T. S. Eliot. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 175–178. 175.

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grant him a lingering sphere of individual interpretation and conspicuously mediated aesthetic experience. For James, the project of salvaging, in Eliot’s terms, “a shape and a significance” from “anarchy” is not afforded any stability: it has to be embarked upon over and over again. When this distinction collapses, the result is presented as the instantiation of a new mode of power — one which no longer functions by means of demarcation at all. Once anarchy can no longer be imagined as an outside, previously disavowed characteristics proliferate. The ensuing anarchy out of bounds no longer allows for the stabilisation of a sphere of individual value and cultural identity. This second political model of Casamassima is, hence, presented as the loss of an organising central distinction. As anarchy can no longer be observed as “inscription of externality”239 from within a place of culture, the consequence is not presented as an occasion for self-fashioning finally unencumbered by the necessity of drawing a distinction. Instead, once the demarcation of identity and alterity collapses, the protagonists are subjected to a calculation of their worth, a utilitarian measure detached from any recognisable authority. The resulting exertion of power hinges on the collapse of any imagined border between both tendencies of modernity identified by Timothy Clark: “its brokenness and arbitrariness, and the accompanying effort at completeness of knowledge.”240 As the anarchist ‘machinery’ fails to be relegated to an outside, the result is presented as a mode of determination and rule in its own right. Once self and Other can no longer be differentiated, protagonists are relegated to an in-between state, which, precisely because it precludes political antagonism, determines them entirely. The ‘brokenness and arbitrariness’ (or with Eliot: ‘futility and anarchy’) that confronts them precludes hermeneutic efforts. This simultaneity of uncertainty and determination will, in Agamben’s terms, be described as a state of exception. In Casamassima, it is anarchism unencumbered by the protagonist’s boundary work that establishes the decisive fact [. . .] that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.241

239 Andrew Benjamin. Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility. New York: SUNY Press, 2015. 70. 240 Timothy J. Clark. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 6. 241 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9.

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The novel presents the “indistinction” that characterises the state of exception as a failure of containment. Specifically, the construction of a residual sense of identity is stripped away by anarchists who cannot be consigned to a disavowed, anarchist outside, nor conceived in antagonistic terms whatsoever. The coincidence of bare life and the “political realm,” then, is figured as the impossibility of projecting “irreducible indistinction” onto a disavowed radical sphere. In presenting anarchism out of bounds, Casamassima retrospectively suggests an absent cause for the material inequality previously noted by its protagonist. Rather than engaging with constitutive features of capitalist modernity, the novel allows for a gesture towards a “sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate”242 as the reason for cultural demarcation coming undone. Thus, the unconstrained, anarchist mode of power is evoked whenever the narrative veers too close to an articulation of the causes for a “huge tragic city, where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty night.”243 As soon as anarchists precipitate a coercive state of exception, the “unmeasured misery”244 of the urban poor is no longer ascribed to structural exploitation or a coercive state. Consequently, as literary fabrications, these figures of malign radicalism come with an extensive ideological function. After all, instead of reasons internal to vaunted civilisation, “pain” is supplemented by the “power” and “hate” of an unaccountable anarchist sphere, which resists representation yet can be held accountable for the status quo. Held accountable by the reader, that is: for the characters, the loss of cultural bounds impedes the very possibility of understanding and communicating the ‘anarchist’ modes of power that suborn them.

3.2.1 Anarchist Slumming The collapse of political distinctions is prefigured by the Princess’ political activism. Her attempts to immerse herself in the radical sphere elide the characteristics which Hyacinth attributes to her ‘for his benefit’. The more ‘radical’ her professed beliefs, the more does she evade any attempts to cast her in the role of a representative of culture. While the novel motivates this process with the gendered exploitation to which she has been subjected, it also casts suspicion on the attempt to supplant mediation and representation with a more genuine self. 242 Henry James. “Preface to the New York Edition of 1909.” The Princes Casamassima. Ed. Derek Brewer. London: Penguin, 1987. 33–48. 47. 243 James, “Preface to the NY edition,” 8. 244 James, “Preface to the NY edition,” 8.

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The Princess’ activism is designed to achieve just that: her anarchist selffashioning is presented as an attempt to garner an identity tied to an authentic reality of radicalism. This search is complemented by the metaphor of ‘going far’. The more variegated her experiences among (1) the people as initial metonyms of reality as well as (2) political radicals (with Hoffendahl as the ultimate absent guarantor of anarchist certainty), the further has she ‘gone’ in her radical trajectory. This version of political radicalism, thus, performs a reversal of Hyacinth’s attempts to retroactively posit an ineffable, radical ‘machine’ against cultural cohesion. While culture, in Hyacinth’s model of demarcation, remains conspicuously mediated, the Princess’ advance towards a revolutionary reality attempts to do away with mediation, obviating the distancing strategies displayed by the protagonist’s ‘illuminated ignorance’. Her attempt to attain an anarchist identity, however, reaches an impasse: by replacing her cultural pursuits with a re-imagined radical identity, the Princess is shown to contribute to a sphere of indeterminacy in which culture and anarchy can no longer be told apart. The loss of a differentiation between both spheres is co-produced by her radical self-discovery. As a result, the attempt to achieve an authentic, revolutionary position of social critique incurs extensive narrative sanction. The Princess’ mode of anarchist slumming not only prefigures “the ‘radical chic’ of the 1890’s, appealing for its attacks on the philistine bourgeoisie, the state, and modernity,”245 as Marks puts it. It also calls into question the intermittent illusions of a shared, cultural sphere set apart from the unconstrained functioning of the anarchist machine. Her project of radical self-creation begins with a reversal. Instead of anarchists furnishing images of decline and fragmentation, in her estimation it is the privileged who exhibit “the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecility of the people who, all over Europe, had the upper hand” (259). Against this devalued ruling class, her model associates anarchism with access to unmediated reality, and with the possibility of transcending class boundaries in favour of solidarity based on shared suffering: She had been humiliated, outraged, tortured; she considered that she too was one of the numerous class who could be put on a tolerable footing only by revolution. At any rate, she had some self-respect left, and there was still more that she wanted to recover; the only way to arrive at that was to throw herself into some effort which would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles and efforts of others. (250)

This characterisation of her radical turn functions as a reversal of the manner in which, according to Robert Pippin’s reading, a Jamesian plot addresses its moral theme and avoids moral scepticism. The desire for an “‘aware’ or properly ‘felt’ 245 Steven Gary Marks. How Russia Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003, 45.

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life” usually runs up against an “indisputably real limitation on such an exploration, something like the claims of others to be and to be treated as free, equally dependent end-setting, end-seeking subjects.”246 At the very moment at which the Princess presents her revolutionary endeavour, she is shown to cancel any such ‘limitation’ associated with other end-seeking subjects: the “comprehension of the troubles and efforts of others” (250) is preceded by a staunch identification of those troubles with her own. Specifically, she turns her class-specific dissatisfaction with a “milieu” (250) into the condition for transcending her privileged sphere and thereby creating a class-independent political identity. By invoking a shared suffering across social strata, the Princess has already achieved rhetorically what she claims to seek. That is, she can assume to have comprehended the strugges of others by eliding any difference between her situation and theirs. This position is implicitly aligned with the claims of Madame Grandoni, the Princess’ impoverished aristocratic companion who abandons her in the course of the revolutionary experiments. Advising Hyacinth to leave the Princess and abandon any attempt to “throw bombs into innocent crowds” (243), the “old woman” (242) cries: “I like people to bear their troubles as one has done one’s self” (243). This admonition to acquiesce to one’s position not only elides any material differences but also misrepresents Hyacinth. Whereas he experiences his escape from the city as a chance for an individual reconstruction of culture, the aristocrat assumes that he is about to succumb to an ill-defined stereotype of anarchist dynamite terror. In this way, she places Hyacinth in the very sphere which, in attributing cultural value to Medley, he is shown to project to the outside and to reconstitute as alterity. Both the Princess and her companion, thus, equate the personal with the political, with their individual circumstances mapped onto society. While for the aged aristocrat, fidelity to class interests and a credo of personal renunciation preclude the necessity of any fundamental political change, the Princess can equate any (however temporary) shift of her personal circumstances with an associated alteration of the situation of the people. While the novel provides ample support for her own suppression under patriarchal rule, it casts doubt on her assumption that class differences can be bypassed in favour of shared experiences. Indeed, it is her hypothesis of transferrable suffering that the narrative traces to the Princess’ ultimate loss of political agency. The Princess’ – Christina Light’s – version of radicalism proceeds on the basis of the claim that she is and is not of the populace. She presents herself as a better example of democratic demands than the protagonist could ever hope

246 Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life, 29.

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to be: “lest you should, in spite of your theoretic democracy, be shocked at some of the applications that I, who cherish the creed, am capable of making of it, let me assure you without delay that in that case we shouldn’t get on together at all” (248). At the same time, her class superposition allows her to judge whether a representative of the people is authentic – “more natural, more complete, more naïf” (249) – and to excoriate Hyacinth for failing to “come in the clothes you wear at your work” (249). These strategies are not simply dismissed. After all, the Princess’ mode of activism does allow for a complex re-definition of her position, enabling her to pass “precipitately from one point to another” (249). To this end, her self-fashioning involves three interlocking practices. Firstly, her “self-respect” (250) and, secondly, the milieu of “resentment and contempt” (251) are united in her person and whichever space she decides to inhabit. This conjoined semantics, thirdly, enables her to dispense with class distinctions and the people, access to whom is enabled by her ‘contempt’ for her origin — which, in turn, is supposed to lead back to her “self-respect.” As a result of these interlocking strategies, The Princess is shown to temporarily fashion a variegated political persona. She made strange acquaintances, under Hyacinth’s conduct; she listened to extraordinary stories, and formed theories about them, and about the persons who narrated them to her, which were often still more extraordinary. She took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex, attempted to establish social relations with them, and was the cause of infinite agitation to the gentleman who lived near her in the Crescent, who was always smoking at the window, and who reminded Hyacinth of Mr Micawber. (477)

Contrary to Hyacinth’s imagined barricades in Paris, the Princess effects an immersion in the social sphere she has momentarily adopted. Whereas Hyacinth temporarily fabricates a space that combines past and present, revolution and consumption within ephemeral bounds, she insists that she has crossed the border between pre-existing, binary spaces requiring no further interpretation. Having escaped the aristocratic sphere, she presents herself as free to indulge in an authentic life of radical activism, re-negotiating in the process both gendered and classbased constraints placed upon her. It is, however, at precisely this point at which authenticity is invoked, that the performative, artificial nature of the endeavour is brought to the fore. Since the Princess approaches London with an expectation of narrative templates, she always already encounters “stories” and makes the objects of her gaze appear as literary figures. The more she looks for the real London, the more likely she is to encounter an intertextually inflected city, the urban sphere of Dickens’ “Mr Micawber.” There is no gap in the appropriation of her surroundings, no insistent medial distance to be overcome. Instead, “acquaintances,”

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“stories,” and “fancies” are immediately projected upon one another, without the hermeneutic impasses stressed in Hyacinth’s cultural endeavours. Her foray into radicalism purports to be all-encompassing: “she pretended to be sounding, in a scientific spirit – that of the social philosopher, the student and critic of manners – the depths of British Philistia.” (418) However, contrary to this pretence of anthropological urban mapping, the novel does not bear out the assumption that there are any such essential ‘depths’ of working-class life to be plumbed in this way. The very posture of interpretability informing both the “strange intercourse,” the “scientific spirit” (418), and, ultimately, the Princess’ entire endeavour of creating a spatial simulacrum of the life of ‘the people’ develop from the assumption that there is a kernel of collective identity to be understood, represented and, ultimately, changed. It is particularly revolutionary change, however, that is presented as impossible amidst the accelerated modernity of Casamassima. With revolt relegated to sparse, barely collective memories of the Commune or the July Revolution, the novel restricts changes of class structure, production, and consumption to impersonal processes not to be upended by any social movement. Under these conditions, James’ protagonists can only opt for the minute inflections of perspective and strategies of multiple mediation analysed above. Any total view of society, in which the fragmented, individual narratives might be shown to share a common determination by capitalism, is relegated to Hyacinth’s vision of anarchism and the imagery of a ‘machine’ underlying surface phenomena. This machine, what is more, is described at the country house: such a political imaginary locates class analysis in a constitutive outside, placing it beyond the pale of ‘culture’ so that the edification of the individual can proceed apace. By dispensing with the hermeneutic challenge that marked the previous demarcations of culture, the Princess is shown to follow the very logic of indeterminacy which, at the culmination of the novel, is used against her. She relinquishes the possibility of drawing a distinction in order to set up a system of equivalences: the “right way to acquaint one’s self with the sensations of the wretched was to suffer the anguish of exasperated taste” (421). The gap separating the Princess from her objects of study is erased by her foray, so that every piece of “pretentious furniture” (421) and “[s]taring carpet” (421) can be taken as an immediate, metonymical indicator of her successful class betrayal. Upon establishing this template of metonymical ‘props’ authenticating her participant observation, the Princess becomes vulnerable to the very system she has co-created: if every sign doubles as an instantaneous claim to authenticity, there is no reason why her interpretation should remain dominant. Her contribution to an elision of differentiations, then, prefigures a mode of power that assigns relationships of contiguity unamenable to further contestation. Accordingly, just as she has reduced

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the complexity of class by arrogating to herself the possibility of both immediately understanding and authenticating its set of signifiers, the Princess is, ultimately, reduced to a logic of straightforward commensurability herself, albeit according to the logic of patriarchal violence and monetary calculability associated with an anarchist sphere unmoored from strategies of demarcation. It is by affecting a view from nowhere, encompassing the social position and perspective of others without semiotic redundancies, that the Princess’ project is as inimical to the demarcation of a simulated identity as the anarchists’. Her performance reduces the sought-after authentic ‘people’ to a set of objects, practices, and a change of address — a version of a fallacious thinking “à fond” (265) that Hyacinth has previously observed in the philanthropically minded who move among the poor: “Their mistakes and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of the destitute when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less irritating.” (265) In Casamassima, thus, any totalizing explanation for the social status quo is shown to give rise to a hubris of explicability. The only alternative offered in the novel, as has been shown in relation with cultural identity, is the opposite strategy: amplification of interpretative impasses and the production of multistable signs. Such a position offers little hope of resisting a sense of modern fragmentation; yet it also declines to submit ‘class’ to a type of representation that can never encompass it. The illusion of change precipitated by the Princess’ “imaginative transfigurement” (499), then, is presented as a category error. It proceeds from the assumption that a well-wrought performance can have an immediate political effect and yield a resolution: “the old ferocious selfishnesses must come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must be smashed!” (573) In contrast to this belief in political agency, the fundamental shifts in the novel do not, however, develop out of exceptional collective actions or revolutionary performativity247 on the part of the individual. Instead, characters contribute to social change by inhabiting and affirming one of the swiftly changing social roles in mass culture. James’ “Foucauldian vision of a silent and unreachable social power that simply absorbs every rebellious voice”248 is not embodied in any one class or sovereign position of authority. Rather, the mobility enjoyed by Hyacinth’s working-class companion, Millicent Henning, is ‘revolutionary’ because it is an epiphenomenon of modern mass society — not in the sense of political change but because it 247 This term is adapted from Rita Sakr. “‘THAT’S NEW [. . .] THAT’S COPY’: ‘SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES’ on the top of ‘SOME COLUMN!’ in Zola’s L’Assommoir and Joyce’s Ulysses.” James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel. Ed. Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. 160–180. 170. 248 Scanlan, Plotting Terror, 8.

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functions as the individual manifestation of a collective, uncontrollable process of bourgeoning commodification and consumer culture. Any revolutionay ambition in Casamassima has to contend with the determining power of material changes, in the face of which insurrectionary ‘smashing’ appears fatuous. Through her role as a ‘shopgirl’ and the (comparatively speaking) conspicuous consumption it allows her, Millicent is shown to participate in a shift that is presented as more seminal than any revolutionary event on the model of the Commune. That is, she becomes what Katherine Mullin calls “a key sexual persona of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Young women of the working, lower-middle, and precariously middle classes were increasingly abandoning established occupations [. . .] in favour of alternatives of contested propriety.”249 While it, thus, presents the tacit politicisation of shifting gender roles and class alignments, the novel leaves little room for ‘contestation’ of the power structures on which these social changes are based. In line with this resigned acceptance of the unfolding dynamics of capitalism, Hyacinth’s final epiphanies are negative ones: he looks at Westminster as a “huge fretted palace that rose there as a fortress of the social order which he, like the young David, had been commissioned to attack with a sling and pebble” (583). Political radicalism is futile in James’ novel. After all, fundamental change is precipitated by autonomous, market-driven processes that exceed individual understanding and political programmes. Meanwhile, the Princess’ notion of immediate mutability of society by her performances and actions is narratively penalised, at the latest when she cannot oppose Muniment’s matter-of-fact imposition: “‘You will go back to your husband!’” (580). The novel, thus, casts doubt on any aestheticopolitical self-fashioning that relinquishes an uncertain evocation of cultural value in favour of notions of immediate, direct political action. In the course of her approximation of the “mean and meagre and fourthrate” life, which “had in the highest degree that paltry, parochial air, that absence of style and elevation” (417), the Princess’ lower-class simulacrum at Madeira Crescent threatens to become identical with itself. Instead of repetition with a difference, her imitation of simple living is about to congeal into mere repetition, with no recourse to ironic detachment. Accordingly, for Hyacinth, her ‘philistine’ house at “Madeira Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve, and toward which his steps could direct themselves, with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege” (482). The “picture of it hung before him half the time, in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a

249 Katherine Mullen. Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 2.

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rarity that doubtless did not literally characterise the scene” (483). The oblique interpretative processes at Medley, where each object could be imagined to point towards a second-order vertical axis of evaluation, is threatened by the incursion of a relationship of iconic similarity not requiring any further hermeneutic engagement. As “[s]imilarity connects a metaphoric term with the term for which it is substituted,”250 increasingly the figurative house replaces its literal referent to a degree that leaves no semantic redundancies in the manner of the Medley “excrescence” (299). The ‘picture’ of the “spot round which his thoughts could resolve” (482) supplants the “spot” itself, eliding the gap which had hitherto characterised each identity constructed in the cultural sphere. The image created by Hyacinth, thus, threatens to run counter to a premise fulfilled by Casamassima as a realist novel up to this point: the merely temporary co-presence of sign and referent. If this temporary simultaneity (which has to be replaced by diachronic absence of the referent and presence of the sign, as in the case of the reconstruction of a revolutionary past in Paris) becomes a permanent state, in Ort’s terms, it “threatens ‘reality’ and its meaningful signification: according to ‘realist’ premises semiosis/sign creation can only be legitimate if signs stand in for absent reality.”251 At this stage, doubt is thrown on the Princess’ attempt to put into practice her “theory that the right way to acquaint one’s self with the sensations of the wretched was to suffer the anguish of exasperated taste” (421); class markers no longer ‘stand in’ for the experience she seeks. In the course of her experiment, signs, instead, threaten to become ‘redundant reduplications’ of what (as a simulation of lower-class life by an aristocrat) already is the reduplication of an absent referent.252 Consequently, whereas the barricades saw the narrator temporarily relinquishing control of Hyacinth’s point of view, this “picture” hanging “before him half the time” (482) is easily dispelled by reinstated authorial control: “it did not literally characterise the scene” (482). Superfluous reduplication has erased Hyacinth as an interpreting instance — and, hence, divested him of the hermeneutic agency which previously guaranteed residual identity. The Princess’ self-fashioning no longer requires the protagonist’s intercession.

250 Roman Jakobson. “Two Types of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance.” Studies on Child Language and Aphasia. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971. 49–74. 73. 251 Ort, Zeichen, 47. My trans. Orig. quote: “Eine Ko-Präsenz von Zeichen und bezeichnetem Referenten [. . .] ist allenfalls als temporärer Übergangszustand bei Zeichenproduktion und Zeichenrezeption zugelassen. Wird er zum relativen Dauerzustand, bedroht er ‘Realität’ und behindert ihre sinnvolle Signifikation: Semiose/Zeichenbildung erweist sich nämlich unter ‚realistischen Prämissen‘ nur dann als legitim, wenn Zeichen absolute Realität vertreten; ansonsten wird sie zur überflüssigen Duplikation (Extremfall von Motiviertheit).” 252 Cf. Ort, Zeichen, 47.

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Instead of bridging the gap between his position and a perennially deferred cultural sphere, referent and representation are folded into one picture, a relationship of similarity in which Hyacinth’s interpretative involvement is incidental.

3.2.2 Anarchist Indeterminacy The novel’s account of coercive power – emerging in the wake of a collapsing differentiation between cultural identity and anarchist alterity – modifies the concept of ‘disciplinarity’ as described by Nathan Jun. In a disciplinary regime, “to be is to be the subject of a praxis and the subject of a theory. My subjectivity is exhausted by the power exerted on me by others and the world and the power that I exert in turn.”253 In Casamassima, both aspects – becoming a subject of praxis and a subject of theory – are connected to the increasing impossibility of drawing a distinction. Despite its denial of spectacular demonstrations of power in political rituals,254 this indeterminate mode of power is residually ocularcentric. That is to say, such disciplinary force produces “nondiscursive formations at the level of practice (e.g. discipline), which are in turn made visible in institutions (e.g. the penitentiary).”255 The degree to which protagonists are ‘seen’ by a ‘supervisory’ instance, however, becomes increasingly unclear. As a result, the novel’s account of power in the wake of the collapse of the culture/anarchy binary hinges on both the reduction of visibility and the production of indeterminacy. As anarchism remains a lingering potential, it is shown to induce sustained uncertainty regarding the question whether the control attributed to radical conspirators corresponds to a diegetic reality. The Princess’ question – “[t]hen it is real, it is solid?” – remains unanswerable. Similarly, when Hyacinth asserts that “I have seen the holy of holies” and that this anarchist centre turned out to be “very dazzling” (330), it is undecidable what, precisely, he has seen in the temporal gap between the first and the second volume of the novel — and who has seen and interpellated him in turn. The effects of this uncertain status between vision and invisibility will now be traced in their consequences for a model of power that dispenses with any determination of selfhood and Otherness. In James’ version of such a model, anarchism (once it is no longer placed beyond the pale of cultural reconstruction) divests individuals of any political status or agency. Instead of subjecting the object of regulation to

253 Nathan Jun. Anarchism and Political Modernity. New York and London: Continuum, 2012. 163. 254 Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 7. 255 Jun, Anarchism, 163.

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explicit demands, this unconstrained ‘anarchist’ mode is predicated on the potential to reduce its targets to bare life — a “carcass” (329). In this process, the protagonist becomes identified with his mere, bodily existence and uncoupled from the identity he has painstakingly built up. Concomitantly, the strategies of controlled vilification of radicalism break down. This upends the novel’s model of power: anarchism that can no longer be projected onto a disavowed sphere of Otherness stands in for unaccountable, coercive power as such. As a result, Hyacinth is subjected to a degree of control that extends to the conditions on which he is alive. This determination of the very life of the protagonist follows on the heels of a loss of demarcation. Anarchism, once it is no longer narrated from within the confines of Medley, becomes a totalising mode of subjection. As a result, the radical conspiracy emerges as a condensed representation of the novel’s broader account of modernity as a “rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms.”256 The terms of this rewriting, however, remain hidden from those subjected to it. The resulting coercion, which replaces the protagonist’s sense of individual and collective selfhood, is introduced by the vow Hyacinth has made to the anarchist cabal. Questioned by the Princess, he responds: “I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you! I am speaking of the very remarkable individual with whom I entered into that engagement.” “To give away your life?” “To do something which in a certain contingency he will require of me. He will require my poor little carcass.” “Those plans have a way of failing – unfortunately,” the Princess murmured, adding the last word more quickly. “Is that a consolation, or a lament?” Hyacinth asked. “This one shall not fail, so far as it depends on me. They wanted an obliging young man – the place was vacant – I stepped in.” (329)

Due to his vow to the anarchist conspirators, the protagonist is no longer required to construct an identity in the manner of his media practices or the reinterpretation of Medley. Instead of setting himself up as the interpreting instance amidst multiply mediated signs, the “carcass” fits a pre-assigned ‘vacant place’, a limited functional role in a larger, unknowable endeavour which requires Hyacinth to ‘step in.’

256 Fredric Jameson. A Singular Modernity. London and New York: Verso, 2012. 35.

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The standard by which his attentat might be deemed ‘enough’ is rendered uncertain. After all, the interpretation of Hyacinth’s pledged body is not left to the protagonist himself. The required “carcass” can, firstly, stand for an entire course of revolutionary action in which he lays down his life for the cause. In an event structure of this kind, crossing over from the semantic space of life to death transforms the order of the diegesis in the manner of a meta-event: “the system of semantic spaces of the text after the event is not the same as before the event. A meta-event is, hence, a revolutionary event.”257 This revolutionary passage is, however, ambiguously condensed in the synecdoche of Hyacinth’s corpse. After all, the protagonist states that he ‘gave his life away’ (327), alleging a completed transaction before answering the Princess’ question whether his future act requires him “[t]o give away your life” (329) with the uncertain statement that he will be required “[t]o do something” (329). His status is unclear: Hyacinth is alive but has given away his life; he is going to die but the carcass has already been created by having “given away your life” (328). According to this second reading, the default orientation towards a future revolutionary meta-event is cancelled. If his life has already been ‘given’ by dint of the unrepresented contract (and, accordingly, the border-crossing has already taken place during the induction ceremony), the revolutionary reordering of the diegesis implied by the metonymical body is moot. As a result of this cancellation of the future meta-event, the “poor little carcass” is divested of its figurative potential altogether: the anarchist event concerns the relinquishing of the body proper rather than the direct action signified by it. Thus, rather than offering a revolutionary border-crossing in a differential semantic field, the signifiers of death are projected backwards, to the act of signing away life, and forwards — to the corpse bereft of metonymical valence. Since the anarchist ritual itself is only narrated retrospectively, it presents a lacuna in the symbolic fabric of the narrated world. The revolutionary underground appears as a ‘zone’ in McHale’s sense of an “an alien space within a familiar space, or between two adjacent areas of space where no such ‘between’ exists.”258 In its modernist incarnation, this zone is still tied to an ‘epistemological dominant’,259 a matter of failing processes of interpretation on the part of the protagonist. In Casamassima, it is specifically by means of its exclusion from the

257 Michael Titzmann. “Semiotische Aspekte der Literaturwissenschaft: Literatursemiotik.” Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur. Ed. Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, and Thomas A. Sebeok. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 3028–3102. 3081. 258 Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 44. 259 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 10.

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template of representability as previously established in the novel that the anarchist conspiracy impedes “epistemological processes of weighing evidence and making deductions” regarding Hyacinth’s actions.260 That is to say, the presentation of the protagonist’s development (after his aneleptic account of the ritual) is uncertain: his immersion in culture is undergirded by the potential arrival of the anarchist orders at any time. As a result, the half-remembered ritual creates the expectation of an eventful change that does not transpire. This potential reversal is, however, all that is required for the functioning of power in the indeterminate sphere of ‘anarchy’. As Prozorov shows, exceptional measures function more effectively as potentialities, since they are “capable of regulating conduct by the sheer threat of their actualisation.”261 Indeed, in Agamben’s formulation of the state of exception, sovereignty functions by means of the potential to not apply any longer. Rather than analysing norms, this model draws attention to the strategies by means of which norms are suspended. The result of such suspension is an individual that can always potentially be reduced to a status of bare life — or rather a “carcass,” in the terms of the conspiracy established above. Accordingly, that “the place was vacant” (329) (and remains vacant throughout the novel) is the basis for the absent conspiracy, much more so than the concrete act in which the protagonist is to ‘step in’ to that vacant place (cf. 329). Indeed, the application of norms (in our context: the precise nature of the act of anarchist violence that Hyacinth is supposed to commit) is less important for the coercive power of James’ fabricated version of ‘anarchism’ than the possibility of withholding that application and obfuscating the rationale for its absence. Under the conditions of anarchy (in its pejorative sense of disorder), Hyacinth’s self-fashioned identity can be reduced to a set of detachable characteristics at any time. This aligns it with the state of exception which, as Agamben reiterates, is also related to the law by the possibility of withdrawing the legal sphere. Instead of positive, propositional statements, the basis of state power is its potential to suspend norms, thus creating the possibility of acts which are “neither transgressive, executive, nor legislative” as they “seem to be situated in an absolute non-place with respect to the law.”262 In Casamassima, however, rather than constituting the basis of state sovereignty, this notion of power based on dissolving differentiations is presented oxymoronically (and contrary to the functioning of extra-literary activist groups) as an anarchist mode of coercion. This allows the narrative to present a stand-in

260 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 10. 261 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 101. 262 Agamben, State of Exception, 51.

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for a modern exertion of power while also retaining plausible deniability: it is, after all, a ‘radical’ group evoked here, one that can just about be considered a deviation rather than an example of a broader shift in the functioning of power. Specifically, its potential for remaining in suspension allows the ever-absent anarchist conspiracy to defer its manifestation in any concrete action. “Being in force without significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung)”263 — it is this formula that describes such a mode of rule that does not offer positive content, but rather subsists by means of the permanent possibility of withdrawing extant demarcations. Hyacinth’s processual demarcation of culture, meanwhile, is rendered conditional, since it can be replaced with a determining event at any point; an event which, however, fails to be specified throughout the novel. The only certainty under the conditions of unbounded anarchism is the ‘certain contingency’ potentially occurring at any point. From the moment Hyacinth pledges his life to Hoffendahl and awaits his command, he is not only determined by an ill-defined terrorist programme, but moreover thrust into the logic of ineluctable telling. Following Jameson, this telling – the récit – constitutes “the regime of past-present future and of personal identities and destinies.”264 In the case of the anarchist command, however, it is skewed towards an uncertain event not yet expressible in the terms of the present. As against Hyacinth’s desire to be inducted into the a-temporal fullness of culture, this absent plot institutes a parallel time marked by irrevocability: “the temporal past is now redefined in terms of what cannot be changed, what lies beyond the reach of repetition or rectification.”265 The Princess self-referentially notes the incompatibility of this association of an event-bound future orientation with the cultural concerns – with ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ – previously negotiated in the novel: “Well, I must say, it seems to me that, from what I have told you, it ought to strike you that I have a title.” “You mean your famous engagement, your vow? Oh, that will never come to anything.” “Why won’t it come to anything?” “It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a novel.” “Vous me rendez la vie!” said Hyacinth, theatrically. (485)

263 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 51. 264 Fredric Jameson. The Antinomies of Realism. London and New York: Verso, 2013. 25. 265 Jameson, Antinomies, 19.

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In this exchange, anarchism appears as a challenge to the form of the novel. This fits in with Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Henry James’ The Art of the Novel, according to which realism functions in accordance with the the antinomy of “destiny versus the eternal present.”266 In these terms, the challenge of culture, namely demarcation of a residual compensatory sphere guaranteeing identity, hinges on preserving a ‘present’ in which Hyacinth is beset by interpretative challenges. This reflexive stalling of destiny-bound plot development returns us to the abiding concern with the representation of consciousness in James’ poetics (cf. 3.1.2.2.). According to James’ narrative theory, the author cannot sustain representation of a present marked by a character’s individual interpretative engagement. In Casamassima, such an extended point in time is associated with one centre of consciousness negotiating multiple perspectives on cultural artefacts: “They were an illusion, for their necessary hour.”267 Likewise, a preceding scenic elaboration of ‘wrought material’ is only barely and temporarily set apart from a return to the “final motivation”268 of mechanical linearity, just as in Casamassima the anarchist plot imposed on the protagonist disrupts the cultural material painstakingly assembled. What is more, James’ authorial persona notes in retrospect that the non-linear constellations of wrought material always already had been determined by a succession of events; the artist, aspiring solely towards the ekphrastic ‘blest illusions’ of a timeless present realises that “yet the bridge spans the stream, after the fact, in apparently complete independence of these properties, the principal grace of the original design.”269 The recognition ‘after the fact’ is crucial: the author realises that telling has always already determined the non-linear showing of points of view. In retrospect, the narrative event has functioned as an unacknowledged supplement. This delayed understanding is staged in the storyworld of Casamassima: in a similar disclosure of plot development, before receiving his final instructions, “Hyacinth sat staring at the empty table with the feeling that he was, somehow, a detached, irresponsible witness of the evolution of his fate.” (547) Like his author in The Art of the Novel, the protagonist is beset by a disclosure of linearity, by the sudden awareness that the mode of ‘showing’ merely forestalled a return

266 Jameson, Antinomies, 26. 267 James, “Preface to ‘The Wings of the Dove’,” 297. 268 Fotis Jannidis. “Narratology and the Narrative.” What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 35–54. 43. As opposed to causal and compositional motivation, “final motivation [. . .] is present when the course of events in the narrative world is determined by concepts such as fate or providence.” 269 James, “Preface to ‘The Wings of the Dove’,” 297.

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to ‘telling’ (on the level of narrative mediation) and ‘acting’ in accordance with his vow (in the story). What the Princess dismisses as some “silly humbug in a novel,” then, becomes exposed as a deep structure undergirding the tenuous ‘eternal present’ of culture and the novel as a whole. In other words, the succession of events imposed by the anarchists was always-already operative while Hyacinth still presumed that his future mission could be detached from cultural pursuits. While the protagonist appears to inculcate an alternative form of value, then, this linear anarchist plot tends inexorably towards the moment of eventful ‘direct action’, which is to expend the protagonist in one act for an uncertain cause. In contrast to that structure of ‘destiny’, the intricate multiple mediations are demoted to mere indifferent interludes between the oath and the assassination. Just as James’ alter ego in Art of the Novel realises that the “principal grace of the original design”270 has presupposed the ‘bridge’ of profane linearity, the distinction between culture and anarchy is, ultimately, not only shown to collapse, but to always having constituted an illusory difference in the first place.

3.2.3 Anarchist Calculus The Princess Casamassima, thus, dramatises the difficulty of fencing off a sphere of progressively uncovered values from an anarchist environment.271 More and more, anarchism is shown to resist projection to the outside of those delimited places in which negotiations of cultural identity are deemed possible.272 The representation of anarchism as a proliferating mode of power no longer amenable to the establishment of boundaries can now be elaborated in the context of the concrete coercive techniques associated with the representatives of the radical underground. Specifically, the anarchist model of ‘exception’ will be analysed with regard to two crucial instances in which its simultaneous withdrawal and ubiquity comes to the fore. The first occasion for 270 James, “Preface to ‘The Wings of the Dove’,” 297. 271 The practices allowing for a “delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories.” Michel Foucault. “History of Systems of Thought.” Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 199–204. 199. 272 Cf. Kathy E. Ferguson. Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets. Lanham/Boulder/ New York/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Rowman, 2011. 22. “As is often the case with the ‘outside,’ it becomes paradoxically important to those still on the ‘inside,’ who need to sustain their selfunderstanding.”

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such ‘regulatory non-disclosure’ is provided in the run-up to Hyacinth’s vow, in the course of which anarchism is presented as a mode of power imposing acquiescence. Secondly, the anarchist state of exception will be shown to be operative in a final tally of the Princess’ worth. Both of these examples demonstrate the specificity of the coercive techniques associated with anarchism in the novel. The emergence of the state of exception can be traced in the movement from a manifest space of British activism to the latent, anarchist underground. Already before the initiation proper, the anarchist ‘zone of indistinction’ impinges on Hyacinth’s rhetorical performance of demarcation, which had stood him in good stead as the basis of fabricated cultural identity. In the Sun and Moon, a meetingplace of various radically inclined figures, the protagonist is shown to argue in favour of avowed antagonism, a scheme of ‘us vs. them’: “If he had a definite wish while he stood there it was that that exalted, deluded company should pour itself forth, with Muniment at its head, and surge though the sleeping city, gathering the myriad miserable out of their slums and burrows, and roll into the selfish squares, and lift a tremendous hungry voice.” (293) The passage that follows this imagined revolutionary upsurge traces the loss of such expectation of sharpened antagonism. Both personal distinction as an activist and a differential boundary between revolutionaries and society are suspended as a politics of difference is replaced with an undifferentiated anarchist sphere. Instead of the manifestation of a latent revolutionary potential, with Muniment – Hyacinth’s role model of workingclass masculinity – coming to the fore as a leader, the revolutionary sphere in the subsequent passage emerges as a far less certain entity. Instead of bolstering distinctions, Muniment is shown to effect an effacement of boundaries that leaves Hyacinth beholden to the anarchist cabal — which itself, as shown above, hovers between potentiality and actuality. The induction itself is described as an “engagement” (329) into which Hyacinth ostensibly enters of his own free accord. This notion of voluntary assent is operative in the entire process of Hyacinth’s anarchist turn, presenting the protagonist as the point of intersection “at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge.”273 The sense of individual choice imparted by the ‘engagement’ underscores that the pledge to commit a future act of ‘propaganda by the deed’ comes with the trappings of a felicitous speech act.274

273 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6. 274 Cf. J. L. Austin. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. In Austin’s terms: “Besides the uttering of the words of the so-called performative, a good many other things have as a general rule to be right and go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our action.” (14)

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Against the very possibility of felicity, however, the novel afterwards foregrounds the means of coercing an effect of voluntary participation and the ‘totalisation’ implicit in the desired revolutionary ‘individualisation’. Rather than cancelling the speech act, this imbalance of power is intrinsic to it, “systematically induced”275 and maintained by James’ distorted version of anarchism. This inequality of the terms of the ‘engagement’ is prefigured by Hyacinth’s response to a fellow would-be revolutionary’s speech. He is ‘affected’ by a “suppositious hairdresser,” who “shrieked out an accusation which made every one stop and stare at him” (294). In response to the charge that “[t]here isn’t a mother’s son of you that’ll risk his precious bones” (294), the protagonist reacts as follows: This little oration affected Hyacinth like a quick blow in the face; it seemed to leap at him personally, as if a three-legged stool, or some hideous hob-nailed boot, had been shied at him. The room surged round, heaving up and down, while he was conscious of a loud explosion of laughter and scorn; of cries of “Order, order!” of some clear word of Muniment’s, “I say, Delancey, just step down;” of Eustache Poupin shouting out, “Vous insultez le peuple – vous insultez le peuple!” of other retorts, not remarkable for refinement. The next moment Hyacinth found that he had sprung up on a chair, opposite to the barber, and that at the sight of so rare a phenomenon the commotion had suddenly checked itself. (294)

Hyacinth’s answer to the challenge is presented as a set of ‘delayed decodings’, since it combines, in Watt’s terms, “the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of making out their meaning.”276 In James’ iteration of this epistemological deferral, the ‘outside world’ is placed at an even further remove than in Watt’s definition. After all, Hyacinth’s ‘reflexive process’ is applied to his own speech and action, which, in turn, develops out of an immediate reaction to his rival’s speech. In this self-reflexive decoding of what causes his own responses, the protagonist “found that he had sprung up on a chair” (294) and “[i]t appeared to Hyacinth that he was talking a long time, and when it was over he scarcely knew what happened” (294). Rather than an autonomous, contractually capable subject freely entering into an ‘engagement’, the passage deprives the protagonist’s revolutionary commitment of any precedence over the situation in which it is produced. That is, instead of giving expression to revolutionary intent as an autonomous subject, Hyacinth is a mere epiphenomenon of the situation, an assemblage of a set of elements.277 It is his frustrated revolutionary ardour that produces what James in 275 Cf. Jaeggi, “Rethinking Ideology,” 67–68. 276 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth, 175. 277 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” Dialogues II. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York:

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the preface describes as ‘experience’: “our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures – any intelligent report of which has to be based on that apprehension. The picture of the exposed and entangled state is what is required, and there are certainly always plenty of grounds for keeping down the complexities of a picture.”278 In the case of the revolutionary ‘utterance-producing’279 series of elements (both real and imagined) making up Hyacinth’s ‘entangled state’, they are duly enumerated in advance of the speech. The ensuing assemblage, first and foremost, includes the protagonist’s expectation of a “grand spectacle” (293) at the Sun and Moon, and the disappointment of that anticipated revolutionary event. The projected spectacle is dissolved in “disorder, or at all events confusion” (293), while the absence of an “organised attempt at the rescue of the proletariat” (293) finds its complement in “a shuffling of benches and chairs, a hunching of shaggy shoulders, a frugal lowering of superfluous gas, and a varied vivacity of disgust and resignation” (293). The description at this juncture draws attention to the degree to which the protagonist perceives the dissolution of the would-be revolutionary vanguard as the dispersal of a collective radical identity as such, which is exposed as only ever having been the result of a momentary performance in the first place. Rather than an insurrectionary mass, or at least a synecdochal representation of a class-based potential for revolt, the space of radicalism is an “unventilated medium in which, at each renewed gathering, the Bloomsbury club seemed to recognise itself” (293). Upon the loss of momentarily collective ‘self-recognition’, the hoped-for revolutionary potential is disassembled into component parts of fractured bodies and material objects. As a result, Paul Muniment, who will turn out to be the arbiter of the anarchist underground, is set up as the hope for a disambiguating, grand gesture. In James’ prefatory terms, he seems to offer a disentanglement of Hyacinth’s ‘entangled state’ and a reduction of the ‘complexities of a picture’. Hyacinth imagines the hoped-for revolution to “pour itself forth, with Muniment at its head, and surge through the sleeping city” (293). The obvious impossibility of such a gathering-up of the dispersed bodies and objects is, in a second step, projected onto

Columbia UP, 1977. 36–76. 51. “The minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage which produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their cause a subject which would act as a subject of enunciation, any more than they are related to subjects of utterance. The utterance is the product of an assemblage – which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.” 278 James, “Preface to the NY Edition,” 37. 279 Cf. Deleuze, Dialogues II, 51.

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Muniment’s interiority, whereby the revolution at least becomes a plotted future event. To that end, Hyacinth attributes to his comrade the panoramic oversight that eludes him. This second step leaves him “in a state of tormented wonder as to what better idea than this very bad one [. . .] Muniment could be revolving in that too-comprehensive brain of his” (293). To this assemblage of (1) dispersed elements and (2) a redoubled projection of a future revolutionary force in the offing, the ‘suppositious hairdresser’ adds a crucial third set of elements. These are related to (3) Hyacinth’s past. Regarding the protagonist’s origin, the orator’s concluding rhetorical flourish of there being no “mother’s son” (294) who would risk his life for the cause cannot but evoke Hyacinth’s mother and the revolutionary lineage of the ‘wild French people’ he has previously concocted for her. It is the addition of this final series to the revolutionary assemblage, then, that determines Hyacinth’s speech — an event which, notably, he has to decode himself as much as his listeners after he “found that he had sprung up on a chair” (294). The decision to declare himself is wholly extrinsic, with the speaker just one of a number of intersecting objects. What precipitates this moment of action is an assemblage that consists of objects and bodies, their unification projected onto Muniment, and the rival’s speech, all of which intersect to create the composite effect of an appeal that “seemed to leap at him personally” (294). Rather than a revolutionary epiphany and an attendant clarification of his own position, Hyacinth’s oration – generated by shoulders, gas, resignation, redoubled revolutionary hopes, present disavowal, past association – is a second-order phenomenon.280 The “room surged round, heaving up and down” (294), relegating Hyacinth to what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling” residing at the “very edge of semantic availability.”281 This structure of feeling is placed far beyond the conceptual frame of a political subject articulating a considered point of view preexisting the conditions that generate it. Before the assemblage, there is neither conviction nor a political actor, let alone an individual one. It is at this point – as the delayed decoding is still underway and Hyacinth is in the process of recovering and interpreting his own performance – that Muniment is shown to reduce the entire constellation painstakingly traced in advance of Hyacinth’s involuntary speech: ‘“Upon my word, I believe you’re game,’ said Muniment, looking down at him with a serious face.” (295) With

280 “In this sense, there are factors outside the self which make possible the acts, speech, and thinking of the human subject,” as Rothfield summarizes a position of this kind. Philipa Rothfield. “Feminism, Subjectivity, and Sexual Difference.” Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct. Ed. Sneja Gunew. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 121–146. 125. 281 Raymond Williams. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1977. 134.

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‘game’, the revolutionary assemblage is replaced by an ambiguous term. While primarily and idiomatically conferring a status as an acquiescing subject ready for conspiratorial action, the term also comes with connotations of a hunted animal. Further, it points to the literal inclusion of Hyacinth in Muniment’s ‘game’, a ludic performance of anarchist conspiracy adopted despite persistent hints at the non-committal detachment of the alleged revolutionary leader. This ambiguity does not fail to exert its effect: following Muniment’s terse summary – as a result of which Hyacinth is “as bold as a lion” (295) at the same time as he becomes “game” (295) – the notion of a deeper, conspiratorial reality underlying the surface politics of the Sun and Moon is brought up for the first time. Muniment’s intervention disrupts the heterogeneous revolutionary assemblage by promising that Hyacinth will be granted the opportunity to “see the genuine article” (295). His condensed conclusion to the multiplicity of elements co-creating Hyacinth’s speech ignores that “[a]t whatever point we fix our gaze, entities are assembled from other entities.”282 Consequently, as against the unruly embodiment, enactment, and materiality of the revolutionary assemblage, Hyacinth is thrust in the position of awaiting the disclosure of an absent, anarchist totality. Amidst a multiplicity of material and non-material elements exceeding any unitary representation, Muniment’s summary (in Andrew Gibson’s terms), raises the expectation of “ontology and the thought of totality spread everywhere.”283 Muniment’s will to totality imposes a permanent delay inaccessible to decoding, with the projected reversal of values deferred until an uncertain future moment. In the meantime, it is to be awaited passively, thus negating the contingent enactments of politics in the diegetic present. In place of the revolutionary assemblage, Muniment introduces the notion of unmediated access to a ‘genuine’ status. While contrasting the Sun and Moon with an underlying, revolutionary plenitude, Hyacinth’s role model never offers the possibility of ascertaining the ontological status of this prospective realityto-come: “‘Are you the genuine article, Muniment?’” (296). From the beginning on, the anarchist conspiracy is, thus, introduced as a means of eluding the processes of ever-renewed interpretation characterising the protagonist’s previous strategies of demarcation. Instead of ambiguous signs and hermeneutic quandaries, he is led to expect a genuine anarchist reality. While cultural identity had been presented as a barely functional illusion, that self-constructed set of residual interpretability at least allowed for the delimitation of heterotopic

282 Graham Harman. “The Assemblage Theory of Society.” Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Winchester, UK, and Washington, UK: Zero, 2010. 172. 283 Gibson, “Ethics and Unrepresentability,” 125.

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media (shop window, theatre, newspaper) that the protagonist could temporarily demarcate against his anarchic environment. By contrast, once the uncertainty of being “game” (295) is connected to the promise of certainty, such distinctions become unattainable. Rather than allowing for the revolutionary deep-structure of the “genuine article” (296), demarcation is replaced by a spatial model of indeterminate extension: “They all ended by sitting silent, as the cab jogged along murky miles, and by the time it stopped Hyacinth had wholly lost, in the drizzling gloom, a sense of their whereabouts.” (296). The chronotopic breakdown stressed in this final sentence of the second book is structurally repeated by the gap in narrative time between this cab ride and the day at Medley which opens Book Third. Quite literally, the vow is rendered a blank space subject to uncertain recollection. Thus, the visual confirmation initially associated with the fantasy of revolutionary induction is replaced with an absence, the anarchist sphere refigured as a gap in the text. His own speech preceding the absent (yet desired) “genuine article” determines the protagonist before he can assent to any revolutionary contract. Hyacinth, in other words, speaks as a radical activist before being interpellated and made aware of the fact. This process is presented as the conversion of the assemblage into a ‘game’ as well as a translation of an unwitting response into a direct speech act. In this way, Hyacinth finds himself enacting a role to which he only assents afterwards. This temporal structure – the subject already coproducing his subjection while awaiting an eventful passage from a preconspiratorial state to conspiracy – aligns with Agamben’s description of the ‘ban’. Homo Sacer argues that the notion of a linear development from a state of nature to a contractual founding of a normative order offers illusory stability: “All representations of the originary political act as a contract or convention marking the passage from nature to the State in a discrete and definite way must be left wholly behind.”284 Likewise, rather than a passage from inchoate disarray to law, the contract impelled by Muniment introduces a state in which any eventful progression is revocable. In this model, the very agreement to revolutionary action is predicated on a constitutive vacancy — after all, the oration that affects Hyacinth the most is the assertion that no “mother’s son” will ever “risk his precious bones” (294). The absence of Hyacinth’s mother is to be supplemented by the “mother’s son” (294), as much as Hoffendahl is to supplement the absent “genuine article” (295; 296). In both of these cases, the protagonist is compelled to fill the gaps

284 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109.

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himself (“I stepped in” 329), an attempt that fully inscribes him in a revolutionary sphere simultaneously imagined as a guarantor of reality and a perennial interpretative blank. Similarly, as the Princess puts it, “Hoffendahl made an immense impression on me; he seemed to me the Master indeed, the very genius of a new social order, and I fully understand the manner in which you were affected by him. [. . .] I said I would meet him in any hole he should designate.” (332) Located in a “hole” – completing a metaphorical triad with the ‘vacant place’ (cf. 329) and the “small orifice” (334)285 – the elusive anarchist sphere couples absence with the promise of revolutionary presence, which, like the ‘social contract’ in Agamben’s thought, never comes to pass. The hole is the whole of anarchy, which, like the state of exception, “is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.”286 While he is still waiting for radical action to manifest, Hyacinth is fully determined by the ‘empty space’ that constitutes its only reality. The novel presents anarchism as a perpetual vacancy, raising hopes of a “genuine article” (295) that fails to materialise. This deferral imposes the structure of exception — or rather: the ban as its isomorphic complement. The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintain itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured.287

Similarly to this power to rescind extant norms, the anarchist sphere only comes to the fore in its permanent potential to dissolve Hyacinth’s cultural identity. Like ‘the one who abandons’ in Agamben, the protagonist is included by the permanent possibility of exclusion. Thus, in the Sun and Moon, the anarchist interpellation wrests Hyacinth from his surroundings, eliding the range of factors that constitute his revolutionary declaration and reducing him to a

285 Cf. Jacob Jacobson. Queer Desire in Henry James: The Politics of Erotics in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000. 173. The imagery of orifices is not lost on critics analysing the queer subtext of Casamassima. “The pun is outrageous but apt. After all, Hoffendahl satisfies Hyacinth, fills him so completely during the initiation (my turn to pun), that the bookbinder even tells his beloved Princess that he has no need of her.” Cf. also Graham, Henry James’s Thwarted Love, 186. Graham presents the overt, anarchist plot as the manifest expression of a latent queer dissidence: “He constantly shifts the reader’s attention from the phony anarchist drama to the genuinely subversive activities plotted behind the scenes.” 286 Agamben, State of Exception, 86. 287 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109–110.

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‘genuine article’. As in Agamben’s account of exception, the protagonist is included in the conspiracy on the condition that he is excluded from his previous self-identifications.288 There is, however, a caveat to this reading of Casamassima in terms of the state of exception. To a greater extent than Agamben, James’ novel accounts for the co-constitution of the structure of ‘abandonment’ by the one who is subjected to it. Homo Sacer reiterates the absence of an authoritarian decision on the state of emergency. Nonetheless, Agamben’s text cannot consistently describe the state of exception without surreptitiously reintroducing a sovereign position from which it is pronounced. Thus, despite his insistence on the ban as a relation rather than a process, the texts feature an insistent return to an imagined moment at which “[p]olitical power (potere) as we know it, on the other hand, always founds itself – in the last instance – on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life.”289 In Casamassima, we are presented with a model utterly sceptical of such a ‘last instance’. Instead, it is precisely the desire and search for a founding ‘instance’ that leads to the characters’ co-production of their subjection. The very desire for a determining sovereign power declaring a ban leads to an ever-more inescapable exposure to coercive power as it is already constituted. As a result, Hyacinth is implicated in his own reduction to bare life, actively co-constituting his status rather than merely being abandoned to it in the manner of the “originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it.”290 Seeking the ‘genuine aricle’ in the anarchist ‘hole’, Hyacinth is is made to suspend the self-made laws previously governing his sense of self. A Jamesian perspective on the structure of exception, then, requires attention to the degree to which characters reduce themselves to ‘naked life’ as a result of the attempt to be recognised by a figure embodying a decisive, authoritarian ‘founding’ capacity. Agamben hints at a similar structure whenever he describes ‘force of law’ or ‘floating imperium’ as concepts which hide the empty space of the law and insist on a foundational presence of norms: “all these are fictions through which law attempts to encompass its own absence and to appropriate the state of exception, or at least to assure itself a relation with it.”291 What the novel adds, however, is the perspective of Hyacinth as a character who continues

288 Hyacinth “hopes to establish a relation to someone whose social identity had been immutably confirmed.” Philip Sicker. Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 67. 289 Agamben, Giorgio. “Form-of-Life.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 151–158. 151. 290 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 28. 291 Agamben, State of Exception, 51.

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to believe in such ‘fictions’, supplying them with a reality they do not possess. That is to say, he is abandoned to the suspension of determinable laws while he attempts to assure a relation to a figure declaring that very suspension. It is as a result of this search for a founding instance that the loss of demarcations and the exposure to a state of exception are unwittingly self-imposed. This paradoxical complicity of the excepted figure is shown when Hyacinth importunes Muniment for a glimpse of the anarchist underground: ‘If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to mind the newspapers,’ Hyacinth pleaded. It was his view of himself, and it was not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never beg for a favour; but now he felt that in any relation he might have with Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This man he could entreat, pray to, go on his knees to, without a sense of humiliation. (151)

What is notable about this ‘suspension of the law’ is that before its inapplicability is noted, Hyacinth is compelled to produce it in the first place: the law is “his view of himself.” Rather than the inescapable relation of ban that Agamben posits as the originary relation of power, the novel attends to the ways in which identity is offered for dissolution by the very figure that constructed it in the first place. As a result of the desire for an instance that suspends extant laws whilst guaranteeing an authoritative connection to those very laws, Hyacinth is compelled to perform his obedience. It is this production of a position between full inclusion and perpetual vacancy – in marked distinction from the multiple mediation and productive artificiality of cultural demarcations – that divests the protagonist of agency. Rather than merely ‘delivered to his own separateness’, Hyacinth is coerced to perform that delivery himself, signalling compliance out of the desire for a deep-structural truth. What defines the transition from Hyacinth’s speech to Muniment’s comments as a “relationship of power” is its presentation as a “mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future.”292 After all, in response to his ‘oration’, Hyacinth is enmeshed in a set of subsequent actions tied to his self-exposure, which combine indeterminacy (delayed decoding) and determinacy (being “game”): After they were seated in it, Hyacinth learned that Hoffendahl was in London but for three days, was liable to hurry away on the morrow, and was accustomed to receive visits at all kinds of queer hours. It was getting to be midnight; the drive seemed interminable, to Hyacinth’s impatience and curiosity. He sat next to Muniment, who passed his arm round him, as if by way of tacit expression of indebtedness. (296)

292 Michel Foucault. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982). 777–794. 789.

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The ‘action upon his action’ consists of Muniment’s gestures, performed “as if by way of tacit expression of indebtedness” (296). This introduces the uncertainty of this exertion of power, since the status of the ‘as if’, the acknowledgment that the ‘indebtedness’ is non-literal, cannot be tied to a determinate centre of consciousness. We cannot, consequently, ascertain whether Hyacinth should be understood to perceive this sudden emergence of ‘debt’ or whether this is the narrator’s comment on Muniment’s ‘action upon an action’. In addition, it is not certain who is indebted to whom in the first place: while the passage could imply Muniment’s indebtedness to Hyacinth, it could also refer to the debt incurred by the inductee, thus describing an obligation that results from the unveiling of the conspiracy. On this second reading, Hyacinth is indebted for the disclosure of “the thing itself” (151), a revolutionary reality no longer dependent on the protagonist’s own faculties.293 In keeping with these redoubled ambiguities, “[i]ndebtedness,” as David Graeber asserts, is fraught with naturalised assumptions: “there is no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt.”294 In Casamassima, as with the oscillation between the desire for a “genuine article” (295) and its deferral, the relationship of debt implies an absent metric which can only be inferred but not made explicit. By withholding both the conditions of the debt and the terms of deleveraging it, the protagonist is increasingly unable to differentiate between interpersonal relationships and formal obligations. Accordingly, when Muniment later ignores Hyacinth, the latter “wondered whether this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of that superior brutality, latent in his composition” (280). Hyacinth infers that there is a coercive system of debt and repayment in place, yet, apart from the undefined future action he is to perform, is not apprised of the consequences of accruing an obligation.295 It is at this point that the uncertain status of the conspiracy emerges as a mode of coercion in its own right. Rather than merely reproducing a vague stereotype of anarchism, the novel inquires into the function of that vagueness. Hence, while Hyacinth is still reconstructing what he has said in order to appear “game,” he is placed under an obligation to balance his account at an unspecified date —

293 David Graeber stresses the constitutive connection of debt and an epistemological impasse. His history of the concept points out that “[t]he very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.” David Graeber. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville, 2011. 5. 294 Graeber, Debt, 5. 295 This uncertainty also stands in stark contrast to Mr Vetch’s immediate waiving of Hyacinth’s literal, monetary debt, without any formal obligations attached.

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his “future is circumscribed by the obligation to pay off the debt incurred in the past.”296 This vague future event remains unaffected by the intersecting elements of the assemblage that produced Hyacinth’s revolutionary declaration, let alone by the protagonist’s self-made cultural sphere. He is not even dissuaded from his aesthetic endeavours; the regime of indebtedness, instead, remains indifferent to his culture-bound education, as long as such pursuits of immaterial value do not impinge on the status as a potential debtor. In Maurizio Lazzarato’s terms, Hyacinth is free to travel and construct paradigms of high culture on the condition that he remain a “‘self’-guarantor’,” in “an ethico-political process of constructing a subjectivity endowed with a memory, a conscience, and a morality that forces him to be both accountable and guilty.”297 As long as Hyacinth can be made to produce his equivalent value upon a future reckoning, his interceding activities – the bulk of the novel’s plot – are treated as an irrelevance. The unbounded anarchist sphere is described in term of a transaction with uncertain benefits: “his liberty was going – the liberty he had managed to keep (till the other day, when he gave Hoffendahl a mortgage on it), and the possession of which had in some degree consoled him for other forms of penury” (311). ‘Liberty’ is placed in an uncertain position: in this self-appraisal, it is both a property that is “going” in the present and, simultaneously, a collateral Hyacinth has already pledged in the past in order to take out an uncertain loan. The funds Hyacinth has raised by treating the abstract category of “liberty” as a real property are, however, immaterial. Regarding this “mortgage” – which, in view of the required ‘carcass’ evokes its French etymology as a “death-pledge, a mort-gage”298 – the only advantage gained by the protagonist is the attendant epiphany itself, the metaphor of the revolutionary machine he gleans from the anarchist vantage point. That is, the uncertain “revelation” (330) of the radical deep-structure (allegedly) underlying society is made possible by putting a lien on “liberty.” This revelation, in turn, involves the effacement of the individual, since it requires, as shown earlier, merely the signee’s body. In effect, the protagonist has mortgaged his life in order to acquire insight into a status which, in turn, is shown to deprive him of life. For J. Hillis Miller, whilst speech acts

296 Joseph, “Making Debt,” 10. 297 Maurizio Lazzarato. The Making of the Indebted Man. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. Amsterdam: Semiotext(e), 2011. 49. 298 Simon Critchley. On the Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London and New York: Verso, 2012. 189. Critchley traces the ontological meaning of debt in Heidegger, with a concept of life as “a series of repayments on a loan that you didn’t agree to [. . .]. Debt is a way of being. It is, arguably, the way of being. This is why credit, and the credence in credit, its belief structure, is so important.” (189)

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are always already predicated on a calculation of death, a mortgage specifically rests on the conditional utterance “‘If I do not die I promise to pay this off’.” By means of this formula “the one who signs a mortgage puts his or her death on the line, signs in the name of his or her mortality.”299 This relationship is redoubled in Casamassima, where the anarchist deal borders on the tautological: Hyacinth purchases his (1) death by (2) mortgaging liberty (signing in the name of his mortality) in order (3) to determine his future status as a carcass. The hermeneutic recuperation of culture is, thus, replaced with a subtraction of signs: in the anarchist mortgage, the collateral, the purchase, and the set of payments collapse into one another. As soon as the ‘act upon the action’300 has been performed – i.e. the vow has been superimposed upon Hyacinth’s involuntary barroom monologue – it is up to the protagonist as a mortgage borrower to assess his standing in a calculation which is at one and the same time exact and inexhaustible.301 The uncertain anarchist debt impacts narrative discourse as much as the level of ‘story’. From the moment he is compelled to repay by receiving his instructions for an attentat, Hyacinth increasingly loses his status as presiding consciousness. As a result, the novel is divested of the extended, internally focalised interpretative processes enabled by culture. Hyacinth is removed from what Miller calls ‘intimate representation’, a process that consigns the protagonist to ‘narrative death’.302 This is demonstrated by Hyacinth’s adoption of external focalisation regarding himself: he “heard himself say these things as if he were listening to another person” (562). Finally, his subjectivity is moved outside of the scope of the narration entirely. Confronted with another reversal of values – Sholto’s commodification of Millicent in the department store – “Hyacinth gazed back at him for the same length of time – what these two pairs of eyes said to each other requires perhaps no definite mention” (585). While in the context of the discussion of Hyacinth’s terrorist engagement the Princess sententiously states that “[w]e must pay for what we do” (329), the novel ultimately deprives protagonists of the metaphorical valence of this statement.

299 J. Hillis Miller. “Lying Against Death: Out of the Loop.” Acts of Narrative. Ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. 15–30. 21. 300 Cf. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 789. 301 Cf. Graeber, Debt, 121. 302 Miller makes this argument regarding The Wings of the Dove, where, from the moment the presiding consciousness is transferred to Densher, “[i]n a sense, Milly is already dead, for the reader at least, since her consciousness has vanished once and for all from intimate representation.” J. Hillis Miller. “Lying Against Death: Out of the Loop.” Acts of Narrative. Ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003.15–30. 17.

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Payment is not figured as part of a homeostatic economy of investment and gain, or even action and consequence in any culminating, eventful reckoning. Instead, what confronts the protagonists in this ‘anarchist’ state of exception is a literal, eventless re-calculation of worth in accordance with an imposed and inaccessible standard of value. Here, James’ anti-anarchist narrative performs its ideological function. Specifically, in David Harvey’s terms, the “fragmentation latent in the money form,”303 rather than developing out of the specific conditions of market capitalism, is projected upon the anarchist conspiracy. After all, the protagonist is shown to reconfigure every other sphere in which the unfixing of social relations previously presented itself as a hermeneutic project. In this way, even wage labour could be wrested from its purely instrumental terms and invested with the standards of an imagined community of future connoisseurs appraising exquisite bookbinding. While the task of attributing value is, thus, privatised and individualised in Casamassima, the money economy is transferred in bulk to the anarchist, conspiratorial sphere. It is Hoffendahl and his cabal who take on the characteristics of “an estrangement from the product of one’s own experience, a fragmentation of social tasks and a separation of the subjective meaning of a process of production from the objective market valuation of the product” rather than “capitalist modernization.”304 Hyacinth’s cultural appreciation offers a stark contrast to this compound of anarchy and capitalism. In “incomparable abominable Venice” (396), the “cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past” (396) give rise to enduring value, imagined as independent from the material conditions that produced it. In this narrative of redemption, the hermeneutic exertions of the individual can render the “tears of the generations” (396) the precondition for collective development — the value of which, while not calculable, can be recuperated by the receptive individual. The radical conspiracy, contrary to this retrieval of aesthetic value, is identified with a money economy as such. ‘Anarchism’ effaces the intermingling of exploitation and redemptive cultural development still perceptible in Venice, Medley, or at Hyacinth’s place of work, all of which enable the individual to imagine non-commodified value to come. While culture, thus, makes it possible to trace the production of imagined worth, anarchism is connoted with calculability of value in terms beyond the individual’s understanding. Libertarian socialism thus misconstrued by the novel causes the

303 Harvey, Postmodernity, 102. 304 Harvey, Postmodernity, 103.

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“conditions of labour and life”305 – the ‘tears of the generations’ – to become imperceptible. The anarchist, narratively refashioned as the representative of a speculative economy, is associated with a mode of domination in which “[a]ll traces of exploitation are obliterated in the object.”306 As a result, the pledge to the anarchist cause emerges as a more precise analysis of labour relations than the diegetically real wage labour. For Muniment’s approval, Hyacinth literally sells his labour power in order to live, pledging the instrumental use of his body in a calculable manner in which, as opposed to the mingled cultural products hypostasised by the novel, the individual’s thoughts, needs, and feelings do not enter the equation.307 This upends Hyacinth’s previous separation of value from “rapacities,” a process of imagining a culture in which the individual is the last vestige of non-commodified value. In contrast to that redemptive individualism, the novel’s version of anarchist domination, in the manner of the power of capital over labour, relies on the alienation of the labourer/revolutionary from the product/revolutionary act and the value generated by it, which is appropriated by the nebulous conspiracy/capitalist order. Hermeneutics no longer factors into this process, which requires a “compact body, in marching order” (285) or a “poor little carcass” (329) treated in purely instrumental terms. The anarchist “engagement” (329; 401; 467; 468; 551; 572) and the associated indebtedness operate by presenting the subject with a promise of certainty – “[y]ou have never seen it yet – though you think you have” (295) – figured in terms of indeterminacy. This structure of an anarchist debt calculated on an absent balance sheet receives its second formulation at the conclusion of the Princess’ attempts to refashion herself as an anarchist about to bring down “[t]he old ferocious selfishness” (574). The simultaneity of the certainty of repayment and the uncertainty of the conditions of debt recurs as these experiments in anarchist activism are cut short by an imposition of a code of calculability.308 As in the case of the subtraction of Hyacinth’s internal focalisation, this reckoning coincides with a cancellation of her perspective. The Princess’ specific experience of gendered oppression is effaced as Muniment, upon receiving a letter from her husband, becomes the

305 Harvey, Postmodernity, 101. 306 Harvey, Postmodernity, 101. 307 Harvey, Postmodernity, 104. 308 ‘Code’ here defined as a “system of rules, agreements and rules of allocation allowing the placement and interpretation of signs and sign complexes.” My trans. Anna-Margaretha Horatschek. “Code.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze, Personen, Grundbegriffe. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2001. 86–87. 86.

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narrator of the other man’s perspective. He starts from a position of relative distance, merely protesting “I don’t see that – for writing to me” (575) in response to the Princess’ denouncement of Prince Casamassima as an “incorrigible cad” (575). Afterwards, that distance is reduced, however. Muniment still hedges his insight into the husband’s state of mind with verba credendi (“I should think, on the contrary, it would gratify him by showing you in a position of weakness and dependence” 575). Finally, however, the ‘anarchist’ shows himself wholly capable of assuming the Prince’s perspective (“He doesn’t hate you” 575). This understanding between men is a direct attack on the Princess’ politics which, as shown above, involve an analogy between the conditions of gender-based discrimination and the predicament of the working class. All of these subtleties are expunged as Muniment (to whom the Princess begins to attribute “incalculable ulterior views” 578) arrogates to himself the only valid standard of evaluation. He ascribes a restricted position to the Princess, which not only denies her claim to a share in ‘universal suffering’, but also renders her immediately calculable. Anarchism emerges as a claim to exclusive, male universality, with the female character conceived as an asset subject to “exclusive inclusion.”309 This yields a calculable set of traits with no claim to political agency. As Muniment puts it: “I count your intelligence, but I don’t count your devotion, and one is nothing without the other” (579). The suspension of demarcated identity that the novel associates with anarchism is, thus, predicated on men agreeing across ideological or political lines to render the Princess’ role specific, local, and negotiable. Between exaltation (“there has never been any one in the world, like you” 574) and calculated specification of her value, the Princess is denied a political status. It is fitting, then, that her name from James’ prequel novel, Roderick Hudson – Christina Light – is almost exclusively used by her confidante. Otherwise, she is merely ‘the Princess’, who, if she is not rendered “sacrosanct and precious” (374) by Hyacinth (despite her protestations) can be associated with a calculable ‘preciousness’ by the anarchist sphere. As a negotiable figure of cultural worth, the Princess’ value is imagined to hinge

309 Étienne Balibar. “Culture and Identity (Working Notes).” Trans. J. Swenson. The Identity in Question. Ed. John Rajchman. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 173–198. 190. Balibar uses this term to describe the “equivocation presented by certain ‘paradoxical classes’, that is, classes that manifest in the real a nonbelonging. It can be suggested that they are linked to all the forms of exclusive inclusion, or interior exclusion. [. . .] The prototype of interior exclusion, however, is Geschlecht, the difference between the sexes, or better the difference of ‘sex identities’, insofar as it is instituted as a division (and also, in all known history, as a domination).”

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on “no one in the world” being like her (574). Conversely, once subject to “exclusive inclusion”310 by Muniment, her value depends on including her in a calculation of her contribution to the cause while excluding her from any radical identity. In Agamben’s terminology, this makes her an ‘example’, the very prototype of exclusive inclusion. An example in this sense is “excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it, but on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it.”311 Similarly, the Princess is not deprived of her self-styled radical identity because she does not belong to the movement, but rather by an exact tally of the degree to which she has contributed to the nebulous ‘anarchist’ project. Previously (cf. 3.2.1), the Princess has been shown to assume that she can freely engage in self-fashioning, meeting the criteria of radical life as effortlessly as she can inhabit the aristocratic or the petit bourgeois lifestyle. However, the same uncertain indebtedness to anarchism determining Hyacinth is also applied to her; she, too, is subjected to a latent standard – a “genuine article” (295) – which controls her without thereby becoming manifest. This is a fundamental shift that spans Casamassima and Roderick Hudson alike: in both novels, whether Christina Light (the future Princess) is criticised or idealised, she is imagined to, in turn, evaluate and judge others in her own right. Contrary to this modicum of agency, under the conditions of the anarchist mode of power the Princess is subject to an impersonal code allocating worth. In the process, Muniment dissolves her claims to an anarchist identity detachable from that calculability: But presently he raised his head, showing a face still slightly embarrassed but none the less bright and frank. “I have no intention whatever of saying anything harsh or offensive to you, but since you challenge me perhaps it is well that I should let you know that I do consider that in giving your money – or, rather, your husband’s – to our business you gave the most valuable thing you had to contribute.” (579)

This code effectively reduces the complexity attributed to the Princess by excluding any of the previous, vexing questions of aesthetic appreciation, representation, and idealisation from its calculus of the valuable and the invaluable. Such a reversal replaces what Rorty calls a “focus imaginarius” associated with concepts such as “absolute truth, pure art, humanity as such”312 with a single, monetary

310 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21. 311 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22. 312 Richard Rorty. Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 195. Rorty opines that that a liberal mindset should proceed from the assumption that such a focus “is none the worse for being an invention rather than (as Kant thought it) a built-in feature of the human mind” (196).

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focus bolstered by the threat of coercive power.313 Whereas culture is at least predicated on a conspicuously mediated and uncertain allocation of value, the anarchist evaluation is no longer open to individual modification whatsoever. This process of reduction to a superimposed code reaches its conclusion when Muniment attempts to hand over her husband’s letter: “Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched,” the Princess replied. “You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked, with the quiet smile of a man who sees things as they are. (575)

Seeing things ‘as they are’ presents the counter-model to the indirectness, multiple mediation, and ‘illuminated ignorance’ (cf. 3.1) that are shown to be possible in the residual cultural spaces. While the Princess still attempts to present her value in terms of a variegated radical persona, Muniment introduces a non-negotiable metonymical template. The contiguous relation he asserts between the Princess and the money she has ‘touched’ does not require her further interpretative activity. Whereas Madame Grandoni previously asserted the impossibility of expending the Princess (“If she would only burn – if she would only burn!” 486), this logic of metonymy claims her conversion into a disposable value. Accordingly, after having read another letter by means of which the Princess aims to demonstrate her radical credentials, “he went straight to the fire and thrust the paper into it” (497), literalising the ‘burning’ expiration anticipated by her companion. Once the Princess accepts and reproduces this metonymical logic – by means of which her attributes can “burn” – she begins to describe herself in a commensurate way: without money she is “of no more value than the skin of an orange” (579). The relationship of similarity in this image is less relevant than its internal contiguity of ‘skin’ and ‘orange.’ After all, what is foregrounded is the contiguous relationship between two terms that is established in an instance of conversion. That she can be seamlessly identified with a logic of orange and skin, container and contained, presents the rhetorical equivalent to a calculation of the Princess according to her husband’s economic means. By privileging the identification of the Princess with her money, Muniment engages in a process of “demetaphorizing, or metonymizing” the multitude of “metaphoric connections between different items and orders of experiences.”314 This anarchist semiotics, thus, constitutes a counterpoint to the Princess’ metaphorical techniques. It not

313 Rorty, Contingeny, 196. 314 Harry Berger Jr. Figures of a Changing World: Metaphor and the Emergence of Modern Culture. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 46.

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only opposes her assertion of similarity between her personal history and the class condition of the people. What is more, metonymy does away with an entire politics of metaphorical substitutions which allow her to speculate on the tertium comparationis between “English society,” the “old régime” – over which, in another nested metaphor, the “French Revolution passed like a whirlwind” – and “Roman society” (313). Such equivocations, which enable the Princess to step outside of her restrictive role and critique her conditions in the first place, are proscribed by the universal equivalent and the logic of contiguity imposed during this final exchange with her erstwhile co-conspirator. It is not only the Princess who is rendered obsolete by this “day of plain truths” (579); rather, the entire differentiation of culture and anarchy as distinguishable entities is repealed. Anarchy out of bounds imposes a system of calculable contiguity. This unconstrained anarchist sphere disavows imagery. In a “demetaphorizing”315 gesture supplementing this metonymical template, Muniment clarifies that he is not “deep” (578), but “genuine” (578). This “genuine” status, in turn, is predicated on measuring whether the financial resources of the Princess have been depleted: she does not “count” (576) beyond this possibility of exploitation, as Muniment assures her: “by your own calculation, the Prince is right” (576). The process of cross-mapping the Princess’ characteristics onto calculable worth is described in terms of a metonymical “generalizable relation: a relation of representative adequacy or logical inferability.”316 Such metonymical ‘inference’ of value disallows semantic redundancy of the type described as the “excrescence” (299) of Medley, on the basis of which the intelligibility of cultural signs could be approached time and again. Upon the subtraction of this semanic surplus, no further hermeneutic activity is required.317 The anarchist accounting is encapsulated by Muniment’s final declaration of calculability directed at the Princess, who, at the end of the novel, remains the

315 This term is introduced by Esther Rashkin as a description of an “undoing or nullifying” of disavowed symbolic meaning. Esther Rashkin. Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. 43. 316 Wai Chee Dimock. “Class, Gender, Metonymy.” Rethinking Class: Literary and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 15–56. 59. According to Dimock’s critique of metonymical reasoning, “metonymy would seem to be a cognitive form especially open to cultural conditioning, since the notion of the ‘representative’ or the ‘generalizable’ invariably carry with them a silent set of normative assumptions” (59). 317 Cf. Henri Lefebvre. “Philosophy as Message.” Metaphilosophy. Trans. David Fernbach. Ed. Stuart Elden. London and New York: Verso, 2016. 245–290. 255. “Redundancy, as we know, constitutes the intelligibility of the message. At the lower limit, repetition, there is no longer a message, and yet complete intelligibility. At the upper threshold, the excess of novelty and surprise makes the message unintelligible and also destroys it as such.”

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only protagonist still holding out for a change of state in which she could perform an eventful border-crossing. Muniment reminds her that there is no longer any border to be crossed. After all, the anarchist calculus can be applied indiscriminately and non-topographically. The conspiracy is a “business” (579), predicated on an estimation of value that no longer necessitates a gap between the observer and the observed. The Princess is evaluated with the same metonymical facility that characterises Muniment’s equation of the target and the function of a political assassination: “He’s a very bad institution.” (581) According to this claim to self-evident contiguity, the Princess is immediately identifiable with her husband due to her economic dependence. In Georg Simmel’s terms, she is confronted with a negation of the “individual form of value” to the extent that “objects become interchangeable, so that money – the representative and expression of exchangeability – is the least individual creation in our material world.”318 This exchangeability not only does away with the Princess’ metaphorical strategies, but also with Hyacinth’s attempts to approach her as the receding incarnation of culture. That strategy – which notably reproduced the very aestheticisation the Princess rejects – can no longer bring forth an “absolute individual value whose significance does not lie in any general quantity of value that could also be represented by another object.” Muniment imposes just such ‘another object’ with the uncertain conspiracy and an absent balance sheet of services rendered.319 This anarchist calculus exerts a normalising function, suggesting that once the surplus of monetary value has been extracted, the Princess is defined in terms of her gender and, more importantly, her marriage status, the latter constituting her only remaining source of worth in this misogynist economy.320 Muniment introduces the monetary correlative of that same process. He turns the Princess’ attempt to overcome ‘clear-cut demarcations’ against her by imposing evaluation without the constraints of an interpreting subject, based solely on an internal logic which “withdraws objects from assimilability by the subject.”321 Anarchy out of bounds, not conceivable as alterity and not

318 Georg Simmel. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby. Trans. Tom Bottomore, David Frisby, and Kaethe Mengelberg. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 122. 319 Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 122. 320 Georg Simmel. “Zur Psychologie des Geldes.” Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes: Aufsätze und Materialien. Ed. Otthein Rammstedt et. al. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. 267–281. 280. Her radical self-fashioning indicates that, in Simmel’s terms, the “liquidation of clear-cut demarcations within a social group and the inflexibilities of caste system, guild coercion and bond with tradition is breached in every area.” 321 Georg Simmel. “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur.” Grundlagentexte Kulturphilosophie. Ed. Ralf Konersmann. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2009. 55–76. 75. My trans. Orig. quote: “Und dann offenbarte sich die tragische Entwicklung, die die Kultur an die Objektivität von Inhalten bindet,

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projected upon the outside of a cultural sphere, purports to provide an allpurpose measure of worth, which remains as unrepresentable as it claims to be universal. It is, thus, not by default that money becomes a marker of “complexity [. . .] to do with the increasing unavailability of what we used to be able to rely on in interpreting and assessing each other,”322 as Pippin’s elegiac account of Jamesian modernity would have it. The use of calculability by the anarchist sphere, which is itself placed outside of ‘interpretation’ and ‘assessment’ on the part of the protagonists, is an enforced reduction of complexity. That is, rather than an impersonal drift towards a modernity of rampant speculative ventures, in the anarchist stereotype these developments find a representative. Once more, anarchism supplies the manufactured villains responsible for the emergence of the “dual nature of money as a concrete and valued substance and, at the same time, as something that owes its significance to the complete dissolution of substance into motion and function.”323 Instead of modernity proper, this as an outgrowth of an anarchist modernity, with the features previously restricted to a radical sphere now presenting the dominant mode of power.324 Similarly to this evocation of the anarchist as an unlikely avatar of modern calculability, Casamassima also features an image of expansive radicalism to illustrate that the political sphere is no longer differentiated into identity and alterity. In response to the anarchist sphere, Hyacinth is left with a lingering “vibration” which had been imparted to his nerves two years before, of which he had spoken to his hostess at Medley – the sense, vividly kindled and never quenched, that the forces secretly arrayed against the present social order were pervasive and universal, in the air one breathed, in the ground one trod, in the hand of an acquaintance that one might touch, or the eye of a stranger that might rest a moment upon one’s own. They were above, below, within, without, in every contact and combination of life. (486)

Information transferred by a network of vibrations does not furnish signs that would be individually interpretable. After all, vibration is not associated with a

die Inhalte aber gerade durch ihre Objektivität schließlich einer Eigenlogik überantwortet und der kulturellen Assimilation durch Subjekte entzieht – diese offenbarte sich endlich an der beliebigen Vermehrbarkeit des Geistes.” 322 Pippin, Modern Moral Life, 11. 323 This “derives from the fact that money is the reification of exchange among people.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 175. 324 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 172. Fittingly for this ideological distortion, it is the anarchist Proudhon (“who wants to abolish all established forms of the state and to recognize only the free and direct interaction of individuals”) who furnishes Simmel with the paradigm of a dissolution of substance.

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stable material signifier but moves through material.325 Shelley Trower has shown that in modernism the vibratory is conceived as a “mode of pre- or nonlinguistic communication.” It informs an understanding “of the body as borderless, and it explained how energy or expression or communication could be transmitted between and beyond bodies across space and time.”326 In the preface to the New York Edition of Casamassima, James associates such transmission with a sensitive mind responding to cultural experiencess — his protagonist “would note as many things and vibrate to as many occasions” as the author “might venture to make him.”327 In the novel itself, however, such vibrational transmission is associated with the uncontainably anarchic. Instead of ‘anarchism’ as the stereotype of radicalism that could be projected to the outside of the cultural sphere, under the conditions of ‘anarchy’ no such demarcation is forthcoming — and formerly ‘radical’ characteristics become ubiquitous. As a result, the erstwhile interpreting individual of ‘culture’ submits to a radically reduced binarism: he or she can either transmit sympathetically, or else fail to pass on information. This information, in turn, is not available to the individual relay in conceptual form. Such networked anarchist modernity is encapsulated by Hyacinth’s expectations of eventful change: “it was – on these nights of intenser vibration – that Hyacinth waited for a sign” (283). This hope for sign-based certainty is misplaced: “There was a strain of heroism in these words – of heroism of which the sense was not conveyed to Muniment by a vibration in their interlocked arms” (447). In both instances, Hyacinth is shown to await a revolutionary signified which would at least attribute a transformative role to the individual conveyor of vibration. However, the vibrational model replaces this notion of performative agency with the transmission of information to be decoded elsewhere. In this mode of communication, ‘sense’ is incidental. Instead, the erstwhile individual is relegated to the role of a co-vibrating hub in an informational network. Finally, the vibrational modernity of anarchism also puts to an end the possibility of political agency. After all, the Princess is still shown to aspire to a manifest revolution, as she claims with indexical certainty: “what we are doing is at least worth trying,” she announces, while “on their head be the responsibility, on their head be the blood!” (574). Pointing towards a foundational distinction of us and them, however, is futile in the anarchist regime, in which basic

325 Cf. Shelley Trower. Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound. London: Continuum, 2012. 7. 326 Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower. Introduction. Vibratory Modernism. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 1–29. 5. 327 Henry James. “The Princess Casamassima.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. 59–78. 62.

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topological distinctions have already been dissolved: the anarchist “forces” are “above, below, within, without, in every contact and combination of life” (486). While still at Medley, the topologically uncertain “forces” (486) could be relegated to an outside. By contrast, at this late point in the novel, the protagonists are indiscriminately “‘in it’” (486). The final attempt to assume that universal forces are arrayed against a definable “social order” (486) in a differential space of culture and revolution is rendered moot. If the purportedly oppositional forces are topologically dispersed and so immersive as to obtain “in the air one breathed” (486), any notion of a sphere determined against that ‘air’ is void.328 Subjected to an elision of differentiation, social order is presented as coextensive with the ‘universal and pervasive forces’ (cf. 486). During the final accounting, the Princess is made privy to the fact that the event she anticipates has already taken place — not as the result of a teleological revolutionary movement but as an elision of demarcation between culture and anarchy.

3.2.4 Anarchist Bifurcation So far, the association of anarchism with an unconstrained mode of power has been shown to dispense with the contingent demarcations of cultural values. Concurrently, however, the novel also traces the impossibility of representing ‘the people’ on behalf of whom the assorted radicals claim to agitate. Increasingly, rather than indicating a potential for political change, the populace appears as an uncontainable crowd. Specifically, Casamassima sets up a failure to find a non-paradoxical mode of imagining the urban masses. As a result of the increasing inability to project dissolution of order upon a constitutive outside, the protagonist is shown to undergo a bifurcation of his own political position. That is, Hycinth experiences a constant oscillation between the extremes of collective revolutionary redemption and a view of urban life as “barbaric or beastlike, deprived of all the elements of (civilised) human existence: as ‘bare life.’”329 The anarchist state of exception is, thus, represented as

328 In Simmel’s terms established above, “in the monetary expression of the value of things, these lose all peculiarities and special characteristics since the only way to reduce many elements to their common denominator is to reduce them to that which is common to them all.” Natàlia Cantó Milà. A Sociological Theory of Value: Georg Simmel’s Sociological Relationism. Bielefeld: transcript, 2005. 188. 329 Sabine Schülting. Dirt in Victorian Literature: Writing Materiality. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. 82.

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a limit of understanding which, in place of the interpretative endeavours in the cultural sphere, emerges as an intractable, internal split. Immersed in an urban space in which he cannot differentiate a separate cultural identity, Hyacinth perceives himself to be confronted by “figures as foul as lepers” (481) and – adopting the very language that disparaged him as a “rat” at the outset of the novel – a “planet overgrown with such vermin” (481). He struggles to come up with a symbolic fiction of the crowds capable of structuring his experience.330 This problem is only resolved when he imagines the people “to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire” (481). This fantasy is shown to emerge from the attempt to purge the chiliastic language of revolution from any concrete class involved in its enactment. As a result of this purification, the purported beneficiaries of social change can only be imagined at the precise moment of their annihilation. Such a conjunction of liberation and destruction proves intractable: the attempt to distinguish the “[j]oy, exultation in the thought of surrendering one’s self to the wave of revolt” (478) from the very subjects by whom and on behalf of whom it would be initiated is shown to produce a political imaginary based on the negation of any perceptible trait. The effort to distil an imagery of social change without a corresponding social referent, thus, embroils the protagonist’s revolutionary imaginary in a paradox: the more he attempts to distinguish a popular alterity from revolutionary exultation, the more self-referentially closed does his imagery become. The process of imagining revolution, thus, confronts the protagonist with a reiteration of his failure to do so — and with his inability to draw a distinction. Derek Brewer attributes to Hyacinth (and, by extension, Henry James) the “power to see both sides of the question [. . .] so well that the only action available to him is self-destruction, which is itself a symbolic statement, the only work of art available to him.”331 Contrary to this notion of an irreconcilable deadlock, the cultural residue in the novel – the theatre, Medley, even the ethical demands posed by his parents’ faces – has shown that the protagonist is able to discern “both sides,” and negotiate them productively, as long as these sides are clearly distinguishable from each other. As soon as this possibility of drawing a boundary dissolves, however, the protagonist is confronted with an

330 Cf. Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954. Trans. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York and London: Norton, 1975. 230. Lacan describes this “function of the symbolic” as “the pact which links the subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts.” 331 Derek Brewer. Introduction. The Princess Casamassima. By Henry James. London: Penguin, 1977. 7–30. 17.

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unsolvable problem of signification: Hyacinth can either imagine a revolution of “sun-touched crests of billows” (478) which annihilates his personal perspective in a communal endeavour requiring no further “testimony” (478); or, alternatively, he can perceive himself to be surrounded by Hogarthian, subhuman caricatures who “appeared to reek with gin and filth” (481).332 Revolutionary semiotics are presented as a paradoxical double bind: the more an upheaval is imagined as an aestheticised “tremendous tide” (478), the less can it include political actors capable of bringing about such change. The tenor of the metaphor – the ‘mass’ of the people who are initially compared to the tide – has to be deleted to enable continued external reference to the ‘transcendental’ revolutionary sphere. This deletion is a matter of literalising the metaphorical. That is to say: instead of continuing to signify a relationship of similarity to the people, the metaphorical vehicle of the tide is turned into “another deluge” (481), which is imagined to sweep away the unruly relity of diegetically real urban crowds. Thus, the “indifferent” (478) creation of metaphors of revolution can only take place on the condition of its tautological redoubling, the ‘deluge’ standing in for the ‘tide’ rather than running the risk of indicating a referent outside of these self-enclosed language games. Such impasses are already indicated by the way in which these images are prefigured by their previous deployment in the novel. Before the ‘deluge’ is introduced to tautologically preserve the purity of the ‘tide’, the term is featured in a straightforward denunciation of ‘the people’: they are found in “public-houses, with their deluge of gaslight, their glittering brass and pewter” (157). The imagery of deficient revolutionary subjects, then, recurs in the exalted image of revolution. This necessitates a deferral of radical aesthetics, as the populace remains an ineradicable supplement of its every metaphorical articulation. The system of images turns on itself – the deluge supplanting the tide, the people erased by the deluge – without yielding either a straightforward alterity of the populace or a lofty epiphany of revolution unencumbered by a popular referent. To compound this semiotic crisis, the people excised from the metaphorical revolution are themselves associated with an uncontainable metonymy. They

332 Cf. Bradley Deane. Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 98. Deane interprets Hyacinth’s position in terms of the socio-economic uncertainties of late-Victorian artistic production. “Like James, Hyacinth seeks to negotiate some form of social engagement that would be neither a submission to an undifferentiated vulgarity nor a personally vitiating and ethically suspect isolation.” The bifurcation between two modes of figuring ‘the people’ does away with such an equilibrium.

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are, in fact, contagiously contiguous.333 Hyacinth’s process of coming to terms with his class devolves into a syntagm conforming to (as well as literalising) the “‘contagious’ magic”334 Jakobson attributes to the metonymic ‘orientation’. That is, the protagonist perceives himself to be “elbowed” (481) by “lepers” (481) who are “saturated” with zeugmatically linked “alcohol and vice” (481). These metonymic chains extend further, to the rich who, rather than being systematically implicated in the unequal distribution of resources, become contaminated by their failure to intervene: “If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich, who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference, and only shifted the shame.” (481) The characteristics attributed to the populace by its association with the poor is transmitted further, so that the Malthusian terror of an “overgrown” world is applied to the ruling classes. They are imagined as “congested,” thus taking over the characteristics of an “overgrown” world exceeding its capacity to hold a surfeit of unsymbolisable people. Amidst these chains of contagion, the protagonist cannot uphold his distinctions: the privileged are debased by sheer dint of their linear, syntagmatic association with the poor. The rich “made no difference” (481) and as a result cannot be imagined as constitutively ‘different’ from the surplus populations.335 The image of the ‘tide’ makes a return in this effacement of differentiations: confronted with aristocratic Captain Sholto’s sexual innuendo, “his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled and eluded him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had entertained and gratified him.” (278) The most apocalyptic register in the novel is consistently reserved not for revolution in and of itself, but rather for the impossibility of containing its traits. The ensuing semiotic crisis demonstrates increasing awareness that not only will no authoritative figure step in and ‘make

333 Here used in its basic sense of a “relation between lexemes that belong to the same semantic, logic, cultural, or situational sphere.” Hadumod Bußman. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 247. 334 Roman Jakobson. “Two Types of Language,” 73. Jakobson attributes this term to the metonymic pole of the rites described by anthropologist James Frazer, the metaphorical one constituting “imitative” magic. 335 Cf. Krista Ratcliffe. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.” College Composition and Communication 51 (1999). 195–224. 203. The capacity for the coexistence of mutually exclusive traits within one identity which Krista Ratcliffe attributes to metonymy, thus, becomes destabilising rather than enabling; the “metonymic coexistence of ideas” (203) emerges as an entanglement of revolution and contagious immersion in the crowd. This leads to unsolvable paradoxes instead of productive renegotiation of a sense of self.

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a difference’, but that it increasingly becomes impossible to draw a difference at all. The ‘tremendous tide’ thus imperils the very process by means of which illusions of cultural value were previously set apart from an undifferentiated environment.336 The cultural sphere, for all the obvious fabrication by means of which it is eked out, still allows for “the finest discriminations, in the perception of beauty and the hatred of ugliness” (157). By contrast, the problem besetting the protagonist’s revolutionary imaginary is a failure to discriminate the ‘ugly’ and the ‘beautiful’, with the “sun-touched crest of billows” indissociable from the metonymical expansiveness of the people. The attempt to encompass the populace in a relationship of similarity or dissimilarity – which would, according to the metaphorical logic of culture, still necessitate the interpreting presence of the subject – is replaced by a metonymical template of contagion. No longer can culture be demarcated against a popular Other, thus furnishing “at best a good dream and at least a necessary fiction [of] such ‘identity of meaning’.”337 The production of revolutionary images that takes the place of such distinctions culminates in two semantics, neither of which can be functionalised as relational alterity. The “wave of revolt” (478) suffuses Hyacinth in an undifferentiated metaphor, while the attempt to set himself apart from the people is accompanied by a metonymical inclusion in their (denigrated and contagious) ranks. As a result of this twofold breakdown of demarcation, the protagonist’s political agency is attenuated. Either he is immediately incorporated into a mass movement usurping his subject position; or he has to furnish imagery in which he condemns to destruction the very people from whom he unsuccessfully attempts to extricate himself. With this dilemma, Casamassima denies the possibility of imagining extensive social change. In any radical vision, the novel’s critique goes, the people are a phenomenal blot that has to be extinguished in order not to mar the aesthetics of insurrection. Both sides of the erstwhile revolutionary signifier exclude each other: the “tremendous tide” (478) achieves its homogeneity by excluding revolutionary subjects, while the contagious urban crowds can only be placed under one interpretative frame if they are, at the same time, consigned to imminent destruction. Revolutionary imagery is at odds with itself: the impossibility of representing the people as political actors leads either to an epiphanic vision

336 This process finds its final tableau as the representatives of the aristocracy and the embodiment of a vital urban populace are united in commodified sexuality; Millicent, “draped in the last new thing” exhibits a dress for Captain Sholto, who “rubbed his lower lip with a walking-stick” (585). 337 Adrian Poole. “Identity of Meaning.” Identity. Ed. Giselle Walker and Elisabeth LeedhamGreen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 9–25. 11.

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of revolution without revolutionary subjects or to tropes of vermin to be eradicated. For all its distortions of contemporary radical politics, this account of revolution can be seen to constitute the narrative’s anti-anarchist hypothesis: revolutionary thought leads to paradoxes and representational impasses which erase the possibility of drawing the very distinctions on which identity – both personal and collective – rests.

3.2.5 Anarchist Carceral The bifurcation of revolution – in the course of which ‘the people’ appear as simultaneously exalted and contagious – does not exhaust the dispersal of anarchist traits resulting from the unsuccessful demarcation of a cultural sphere. In addition to precluding the stable images of the populace desired by the protagonist, anarchism in Casamassima stands in for the coercive state apparatus. Specifically, the anarchic dissolution of boundaries emerges as an analogue to the carceral template described at the outset of the novel. Carceral society as a “proliferation of social controls defined through a continuum of behavioural correction that extends beyond the wall of the prison”338 indeed provides the very model of what is ultimately described as the anarchist mode of power. As the state and anarchy collapse into one another, the state of exception (as a mode of power predicated on the loss of distinctions) confronts the protagonists throughout the storyworld. The prison template offers a material complement to this increasingly ubiquitous exercise of power. After all, it functions on the principle of an effacement of topological, topographical, and semantic distinctions, suspending protagonists in states of perpetual uncertainty in which their status cannot be ascertained. This carceral model is established at the very beginning of the novel. The representative of the prison system, the depiction of the prison itself, and its effect on the protagonists prefigure the indeterminacy and effacement of boundaries that the novel pins on ‘anarchism’. Not only does the discussion of radical strategy explicitly revolve around the use of these carceral spaces, but the conspirators can also be shown to adapt the main function associated with the prison: it reorganises space, so that its effect is no longer that of a bounded disciplinary regime but the production of an uncertain, borderless penitentiary space. Thus, by presenting the carceral regime in anarchist terms, the novel

338 Roy Coleman. “Carceral Society.” Dictionary of Prisons and Punishment. Ed. Yvonne Jewkes and Jamie Bennett. Devon: Willan, 2008. 32–34. 32.

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can represent state power and social control, yet project these strategies onto political radicals. While statist and anarchist power function similarly, the novel can uphold the pretence that it is, after all, concerned with radicalism rather than an emerging set of ‘social controls’. In the following, I will briefly outline the characteristics of the prison regime in order to afterwards demonstrate its transfer to an ‘anarchist’ mode of power. 3.2.5.1 Carceral Template The template for the effacement of distinctions which comes to be identified with an unbounded anarchist sphere is initially not provided by a figure of political radicalism. Rather, it is enacted by the protagonist presented as the very incarnation of the law, namely the prison officer Mrs Bowerbank.339 The arrival of this figure of authority, who comes to Lomax Place to suggest that Hyacinth should visit his dying mother in prison, is predominantly focalised through Miss Pynsent (‘Pinnie’). As shown above, the dressmaker, a former co-worker of Hyacinth’s mother, has created a private myth regarding her adopted son’s aristocratic origins. In the face of the prison official, this set of assumptions making up her symbolic identity is subjected to sustained destabilisation. As Pinnie’s assumptions about Hyacinth’s lineage are dismantled, the dressmaker is shown to expect a compensatory, alternative order to be imposed from an elevated position in a vertical arrangement of ‘high’ and ‘low’ — a spatial semantics to which, after all, the representative of the law refers constantly. Instead, she is confronted by a wholesale effacement of distinctions, culminating in the prison itself as a veritable model of a sphere in which inside and outside are rendered as indistinct as life and death. The carceral space encapsulates an exercise of power which dispenses with the allocation of identity and alterity. Rather than outright coercion, the effect of the prison is figured as implicit authority predicated on the suspension of explicit demands. As the turnkey puts it to the overwhelmed Miss Pynsent: “You needn’t bring the child at all, unless you like. There’s many a one that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion” (59). It is this absence of ‘compulsion’, however, which renders this paradigm all the more inescapable. Thus, as a

339 Cf. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2008. Miller points out that both the enforcement and the internalisation of social norms are gendered in the novel. “Social order is maintained, the novel suggests, through systematic effeminization at every level of organization, and femininity functions here as a metaphor for the kind of individuality demanded by modern social systems and highly structured ‘maternalistic’ bureaucratic institutions.” (46)

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consequence of the prison official’s insistence, the dressmaker is shown to not only abide by, but also feel guilty for following Mrs Bowerbank’s noncompulsory compulsion. This guilt, also figured as a debt to be repaid, continues to inflect Pinnie’s actions. Her pretensions to grandeur imputed to Hyacinth are removed; she is not, however, granted a functional alternative. Rather, the prison emerges as a template of ‘indistinction’ which can neither be assimilated into a concept of identity nor projected onto an excluded sphere of alterity. The main function of the prison is its capacity to confront the protagonists with an absence of discernible instances of authority that could establish a clearcut order. This role is initially invested in the prison official, in whom state power is presumed to reside. Presented as “closely connected with the administration of justice” (56), the turnkey incarnates what Deleuze describes as the ‘dogmatic image of thought’. That is, her worldview requires both the “identity of a Self”340 provided by ‘common sense’ and a means of coordinating it with an object, in this case the delinquent body of Hyacinth’s mother. This coordination is enabled by “good sense,” which allows common sense to “point beyond itself towards another, dynamic instance, capable of determining the indeterminate object as this or that, and of individualising the self situated in this ensemble of objects.”341 In the novel, such ‘good sense’ is provided by the warden’s selfproclaimed expertise, by means of which she can not only establish distinctions but also pronounce them invalid. Both operations are in effect as she ventures a swift categorisation of Hyacinth: “‘If it’s your parents that settle your station, the child hasn’t much to be thankful for,’ Mrs Bowerbank went on, in the manner of a woman accustomed to looking facts in the eye.” (56) The prison official argues in favour of an unalterable identity — Hyacinth’s mother is “low” (57), “at the very bottom” (57), placed in a position in which class judgment, moral judgment and gendered judgment combine in an image of a ‘fallen woman’. Insight into this ‘low’ state is both restricted (“What does such a piece as that know about fathers?” 57) and, to the trained eye, immediately obvious (“I was there when she came in and I know to what she had sunk” 57). Even as the warden indicates a straightforward distinction between topological and semantic spheres – “‘[a]t the very top, poor thing! Well, she’s at the very bottom now’” (57) – she cancels the event of the subsequent fall by denying that there ever was a point at which “she wasn’t low” (57). This simultaneous assertion and effacement of judgments

340 Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 236. 341 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 236.

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enabled by the turnkey’s dogmatic image of thought creates the impression of pre-determined categories — yet never makes these explicit. The ‘eschatology’ of good sense appears to be on the cusp of becoming manifest,342 which places on Pinnie the burden of inferring its terms. In order to avoid judgment by this supposed arbiter of order, thus, the dressmaker attempts to pre-empt authoritative pronouncements to come. This voluntary submission leads to a perpetual “fluttering wish to assent to every suggestion made by her visitor, whom she regarded as a high and rather terrible personage” (53). Literalising the notion of an all-seeing arbiter of law, the warden is expected to provide an immediate ascription of identity: “Mrs Bowerbank was very slow, and considered her so long before replying, that she felt herself to be, in an alarming degree, in the eye of the law” (56). This sense of being seen by the penal representative counters Pinnie’s own account of her charge’s origin, which up to this point provided intimations of splendour so tentative as to be summarily traced by the narrator. This personal creed, inaccassible to any internal focalisation, adds up to “a certain tall imaginative structure which she had been piling up for years. Even as she heard it crash around her she couldn’t forbear the attempt to save at least some of the material” (57). As opposed to the immediacy of the “eye of the law,” Pinnie’s private myth allows her to continually adduce evidence for Hyacinth’s status as the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. To this end, she fits ephemeral observations into a secret origin which never coalesces into a fully formed, explicit narrative: “The boy proved neither a dunce nor a reprobate; but what endeared him to her most was her conviction that he belonged, ‘by the left hand’, as she had read in a novel.” (58) This private faith, however, cannot withstand “Mrs Bowerbank’s overwhelming logic” (58). From Pinnie’s perspective, the warden is an arbiter of sovereign demarcation. And indeed, by consistently excluding herself from the sphere she delineates for delinquent alterity and respectable identity, Mrs Bowerbank purports to guarantee hard and fast distinctions from a position not beholden to either side. This logic is bolstered by ocular proof, by “looking facts in the face” (56), and comes with the trappings of commonsense rationality. As a result of its unassailable ‘dogmatic image of thought’, the act of “letting in the cold light of the penal system on a dear, dim little theory” (57) imposes binary certainties on Pinnie’s “imaginative structure” (57). The novel, however, casts doubt on the Bowerbank system and its claim to determine an adaptable heterostereotype of the “foreigner that carries a knife” (57)

342 “A distribution is in conformity with good sense when it tends to banish difference from the distributed. [. . .] Good sense is by nature eschatological, the prophet of a final compensation and homogenisation.” Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 224.

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against Pinnie as a “respectable little body like you” (57). While grandiloquently asserting the identification of norms and a disavowal of the abject perpetrator, the turnkey is shown to conflate oppositions rather than providing the order of distinctions that she is initially seen to incarnate. This collapse of determinable identity and alterity is already initiated when the classifications imposed by the turnkey are reified topographically rather than topologically.343 Once the abstract distinction of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is replaced with the diegetic prison, the carceral space becomes unbounded. It does not, thus, effect the announced separation of an excluded alterity “at the very bottom” (57). Instead of reifying the previous distinction of respectable and delinquent bodies in an “expression of the righteous forces of society” (79), the prison is presented as a conceptual and spatial sprawl: the “penitentiary struck her as about as bad and wrong as those who were in it” (79). It features no central “face” resembling the “righteous forces” enforced by Mrs Bowerbank. Indeed, the prison is not initially seen whatsoever. Rather, the view of the carceral space is at first attributed to the narrator and only in a second step focalised by the protagonists. This interjects a delay between the presence of the prison sprawl and its visual apperception: “they came to a big, dark building with towers, which they would know as soon as they looked at it” (79). The carceral space eludes spatial determination here, since ‘knowing’ it remains a future state even upon arrival. In this, the prison resembles what Foucault calls “series that have neither beginning nor end.”344 These, however, are not only traced inwards – by means of the resemblance of the penitentiary to “those who were in it” (79) – but also outwards: it threw a blight over the whole place and made the river look pale and poisonous, and the opposite bank, with its protrusion of long-necked chimneys, unsightly gasometers and deposits of rubbish, wear the aspect of a region at whose expense the jail had been populated (80).

The series of spatial determinations cannot be contained. In this unbounded space, the inmates resemble the prison which, in turn, submits the entire environment to its regime of similitude. As opposed to the demarcations pronounced by Mrs Bowerbank, these nested resemblances cancel classificatory boundaries. 343 Cf. Andreas Mahler. “Topologie.” Handbuch Literatur und Raum. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 17–29. 344 “The similar develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another.” By means of series of this type, it becomes possible to suggest a presupposition of a “primary reference that prescribes and classes” as a matter of similitude. Michel Foucault. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. and ed. James Harkness. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1982. 44.

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The river is barely a topographical border (it, too, looks “poisonous and foul,” thus rendering it another link in the chain of similitude), let alone a semantic one. Instead of setting apart the alterity of the “wicked” and the “low,” the surrounding industrial wasteland is shown to reproduce the carceral system sprawling outwards, adducing contiguity to its production of chains of similarity. Thus, the prison model reverses the function of ‘discipline’, which, as Deleuze put it, effects an “organization of vast spaces of enclosure” in which “[t]he individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another.”345 James’ carceral space, by contrast, is open, uncontained, and distributes its characteristics indiscriminately. The prison does not effect a concentration within a materially reified interior but produces a simultaneous intermingling and expansion of inside and outside. This carceral sprawl implicates its objects not by fixing a position, but rather by rendering moot the question of positionality. As a consequence, the disciplinary function of the prison fails. Its exertion of an “educating and moralising power”346 as suggested by Mrs Bowerbank’s initial dogmatic image of thought is replaced by an expansive space, in which the position inside or outside of an ordered space is not clarified, neither spatially nor semantically. Thus, when Miss Pynsent “observed to her guest” (56), this shows that she is not merely submitted to the normative gaze of an all-seeing, sovereign “orb” (56). Rather, her own manner of ‘observing’ implicates her in a coproduction of judgment in accordance with absent standards. As a result of the expansion and indistinction of the prison, it becomes an objective correlative to this withdrawn decree. Consequently, “the dressmaker felt rebuked in the past as well as in the present” (57). Instead of visiting the prison, Pinnie is convinced that throughout her life she has, figuratively, always already been there. She is retroactively judged by the normative authority so uncertainly encoded in the prison — without being apprised of the grounds for any ‘rebuke’. This carceral suspension of difference no longer requires the ocularcentrism initially associated with its agent.347 Contrary to Mrs Bowerbank’s allseeing “orb” (56), the prison is characterised by its “windowless walls” (79). In 345 Gilles Deleuze. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 102 (1992). 3–7. 3. 346 As per Andrew Johnson’s analysis of the “carceral society” in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Andrew Johnson. “Foucault: Critical Theory of the Police in the Neoliberal Age.” Theoria 61 (2014). 5–29. 7. 347 Cf. Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1994. Regarding French theory of surveillance and control (particularly by Foucault and Debord), Jay notes that “the ocularcentrism of those who praised the ‘nobility of sight’ was not so much rejected as reversed in value. Vision was still the privileged sense, but what that privilege produced in the modern world was damned as almost entirely pernicious.” (383)

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a similar mode, Pinnie is shown to think that “if it was hard to believe anything so blind and deaf and closely fastened would relax itself to let her in, there was a dreadful premonitory sinking of the heart attached to the idea of its taking the same trouble to let her out” (80). Whereas Jennifer Turner defines the prison in terms of heterotopic space, attributing to it “binary geographies between inside and outside [which] register as ideological obfuscations that hide the crucial role of prisons,”348 James’ early modernist iteration of carceral space cannot be imagined in terms of a border-crossing between bounded spaces at all. Entering and leaving are both ‘troubling’, thus adding a further “weird space”349 to the carceral sprawl and the decades-spanning rebuke. In its blurring of differentiations between the carceral space and its outside, the prison is imagined as anti-panoptic. After all, Foucault’s account of the panopticon stresses its production of permanent visibility, which renders superfluous the enclosure, deprivation of light, and hiddenness constitutive of earlier carceral modes.350 The prison in Casamassima initially – for all its “walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries” (82) – reproduces these earlier carceral forms, appearing as a ‘dungeon’ rather than a panopticon. After all, instead of panoptic individualisation it features “vast interior dimness” (82), hides as much as it reveals, and renders the inmates “scarcely female” (82) rather than immediately classifiable. This indistinct status extends to the image of Hyacinth’s mother, which Pinnie extrapolates by staring at the prison from the (ostensible) outside. Instead of apprehending the penitential space, it is shown to disclose its meaning outright, as a matter of an immediate relation of contiguity. Staring at the outside of the prison equals meeting its inhabitant, with no discernible mediation inbetween these positions. The movement towards the delinquent does not involve an eventful border-crossing but is already prefigured entirely by this identification of the building with its inhabitant — a metonymical immediacy that leaves no semantic gap to overcome.

348 Jennifer Turner. “‘No Place Like Home’: Boundary Traffic through the Prison Gate.” Placing the Border in Everyday Life. Ed. Reece Jones and Corey Johnson. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. 227–250. 228. 349 J. Hillis Miller. The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2011. 18. In his analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s model of community, Miller describes a topography that resembles James’ carceral: “a certain weird space, in which the topographical terms are withdrawn as soon as they are proffered. The limit, for example, is not an edge, border, or frontier, since there is nothing that can be confronted beyond it.” 350 “In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full light and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.

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She was alive, in that huge, dark tomb, and it seemed to Miss Pynsent that they had already entered into relation with her. They were near her, and she knew it; in a few minutes she would taste the cup of the only mercy (except the reprieve from hanging!) she had known since her fall. A few, a very few minutes would do it, and it seemed to Miss Pynsent that if she should fail of her charity now the watches of the night, in Lomax Place, would be haunted with remorse – perhaps even with something worse. There was something inside that waited and listened, something that would burst, with an awful sound, a shriek, or a curse, if she were to lead the boy away. She looked into his pale face for a moment, perfectly conscious that it would be vain for her to take the tone of command; besides, that would have seemed to her shocking. (80)

This carceral phenomenology does not set aside demarcated spaces for the confinement of what is labelled deviant. It rather features the production of a “relation” that is reproduced by the individual. Instead of the (hierarchical, organised) norm presumed by Pinnie, what she associates with the mother is a reduction to what Agamben calls ‘bare life’. This term describes the politicisation of biological life by its exposure to sovereign violence. It emerges as the “‘zone of indistinction’ [. . .] produced in the division of biological, nutritive life and political life.”351 This is not simply an exclusion but, to use Agamben’s paradoxical formulation, an inclusive exclusion that also characterises the state of exception more generally. Like the exception from a rule, bare life is produced by a sovereign power displacing an extant order. Although Agamben often formulates this in terms of suspended law, there are a number of ordering fictions which, upon their removal, give specific contours to the exercise of boundless power over life. What James’ carceral system adds to this is its emphasis on the very expectation that an ordering rule will be authoritatively reinstated and mediated. It is this particular ordering fiction which, once it is withdrawn, contributes to the possibility of “life taken without the law’s authority or mediation.”352 Consequently, for all its initial manifest visibility in the figure of Mrs Bowerbank, the carceral system functions by withdrawing its application, ‘unconditionally exposing’ those who expect a normative injunction “to a death threat.”353 That is, the prison does not exclude transgressors in an eventful border-crossing that would only serve to make the existence of a normative sphere perceptible and representable. Instead, the “law 351 Catherine Mills. “Supposing the Impossibility of Silence and of Sound, of Voice: Bataille, Agamben, and the Holocaust.” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Ed. Andrew Norris. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. 198–221. 219, n. 5. 352 Peter Fitzpatrick. “Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law.” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Ed. Andrew Norris. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. 49–73. 49. 353 Giorgio Agamben. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3.

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presupposes the nonjuridical (for example mere violence in the state of nature) as that with which it maintains itself in a potential relation.”354 Any set of norms is, thus, defined by the possibility of its own suspension, a self-effacement only possible if it replaces the relational complementarity of exclusion (alterity) and inclusion (identity) with a threshold state in which they can no longer be told apart. Whoever is relegated to this status remains in a continuous relationship with the figure of sovereignty that banished her; she is “at every instant exposed to an unconditional threat of death.”355 This exposure is not the result of a speech act, a judgment, or a punishment: whatever happens to bare life in the spaces of exception marks only the continued dissolution of any “rights, free will, and social contracts,” since “from the point of view of sovereignty only bare life is authentically political.”356 It is, thus, not even the case that a previous, stable political identity is dissolved in this model. The production of ‘bare life’, instead, functions on the presupposition that any claim to an identity bolstered by rights and the certainties of an ordered polity is always already subject to its potential suspension. As a result, any particular way of life becomes a matter of conditional, revokable ‘identity-effects’ which preclude a foundationally bolstered self. As a result of the withdrawal of the expected figure of authority, Pinnie is shown to “already” have “entered into relation” (80) in the above passage. The novel, thus, emphasises the reproduction of the state of exception in and by the individual. Pinnie is compelled to construct an epistemology of exception herself rather than ‘being excepted’ by manifest, sovereign fiat. Instead of a residual assurance of a norm (or else its suspension by a figure of authority in an act of disclosure) the “relation” is with the dressmaker herself. She is forced to reimagine the “reprieve from hanging” originally extended to Hyacinth’s mother — and, in the process, to accept a topological imagery of the “fall” and “mercy.” In supplementing the “mercy” of incarceration as a temporary respite from death with the “mercy” of presenting the mother with her son, Pinnie internally reproduces and applies a language of indirect compulsion. This oblique imposition shows itself when she “cannot take the tone of command” (80) and thus initially fails to convince Hyacinth to see his mother. She cannot compel him with arguments focussed on a determinate intention on the part of the subject (“If we are kind we shan’t mind it’s disagreeable” 80) or the object of their intervention (“She is not bad now; it has all been washed away – it has been expiated” 81). Rather than issuing a command or providing

354 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21. 355 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 183. 356 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106.

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a foundation in either ethical intent or theological atonement, the type of power co-produced by Pinnie – in line with the sentimental and edifying reconciliation to be produced by taking the child to prison – requires Hyacinth to adjust his actions to the imputed inner state of the prisoner: “‘If she likes you, that will be enough.’” (81) In the process, the distinction between psychological and carceral space becomes ambiguous. As the internally focalised account anticipates the consequences of refusing the turnkey’s demand, not only is the precise nature of the “something inside” (80) that would break forth not specified. What is more, it is also not certain if the ‘inside’ refers to the protagonist’s interior or else marks a return to the spatial interior of the mother’s space in the “tomb” (80). As a result of the constant disavowals of punitive certainty, Hyacinth’s mother, who, as a “wicked, low foreigner” (152) is to furnish a figure of alterity, is presented as both dead and alive: “She looked unnatural to Amanda Pynsent, and terribly old; a speechless, motionless creature, dazed and stupid” (84). Her “strange, fixed eyes” are “the only portion of all her wasted person in which there was still any appearance of life” (84). Inclusion of the type claimed by Mrs Bowerbank’s “gloomy impartiality” (59) depends on the simultaneous exclusion of a body in a state of suspension, its status rendered indistinct. “[T]hat which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded,” as Agamben puts it in his account of the state of exception.357 An ‘inclusive exclusion’ of this type is prepared by Mrs Bowerbank’s scene-setting for the sentimental reconciliation of Hyacinth and his mother. In its Jamesian iteration, then, the “ungrounded legislation”358 of exception is not literally a legal matter, but rather functions in accordance with aesthetic classifications of an object of observation. In keeping with her co-option, Pinnie contributes to this sentimental preparation by emphasising that it is Hyacinth’s “being so attractive that made it a kind of sin not to gratify the poor woman, who, if she knew what he looked like to-day, wouldn’t forgive his adoptive mamma for not producing him” (63). ‘Producing’ him, first and foremost, refers to the simple act of presenting the son in the carceral setting in order to give an appreciable narrative structure to the proceedings:

357 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46. 358 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46. “Forbidden action, marked by sacredness, is not, however, simply excluded; rather it is now only accessible for certain people and according to determinate rules. In this way, it furnishes society and its ungrounded legislation with the fiction of a beginning.”

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“Certainly, in her place, I should go off easier if I had seen them curls which brought her to her feet,” Mrs Bowerbank declared, with a flight of maternal imagination which brought her to her feet, while Miss Pynsent felt that she was leaving her dreadfully ploughed up, and without any really fertilising seed having been sown. (63)

Just as previously it was defined as a reprieve from hanging (cf. 80), the value of life is now evoked in terms of the proper staging of death. The status accorded to Pinnie in this “maternal imagination” (63) reinforces the impression of a disavowed link between the position of authority and “that which is excluded from the community.”359 She is to “produce” the body required for the sentimental carceral performance preceding the mother’s death, yet is herself excluded as a conspicuously non-maternal body. As Pinnie is left “without a really fertilizing seed having been sown” (64), her relevance is limited to “producing” the sentimentalised body of her adoptive son. The dressmaker, in this way, is excluded from a shared status as ‘mothers’ furnishing a last vestige of shared identity between the jailer and her victim. If the main function of the warden’s visit is the production of “life that has legal significance only as a living organism, not as a political subject,”360 the ‘production’ of the maternal allows for a tacit connection between the representative of rule and the controlled body under the auspices of that same procedure. Motherhood as a construction to be reinforced and shared or else suspended and ‘ploughed up’ at any time allows for a conception of “the individual as a simple living body” — a body that is, surreptitiously, “what is at stake in a society’s political strategies.”361 The allocation and suspension of identities is rapid: in this passage, it is the excluded figure of bare life that is normalised, as her reactions to her son are anticipated to be a ‘natural’ way of ‘going off’. At the same time, Pinnie is recast as latently abnormal, yet, in turn, reintroduced into the normative as an appropriately docile “respectable little body” (57) of contented working-class life. Rather than an authoritative demarcation of identity and alterity, the carceral functions as a “plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality,” in which “the operation of normality consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality.”362 Instead of a grand, sovereign power founding itself on the exclusion of bare life, James’ carceral figure is produced by blurring the line

359 Giorgio Agamben. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P. 105. “[T]hat which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded, and it is assumed by the society as an immemorial, and yet memorable, past.” 360 Amy Swiffen. Law, Ethics and the Biopolitical. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. 13. 361 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 3. 362 Foucault, Security, 63.

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between norm and aberration. There is no gesture of exclusion, since identity and alterity are placed in a relationship of paradoxical simultaneity. This finds its equivalent in a spatial structure that makes it impossible to tell apart inclusion and exclusion. As a result, elimination from society coincides with inclusion as a mother; meanwhile, exclusion from the death sentence is figured as an inclusion into the carceral space. Topographically, meanwhile, seeking to enter a prison reveals that its inside can barely be set apart from its outside. 3.2.5.2 Carceral Anarchy The analysis is now in a position to trace the projection of a carceral mode of indeterminate control onto the radical sphere. Specifically, the prison template prefigures the representation of ‘anarchist’ power in the novel. In the shift towards indirect modes of coercion, the ‘exclusive inclusion’ of the carceral primes the reader to suspect any dichotomous formulation of a conflict between unitary state power and a revolutionary counterforce. Indeed, the narrative increasingly denies the very notion of any antagonism whatsoever, class-based or otherwise. What we learn about the anarchist mode of determination, instead, suggests that it functions by impeding any act of drawing a distinction. The ensuing model of power, like the carceral sprawl, makes the dissolution of antagonisms contingent on the subjects’ own attempts at self-disclosure — on assertions of identity which, upon their suspension, leave no recourse to illusions of communal identity. In other words: the more protagonists work towards a speech act that would clarify their position, the more are they suspended in states of exception in which neither equivalence nor opposition can be discerned. While an untenable view of a revolutionary ‘tide’ has already been shown to devolve into paradox in Hyacinth’s attempt to position himself vis-à-vis the populace (cf. 3.2.4), such self-defeating rhetoric of antagonism reaches its apogee in the Princess’ extended assertions of conflict: Is everything that is gathering force, underground, in the dark, in the night, in little hidden rooms, out of sight of governments and policemen and idiotic ‘statesmen’ – heaven save them! – is all this going to burst forth some fine morning and set the world on fire? (200)

This notion of the diegesis as a vertically structured space in which ocularcentric authority has to be evaded by clandestine revolutionary endeavours is already dispelled as Pinnie and Hyacinth attempt to find the prison. The dressmaker plans her itinerary by asking “policemen, conductors of omnibuses, and small shopkeepers, till they came to a big, dark building with towers, which they would know as soon as they looked at it” (79). Policemen do not, as Pinnie assumes, interpellate the individual by means of “sight.” In order to normalise

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ideology, ‘interpellation’, as conceived by Louis Althusser, functions by an individual’s recognition that the policeman’s hail “was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).”363 Instead of being called to account (which, after all, could be complied with or resisted), the main task of James’ explicit representatives of state authority consists in pointing towards the Newgate towers. The policeman is a mere conduit indicating the space of dispersed, topologically uncertain power, which, in turn, does not interpellate but renders uncertain any claim to stable identity. This absence of explicit, coercive power remains a constant. When, towards the end of the novel, Hyacinth is unmoored in an urban space he can no longer interpret, he feels himself confronted with “terrible, mysterious, far-off stars, which appeared to him more than ever to see everything and to tell nothing.” The objective correlative of this distant gaze is provided by a policeman who “creaked along on the opposite side of the way, looking across at him as he passed” (554). The space overseen by the police, then, is not one of perpetual surveillance but rather one of ‘abandonment’.364 The representative of the law, like the turnkey, is merely another metonymical incarnation of an urban space that resists interpretation. In such an environment, the individual can neither set themselves up as an opponent nor as a supporter of any determinate, foundational order in the first place. There is no system to attack. Accordingly, when the novel presents the anarchists’ discussion of the function of incarceration, they are increasingly shown to reproduce rather than oppose carceral indeterminacies. The prison as a template of an ‘anarchist’ mode of power predicated on uncertainty is represented by Paul Muniment, the elusive figure representing the revolutionary underground. His carceral discourse is introduced as soon as an unnamed activist attempts to clarify the indistinct political status of the anarchist ringleader, Hoffendahl: “‘What the devil has he done then?’” (287) Muniment’s answer – that “he had spent twelve years in a Prussian prison, and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest to the police” (287) – is ambiguous, especially in the context of a co-conspirator’s addition that this fact is to be considered “useful” (287). Subsequently, two interpretations of the use of spending years in prison are adduced to the prison sentence. The initial analysis is provided by Poupin, a figure of revolutionary nostalgia harkening back to the 1871 Commune and its

363 Louis Althusser. “Ideology,” 119. Such an interpellation retroactively imposes its own temporality; after the event those subjected to it have always already been subjects: “individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects, which they always-already are.” 364 Thanos Zartaloudis. Agamben and Law. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 126. It is “Agamben’s wager that the two meanings of abandoner (to abandon) and à-ban-donner (to banish, to outlaw) secretly but factually coincide.”

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marked political antagonisms which still sustain him in exile. The vaguely sketched revolutionary commitment sustaining this character accords with Woodcock’s characterisation of the fading memory of the Commune: “the tradition acquired a romantic aura; it became part of a revolutionary myth and in many countries had little relation to practice.”365 Poupin’s position of revolutionary essentialism not only partakes of that myth but also fosters belief in its dissemination. He trusts that acts of revolt can be represented – specifically narrated – so as to strengthen radical ties. This approach runs up against the new mode of unbounded anarchism emerging in the course of the debate on the symbolic efficacy of the prison. In what follows, I will briefly set out the model associated with the figure of revolutionary nostalgia. Afterwards, I will show how Poupin’s staunch invocation of the political difference between revolutionaries and a repressive state apparatus is suspended in order to usher in the anarchist state of exception. This second model, then, emerges as a negation of the first rather than a set of principles in its own right. Muniment’s position comes to the fore by subtracting the Communard’s certainties. The use of the prison sentence proposed by the revolutionary exile follows a dramaturgy of struggle imported from idealised past uprisings: “it was one of those failures that are more glorious than any success” (288). Prison time, from this point of view, is a symbolically appropriate finale for an act of communication in which direct action furnishes “un bel exemple” (289). Such an interpretation as an example aligns Hoffendahl’s actions – which Poupin privileges over the imprisonment in and of itself – with the Commune as the anarchist ur-event: He himself esteemed Hoffendahl’s attempt because it had shaken, more than anything – except, of course, the Commune – had shaken it since the French revolution, the rotten fabric of the social, the rotten fabric of the actual social order, and because that very fact of the impunity, the invisibility, of the persons concerned in it had given the predatory classes, had given all Europe, a shudder that had not yet subsided. (288)

Poupin’s revolutionary strategy is presented as a stultified, self-enclosed set of phrases rhetorically invoking a historical situation unamenable to present conditions. Despite the obsolescence suggested by his repetitive rhetoric, this appraisal of Hoffendahl’s revolutionary moment can be analysed in terms of some broad tenets of (insurrectionary) anarchism.366 In particular, Poupin’s interpretation

365 Woodcock, Anarchism, 13. 366 The creation of a “bel exemple” by means of direct action recalls historical anarchist strategies. Specifically, it evokes the writings of Errico Malatesta, for whom, as Turcato points out, “partial uprisings, local revolts, and acts of propaganda by the deed were valuable in instilling a struggling habit and forming a revolutionary consciousness in workers.” This allows for an

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presents a caricatured version of anarchist direct action — albeit one that neglects the prefigurative ethos of anarchism,367 its applicability to a plethora of social systems, and its emphasis on nonviolence.368 Nonetheless, despite these historical distortions of the novel’s account of anarchism, Poupin’s reported speech is steeped in the material precedent set by the Commune, providing a topologically specific model of society and laying out an “actual social order” (288) which can be opposed to statist coercion and violence in the first place. The revolutionary plenitude enthusiastically promulgated by the aging radical dispenses with any “economy of heroism” (288) — in Poupin’s model, the effects of revolutionary action are incalculable.369 His narrative of Hoffendahl’s revolutionary act as a “great combined attempt” (288) imputes the possibility of a series of political events, the progress of which constitutes an unfolding of “the social question” (288). From such a point of view, which foregrounds the narratable break with an existing order, “[t]he commune is an event because it creates a political space that is autonomous from the state.”370 For Poupin, this creation of a new order of social relations is supported by the fact that it “took place in four Continental cities at once” (288). This propagation of direct action does in fact recall the

uprising to be regarded as a communicative act interpreted in terms of “ultimate insurrectionary ends.” Turcato, Making Sense of Revolution, 76. Turcato rightly points out that the “indeterminacy of social action, the precedence of deeds over ideas, and the propaganda value of direct action” are easily obscured by the stereotype of ‘senseless’ anarchist acts. (76) 367 For a succinct definition of prefigurative politics, cf. Carl Boggs. “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Worker’s Control.” Radical America 11 (1977). 99–122. 100. By ‘prefigurative’, Boggs means “the embodiment, within an ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.” 368 Emma Goldman’s examples include abolition, trade-unionism, as well as the individual: “Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.” Emma Goldman. “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For.” Anarchism as Political Philosophy. Ed. Robert Hoffman. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010. 34–50. 48. 369 By interpreting Hoffendahl in terms of the Commune, Poupin opposes an older model to the impending stereotype of the anarchist as a terrorist figure killing indiscriminately and without recourse to a political goal. This stereotypical version of anarchism was soon to enter the headlines after The Princess Casamassima was published and a number of attacks outside of Britain were attributed to ‘anarchists’. “The early 1890s saw an outbreak of terrorist scares in France perpetrated by people claiming to be anarchists – including a home-made bomb thrown into the French Assemblée Nationale, and the assassination of the French President, Sadi-Carnot.” Siân Reynolds. Paris-Edinburgh: Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 92. 370 Saul Newman. The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 129.

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revolutionary communes in Lyon or Marseilles that preceded the 1871 Paris uprising as attempts to enable “the incarnation of ‘revolutionary facts’ through direct action of the people themselves.”371 In his assessment (and implicit historical cross-mapping) Poupin is not dissuaded by ‘the people’ having had little involvement in Hoffendahl’s direct action. Furthermore, he ignores that, in contrast to the collective struggle of the Commune, the political actors in Hoffendahl’s case ended up isolated from their co-conspirators who “had not come forward and insisted on sharing with him his tortures and his captivity” (289). The French activist is shown to follow a logic of communicability, in which the essential properties of the revolutionary act have to be magnified and conveyed to achieve their desired effect. According to this theory, the violent suppression of the Commune (and Poupin’s own protracted exile) may have shown the unfeasibility of revolution in one bounded space. In response, however, the range of direct action merely requires expansion rather than a fundamental change of its revolutionary goals or practice.372 This interpretation of Hoffendahl thus allows for the revolutionary trajectory to be set apart from the reactionary violence that ended it, thereby both salvaging and reiterating its potential. This logic of representation allows for Hoffendahl as a solitary figure in prison to metonymically incarnate an entire plot. If, as van Alphen argues, the “experience of an event or history is dependent on the terms the symbolic order offers,”373 the ‘order’ associated with Poupin is one of successful representation across time: the terms of the symbolic order of 1871 Paris are carried over to another event which is adapted to its characteristics. Just as, according to McCracken, “[t]he paradox of the Commune is that it is represented through a discourse of its nonrepresentation,”374 Poupin accords value to the very impossibility of detailing the precise nature of Hoffendahl’s deeds. An opening for revolutionary agency is upheld by the fact that it cannot be expressed directly. That “there had been editors and journalists transported even for hinting at it” (288) – as well as the “impunity, 371 Graham, The First International, 142. 372 As David Harvey puts it (following Lefebvre), “anarchism in one city is an impossible proposition. It is simply too easy for the forces of bourgeois reaction to surround the city, cut its supply lines and starve it out, if not invade it and slaughter all who resist (as happened in Paris in 1871).” David Harvey. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London and New York: Verso. xvi. 373 Ernst van Alphen. “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory and Trauma.” Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mieke Bal. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 107–123. 110. 374 McCracken, “The Author as Arsonist,” 73.

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the invisibility” (288) of the conspirators – constitutes an absence which only serves to hypostasise the magnitude of a revolutionary movement coming into presence. In this way, the Poupin model refigures any dearth of signs into an indication of a revolutionary shift too significant to be described, turning uncertainty into a strategy of representation in its own right. Thus, the vagaries of direct action themselves enable what Jesse Cohn calls “enclosure, the drawing of a frame around an object.” If, indeed, there is “no representation without the exclusion of something from the scope of representation,”375 the absent revolution (to which any direct action contributes without ever fully exhausting its potential) fulfils the function of an external referent: as a possibility haunting the present, insurrection ensures the cohesion of the self-referential signs making up revolutionary identity. In an anarchist semantics thus conceived, the “social order” internally stand in for “predatory classes,” which, in turn, can be equated with “all Europe.” These shifts are possible because outside of this system of representation, the teleological course of the “social question” provides a transcendental signified which itself cannot become part of this metonymical chain.376 Accordingly, although Poupin “must regret that some of the associates of the devoted victim had not come forward” (289), from the point of view of this older model of insurrection, the isolation of the solitary arbiter of revolution can be functionalised by making him exemplary. Just as the structure of the Commune overlays the Hoffendahl plot, Hoffendahl himself can immediately represent the variegated group assembled in the Sun and Moon. The worthy amongst them are to emulate the “bel example” (289) — they are links in a chain of revolutionary continuity. This logic of the expandable example accords the carceral space a determinate role: the “tortures” (289) of the prison, as opposed to their indistinction in Mrs Bowerbank’s carceral theatre, become meaningful signifiers. They point to a collective identity stabilised by an ineffable revolutionary signified and, at the same time, strengthen the impression of a shared alterity of unbridled state violence. It is Poupin as an ostensible figure of revolution who, thus, provides one of the few instances of a binary distinction in the novel, an expandable system of self and Other which provides a consistent and expandable identity, history, and teleology. For the Communard,

375 Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, 47. 376 From a post-anarchist point of view, Poupin’s model of revolution can, thus, be said to fail the injunction that it “not fall into the trap of essentialism – that it does not, in other words, become a metaphysical or essential point of departure outside power.” Newman, AntiAuthoritarianism, 157.

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the norms of statist power can be recast as alterity, against which an alternative, projected radical order of the people can be demarcated.377 The counter model to this revolutionary essentialism is introduced by Paul Muniment, who dispenses with any promise of foundational, revolutionary identity, whether constructed or essential. In the process, this second model transposes the carceral template to anarchist dissolution. The ensuing collapse of distinctions pivots on the structural repetition of the prison model introduced in the first chapter of Casamassima. In Muniment’s account of the carceral, the symbolic valence accorded to Hoffendahl’s incarceration by Poupin is retracted, leading to one of the few programmatic statements of the ‘anarchist’ model of indeterminacy in the novel.378 With Muniment’s brand of anarchism, the novel pre-empts many of the anti-anarchist stereotypes developing towards the 1890s, especially the charge of incoherence: his position evades any defined reintegration into an ideologically distinct position. As a result, the novel refashions his radicalism as the very template for a mode of power predicated on uncertainty, in a manner that distorts contemporary anarchist philosophy and practice beyond recognition. Specifically, Muniment’s comments on the function of the prison and revolutionary tactics evade all three rhetorical evocations of radical essentialism offered by Poupin: he refuses to provide (1) figures of alterity, to (2) avow revolutionary teleology, or to uphold the (3) possibility of symbolic equivalence between dissimilar revolutionary actions. Accordingly, Muniment does not attempt to recover a defined political motivation for Hoffendahl but, instead, elaborates a negative definition of the anarchist conspirator: “he had spent twelve years in a Prussian prison, and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest to the police” (287). Radical interests and police interests are aligned in this comment — the revolutionary is discerned by other revolutionaries through the medium of the prison and law enforcement. This focus on the ‘interest’ shown by the state (which, in turn, finds expression in the prison sentence) is explicitly devoid of any distinction of an inside and an outside of the carceral sphere. When a participant suggests that “[t]hey will smash best, those who have been inside” (288), Muniment’s response is far from the principled opposition to incarceration that has been a cornerstone of anarchist

377 Rosemary Hennessy. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993. 54. 378 It also evades some of the narrative certainties which Sara Blair’s reading attributes to the character as a representative of a masculinist romance ideal associated with the “racerenewing fictions” of Haggard, Stevenson and other purveyors of “race vitality.” Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation, 106.

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philosophy from its inception.379 “‘Ah, no; no smashing, no smashing,’ Muniment went on. ‘We want to keep them standing, and even to build a few more; but the difference will be that we shall put the correct sort in.’” (288) Against Poupin’s nostalgic essentialism, revolution is imagined in terms of a repurposing of the instruments of the state, a use of force that necessitates the perpetuation of coercive institutions. This reassertion of ‘unsmashed’ state institutions offers a condensed model of anarchy as a suspension of demarcations in Casamassima. In the absence of a differentiation between cultural identity and anarchic alterity, society functions in accordance with an implicit calculus of the “correct,” the criteria for which are not to be disclosed. This collapse of demarcations functions without localisable spaces nor semantic ascriptions that could determine the inclusion or exclusion of subjects. There will be no eventful revolutionary change of state, the novel suggests, thus bolstering Muniment’s assurance that “[n]othing will happen – nothing will happen” (494). This static anarchism out of bounds, then, dispenses with the minimal definition of narrativity by eliding the possibility of distinguishing canonicity and breach: “to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from in a manner to do violence to [. . .] the ‘legitimacy’ of a canonical script.”380 Muniment’s system works against a concept of revolution as an eventful change that would allow, as a fellow activist interjects, to “‘ave their ‘eads – all that blooming lot” (288). The ‘head’, after all, still evokes a hierarchical system to be (eventfully) replaced with a more egalitarian or redistributive one — for which Muniment’s calculus of the correctly jailed cannot provide a symbolic register. Muniment as a new type of political radical is shown to have another set of practices in mind entirely. In his expansion of the carceral system, he imagines a distribution of bodies that distinguishes “correct” from non-viable life. This is far from a defined identity relationally defined against its obverse. Instead, this ostensible difference sets aside expendable masses on the one hand (to be

379 Paradigmatically, in Kropotkin’s revolutionary pamphlets written at the time of the publishing of The Princess Casamassima: “On the other hand, no matter what changes are introduced in the prison régime, the problem of second offenders does not decrease. That is inevitable; – it must be so; – the prison kills all the qualities in a man which make him best adapted to community life. It makes him the kind of a person who will inevitably return to prison to end his days in of those stone tombs over which is engraved – ‘House of Detention and Correction.’ [. . .] A prison cannot be improved. With the exception of a few unimportant little improvements, there is absolutely nothing to do but demolish it.” Peter Kropotkin. “The Criminal in Prison and Outside.” Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings. Ed. Roger N. Baldwin. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002. 222–223. 222. 380 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 11.

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removed with genocidal abandon), and, on the other, a set of individual revolutionary actors who gain marginal utility by a calculation of indeterminate sacrificial effects. If they succeed in potting you, do as Hoffendahl did, and do it as a matter of course; but if they don’t, make it your supreme duty, make it your religion, to lie close and keep yourself for another go. The world is full of unclean beasts whom I shall be glad to see shovelled away by the thousand; but when it’s a question of honest men and men of courage, I protest against the idea that two should be sacrificed where one will serve. (289)

The calculus of ‘sacrifice’, for all its utilitarian determination of the symbolic effect of the “supreme duty” (289) of revolutionary action, still functions according to a logic of media: revolutionaries, following their “foremost duty [. . .] not to get collared” (289) preserve their communicative potential. However, rather than furnishing “society and its ungrounded legislation with the fiction of a beginning”381 – as Agamben puts it in Language and Death – Muniment focuses on the first part of the definition: the “ungrounded” legislation becomes the default state. Instead of offering a foundation for a new, common identity, sacrifice conceived in this way emphasises a notion of death that recedes from signification. Agamben’s distinction between sacrifice and homo sacer – sacred man – clarifies this point: “In modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our culture the meaning of the term ‘sacred’ continues the semantic history of homo sacer and not that of sacrifice.”382 In this model, sacrifice no longer functions as an eventful change in which inside and outside remain demarcated and traversable. Such a narratable sacrificial event conceived in terms of border-crossings383 is not recoverable. Instead, the ‘sacred’ functions by abandoning the excluded life on a threshold between two states: homo sacer can be killed with impunity, yet is not to be sacrificed. Through this double exclusion, this figure is denied the possibility of symbolic reintegration. What results is a “zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide,”384 in which life – ‘bare life’, to take Agamben’s term for this status – can be eliminated obliquely. In the process, neither is the

381 Giorgio Agamben. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 105. 382 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114. 383 The traditional dimensions of the sacred narratable in this manner include: “its ambivalence, its attraction-repulsion, its elation to ecstasy, its limit-setting and limit-transgressing power.” Dominick LaCapra. “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben.” Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Ed. Matthew Calarco. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. 126–162. 138. 384 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83.

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figure of sacred life symbolically excluded nor explicitly judged, let alone cast out as an Other. After all, such performances of alterity would make the exercise of power overt and restore a shared semantics, if only one of transgression and punishment. To avoid such representability, the anarchist’s suggested tactics, which suspend a symbolic relationship between identity and alterity, produce life “to be shovelled away by the thousands” (289). James’ anarchist state of exception is produced by dissolving the possibility of demarcation — a removal of features that relegates its targets to a status of unmarked, ‘natural life’, the killing of which functions as the foundation of the projected political practice. This process is deprived of any eschatological value previously assigned to anarchism. Muniment’s statement to Poupin that “[y]ou shall never share my fate, if I have a fate and I can prevent it!” (290) encapsulates the permanent deferral of the promised revolutionary event. The statement can, firstly, mean that the ‘anarchist’ intends to prevent Poupin’s share in a fate that is uniquely Muniment’s, in which case it would still conform to a concept of sacrifice as border-crossing. More in line with his argument on of symbolically ‘ungrounded’ death, however, it can also be seen to dispense with a concept of fate altogether. On this second reading – in which Muniment’s mode of power is predicated on the collapse of demarcated spaces – he not only decries the possibility of revolutionary teleology, but also of narrative progression tout court. In the process of repudiating ‘fateful’ eventfulness, Muniment seeks to ‘prevent’ any linear event structure that would propel him from one space to a semantically distinct second one.385 At the same time as he reduces the narratability of ‘unclean beasts’, Muniment, thus, reduces his own potential for changes of state. The violence he imagines the future order to express is not, after all, shown to stabilise a recoverable hierarchy — not even one with himself on top. It is, rather, to diminish the very possibility of demarcating collective values at all. Instead of determinable principles, he outlines an abstract calculation that functions without recourse to signifiable differentiations. In this self-subverting model, sacrifice founds a sphere of non-sacrificial death. The terms of the calculation remain as unspecified as the precise identification of the ‘unclean beasts’. By elaborating the template of exception, this fantasy of expanding control by obscuring the terms of inclusion and exclusion, thus, emerges as the rhetorical equivalent to the prison. The possibility of suspending the political identity of revolutionary figures and, instead, evoking undifferentiated life reproduces on a larger scale the carceral production of Hyacinth’s mother as an “obliterated

385 Lotman, Structure, 239.

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past” (84). The term described her final reduction to a set of traits subject to suspension at any time, leaving a “speechless, motionless creature, dazed and stupid” (84). This prefigures the novel’s use of anarchism as the stand-in for a farreaching state of exception. The subterranean affinities between the carceral system and Muniment’s imagined exercise of power establish the novel’s fictive ‘anarchism’ as a cypher: it is used to present and evaluate coercive power more generally. On this level, then, the narrative as a whole performs a projection of disavowed traits on a permanently withdrawn anarchist sphere. Instead of engaging with the latent power structure underlying its narrative version of modernity, ‘anarchism’ takes the place of any systematic analysis of power under the “state-capital nexus.”386 Thus, the novel can explore modes of power predicated on the dissolution of boundaries, yet at the same time continue to relegate the strategy of post-binary subjection to an absent radical sphere. While explicit representation of state power is largely restricted to the turnkey’s appearance, it is the anarchists for whom power is imagined to hinge on dehumanised bodies divested of a political status. This projection is particularly noticeable in the context of discussions of the Commune, which, after all, historically resulted in the French state’s massacre of its own citizens. Instead of engaging with this unrepresented supplement to Poupin’s revolutionary nostalgia, the representation of Muniment ensures that the removal of expendable ‘surplus populations’ is rendered an issue of the radical sphere.387 By making theory of ‘unfit life’ an anarchist concern, the novel can simultaneously represent and disavow the suspension of demarcation and the state of exception. The absent norm sketched by the anarchist functions by not explicitly applying to anyone — but at the same time always potentially applying. If, as Foucault describes the biopolitical operation of power, “the norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize,”388 the version of this procedure attributed to the

386 Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Naná de Graaff, and Henk Overbeek. “The Rebound of the Capitalist State: The Rearticulation of the State-Capital Nexus in the Global Crisis.” The StateCapital Nexus in the Global Crisis: Rebound of the Capitalist State. Ed. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Naná de Graaff, and Henk Overbeek. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 1–5. 2. 387 Cf. Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990. 784. The figure of Muniment allows the novel to refrain from an analysis (or sustained literary equivalent) of “a surplus population of workers [as] a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis.” By making Muniment the theoretician of unfit life, surplus population as “the lever of capitalist accumulation” can be deflected to the same extent as structural inequality is subordinated to cultural achievements during Hyacinth’s grand tour. 388 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 253.

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anarchists functions by deferring a decision in favour of either technique. The very indeterminacy of the distinction between “honest men” and “unclean beasts” is foregrounded over and above criteria for sorting anyone into either category. The ‘beasts’, particularly, hover between mere bodies, a sacrificial group, and a population. Muniment’s fantasy of control, then, is located on a quantitative scale of objects, without ever arresting its movement from the single body to the calculable sacrificial bodies, and, finally, the expandable mass of ‘beasts’. In this way, the “power over the body in an individualizing mode” (prefigured by Pinnie’s internalised reproduction of the carceral indeterminacy) coincides with “a second seizure of power that is not individualising but, if you like, massifying.”389 Instead of bestowing a hegemonic revolutionary identity on the group gathered, Muniment combines the interdiction of symbolic sacrifice with a multiplication of quantifiable bodies. This combined strategy prepares the ground for the pivot from the biopolitical to the necropolitical status of Hyacinth, defined as he is by the very ‘indeterminacy’ of his ‘poor carcass’.390 Muniment’s model of power, all in all, moves beyond the dichotomous determination of a political position. His rhetoric limns the individual body and the living mass, which is brought into political consideration as killable multiplicity.391 Life becomes relevant only at the moment of its disposability, leading to an indistinct revolutionary status between political identity (“honest men”) and the bare life upon which it is founded. The subtraction of residual demarcations of self and Other by the calculus of “life that may be killed but not sacrificed”392 is protested in vain by Poupin: “Trop d’arithmétique – trop d’arithméthique!” (289). It is, after all, Muniment’s discourse – and not Poupin’s revolutionary essentialism – that is shown to sway Hyacinth to pledge his undying allegiance to the supposedly radical convictions analysed in chapter 3.2.2. What compels the protagonist is, thus, precisely not the model of the example set up by Poupin. To wit: the former Communard claims that revolutionaries who subject themselves to imprisonment provide a legible revolutionary identity as well as a visceral “shudder” (288) to the ruling classes — which are, thus, delineated as a relational Other against whom revolu-

389 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 243. 390 Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (2003). 11–40. 11. For Mbembe, “sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes.” 391 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 249. 392 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83.

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tion can be defined: “‘C’aurait été d’un bel exemple!’” (289). Instead, in keeping with the model of power set out by Muniment, Hyacinth’s “contagion of excited purpose” (291) is paradoxically precipitated by the very absence of a defined purpose. He is shown to be “ready for anything” (291) not despite but because of the elision of any determinate purpose by his anarchist role model. It is because Muniment withholds a revolutionary programme (Hyacinth is “sure he was only playing with the company” 291) that the protagonist is compelled to fill the gap himself. The less a purpose is defined, the more does Muniment’s rhetoric prompt an attempt to achieve an unmediated, direct relationship with power, culminating in the desire “to stand face to face with the sublime Hoffendahl” (291). In addition to refusing Poupin’s example, this ocularcentric desire for everdeferred certainty starkly contrasts with the indirect approach to the ephemeral “wounded face” (479) of Hyacinth’s mother and his father’s “countenance” (479), which previously ensured oblique and negotiable identity. By refusing a straightforward model of communicable exemplarity – Pupin’s “bel exemple” (289) – Muniment is shown to finally establish his “economy of material” (288). Denying as it does faith in any example which could at least accord symbolic validity to revolutionary action, this ‘economy’ proscribes a popular mass-movement of the type imagined in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,393 alluded to as Hyacinth is shown to imagine the people as a “sleeping lion” (283). When the protagonist takes up such rhetoric, he can conceive of revolution as a theatrical spectacle with a defined poetics: once a role is allocated, his “ambition was to play it with brilliancy, to offer an example – an example, even, that might survive him – of pure youthful, almost juvenile, consecration” (283). Muniment, however, dismantles this notion of revolutionary performance in which individual actions serve to exemplify a revolutionary ethos. “A fine example, old man? Is that your idea of a fine example?” Muniment, with his amused face, asked of Poupin. “A fine example of asininity! Are there capable people, in such plenty, about the place?” (289)

Muniment’s “supreme duty” and “religion” (289) dispense with the production of examples as proxies for a set of collective actors and defined antagonists.

393 I.e. to the oft-quoted revolutionary slogan “Rise like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number – / Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you – / Ye are many – they are few.” Percy Bysshe Shelley. “The Mask of Anarchy.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York and London: Norton, 1977. In its original context, the simile is attenuated as an indication of revolutionary essentialism; the injunction to rise up is the result of a series of mediations in which the “slaughter to the Nation” presented by the Peterloo massacre can signify a revolutionary appeal only after it “Shall steam up like inspiration” (361).

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The meaning of the imagined revolutionary vanguard, however, is tautological: direct action is primarily a demonstration that the perpetrator is “prepared for that” (287). What they are prepared for – “that” – is only disclosed as “that” is achieved, thus proving that they were ready for “that” to begin with. As opposed to the straightforward paradigmatic model propounded by Poupin, the exemplarity offered by Muniment’s “economy of heroism” (288) is closer to Agamben’s notion of the example as a marker of indeterminacy that “escapes the antinomy of the universal and the particular.”394 This status is attributed to the notion that the example both holds for all cases of the same type, whilst also being included as an element within its typological category: “Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity.”395 This intermediary position – neither included in its class nor excluded from it – makes the exemplary the point, as DeCaroli puts it, “where a transition gets hung-up, where it lingers on a threshold, where it hesitates and thereby reveals itself as purely transitional.”396 It, thus, stands in glaring contrast to the revolutionary essentialism of Poupin’s “bel exemple” (289). Muniment advocates the construction of a counterfactual example, the creation of a myth of revolutionary potential in Britain. He wants to spread the impression that “the swindled classes were at least fairly in league – had really grasped the idea that, closely combined, they would be irresistible. They were not in league, and they hadn’t in their totality grasped any idea at all – Muniment was not slow to make that equally plain.” (292) The very fact that the feigned coherence of the revolutionary movement is made plain does not diminish its functioning in what the novel presents as an ‘anarchist’ mode of power. Munimentstyle propaganda internally divests the radical group members of any notion of political action on the basis of the ‘bel exemple’. Externally, it simulates a movement that does not exist in the storyworld. Between both poles, the exemplary revolutionary set becomes transitional, lingering on the threshold between fact and fiction, ascribed and withdrawn at the whim of the leader. The uncertainty of the political effects of such a simulated movement is extended to the reader. After all, while the anarchist’s propaganda is ostensibly directed outwards, asserting that “society is scareable” (292), no such effect is shown in the novel: Casamassima gives little indication that there is any such society that could react to a manufactured anarchist ‘scare’ in the first place. 394 Agamben, The Coming Community, 9. 395 Agamben, The Coming Community, 10. 396 Steven D. DeCaroli. “Visibility and History: Giorgio Agamben and the Exemplary.” Philosophy Today 45 (2001). 9–17. 9.

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Inculcating an example of the revolutionary as calculable sacrifice is, then, directed towards the socialists themselves as much as their class enemies. The strategy functions as a means of determining the individual in a manner that dispenses with the binary differentiation of inclusion (collective identity) or exclusion (disavowed alterity). Crucially, this recalls Agamben’s concept of “exclusive inclusion,” as well as its relation to exception, which presents an inclusive exclusion by basing its procedures on the bare life excluded from its confines.397 Whereas the “unclean beasts” to be ‘shovelled away’ in the future are presented as life defined by its exceptional status, the exclusive inclusion of the example applies to Hyacinth himself.398 In the very process of volunteering for revolutionary action, he enters into a relation of exclusion from the set of non-existent revolutionaries who “were not in league” (292). At the very point at which Hyacinth, thus, avows his status as an exemplary revolutionary, he is shown to not only exclude himself from the ‘norm’ but, simultaneously, to indicate that there is no such ‘normal’ case in the first place: “at the end of five minutes the club-room emptied itself, not, evidently, to be reconstituted, outside, in a revolutionary procession” (295). The anarchist mode of exemplarity functions by suspending the set it incarnates. Thus, the moment Hyacinth professes his revolutionary status, he is apprised of the fact that his paradigmatic status makes him incommensurable with the identity he stands for: “‘Whom do you mean by ‘we’?’ said Muniment.” (295) Setting himself up as an extraordinary arbiter of anarchy – “ready to do anything that will do any good” (294) – he must, similarly, contend with the exclusion of his paradigmatic readiness from the (uncertain) set of potential revolutionary actions. Muniment, again, counters the profession of an essentialist identity with a rhetorical question: “‘Ready for what? There is nothing to be done here.’” (295) The collapse of a determinate position recasts Hyacinth as “the figure in which singularity is represented as such, which is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable.”399 In view of this mode of power predicated on the production of an uncertain exemplary status, Muniment can be said to reproduce the structure of the carceral opening the novel. As in the prison template, his strategy functions by means of the expectation of an authoritative injunction which never comes to pass. Just as Pinnie internalises the turnkey’s gaze and attempts to become an exemplary “respectable little body” (57), Hyacinth (under Muniment’s influence) is shown to aspire to a revolutionary identity that is

397 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21. 398 Put succinctly, the example “shows its own signifying and, in this way, suspends its own meaning.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22. 399 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22.

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continually rescinded. Similarly, the version of anarchism set out by Muniment functions as a process of suspending the representable positions of classic, revolutionary anarchism (the bel exemple, 165) in order to enable a converse notion of a multitude determined by bare, ‘beast’-like life. By prompting failing selfinsertions into an absent symbolic plenitude, Muniment’s ‘anarchism’ coerces complicity in the manner of the dispersed mode of power characterising the carceral model. As it disallows the drawing of distinctions, the anarchist conspiracy elides the difference between present and past, each of which becomes instantly substitutable for the other. Thus, Hyacinth previously was able to negotiate the past actions of his parents and their influence on his situation by approaching them indirectly, through the ethical demand posed by the “wounded face” (479). Without such oblique interpretative engagement and under the conditions of the anarchist calculus (itself subject to “incalculable ulterior views” 578), his agency is attenuated: the planned killing of an aristocrat is motivated by the previous killing of his father — another aristocrat. Tautology is shown to loom in the absence of the semantic “excrescence” (299) that furnished ever-renewed discriminations within the multiply mediated cultural spaces. The anarchist metric and its attendant trajectory towards a predetermined moment of semiotic expenditure is evoked a final time by Hyacinth’s death, which casts doubt on the possibility of escaping the novel’s version of an anarchist conspiracy. When the Princess opens the door to Hyacinth’s room, “[s]he heard a crack” (590). This presents a textual echo of the anarchist politicoaesthetic project which, as Hyacinth predicts at Medley, will render him “audible (with a small, sharp crack) for a second” (334). Redoubled aristocrats, the ‘cracks’ of revolutionary action: for a moment the semantic superfluity of cultural ‘illuminated ignorance’ seems to have been supplanted by the return of the eversame. As opposed to such recurrence, however, the novel positions the concluding ekphrastic vignette of Hyacinth’s body. In the manner of the signs assembled at Medley, it offers a final vignette of the requirement for a hermeneutic engagement. Against the anarchist state of exception, the individual body exceeds reduction to a corpse (or rather a “carcass” 329) achieving calculable ends. As a visual signifier exceeding its bounds – “something black, something ambiguous, something outstretched” (590) – Hyacinth’s remains reintroduce a prompt for interpretation. Opposing the unmediated calculation and ascription of instrumental value which the novel associates with anarchism, the dead body, thus, constitutes a last instance of a cultural sign.

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3.3 Conclusion This final ambiguation does not fundamentally alter the novel’s overall trajectory. The analysis has shown that the text presents a development from a residual strategy of demarcation to a state of exception. The maintenance of a culture/ anarchy divide initially displayed by the protagonist features a sophisticated array of strategies designed to sustain a project of aesthetic appreciation and ongoing interpretation. As long as signs are associated with indications of their preliminary status, the protagonist can define his cultural project against a constitutive, anarchist outside. ‘Culture’ understood in this processual, barely sustained sense is predicated on multiple mediation and the evasion of identification in terms of any one category. In the case of the Paris sojourn, this even allows for a negotiation of the revolutionary past and its reconstruction in a performative, open-ended manner. These strategies of demarcating a conspicuously constructed cultural sphere contrast with the novel’s presentation of the state of exception taking hold as soon as the boundaries of processual culture are diminished. Casamassima, uniquely among the novels in the corpus, associates this mode of post-binary rule with an uncertain anarchist conspiracy. The state of exception emerges as soon as this radical sphere, the diegetic reality of which is perpetually in doubt, can no longer be extracted from the compensatory heterotopias of culture. As a consequence of its ensuing ubiquity, this anarchist mode of rule is shown to lead to a direct, unmediated determination of its targets. Such post-binary determination has been shown to function on the model of a state of exception. However, in contrast to Agamben’s formulation of this concept, the analysis has yielded the novel’s focus on the degree to which those deprived of their political self-definitions are complicit in the suspension of classificatory borders. It is the expectation of an explanatory deep-structure, expressed by images of the ‘machine’ or the ‘tide’, that prepares the emergence of an anarchist state of exception which disregards previous, self-ascribed identities.

4 Residual Politics in The Secret Agent In Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, anarchists are assigned a crucial political role. This role is not, however, associated with political positions of their own: anarchist opposition to capitalism, state-protected property, and the wage relation – let alone libertarian collectivist or communist alternatives – are conspicuous by their absence.1 Instead, the novel traces attempts to determine places in which such a critique of material conditions and the ideologies sustaining them is unnecessary. It is for the maintenance of these spheres of residual order that, in another appeal to the necessity of political demarcation, a constitutive outside is shown to be required. This chapter will analyse the function of anarchism and anarchists for the delineation of such a sphere. After all, in order to derive a notion of a collective identity, the novel shows, it is not enough to merely draw conceptual and material boundaries to allow for the reproduction of a set of essentialist truths. In order to allow for such internal elaboration, ranging in scale from the national to the self-affirming coterie of the salon, an external space is required, against which such procedures of selfaffirmation are defined. This foil is – just barely – associated with anarchism and anarchists; or rather, with fictional representations of anarchism, which misrepresent, malign, and functionalise its philosophical and historical counterparts. Only as long as heterostereotypical figures of Otherness are sustained, can the sense of impending disorder, emerging within virtually every social sphere in the novel, be projected outwards. Dissolution of order is projected onto discontents deprived of a determinable political position, let alone an antagonistic status in which they would emerge as opponents in a hegemonic struggle.2 Anarchists are policed instead of entering into political discourse. The analysis will, thus, trace the ways in which, as Schwarz puts it, “for Conrad, contentment was found in alternatives to ideology, politics, and material interests, in a small viable self-created space of the mind in which one insulates oneself as best one can from the hurt of politics.”3 Ensuring such a space – which is literal, material, and ideological in addition to a ‘space of the mind’ – is the decisive act 1 Cf. Deric Shannon. “Anti-Capitalism and Libertarian Political Economy.” The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 91–106. 93. 2 Laclau, “Universalism,” 35. That is, anarchism is refused integration into the process by means of which different groups “compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation.” 3 Daniel R. Schwarz. Rereading Conrad. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2001. 97. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-004

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around which the novel’s political imaginary will be shown to revolve. ‘Insulation’ is not a matter of solipsistic seclusion, but can only ever emerge as the result of deliberate, political demarcations. The few political actors upholding such barriers partition off an identitarian inside, while consigning the breakdown of ordering ideologies to the outside. As long as this outside can be associated with anarchists – dismissed, disavowed and overall presented as a “degenerate bunch of cronies”4 – its internal consistency is assured. Political demarcation of this kind hinges on a difference that is both exposed in its contingency and affirmed in its social utility. The reader is presented with the difficulties of setting apart law and anarchism, the representatives of which display similar characteristics. Any projection of disavowed traits upon an individual or collective bearer incarnating chaos and breakdown, thus, constitues a necessary fiction. The need to maintain the imaginary coherence of collective identities is shown to outweigh the necessity to dismantle the contingent boundary on which it is based. In addition to upholding residual certainty within the diegesis, the ensuing political demarcations will be shown to sustain the possibility of narrative templates, which depend on the continued distinction of order and anarchy. Only if political radicals can be imagined to cross a semantic border and transgress a norm, can the continued validity of that border be presented by means of eventful changes of state. The ‘apparatus of demarcation’ will, thus, be considered as a specifically narrative negotiation of order and its obverse, a literary political theory in which continued plot progression is as much at stake as the intradiegetic polity. This possibility of a (1) demarcation of anarchism is the focus of the first part of this analysis. In Conrad’s iteration of political difference, radical politics and their proponents function as markers of Otherness in a binary model in which identity and alterity can be residually distinguished. From this point of view, the text does provide a sophisticated account of anarchism — or rather of a stereotype thus designated. For all its disparagement of reactionary instrumentalisation of ‘anarchist panic’, however, the novel still comes down on the side of the necessity of a radical Other, no matter how fabricated the ‘black peril’ may be.5 Correspondingly, the narrative concerns itself with the refashioning of stereotypical anarchists, the containment of their views, and the manner in which they can be functionalised. A reading of anarchism in this

4 Ian Ward. Law, Text, Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 130. 5 For an extensive account of the “strength and lasting hold of the terrorist conspiracy myth” and its association with “new journalism,” cf. Constance Bantman. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the first Globalisation. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. 115.

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utilitarian vein cannot, with Derrida, “legitimately transgress the text towards something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside language.”6 Instead, alterity becomes a matter of antagonistic struggle for disavowal in and by the narrative itself. The novel, thus, primarily presents political radicalism in terms of its use as a foil against which identity can be delineated. Rather than evaluating libertarian socialism as a political philosophy, the reader is confronted with competing stereotypical images of anarchism, their respective functions, and the political effects yielded whenever anarchist alterity is fabricated, reified, and sustained. The analysis will, thus, not primarily deal with any essentialist, extraliterary radicalism which could be distorted or supported by its literary iteration. In The Secret Agent, anarchism is always already a discursive construct — albeit one that comes with a variety of narrative forms as well as, diegetically, conflicting modes of political instrumentalisation. This model of demarcation is shown to be on the verge of breakdown. The disintegration of a radical sphere that forms the relational obverse of a collective self is the focus of the second part of the analysis, which considers the (2) dissolution of alterity. The ensuing disarray will be shown to emerge whenever the contingency of political demarcation becomes conspicuous. As soon as anarchist alterity is no longer discernible, the collective identities defined in opposition to that outside likewise lose their coherence. As the narrator puts it with regard to Winnie Verloc: “She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.” (131) This second stage of dissolving alterity, conversely, forces the characters to ‘look into’ the premises of their constructs of self and Other — a sceptical inquiry which, the novel suggests, undoes the containment afforded by political demarcation in the first place. Characters are shown to be incapable of subsisting without the illusion of community defined against anarchy, an unruly sphere outside of its boundaries. In the absence of differentiation, not only does such communal identity dissolve, but, what is more, the protagonists are divested of a sense of personal selfhood. As a consequence, the characteristics assigned to anarchism – once they can no longer be contained by their association with disavowed figures outside of the political consensus – begin to circulate within the narrative, without regard for self-created identities. The result, rather than a mere loss of political identity, is presented as a wholesale dissolution of a mode of speech, spatial organisation, and even differentiation of the human and the non-human.

6 Derrida, Grammatology, 158.

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As a consequence of the dissolution of alterity, modes of power emerge which no longer require the distinction between identity and a disavowed, anarchist Other in the first place. These modes of coercion, analysed in the third part of this chapter, will be shown to constitute (3) states of exception. In contrast to the containment of cordoned-off spheres of order, these models function within an unconstrained urban sphere bereft of differentiation. Indeed, the arbiters of this mode of power will be shown to actively undo extant demarcations of identity and alterity, as well as the essentialist assumptions undergirding that split. In Agamben’s terms, this involves the “suspension of the order that is in force in order to guarantee its existence;” determinable laws are removed in order to allow for the state of exception to appear as a “fictitious lacuna in the order for the purposes of safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation.”7 Power thus conceived does not function by the application of norms and laws but rather by withdrawing explicit rules, thus creating a zone in which “executive power” acts on the assumption of a force of law undeterred by the letter of the law.8 The specific literary presentation of the state of exception will be shown to deny this limit concept a single mode of functioning: in The Secret Agent, it makes a difference from which position of authority difference is suspended. Thus, the analysis will trace two opposed procedures of invoking a state of exception, the first associated with the ambassador, Vladimir, and the second decided by the British Assistant Commissioner. While both revolve around the possibility of declaring the suspension of identities, the latter is, ultimately, shown to at least allow for residual forms of collective identity to persist. While the British arbiter of exception co-produces “categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system,”9 his activities shore up places in which illusions of ‘integration’ can be maintained by the privileged few. The Russian version, meanwhile, offers little by way of identitarian illusions. Instead of one, unitary phenomenon, this doubling of states of exception allows for a comparison, especially since each mode of suspending identities is associated with distinctive modes of representation. This presentation of plural exeptions offers a specifically literary negotiation of extra-legal space.

7 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 31. 8 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 31. 9 Agamben, State of Exception, 2.

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4.1 Demarcation of Alterity in The Secret Agent Critical approaches to The Secret Agent have emphasised the narrative’s “crisis of authority,”10 ranging from the breakdown of hierarchical models of politics to the collapse of individual identity and an irreversible movement towards entropy suggested by the new field of thermodynamics.11 While the novel’s concern with such loss of organising principles is undeniable, however, the text equally presents and evaluates the possibility of recouping essentialist concepts of identity in the face of an impending dissolution of order. The establishment of relational alterity plays a crucial role in this abiding representation and evaluation of communal identity. In this strategy, following Gertenbach, “the Other appears as the disavowed part of order, as the foundational violence of order, so that the discussion revolves around questions of founding, of providing and disavowing foundations.”12 That is to say, in order to maintain a space of communal certainties, the novel sets up the necessity to establish an originary exclusion. The minimal requirement for a residually cohesive collective identity is its definition against a constitutive outside. As the storyworld of The Secret Agent is described from the outset as a space of dissolving order, it is the loss of differentiation itself that is projected upon anarchists and anarchy. Accordingly, what is required for the demarcation of a defined place of order is a surrounding, undifferentiated space allocated to alterity — a ‘them’ to offset

10 Andrea White. “Conrad and Modernism.” A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad. Ed. John G. Peters. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 163–196. 186. 11 For an analysis of the way in which, regarding Winnie Verloc, “Conrad draws attention to the larger, more politicized implications of her personal crisis,” cf. Elena Burton Harrington. “The Female Offender, the New Woman, and Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent.” The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 57–69. 59. David Mulry traces the later addition of chapter 10 to the notion that the political is not authoritatively superordinated to the personal; instead, “the familial drama and the political crisis” are “twinned – essentially metonymic – substituting for, and reinforcing one another.” Mulry, Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists, 147. Cf. also Jill Clark. “A Tale told by Stevie: From Thermodynamic to Informational Entropy in The Secret Agent.” Conradiana 36/1 (2004), 9. For further exploration of thermodynamics as the background for informational breakdown in the novel, cf. Houen, “The Secret Agent: Anarchism and the Thermodynamics of Law,” 995–1016. 12 Lars Gertenbach. “Ausgang – Supplement – Schwelle: Das Andere der Ordnung bei Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida und Giorgio Agamben.” Das Andere der Ordnung: Theorien des Exzeptionellen. Ed. Ulrich Bröckling et al. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. 189–208. 189. My trans. Orig. quote: “Das Andere der Ordnung erscheint hier als deren verdrängter Teil, als eine die Ordnung als solche gründende Gewalt, weshalb diese Diskussion insbesondere um Fragen der Gründung, der Begründbarkeit sowie der Entgründung kreist.”

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the sense of an ‘us’. This semantic (yet topologically and topographically reified) space will, with Mouffe, be analysed as a ‘constitutive outside’: “[i]n order to be a true outside, the outside has to be incommensurable with the inside, and at the same time, the condition of emergence of the latter. This is only possible if what is ‘outside’ is not simply the outside of a concrete content but something which puts into question ‘concreteness’ as such.”13 The anarchist outside, in other words, has to be emptied of its differential status in a chain of signification in order to mark the outer limit of the sphere of identity. Only if the “beyond,” which anarchism is set up to indicate, becomes “the signifier of pure threat, of pure negativity, of the simply excluded, can there be limits and system (that is an objective order).”14 The characteristics of this radical foil are presented, negotiated, and evaluated ambivalently in the novel. After all, demarcation of a normative identity from its anarchist obverse – as well as a border separating them – is far from a foregone conclusion. The boundary has to be made manifest by protagonists who realise the contingency of the differentiation, yet restore it nonetheless, for the sake of maintaining a socially cohesive illusion of communal belonging. As Bhabha puts it, to be binding, “rules of recognition must reflect consensual knowledge or opinion; to be powerful, the rules of recognition must be breached in order to represent the exorbitant objects of discrimination that lie beyond its purview.”15 This shows that the boundaries of a rule are maintained negatively, by controlled breach as much as any positive content it encodes. Consequently, it is only as long as ‘objects of discrimination’ are confidently identified as ‘anarchist’ that the production of collective identity can proceed apace, periodically marking its normative status against the ‘breach’ of a transgressive, radical Other. The overarching political conflict of the novel is staged between competing modes of setting up radical political alterity. The Secret Agent leaves little doubt that the represented (and caricatured) anarchist movement in Britain is not a threat to the status quo. As anarchism is divested of legitimacy as a political movement, however, antagonism is displaced onto the different stakeholders in the novel who try to define the political Other. In other words, the narrative presents several attempts to ground political identity by constructing convenient markers of radicalism. Foundational claims to identity and, more importantly, the respective, manufactured Other to be defined against that identity become a matter of hegemonic struggle. Such attempts to dictate the terms of self-evident,

13 Chantal Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 12. 14 Ernesto Laclau, “Empty Signifiers,” 38. 15 Homi K. Bhabha. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985). 144–165. 154.

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‘natural’ identity and alterity – as well as their material and spatial correlates – are even explicitly discussed as a language game by the figure of the Professor: “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality – counter moves in the same game” (52). In what follows, some of these ‘counter-moves’ will be analysed. Specifically, at the beginning of the plot, an entire ‘apparatus’ is understood to provide intimations of order against anarchist alterity. In addition to restoring notions of normative identity, these strategies also come with a determinate mode of narration. As long as the characters believe in the political difference that is diegetically available to them, the narrator is shown to partake in the allocation of ‘counters’ of identity and alterity. On the condition that the distinctions hold, an ‘authorial’ instance offers taxonomies and psychological explanations of what makes an anarchist a figure of deviance, all of them ascribed with zero-focalised detachment. Thus, the institutional apparatus of governance will be shown to enable residual narrative (in addition to diegetic) certainty, which, for all its ironic detachment, partakes in the authoritative distribution of what is included and what is excluded from a polity. The ideology underlying the apparatus of demarcation is given exemplary expression in chapter 8 of The Secret Agent. The narrator ascribes to Stevie, the brother of Winnie Verloc, a staunch optimism regarding the police as a moral good in society. As the narrator glosses this character, who is associated with a vaguely sketched intellectual disability: “He had formed for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil. The notion of benevolence especially was very closely associated with his sense of the power of the men in blue.” (127) The disparity in register between Stevie’s exclamations and the narrator’s grandiloquent elaboration of the character’s “moments of consoling trust in the organised powers of the earth” (126) should not detract from the status of this belief as the primary ideological function of the police that is at stake in the novel. All of the elements that will be shown to recur in the self-image of Chief Inspector Heat are anticipated by Stevie’s vision: specifically, a metonymical chain of identity, ranging from minute everyday signs (“men in blue”) to the level of the “institution,” finally yields a macroscopic view of an organised world. What is more, this hypostasised order is offset by the attribution of an alterity that furnishes a negative complement to police power. This position of Otherness is furnished by “evil,” which to Stevie is immediately encapsulated by a “poor cabman beating the poor horse” (126). This view of an essential order does not go unchallenged. Indeed, Stevie’s sister, Winnie, asks: “Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them

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who have.” (127) This statement by a character not otherwise given over to radical political pronouncements is not contradicted by the novel. After all, the charge that the police function consists in maintaining extant property relations is at least as old as the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre in 1819, a key event in the origin story of the London Metropolitan Police.16 What is more, the narrative transposes this function of maintaining capitalist inequality onto the main police protagonists themselves, who are shown to serve and protect their own status and material interest through the detection of alleged political crime. Nonetheless, Stevie’s notion of a ‘benevolent institution’ is not wrong — it describes the main ideological effect (and felt affect) that is to redound to the executive in The Secret Agent. While the novel offers the possibility for a critical reading of the police function, it places equal emphasis on the conditions for maintaining the ideology of a ‘benevolent institution’. How, in other words, to foster the belief that representatives of order are engaged in a struggle with breakdown, chaos, or anarchy – in short, ‘evil’? An entire mode of governance hinges on the production of this narrative template and the prevention of any sceptical inquiry into the function of policing. In Conrad’s narrative, the differentiation between identity and alterity (still negotiated as an individual process of interpretation in Casamassima) is associated with a set of institutions and techniques, an entire regularised mode of meaning making. Accordingly, we are presented with elaborate strategies of inculcating the sense of a “benevolent institution” (consonant with a benevolent society) set against the constitutive outside of radical politics. While not precisely ‘evil’ in the sense articulated by Stevie, anarchists provide a foil upon which intimations of a “[b]ad world for poor people” (126) can be projected. As long as anarchists roam the streets, the ‘bad world’ has a cause and a focal point that is not intrinsic to society itself. It is, thus, the determination and elaboration of radicalism that forms the first step of police ideology. Once successfully evoked, this is followed by the need of ‘suppression’ of this self-created alterity. There is no ‘anarchist’ in The Secret Agent — unless this figure is brought forth in the founding distinction of a whole host of institutional practices that are scalable downwards (to the individual policeman) and upwards (to a collective identity). This construction is presented as functional in the novel, offering a socially conducive lie upon which characters – Stevie, first and foremost – are shown to depend. In this paternalistic view, scepticism of the type formulated by Winnie

16 Cf. Richard Clutterbuck. International Crisis and Conflict. Basingstoke and London: Palgrave, 1993. 28. For an account of theories of the police as “an instrument of class rule,” cf. Malcolm Anderson. In Thrall to Political Change: Police and Gendarmerie in France. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 4.

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is presented as uncontainable, indirectly contributing to her eventual demise. The novel is, consequently, more concerned with strategies of bolstering an ‘ideal conception’ of law and order than with a dismantling of such ideologies. Taking our cue from Giorgio Agamben, this first model of drawing and stabilising a distinction between order and anarchy will be discussed as an ‘apparatus of power.’ a. It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. b. The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation. c. As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.17

In this vein, The Secret Agent displays a specific “intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge”18 by means of which several loosely associated institutional actors establish and maintain a sense of normative identity against the obverse of political radicalism. The police appear twice in this model: firstly, they are embodied by the literal representatives of an executive presenting itself as ‘benevolent’. Secondly, the police apparatus comprises a set of practices designed to establish political alterity, performed by associated institutional actors; these include Chief Inspector Heat, Verloc (as the titular secret agent), and the Russian Embassy (as an ally against anarchism). What this tenuous alliance offers, in Luhmann’s terms, is the “distinction between loose and strict couplings of elements. A medium consists of loosely coupled elements, whereas a form joins the same elements in strict coupling.”19 Within the diegesis, if we understand “action as medium” and the apparatus of demarcation established between these actors as “the totality of its actions,” strict couplings of actions arise whenever an anarchist is identified, apprehended, and communicated both internally and to a ‘public.’20 As long as the same elements are selected from a range of other available options and joined in successive couplings, the loose association of institutional actors persists. While the perpetuation of this ‘political mediation’ is dependent on the continual production of figures of alterity, at the same time it allows for an internal disavowal of its own expedient manufacture of ‘anarchists’. Once considered from within the

17 Giorgio Agamben. “What Is an Apparatus?” What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. 1–24. 2. 18 Agamben, “Apparatus,” 3. 19 Niklas Luhmann. Theory of Society. Vol.1. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012. 118. 20 Luhmann, Theory of Society, 118.

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demarcated political identities, the ‘strict coupling’ of traits making up the communicable radical stereotype can be treated as a group of essential features. For instance, observed from within the Russian embassy, the anarchist becomes a symptom of “moral insanity” (21); considered from the police headquarters, anarchists necessitate an extensive surveillance mechanism; and appraised from the perspective of the informant, ‘radicals’ barely have a determinable existence whatsoever, since he has replaced them with the vague sense that society requires his protection. These internal elaborations, however, require the previous construction and communication of the ‘strict’ form of an anarchist Other amidst the loosely associated actors who partake in the apparatus of demarcation. In the absence of this communicable alterity, none of these systems can maintain the self-images on which their members depend. For these interlocking modes of policing to furnish a relational outside, political radicalism has to remain underdetermined, an adaptable sign to be renegotiated amongst the participants. Positioned at the threshold of each evocation of political norms – “excluded from the order of signification and included as an integral part of the respective institutional logic”21 – the construction of anarchism remains unstable and temporary. This is especially the case since the radical signifiers have to remain sufficiently broad so as to point to disorder as such rather than, say, expressing a genuine political critique. By blurring the precise aims and the nature of the threat associated with anarchism, it can be voided of content. In that way, following Laclau, radicalism becomes “present as that which is absent: it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence” regarding which “various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack.”22 The overall aim of this model is the establishment of a differential order that can be accepted as reality; accepted, it is crucial to add, by those involved in its construction as much as its supposed beneficiaries. Adapting a concept by Alenka Zupančič , we can call this the creation of a ‘reality principle’: “[t]he reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact or (biological, economic . . . ) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as nonideological).”23 Whether it is possible to maintain a reality principle of this type, more elaborate

21 Eric C. H. De Bruyn. “Bateau/Tableau/Drapeau.” Allegorie: DFG-Symposion 2014. Ed. Ulla Haselstein. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. 697–728. 724. 22 Laclau, “Empty Signifiers,” 44. 23 Alenka Zupančič. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. 77.

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than Stevie’s vision of coherence but structurally isomorphic with it, is the determining question for the apparatus of governance presented in The Secret Agent. From the perspective of protagonists who act as purveyors of alterity, the attendant sphere of identity and its spatio-temporal reifications appear stable. As soon as, however, focalisation switches to a narrative instance unconstrained by such assurances, we are confronted with a “fragile world of identity formation and object formation” in which “political subjects are articulated through moments of closure that create subjects as surfaces of inscription, mythical and metaphoric, invariably incomplete.”24 In order to sustain the notion of an ordered social sphere – and to ward off insight into its ‘inevitable incompleteness’ – the self-proclaimed arbiters of order have to mutually settle on a minimal definition of anarchist radicals as the ultimate referent around which the agent provocateur, police surveillance, diplomatic cooperation, and the media revolve. This temporary agreement on the radical threat is indispensable for the continued production of a shared set of norms, however tenuous: as Ernesto Laclau puts it, “if the systematicity of the system is a direct result of the exclusionary limit, it is only that exclusion that grounds the system as such.” Any recourse to an essentialist “positive ground” which could “signify itself in terms of any positive signified”25 is shown to be insufficient. This failure of a positive ground becomes clear whenever protagonists insist in vain on their identity even after they have outlived their usefulness as co-creators of a sense of anarchy. As soon as the construct of political alterity no longer furnishes an object of joint interventions, the identity previously defined in opposition to the Other is likewise shown to break down. The anarchist, especially, has to be shown to impinge on the borders of the normative sphere time and again in order to maintain the fiction of collective identities bolstered by those very norms in the first place. Verloc, Heat, and (analeptically) the previous official at the Russian embassy are shown to have co-created this system of alterity politics to arrogate to themselves continued legitimacy as stalwarts against anarchy. In a first step, their shared system produces anarchists as objects of discourse, only to treat them, in a second step, as if they were anterior to discourse and “furnished the ground, the foundation of things.”26 It is on the basis of that differential ground that the functioning of their supposedly well-appointed social sphere founds itself.

24 Michael Keith and Steve Pile. “Introduction Part 2: The Place of Politics.” Place and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile. 22–40. 27. 25 Laclau “Empty Signifiers,” 37. 26 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 53.

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4.1.1 Constructing Anarchist Alterity The model of demarcation, by means of which figures of alterity are provided for the definition of collective identity, depends on three components. All of these are needed for the successful evocation of an anarchist threat. Firstly, it involves an ideology of a natural order of society which requires stabilisation by dint of alterity, yet is itself not constructed. This stance is best demonstrated by Verloc, who emerges as a staunch believer in an essential constitution of social order to which he merely contributes. Secondly, we are made privy to the discursive material refashioned into anarchist alterity, namely the assorted anarchists that make up the ‘organisation’ Verloc has infiltrated as a police spy. And, thirdly, the novel presents the institutional elaboration of the anarchist transgression and the strategies by means of which competing ideologies of order are defined against it. 4.1.1.1 Autostereotype of Social Order The steadfast belief in an ordered constitution of society is associated with Verloc, who also furnishes the first stage in the demarcation of alterity. This character’s involvement in the policing of anarchism is mostly evoked in retrospect. While in the second chapter his assurances are systematically dismantled, in several analeptic presentations of the apparatus of demarcation we are made privy to his role in the system of policing before its dissolution. As a double agent in the employ of both the London police and the Russian embassy, he is shown to be responsible for adding the impression of external reference to the apparatus of demarcation.27 By offering the guarantee of privileged access to a radical sphere, Verloc furnishes the anarchist transgressors that are subject to further processings by cooperating institutions. Only by offering the assurance that the obverse of order is diegetically real can ambassadorial reports be written, the account of police investigations be given in a “clear matter-of-fact manner” (73), and stories of radical transgression be disseminated in the media. Verloc is also, however, subject to ‘self-interpellation’: by alternately inhabiting, constructing and selling an anarchist role, he is shown to stabilise his own

27 In the terms of systems theory, Verloc dissembles that he, like any “observer needs to draw a distinction in order to observe and in doing so creates his or her own marked and unmarked space. This is what Luhmann means by ‘self-reference’ and ‘other-reference’ (or ‘external reference’).” Michael King and Chris Thornhill. “Introduction.” Luhmann on Law and Politics: Critical Appraisals and Applications. Ed. Michael King and Chris Thornhill. Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart, 2006. 1–10. 9.

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identity as much as the institutional certainties he props up. Thus, as Verloc sets out towards the embassy at the beginning of the novel, he is shown to rely on the efficacy of a system keeping anarchy at bay, despite being instrumental in the construction of anarchism as an object of knowledge in the first place. The character engages in a “socialization of the invented thing,” so that he both constructs and assumes a “system of conventions that will at the same time ensure its inscription in a common history, its belonging to a culture: to a heritage, a patrimony, a pedagogical tradition, a discipline, a chain of generations.”28 Against the radical figure he makes speakable, identifiable, and subject to “repetition, exploitation, reinscription,”29 the first identity to be specified is his own. In the apparatus of demarcation in which Verloc plays his part, political alterity is, first and foremost, a lack regarding which “various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack.”30 At the same time, however, the alterity politics of The Secret Agent present a remarkably harmonious view of this “filling function.”31 As long as the associated institutions can agree on the continued necessity to intercept anarchist activity, they can establish the concomitant impression of a shared ideology. Specifically, this consensus is achieved by suggesting imminent anarchist attacks. Thus, Verloc claims impending anarchist violence “on the occasion of the Grand Duke Romuald’s visit to Paris, which was telegraphed from here to the French police” (17). This alleged threat gives Verloc the opportunity to demonstrate his facility at evoking alterity. The ‘demonstration’ to that effect is called for because the new ambassador, Vladimir, questions his efficacy as an anarchist infiltrator. To prove him wrong, the secret agent attempts a display of his influence. His voice, famous for years at open-air meetings and at workmen’s assemblies in large halls, had contributed, he said, to his reputation of a good and trustworthy comrade. It was, therefore, a part of his usefulness. It had inspired confidence in his principles. “I was always put up to speak by the leaders at a critical moment,” Mr Verloc declared, with obvious satisfaction. There was no uproar above which he could not make himself heard, he added; and suddenly he made a demonstration. “Allow me,” he said. With lowered forehead, without looking up, swiftly and ponderously he crossed the room to one of the French windows. As if giving way to an uncontrollable impulse, he opened it a little. Mr Vladimir, jumping up amazed from the depths

28 Jacques Derrida. “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Vol. 1. Ed. Peggy Kanuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 1–48. 6. 29 Jacques Derrida, “Invention of the Other,” 6. 30 Laclau “Empty Signifiers,” 44. 31 Laclau “Empty Signifiers,” 44.

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of the arm-chair, looked over his shoulder; and below, across the courtyard of the Embassy, well beyond the open gate, could be seen the broad back of a policeman watching idly the gorgeous perambulator of a wealthy baby being wheeled in state across the Square. “Constable!” said Mr Verloc, with no more effort than if he were whispering; and Mr Vladimir burst into a laugh on seeing the policeman spin round as if prodded by a sharp instrument. (18)

The model of demarcation is presented emblematically in this passage. Interlocking chains of mediation involving several metonymical stand-ins for institutions and political entities are, by means of Verloc’s demonstration, presented in terms of demonstrable, essentialist validity. His “famous” voice is to sustain this notion of a foundational political identity, in comparison to which his actions as agent and double agent, the entire apparatus of demarcation upon which his position depends, are surface phenomena. His voice issuing forth from the window offers (with Derrida) a “signifier that does not fall into the world, a signifier that I hear as soon as I emit it, that seems to depend upon my pure and free spontaneity, requiring the use of no instrument, no accessory, no force taken from the world.”32 As Verloc seeks to demonstrate such unmediated presence, he detaches the “reputation of a good and trustworthy comrade” (18) from its status as a mere cover identity. In other words, he attempts to transform features of his radical self (excluding the professed politics) into a demonstrable, general feature of who he, essentially, is. Such demarcation of identity requires a perspectival shift. It enables a self-evidently constructed position to be naturalised and brought into the seemingly ‘unmediated’ priority of speech. This same principle of conversion underlies both Verloc’s political position and his domestic role. In his house, too, he attempts to transform the economic arrangement of his marriage into an immediate, affective presence. This illusion of shared intimacy, likewise, is associated with phonocentric immediacy, as the “belief that he lacked no fascination for being loved for his own sake” (185) is to be ‘brought home’ by means of his “husky domestic voice” (189). The demonstration of his voice, thus, gives an apt image of the functioning of demarcation more generally: what is at stake is the simultaneity of constructing an identity and disavowing one’s own role in the process, thus giving an essentialist twist to an artificial distinction of self and Other. Maintaining a demarcation of identity and alterity, thus, hinges on the transformation of a system of mediation into immediate presence. Verloc, for one, contributes to an image of social stability reproducing itself under the ‘idle’ gaze of the police, yet requiring an added stimulus for protection — it is, after all, 32 Jacques Derrida. “Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva.” Trans. Alan Bass. Positions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. 15–36. 22.

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ultimately represented by a “wealthy baby being wheeled in state” (18). In the anarchist-cum-police-spy’s demonstration of his modus operandi, such a social sphere has to be prompted to vigilance by a “sharp instrument” (18). The smooth functioning of metonymic chains depends on this outside impetus: Verloc can only elevate the combination of “baby” and “perambulator” to a presentation “in state” on the condition that this image of passive contentedness be defined against a threat, in this case supplied by the voice of the counterfeit anarchist. The radical voice functions as external reference for the condensed system he surveys, eliciting in response a mutual assurance that its autopoietic reproduction can proceed apace. In Derrida’s terms, Verloc offers “[s]elf-presence, transparent proximity in the face-to-face of countenances and the immediate range of the voice,” a reverie of unmediated expression simulating “the Anarchistic and Libertarian protestations against Law, the Powers, and the State in general.”33 According to Verloc’s model, however, such phonocentric immediacy only creates the impression of “proximity” – in the form of the ‘sharp instrument’ prodding the policeman – to ensure that the trifecta of political mediation can define itself against an outside threat. ‘Law, powers and state’ are presumed to function all the more efficiently if they are occasionally made to respond to an ‘immediate’ disruption issuing forth from outside of their interlocking productions of order. The punchline of Verloc’s demonstration presents this salutary disturbance as successful: the policeman ‘spins around’ rather than merely contributing his “back” as one element in the metonymies of “baby,” “perambulator,” and “state.” Throughout, focalisation of Verloc’s demonstration is not specified. The passage may strike the reader, as it does Andrew Wright, as “encompassingly nihilistic” and indicative of a Conradian “decline in social faith.”34 However, the fact that it is not inflected by a character in the storyworld keeps open the possibility of taking at face value its initial trust in objective social order. From this ‘authorial’ point of view, we can take the vignette seriously as an insight into an order of self-referential actors who, for added alacrity, require an occasional external stimulus. This reading is bolstered by the metonymical structure of the passage. After all, the perambulator represents both the “baby” and the comically unnamed person ‘wheeling it’; the policeman is contiguous with his ‘broad back’ and in turn synecdochically incarnates taken-for-granted order. By disclosing this scene, following David Lodge’s definition of metonymy, the

33 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 138. 34 Andrew Wright. Fictional Discourse and Historical Space. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1987. 75.

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novel offers a vision of a world rendered coherent by “condensations of contexture.”35 After all, metonymical deletion – for instance of the person in charge of the perambulator36 – relies on the presumption that the scene presents a “natural combination” of elements in a state of “existential contiguity in the world.”37 On the basis of this model, it is sufficient to “boom [. . .] out in his clear oratorial bass” an example to immediately evoke in Verloc’s addressee a contiguous “record” (17) of services rendered. These services find their equally immediate, phonocentrically anchored counterpart in his function as radical infiltrator whenever he is “put up to speak by the leaders at a critical moment” (18) during socialist meetings. What he says is less important than the staunch belief that it is enough to demonstrate an ordering presence by raising his voice. Although he combines incompatible ideological positions as anarchist, police spy, and embassy agent, Verloc’s position is not contradictory as long as his voice evokes countervailing social cohesion. By dint of the metonymical association and this intermittent phonocentrism, the possibility of “orienting and organizing the coherence of the system” is maintained.38 That is, the passage performs the notion that a spoken, exclaimed, or whispered assertion of “the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form.”39 In the model demonstrated by Verloc, where the line of demarcation is drawn is less important than the performative act of invoking the possibility of order itself. In the resulting tableau of social stability imputed to London, the city displays its stability upon verbal prompting from outside rather than being reproduced by the apparatus of power to which Verloc contributes. The attitude negotiated in connection with Verloc can, firstly, be summarised as the belief in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a ‘monologic world’, in which “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated; otherwise it simply ceases to be

35 David Lodge. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 94. 36 With Lodge, “deletion is to combination as substitution is to selection,” as the condensation allows us to recover a notional sentence from which, compared to the manifest sentence in the novel, “the items deleted are not those which seem logically the most dispensable.” David Lodge. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 94. 37 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, 95. 38 Jacques Derrida. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 915–926. 915. 39 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 915.

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fully valid thought.”40 This monologism, secondly, rests on alterity outside of its confines, a set of verbal or visual signifiers upon which it can base its functioning. It is for this reason that the social scene observed from the window of the embassy requires an ordering voice as much as the revolutionary assembly at the moment Verloc is ‘put up’ to provide oratory. In this, Verloc incarnates fundamental optimism regarding the capacities of language and signs. The new ambassador, unimpressed by the demonstration of metonymically and phonocentrically stabilised social order, reacts to this trust with the disappointment of an avant-garde audience confronted with outmoded conventions: “Voice won’t do. We have no use for your voice. We don’t want a voice. We want facts—startling facts—damn you” (19). By contrast, in Verloc’s pre-lapsarian world of political stability, in which such ‘facts’ are obviated by metonymical indicators of systemic coherence, his voice provides what Conrad’s A Personal Record describes as “the thundering of the tender vocal chords. Don’t talk to me of Archimedes’ lever [. . .]. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”41 However, Verloc does not aim to ‘move’ the world, but merely to prompt it to display its ordered constitution. Despite his status as informer to the police and the embassy, such trust in the efficacy of words for the purposes of demarcation connects Verloc to the anarchists he has infiltrated. When Michaelis, the utopian socialist who is to be framed for the Greenwich attack, holds forth on the “lawful inheritance of the suffering proletariat” as an ineluctable necessity, the narrator notes that he “pronounced the great word ‘Patience’—and his clear blue glance, raised to the low ceiling of Mr Verloc’s parlour, had a character of seraphic trustfulness” (37). Conrad’s fictional anarchists are firmly ensconced in an apparatus of demarcation which keeps track of them, produces reports on them, and occasionally – when “another dynamite campaign” (100) is required as an eventful determination of alterity – presents them as terrorists fit for mass-media circulation. Each iteration of anarchist rhetoric, be it Yundt’s insurrectionist tirades, Ossipon’s scientific tracts, or Michaelis’ utopian passivity, is presented as a closed-off, monologic type of speech. The anarchists vary repeated themes with minimal difference. In the process, they echo Verloc’s belief in the efficacy of the word — as Michaelis puts it, “revolutionary propaganda was the delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world” (37).

40 Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis and London: Universiy of Minnesota Press, 1984. 80. 41 Joseph Conrad. Preface. A Personal Record. New York and London: Harper, 1912. 3–19. 4.

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This reliance on monologic truths makes the anarchist figures all the more amenable to policing in accordance with an apparatus of demarcation. The anarchists provide the discursive material that can be rearranged whenever the governance of social order requires a relational Other. The anarchists are, hence, associated with an assumption of what Richard Rorty calls a “final vocabulary.”42 Whether they proceed from a broadly Marxist, an insurrectionary, or a scientific variety of ‘anarchism’, they share the notion that the remaining task is to “think through its implications [. . .] as a matter of spotting the relations between the various platitudes which provide contextual definitions of the terms of this vocabulary.”43 The goal, rather than an ‘ethics of revolutionary practice’ in the manner of the extraliterary anarchist tradition,44 consists in weaving the individual, monologic statements into a “perspicacious system.”45 As a result, the practice of each of Conrad’s fictional anarchists exhausts itself in self-referential confirmation of an initial idea. They are associated with a pseudo-logical selection and combination of signs; that is, with Rorty, the anarchists assume that to “be commonsensical is to take for granted that statements formulated in that final vocabulary suffice to describe and judge the beliefs, actions and lives of those who employ alternative final vocabularies.”46 Despite the occasional call for insurrectionary violence – “No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity” (32) – this steadfast reliance on a ‘habituated’ mode of speech renders the supposedly radical language ‘commonsensical’ in Rorty’s sense. It follows from this idle common sense that while they repeat their essentialist assumptions, each anarchist is shown to be constitutively averse to any action whatsoever. Thus, Michaelis, a coarse caricature of the anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin,47 has universalised his carceral condition, having become ‘habitualised’ to it. Prison and isolation, the novel suggests, have brought forth his mode of speech, rendering his certainties of “the end of all property coming along logically” (32) an extension of his incarceration. The carceral condition has been transformed into a teleological socialist utopianism. In keeping with this contiguity of state power and anarchist rhetoric, even the presentation of the radical monologues blurs distinctions. Initially introduced as direct quotations, the

42 43 44 45 46 47

Rorty, Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity, 77. Rorty, Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity, 77. Cf. Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 6. Rorty, Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity, 77. Rorty, Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity, 74. Cf. Norman Sherry. Conrad’s Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. 269.

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repetition of their basic tenets is increasingly divested of quotation marks and introduced as lengthy passages of indirect speech. These reproduce stylistically the ellipses and redundancies of spoken language: “Yes. Struggle, warfare, was the condition of private ownership, It was fatal. Ah!” (32) Anarchist speech is not even typographically set apart from its textual environment. Their language is embedded in (and, thus, straightforwardly controlled by) the narrator, whose very presentation of the radical screeds as reported speech demonstrates the degree to which purported radicalism in the novel is tolerated and functionalised by the very authorities it attacks. Hence, from the beginning on the anarchists are presented as types, representing well-worn discursive constructs immediately consigned to alterity. The narrator already initiates this project of setting political radicals aside as facile heterostereotypes by adducing constant reminders of their grotesque bodies. According to this presentation, they are an assortment of “an enormous stomach and distended cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent complexion” (31), or “extinguished eyes without gleams blackening the deep shadows under the great, bony forehead” (32).48 In the case of the “old terrorist” (32), Yundt, the “shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison, emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away on the rubbish-heap of things that had served their time” (36). Rather than posing a challenge to the apparatus of demarcation, the anarchists displayed in Verloc’s living room largely bear out its assumptions. The narrator can straightforwardly subject them to a dehumanising gaze, in which they become classifiable as the bearers of disavowed characteristics. Aberrant by default, they offer ample material for further discursive processing. 4.1.1.2 Internal Elaboration In The Secret Agent, it is only if an institutional signified can be subjoined to a heterostereotypical signifier that the anarchist Other can be brought out as the culprit behind an attentat, dynamite outrage, or conspiratorial activity. Order functions differentially, emerging momentarily as the successful representation of a radical transgression. That is: without recursively constructing its differential

48 This accords with Fothergill’s view that Conrad’s political fiction is less concerned with a philosophical account of anarchism than with “so-called anarchism.” That is, instead of attributing diegetic reality to acts of political violence, his fiction only ever displays “acts displaced by the secondary act of narration,” rendering political radicalism a matter of interpretation from the outset. Anthony Fothergill. “Connoisseurs of Terror and the Political Aesthetics of Anarchism: Nostromo and a Set of Six.” Conrad in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 137–154. 147.

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counterpart, any normative order escapes representation. It is not enough, then, to draw a difference. Rather, within the ordering system, the radical heterostereotype is submitted to further internal elaboration. In this process, the purveyors of order not only produce the ‘social fact’ of an anarchist Other, but also proceed to ascribe essential characteristics to the symbolic identity and alterity they have constructed. In other words, they both signify their social role and begin to adopt it for themselves, elaborate it, and accept it as a matter of essentialist certainty. This internal elaboration, which elides both the contingency of social order and its dependence on alterity, can once more be demonstrated using the example of Verloc. After his involvement in the construction of relational systems of order, he attributes to himself the very traits which he has only ever derived as a result of contingent demarcation. Their characteristics are internally elaborated as essential properties rather than discursive effects. In the case of the double agent, such naturalisation of the self-image – and the disavowal of its differential status – unites his ostensibly political and private roles. His positions as selfappointed protector of society and patriarchal head of family follow the same trajectory, in the course of which an identity constructed as the result of a fabricated difference is hypostasised as an ineffable truth. This transfer from the “socially positioning power of discourses” to “durable aspects of self”49 is encapsulated by Verloc’s status as a spy for the embassy. He was “the invaluable Secret Agent Δ of Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s despatches” (211), as the narrator explains regarding a descriptive tag hovering between heterodiegetic ascription and the self-image of the protagonist. Verloc is shown to foster a self-image on the model of this signifier ‘Δ’, which stands in for the entire shared code ostensibly guaranteed by the government.50 This self-image – as “servant of law and order, faithful, trusted, accurate, admirable” (210) – is predicated on its legibility by those in the know, a community of official conspirators. It is also this condensation of a secure identity, however, that becomes fraught. Rather than indicating a privileged epistemological position, the sign is taken up in increasingly (and overtly) contingent contexts: it is evoked by the “triangular piece of dark blue cloth” (92) that remains of Stevie after the explosion, the “open triangular space” (110) on which his house is

49 Dorothy Holland. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. 28. 50 The anonymous author of Der Anarchismus und seine Träger: Enthüllungen aus dem Lager der Anarchisten is referred to with the same symbol; originally a series of articles in right-wing newspapers, the “‘revelations’ are more an accumulation of [. . .] biased gossip and bourgeois anxieties.” Hubert van den Berg. “Another Source for The Secret Agent.” The Conradian 16 (1991). 48–50. 50.

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located, and the detail of his “heavy overcoat hanging in a triangle on each side of the chair” (135). The symbolic sign, arbitrary yet conventional and legible to those conversant with its code, is transformed into iconicity – the Greek letter becoming a triangle – and indexicality. The uncontainable status of the latter is compounded by the label pointing to the explosion in Greenwich park, to the central unrepresentable event that is shown to disrupt any explanatory discourse brought to bear on it in the narrative. Indeed, it is the identification of Stevie by means of the detached label that ultimately leads to Verloc’s death. By contrast, all of these diffractions are kept at bay as long as a set of rules can be taken to govern the conversion of ‘Δ’. While the meaning of the sign is still contained, alterity construction can continue apace. Specifically, it is still possible to agree on a shared notion of anarchist conspiracies that have to be unveiled by Δ, relayed by the embassy, solved by the police, and communicated by the press. In this smoothly unfolding language game, Verloc can assign to himself the role of a supplier of original transgressive events. He stands at the beginning of a production of anarchist narratives, relaying privileged information in order to ensure a steady supply of radicals to be evoked, internally elaborated, thwarted — and communicated. Specifically, Verloc, in his role as Δ, enables anarchist plots, both in the sense of diegetic plans and as minimal arrangements of narratable events. These are to be set in motion and prevented in time as a means of demonstrating the ordering capacities of the apparatus of demarcation. A breach of norms becomes subject to a series of subsequent processings, which make it possible to reconstitute the ‘semantic nucleus’ of an anarchist transgression as a narratable event (such as a “dynamite campaign” 100).51 In the specific case of the political Other, however, anarchist alterity is predicated on presenting a potential breach. The more loosely defined the abyssal referent of anarchy, the more leeway is granted to the actors involved in the process of stabilising normative identities against it. We gain an insight into the production of alterity in this system as Verloc — his demise imminent – eulogises his contributions: He perceived that his wife had sat up. Mrs Verloc’s arms remained lying stretched on the table. Mr Verloc watched at her back as if he could read there the effect of his words. There isn’t a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I hadn’t my finger in at the risk of my life. There’s scores of these revolutionists I’ve sent off, with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier. The old Baron knew what I was worth to his country. And here suddenly a swine comes along—an ignorant, overbearing swine. (175)

51 Cf. Linder/Ort, “Übertretung,” 33.

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As Δ, the informer supplies the potential anarchist terrorist apprehended at the border. He is, thus, responsible for the referential material that constitutes the basis for the ensuing constructions of alterity. In the process, the second-order connotations to be associated with the “revolutionists” who are “caught on the frontier” (175) (as anarchists, as immediate threats) open up a set of facultative third-level connotations. These make it possible to associate the signifier “scores of these revolutionists” with the signified of whichever order is to be stabilised against it. On each level, the translation of uncertain, potential transgression into a “murdering plot” is constitutive for the self-reproduction of the respective systems involved in the apparatus of demarcation. After all, the institutions participating in the policing of classificatory (as well as diegetically real) borders are shown to define their very purpose in the process of constructing a “frontier” about to be crossed. To this breach, they impart the status of a describable event.52 The stabilising function of the anarchist Other is mirrored by the domestic sphere in which it is wistfully remembered. As he reminisces on his activity as a secret agent, Verloc is shown to watch “at her back as if he could read there the effect of his words” (175). Winnie is not only mistaken for a set of decipherable signifiers in the manner of the metonymical “broad back of a policeman” (18), but, what is more, these signs are presumed to follow a shared code. This assumption of semiotic stability suggests a domestic equivalent to the certainty that ‘Δ’ is legible on the basis of a communicable array of assumptions.53 In both cases, order is inertly assumed. While in his political role, Verloc provides ‘murdering plots’ for the self-definition of institutional identities, in the domestic setting he evokes the alterity of the ambassador who has invalidated this role, the “swine” (175) responsible for the collapse of a mutually beneficial

52 With Barthes, a connotative system of this type “suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent.” Barthes, Mythologies, 124. 53 This assumption stands in sharp contrast to the long-standing debate on the origin of Conrad’s triangle/uppercase delta, particularly the plausibility of an allusion to Irish republicanism claimed by Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, 323. While Sherry draws plausible connections to the Clan-na-Gael organisation, Michael Newton productively emphasises the “interweaving of discourses” and the necessity to invoke “the work of art, not a series of abstruse allusions to ‘facts’ waiting to be uncovered.” (377) This is an especially important caveat since Verloc is an intradiscursive equivalent to such a meeting-point of discourses, yet treats his several interests and payrolls as so much surface material obscuring an essential self. Michael Newton. “Sir William Harcourt, Ford and Helen Rossetti, Bourdin’s Relations, and a Warning Against Δ.” The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. 129–146. 144.

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system. The protagonist proceeds from the assumption that if a compelling figure of interruption can be presented – the ‘swine’ taking the place of the ‘murderous’ anarchist at the frontier – his wife will remain firmly entrenched in a controlled domestic identity. Only if alterity is assured can the asymmetric interests undergirding the respective systems be occluded. Like Verloc attempting to decipher “the effect of his words” (175) on his wife’s back, political stability is predicated on the belief of each protagonist that they can come to an agreement on the commensurable representation of anarchist alterity as manifested in jointly constructed “murdering plot[s]” (175). This project must remain constitutively undefined, depending as it does (like the illusion of domestic accord) on granting essentialist validity to the manufactured circulation of “revolutionists” with “bombs in their blamed pockets” (175). After they have been made to appear in communicable form, then, anarchists are retroactively taken to pre-exist their institutional emplotment.54 In another correspondence of the (allegedly) political and the private, the marriage contract and the apparatus of demarcation alike suspend further sceptical inquiry into the constructed Others upholding their consistency. This is condensed in Verloc’s thought that “[s]he was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living beings. The far-famed secret agent Δ of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s alarmist despatches was not the man to break into such mysteries” (132). In both cases interrelated here – his domestic arrangement and his activities as agent provocateur – Verloc is associated with the same two-step model of demarcation. Firstly, he takes part in a transactional process. In marrying Verloc, Winnie aims to secure the material wellbeing of her brother; Verloc, meanwhile, can address her “in a peculiar tone [. . .] as the note of wooing” (191). Secondly, however, this exchange is disavowed, leaving the character “no other idea than that of being loved for himself” (210). This second pivot is crucial: continued ‘mysteries’ emerge as the condition of possibility for just barely maintaining an order that collapses under too-strident inquiry. After having been shown to regard his wife as “chief possession” (132), the protagonist can perpetuate his domestic life on the basis of the assumption that her own actions cannot, in turn, be motivated by determinate interests. Similarly, although his “alarmist despatches” (132) have uncertain truth value, designed as they are to justify his position, the protagonist can afterwards treat them as facts merely passed on to the embassy and investigated by his police contacts. Before the “mysteries” (132) of anarchist agitation can be fathomed,

54 As in the previous cases, a succinct summary of such ‘retroactive positing’ is provided by Edelman, No Future, 7.

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they have to be set up as political arcana in the first place: similarly to the presentation of Winnie as “mysterious” (188), the symbolic representation of political radicals is facilitated, only to be treated as an epistemological impasse. In both cases, these tactics serve to occlude the constructedness and transactional status underlying the ongoing production of ‘revolutionary’ threats. Both sources of Verloc’s certainties – the domestic sphere and his role as informer – thus depend on the protagonist’s remaining “indolent, with the indolence which is so often the secret of good nature” (132). A demarcation between self and Other is both constructed and, afterwards, inertly assumed. This ‘indolent’ assumption of default order also holds for the chain of policing that produces anarchist figures of otherness: “these revolutionists I’ve sent off, with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier” (175). The ostensible plans of such political radicals are lightly sketched, implied just enough to allow for an abortive border crossing and a subsequent return to what Lotman calls a “basic plotless structure.” If “what the plotless text establishes as an impossibility is the very thing that constitutes the content of the plot,” sending off revolutionists to their arrest forestalls “the ‘revolutionary element’ in relation to the world picture.”55 In order to ensure a functional differentiation between self and Other, this practice simultaneously evokes a transgression and makes it a communicable sign for the benefit of those in the business of policing supposed ‘anarchism’. However, the event of anarchist ‘direct action’ is cancelled before a border has been crossed. The radical plot is, thus, defined as an abortive breach of order which is ever-imminent, yet remains in a state of constant event cancellation. In other words: the policed sujet consists in the creation of a minimal border-crossing from a (1) potential threat to a (2) contained threat. Paradoxically, then, this residual ‘happening’ is achieved by preventing any topographical or semantic border-crossing from actually taking place. In the process, it is not specified which “frontiers,” specifically, are secured. This indeterminacy adds to the impression that the autopoietic selfreproduction of political identities occurs on the basis of a minimal breach, which is adumbrated rather than narrated with any conviction. The “frontier” is set up as an abstract semantic opposition which does not require further specification. Its transgression is, firstly, only ever evoked as a distant potential and, secondly, revoked as a matter of course. As a result, the ‘demarcationary’

55 Jurij Lotman. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. 238.

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mode of creating anarchist alterity is insistently “spatial and achronic,”56 with potential events communicated as an already accomplished feat of recursive signification. Its bulk effect is to minimise the temporal gap between a breach of order and its containment within stable states and state institutions, thus suggesting their seemingly automatic maintenance of order. This procedure is reinforced by the description of a meeting between the secret agent, the former ambassador, and Verloc’s police liaison, Chief Inspector Heat. The policeman recalls that the agent gave him a piece of very startling news. Then the Baron took me aside nervously to praise him up to me, and when I turned round again I discovered that the fellow had vanished like a ghost. Got up and sneaked out down some back stairs, I suppose. There was no time to run after him, as I had to hurry off after the Ambassador down the great staircase, and see the party started safe for the opera. However, I acted upon the information that very night. Whether it was perfectly correct or not, it did look serious enough. Very likely it saved us from an ugly trouble on the day of the Imperial visit to the city. (95)

Here, ‘acting upon’ the information is said to have prevented diegetically real anarchists from disturbing a stable social order and international diplomacy as encapsulated by an Imperial visit to London. The urban centre functions as a metonymical stand-in for the British Empire, which can be aligned with other Imperial representatives in an uninterrupted chain of contiguities. A description of this multiscale order equals a prescription of the necessity to preserve it against destabilisation by anarchists.57 The possessor of privileged information from behind the radical scenes merely has to impart his information for his interlocutors to be able to agree on the threat and the necessity of preventing it. His performance as secret agent informing on his comrades to the Russian ambassador receives a favourable review by Heat: “Whether it was perfectly correct or not, it did look serious enough.” (95) The delivery of his “startling news” (95) before vanishing “like a ghost” (95) is presented as successful stagemanagement. The mock-anarchist dramatises his position as an operator behind the scenes, emanating forth from an authentic revolutionary outside against which a momentary inside can determine its normative status, its internal enmities notwithstanding. Intimately involved in what Stuart Hall calls the “practice of ‘closure’ and exclusion” of the Other, Verloc’s appearance in the

56 Lotman, Structure, 239. “From the moment that a route is traced on a map – not a general route but that of a single vessel – new evaluative coordinates are introduced. The map and the typal route are spatial and achronic.” 57 Cf. Audrey Jaffe. The Victorian Novel: Dreams of the Real. Conventions and Ideology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 24.

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dressing-room “symbolically fixes boundaries and excludes everything which does not belong.”58 This practice, what is more, facilitates ongoing reference to a radical outside. Privileged insiders agree on the nature of this outside threat and, in this way, come to terms on a temporary sphere safe from destabilisation, anarchist or otherwise. If an attack happens, the breach can be attributed to the supposed radicals at the border, as well as connected to the mysterious anarchist sphere to which Verloc is presumed to return: “when I turned round again I discovered that the fellow had vanished like a ghost” (95). If, however, nothing happens and the agreed-upon order is not breached, the attack can be said to have been successfully thwarted: the “ugly trouble” (95) has been evaded. By subsisting either way, Verloc’s model is one of ‘realist’ representation, which, in Audrey Jaffe’s terms, “takes as given the structures it puts in place (hence the term ‘description’ plays right into its hand).” Its “descriptions are also prescriptions, a circle drawn around a specified centre, the organization of a limited space.”59 Accordingly, although the reader is made privy to the construction of anarchist alterity – a set of “murdering plots” that never take place, telegraphed reports that circulate nevertheless – the apparatus of demarcation treats the radical threat as real. Whatever happens, the decription/prescription of alterity ensures that ‘anarchy’ remains in the representational ‘circle’ of a relational system tacitly agreed upon. This form of communication is regularised when Verloc is made the go-to informer by the Chief Inspector, who guarantees that, in exchange, he will not interfere with Verloc’s trade in “shady wares” (189) — presumably pornography and condoms in addition to radical pamphlets.60 “I took it upon myself to promise him that, as long as he didn’t go in for anything obviously outrageous, he would be left alone by the police.” (96) Like the trade of information in the dressing-room, in which an agreement on the terms of exchange is reached, this inofficial economy is symmetrical: Verloc trades in pornography to keep up his semblance of bourgeois respectability, whilst Heat enables the continued 58 Stuart Hall. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.” Representation. Ed. Stuart Hall. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 2003. 223–290. 245. 59 Jaffe, The Victorian Novel, 24. Fittingly for the performative invocation of order, Jaffe adds that “[l]ike the process of Althusserian interpellation, realist representation performs itself over and over again. And not only does it build the illusion of a certain kind of space, but it is said [. . .] to construct and depend on consensus.” 60 Rice points out that the grandiloquent function of “preserving an imperfect society” (SA 190) is a double entendre, also referring to ‘preservatives’ as a euphemism for condoms. Tom Rice. “Condomization in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.” Conradiana 40 (2008). 129–145.

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flow of wares to receive information and, thus, ensure a sufficient supply of anarchists. Indeed, the cycle of transgressive wares and confidential information is shown to form a closed system of “shady transactions” (40) guiding Verloc’s very choice of profession: “Moreover, it did not take him out of his own sphere— the sphere which is watched by the police. On the contrary, it gave him a publicly confessed standing in that sphere, and as Mr Verloc had unconfessed relations which made him familiar with yet careless of the police, there was a distinct advantage in such a situation.” (40) The transactions make up an unperturbed sphere of mutually beneficial exchange, a self-referential functioning which, however, constantly requires external reference in the manner of Verloc’s voice startling the policeman like an “instrument” (18). The participants establish what Agustín deems a “logic of equivalence which establishes discursive formations against an exteriority to which they are opposed,”61 with the simulated referent of political radicalism allowing for “familiar” (35) terms of exchange. Every beneficiary of these transactions has to acknowledge the unspoken premise that information is given, acted upon, and mediated regarding an empty signifier of political radicalism which cannot, however, be unduly specified. After all, the label ‘anarchist’ has to reference several disavowed groups and ideologies at once to remain adaptable to the purposes of any one of the institutional actors involved. Verloc’s police contact, Chief Inspector Heat, makes this constitutive blurring of alterity explicit. More precisely, he ruminates on his role in a passage that blurs free indirect thought and thought report to suggest the character’s partial knowledge of the system of transactions in which he is involved: “A department does not know so much as some of its servants. Being a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed. It would not be good for its efficiency to know too much.” (67) The police, like the other institutions involved in the realist language game, depend on the maintenance of a potential threat to be invoked at the convenience of its representatives. An anarchist Other around which illegal trade, police work, and diplomacy can revolve is predicated on not knowing, with the novel performing an extended ‘agnotology’, a study of constitutive ignorance.62 Demarcation functions on the basis of anarchism as an empty signifier, in which the lack of knowledge regarding a “murderous attempt” (24) is currency rather than “something in need of correction, a kind of

61 Óscar García Agustín. Sociology of Discourse: From Institutions to Social Change. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2015. 68. 62 Cf. Robert Proctor. “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and its Study).” Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Ed. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. 1–36.

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natural absence or void where knowledge has not yet spread.”63 Like its isomorphic domestic arrangement – the married couple remaining mutually unaware of the terms of their implicit contract – the constitution of anarchist policing also depends on the “instinctive conviction that things don’t bear looking into very much” (132). The Secret Agent traces two interlocking assumptions that enable political difference: the participants act as if they are referring to a diegetically real anarchist threat; this threat, however, has to remain unspecified so that an accord in the matter of the dressing-room narration can be reached and the communicative consensus on the construction of radical threats maintained.

4.1.2 Perpetuating Anarchist Alterity After the initial evocation of abortive frontier-crossings and attempted acts of ‘propaganda by the deed’, the novel presents their further institutional processing. This function is associated with Chief Inspector Heat, who is responsible for the elaboration of his agent’s information in order to stabilise a figure of political alterity. As his superior realises, the “reputation of Chief Inspector Heat might possibly have been made in a great part by the Secret Agent Verloc” (96). Based on hints provided by his informant, the policeman takes up the production of infractions within what Jaffe calls “Realist space” which “must represent what ‘everyone’ agrees constitutes the real.”64 This ‘realist’ account of anarchism is to be integrated into the complete picture of a mapped place in which each transgressor is marked and traced. The aim is an institutional inside assuring both production and observation of the anarchic outside: “The reports had come in: every anarchist had been exactly accounted for” (72). The following chapter traces an urban imaginary of comprehensive surveillance generated from the position of such an institutional ‘inside’. Elaboration of alterity is geared towards an ‘accounting’ in which “the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical.”65 While anarchists are set up as a potential threat, they are firmly entrenched in spheres of alterity, without any remaining possibility of unrecorded disruption.

63 Robert Proctor. “Agnotology,” 2. 64 Jaffe, The Victorian Novel, 24. 65 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4.

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4.1.1.1 Institutional Consolidation As the incomplete border-crossings of ostensible radicals have shown, the thoroughly policed distinction between ordered social spheres and the successfully observed anarchists is presented as a ‘sujetless’ state. Accordingly, it is set up to disallow “new developments in a changing world,” representing instead “the cyclical iterations and isomorphisms of a closed cosmos,”66 the order of which is periodically demonstrated. Externally, this is achieved by the dramatisation of an imminent threat, such as the “ugly trouble on the day of the Imperial visit to the city” (95). As a matter of internal procedures, however, the ‘exact’ placing of “every anarchist” is fully dependent on the institutional production of knowledge. Information from the ‘accounted-for’ anarchist outside is passed on internally by “[s]peaking tubes resembling snakes [. . .] tied by the heads to the back of the Assistant Commissioner’s wooden arm-chair,” while “their gaping mouths seemed ready to bite his elbows” (72). The medium transmitting information of the alleged, radical outside takes on the very characteristics it presents to the institutional representatives inside. While in its transfer from Verloc to Heat, anarchism is a matter of ‘accounting’ and event-cancellation at the ‘frontier’ – an entire system of control set up for its management – internally it can be elaborated as an imminent threat. The anarchist relayed by snake-like ‘speaking tubes’ thus becomes a combined signifier both of imagined colonial Otherness and political radicalism, presenting a danger inscribed into the very mechanisms of conveying information. As Tanya Agathocleous has shown regarding this medium-cum-radical-message, the combination of “the primeval past identified with the colonies, and a machine-dominated future identified with the arch of capitalism” are combined in the image of the snakes on the mechanical chair.67 As per the apparatus of demarcation, then, an erosion of distinctions is copied into the inside of the institution, where it can be negotiated safely. After distinguishing a regularised, ‘surveilled’ anarchist exterior from the interior of the police, that same distinction becomes subject to re-entry into the set-apart institutional sphere. In other words, the difference order/anarchy appears twice: “as the difference produced by the system, and as the difference observed inside the system.”68

66 Wolf Schmid. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 8n13. 67 Tanya Agathocleous. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 178. 68 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 45. My trans. Orig. quote: “Die Differenz System/Umwelt kommt zweimal vor: als durch das System produzierter Unterschied und als im System beobachteter Unterschied.”

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The observation from within, however, threatens to fail in its remit to reproduce this nested distinction. Specifically, within the police system, we witness a proliferation of traits previously consigned to the anarchist outside. The radical traces lose the distinctiveness that makes them appear identifiable in the external environment of the institution. Notably, the AC’s ‘speaking-tubes’ also evoke the bombs constructed by the “perfect anarchist” (70) introduced later in the novel. A crucial part of this terrorist figure’s explosive device is a “tube [which] leads up—” (49), just as the bomb he builds consists of a “thin tube of tin enclosing a—” (57). In both cases, the explanation of the tube’s connections is cut off by an ellipsis, a semantic blank interrupting the elaboration of a destructive mechanism. The bomb, thus, literalises the situation of Heat’s superior, who has to be ‘cut off’ from his environment in order to be furnished with an appropriate set of anarchist signifiers for further processing. Where his speaking-tubes lead, as in the case of the Professor’s devices, is unknowable, making the figure ensconced in the institution fully reliant on the representations provided from an outside beyond his control. Upon re-entry, the anarchist Other can be associated with further connotations in order to evoke the impression of a shared, radical referent. In this process, the image of the “tubes resembling snakes” can take on multiple associations. The novel presents a veritable “institutional poetics”69 for the making and unmaking of differentiations between self and Other, based on immuring the place of these procedures from an outside to which it is only connected by the uncertain ‘tubes’. These not only emerge as an image of non-Western, exoticised spaces in the manner of the Congo River — an “immense snake uncoiled” that “charmed” (8) Marlow in Heart of Darkness. What is more, the trope also evokes degenerationist associations in line with the images of atavistic devolution that recur throughout The Secret Agent. Specifically, while the AC is metonymically connected to snakes, a ‘cleaning woman’ is dehumanised to the point of metaphorically becoming “like a sort of amphibious and domestic animal living in the ash-bins and dirty water” (135). Finally, the ‘tubes’ also take on associations of a modernity bereft of individual control, in which the very media of communication constrict the individual. All of these connotations are added to the initial similarity to the bomb and the recurring cultural image of anarchists as ‘snakes’,70 thus demonstrating the range of interpretative processings that can

69 David Hansen-Miller. Civilized Violence: Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 23. 70 Cf. Mulry, Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists, 9. Mulry traces the metaphor of ‘nurturing snakes in our bosom’ in the English discourse on anarchism. / Cf. also Roger Webster. “The Aesthetics of Walking: Literary and Filmic Representations of London in Joseph Conrad’s

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be applied to political radicalism once it has been copied into the institutional sphere. Rather than a loss of control, the re-entry is, thus, presented as the very basis of the apparatus of demarcation. Anarchist panic and a coruscating set of associations of impending danger and civilisational collapse can be indulged within the confines of a closed-off sphere differentiated from its environment. In short, the Assistant Commissioner receives signifiers of Otherness through restricted channels to justify the police endeavours taking place outside of its immediate domain. This reduction of complexity is an integral part of a mode of power predicated on the production of relational alterity. A radical foil, however, is not the only outcome of this strategy, as shown by the representation of the AC’s subordinate, Heat. Over and above his role in the transfer of anarchist information into his institution, the Chief Inspector uses the resulting political difference to confirm his identity: For Chief Inspector Heat was a kind man, an excellent husband, a devoted father; and the public and departmental confidence he enjoyed acting favourably upon an amiable nature, disposed him to feel friendly towards the successive Assistant Commissioners he had seen pass through that very room. There had been three in his time. The first one, a soldierly, abrupt, red-faced person, with white eyebrows and an explosive temper, could be managed with a silken thread. [. . .] To work with him had been a pride and a pleasure. (88)

As in the case of Verloc, that other self-appointed family man with whom Heat is associated in “curious symbiosis and [. . .] neat symmetry,”71 the Chief Inspector’s self-image is not derived by means of one simple differentiation against anarchists but requires further internal elaboration. Specifically, since he peddles in the assurance that anarchists are already ‘accounted for’, his mode of policing only requires the thwarting of an occasional looming act of terror to perpetuate itself. The identification and prevention of such an act The Secret Agent.” London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image. Ed. Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2007. 91–118. 97. Webster analyses the manner in which the “denaturalized setting is overlaid with a discourse of foreignness, of the alien” and “nationality and identity appear uncertain and blurred.” / As an example of the journalistic discourse in this vein, cf. for example “The Anarchist Terror.” Manchester Courier, 16 March 1894. 6. “The Anarchist snake is scotched but not killed in France, and yesterday afternoon a further proof of its continued existence was given in Paris. After the frequent cases in which the miscreants who indulge in Anarchist methods have shown us that human life is no consideration in their projects for the world’s regeneration, it is not surprising to find that the pleas of history and architecture fall upon deaf ears.” 71 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. “‘Sudden Holes in Space and Time’: Conrad’s Anarchist Aesthetics in The Secret Agent.” Conrad’s Cities: Essays for Hans van Merle. Ed. Gene M. Moore. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. 207–221. 215.

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functions as an impulse from outside in the manner of Verloc’s “sharp instrument” (18) prompting the policeman to turn around. By occluding his own role in fabricating those prompts, the ensuing social order determined against the anarchist threat can be transformed into a gage of Heat’s personal identity as protector of that order. Anarchism just barely furnishes a heterostereotype for this mode of autostereotypical stabilisation. The apparatus of demarcation supplements this distinction with the sense of being respectable, a “kind man, an excellent husband” performing a social function as a “pride and a pleasure” (88). Just as Verloc provides material for “alarmist despatches” (132), Heat’s respectability is predicated on feeding just enough information about political radicalism into the police force to allow for further processings in line both with his own self-image and the needs of the “successive Assistant Commissioners” (88). As a consequence, this police figure denies any template of detective fiction, since his mode of investigation is predicated on the ability to ‘manage with a silken thread’ what counts as an anarchist transgressor in the first place. As a correlate to the controlled opposition of ‘radicals’, the apparatus of demarcation, then, also offers a set of institutional identities to be typified and ‘passed through that very room’. Just as the narrator has previously presented anarchist types determined by a few, physical characteristics and a limited set of ideas, Heat demarcates a place of institutional identity in which he can perform an equivalent classification for each successive representative of law and order. They become a set of “soldierly, abrupt, red faced” traits managed with the same facility as the radical figures that Heat offers them. 4.1.2.2 Mass Media Dissemination After its extraction and internal processing, the manufactured anarchist is disseminated to a broad audience. To this end, the system of demarcation relies on mass media. In showing this nexus of policing, politics, and the newspapers, specifically, the novel reflects what Constance Bantman identifies as the “anarchist panic in the context of the rise of the popular press and new journalism in the mid-century – a term associated with the growth of cheap newpapers addressed to a large working-class readership.”72 In order to communicate their distinction of identity and alterity to the outside of the institution, the police are shown to rely on a ‘loose coupling’ with the press: “an open-ended multiplicity of possible connections that are still compatible with the unity of an element.”73

72 Bantman, The French Anarchists, 115. 73 Cf. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 104.

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That is, as a result of this collaboration, discourses on anarchism can be passed on as another instance of ‘tight couplings’ of selected elements. These elements, in turn taken both from journalistic representations and from the police discourse, are combined to make a radical Other momentarily representable and transmissible. In the process, the newspaper is seen as an intermediary between the police and the public, a controllable interface for the distribution of information outside of the institution. The aim of this media interface is “not to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them.”74 To ensure this ‘distinction’, the logic of mass media demands a spectacular presentation of delinquents; seeking to meet this demand, Heat can make use of a personal, pre-disciplinary mode of power, which presents a harmless socialist utopian – the “ticket-ofleave apostle” (31) Michaelis – as an emblematic figure of transgression: “There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against him,” he said, with virtuous complacency. “You may trust me for that, sir,” he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fulness of his heart; for it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special indignation in this case. It was impossible to say yet whether it would roar or not. That in the last instance depended, of course, on the newspaper press. But in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade, and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the law. (84)

This system of display, for all its presentation as indirect thought, is related in the manner of a manifesto. Introduced by verbs of thought, it is capped off by the narrator’s interjection that the character ‘did logically believe’ in the function of the prison as an ideal economy, the flourishing of which merely needs the occasional guidance and intervention by the police official. In this presumption of a governmental technology already in place, requiring only a sporadic prompt from outside, Heat’s carceral imaginary once more resembles the model associated with Verloc’s voice. Like the double agent’s phonocentric performance, his exertions aim to ensure the self-replication of an unimpeded economy of control by constructing an external stimulus. Who supplies that prompt is, however, much less certain than the “proper fate” of incarceration reserved for the figure of alterity. The phrase “declared enemy of the law” neglects to specify the instance declaring the status of ‘enemy’ in the first place. While it can refer to the preferred anarchist scapegoat, it can also denote a declaration by the Inspector or even the newspaper, which ‘declares’ the relationship of the individual to the law. In Heat’s strategy

74 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 272.

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of setting up anarchist alterity, these positions are mutually reinforcing. According to the policeman’s implicit media theory, the press functions as a means of placating the public. It offers a directed mode of two-way communication, both transmitting ‘public opinion’ and enabling Heat to tailor a political Other to its demands by “lumping all forms of anti-statist politics together.”75 After all, in this model of demarcation, media construction and reinforcement of anarchists as diegetic reality are not mutually exclusive. In Luhmann’s terms, “there is little sense in asking if and how mass media represent an existing reality in a distorted fashion; they generate a description of reality, a construction of the world, and that is the reality towards which society orients itself.”76 Thus, the novel does not imply that Heat’s intended media image of the anarchist is a skewed version of Michaelis, as if there were an unaccounted-for reality to the utopian socialist whom he has selected as the culprit for the Greenwich explosion. The reality of mass media presented by the novel is more far-reaching than that: released from the carceral system, ‘Michaelis’ consists of the headlines written about him, a bloated bearer of malleable alterity. As in Marlow’s monologue in Heart of Darkness, the “policeman” and the “voice [. . .] whispering of public opinion” (HD, 49) go hand in hand, making and disseminating representatives of scandal and sentiment. Accordingly, the Chief Inspector picks his synechdochic figure of anarchist terrorism because of the way journalists have previously “written him up with emotional gush” (90). Michaelis “had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment, the same sentiment which years ago had applauded the ferocity of the life sentence passed upon him for complicity in a rather mad attempt to rescue some prisoners from a police van” (78). The changeable impression Michaelis has made on his “empanelled countrymen” (78) on the occasion of the trial is already at a remove from the “mad attempt” (78) precipitating it: “That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of his release was made for him on no better grounds by people who wished to exploit the sentimental aspect of his

75 Barry Maxwell and Raymond Craib. No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms. Introduction. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015. 1–11. 5. Maxwell characterizes this homogenisation of the heterostereotype as an erasure of both historical and spatial differentiations between socialisms. The elision of differences precedes attempts to “cast anarchism as a ‘misplaced idea’ or a foreign ideology” to be extirpated. 76 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 102. My trans. Orig. quote: “Es hat deshalb wenig Sinn, zu fragen, ob und wie die Massenmedien eine vorhandene Realität verzerrt wiedergeben; sie erzeugen eine Beschreibung der Realität, eine Weltkonstruktion, und das ist die Realität, an der die Gesellschaft sich orientiert.”

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imprisonment either for purposes of their own or for no intelligible purpose.” (79) This second aspect of the narrator’s history of the case is crucial: the sentiment produced by the media is incalculable, following an autonomous logic. In a novel suffused with the circulation of information through print media, the reception of the purported anarchist is “groundless” (79), since it does not offer a predictable logic of ascription. Not even the public constructs of alterity are consistent: Michaelis is condemned and sentimentally praised without a discernible set of interests underlying these ‘unintelligible’ vacillations. A shift takes place in the short history of Michaelis as a media figure. The initial ‘exploitation of the sentimental aspect’ still implies the existence of a truthful account preceding its sentimental distortion. This attempt to maintain the notion of an anterior truth by casting suspicion of manipulation on the media, however, is abandoned. Instead of exploitation, the narrator denies any “purpose” (79) whatsoever to the changes in the public perception of the anarchist. In Luhmann’s terms, “the suspicion of manipulation does not entail appreciable consequences, since the knowledge extracted from mass media forms a self-perpetuating, closed framework as if of its own accord.”77 As a response to such unstable dissemination of information, Heat constructs his own model, which is to reinstate the possibility to tell apart truth and misrepresentation. From the reality of mass media, this model of policing selects those criteria consonant with the overall strategy of creating stabilising images of a political Other. In order to derive a controllable figure of alterity, Heat purports to only observe and create an ‘account’ (72) of anarchist activity in the city. His system of surveillance – like the initial media theory of “exploitation” offered by the narrator – implies external reference to anarchist deeds, which only have to be recorded to ensure police control. In stark contrast to this imagined causality between radical action and police reaction, however, Heat is shown to react not to the activities of any diegetically real anarchists, but rather to the ‘selfperpetuating’ media: “it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special indignation in this case” (84). That is, he extracts signs of radicalism (objects of “a revulsion of popular sentiment”) from the self-enclosed system of mass media in order to be capable of reacting to public demands which, in turn, he infers from those same media.

77 Niklas Luhmann. Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996. 1. My trans. Orig. quote: “Wir wehren uns mit einem Manipulationsverdacht, der aber nicht zu nennenswerten Konsequenzen führt, da das den Massenmedien entnommene Wissen sich wie von selbst zu einem selbstverstärkenden Gefüge zusammenschließt.”

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The policeman arrogates to himself the agency of deciding when potential delinquency is transformed into manifest delinquency. That is, he can compensate for the absence of a predictable interaction of the media and the public by restoring a sequence of events. Specifically, he adumbrates what Foucault calls an “ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted.”78 Whenever the uncertainty of the public is perceived, a narrative of delinquency can be grafted onto an anarchist figure imagined as always already in breach of social order by having evaded prison in the first place. A “man like that has no business to be at large, anyhow” (84), so that the moment he is “thrown down” from the self-appointed heights of police authority to the uncertain region of public opinion merely brings to the fore his latent potential as a deviant figure. Once this has been achieved, a secondary eventful sequence is retroactively assembled. In this narrative arrangement, the figure that already has been set up as a default transgressor can be associated with a breach of order to justify his criminalisation. It is in accordance with this procedure that, as Heat assures his superior, “[t]here will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against him” (84). This mode of power, thus, depends on the possibility of imputing a sequence to three non-sequential, independent states at the convenience of the police. These states are constituted by (1) the potential delinquent, who, (2) finds a disciplinary correlate in the policing strategy of having “that man in hand”; this redoubled state of potential delinquency and potential discipline, in turn, (3) corresponds to an indifferent public not yet incited to respond either way. If that public, as relayed by the media, shows “special indignation,” the necessity of procuring a narrative arises: accordingly, the policeman reconstructs an eventful sequence. In order to impose a linear succession onto the media response, Heat is shown to react with a basic eventful template of ‘casting down’ the anarchist (a border-crossing from high to low) and, thus, transforming the political radical from a latent into a manifest threat. By selecting media constructions of anarchists, processing them, and feeding them back into the newspaper system, the apparatus of demarcation embodied by Heat contributes to a closed loop of restricted distribution of information. This autopoietic system particularly supplants the narrator’s overdetermined representation of London as a city exceeding control. The transformation of mass media signs into ‘observed’ anarchists allows for London, the “cruel devourer of the

78 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 282.

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world’s light” (as per Conrad’s “Author’s Note”79), to be treated as if it were an ordered sphere. In it, potential arbiters of transgression are counted, controlled, and presented to the public at any – medially opportune – time.80 Once this transformation into a sequential event of delinquency has been assured, a whole series of further discourses can be enlisted to enable a realist view of anarchists ‘out there’, anterior to their being ‘thrown down’. This strategy, exemplified by the planned selection of Michaelis as a convenient public figure of alterity, is supported by the carceral system; after all, “[t]he rules of the game did not protect so much Michaelis, who was an ex-convict” (90). The policeman can, furthermore, “take advantage of legal facilities, and the journalists who had written him up with emotional gush would be ready to write him down with emotional indignation” (90). Such ‘writing up’ and ‘writing down’ repeats the topology of the original metaphor associated with the policeman. The newspapers write Michaelis down just as Heat sees himself capable of ‘casting’ him down, assigning Otherness with commensurate certainty. Thus, in this expansive system of control, the police, media, carceral, and legal system are imagined to function together to generate threats before purporting to have restored order. Following Edelman, the reader is once more confronted with ‘retroactive positing’: the Chief Inspector contributes to the construction of the “framework within which we experience social reality, but only insofar as it compels us to experience that reality in the form of a fantasy: the fantasy, precisely, of form as such, of an order, an organization, that assures the stability of our identities as subjects.”81 In Heat’s case, this two-step process of essentialising a joint construction of a political Other is shown in its spatial and temporal extension. Regarding anarchist attacks, the policeman asserts that “nothing of the sort could even be thought of without the department being aware of it within twenty-four hours; and he had spoken thus in his consciousness of being the great expert of his department” (63). The protagonist lays claim to a seamless, shared clock-time guaranteed by his vigilance – a policed “twenty-four hours” with no “holes in space and time” (63) that might disturb the continued production and observation of controllable anarchists.

79 Joseph Conrad. “Author’s Note.” The Secret Agent. Ed. John Lyon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 228–233. 23. 80 As Gasiorek puts it, “the principle of visibility on which surveillance depends fails because urban space does away with identity, frustrating the principle of observation on which surveillance is predicated.” Andrzej Gasiorek. A History of Modernist Literature. Malden, Oxford, and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. 115. 81 Edelman, No Future, 7.

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In important respects, Heat’s system departs from the the panopticon as the default metaphor for impersonal mass surveillance.82 To make supervision productive as a means of determining identity as well as anarchist alterity, the policeman is shown to presume a personal responsibility for the maintenance and fostering of the controlled anarchist Other. In other words, Heat displays a mode of power expended on “all the anarchists in his flock” (72) at the same time as the individual radical can be addressed as “one of his special flock” (69). In addition to the pretensions to an observable metropolis, thus, Heat is shown to consider himself a figure of authority in a manner that Foucault describes as ‘pastoral’. It is not exercised over a fixed territory so much as over a multitude moving towards an objective [. . .]; finally, through an essential paradox, it is a power that individualizes by according as much value to a single sheep as to the whole flock.83

By invoking the ‘flock’, Heat is shown to mobilise the ego-ideal of the policing subject: he demarcates self and other, while, at the same time, attending to the specificities of each anarchist case. This self-image promises “fields of knowledge, which, cultivated by a capable man, had a distinct value for the individual and for the society” (154). Such a ‘pastoral’ “system of supervision” (154) selects individual deviations from the orderly reproduction of controlled anarchism only to mark the coherence of the remaining normalised and counted figures of alterity. The flock is an especially useful image of controlled alterity for two reasons. Firstly, as Foucault puts it, “what the shepherd gathers together is dispersed individuals. They gather together on hearing his voice. [. . .] Conversely, the shepherd only has to disappear for the flock to be scattered. In other words, the shepherd’s immediate presence and direct action cause the flock to exist.”84 That is, despite his dependence on pre-mediated newspaper accounts of alterity, the prevarications of a ‘public’, and a range of institutions, the image of the ‘flock’ assigns to Heat an ultimately personal responsibility for the very coherence of the anarchist Others.

82 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. Regarding The Secret Agent, Schnauder, particularly, emphasises that the “initial phase of the investigation into the failed bombing illustrates how the whole populace comes under the police’s panoptic gaze” (212). Ludwig Schnauder. Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 83 Michel Foucault. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Ed. Michael Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 364. 84 Michel Foucault. “Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason.” Power. Ed. James D. Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press, 1994. 298–325. 302.

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What is more, the flock is ‘gathered together’, which, in the relational logic undergirding the apparatus of demarcation, allows Heat to attribute a countervailing set of traits to the collective identity of which he forms a part. The range of the self is expansive in Heat’s model, its scope becoming progressively more panoramic the more it can be defined against the constrained, organised, and limited anarchist flock. As long as the complementary image of ‘cultivated’ alterity holds, the autostereotype extends to the planetary: “All the inhabitants of the immense town, the population of the whole country, and even the teeming millions struggling upon the planet, were with him.” (71) What is more, Heat ascribes to himself an essential “authorised mission on this earth” (71) and expands the signifying chain of identity to a veritable ‘chain of being’, a multiscale bond connecting his mission to the “planet” (71). The constraint of the heterostereotypical flock, thus, allows for an ever-expanded autostereotype. Rather than an impersonal system of surveillance, this police fantasy allows for a homogenous, controlled world, in which residual transgressors are selected not so much for their deviance and aberrance, but for the possibility of bringing into view their opposite number: purveyors of care, organisation, and personal responsibility. Despite this expansive pastoral vision, The Secret Agent presents its readers with a system in which the well-honed production of political alterity is in its last throes. As long as the apparatus of demarcation persists, definition against occasional anarchists apprehended at the “frontier” (175) allows for a view of London (and by extension Britain) as a cohesive ‘place’, set apart from surrounding ‘space’ just enough so as to motivate and justify further policing. Relatedly, as long as disorder can be simulated in the press, taken up, and processed by the police, as well as distributed by mass media, the anarchist can still be treated as diegetically real. While demarcation persists, further, the various identities predicated on the maintenance of a communicable, relational Other are exempt from formulation in explicit, propositional terms. After their definition against relational alterity, the various personal and institutional selves – Verloc as protector of society, Heat as organiser of potential transgression, Baron StottWertheim as bastion against an international rise of anarchist violence – can proceed independently. These actors operate within “invisible media environments”85 that disavow their emergence as a result of contingent differentiations against a manufactured anarchist Other.

85 Lance Strate. “Studying Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach.” Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical, and Postmodern Perspectives. Ed. Paul Grosswiler. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 67–82. 69.

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By distinguishing itself from the nefarious activities of anarchists, the respective system involved in the policing of radicalism is enabled to “leave the ‘unmarked state’ in which nothing can be seen and one cannot even speak of ‘space’ towards the ‘marked state’, thus drawing a border in the process of crossing it.”86 This process of setting apart functional systems from a mediated Other is, however, tenuous. As shown above, the potential ‘anarchist’ plot or the transgressor “in hand” for strategic deployment only just allow for eventful border-crossings to be narrated. Accordingly, the model of policing increasingly loses its capacity for differentiation. The price of essentialising the ostensibly simulated figures of alterity (and thus, in Edelman’s terms, of experiencing reality in terms of a ‘retroactively posited’87 fantasy) is an unquestioned, inert sense of alterity. As a result, the novel suggests, the fiction of anarchist transgression increasingly cannot be given sustained representation. Hence, once the manufacture of ‘radicals’ fails, its complement of social order also dissolves into an unmarked state without the possibility of further demarcation. This ever-impending failure of differentiation besetting Heat’s and Verloc’s mode of political difference produces a city of “diffused light, in which neither wall, nor tree, nor beast, nor man cast a shadow” (9). Without a ‘shadow’ to offset the identity of self-proclaimed arbiters of order, the city appears as a blur. This imminent collapse shows that while the novel presents a sophisticated institutional poetics of differentiation, its success is mainly imagined in retrospect. In the diegetic present, anarchist alterity only barely exerts its function of presenting a differential foil.

4.2 Dissolution of Alterity The apparatus of demarcation has been shown to yield an incomplete delineation of borders and abortive border-crossings. At the diegetic “frontier” (175), where anarchists are apprehended and transformed into a variable ‘floating signifier’, the manufactured anarchist plots threaten to exceed their status as

86 Niklas Luhmann. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. 51. My trans. Orig. quote: “Der Begriff der Form im differenztheoretischen Sinne setzt deshalb die Welt als ‘umarked state’ voraus. Die Einheit der Welt ist unerreichbar, sie ist weder Summe, noch Aggregat, noch Geist. Wenn eine neue Operationsreihe mit einer Differenz beginnt, die sie selber macht, beginnt sie mit einem blinden Fleck. Sie steigt aus dem ‘unmarked state’, in dem nichts zu sehen ist und nicht einmal von ‘Raum’ gesprochen werden könnte, in den ‘marked state’ ein und zieht, indem sie sie sie überschreitet, eine Grenze.” 87 Edelman, No Future, 8.

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signifiers of transgression. Identification and prevention of a potential anarchist attack can only ever yield a minimal sequence. The ensuing loss of the transgressive figure of ‘the anarchist’ divests the avowed arbiters of social order of their primary ordering device. After all, in Foucault’s terms, “limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.”88 Both of the hypothetical states mentioned in this “Preface to Transgression” are shown to be imminent in the model of demarcation set up in The Secret Agent. Firstly, due to the dependence of any signifiable political distinction on a ‘limit’, its purveyors fail to account for the insistently potential status assigned to the anarchist perpetrators. As Heat puts it regarding Verloc’s supposed insider information about an impending act of terror, “[w]hether it was perfectly correct or not, it did look serious enough” (95). The simulation of alterity, then, does not offer certainty of a transgressed limit, but merely intimations and vague threats — with catastrophic consequences for the illusion of police control. Secondly, Foucault’s hypothesis that a transgressive crossing of a limit is ‘pointless’ if the boundary itself is illusory will likewise be shown to beset the arbiters of demarcation. After all, if the putatively oppositional spaces of alterity are not sufficiently different from their identitarian counterparts to begin with, anarchism fails to appear as a constitutive outside at all. This second mode of attenuated demarcation will be shown to recur whenever characteristics that were thought to be ‘anarchist’ appear in spaces purported to be associated with normative order. Proceeding from these vanishing ‘transgressions’, the following chapter will analyse the effect of the suspension of dichotomous order on the participants in the apparatus of demarcation. These characters, after all, are shown to simultaneously create and rely on illusions of a stable self and an incommensurable alterity beyond the pale. The loss of such residual distinctions will be demonstrated for Heat’s police function, before the suspension of political difference will be shown to impinge on the certainties of the mock-anarchist figures Verloc and Ossipon. Finally, the dissolution of order will be traced in connection with an anarchist figure radically different from the heterostereotypical types assembled in Verloc’s anarchist group. The Professor as the “perfect anarchist” (90) presents a condensed trajectory of dissolving certainties. With this character, the novel features a point of view that programmatically

88 Michel Foucault. “A Preface to Transgression.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 29–52. 34.

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attacks the institutional meaning making just barely upheld by Heat, Verloc and the other participants in the apparatus of demarcation. Dispensing with the reproduction of both ‘limit’ and ‘transgression’, however, does not lead to the extraordinary autonomy the Professor claims. Instead, the dismantling of extant political difference receives narrative sanction. Scepticism of the language games that allocate self and Other leads to an incapacity to maintain epistemological (rather than merely political) stability.

4.2.1 Dissolution of the Police Function As the tenuous agreement on anarchist alterity wanes, the differentiation between unmarked state and marked transgression is likewise shown to dissolve. This breakdown has two consequences. To begin with, (1) the very dependence of personal and collective identity on a relational Other becomes conspicuous. The protagonists are temporarily exposed to the fact that they were operating on the basis of a limited distinction rather than any essential self. Once the techniques of boundary-construction are no longer withdrawn from access (and thus no longer recede into an unacknowledged background), they become alltoo apparent, precluding the passive presumption of a homogenous sphere of comprehensible norms. This encroaching exposure of the strategies of maintaining alterity, leads to (2) an uncontrolled dissemination of formerly contained anarchist traits. As a consequence, the sense of breakdown and dissolution of order relegated to radical discontents is diffused throughout the narrated world. Instead of controlled heterostereotypes of anarchists, thus, the novel turns to a presentation of anarchy, here conceived as a state of breakdown in which differential boundaries fail to be established. Even the consistency of spatio-temporal experience is shown to be ‘contextual’, depending as it does on a preceding decision on the limits of the sphere of order and its unordered outside. That is, if an encounter cannot be framed in terms of political difference – a founding distinction of friend and foe89 – the resulting breakdown refuses containment as ‘political’ entirely. Once the narrated world can no longer be figured in antagonistic terms, it threatens to exceed comprehensibility altogether, down to its fundamental apprehension in terms of topography and sequence. Any imagined consistency, then, hinges on political differentiation — with the result that the loss of alterity coincides with a temporal and spatial crisis.

89 Cf. Alireza Shomali. Politics and the Criteria of Truth. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. 46.

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4.2.1.1 Identity without an Other Dissolution of alterity finds its paradigmatic expression in Chief Inspector Heat. While this character is shown to retain a vestige of self-definition through his involvement in the apparatus of demarcation outlined above, the encounter with the Professor allows the novel to dramatise the breakdown of his dichotomous worldview. The narrator identifies a reason for the vulnerability of the policeman’s distinctions of identity and alterity. After the Greenwich explosion, the victim of which is as uncertain to the protagonist as it is to the reader at this point in the narrative, he assures his superior that it will be solved “within twenty-four hours” (63). He had gone even so far as to utter words which true wisdom would have kept back. But Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion. His promotion had been very rapid. (63)

What the narrator describes as ‘true wisdom’ is the precondition for the successful maintenance of political demarcation in The Secret Agent (and the early modernist political imaginary more generally). That is, in order to restore momentary, stabilising certainties for others, political actors require the capacity to disavow those certainties for themselves. Despite bolstering norms, such characters remain aware of the provisional nature of any order amidst the irresolvable “contradictions” (63) besetting them. A negative capability of ‘true wisdom’ allows such figures to provide certainties despite not being “certain of anything.”90 Indeed, temporarily shoring up such stability is shown to be possible only from a position of “contradictions,” not least since it requires the adoption of mutually contradictory social roles without requiring their ultimate alignment in a stable identity. Such a double vision – the maintenance of certainties for others in full view of their lack of essential validity – is upheld by the Assistant Commissioner (cf. chapter 4.3.2). In contrast to Heat’s essentialist chains of ordered spheres, the AC’s interventions are compared to his habit of playing card games. He proceeds, that is to say, by admitting the contingency of the rules of the game and dismissing their validity outside of the agreed-upon confines. Specifically, Heat’s superior indulges

90 For an adaptation of Keat’s concept of ‘negative capability’ to Conrad, cf. Jeremy Hawthorn. Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment. London: Edward Arnold, 1990. Cf. also Jane Adamson. “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy.” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 85–110.

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in a literal “daily whist party” (76) with “co-sufferers” (76) whilst assuring others that their figurative language games have truth value. While thus shoring up belief in the validity of aesthetic appreciation (the salon) and parliamentary politics (Sir Ethelred), his own conspicuously ludic sense of self offers a “drug against the secret ills of existence” (76). The character is shown to be capable of political action precisely because his interventions are based on what Mark Wollaeger has termed “[s]kepticism [which] leads naturally to an anxiety about agency” and establishes a “link between epistemological and moral skepticism.”91 It is this aptitude in the face of an acknowledged uncertainty that the above passage contrasts with Heat’s insistent recourse to identitarian essentialism. Heat not only co-produces collective identity but is also shown to require a homogenous, non-contradictory sense of self, with the public and the private permanently brought into alignment. As the example of Verloc’s status as ‘Δ’ has shown, such an assumption is unstable. Inert identity relies on the foundational assumption of a shared code.92 Such a supposition prompts Heat to proclaim the complete observation of anarchists in the city, “with infinite satisfaction to himself, because it was clear that the high official desired greatly to hear that very thing” (63). In this, he proceeds from the notion that indicating an ordered city is enough to also evoke a set of shared premises. Verloc’s case has already shown the vagaries of asserting a shared worldview in this way. After all, each character in The Secret Agent brings to bear radically different notions of the contract undergirding their residual social spheres. While Verloc associates the bygone interpretative stability of being Δ with an equivalent trust in the ongoing, mutual acceptance of the obligations of marriage, for Winnie the death of her brother makes her assent to the arrangement null and void. It is only not speaking, not inquiring, and not bringing to the fore these radically different assumptions that maintains their stabilising function. As soon as the premises are formulated, the domestic household emerges as the sum of implicit and explicit assumptions, coalescing into momentary contractual form only as long as their incompatibility remains hidden. The same is true for the institutions presented in the novel. Any assertion of their internal coherence

91 Mark Wollaeger. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990. 120. 92 In Ripstein’s succinct definition, “[i]n a foundationalist theory, some set of considerations is held to support a particular form of political order, without itself depending on any substantive assumptions about the legitimacy of particular forms of human interaction. Hence the metaphor of a foundation, which holds up an edifice without itself being supported by anything.” Arthur Ripstein. “Foundationalism in Political Theory.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987). 115–137. 115.

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and their synecdochic encapsulation of larger social arrangements can only proceed if their underlying, diffracted, and heterogeneous codes are not made explicit, formulated, or, worst of all, compared. While the Assistant Commissioner ensures this functional ignorance, Heat is shown to partake in it, presuming the essential validity of his identity and of the figures of alterity against which it is defined. As opposed to the negative capability of ‘true wisdom’, the Chief Inspector is shown to position himself as the embodiment of normative identity, fully inhabiting his “present position” as a “kind man, an excellent husband, a devoted father” amidst “this world of contradictions” (88). As the above analysis by the narrator indicates and the subsequent narrative bears out, the sheer assumption of such certainties cannot be upheld if they are adopted as an integral part of a symbolic identity. For Heat, a stable self is fully expressed by a series of mutually reinforcing ascriptions, culminating in “public and departmental confidence” and an “amiable nature” (88). As the previous chapter has shown, all of these assurances are maintained despite their reliance on parallel series of interlocking constructions of alterity, with the uncertain dissemination of mediated signs forming a relay between the construction of an anarchist sphere, the public, and methods of policing. Thus, Heat derives a position of hypostasised certainty from uncertain mediation, a process encapsulated by his “putting unbounded faith in the sporting prophets” of a “particular evening publication” (152). After deriving identity and alterity from representations, their conversion into a presumed reality, likewise, emerges as an act of faith. In the process, as Žižek describes such conversions, “what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements.”93 Heat’s fetishisation of identity as ‘immediate property’ is a ‘structural effect’ of his social role in its network of information (newspapers, informers, superiors) but adds up to a generalised “idea of property” (69). It is also this process of translating contingent terms into ineffable qualities, however, which is shown to render this model unstable. Increasingly, this process is incapable of setting up figures of alterity that support the network of relations and his selfascribed properties alike. This is because the assurance of stabilised identity is converted into the premise of his differential operations rather than the outcome of contingent demarcations. In contrast to ‘true wisdom’, this model of demarcation fails to extend its essentialist premises to others, consigning its adherents to the much less durable confines of their self-created, individual certitudes.

93 Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989. 24.

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In Heat’s recollection of a past conversation with a ‘high official’, the reader is made privy to the results of such an incapacity to uphold a contingent “play of limits and transgressions.”94 Instead of a limited language game in need of perpetual repetition, the policeman has created the impression of an unassailable, consistent and, crucially, undemarcated identity, neither striated by a boundary nor in danger of an eventful change of state: “There isn’t one of them, sir, that we couldn’t lay our hands on at any time of night and day. We know what each of them is doing hour by hour,” he had declared. And the high official had deigned to smile. This was so obviously the right thing to say for an officer of Chief Inspector Heat’s reputation that it was perfectly delightful. The high official believed the declaration, which chimed in with his idea of the fitness of things. His wisdom was of an official kind, or else he might have reflected upon a matter not of theory but of experience that in the close-woven stuff of relations between conspirator and police there occur unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time. A given anarchist may be watched inch by inch and minute by minute, but a moment always comes when somehow all sight and touch of him are lost for a few hours, during which something (generally an explosion) more or less deplorable does happen. (63)

This passage condenses the process by means of which the presuppositions the Chief Inspector has co-created are ‘retroactively posited’ as an incarnation of the system which he upholds. That is, the isolated figures of political alterity only ever produced by surveillance are presented as requiring surveillance. In order to accomplish this, the report is transformed from quoted speech on comprehensive surveillance as “the right thing to say” to an indirectly narrated matter “not of theory but of experience.” This perspectival drift shows how the priority of constructing the anarchist object of surveillance can be disavowed. Instead of a contingent demarcation of an Other, Heat sets up an anarchist signifier that “mythologically attempts to embody the real.”95 Following Stavrakakis, this constitutes an “imaginary illusion of anchoring [. . .] symbolic being to a presymbolic level of immediate fulfilment of need.”96 That the declaration is shown to ‘chime with an idea of the fitness of things’ sets up this reversal. The production of political crime by means of surveillance techniques is immediately converted into an implicit, unquestioned mode of observing a pre-existing class of transgressors. Consequently, the apparatus of policing – a “formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an

94 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” 34. 95 Yannis Stavrakakis. Lacan and the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 60. 96 Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 60.

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urgent need”97 – becomes a matter of immediate “experience.” This transfer, in turn, can be understood both in the sense of a phenomenological ‘experience’ of a world ordered by the surveillance gaze, and, temporally, as the ‘experience’ accumulated by the well-honed police institution itself. That the technology bringing forth anarchists is immediately naturalised to become a matter of selfevidence is further emphasised by its presentation in the conditional: “he might have reflected,” but does not reflect. After all, the presentation of complete surveillance appears to make such reflection unnecessary. It is here, however, that the tenuousness of Heat’s vision of a controlled city becomes apparent. It is not certain, after all, to whom this lack of reflexivity is attributed. Regarding the narrator’s statement that “[t]he high official believed the declaration, which chimed in with his idea of the fitness of things,” we cannot be sure whose outlook is summarised. The assumption of an inert, panoptically overseen urban sphere could either represent Heat’s convictions, which have been made to successfully ‘chime’ with his superior’s. With equal plausibility, however, the phrase can be seen to present the placated certainties of the “high official.” The internal focalisation of the ‘chiming’ and, by extension, the entire resulting presentation of a “wisdom of an official kind,” then, can be attributed to either character. What is more important than the uncertainty of focalisation, however, is the fact that in this construction of ‘official wisdom’, neither reading materially changes the understanding of the passage. The self-affirming certainties of the apparatus of demarcation are shown to have reached a point at which its bearers become interchangeable, proceeding from the same assurances and mutually confirming their preconceptions. The ‘fitness of things’, thus, offers a self-enclosed, communicative system that dispenses with external reference altogether. The exchangeable “idea” depicts a phase in the self-reproduction of the apparatus of demarcation at which a rote collective identity generates accepted doctrine without requiring much by way of environmental input. Rather than a temporary effect of demarcation against an anarchist outside, the certainty of a policed city is taken for granted. The map of surveillance has become the territory, functioning as a default assumption of control which minimises the interval between production and naturalisation of its political enemies. Despite its suggestion of security, the image of collective identity which Heat communicates is presented as an insufficient evocation of binary order. In particular, it offers no remnant of what Althusser calls “material practices governed by

97 Michel Foucault. “Truth and Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 194.

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material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.”98 Instead of unfolding such an interlocking series, the ‘wisdom of an official kind’ is presented as immediately synchronic. That is to say, within the institution, the “close-woven stuff of relations between conspirator and police” provides the image of a static identity in which the distribution of self and Other is outlined on a spatial grid. In this model, a temporalised differentiation of identity against an anarchist counterpart is no longer possible. As a result, classificatory borders of the city are inertly presupposed rather than marked at the moment of their transgression. Pursuant to this assertion of a stable spatial model, there is no discernible hierarchy between (1) the ‘stuff of relations’, (2) the surveillance of one component of that “stuff” (anarchists) by another (the police), and (3) the “holes” in the “stuff” entailed by that relation. As a result of this levelling – and of the attendant impossibility of establishing a sequence between these elements – “sight and touch” (and their complements, observation and detainment) are seen to coincide. Any ‘seeing’ directly corresponds to immediate, tactile contiguity. Belief – according to de Certeau, “similar in its form to seeing”99 – is presented as a direct visual confirmation of order as manifested in the ongoing ‘relations’ between police and its targets. As a result of these presumed certainties, any variation of the expected distribution of self and Other is conceived as a gap in the very fabric of urban reality itself rather than an epiphenomenon of an all-too stable epistemological framework superimposed upon it. ‘Conspirators’ are not imagined as transgressors but as guarantors of identity, emerging as a stable component of the ‘close-woven stuff’ of which a comprehensively controlled space consists. Thus, the integrative capability of surveillance appears to have elided any possible breach. Since in Heat’s paean to “hour by hour” observation, thus, transgression is precluded, any change of state becomes unrepresentable — or rather ‘unaccountable’, considering the policeman’s repeated avowals that “every anarchist had been exactly accounted for” (72). In Heat’s faltering model of demarcation, the resultant “holes in space and time” emerge as the result of a “perceptual fallacy of thinking that the world is limited to what we perceive,” a selective view which (as per Asenjo) “errs by subtracting, by eliminating from our awareness the fact that reality extends beyond the scope of our perception.”100 In the Conradian version of this fallacy, the coincidence of perception and control leads to a model in which an ‘explosion’ is not 98 Althusser, “Ideology,” 114. 99 Cf. Michel De Certeau. “What We Do When We Believe.” On Signs: A Semiotics Reader. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. 192–202. 193. 100 F. G. Asenjo. In-Between: An Essay on Categories. Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1988. 1.

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perceived as a symbolic act of violence committed by a political Other. Instead, it can only be seen to “occur” or “happen” as a result of a brief gap in the pretensions to a complete and enclosed system of control. Heat’s model of identity (once divested of its autostereotypical self-image of pastoral power over an anarchist ‘flock’) fails, in Foucault’s terms, to assure the “notions of development and evolution” necessary to “group a succession of dispersed events, to link them to one and the same organizing principle.”101 Particulalry, the undisturbed, comprehensively observed city precludes “the outline of future unity,”102 since the required concord appears to have been achieved in the present, manifest in a comprehensive mapping of potential alterity. In Heat’s plotless ‘surveilled’ city, not only is the dynamism of the ‘impossible’ border-crossing constitutively disavowed; what is more, the very existence of a border (still touted as the condition for the distribution of anarchist heterostereotypes) is replaced by a de-temporalised image of spatial coherence. As per Jerome Bruner, ‘canonicity’ and ‘breach’ are co-dependent, the canonical order emerging as such only upon its disturbance. The model of an explosion ‘happening’ in the absence of vision precludes such breach. It follows that in the absence of a deviation from an “implicit canonical script,” the very ‘legitimacy’ of that script remains unmarked.103 The transgressive breach can no longer be leveraged into the signified of a transgressed identity, as that identity is always already imbricated with its obverse in an indissoluble, ‘close-woven’ whole. 4.2.1.2 Dissolution of Demarcations The description as “close-woven stuff” aligns the shared police/anarchist signified of surveillance signifiers with the very type of political radical it is presumed to hold in check, namely the Professor. This figure, while also a variation of a wellestablished discursive type of the ‘dynamiter’,104 is differentiated from the remaining anarchists in the novel by his focus on giving violent expression to his beliefs. As an embodiment of the alleged anarchist propensity for violent ‘propaganda by the deed’, the character emerges as a proto-terrorist figure, reiterating a poetics of material and symbolic dissolution of the social fabric. He is accused of

101 Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 24. These are among “a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity” of which the “negative work” of Foucault’s archaeology is to rid itself. In the novel, the illusion of continuity is already lacking from the start, to the point of historical change appearing as prima facie impossible. 102 Foucault, Archaeology, 24. 103 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 11. 104 Cf. Ó Donghaile, Blasted, 32.

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giving “his stuff to anybody who’s up to asking” (48); fellow anarchists worry that the police will “[g]et the stuff”; and, as Ossipon describes the potential suicide bombing: “you carry in your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people into eternity” (223). This explosive stuff, what is more, is determined by its temporal interval: “A full twenty minutes must elapse from the moment I press the ball till the explosion takes place.” (50) Instead of countering the abhorred ‘perfect anarchist’, Heat’s deteriorating system of demarcation (the “closewoven stuff of relations”) has produced a correlative to this explosive ‘stuff’. After all, his perpetually observed cityscape, rather than bolstering the collective identity he claims to represent, gives rise to “holes in space and time” (63). Instead of producing certainties, the system of surveillance, like the Professor’s explosive, is determined by what it cannot encompass. The verbal repetition of ‘close-woven stuff’ and the explosive ‘stuff’ peddled by the terrorist points to an oblique connection between both modes of asserting identity. Specifically, in both cases, hypostasised assertions of order bring about their own lacunae, interstitial times that exceed not only observational capabilities but an entire conceptual apparatus. For the Professor and Heat alike, the assurance of control brings about its own negation, an interval that cannot be symbolised by the spatial and temporal certainties it is set up to guarantee. This production of an interstitial time will be shown to constitute the second level on which Heat’s policed differences collapse. Expanding on their connection, it is the confrontation with the Professor that disrupts the certainties previously enabled by the policeman’s fantasies of surveillance. The encounter brings to the fore the limitations of Heat’s demarcations of identity and alterity. As the Inspector muses: “Catching thieves was another matter altogether. It had that quality of seriousness belonging to every form of open sport where the best man wins under perfectly comprehensible rules. There were no rules for dealing with anarchists.” (72) Not only does the Professor not conform to the political demarcations the police take for granted, but, what is more, he provides an analysis of those rules. According to the Professor, for all their insinuations of difference, the authorities and their opponents are complicit in maintaining the status quo: The other day I came suddenly upon Chief Inspector Heat at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. He looked at me very steadily. But I did not look at him. Why should I give him more than a glance? He was thinking of many things—of his superiors, of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary, of newspapers—of a hundred things. But I was thinking of my perfect detonator only. He meant nothing to me. He was as insignificant as—I can’t call to mind anything insignificant enough to compare him with—except Karl Yundt perhaps. Like to like. The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game—so do you propagandists. (52)

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The Professor’s summary of the terms of the prevalent language game is not discredited. After all, the preoccupation with the production of transgression (‘revolution’) upon which communicable order (‘legality’) can be founded has been presented as the basis of an entire apparatus of demarcation, ranging from the domestic sphere of the secret agent to the police, the embassy, as well as the media and its version of a public. In analysing the mutual constitution of purported opponents, the Professor provides an analysis of a “doctrine of the police” which has previously provided the notion of shared, communal identity; such a doctrine, in Foucault’s terms, “defines the nature of the objects of the state’s rational activity; it defines the nature of the aims it pursues, the general form of the instruments involved.”105 However, while it aptly describes the ‘legality effect’ created by police and revolutionaries, his analysis goes further, presenting a more thoroughgoing language scepticism. The ‘general form of the instruments’ outlined by Foucault requires a concomitant language game in order to introduce differential signs into a system consisting of elements that are “at bottom identical.” To this end, the Professor’s account of language-based order offers the concept of “counter moves” to describe ostensibly hard-and-fast antagonisms as a matter of relational co-dependence. Without the counter moves of ‘revolution’, the assertion of ‘legality’ would remain an unmarked default state. Thus, a distinction has to be drawn and transgressions across that border have to be simulated in order to make a sphere of ‘legality’ appear in the first place. This notion of a “little game” resembles contemporary modernist language philosophy. Specifically, it evokes the language scepticism of T. E. Hulme’s “Cinders” (1906/1907), a philosophical sketch that describes the establishment of conceptual order: “[s]ymbols are picked out and believed to be realities.”106 For Hulme, language establishes a bounded space within an unordered pre-linguistic multiplicity of the world. This rule-bound intimation of order, in turn, depends for its functioning on the participants mistaking their limited ordering grid for reality. They treat the individual signs as referential rather than differential. In an inchoate, pre-linguistic environment, order is established, in Hulme’s account, by drawing an initial differentiation to set apart an interior. Within that space, concepts are created differentially and manipulated in the manner of a game. As a result of the efficacy of the ‘moves’ of the opposed counters in the

105 Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim,” 314. The term ‘police’ refers to a type of political rationality associated with ‘reason of state’ rather than “an institution or mechanism functioning within the state.” 106 T. E. Hulme. “Cinders.” The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. 7–23. 8.

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bounded, conceptual system, in time they come to appear as a closed reality in their own right. That the differential positions are only meaningful within the restricted bounds that have been established in the “cinders” of the world to begin with has to be perpetually disavowed: “certain ordered routes have been made, thus constituting whatever unity there may be – a kind of manufactured chessboard laid on a cinder-heap. Not a real chess-board impressed on the cinders, but the gossamer world of symbolic communication.”107 While what can be known is entirely pre-formed by the language game established in the disordered, non-binary ‘cinders’, Hulme’s image is not entirely determinist. After all, the referential illusion of the ‘chess-board’ requires a degree of recombination within the bounded parameters of the game: “People imagine that all the complicated structure of the world can be woven out of ‘good’ and ‘beauty’. These words are merely counters representing vague groups of things, to be moved about on the board for the convenience of the players.”108 The illusion of order is the result of this series of rule-bound moves performed by means of the differential set of signs. That is to say, each deployment of language brings to the fore the shared code and instantiates the continued validity of the bounded system that stands in for a constitutively unreachable reality. Similarly, the elements enumerated by the Professor – reputation, law courts, salary, and especially newspapers – have been shown to form Heat’s exclusive preoccupation, with anarchist alterity only considered in terms of the synchronous, spatial apparatus upholding his own institutional position. After all, we are informed that “Chief Inspector Heat thought but little of anarchism. He did not attach undue importance to it, and could never bring himself to consider it seriously. It had more the character of disorderly conduct.” (72) Order and disorder, police and anarchists: Heat’s dichotomies do make him appear as a “counterword monger,” participating in a process in which “[s]ymbols are picked out and believed to be realities.”109 Likewise, the “close-woven stuff of relations” and the “structure of the world [. . .] woven” from concepts also aligns Heat with the inert assumption of extant language games with which Hulme charges his contemporaries.110 The Professor is shown to use the same metaphor of a restricted ‘game’ for his description of the way in which representatives of social order determine their interpretative horizon by means of the differential signs on offer. His account of

107 108 109 110

Hulme, “Cinders,” 9. Hulme, “Cinders,” 8. Hulme, “Cinders,” 8. Hulme, “Cinders,” 8.

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“counter moves in the same game” also resembles Hulme’s recurring notion of the epistemological capabilities depending on processes in which “a flat word [is] passed over a board like a counter.”111 More specifically, however, the “perfect anarchist” (90) furnishes an analysis of the differential deployment of the individual signs to uphold their identification with ‘vague groups of things’. The entire worldview he attributes to the policeman is seen to depend on language-based, contingent differentiations of institutional identity and revolutionary alterity, designed to extrapolate a ‘complicated structure of the world’ from what amounts to a simplistic binarism. Hence, according to the anarchist analyst, Heat thinks of his “superiors, of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary, of newspapers—of a hundred things” (52). These ‘hundred things’ that combine to form Heat’s assurance of identity are set apart from the group of countervailing, excluded ‘things’ that constitutes their antagonistic counterpart. To provide the shared illusion that the institutional actors refer to anything but their own social reproduction, and to obscure the code undergirding identity and alterity alike (the “basket,” in the Professors terms, the ‘gossamer web of symbolic communication’ in Hulme’s), the anarchists are indispensible. The enumeration of the metonyms of social order requires the relational obverse of the ‘revolutionists’ to provide the assurance of a common, contiguous identity. In view of the other would-be revolutionaries and anarchist shams presented above, and Heat’s own reliance on ‘throwing down’ opportune signs of alterity at a convenient moment, the Professor’s analysis cannot be dismissed. Not only are we enabled to trace at least some of the ‘hundred things’ that make up the self-image of the policeman; what is more, whenever the reader is provided with internally focalised glimpses into Heat’s processes of creating and essentialising his residually differential worldview, the Professor’s analysis is justified. However, for all the accuracy of the analysis, The Secret Agent does not bear out the value of exposing the attempt “to include it all under one large counter such as ‘God’ or ‘Truth’ and the other verbalisms, or the disease of symbolic language.”112 The imminent breakdown of the apparatus of demarcation, after all, does not follow from the attempt to determine counters as such, nor from the set of rules regularising their possible combinations. Instead, Heat’s model falters in its task to supply counters for others, a remit that would require him to remain aware of their function of reducing complexity. Rather than offering the respite of an ordering ideology, Heat displays the “curious phenomena of men explaining

111 T. E. Hulme. “Notes on Language and Style.” The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. 23–45. 24. 112 Hulme, “Cinders,” 9.

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themselves by means of the gossamer web that connects them.”113 As the Professor puts it, “[h]e plays his little game” (52), only to immediately efface the fact that it is a game in the first place. This self-deceptive faith in the contingent demarcations of identity and alterity makes Heat incapable of coming to terms with the Professor. It is not the process of “‘essentializing’ (of identity, or gender, or race etc.)”114 that is shown to render his system tenuous, but the incapacity of a selective ‘essentialising’ for the sake of those who depend on the appearance of verbal ‘counters’ as essences. To return to Hulme’s terminology once more, “[a]ll is flux. The moralists, the capital letterists, attempt to find a framework outside the flux, a solid bank for the river, a pier rather than a raft. Truth is what helps a particular sect in the general flow.”115 The Professor’s analysis of the language games of legality articulates the conditions for the maintenance of such ‘Truth’ in a city which, similarly to Hulme’s “flux ontology,”116 is “dissolving in a watery atmosphere” (74). His redescription draws attention to the communicative consensus achieved by the ‘particular sect’ through the syntagmatic chain of “superiors, reputation, law courts, salary, and newspapers” (52), presenting them as loosely coupled institutions which collectively build up a semblance of order. As a result, the Professor’s intradiegetic hermeneutics of suspicion lays bare the contingency of police order.117 The ‘economy and logic’ of demarcation is disturbed not merely by its explicit critique, however. The Professor himself, upon confronting Heat, is not representable within the bounded sphere created by the policeman’s residual apparatus of demarcation. Thus, the “perfect anarchist” does not merely provide an analysis of vaunted institutions as a contingent language game, exposing their reified grandeur as an artificial unity. His appearance in the novel also cuts across the relational determinations of identity and alterity instantiated by this conceptual order, briefly presenting a position not symbolisable by means

113 Hulme, “Cinders,” 8. 114 Andrew Michael Roberts. “Conrad, Theory and Value.” Conrad and Theory. Ed. Andrew Gibson and Robert Hampson. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. 180–202. 180. 115 Hulme, “Cinders,” 10. 116 Grimm describes Nietzsche, whose influence on “Cinders” is evident, with this term (“language is incapable of authentically grasping the change, paradox and ambiguity which charactarize the world.”) Rüdiger Hermann Grimm. Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1977. 106. 117 With Bornedal, the Professor shows that systems of the type presented by the apparatus of demarcation “invent their own conceptual universe. They develop a certain economy and logic for this conceptual enterprise as these concepts become mutually self-defining and selfdetermining.” Peter Bornedal. Speech and System. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997. 24.

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of conventional “counter moves” (52). This incommensurability is shown by Heat’s failure to maintain his own stabilised identity, a disintegration narrated in an extended analepsis. In-between the two parts of the confrontation of the policeman and the anarchist, the novel intersperses a lengthy flashback, in which Heat recalls the particulars of discovering Stevie’s human remains after the Greenwich explosion. This mental return to the scene of the crime, prompted by encountering the Professor who (unbeknownst to Heat) created the explosive device, interrupts his assessment of whether he has successfully self-fashioned himself as a “principal expert in anarchist procedure” (63). In this context, the memory insinuates itself as the one “circumstance whose recollection depressed the usual serenity of the eminent specialist” (63): the shattering violence of destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning. The man, whoever he was, had died instantaneously; and yet it seemed impossible to believe that a human body could have reached that state of disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony. No physiologist and still less a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception of time. Instantaneous! (65)

Heat is confronted with a fragmented signifier not to be ordered by means of his previous epistemological certainties. Upon seeing the “heap of nameless fragments,” the character’s own integrity is instantly called into question. Whereas previously, the policeman is shown to measure his own, coherent self against the alterity of anarchists, viewing the disintegrated body sets his feelings – “affected [. . .] with a sense of ruthless cruelty” – against his “reason” (65). First and foremost, thinking about Stevie presents Heat with a temporal problem, aptly summarised by Paul Wake: “How, if the present is understood in relation to the past and the future, can the instant of death, which is that for which there is no passage, appear in the narrative?”118 The view of the mangled body recalled during the encounter with the Professor disrupts the linearity of the protagonist’s self-assurance.119

118 Paul Wake. “The Time of Death: Passing Away in The Secret Agent.” The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. 13–20. 18. 119 His certainties are subjected to what Britzolakis calls the “dissociative energy that circulates through the text.” Christina Britzolakis. “Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Impressions as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford.” Journal of Modern Literature 29 (2005). 1–20. 13.

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Specifically, the dispersal of “mixed things” (65) contrasts with Heat’s departmental self-presentation, replete as it is with markers of clock-time.120 Heat arrogates to himself the capacity not only to act “upon the information that very night” (95) and to ensure the observation of anarchists “hour by hour” (63), but also to substantiate his temporal certainty with a detailed, linear account of his further investigation. He finds out that Verloc had married “that very day at 11.30 a.m.” (95), gathers further clues until he has accrued “the complete record of that man” (96), a “history” (96) suited to a linear re-telling. Such hypostasised linearity, encapsulated by the comparison of Heat with a “tight-rope artist” (91), confirms him in his self-professed ability to account for the dispersed anarchists in London at any time. This changes during the remembrance of the aftermath of the explosion.121 Crucially, this incursion of immeasurable time is not, as a recurrent account of modernism suggests, a universal feature of perception in the manner of Woolf’s influential account of life as “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” rather than “a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged.”122 In The Secret Agent, the atomisation of consciousness is not a default ‘modern’ condition; rather, such processes are the result of the disintegration of ordering strategies. Psychological realism and its complement of experiential time (durée123) emerge as the specific effect setting in whenever relational alterity fails. Thus, in the case of the Chief Inspector, exposure to “innumerable atoms” emerges as the result of a redoubled loss of demarcation against an anarchist Other. Not only do his strategies of identity formation momentarily falter in confrontation with the Professor, prompting the analeptic return to the aftermath of the explosion in the first place. What is more, in his reminiscence he also confronts his inability to keep track of temporal certainty when confronted with Stevie’s body. No longer can he assume a shared time connecting his actions with a ‘planetary’ identity, an expansive temporal model reified by the

120 The time, as Bergson lets his devil’s advocate argue, “which our clocks divide into equal portions,” conceived as “measurable and therefore homogenous magnitude.” Henri Bergson. Time and Free Will. Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950. 107. 121 Cf. Todd K. Bender. Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë. New York and London: Garland, 1997. 55. Stevie’s mangled remains, as Bender puts it, bring to the fore the “contrast between uniform time as measured by the Greenwich Observatory and variable duration as experienced by individuals in The Secret Agent.” 122 Virginia Woolf. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. London: The Hogarth Press, 1929. 184–195. 189. 123 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100. “Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.”

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Greenwich observatory itself. As a result of losing track of shared time, Heat fails to assign the interim between life and death a ‘counter’. Instead, the Chief Inspector has to reckon with the incapacity of his chosen media to make sense of the process of disintegration: He remembered all he had ever read in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the instant of waking, of the whole past life lived with frightful intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up, streaming, for the last time. The inexplicable mysteries of conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks of an eye. (65)

The character is confronted with enforced self-reflection regarding the means of representation replacing the inert assumption of a ‘settled society’. Whereas his previous institutional reports, which feature the aforementioned profusion of markers of clock-time and linearity, were marked by paratactic simplicity, the attempt to come to terms with the gap between Stevie’s life and death results in self-referential metaphors. The image of the stream approaches a closed loop as the similarity between “life” and “stream” re-enters the metaphorical vehicle, the very content domain set up to convey it; the “doomed head” relives life while drowning in the metaphorical representation of the very life that is to be explained in the first place. In the fledgling attempt to distinguish a metaphorical system from its environment, the “stream” standing in for a linear conception of life is reproduced by the imagined “drowning man,” who, upon dying, is subject to a life relived with “frightful intensity” — which, we have to presume, would equal another stream, as per the initial comparison. Rather than a simplification, the trope functions as a recursive prompt to self-reflexivity, in which that which is compared on the basis of similarity recurs on the level of the comparative vehicle, reproducing the metaphor within the metaphor. Woolf may express an “unconditional gratitude” to “Mr. Conrad” for dispensing with an inordinate literary concern “not with the spirit but with the body,”124 yet within the diegesis, the representation of the ‘spirit’ of others is registered as an imposed, disorienting gap. Defamiliarising metaphors impinge upon the very protagonist who seeks to embody the familiar, ordinary, linear, and ordered. Thus, only upon rendering tenuous a mode of policing identity and alterity can the novel present an individual perception of time. This self-reflexive temporality is no longer anchored to the reiterated certainties of clock-time, nor to the international ‘accord’ of the Greenwich Observatory. Alternative temporalities do not emerge as a more appropriate means of rendering consciousness per se, but as 124 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 185.

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a mode of representing consciousness under duress. Thus, the novel connotes stylistic innovations with a breakdown of political demarcations, with the complexity of metaphors for the ‘spirit’ acquired at the cost of a loss of the protagonist’s referential illusions. The more the gap between signifier (the language of ‘popular publications’) and signified (the interim between life and death) is to be closed, the more conspicuous does it become. Consequently, although the explosion has not materially impacted the Observatory – the very incarnation of an interpersonal consensus on the distribution of time – the temporal certainties of a linear narrative bolstered by sequential, shared time are no longer a given. In the analepsis, Heat is confronted with fragments that fail to cohere and, worse, force him to exhibit “sympathy,” which, as the narrator assures us “is a form of fear” (65). Heat is beset by an expansiveness of sympathetic understanding that refuses closure as he attempts to rise “above the vulgar conception of time” (65) in reckoning with the instantaneity of Stevie’s demise. This enforced sympathy thwarts the autopoietic self-reproduction of the apparatus of control. Instead of one, recently standardised time, the policeman is confronted with an unwanted and uncontainable experiential time. Thus, Heat has to interpret “real duration, the heterogeneous moments of which permeate one another”125 — and is unequipped to do so. In the case of the Greenwich fragments, furthermore, it is not his own consciousness that is subjected to interpenetrating states; rather, it is a ‘permeation’ with the imagined consciousness of another (the “drowning man”) that Heat is shown to invoke upon encountering the Professor. Interstitial gaps in the policeman’s orderly distribution of identity and alterity multiply upon the “chance meeting” (62) with the “unwholesome-little moral agent of destruction” (62). Not only is the meeting itself presented in terms of the “sudden holes in space and time” (63) previously tied to the orderly surveillance of police and anarchists, as the “blended noises of the enormous town sank down to an inarticulate low murmur” (62). What is more, within that ‘inarticulate’ gap, the aftermath of the explosion is introduced as a “circumstance whose recollection depressed the usual serenity of the eminent specialist” (63). Within that ‘recollection’ prompted by the Professor, in turn, the attempt to come to terms with Stevie’s conscious interim presents a third embedded, interstitial time, before the attempt to bring to bear his ‘popular publications’ is shown to proliferate gaps. In that process, “pain and torture” are interspersed with the moment of ‘drowning’ — which, in turn, harkens back to the original, first-level gap, namely the ‘sinking down’ of the ‘blended noises’ upon encountering the Professor.

125 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 110.

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In his reckoning with proliferating interstitial times, not only does Heat momentarily lose track of his self-image as the embodiment of a system of observation tracking aberrance “hour by hour” (63). What is more, he is forced into a selfreflexive engagement with his own institutional self-presentation. In addition to recalling the confrontation with Stevie’s remains, another brief analepsis prompted by the Professor incites Heat to remember his confident pronouncements to his superior: “One thing I can tell you at once: none of our lot had anything to do with this.” (64) The explosion leads the character to lay bare the extent to which anarchists barely function as diegetically real threats. After all, his controlled radicals emerge as a ‘we’ rather than a ‘they’, thus validating the Professor’s analysis that the purported differences drawn between law and transgression are “forms of idleness at bottom identical” (52). Furthermore, in its impromptu formulation – “at once” – the immediacy of his reaction prefigures the “instantaneous” (65) moment of Stevie’s death that he subsequently attempts to interpret. Finally, his blithe assurance incites the superior’s own investigation, which runs counter to Heat’s institutional demarcations. The AC will be shown to feed on “the human material which was brought to it in his official seclusion” (87) — the human material in this case constituted by Heat himself. In contrast to the Greenwich investigation, during which it is Heat who bends over Stevie’s remains which “may be called the by-products of a butcher’s shop” (66), the reaction to the explosion opens up the possibility of the cannibal imagery being applied to anyone. Regardless of extant demarcations of self and Other, any character can be reduced to the status of ‘human material’, up to and including the self-appointed arbiter of order. In place of determinate anarchists functioning as bearers of an anthropophagous rhetoric – such as the ‘terrorist’ Yundt holding forth on capitalists “nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh [. . .] of the people” (38) – the novel presents impending anarchy, in its pejorative sense of chaos and breakdown. The analepses submit previously disavowed features to an aleatory redistribution throughout the diegesis. As a result, the very imagery of Otherness cannot be contained. The writers of urban tracts on the model of William Booth’s Darkest England can still consign imagery of cannibalistic regression to poor city districts, thereby metonymically associating the East End with a stereotypical non-Western space. Its ‘throwbacks’ emerge “where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die.”126 In the interlocking analepses prompted by the encounter

126 William Booth. In Darkest England and the Way Out. New York and London: Funk & Wagnal, 1890. 10. Cf also Yuet May Ching. “‘A heap of nameless fragments’: Sacrifice,

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with the Professor, by contrast, there is no such assurance of a localisable, topologically specific breakdown of collective identities. Rather than a critique of any one group or a targeted denunciation of particularly ‘cannibalistic’ types of exploitation, the incidental recurrence of this imagery ensures that it could potentially apply to any seemingly stable self. This unpredictable, random-seeming dissemination of cannibalistic imagery is part and parcel with an increasing recurrence of imagery of disordered matter circulating through the narrative in the wake of the collapse of demarcations. In Jameson’s terms: If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and retensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’ and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.127

In the novel, such ‘heaps of fragments’ incurred by loss of temporal organisation are literalised as “a heap of rags, scorched and bloodstained” (64), the “gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things” (65), and a “heap of nameless fragments” (65). The links of the signifying chain of the apparatus of order have been severed, leaving the policeman in a “rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers”128 which can no longer be submitted to a serial logic. Rather than yielding metonymical series, the addition or subtraction of traits does not change the constitution of the remains. Consequently, Stevie’s fragments present the policeman with stuff, unordered matter that refuses syntagmatic organisation. The residue of Stevie, “which seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops” (65), cannot be conceived as a link in a chain of contiguous elements of the kind uniting the policemen with the “teeming millions struggling upon the planet” (71). As a result, the process of allocating identity and alterity is brought up short. Both the media event (the anarchist at the frontier) and prevention (the attack augured in the dressing room), by means of which the apparatus of demarcation proceeds under normal circumstances, fail. Instead of a terrorist act, the policeman is confronted with the “raw material” (64) preceding organisation by means of his language game. This breakdown is associated with the Professor not only because the proto-terrorist has supplied the explosives responsible for the ‘heap of mixed

Cannibalism, and Fragmentation in The Secret Agent.” The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 36–48. 38. 127 Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 128 Jameson, Postmodernism, 26.

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things’. What is more, his aleatory mode of distributing explosive material prefigures the unconstrained redistribution of uninterpretable matter. After all, he would ‘shovel’ his “stuff in heaps at the corners of streets” (55), without regard for the professed political motives of the recipients. Against the destabilising effect of this all-purpose material, the Chief Inspector attempts to salvage a clearcut differentiation of lawful identity and anarchist alterity. To this end, he is shown to assign to his interlocutor features of relational Otherness, attempting to brand the Professor with negative, yet complementary and decipherable characteristics. He does so under duress from the analeptic loss of demarcations and his own admission to the construction and functionalisation of “our lot.” Against this redoubled self-reflection, Heat expands communal identity to the status of unconstrained, universal homogeneity. In order to reassert control over the Professor, the policeman not only introduces a demarcation of madness and sanity but also argues in terms of ‘life’: With all his healthy contempt for the spirit dictating such speeches, the atrocious allusiveness of the words had its effect on Chief Inspector Heat. He had too much insight, and too much exact information as well, to dismiss them as rot. The dusk of his narrow lane took on a sinister tint from the dark, frail little figure, its back to the wall, and speaking with a weak, self-confident voice. To the vigorous, tenacious vitality of the Chief Inspector, the physical wretchedness of that being, so obviously not fit to live, was ominous: for it seemed to him that if he had the misfortune to be such a miserable object he would not have cared how soon he died. Life had such a strong hold upon him that a fresh wave of nausea broke out in slight perspiration upon his brow. (70)

It remains ambivalent to whose consciousness, precisely, we should attribute this foray into vitalist discourses “centred on the idea of will, or life force, as the expression of a restless individuating power.”129 The “healthy contempt” (69) is still focalised by the protagonist setting himself apart from the pathology of political radicalism. Similarly, the change in the presentation of the city – the “narrow lane” (69) taking on the “sinister tint” (70) of the Professor – is the result of the character’s urban epistemology coming undone under the influence of the ‘perfect anarchist’. This instance of free indirect discourse, however, does not straightforwardly foreground Heat’s subjectivity. Rather, the description oscillates between the protagonist’s changing perception of the urban order and the narrator’s view of the Professor’s influence. If attributed to the narrator, the attempt to turn the terrorist 129 Armstrong, Modernism, 79. For an account of the “modern cultural circuit between authorized and marginal technoscientisms,” cf. also Bruce Clarke. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001. 74.

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physiognomy into “a site of narratorial judgment”130 fails to restore the receding certainties in the diegesis. In this case, the observed specimen’s traits refuse containment, becoming subject to a metonymical transferral to their surroundings instead.131 To make matters more entangled, the narrator’s loss of categories and Heat’s destabilisation are accompanied by a third perspective: the “vigorous, tenacious vitality” itself is identified as the subject to which things “seem” to be distinguished into health and “wretchedness.” It is to this vitality that unhealthy demeanour of the Professor “was ominous” (70). In this reading, vitalist judgment is not a set of categories deployed from the certainty of an unmarked position; instead, life has “such a strong hold” (70) on the character that rendering the differentiation between life-affirming self and life-denying Other becomes an involuntary response. Rather than the previous chain of mediations which allowed for the policing of anarchist alterity, the policeman – subjected to the “atrocious allusiveness” (70) of the Professor – is presented as a “body totally imprinted by history,”132 his vitality expressing itself autonomously, in his stead. Although ‘health’ is the last vestige of a position of hegemonic certainty, the subject is produced by the traits assigned to it, rather than applying these categories from a position of normative authority. Discourses of health and life, rather than restoring essentialist distinctions between a vital social body and its pathological aberrations, disclose the degree to which the individual determining identity and alterity is already enmeshed in a set of preceding distinctions exceeding his control. Rather than establishing differences with sovereign certainty, Heat is shown to be, in Foucault’s terms, “simultaneously undergoing and exercising” the vitalist certainties he applies.133 As a result of this shift of focalisation, the ‘illusion of substantial unity’ bestowed by vitalist demarcations is no longer expressible in political terms by the character relying on vitality as a last resort of a coherent identity. For Heat, ‘life’ is a “final vocabulary,” with the caveat that its terms (which implicitly structure the character’s attempt to recover alterity) fail to converge into explicit speech acts. What is more, the policeman is not afforded the possibility of redescribing

130 Andrew Michael Roberts. Conrad and Masculinity. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. 85. 131 The later brief, zero-focalised account of the terrorist’s bathetic origins can be read as an attempt to return to a certainty of a normative standpoint of this type, albeit one of individual genealogy rather than taxonomic categorisation. 132 Michel Foucault. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76–100. 83. 133 Michel Foucault. “Two Lectures.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 78–109. 98.

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his vocabulary in the manner of Rorty’s ‘liberal ironist’. His foundational distinction between life and its obverse is ‘metaphysical’, in the sense that it purports to offer the possibility to ascertain a “relation between human beings and ‘reality’, and the idea that we have a need and duty to enter into this relation. It also tells us that ‘reality’, if properly asked, will help us determine what our final vocabulary should be.”134 In order to recover “consciousness of universal support in his general activity” (71), Heat, then, is associated with vocabulary that refuses containment, imposed on his body from outside and forming an unacknowledged ‘zero point’ for his discursive practices.135 This vitalist turn does not, however, yield a foundation for a straightforward antagonism between a normative identity and its relational, political obverse. Instead, The Secret Agent traces the character’s ideology of order to its foundational terms, at which point they exceed his vaunted modes of control. Peter Zima points out the ambiguity of ‘subject’: it describes “what is fundamental or underlying (hypokeimenon, subiectum) and what is subjugated (subiectus=subject in the sense of the king’s or emperor’s subject or subjects).”136 In the case of Heat’s vitality – “[l]ife had such a strong hold upon him” (cf. 70) – both of these strands collapse into one. That is, the Chief Inspector is subjugated to the unacknowledged terms that underlie his sense of subjecthood. As a consequence, the protagonist is determined by his strategies of determining others, as his underlying assumptions of vital forces (or else, the vital force itself) are granted an agency that he himself lacks. Heat is, metaphorically, arrested: after all, throughout the novel, variations of the expression ‘getting hold’, which here describes his response to the Professor, are otherwise used to describe the apprehension of anarchists — notably by Heat himself as he comes to the conclusion regarding ‘the perfect anarchist’ that he will “get hold of him in his own time, properly and effectively according to the rules of the game” (90).137 Instead of such avowals of control, in the short reversal of focalisation to vitality itself, the ‘hold’ is exerted upon Heat by his own, unacknowledged final vocabulary. The dissolution of the apparatus of demarcation,

134 Rorty, Contingeny, 75. 135 That is, “a metaterm that gives the whole system differentiated meanings without itself having any particular signification.” J. Hillis Miller. “Zero.” Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. New York: Routledge, 2003. 369–391. 376. 136 Peter Zima. Subjectivity and Identity: Between Modernity and Postmodernity. London/New Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015. 2. 137 Cf. also the AC’s musings on the consequences “[i]f the fellow is laid hold of again” (83) and his “getting hold of the the case with growing interest” (87); in his final confrontation with Vladimir, he announces that “[w]e’ve got hold of a man called Verloc” (166).

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rather than issuing from a politically antagonistic challenge, is shown to develop out of its own internal inconsistencies. As the heterogeneous traits assembled under the rubric of identity can no longer be determined against their constitutive obverse, the discursive production of an anarchist outside reaches an impasse. The arbiter of a distinction between order and anarchism is shown to be increasingly divested of interpretative authority over the establishment and maintenance of such binary certainties. As a result, traits previously bound to aberrant political Others impinge on the sphere of identity, infiltrating the very terms on which a sense of self founds itself.

4.2.2 Dissolution of Anarchism So far, the self-proclaimed anarchists in the novel have mainly appeared as the discursive material intermittently stabilised into figures of political alterity. However, radicals in The Secret Agent also contribute to the dissolution of differential order, and become cyphers of the ‘anarchic’ states that follow. Firstly, as shown above, they begin to elude determination as political Other. Instead of offering an essentialised, complementary counterpart to collective identities, their role as mere constructs in an apparatus of demarcation becomes increasingly conspicuous. There are no essential features associated with these figures. Rather, the challenge for a production of hegemonic truth consists in their function being all-too explicit. Once the fabrication of political Others is known, they can no longer serve as an adaptable foil for residual identities. Secondly, the anarchist figures in The Secret Agent are shown to prefigure a replacement of any collective identities with diffracted, individuated modes of making meaning. Chapter 4.1.1.1 has shown the degree to which the individual anarchists rely on the monologic reiteration of a restricted set of basic assumptions. Each of these reiterated assertions assumes its foundational verity, with determinate figures of state or capital providing the exact type of complementary counterpart to allow for the internal consistency of the resulting rhetorical stance. However, for all their repeated invocation, the novel presents these assumptions as ephemeral. Specifically, what passes for anarchist thought in the novel’s political imaginary disintegrates as a result of a failure to stabilise its respective antagonists. Confronted with phenomena exceeding the narrow bounds of their respective pseudo-logic, each of these systems not only exhibits its internal inconsistencies but, what is more, lays bare its self-referential character. Any notion of alterity capable of assuring an opponent of their ‘radical’ positions breaks down, laying bare the conceptual apparatus by means of which the respective modes of thought function. The anarchists, thus, not only

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fail to be consigned to alterity by others; what is more, each anarchist, in turn, loses track of differential alterity in their own right, with the result of increasingly fragmented, untenable epistemologies. 4.2.2.1 Recursive Degenerationism The gap in any inertly presumed distinction of self and Other is set up in connection with Stevie. While the heterodiegetic narrator gives us ample insight into this character’s view of the world, to Verloc he is an irrational figure beyond understanding. Whilst Stevie is incommensurable with his brother-in-law’s conception of identity, neither can he be relegated to a relational, controllable mode of Otherness with any certainty. This difficulty of making sense of Stevie is all the more remarkable since he takes up the very rhetoric of political radicalism employed by the anarchists — but understands it literally. Taking the radicals at their word, he disrupts the characters’ use of anarchist rhetoric for the relational maintenance of their identity. ‘Saintly’ Michaelis, for instance, can put forward a materialist theory of change while withdrawing from any political struggle and reproducing the conditions of his incarceration. With figures such as this, the narrative restricts anarchism to its function as alterity, reducing its historical complexity to the images generated by the apparatus of demarcation. That is, the anarchist figures largely abide by the very stereotypical features which purportedly ‘normative’ actors impose on them to secure their own sense of consistency. These functional definitions of anarchism require a transferral to the status of reference. After the conditions of the respective cut between identity and alterity have been laid out, the process of their construction is suppressed, so that the demarcation of self and Other can be seen to structure the entire polity. This constitutive effacement of the sheer “contingency of the apparatuses that govern”138 requires precise attenuation of information. That is, the various systems involved in policing transgressors can only agree on figures of alterity as long as these remain sufficiently undefined so as not to expose differences between the loosely coupled institutions. The narratorial transmission of these processes, in turn, induces the reader to question such contingent distinctions, expressed as they are by the insistent repetition of generic descriptors: Michaelis is the ‘ticket-of-leave apostle’, Verloc is a ‘trusted secret agent’ — these ascriptions hover between the characters’ self images and condensed, descriptive tags drawing attention to their dependence on limited and contingent language games. Such ‘tags’ are stabilised by inducing, in Rorty’s terms, “radical and 138 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 101.

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continuing doubts about the final vocabulary” upon which they rest.139 By according with these tags, the anarchists themselves are brought to a point at which they have “no noncircular argumentative recourse.” Their repetition of stock phrases is as far as they can go with language: “beyond them there is only hopeless passivity or a resort to force.”140 Stevie acts precisely in opposition to such stabilisation of a final vocabulary, bringing to the fore ‘hopeless passivity’ and ‘force’ in turn. Instead of going ‘beyond’ it, however, he literalises the final vocabulary, creating a parodic version not only of the language used by anarchists, but also of the very strategy by means of which every protagonist in the novel accords referential truth to contingent systems of identity and alterity. Thus, Stevie reacts to “tales of injustice and oppression” (7) with bona fide propaganda by the deed, displaying in this a “stroke of originality” (7): he is “discovered one foggy afternoon, in his chief’s absence, busy letting off fireworks on the staircase” (7). As a result of his intervention, “[w]ild-eyed, choking clerks stampeded through the passages full of smoke, silk hats and elderly business men could be seen rolling independently down the stairs” (7). As opposed to the final vocabularies of the anarchists – their recursive evocations of certainty only ever repeated in monologic seclusion – Stevie acts as if their radical indictments of society were true. In this way, he effects a momentary intervention into the order of things, a zeugmatic elision of difference between silk hats and their wearers. Elsewhere, reacting with “genuine emotion” (118) to a fallen horse, he charges into a a crowd “which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national spectacle” (7). Accordingly, Stevie is associated with a language that refuses the placidity of a final vocabulary, whether private or, in the case of the ‘national spectacle’, public. By adopting and literalising anarchist discourse, Stevie assumes a position of genuinely radical Otherness in relation to it. His enacted alterity, in other words, refuses to be suborned to a relational model of identity. It takes up and estranges, notably, the aged would-be revolutionary Yundt’s rhetoric about “present economic conditions” (38) and ‘them’ “nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and warm blood of the people” (38). This rhetoric, combined with an inability to act on his professed convictions, is set up as a closed-off language game primarily serving to assert his identity as a revolutionary-in-waiting. By taking over and inhabiting this imagery, literally incorporating it – he “swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible gulp” (38) – Stevie disrupts this

139 Rorty, Contingeny, 73. 140 Rorty, Contingeny, 73.

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self-serving function.141 In staging these literalisations, the novel does not allow for a reduction of this character to a representative figure of the pathologies of modern life, however. After all, in addition to the city, his ‘violent response’ is also shown to result from violence inflicted on him by his father, who displayed a “propensity to brutal treatment” (29). As a result, Stevie incorporates any instance of pain, as a “shock-receptor”142 that allows for little differentiation between verbal and physical trauma, translating both into an immediate reaction unaffected by any justificatory framework for violence. By ‘gulping down’ words or literalising injustice as fireworks (and, later, exploding “in the manner of a firework” himself; 191) Stevie embodies a blurring of the literal and the figurative — the thematic is made diegetic and anarchist rhetoric is embodied.143 Occasionally, the character is read in terms of a theory of reception gone wrong. For Rosemarie Bodenheimer, for one, he is a surrogate for a naïve reader of Victorian social novels.144 Michal Greaney sees Stevie as a ‘general reader’ lacking in hermeneutic sophistication, a “cruel caricature of ‘public opinion.’”145 Indeed, public opinion is presented as an unstable and ineffable construct in the novel — even Heat, who relies on the public, attributes its collective shifts to rules he cannot comprehend. Likewise, the terrorist Professor is beset by one recurring fear regarding the public sphere: “What if nothing could move them?” (61). In the terms established above, the shock embodied by Stevie, however, consists in precisely this impossibility of settling on a symbolic mold. Since we have seen how fragile the identitarian commitments of figures like Heat or Verloc turn out to be, this destabilisation receives tacit justification in the novel. Stevie literalises constructions of identity which not only function to uphold the status quo, but, what is more, lock their adherents in self-referential, enclosed language games.

141 He displays a version of the “reactivity” which, for Simmel, characterises the modern metropolis, in which impressions “through the rapidness and contradictoriness of their changes” overwhelm the individual and “force such violent responses.” Georg Simmel. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Trans. H. H. Gerth. Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. Ed. Richard Sennett. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. 47–60. 51. 142 Britzolakis, “Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis,” 11. 143 Wollaeger sees this as an authorial self-indictment: “By literally and figuratively sacrificing corporeal integrity to the demands of verbal and thematic coherence, Conrad implicates himself in the exploitation that the novel’s characters routinely impose on each other.” Mark Wollaeger. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2008. 56. 144 Cf. Rosemarie Bodenheimer. “Slapstick Noir: The Secret Agent Works the Victorian Novel.” The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Ed. Lisa Rodensky. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 746–755. 753. 145 Michael Greaney. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 142.

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He does so by refusing a strategy of demarcation shared by policemen and anarchists alike, disturbing their placid binarism by sheer dint of exceeding any attempt to assign him a status as relational alterity. To this end, his “enactment of revolutionary conceptions of identity [. . .] prohibited by realist conventions of representation”146 includes a hyperbolic performance of the rhetoric of anarchism, generated to no avail by ineffectual radicals in the storyworld. If there are traces of genuine anarchist practice in the novel, they can be found in this version of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which doubles as a performative critique of a calcified socialist rhetoric easily co-opted by an apparatus of demarcation. Stevie actualises the revolutionary potential lying fallow in anarchist rhetoric. In this, little remains of anarchist propagandism, which historically “thought that the demonstration of anarchism through action – ‘insurrectional deeds’ – would disrupt existing class relations.”147 However, at the very least, his brief performances bring to the fore a disorder always already underlying Conrad’s narrative universe, demonstrating the suffering undergirding the ‘national spectacle’ and disclosing a professional world just one intervention away from a ‘stampeding’ state of nature. The inability of others to place him in a system of demarcation renders Stevie a major factor in the dissolution of self and Other staged by The Secret Agent. In this, he occupies a similar structural position vis-à-vis the “social mechanism” (11) as the Professor does regarding Heat. As a consequence, Stevie is the focus of several failing attempts to assign him to relational alterity. Hence, what precisely makes Stevie ‘different’ is a matter of interpretation within the novel rather than a self-evident pathology or disability. Stevie is not merely presented as Other, but is the target of efforts to make him so, rendering him the first instance of an attempted imposition of alterity in the novel. However, his performative practice constitutively resists straightforward assignations of deviance. As James Berger puts it, Stevie is positioned at the “boundary not just of this novel’s social-symbolic order but of symbolization itself.”148 He offers, in other words, “a line of escape from any fixed and stable order. It is a line between things, between clearly demarcated entities and identities, a zigzag, unpredictable course that disrupts the coordinates of an organised

146 Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, 14. 147 Kinna, The Government of No One, 100. 148 James Berger. The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity. New York: New York UP, 2014. 74.

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space.”149 This ‘line of flight’ cuts across the demarcations established by other characters and their ideologies. Through the confrontations with Stevie, the novel presents a paradigmatic instance of a failure of differential order and an attendant breakdown of categories. This is demonstrated by a brief episode in which the anarchist council – with its successive, irreconcilable monologues on revolutionary action – is interrupted by the sight of “innocent Stevie,” who is in the process of engaging in his customary artistic practice: Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable. The artist never turned his head; and in all his soul’s application to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to snap. (34)

In critical accounts, the habit of “drawing circles, circles, circles” (34) has been presented as an encapsulation of the political perspective offered by the novel. The shapes, in such a reading, emerge as the deviation from whichever norm the critic attributes to the novel. This norm, in turn, is derived on different analytical levels, ranging from Conrad’s biography to the political context of the early 20th century, or, according to Vargish and Mook, from geometry as such: geometric order is a shorthand for wholesale “rational systems”150 which are disturbed by Stevie’s art. Accordingly, “[t]he archetypal symbol of formal perfection, of perfect order, and of geometrical completeness seems in Stevie’ hands to represent cosmic anarchy. The bankruptcy of traditional methods for protecting the political order, and the obtuseness of its agents, are symbolised by the transformation of the circle into a sign of disorder.”151 Vargish’s/Mook’s gloss of “cosmic chaos” (34) as ‘cosmic anarchy’ is apt: however, instead of an ontological deep-structure, anarchy (in its pejorative sense of breakdown) is, specifically, associated with the response of the assembled anarchists. The failure of coming to terms with the circles is imbricated with the novel’s presentation of anarchism as the paradigm of ideologies repeated with monologic insistence, incapable of enacting the political demarcation they espouse. The

149 Ronald Bogue. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 130. 150 Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook. Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. 72. 151 Vargish/Mook, Inside Modernism, 72.

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self-referential closure of ‘anarchist’ rhetoric makes it impossible to establish a communicable distinction between identity and alterity. This failure of drawing a political difference is demonstrated, firstly, by the radicals’ inability to assign an interpretation to Stevie’s art. Secondly, the foundational categories asserted by the protagonists are dispersed within histoire and discours alike, in a manner that structurally poses an objective correlative to Stevie’s circles. In this way, the foundational truth claim purportedly grounding each version of political radicalism is deprived of its cohesive function, rendering the anarchist salon an illustration of the ‘cosmic anarchy’ of the circles. Before their reduction to ‘chaos’ towards the end of the short passage, the circles are not described as markedly disordered. Instead, they are characterised by the simultaneity of overdetermination (“uniformity of form”) and “confusion.” This confusion, in turn, is not simply identified with chaos: the intersecting lines are, after all, said to ‘suggest’ meaning. What is more, they refer to a “rendering of cosmic chaos” rather than constituting chaos themselves. There is a method to the “mad art attempting the inconceivable” (34): it revolves around the provision of a correlative for the absence of form itself.152 Instead of an unmediated, chaotic deep-structure prefiguring the succeeding plot, the account of Stevie’s visual art is, thus, conspicuously mediated; it is the (1) suggestion of a (2) rendering of a (3) signified. This medial self-reflexivity – in the broad sense in which “any sign that refers to itself or to aspects of itself is a self-referential sign”153 – connects Stevie to the dissolution of binary differentiation. In this context, the horror of hermetic self-reference expressed by the narrator’s account of the circles is consonant with Nordau’s contemporary degenerationist categories. For the theoretician of ‘anarchic’ art, “[t]he cult of rhyme for rhyme’s sake introduces into the brain itself of the poet, little by little, a kind of disorder and permanent chaos; all the usual laws of association, all the logic of thought is destroyed in order to be replaced by the chance encounter of sounds.”154 In analogous, yet far less disparaging fashion, Stevie’s art is all too close to offering circles for circles’ sake, as well as (in the alliterative ‘cosmic

152 Sherry draws attention to the concentration of motifs of degeneracy and decadence in the description of Stevie: “He appears at once as the Caliban of the degeneration typology that was modeled by Nordau and the Ariel of the decadent artist who is exemplified in Beardsley, whose ‘frail way’ is also Stevie’s.” Vincent Sherry. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 121. 153 Winfried Nöth. Introduction. Self-Reference in the Media. Ed. Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 3–30. 8. 154 Nordau, Degeneration, 269–270.

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chaos’) drawing attention to mere sound-based paradigms collapsed onto the prosaic syntagm. His ‘mad art’ expresses, first and foremost, its own potential for representation rather than offering a referential sign, let alone an alterity to be clearly consigned to one side of a differential system. The circles present a medial substrate without forms emerging from it; after all, no differentiations are observable in the circles themselves. Instead, confrontation with the circles, in Agamben’s terminology, “is not the experience of something – a formless being – but rather perception of its own formlessness, the self-affection of potentiality.”155 In this vein, Stevie’s circles are self-enclosed to a degree that disrupts any attempts of immediate interpretation, both within the diegesis and with regard to later, isomorphic structures such as the ‘coruscating’ series of interpretations after the explosion. The circles are, hence, not presented as ‘chaos’ – anarchy in the depreciatory sense – from the outset: the description as “cosmic chaos” is already adduced as a first attempt of interpreting them. Specifically, this description is associated with the narrator’s attempts to come to terms with their absence of demarcation. The circles’ ‘chaotic’ status is an explanatory tag designed to offer reassuring closure at the end of a hypotactic profusion of characteristics. Thus, the zerofocalised addition of “chaos” at the end of the description interrupts the selfreferential vignette in which Stevie’s signs, first and foremost, refer to each other. The circles, thus, cannot be aligned with the narrator’s guarantee of external reference to an Other, which is previously asserted with taxonomic certainty in a lengthy diatribe on the causes of anarchist pathology. In the process, the narrator takes over the task of passing a “verdict” (39) on the assorted anarchists in the shop, a judgment previously presented from the perspective of Verloc. The secret agent examines his ostensible comrades with an “instinct of conventional respectability” (39) and a classificatory ease that bespeaks his occupation as a police informer. In adopting this gaze, associated as it is with the police system of demarcation, the narrator proceeds from the “price” (39) required for social existence. From this premise, he goes on to enumerate the “poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets and incendiaries” (39) who make up the anarchist contingent, all of whom share the basic disinclination to ‘pay that price’. Against this determinate binary order, as sharply distinct as it is ever drawn in the novel, Stevie’s circles refuse classification. No series of specimens set up by the police spy and the narrator can make sense of them. Instead, the circles present, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, “formless pullulation, a place out of place and a time out

155 Giorgio Agamben. “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. 205–219. 217.

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of time which is neither nothing nor something but a swarming multiplicity of identical forms which cancel one another out.”156 The narrator attempts to reorganise these circles engendered by their own self-referential logic: by referring them to an external phenomenon, they are to maintain a semblance of external reference, assuring us of their facile association with “cosmic chaos.” However, as in the case of Heat’s ‘planetary’ self-image set up against the threat of the Professor, the macroscopic scale of the terms of comparison only functions as an indication of the difficulties encountered in the course of bolstering a system of differentiations. The hyperbolic overdetermination of the signified is evoked to maintain a residually differential system as well as to ensure that Stevie’s art does not remain in its self-perpetuating state. As a result of the narratorial intervention, Stevie’s “thin neck” and a “deep hollow at the base of the skull” are observed with a phrenologist’s certainty. This description, hence, shifts to biologistic attempts to obtain a classifiable (rather than Stevie’s own radical, self-referential) alterity, a taxonomy of deviant characteristics against which a normative, healthy body could be derived. This conspicuous construction of alterity submits the body to degenerationist pathology, with the “circles” furnishing both symptom and medium — and the ‘cosmic chaos’ bringing this conversion to a close in a recovered, constitutive outside. That is, by returning the circles to a signified of utmost disorganisation and extension, Stevie has been made residually functional as a guarantor of “limits through which a (non-dialectical) negativity is constructed,” allowing the narrator to curb “an indefinite dispersion of differences whose absence of systematic limits would make any differential identity impossible.”157 By redefining the self-referential formlessness of the circles in terms of redoubled external reference, the narrator has shored up their status as contrastive foil and can, thus, proceed to take over the police function from Verloc. Confronted with an unreadable sign unamenable to discursive control, the intermittently authorial narrator re-establishes a secure reading in which the self-generating circles do not refer to each other, but are associated with discursively bolstered reference points.158 This shows that

156 J. Hillis Miller. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1965. 59. 157 Ernesto Laclau. “Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject.” Ernesto Laclau. Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso, 2007. 47–66. 53. 158 For instance, Victorian discourses can conceive that “the present state of the universe was the result of blind mechanical forces, which operated on the original cosmic chaos to produce, slowly, the interrelated systems of galaxies and solar systems.” Anthony O’Hear. Philosophy, Biology and Life. Ed. Anthony O’Hear. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 235–258. 244.

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Stevie’s art can only be modelled as a transgression of norms if it is reconstituted as a differential sign, both an index of a body transgressing a healthy norm and of anarchy breaching a normative order.159 Despite this recuperation of the the circles for a discourse of aberrance, an articulable norm is, however, conspicuously absent. Not only are the other anarchist bodies assembled in the salon assigned equal degrees of physical deviation, but, what is more, the authorial gaze neglects to define the rule to which Stevie is the exception. As a result, rather than an identity bolstered by the alterity of the aberrant body, the circles, and the cosmic chaos, all the narrator has to offer is an ever-expanding chain of synonyms for the negativity required: “monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable” (39). The chain of negative qualities is expanded, without ever assigning a determinate value to the “price which must be paid” (39) for society to function. It is this absence of a positive determination that marks the strategy of ‘scaling-up’ to ‘cosmic chaos’ as a temporary solution. After all, if Stevie’s actions are to become a signified of a transgressed rule, they have to present the order disturbed by the transgression in an at least residually consensual manner. ‘Cosmic chaos’ appears as unsuited to this co-constitution of norm and breach: the certainty achieved “about cosmos, about the necessity and possibility of order,” as Thacker describes such ordering reference to a “Great Beyond,”160 appears too hyperbolically macroscopic, cut-off as it is from any interpretative categories wielded in the diegesis. Meanwhile, recourse to a pathologising gaze at the neck and skull, as Ossipon’s reinterpretation of Stevie will show, likewise does not constitute a shared set of certainties anymore. The narrator’s attempt of integrating the circles into a differential system, then, is for the benefit of the reader alone, if at all. Within the storyworld, the attempts to come to terms with Stevie are shown to come up short immediately, without any recourse to a ‘cosmic’ chaos to which “mad art” (34) could refer. The second breakdown of ordering categories in the confrontation with Stevie’s art is associated with Ossipon, whose certainties are derived from his self-identification as former medical student and ‘scientific anarchist’. In an elaboration of the narrator’s attention to Stevie’s body, this amateur Lombrosan criminologist attempts to make use of the discourse of degeneration to classify signifiers of transgression — and, in this way, delineate the validity of his norms: “Typical of this form of degeneracy—these drawings, I mean” (34). In keeping with contemporary trends of this pseudo-science, Ossipon’s statement asserts

159 Linder/Ort, “Zur sozialen Konstruktion der Übertretung,” 31. 160 Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent 2.2 (2012). 66–75. 68.

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degenerationist alterity on the basis of the artistic manifestation of supposedly ‘regressive’ features. Along these lines, Max Nordau’s Degeneration traces impressionist painting to “a hysterical subject whose retina is [. . .] partly insensitive.”161 For Nordau, syptomatic observation registers the features of the artistic product before inferring the respective mode of transgressive subjectivity. Not only does a ‘degenerate’ drawing, then, point towards the “organic grounds” and “peculiarities of [the] brain”162 of its originator, but the artist him- or herself encapsulates a type of deviation which, in turn, stands pars pro toto for its obverse, a sane and healthy body. On these discursive grounds, Ossipon’s classification proceeds from the drawings to an explanation of why he would “call that lad a degenerate” (34). Afterwards, categorisation continues apace: “That’s what he may be called scientifically. Very good type too, altogether, of that sort of degenerate. It’s enough to glance at the lobes of his ears. If you read Lombroso—” (35). Ossipon’s version of degenerationist discourse dispenses with the ‘cosmic’ scale evoked by the narrator. Instead, the alleged regression can be diagnosed and contained in the ‘stigmata’ (to use Lombroso’s own term) of the deviant body, which atavistically recapitulates tendencies long since superseded by the civilising influence of bourgeois society.163 This system linking degeneracy and criminality is imbricated with a fantasy of observation: the unbiased specialist’s gaze (backed by staunch empiricism) enables a semiotics of disclosure, which does not remain constrained to the object of observation present but opens up a panoramic overview of temporal development.164 According to the terminology developed by Cesare Lombroso, the expert degenerationist can pronounce the recurrence of features in the criminal with diagnostic certainty: “In spite of the thousands of years which separate him from prehistoric savages,” he can organise the “gradual transformation of the present system” with the aim of eradicating criminality — and unmodifiable criminals themselves.165 If deviance is furnished in this manner, the healthy body of Ossipon as the “robust anarchist” (209) can elude description as a body altogether. Instead, it emerges as 161 Nordau, Degeneration, 26. 162 Nordau, Degeneration, 19. 163 For an account of Lombrosan stigmata, cf. Werner J. Einstadter and Stuart Henry. Criminological Theory: An Analysis of Its Underlying Assumptions. Lanham/Boulder/New York/ Toronto/Oxford: Rowman, 2006. 84. 164 Cf. Peter Becker. “Der Verbrecher als ‘monstruoser Typus’: Zur kriminologischen Semiotik der Jahrhundertwende.” Der falsche Körper: Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Monstrositäten. Ed. Michael Hagner. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995. 147–173. 162. My trans. 165 Gina Lombroso Ferrero. Criminal Man: According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1911. 135.

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the source of unbiased observation, which is itself not counted amongst the specimens observed. The constitution of the taxonomer is to provide a discursive origin made perceptible only at the moment of its demarcation against the diffracted anatomy of the degenerate object. So much for the theory, from Lombroso through Nordau to its fictional adherent. In practice, however, the ‘scientific anarchist’ is denied this unmarked position. His attempt to interpret the distinction between biological health and degenerate illness runs up against the previous description of his own appearance in terms of biologist and degenerationist characteristics, including the racist component of this strand of criminological knowledge.166 After all, for Lombroso, the very study “not of crime in the abstract, but of the criminal himself” is justified by the necessity of studying congenital transgression “as an anomaly, partly pathological and partly atavistic, a revival of the primitive savage” — who, in turn, finds a synchronic equivalent in the racialised, non-Western Other.167 This racist classification recurs in the narrator’s description of Ossipon himself. The enumeration of the medical student’s body (already counteracting its status as the source of unmarked taxonomy) concludes with a description of his “flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type” (33). What is more, the narrator usurps the scientist’s pose by asserting that the “disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon’s thick lips accentuated the negro type of his face” (37). The discursive superimposition of delinquent physiology and racist typology, which remains implicit in Ossipon’s own observations, enters the narrator’s view as outright denigration. In this, the narrative voice avails itself of the diagnostic claims of degenerationist discourses: according to Lombroso’s metonymical combinations of traits in such biologistic and racial typology, for instance, “[t]he lips of violators of women and murderers are fleshy, swollen and protruding, as in negroes.”168 Even more explicitly, Lombroso’s early lectures on The White Man and the Coloured Man superimpose a racial meta-category to sum up a whole host of religious and political differences: “If one sentence were to summarize all of these characteristics, we must say that there are two big races:

166 Cf. Rod Edmond. “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse.” Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality 1890–1940. Ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 39–64. 47. “This attention to the physical symptoms of degeneracy, and their troubling implications for moral and social health, is both sustained and undercut by Ossipon’s Lombrosian discourse.” 167 Lombroso Ferrero, According to the Classification, xii. Race is a link in a chain of deviance including “the normal individual, the lunatic, the criminal, the savage, and finally the child.” (xvii) 168 Lombroso Ferrero, According to the Classification, 16.

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the Whites and the Coloureds. Only Whites have achieved the most perfect symmetry in the shapes of the body.”169 In The Secret Agent, this substrate of racist categorisation, which remains implicit in Ossipon’s observations, functions as a perspectival about-face. The unacknowledged part of his unquestioned taxonomy is turned back upon the observer in a sudden, heterodiegetic reversal. At the point at which the amateur scientist performs his casual mastery, indicating self-evident deviance “with a shade of condescension and a toss of his head towards the kitchen” (34), his taxonomic certainties cannot be constrained by his interpretation. What he excludes from his appeal to Lombroso, indicated by the ellipsis following the degenerationist’s name, returns as a suppressed substrate, inscribing the terms of racist classification in the figure attempting to embody a norm. The self-styled position of a disembodied, normative gaze, in this way, becomes subject to its own excluded components. Indeed, instead of the epistemological control to which Ossipon aspires, he is increasingly shown to display “that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of science can give to the dulness of common mortals” (35). Similarly, when challenged on his simplistic categories, he meets “the shock of this blasphemy by an awful, vacant stare” (35), thus displaying the same characteristic evinced by the object of his classification, Stevie, who has previously been depicted in terms of ‘vacancy’: he is “staring vacantly” (29); evincing a “vacant droop of his lower lip” (7); displaying a “vacant mouth and distressed eyes” (115); looking “vacantly into the fierce little eyes” (122); showing a “vacant gaze” (122); and, finally, glaring with “vacant sulkiness” (122). Taking its place in this series, the position of scientific certainty itself is bereft of any claim to classificatory control over alterity. The Secret Agent, thus, stages the impossibility of constraining the diagnosis of aberrant features to anarchist figures against whom a norm could be evoked. In the process of this failure to construct and naturalise deviance, the ‘scientific’ discourse of degeneration is divested of its status as a means of disinterested observation. As a result, signifiers of degeneracy are applied and withdrawn by protagonists and narratorial judgment alike in a manner which increasingly precludes the possibility of gaining stabilising images of political

169 Cesare Lombroso. L’Uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore: Letture sull’origine e la varietà della razze umame. Padua: Sacchetto, 1871. 222. My trans. Orig. quote: “Che se con una sola frase noi vogliamo riassumere quasi tutti questi caratteri, noi dobbiamo dire che vi sono due grandi razze: la Bianca e la Colorata. Noi soli Bianchi abbiamo toccato la più perfetta simmetria nelle forme del corpo.” Cf. also. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter. Editor’s Introduction. Criminal Man. By Cesare Lombroso. Trans. and ed. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006. 1–36. 17.

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Otherness. This contrasts with the initial presentation of each member of Verloc’s anarchist salon, which still partakes in an authorial narrator’s equivalent to Lombroso’s diagnostic techniques. After all, in a key article, Lombroso offers ekphrastic descriptions of photos of Chicago anarchists. The article proceeds to trace a distribution of aberrant traits, ranging from “acrosephaly and facial asymmetry” to “an anomaly, very frequent in normal men as well; that is to say the ears are without lobes.”170 These characteristics are associated with crime and mental illness, as Lombroso concludes that anarchists “possess the degenerative characters common to criminals and to the insane, being anomalies and possessing these traits by heredity.”171 While some of these features occur individually in the novel, their association with degenerative figures unambiguously evincing them – and thereby opening up the possibility of a Lombrosan diagnostic observer position – is not recovered. As Ossipon is subjected to the narrator’s taxonomic gaze, and himself observes the “lobes” of a specimen while exposing his own biases and blind spots, the degenerationist triad – anarchism, crime, and ‘madness’ – is withdrawn as a means of determining a political Other. There are consequences to the ensuing categorical uncertainty: as the ‘anarchist’ cannot be differentiated on a disavowed side of a distinction, the traits invested in the delinquent body are shown to circulate in a “disregarded distribution” (59); the terms of degenerationism recur, but rather than imparting a stable observer position they are shown to dismantle any claim to epistemological hegemony. The main effect of this circulation of traits – rather than yielding a recoverable taxonomy of transgressive bodies – is thus the removal of any principle of distribution altogether. The further recurrence of traces of degeneration proceeds in analogy to Stevie’s circles rather than positing a secure vantage point from which to scrutinize them. In addition to the Lombrosan theorist being described with the racist terminology of degeneracy, Karl Yundt, the selfdescribed “terrorist” (31), offers an explicit critique of the terms of criminology: “Did you ever see such an idiot? For him the criminal is the prisoner. Simple, is it not? What about those who shut him up there—forced him in there? Exactly. Forced him in there. And what is crime?” (35) This analysis accurately describes the variability of the definition of transgression in novel. After all, in The Secret Agent the allocation of deviance and crime emerges as the fleeting possibility for “order to differentiate crime from itself (discrimination) and, at the same

170 Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 338. 171 Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 339.

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time, relate it to itself,”172 as the residual demarcation of mass-mediated anarchists has shown. Yundt, thus, offers a fitting dismantling of the concept of ‘crime’ as an essentialist category deducible from “ears and teeth of a lot of poor, luckless devils” (35). To use the example of Heat, the policeman is indeed shown to have given up on observing thieves in terms of criminality. Since the “idea of thieving appeared to his instinct as normal as the idea of property” (69), such run-of-the-mill transgressors are temporarily used to establish a different distinction: they make it possible to separate the anarchist “Lunatic” (72) from the normative, property-bound and sane criminal. While Yundt’s critique is, thus, justified, it is far from a comprehensive auto-critique of the narrative. His deliberation is itself the result of a distinction in which the ‘terrorist’ indicates a marked side of a distinction (Ossipon’s Lombrosan criminology) whilst remaining unable to observe his own, unmarked side. Following Luhmann, Yundt is beset by an unavoidable oversight: while observing Ossipon’s distinctions, he avails himself of an observation which “uses a distinction in order to indicate something (but not the distinction itself).”173 That is, while the (erstwhile) terrorist is able to reconstruct how degenerationism draws distinctions (between normal and degenerate), he is unable to observe the distinction that he, in turn, makes to perceive the limited empiricism of others. A ‘blind spot’ of this kind is literalised as the narrator, in turn, provides a third-order observation of Yundt (who is the second-order observer of Ossipon). Not only are “his extinguished eyes without gleams blackening the deep shadows under the great, bony forehead” (35), but that sense of diminishment also extends to his status as anarchist. While once evoking “sinister impulses” (36) in others, he is “emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish-heap of things that had served their time” (36). In other words, he does expose the contingency of the criminologist distinction, and

172 Bernhard Greiner. “Crimen – Diskriminierung – Literatur der Übertretung.” Verbrechen – Justiz – Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900 bis zu Gegenwart. Ed. Joachim Linder and Claus-Michael Ort. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999. 307–323. 307. My trans. For Greiner, “a systematics of literary appropriation of crime (or, to put it in a structurally neutral way: of transgression) has to understand ‘crime’ as a relational term, i.e. as a ‘transgression’ which can only be understood with reference to ‘order’ (and vice versa), in that order differentiates crime from itself (discrimination) and, at the same time, relates it to itself.” My trans. Orig. quote: “eine Systematik literarischer Aneignungen des Verbrechens (strukturell neutral formuliert: der Übertretung) hat ‘Verbrechen’ als relationalen Begriff zu nehmen, d.h. als ‘Übertretung’, die nur von ‘Ordnung’ her zu fassen ist (und umgekehrt), indem diese jene von sich unterscheidet (diskriminiert) und damit zugleich auf sich selbst bezieht.” 173 Niklas Luhmann. Theory of Society. Vol. 2. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. 330.

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thus confirms the loss of its empirical certainties already indicated by their recursive application to Ossipon. However, his observation of the ‘scientific anarchist’s’ mode of observation is, likewise, consigned to the marked side of a differentiation by the narrator. This return to an insistently authorial mode of representating the anarchists informs the reader that the distinction Yundt “uses to indicate the one side or the other serves as the invisible condition of seeing, as blind spot. And this can be said for all observation, whether the operation be psychic or social, whether it be carried out as actual process of consciousness or as communication.”174 Thus, while the self-ascribed terrorist determines Ossipon and criminology as a second-order observer, he is shown to be unable to observe the distinctions which he, in turn, draws in order to consign Ossipon’s first-order perspective to alterity. While critiquing degenerationist demarcations, thus, Yundt remains oblivious to the form of his own distinction. This assessment of the would-be terrorist’s position, in turn, is supplied by the narrator. That is, as in Ossipon’s case, the narrative voice applies to Yundt the very Lombrosan terminology that the “moribund veteran of dynamite wars” (36) has disavowed. In dwelling on the “great, bony forehead” (35), for instance, the criminologist’s gaze – unveiling “characteristics found only in 10% of normal persons, receding forehead as in apes, and the lemurian apophysis”175 – is firmly reinstated. In addition to restoring the distinctions of the first-order observer (Ossipon) to undercut the claims of the second-order observer (Yundt), the narratorial re-description of the ‘terrorist’ also lays bare the form of the distinction applied by the insurrectionist anarchist himself: he sets apart unjustified constructs of crime (“how criminals are made for Lombroso” 35) from a justified mode of ‘direct action’ (“death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity” 32). Since, however, he “had never in his life raised personally as much as a little finger against the social edifice” (36) and is “moribund” (36) to boot, the narrator momentarily presents Yundt as blind to his own presuppositions. Consequently, the “cavernous eyes in the face” turning with a “blind stare” (36) are metaphorically ‘blind’ to the contingency of their own speaking position, as opposed to the narrator’s distinctions, which in this instance make it possible to ‘see’ the blind spots of others. The drift of distinctions does not stop with the narrator passing unanimous judgment on Yundt, however. After all, the narrative voice has been shown to bring to an unconvincing close its own failing attempts to disavow

174 Niklas Luhmann. Theory of Society. Vol. 1. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. 35. 175 Lombroso Ferrero, According to the Classification, 243.

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Stevie’s circles. The reader is, thus, not provided with the narrator as an “extramundane subject”176 observing a world from a position unencumbered by the necessity of drawing distinctions. The mutual gazes, instead, show a regress of demarcations, which are individually capable of discerning the conditions of possibility undergirding the systems of others, whilst remaining constitutively unable to pinpoint their own. Such failure of self-reflexivity, however, is a feature rather than a drawback of any mode of observation in the early modernist imaginary. This accords with Luhmann’s emphasis that the blind spot is a ‘condition of seeing’ rather than its impediment.177 By contrast, whenever the blind spots of a system become conspicuous, the characters are no longer capable of drawing distinctions at all. Without a boundary cordoning off a suitable Other, however, the sense of self is likewise imperilled. Notably, after realising that it is “the half-witted lad” (212) who has died in the explosion, we are told that a “great light broke upon Ossipon” (212). This ‘light’ is immediately followed by a statement of scientific certainty, now appended as adverbs to indicate their barely cohesive function: “He exclaimed scientifically, in the extremity of his astonishment: ‘The degenerate—by heavens!’” (212) What is more, he is “terrified scientifically” when confronted with Winnie, now conceived as “a degenerate herself of a murdering type” (217). If this realisation appears to momentarily validate the distinction between norm and degeneration previously brought to bear on Stevie’s circles, the further development of this assurance implicitly reiterates Yundt’s critique that criminology provides scientistic mystifications for constructions of crime (“branding instruments” 35) in order to impart illusions of essentialist truth on contingent power differentials. In an individual recapitulation of this ideological function, Ossipon decides that moral categories no longer apply to Winnie after her ‘branding’ as degenerate. As a result, the ‘scientific anarchist’ feels momentarily justified in robbing and abandoning her. In the wake of Winnie’s suicide, however, these briefly mobilised epistemological certainties are shown to dissolve. Indeed, Ossipon fails to maintain his visual confirmation of any certainties whatsoever. Instead of a “great light” (212) of degenerationist taxonomy reinstating his well-worn observations, the ‘scientific anarchist’ is subjected to indistinct observation himself: the “towers of the Abbey saw in their massive immobility the yellow bush of his hair passing under the lamps. The lights of Victoria saw him too” (219). As Ossipon is at this stage incapable of setting himself apart from the

176 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 56. 177 Cf. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1, 35.

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urban environment, the city is disclosed as a succession of abstract “Squares, Places, Ovals, Commons” (220). Under the conditions of a wholesale loss of demarcation, London is a succession of “monotonous streets with unknown names” (220). Unclassifiable as the city becomes, it presents a spatial correlative to Ossipon’s own, supposedly unmarked position, which at the beginning of the novel allowed him to to shine a typological “light” on the deviance of others. Lombroso’s and Nordau’s categories become as much a “worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere” (218) as the “phrases of sham sentiment” (218) to which Winnie is shown to momentarily resort. Consequently, the assured dichotomy of the normal and the degenerate fails: “He could face no woman” (227), in marked distinction to the previous facility at creating an instant, gendered nomenclature. As a result of his loss of a secure Other, Ossipon is finally shown to be unable to draw any distinction whatsoever, ending up instead with “the mystery of a human brain pulsating wrongfully to the rhythm of journalistic phrases. ‘ . . . . Will hang for ever over this act . . . ’ It was inclining towards the gutter. ‘of madness or despair . . . .’” (227) Italicised fragments of the newspaper report on Winnie’s death, which are not even immediately attributable to Ossipon’s consciousness, are interspersed throughout the final narrative passages. In the course of this circulation of decontextualised signs, the narrator’s voice is placed between two ‘rhythmic’ repetitions of newspaper prose. Like the ‘brain pulsating’ with extraneous material, prose becomes the interlude between two fragments. Occurring between the pulses, the narrator’s interjections appear at the point at which a metric break would be required, at least if we take seriously the ‘rhythmic nature’ of the recombined fragments and read them as an accidental heptameter. In Agamben’s terms, such a caesura “causes the word and the representation to appear as such. To bring the word to a stop is to pull it out of the flux of meaning, to exhibit it as such.”178 That is to say: the narrative mode of bringing Ossipon’s story to its conclusion (the “gutter”) constitutes the gap between two mass media fragments, thus challenging the pre-eminence of the authorial comments appearing throughout the novel; or, as Agamben puts it: ‘exhibiting them as such’. As the media snippets are dispersed across the page as much as they are the diegetic result of a “brain pulsating to the rhythm of an impenetrable mystery” (227), any notion that these signs could refer to anything else than the mediated, rhythmic production and dissemination of information

178 Giorgio Agamben. “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Film.” Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Ed. Thomas McDonough. Cambridge and London, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 313–319. 317.

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itself collapses. The cadenced newspaper montage does not explain Winnie’s final hour, but imposes a temporality of recurrence on the narrative, refusing any signifiable distinction whatsoever. Instead of marking identity and alterity, the fragments, then, establish mechanical repetition increasingly unmoored from Ossipon’s perspective. This dissemination functions differently from previous instances of mass-mediated signs taking the place of epistemological gaps. When Heat is confronted with the remains of Stevie, he applies “all he had read in popular publications” (65); similarly, when Winnie experiences an unsustainable freedom in the wake of killing her husband, the newspaper phrase “The drop given was fourteen feet” is repeated with rhythmic insistence, having “been scratched on her brain with a hot needle” (196). As Parkes observes, the novel “calls up the spectre of a single brain organized solely according to the reiterative patterns of newspaper technology.”179 However, in the cases of Heat and Winnie, the disconnected phrases themselves are supplemented for an epistemological gap. In the case of the caesurae besetting Ossipon, by contrast, this structure is reversed: “‘An impenetrable mystery’ . . . . He walked disregarded . . . . ‘This act of madness or despair.’” (227) Rather than the fragments of mass media taking the place of a situation beyond the understanding of the protagonists, in this final case of the rhythmic dispersion of Winnie’s story it is the narratorial commentary that is placed between the “disregarded distribution” (59) of mass media matter.180 The narrator’s heterodiegetic authority occupies the interstices between journalistic fragments rather than the other way around. Thus, it is the authorial narrator’s confident pronouncements that become isomorphic to Heat’s popular publications, Ossipon’s criminological fragments, and Winnie’s imagery of gallows and punishment. The scientific anarchist’s anguished (internally focalised) attempt to attain secure knowledge of Winnie’s suicide and the narrator’s account of Ossipon’s descent (“feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing no sound” 227) are placed on the same footing. Both are equally reduced to the 179 Adam Parkes. A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 120. 180 Cf. Peter Lancelot Mallios. “Reading The Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, the Premonition of Simulation.” Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. Ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 155–174. 170. “What is entertained here is a reproductive relationship to the world – say, in the context of the press, a written relationship to events – that is so powerful that the elements of representation and of a differentiated, autonomous reality drop out entirely, the world instead being scripted, constituted, supplanted by the media and models that are brought to bear upon it.”

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status of a break in the dispersal of the fragmented article. The repetition increasingly disconnects the narrator’s interludes from the prosodic requirements of the “beauties of its journalistic styles” (224), the authorial irony barely registered amidst the fragmentary media pattern. As a result, the very status as narrative is subordinated to rhythmic iteration. In turn, the narrator’s account is relegated to a repetition of epistemological impasses which are already presented as solved and contained in the newspaper stock phrases surrounding it. Once designated a ‘mystery’, Winnie’s death has been processed as far as necessary for mass media communicability. The repercussions of the event that emerge as a rupture in the novel – with Verloc himself, Winnie, and Ossipon engaged in extended processes of delayed decoding – are processed immediately in the media environment. Consequently, a crisis of language only emerges for those who rely on the assumption of an ordered social sphere, and require commensurate signs for the description of interlocking identities. By contrast, the newspapers do not even purport to re-draw the lines between self and Other: they proceed from the assumed unknowability of the unknown woman’s intention, yet offer nothing but rhythmic avowals of this impossibility of understanding. The resulting phrases present a combinatory system in which change is not introduced by simulating any referential function but rather by rearrangements of signs. Difference in this system is introduced by the placement of the ellipsis in each iteration, or else the order of the assemblage. Mental interiority is fully subsumed by this variation of the ever-same. Under such conditions of media dissemination, interpretation is unnecessary. The pretence of an ordered social sphere that is finally replaced by this media rhythm is already dismantled before this final breakdown. Or rather: we are made privy to the extraneous material always already excluded from any demarcation of a residually normative sphere. Such exposure occurs whenever focalisation is removed from the purveyors of protected urban places, and before a reinstated authorial narrator projects an emerging sense of disorder onto anarchist malcontents. In these interstitial passages, the sporadically extradiegetic view of the city produces conjunctions of the human, the animal, and the material set apart from the claims to privileged urban knowledge.181 However, the description of a “thick police constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if he too were part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamppost” (11) still accords a privileged view to the narrative presentation of 181 I.e. the narrator, “albeit fictitious [. . .] is included (as narrator) in no diegesis but is on an exactly equal footing with the extradiegetic (real) public.” The narrative instance is “‘offdiegesis,’ is situated outside of the diegesis.” Gérard Genette. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. 84–85.

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the city, to the possibility of exposing a deep-structure of interacting objects not exhausted by any system of signification imposed on it. This changes with the reiterated slogans closing the novel, as the “impenetrable mystery” (227) is finally dislodged from the journalistic context and reinscribed in the narrator’s account. In this citation, narrative emerges as a facultative supplement to the mechanical repetition of phrases. At the same time, “madness” loses its referential function in Lombrosan taxonomy, emerging instead as a stock sign gaining its meaning from its repeated series rather than referring to a disavowed, transgressive figure.182 Amidst this circulating ‘madness’, the narrator cannot even relegate the fragments to the status of “cosmic chaos” (227) as the authorial description descends into its own conspicuously repetitive model: “He walked along the street without looking”; “Comrade Ossipon walked without looking”; “It was ruin [. . .]. It was ruin.” (227) The Secret Agent, thus, inculcates scepticism regarding the degree to which “[m]inimizing the authority of the cultural producer creates the opportunity for popular participation and democratic determinations of cultural values,”183 as Harvey summarises the more optimistic accounts of collage and montage aesthetics. By denying the reader a vantage point outside of Ossipon’s predicament, and presenting a narrative taken over by a template of disconnected montage, the novel focuses instead on the “price of a certain incoherence or, more problematic, vulnerability to mass-market manipulation.”184 In the absence of a simulated authority upholding collective illusions of a wellpoliced city, it is not only collective identity and alterity, but the very notion of the individual subject and narration that become jointly untenable. Consequently, the narrative can no longer expose the shortcomings of individual anarchists by recursively applying their own categories to their grotesque corporeality and inconsistent ideologies. As foundational certainties are diminished for the protagonist, the novel’s own dissolution into circular

182 Cf. Herbert N. Schneidau. Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. 120. It is only in this sense of the media creating a self-referential environment beyond demarcation, following Schneidau, that “Winnie has more power over Ossipon in death than she could ever have had in life.” It is the reiterated sign in the selfreferential system of media that exerts this effect. In the diegesis, Winnie is consistently shown to be subject to patriarchal oppression. In Ossipon’s case, the reader is explicitly reminded of the gendered component of his treatment of Winnie as the Professor brings up his history of exploitation: “Tell me, Ossipon, terrible man, has ever one of your victims killed herself for you—or are your triumphs so far incomplete—for blood alone puts a seal on greatness?” (223) 183 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 51. 184 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 51.

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imagery and rhythmic repetition likewise rescinds the possibility of grand narratives of cultural identity against which anarchist aberrations could be defined. Thus, at the same time as Ossipon loses any capacity of drawing distinctions within the storyworld, the reiteration of ‘madness and despair’ divests the narrator of the role still residually assumed in confrontation with the anarchist types. The facility of narratorial third-order observation of the ‘radicals’ is replaced by the rhythm of mass media. Meanwhile, Ossipon’s first-order distinction of norm and deviation is replaced by his status as a node in a process of communication that no longer takes heed of individual distinctions. Whilst the narrator is relegated to connective tissue between headlines, the ‘scientific anarchist’ ends up with “the leather yoke of the sandwich board” (227), completing his transformation into a mere instance of transmission.185 Advertising slogans ‘pulse’ with the same ease as the mass media replicated by his “brain pulsating wrongfully to the rhythm of journalistic phrases” (227). The ‘wrongful’ brain is out of synch as mechanical rhythm takes over from narrative, making propositional content an imperfect afterthought to the self-reproduction of media. Retrospectively, this pivot to ‘rhythmic phrases’ also casts suspicion on attempts to reintroduce degenerationist certainties in order to explain Winnie’s killing of Verloc. After all, in the moment-to-moment account of her actions, the narrative instance turns to biologistic notions, according to which Winnie takes on her brother’s physical characteristics. Before, however, tracing this resemblance to individual features (“even to the droop in the lower lip” 192) familiar to degenerationist analysis, the narrator avails himself of religious imagery, presenting the process of transference of atavistic traits “[a]s if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister” (192). This attempt to come to terms with the female protagonist’s act of violence aligns with Ossipon’s attempt to see her as a figure of biblical temptation preceding the “light” of scientific taxonomy: “He saw the woman twined round him like a snake.” (213) Rather than a definitive, biologist frame for understanding alterity, thus, the novel stages halting attempts to assign Otherness to a figure that cannot be imagined outside of her previous social roles, however contingent they may have been: “Mrs Verloc, veiled, had no discernible form” (213). These faltering attempts to make sense of Winnie’s ‘delinquency’ culminate in the description of the act of killing, into which “Mrs Verloc had put all

185 Cf. Miller, The New Woman Criminal, 185. For Miller, the sandwich board “suggests that his body will be emasculated and commodified under consumer capitalism. He will not demolish the system, but the system will demolish him.”

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the inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns, and the unbalanced nervousness of the age of bar-rooms” (193). All the requisite components for a return to the initial first-order observation by Ossipon are provided here. After all, her ‘killing blow’ is tied to an atavistic pre-history of ‘caverns’, in line with Lombroso’s notion that “[i]t is sad but true: among brutes, savages, and primitive people, the female is more cruel than compassionate.”186 At the same time, the “unbalanced nervousness” reintroduces the notion of degeneration as a response to modernity. However, in light of the “disregarded distribution” (59) of scientific terminology, the authorial narrator’s allocation of ‘obscure descent’ appears as an equivalent to the strategies by means of which the scientific anarchist attempts to bolster his understanding of Winnie. Rather than providing a determinable atavistic recurrence or a set of inherited traits, the narrator displays the same reduction of complexity as Ossipon once confronted with the “mysteriously still” (192) figure of Winnie. In other words, the supplementation of a degenerationist-criminological frame reduces complexity only after previous attempts to make sense of the object of observation have failed. This recourse to pathological categories as a last-ditch effort to regain interpretative coherence is even mirrored by Verloc himself, whose last thoughts pertain to a “ghastly struggle with that armed lunatic” (192). The categories of mental illness, madness, and ‘lunacy’, still associated with identifiable heterostereotypes at the outset of the novel, emerge as a conspicuous last-ditch effort to reinstate order at the moment of death — a decoding delayed in perpetuity. Having Verloc – whose incomprehension of the terms of the domestic marriage contract have precipitated his death – invoke ‘lunacy’ while the narrator speculates on the transference of atavistic deficiencies serves to further undercut the authority of the zero-focalised, authorial gaze. Without stabilising anarchist figures to anchor their scientistic classification, both intra- and extradiegetic instances are brought up short equally in their attempts to sustain the terms of deviance. Rather than confirming the universality of degenerationist traits or the impending collapse into a pre-civilisational state, the scientistic discourse, then, marks the incapacity of disavowing the traits of anarchism, degeneracy, and criminality. Little remains of the certainties of “bio-historical anachronism” in which the “anomalous individual thus languished behind phylogeny – the stage of evolution of the race as a whole.”187 Far from restoring an overarching

186 Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero. The Female Offender. New York: Appleton, 1898. 65. 187 Daniel Pick. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 126.

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demarcation, this entire discourse emerges as a barely functional means of depoliticisation. The terminology of Lombroso and Nordau is taken up in confrontation with “obscure” (90) phenomena, only to be exposed as just another observer position incapable of drawing a permanent distinction. From this perspective, the narratorial ascription of “obscure and immemorial descent,” rather than authenticating a genealogy of deviance, is an attempt to bridge a gap in the apparatus of demarcation, which can no longer furnish anarchist perpetrators. In this, the attempt to establish a genealogical reason for the act of violence follows the same trajectory as the run-up to the murder. After all, the killing is incited by a single sentence of Verloc’s which “flowed into an empty place in his wife’s memory” (191). In like manner, throughout the novel the degenerationist scheme compensates for an emptiness, an ‘empty place’ where explanations are expected. That is, whenever such an ‘empty place’ is encountered – a phenomenon outside of previous assumptions of order – we are made privy to serial, failing attempts of re-establishing certainties on the basis of this Social Darwinist epistemology. In the process, the association of an atavistic recurrence proclaimed by the narrator is not shown to be substantially different from Ossipon’s attempt to ‘gaze’ “scientifically at that woman, the sister of a degenerate, a degenerate herself of a murdering type. He gazed at her and invoked Lombroso.” (217) The attempted explanatory schema, in confrontation with a lack of comprehension, is here reduced to an appeal to authority: an invocation of the patron saint of degeneracy as well as mere repetition of his central terms. However, rather than offering Lombroso’s instantaneous classification, this reiteration of “a degenerate, a degenerate” (217) prefigures the final rhythm of journalistic phrases. The terms of alterity are unchanged: such pathologisation has already been used by Heat to differentiate the ‘lunatic’ Professor from the common criminal. However, by tracing the way in which these constructions of Otherness are “circulating in the public sphere” (where, as Antliff has shown, this mode of knowledge “laid down the framework for the ensuing antimodernist/antianarchist discourse”188) they appear as faltering attempts to substitute for what remains, ultimately, an ‘empty place’ bereft of a final explanation. Stripped of its authority, this circulating degenerationism no longer allows for the relational definition of a political identity by means of complementary characteristics.

188 Alan Antliff. Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2001. 49.

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In this context, the narrator’s evocation of ‘obscure descent’ incites a readerly reconstruction of Winnie’s descent into ‘lunacy’. Far from “immemorial,” her trajectory results from picturing Stevie’s death: she remembered it pictorially. [. . .] Mrs Verloc closed her eyes desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a pyrotechnic display. (191)

This ‘pictorial’ memory of an event which Winnie has not witnessed herself, as well as its status as a ‘display’, counter the notion of a pathological deepstructure expressing itself in a final confirmation of degenerationist concepts of delinquency.189 According to Lombroso, the recurrence of “primitive periods of human evolution” in identifiable, divergent features, after all, serves to uphold a broadly linear concept of time, in which a developmental narrative is transgressed by the statistical recurrence of superseded features.190 As the atavistic past reappears in the present body, the boundaries between the normal and the pathological, as well as a developmental succession leading from the former to the latter, are maintained. By contrast, Winnie’s pictorial display is associated with the head “suspended alone” (191). The processing of the images is placed outside of linear time, ‘suspended’ in a dilated moment unamenable to any ‘immemorial’ grand narrative of development and regression. Temporal continuity is only re-established as misaligned clock-time (literally the “pulse of an insane clock” 194) is replaced with a composite image of psychological time, the intervals of which are far from regular: the gaps between the drops of blood shorten, so that the “ticking changed into a continuous sound of trickling” (194). This atemporal suspension in time does not present a complete break with the previous organisation of the Verloc household. Rather, it brings to the fore its tacit agreements by cancelling Winnie’s part of the implicit contract, namely the

189 Gendered concepts of delinquency are superficially evoked in the presentation of the aftermath of the killing. The “irritation consequent on a degenerative process” in the ‘female offender’ is, in Lombroso’s terms, “neither so constant nor so lasting,” and thus appears consonant with the insistence that the “extraordinary resemblance to her late brother had faded” (192) after the killing. Lombroso/Ferrero, The Female Offender, 111. 190 Lombroso/Ferrero, The Female Offender, 217. This developmental template is expanded to broad delineations of alterity, in which the gendered account of limitation is mapped onto the divide of human/animal, civilised/aboriginal, and male/female, respectively: “In female animals, in aboriginal women, and in the women of our time, the cerebral cortex, particularly in the psychical centres, is less active than in the male. The irritation consequent in a degenerative process is therefore neither so constant nor so lasting, and leads more easily to motor and hysterical epilepsy, or to sexual anomalies, than to crime.” (111)

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“security of Stevie loyally paid for on her part” (179). In the terms of this agreement, Winnie had replaced the linear event sequence of a “voyage down the sparkling stream of life” (178) with a non-consecutive present, a “domestic feeling, stagnant and deep like a placid pool” (178). Thus pre-empting the suspension of time with stagnant time, the domestic sphere already entails its own departure from linear temporality. This arrested development is a result of social arrangements rather than degeneration, of gendered oppression rather than atavistic regression; and, most importantly, via the “secret places” (179) by means of which Verloc finances it, suspended time becomes explicitly political rather than biological. This counter-narrative to the linearity undergirding ‘descent’ unfolds against the background of an exhaustive account of the several political stakeholders involved in bringing about Winnie’s purportedly degenerative disposition. These range from Verloc himself, his handlers in the embassy, and the police department to the anarchist Professor who supplies the explosives. A set of decidedly political interests, then, converges and is brought home in the form of the lingering image of Stevie’s head suspended outside of linear time. What the narrator brands as degenerative atavism is, thus, the result of imperfect demarcation: rather than relegating a sense of disorder to a constitutive outside while maintaining an ideology of normative order on the inside, political differences are blurred. This is literalised by an alternative form of ‘descent’, in which the city appears as an ‘aquarium’, a bounded replica of an unbounded, outside space. Specifically, when the Assistant Commissioner leaves the police department, his “descent into the street was like the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off” (108). This recalls the Lombrosan “descent to customs [. . .] akin in their nature to the orgies of uncivilised tribes.”191 While the AC descends to the lower rungs of an evolutionary ladder, however, this movement does not quite accord with “the revelations by social explorers of the extent and depth of urban poverty.”192 Contrary to the aforementioned Darkest England, after all, flawed descent circulates through a variety of social strata. Given these degenerationist associations, the reader cannot but read the Home Secretary’s lineage – the “[u]nbroken record of that man’s descent” (100) – in such biologistic terms, too. ‘Descent’ multiplies: rather than an unbroken line marred by regression, it receives literal, topographical equivalents and counterparts in aristocratic genealogy. Thus dispersed, the concept disseminates the absence of shared temporal organisation; rather than the result of individual

191 Lombroso/Ferrero, The Female Offender, xvi. 192 Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion,” 492.

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deviation, noxious descent becomes the general condition in an urban sphere in which the concept of shared time is replaced with a multiplicity of stalled and dilated temporalities. This absence of temporal organisation already obtains from the outset in The Secret Agent. Or rather: the ‘holes in space and time’ that interrupt Heat’s surveillance imaginary become an inescapable fact of urban phenomenology. “Eternity is a damned hole” (223), as Ossipon presents one such moment in which the suspension of linear time becomes conspicuous. The emergence of distended ‘proper times’ deviating from developmental linearity reaches its apex in the course of a cab ride, during which “all visual evidence of motion became imperceptible [. . .] and time itself seemed to stand still” (115). Any teleological narratives falter in the London of The Secret Agent, leading to imagery of stalled time long before the ‘suspended head’ is shown to replace the “empty place” in Winnie’s memory (cf. 191). Since the breakdown of developmental time suffuses a city no longer conceived as an index of progress,193 the political task set up by the narrative consists in forestalling widespread insight into this impossibility of a time measured and communally agreed upon. To this end, degenerationist taxonomy constitutes an attempt to simulate certainty in the face of a collapse of communally ordained time. The devolutionary template, then, is presented as a conspicuous attempt to arrange the diegesis in terms of a binary structure of self and Other — which fails, as the terms of this boundary work circulate throughout the narrative. Instead of achieving a distinction of identity and alterity, then, the characteristics to be disavowed are circulated in an anarchic fashion of “disregarded distribution” (59). They refuse to remain associated with any one anarchist figure of deviancy underlying the continued assumption of a complementary norm. This loss of demarcation is extended to the narrator’s failing attempts to constrain interpretation of individual actions to the depoliticising category of ‘immemorial descent’. By adumbrating and rescinding an all-purpose explanatory scheme, the novel stages the impossibility of re-establishing alterity on the basis of a determinate split between norm and aberration. Already applying recursively to its initial representative, Ossipon, the discourse of degeneration is exposed as an inadequate mode of restoring a cohesive grand narrative, let alone a sense of linear time. Ultimately, in the manner of Stevie’s ‘coruscating circles’, the erstwhile descriptors of anarchism exceed stable differentiation as degenerate alterity — and reappear in spaces putatively governed by progress.

193 Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion,” 491.

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4.2.2.2 Dissolution of the “Un-Man” The anarchists evade the production of political alterity twice. As the degenerationist discourse has shown, categories assigned to the political Other are, firstly, disseminated throughout the represented world. Secondly, however, the anarchists are shown to be as dependent on a demarcation of self and Other as the other protagonists — and lose their sense of self as soon as those certainties become untenable. It is this latter breakdown of demarcation which reaches its most extensive presentation with the figure of the “perfect anarchist” (70), the Professor. Whereas the ‘retroactive positing’ of the apparatus of demarcation (cf. 4.1) allows for a temporary return to political certainties, and the Assistant Commissioner is associated with a post-foundationalist demarcation of contingent alterity for the sake of others, the Professor emerges as the most sustained treatment of foundationalism in the novel. That is to say: in keeping with foundationalist models of the political, the character is associated with the attempt to define his own position by means of an “Archimedean point, [. . .] on which all of our epistemic endeavours could be definitely ‘grounded’.”194 While he dismantles the differential language games of others, the Professor is shown to aspire to an ineffable essence that sets him apart from each and any collective identity. Thus, he is associated with the attempt to become an autonomous and self-generating subject, denying any dependence on others.195 The novel consistently dramatises the failure of this autonomy. However severely the Professor enacts his self-sufficient status – and however totalising, in turn, the denouncements of communal meaning making – the social proves an ineradicable supplement. This accords with Henri Lefebvre’s contention that any notion of a ‘certain space’ – “the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power”196 – is necessarily collective. The ‘perfect anarchist’ denies this consistently, since he arrogates ‘certain space’ to his selfcreated identity – and attempts to delegate the social to the outside of his sphere of certainty. The very attempt to maintain a totalising differentiation of this kind, however, is shown to lead to the ‘shattering’ of such certainty. In the course of this breakdown, not only does the anarchist fail to establish a distinction from Others, but he also emerges as fully dependent on the environment from which he attempts to extract himself.

194 Gary Brent Madison. The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics. Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 2001. 69. 195 Cf. Thomas Docherty. Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. 6. 196 Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991. 25.

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Foundationalist aspirations, thus, lead to a dismissal of the collective foundations of others. The attendant ‘Cartesian strategy’, as Docherty puts it, refers “the world’s meaning, if not its very being, [. . .] to the self-present subject of consciousness who now acts as a stable centre for the elaboration of a stringent and ascetic truth.”197 While this is true for all demarcation attempts in the corpus, this pursuit is radicalised by the Professor’s unceasing attitude of doubt. With the “perfect anarchist” (70), the attempt to determine a doubting self whilst dismissing as ‘mere games’ the merely contingent truths of others is presented as recursive. The purportedly autonomous identity is relegated to setting up ever-new truths to dismantle, language games to uncover, and certainties to diminish. Only by distinguishing himself from the certainties of others, then, can the Professor claim a sense of autonomy. In an extreme form of the early modernist theme of distinction, thus, the vaunted self emerges as an epiphenomenon the more it is imagined as complete and sovereign. While the character still alleges that “[h]e was a force” (227), he is forced to engage in everrenewed attempts to draw a difference, without successfully setting apart the ‘ascetic truth’ of the desired self. As a result, the ever-more ‘extremist’ subject never attains the centrality it seeks; instead, the Professor is shown to dismantle the residual, shared illusions of stability barely sustained by the very language games he dismisses. In presenting a reductio ad absurdum of the search for an autonomous subject position, the novel presents (and narratively penalises) the aspiration to a position of the ‘unique’ (der Einzige) as avowed by the character’s closest philosophical analogue, the German individualist anarchist Max Stirner.198 As Banu Bargu puts it, for Stirner “the I is the foundation, but because the I is what remains outside any abstraction and that which constantly eludes conceptualization, it is, at the same time, an anti-foundation.”199 It is this position that allows Stirner to conceive of a changeable self without essentialist ascriptions, relinquishing the category of the ‘human’ itself – always invoked as a coercive ascription200 – in the process. In Stirner’s thought, then, the question is “not 197 Docherty, Alterities, 3. 198 Watts explains the discusive relevance of Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum with its “popular revival during the 1890s.” Cedric Watts (ed.). Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunningham Graham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. 121n53. 199 Banu Bargu. “Max Stirner, Postanarchy avant la lettre.” How Not to be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left. Ed. Jimmy Casas Klausen and James Martel. Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2011. 103–122. 107. 200 In Stirner’s anti-humanism, essentialist ascriptions lead to an attitude described as follows: “I don’t treat them as unique ones who carry their law in themselves and live by it, but as essences that should obey some ‘rational’ law. I establish what the ‘human being’ is and what acting in a

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how he is to produce the true I in himself, but how he is to dissolve himself.”201 In Conrad’s literary treatment, as in Stirner’s philosophy, the search for a position that would ‘elude’ the conceptual and offer an autonomous, direct instantiation of the self is shown to lead to a dismantling of alternative conceptual systems, all of which are to be denied any application to the solitary self. By presenting the Stirnerian Professor as a secluded proto-terrorist, then, the novel can finalise its detachment of anarchism from the historical opposition to capitalism and the state. Instead of a mass movement that played a crucial role in the First International, the anarchist-as-egoist is narrated as a figure whose paradoxes can only be solved by imagined self-destruction.202 The narrative iteration of the attempt to derive an ‘anti-foundation’ by negation, consequently, leads to an increasing impossibility of upholding any epistemological frame whatsoever. In the narrative’s political imaginary, the dissolution of contingent order – unalloyed by a post-foundationalist restoration – can only culminate in the imagined annihilation of the self.203 With the Professor, the “creative nothing” of Stirner’s ‘egoist anarchism’204 is represented by a figure striving towards a refusal of each and any ascription, a process which is to culminate in a position of “sinister freedom” (61). What this ‘freedom’ entails is already explored with regard to the topology and topography of the ‘creative nothing’ in the novel. The spaces associated with the anarchist establish a metaphorical affinity between the Professor’s failing ascription of a foundational self and Verloc — more specifically, Verloc after his status as Δ, the certainty of the “social mechanism” (11), and its metonymical expression in the bourgeois household have been withdrawn. The Islington base of the ‘perfect anarchist’, to begin with, is associated “with that poverty suggesting the starvation of every human need except mere bread. There was

‘truly human’ way means, and demand of everyone that this law become norm and ideal for him, failing which he will reveal himself as a ‘sinner and criminal.’” Max Stirner. The Unique and Its Property. Trans. Apio Ludd aka Wolfi Landstreicher. Baltimore: Underworld, 2017. 216. 201 Stirner, Unique, 33. 202 “[A]narchism only assumed the status of a genuine movement after people with anarchist sympathies became involved in popular struggles, starting with the struggle of European workers for self-emancipation.” Graham, The First International, 2. 203 Cf. Marchart, Post-Foundational, 48. 204 Ruth Kinna and Matthew Wilson. “Key Terms.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. 329–352. 338. In brief, egoist anarchism “rejects all forms of external authority such as the state, but goes further and rejects any notion of morality or responsibility, because even these limit the freedom of the individual.” Wilson and Kinna draw attention to the overwhelming rejection of egoism in anarchist theory and practice alike.

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nothing on the walls but the paper, an expanse of arsenical green, soiled with indelible smudges here and there, and with stains resembling fading maps of uninhabited continents.” (221) The Professor cannot, in the manner of Conrad’s reluctant colonialists, reassert a stabilising topography of putatively ‘uninhabited’ places to maintain domestic illusions of progress and, as Marlow exults in Heart of Darkness, a redemptive “idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea.”205 Instead, the map on his wall presents a redoubled potential meaning, an image neither quite coalescing into a stable representation nor referring to a mappable (‘explored’) space. This notion of matter disclosing unrealised meaning finds its analogue in the position of Verloc after the enforced dissolution of his identitarian certainties. The wall defined by the absence of interpretable signs anticipates the secret agent’s negative epiphany shortly before his death: “There was nothing behind him: there was just the whitewashed wall. The excellent husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall.” (176). In both cases, the ‘walls’ fail to enclose determinate places, becoming markers of absence instead. This lack encompasses the loss of iconic stabilisation (the ‘lines’ as a map) and of a shared code (‘writing on the wall’) alike. The walls in both cases are disclosed as matter, which, in Harman’s terms, “evades all announcement through its qualities, resisting or subverting efforts to identify it with any surface. It is that which exceeds any of the qualities, accidents, or relations that can be ascribed to it.”206 This sphere of objects in excess of the assumptions of a “social mechanism” (11) looms in the background of the competing political ordering schemes in The Secret Agent. Their inexhaustible effects emerge whenever the attempted differences between self and Other collapse. With the Professor’s unmapped and Verloc’s unwritten walls, then, the objects previously consigned to the outside of residual certainties begin to announce their independence from ephemeral ordering attempts. The unruly matter of the walls exceeds the logic of metonymic chains such as “the house, the household, and the business” (9) or the “horses, carriages, houses, servants [which] had to be protected” (9). These elements impart stability only as long as the breakdown of order can be projected upon determinate figures of otherness. In the absence of such projections, the characters cease to be masters of their own house, as the walls exceed ascriptions and present an insistently independent reality. In this sphere of mind-independent matter, any “faded maps” (221) exhibit

205 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 7. 206 Graham Harman. “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl.” Collapse IV (2012). 3–34. 16.

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the finite ordering capacities of their observer. The equivalent to this “asignifying matter”207 is provided by media failing to transmit information in the manner expected by observers. As in the case of the wall displaying a missing inscription, in such cases a medial substrate is suggested, yet fails to be associated with any form. In Luhmann’s terms, this already suggests dissolution of demarcation, since “[t]he forms that emerge from the tight coupling of a medium’s possibilities distinguish themselves (their inside) from the remaining possibilities contained in the medium (their outside).”208 In the absence of such distinction between medium and form, the represented media in The Secret Agent are relegated to signalling the absence of any ‘arsenal of possibilities’.209 This empty mediality is taken up – again, shortly before his demise – as Verloc’s attempt to communicate his state of mind to Winnie is lost in translation: “The waves of air of the proper length, propagated in accordance with correct mathematical formulas, flowed around all the inanimate things in the room, lapped against Mrs Verloc’s head as if it had been a head of stone.” (191) The passage refuses to grant precedence to the transmission of meaning over and above the material interactions involved in the process. Notably, at this point the novel itself self-reflexively foregrounds its mediality, just barely maintaining a semblance of metaphor by authorial fiat: the ‘head’ compared to the ‘head’ is already close to tautological repetition. Relations of similarity fail to illustrate the situation, replaced as they are by a type of metonymical overdetermination that turns Verloc’s interlocutor into just one more ‘inanimate thing’. Mindindependent matter as potential mediality refuses specification of any one form. Accordingly, Verloc’s domestic place is deprived of the distinctions previously upholding its bounds, leaving him in an “uninhabited and thirsty plain” (42). This, in turn, finds a correlate in the shapes of “uninhabited continents” (221) on the Professor’s walls. In both cases, applying Yi-Fu Tuan’s terminology, place reverts to undifferentiated space, rendering the respective domestic environment bereft of a “fixed pattern of established human meaning.”210 That most basic function of an enclosed place – “a tangible world that articulates experiences, those deeply felt as well as those that can be verbalized, individual as well as collective”211 – is rescinded. Thus, both characters are deprived of foundationalist

207 Aidan Tynan. Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. 130. 208 Cf. Luhmann, Art, 104. 209 Luhman, Art, 104. 210 Yi-Fu Tuan. Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 54. 211 Tuan, Morality and Imagination, 100.

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certainties, albeit for different reasons. While for Verloc, the assumption of a wellordered domestic place is revoked by the ambassador in a set of explicit speech acts, in the case of the Professor reduction of a space to an empty medium is selfimposed, the result of the search for an autonomous self.212 Both the “expanse” (221) in the Professor’s and the ‘uninhabited plane’ in Verloc’s surrounding are the consequence of a shared incapacity to delineate a constitutive outside, a sphere for nonhuman matter that cannot be semanticised. After all, in The Secret Agent, maintaining the illusion of a world ordered by determinable categories – what Thacker calls the “world-for-us”213 – is possible only under the conditions of a residual demarcation against a constitutive outside. Any dissolution of stable alterity (as a foil upon which to project disorder and breakdown) begins with faltering political distinctions, yet soon exceeds the political; escalating further, the failure of maintaining a relational outside is correlated with the impossibility of privileging a human perspective at all. The ensuing “world-without-us” is, thus, not presented as an ineffable deep-structure.214 Rather, material objects begin to appear outside of the characters’ conceptions as a result of their failure to establish a political distinction. The “subtraction of the human from the world”215 is not a universal condition, but results once characters are unsuccessful in their attempts to project a sphere emptied “of every human need” (221) onto a disavowed alterity. In the case of the Professor, this failure of differentiation is bound up with the very attempt to arrive at a final, determinative foundation for his personal and political agency. His project is predicated on removing restrictions imposed by “the weak, whose theology has invented hell for the strong” (223). This position, however, is immediately made conditional, dependent as it is on the notion of a Social Darwinist struggle, in which, as the Professor asserts “I remain—if I am strong

212 Cf. for a conceptualisation of the ‘empty medium’, Michael Zimmermann. “Thinking the Image from the Inside of the Picture.” What is an Image? Ed. James Elkins and Maja Naeff. University Park, PA. The Pennsylvania State UP, 2011. 218–225. 224. “Before the medium contains anything [. . .] it is already there, in a state of emptiness, but filled with all its potentialities.” Zimmermann’s account of the modernist notion “that the medium somehow preceded itself and was originally void in a primordial sense” is reminiscent of the initial description of “matter that never dies” (11) outside of the protagonist’s purview. Like the wall-medium exhibiting the absence of writing-form, the nonhuman city is evoked as a medium easily reverting back into a ‘primordial’ state preceding the tight couplings of elements imposed on it. 213 Thacker, Dust, 4. “This is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human.” 214 Thacker, Dust, 5. 215 Thacker, Dust, 5.

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enough” (222). The ellipsis is telling; just like the interlude elapsing between the activation and detonation of his bomb, it introduces a gap into the Professor’s assertive programme, rendering an uncertain future condition the basis of his claim to an elevated status in the present. The formulation resembles the introductory terms put forward by Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property, which states that “God and humanity have based their affairs on nothing, on nothing but themselves. I likewise base my affair on myself, this I who just like God am the nothing of all others, this I who am my all, this I who am the Unique.”216 What separates this anti-foundationalism from the post-foundationalist projects associated with Hyacinth Robinson in Casamassima and the Assistant Commissioner in The Secret Agent is the conclusion that is drawn from the insight that no foundational truths undergird extant political communities. Whereas post-foundationalism derives from this perspective an imperative to draw contingent distinctions, the Professor’s inability to accept anything less than a “lever” to “move the world” (226) refutes any such limited epistemologies. The search for a foundationalist point outside of any extant language games incites a dismantling of any other system of meaning, all of which can be dismissed by dint of their reliance on limited signs: on “counter moves in the same game” (52). By claiming for himself a foundational self outside of discursive prefiguration, any other mode of meaning making cannot but fall short of this requirement, thus becoming subject to anti-foundationalist dismantling. In its enactment by the Professor, this anti-foundationalism (aimed at the provision of a foundational Archimedean point for himself) leads to everrenewed attempts to base ‘his affair on himself’. This self, however, in the absence of foundational narratives, becomes subject to perpetual regress, i.e. to the question whether there is “some belief in the chain of beliefs, offered as reasons, that is immune to further interrogations.”217 His extended performances of antifoundationalist independence from convention perpetually throw up new instances of an underlying truth, which briefly appears to arrest this regress — before it is exposed as just another contingent language game, which, consequently, has to be dismantled in turn. In this, the novel shows that foundationalism dismantles itself, since it leads to a ‘deconstruction’ of disavowed foundations of others, veering into their (literalised) destruction.218 The Professor attempts to rid himself of every last vestige of communally agreed-upon meaning in order to thereby

216 Stirner, Unique, 27. 217 Peter D. Klein. “Infinitism.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Epistemology. Ed. Andrew Cullison. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 83–105. 91. 218 Cf. Rodolphe Gasché. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. 120.

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exorcise what Stirner calls the phantasm (‘Spuk’) of essence: “But it is not only the human being, but everything, that ‘haunts.’ The higher essence, the spirit, that haunts everything, is at the same time bound to nothing, and only – ‘appears’ in it.”219 However, the novel’s version of the injunction to “[r]id! rid!” (i.e. to ‘get rid’ of the “thousand fetters”220 of conventions placed on the individual) devolves into the Professor’s final exclamation: “Exterminate! exterminate!” (222). This imperative refers to the ‘perfect anarchist’ himself as much as the imagined victims “to be taken in hand for utter extermination” (222). Everyone, even the Professor himself as soon as he is brought into language, is under suspicion of being a mere phantasm. At the same time, the character is shown to be unable to accept the solution offered by the apparatus of demarcation, namely treating selected beliefs as as if they were an essential cornerstome of an equally certain identity. As a consequence, he has to identify ever-new phantasms of which to ‘rid’ himself. Haunted by the proliferating Spuk of convention, he is led from the dismantling of individual beliefs to the denial of any contingent distinctions of self and Other whatsoever: “But I don’t play” (52), as the Professor announces. The refusal to bolster any one contingent language game, consequently, culminates in the attempt to locate the dreaded conventions in the very bodies of himself and others. Further, if the regress of certainties fails to be stalled any other way, he imagines the destruction of those bodies as the only strategy by which to halt the ever-regressive dissolution of foundational beliefs. Like Stirner’s redoubled appeal ‘to rid’, the imperative of ‘extermination’ lacks an object. Taken to its own limits, the anti-foundationalist impetus, caught in an infinite regress of countering convention without thereby establishing new beliefs, ends in undifferentiated calls to violence. These, in turn, achieve neither the determination of an Other nor the desired autonomous

219 Stirner, Unique, 61. 220 Stirner, Unique, 178. Stirner’s account does not justify violence, let alone ‘extermination’ in the manner of the Professor. The imperative “Los, los!” translated as “Rid, rid!” is associated with a position of ‘freedom’ which can only negatively define the position of the self in relation to the constraints which are to be abolished. From a position of that kind, “its watchword resounds, and you, eager to follow its call, even get rid of yourselves, you ‘deny yourselves’.” (178) This contrasts with Stirner’s preferred term, Eigenheit (‘ownness’). The own “does not need to free himself first, because from the start he rejects everything outside himself, because he prizes nothing more than himself, deems nothing higher than himself – in short because he starts from himself and ‘comes to himself’” (178–179). The Professor is closer to the negative, disavowed ‘freedom’ than the ‘ownness’ of Stirner. After all, “‘[f]reedom’ rouses your rage against everything that is not you,” whereas ownness “calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment. ‘Freedom’ is and remains a longing, a romantic lament, a Christian hope for otherworldliness and the future.” (178)

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phantasm-free self. That self, after all, would be another ‘phantasm’ in its own right if it were to be expressed with limited signs and communicated in contingent social settings. Thus, the nominal goal of the Professor’s ideology has to be precluded from actualisation with the same vehemence as the conventions the character opposes. Its success would commit the character to an inexpressible, unsignifiable status and dispense with the possibility to perpetually ‘rid’ himself and others of their false consciousness. Thus, the attempt to deny extant conventions indissolubly ties the character to those very discursive preconditions. Forced as he is to perennially evoke the phantasms that are to be dispelled, he functions as the negative affirmation of what Stirner calls a “web and network of dependence and devotion; it is a togetherness, a sticking together, in which those ordered together acquiesce to each other, or in short, depend on each other: it is the order of this dependence.”221 The desire for antifoundationalist independence from the ‘order of dependence’ brings about its own negation, an inextricable dependence on that same order. The Professor has already been shown to offer an explicit critique of the coconstitutive nature of norm and transgression, exposing their reliance on a shared underlying language game. With this figure, the novel, thus, presents a sceptical dismantling of any extant political demarcation. Whichever alterity is asserted, the Professor’s method offers the possibility to level the distinction thus achieved, and to expose political differences as “counter moves in the same game” (52). The analysis of the apparatus of demarcation in chapter 4.1 has shown that this analysis is borne out by the remaining figures of political order in the novel. Heat and the associated institutions producing alterity are, after all, shown to construct figures of Otherness in order to determine their claims to political identity. The novel is at pains, however, to re-politicise the position from which such contingent language games can be dismantled in the first place. The Professor, all claims to autonomy notwithstanding, does not pronounce the limitations of extant discourses from an extra-discursive point of view. Instead, while denouncing the political antagonisms of others, his strategy forces him to recursively establish a political difference of his own. In this, he remains a political foundationalist. In Marchart’s sense, his position impels the search for a principle “which is to ground politics from without. It is from this transcendent ground that the functioning of politics is claimed to be derived.”222 This ‘transcendent’ ground, however, requires constant reformulation. An expressible and communicative foundation would, after all, constitute

221 Stirner, Unique, 234. 222 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 12.

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just another language game, another set of ‘counter moves’ open to attack in the Professor’s own terms. As a consequence, whichever foundational principle the extremist reaches in his attempt to define himself against the merely contingent ideologies he attributes to others, requires instantaneous dismissal in order to motivate the ongoing search for a ‘transcendent ground’. The narrative precludes non-discursive markers of radical Otherness from giving rise to an individual position so autonomous and individual as to be beyond interpretation in conventional terms. As a result, the Professor, in the terms of Mouffe/Laclau, is beset by “more or less complex forms of differential positions among objects, which do not arise from a necessity external to the system structuring them and which can only be conceived as discursive articulations.”223 The ‘perfect anarchist’ remains bound to the very ‘counter moves’ he denounces, evoking and articulating conventions in order to assert his independence from them. Consequently, the Professor has to imbue the city – that “old, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones” (42) – with meaning, recreating it as a convention-bound polity in order to conceive of his own, radical opposition to it. Rather than an alternative to a politics of demarcation, the Professor, thus, represents its apogee: his project remains oriented towards an ultimate legitimation by a metanarrative-to-come,224 towards a cohesive model of evaluation that is inexpressible in the terms of any present order. His extremism cannot resign itself to the determination of contingent foundations amidst the urban space “dissolving in a watery atmosphere” (74). Instead, he opts for a “center in the constitution of structure,” what Derrida describes as “fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this certitude, anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught in the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.”225 The analysis of the confrontation with Heat has already shown both elements of a principle of ‘structurality’ not included in the ‘structure’. Firstly, the Professor attempts to achieve the ‘immobility’ of an essential position outside of “[r]evolution, legality—counter moves in the same game” (52). Secondly, he

223 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. “Hegemony: The Genealogy of a Concept.” The New Social Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates. Ed. Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 76–87. 74. 224 Cf. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 19. “True knowledge, in this perspective, is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements that are incorporated into the metanarrative of a subject that guarantees their legitimacy.” (35) 225 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 915.

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is beset by the suspicion that a position outside of the “public faith in legality” (60) is constitutively impossible: “What if nothing could move them?” (61). As a consequence of the endeavour to reach a point uninflected by the contingent language games played by Others, the ‘perfect anarchist’ is shown to be unable to draw a distinction at all. The extremist attempt to establish a difference between foundational certainty and the merely contingent, thus, finally produces its opposite: a blurring of distinctions in which a decisive contrast between the self-proclaimed position of superiority and the disavowed inferiority of social norms can never be achieved. In Todd May’s terms, Conrad’s egoist anarchist conceives of power as a “suppressive force”: the “image of power” with which his “anarchism operates is that of a weight, pressing down – and at times destroying – the actions, events, and desires with which it comes into contact.”226 According to Conrad’s version of this suppressive hypothesis, the Professor is shown to reiterate the constraints imposed upon him. Hence, the haphazard institutional techniques of the policeman are exalted as an inescapable force of collective identity impinging on the individual. To fashion Chief Inspector Heat into an ‘image of power’, the ‘perfect anarchist’ reconfigures him as the embodiment of “all the forces he had set at defiance: the force of law, property, oppression, and injustice. He beheld all his enemies, and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his vanity. They stood perplexed before him as if before a dreadful portent.” (62) Thus, in order to sustain hope for his distinctiveness resisting such compound force, the normative power vested in the policeman is redescribed with hyperbolic pitch. Only if the ‘suppressive force’ is still bearing down on the individual can the Professor maintain the notion of an ever-deferred future state outside of its constraints. It is, hence, by upholding a self-created “oppression of the weak” (244) that the foundational traits that are to undergird identity – “superiority over all the multitude of mankind” (62) – are imagined to come to the fore. This foundational identity is presented as the basis for a mode of direct action – a ‘lever’ in the Professor’s terms – from which the heteronomy of any other mode of thought can be subjected to suspicion. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I’ll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn. (226)

226 May, The Political Philosphy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 61.

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The monologue appears to illustrate the distinction between genuine (foundationalist) anarchism and conventional anarchism, with the latter limited by its very dependence on translating ‘force’ into communicable terms. However, the opposition between the ‘mediocre’ world and its representatives on the one hand, and ‘[m]adness and despair’ on the other, is already shown to falter at the moment of its evocation. According to the Professor’s claim to autonomy, ‘force’ has to be articulated without a conventional medium sullying its independence. However, as soon as he envisages what, precisely, this ‘force’ might consist of, it is immediately diffracted into a set of metonymical complements that reconstitute it as a conventional sign. In the process, the Professor presents ‘force’ in terms of ‘crime’, thus taking up and repurposing the very term previously associated with the policed, highly conventional demarcation of norm and transgression. Instead of moving beyond social norms, force-as-crime takes up a well-worn signifier of Otherness, reconstituting the very marker of his exalted position in terms of the apparatus of demarcation.227 In other words: the Professor takes recourse to the very categories of acceptable transgression evoked in the internal monologues of his police nemesis, to whom “the idea of thieving appeared [. . .] as normal as the idea of property” (69). Instead of generating the autonomous self he envisages – an objective correlative to the desired “world like shambles” (222) – the identity-defining ‘force’ remains imbricated with the “eyes of the fools.” Thus, every imagined defiance of “the superstition and worship of legality” (54) remains tacitly associated with legal constraints. As soon as the position of autonomy is imagined, its conversion into a signifiable transgression is simultaneously pre-empted. The Professor enters the language game of law and crime in order to dissolve it, yet never quite dispenses with the conventional understanding he attributes to society and its discontents alike. The demarcation between “force” (222) and “the weak” (223), thus, includes a transfer of an ever-expanding set of features to the side of ‘weakness’. This includes, crucially, the very mechanism of demarcations itself: the Professor disavows the entire apparatus of “counter moves in the same game” (52). In the process, the anarchist’s model has to ward off the notion that his position could engender ‘counter moves’ in its own right. In order to evade reconstitution as a “little game” (52) of conventional distinctions, fundational identity – the “force” (222) that the Professor claims to incarnate – requires incessant purification from remaining hints of “social convention” (52). This effort of differentiation causes 227 ‘Force’ devolves into a specific instance of “[g]eneralized symbolic media of communication,” Luhmann’s term for “semantic devices which enable essentially improbable communications nevertheless to be made successfully.” Niklas Luhmann. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy. Trans Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1982. 18.

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a compulsive concern with ‘Them’, i.e. a totalising image of society that is to provide his system with a maximally extended alterity. The anaphoric excess of third-person plural pronouns already indicates the flaw of this approach. Specifically, while the conventions which ‘they’ follow can be enumerated and obsessively itemised as artificial constructs, the counter-model, the desired position of independence from conventional order itself, is added as a paratactic afterthought: Their character is built upon conventional morality. It leans on the social order. Mine stands free from everything artificial. They are all bound in all sorts of conventions. They depend on life, which, in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organised fact open to attack at every point. Whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident. (51)

Attaining a representation of ‘evident’ superiority emerges as an open-ended endeavour determined by a central paradox: any sign outside of “restraints and considerations” can only be attained relationally, as the obverse of the very constraints that are to be rebuked. To ‘stand free from everything artificial’ is a position that is denied autonomous expression, depending instead on ever-widening determinations of the spheres in which “all sorts of conventions” can be found. Instead of setting up an ineffable individuality, thus, the Professor’s position appears entirely determined: any successful representation of his ‘character’ requires a differential marking against a progressively all-encompassing environment. At the moment this differential setup appears completed, it lays bare its relational character, in which the vaunted self is the mere result of a transgression against the norms it attempts to expunge. As a consequence of this exposure, he enlists a whole series of signifiers on the side of conventional morality to reiterate the “superiority” of his own independent status. It is, thus, the very position of freedom from convention that is shown to “depend on life” and its metonymical complements. The attempt to signify his status – to make it “evident” (51) – cannot detach itself from what Lotman calls a relationship to a “world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event.”228 It is only in the context of that world picture – artificial and historical as it appears in the Professor’s own terms – that he can determine whether his activities successfully exceed representation in the first place. In other words, once he articulates his autonomy as a position in excess of convention, it is simultaneously associated with the specific set of restraints he disavows. Rather than radically Other, he is inscribed in a symbolic space, struggling to define death in

228 Lotman, Structure, 234.

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opposition to life, or “madness and despair” (224) in contrast to society’s alleged claims to rationality. Independence from the social order requires a “meaningful departure from the norm,”229 a signalling of exteriority that associates the norm with the position exceeding its bounds. At the end of this process, the Professor’s status is far from ‘evident’ in the manner originally envisaged. As a result of these impasses, the Professor’s Stirnerian ‘I’ is constitutively inexpressible. By continually projecting any positive content back upon the selfcreated alterity of society, that same social sphere becomes all-encompassing, reproducing not only a set of rejected features, but also the means by which these features are to be described. This return of the disavowed is demonstrated when the character attempts to stabilise his image of society as a homogenous alterity by describing “revolutionists” as “slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention” (52). Any position allocated in society is denigrated as a conventional language game mastering its participants. According to this analysis, the ‘revolutionists’, too, are determined by their circumscribed range of concepts, with their claims to self-mastery an illusory after-effect. This account does not, however, furnish a relational identity for the Professor, nor a mastery that would establish a contrast to the convention-bound ‘slaves’. After all, the stated scepticism cannot be discontinued once a determinate position of mastery has been reached. This point is illustrated when the Professor exclaims the anarchist slogan “No God! No Master” (already a well-worn cliché at the turn of the century) “sententiously” (223).230 What is more, however, mastery exceeds the very possibility of inscription as a trait on the side of identity. In this analogy, the ‘slaves’, after all, acquire their status due to their determination by unquestioned language games — a mastery by the very phantasms which the Professor attempts to expunge. Since ‘slave’, hence, describes someone subjected to ‘mastery’ by the ‘conventional’, the ‘perfect anarchist’ cannot arrogate the status of master to himself.

229 Lotman, Structure, 234. 230 In its French iteration (‘Ni dieu, ni maître’) the slogan goes back to an 1881 paper by LouisAuguste Blanqui. Cf. Cedric Watts. Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007. 47. Daniel Guérin elaborates that after Blanqui’s death, “a number of groups and newspapers laid claim to the title. It was displayed on the walls of the Maison du Peuple in the Rue Ramey in Paris. From then on it was the catch phrase of the anarchist movement, even if the latter’s inspiration was so very different from – not to say contrary to – Blanquism’s.” Daniel Guérin. “Foreword.” No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK, 2005. 1–7. 1.

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In order to evade the position of a mastery now contaminated by convention, the Professor distances the term from his own position of ‘superiority’. In turn, he reintroduces ‘mastery’ on the side of the very society he rejects. It is, in the wake of this projection, no longer the ‘slavish’ who are subjugated. Instead, those who embody and enact social convention are recast as “our sinister masters—the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind” (222). At this point, the egoist metaphor reaches a paradoxical deadlock: the slavish become masters due to their subjection to convention. In his effort to purify his identity from any conventional determination, the originally distinct categories of weakness and strength become tenuous, as being mastered and mastery, being enslaved and enslaving merge into one. Instead of affirming his identity, the Professor ends up in a performance of the interchangeable status of any articulable quality on the side of alterity. In a last-ditch effort to uphold demarcation, the ‘perfect anarchist’ fetishises the very social order which throughout the novel is shown to be in its last throes. The character provides his own metacommentary for this totalising scope of the rejected Other: “Sometimes I think they have everything on their side” (222). This loss of alterity finds its correlative in the media chosen by the Professor to give expression to the distinction between an authentic self on the one hand and society on the other. The representational problem besetting foundationalist anarchist individualism is the interrelation of alterity with language as such. That is, as much as he stresses his independence, any statement he makes functions in differential fashion. At the very least, that is, the Professor is shown to remain beholden to what he is not. The ‘perfect anarchist’ is fully aware of this, as his animosity towards the conspicuously hermetic writing of the utopian socialist Michaelis shows. What is unacceptable regarding the ‘ticket-of-leave apostle’ is not just the content of the vision of a “world planned out like an immense and nice hospital, with gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to devote themselves to the nursing of the weak” (221). The Professor’s invective is also directed against the conditions of producing such writings. He finds his comrade, bankrolled by his patroness and whisked off to a retreat in the countryside, in a cottage: “He had been writing his book for four hours already. He sat in that tiny cage in a litter of manuscript.” (221) Michaelis is presented as immured, the conditions of his prison term reproduced by an immersion in a sign system in which his writing, his isolation, and the utopian future project are caught in a selfreferential loop. His utopianism depends on there not being “a soul anywhere” (221) that could disturb the mutual confirmation of the elements making up this system. In this, Michaelis’ “Angelic” (221) condition is not different from the other anarchist systems in the novel, all of which depend for their continued functioning on the monologic, circular reiteration of their respective scientific

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(Ossipon) or insurrectionary (Yundt) language games. However, similarly to Stevie’s circles, Michaelis’ immersion in a self-confirming semiosphere at least makes its status as a closed-off language game immediately perceptible. The confines of his ‘prison-house of language’ are readily apparent. The utopian anarchist, then, makes it plain “that you can see only as much as your model permits you to see; that the methodological starting point does more than simply reveal, it actually creates, the object of study.”231 It is only on the basis of such a limited set of combinatory signs that Michaelis can reproduce the inevitable, teleological course towards the “lawful inheritance of the suffering proletariat” (37). In order to differentiate himself from such self-referential “dreams of a world like a beautiful and cheery hospital” (223), the Professor has to invent a countervailing media practice that guarantees external reference. His position of Stirnerian autonomy can, paradoxically, not rely on elaborating a set of autonomous doctrines, since such accomplished autonomy would render it all-too similar to the Michaelis-style prison. Hence, the Professor’s system requires a relation to its environment; if he is to avoid a ‘world planned out’, his model has to set up hetero-reference, “namely to point to, or designate, elements of what conventionally is (still) conceived of as ‘reality outside’ a semiotic system.”232 Only by maintaining the notion that he is engaged in a “contemplation of the multitudes thronging the pavements” (223) can the ‘perfect anarchist’ distinguish himself from the hermetic writing situation of Michaelis. Consequently, he is confronted with a redoubled challenge: he has to maintain the fiction of referring directly to the detested social environment whilst, simultaneously, detracting from the “problem that systems themselves cannot distinguish between the environment as it really is and the environment as they designate it.”233 Despite his scorn of Michaelis’ ‘hospital’, the Professor’s most certain descriptions of “Mankind” (223) are predicated on an unacknowledged isolation in the manner of Michaelis’ ‘prison-house of writing’: the contemplation of the multitudes “extinguished his assurance under a load of doubt and uneasiness which he could only shake off after a period of seclusion in the room with the large cupboard

231 Fredric Jameson. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. 14. 232 Werner Wolf. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Ed. Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 1–88. 18. 233 Niklas Luhmann. “The Modern Sciences and Phenomenology.” Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Ed. William Rasch. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. 33–60. 50.

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closed by an enormous padlock” (223). It is only in these self-enclosed spaces that the Professor can reproduce his guiding fictions: firstly, that it is possible to consign the entire social environment to alterity; and, secondly, that this can be accomplished without thereby translating that very environment into a selfreferential system as closed-off – literally ‘padlocked’ – as Michaelis’ secluded theorising. As a consequence, the Professor’s claim to autonomy requires a constant simulation of external reference, thus upholding the notion that the environment is accessible and can be disavowed as a totality. The challenge of this ideology is considerable: it requires the ‘perfect anarchist’ to simultaneously disavow his “seclusion” (223) and replace it with an image of urban crowds as a stand-in for society, an expansive multitude which has “everything on their side” (222). In this, he cannot rely on writing — which is where the bomb-asmedium comes in. The explosive is likened to photographic technology, geared as it is towards representing his surroundings without thereby integrating the city into a selfenclosed system in the manner of Michaelis. Photography, then, promises an indexical relationship to the metonymies of social order the Professor aims to destroy. To this end, the detonator, activated by an “india-rubber ball” (49), is to establish an immediate relationship to the city on the model of the camera: “The pressing of this ball actuates a detonator inside the flask I carry in my pocket. It’s the principle of the pneumatic instantaneous shutter for a camera lens. The tube leads up—” With a swift disclosing gesture he gave Ossipon a glimpse of an india-rubber tube, resembling a slender brown worm, issuing from the armhole of his waistcoat and plunging into the inner breast pocket of his jacket. (49)

In this passage, the representational impasse besetting the extremist foundationalism finds its material complement. While explaining the object encapsulating his allegedly superior status, the Professor is brought up short. Instead of materialising his foundationalist self-image, he is relegated to the indexical, a “swift disclosing gesture” taking the place of the language of superiority. Thus, rather than expressing a pre-existing superior status, the medium (itself decidedly ‘impure’, in the Professor’s own terms, consisting as it does of a ‘brown mixture’) stands in for the individual, with compound matter replacing his status as an elevated “force” (222). What is more, the medium imposes on the terrorist aesthete the logic of reproducibility: to achieve external reference to an entire urban environment by recording and destroying it in one fell swoop of demarcation, the protagonist, paradoxically, remains fully beholden to an ever-renewed interpretation of urban space. As Carroll puts it, the Stirnerian ‘unique’ in its search for a “noumenal core” reduces the social to the function of providing “the I with a means of

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expression.”234 Similarly, in the case of the Professor’s photographic terrorism, he requires the (disavowed) urban crowd for the mediation of his purported individual essence. As a result, he has to perpetually adapt to the environment in order to express the difference of the self in a cataclysmic act. Rather than asserting his independence, this dependence of the bomb/camera on the very objects it is to capture and reject renders the individual a ‘vanishing mediator’.235 Far from being liberated from the crowds, he is involved in a permanent attempt to perfect the indexical relationship to the city. The bomb, after all, has to “adjust itself to all conditions of action, and even to unexpected changes of conditions” (50). It becomes an idealised expression of the society which it is to attack, rather than a correlative to the unique properties of the individual. Both opposed to the city yet entirely dependent on its every characteristic, the Professor is shown to lose the capacity for autonomous judgment. The crucial message of his medium is not the explicit excoriation of society but rather the fact that – as he responds to Ossipon’s remark that he would become insane in the interim between activation and explosion – it “[w]ouldn’t matter if you did. Of course, it’s the weak point of this special system, which is only for my own use. The worst is that the manner of exploding is always the weak point with us.” (50) The photographic bomb is predicated on ensuring a cut between the self and the world, yet produces an ever-widening interim. Caught between self-reference and external reference, between destruction and adaptation, the “special system” (50) is just as paradoxical as the replacement of language with mixed matter. The more the ‘perfect anarchist’ is shown to strive for an expression of his independent status, the more does he become inextricable from the ever-expanded alterity of society. 4.2.2.3 Dissolution of Terrorism The character’s attempt to evade his ideological and material entanglements in order to establish a final distinction from conventions thus finds its equivalent

234 An 1887 photography manual already foregrounds the operator’s responsiveness to every detail of the subject enabled by the pneumatic shutter; it offers “a very decided advantage in the hands of the operator, who, standing at any point, could watch the expression of the subject and seize the right moment to secure the impression desired; so that the pneumatic shutter seemed to be the proper complement to the lightning dry plate.” E. M. Estabrooke. Photography: In the Studio and in the Field. New York: E. & H. T. Anthony, 1887. 124. 235 The vanishing mediator provides a kind of “overall bracket or framework within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and removed when its usefulness is over.” Fredric Jameson. “The Vanishing Mediator: Or, Max Weber as Storyteller.” The Ideologies of Theory. London and New York: Verso, 2008. 309–343. 331.

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in the search for a “perfect detonator” (52). This fetishised explosive device carried on the body is to signify a mode of action that cannot be described in terms of conventional oppositions. As he puts it to his fellow anarchist Ossipon, “[y]ou couldn’t find anything half so precise to define the nature of your activity with all your committees and delegations” (52). The bomb is imagined in the context of a performance in which signifier and signified – distinguished so clearly in Heat’s model of the criminal – become indistinguishable. The explosion is to communicate nothing but its own excess of meaning, over and beyond any extant language games of norm and transgression. As a “nonsemiotic” act, this imagined act of terror enacts its own unavailability to the distribution of legality and illegality.236 How is a radical poetics of terror to interfere with extant modes of creating political differentiations? In its formulation as an aesthetics of a pure detonator eluding interpretative conventions, the Professor’s project prefigures a recurring problem of modernist poetics. Anthony Ludovici, for one, takes to the pages of the New Review in 1914 to charge the avant-garde projects of his time with an ‘anarchism of form’. By this, he means art for art’s sake that dispenses with hierarchies predicated on the authority of the ‘poet-legislator’. For Ludovici, such anarchist l’art pour l’art is a slippery slope, in the course of which the work of art will become indistinguishable from the state of social collapse surrounding it. That is, if “even the most daring innovator can be outdone by some one who declares that the greatest art is the blank sheet of paper,” art structurally reproduces a “state of anarchy” already obtaining in a society in which “all great schemes of life seem to be at an end.”237 In this concurrence of artistic and socio-political dissolution of order, according to the article’s closing salvo, the “anarchy of art” becomes no less “threatening than that which finds its vent in the open streets, by dynamite and nitro-glycerine.”238 The Professor’s programme offers an early modernist equivalent to such fear of aestheticopolitical “dissolvent influences in modern times.”239 His bomb, rather than the exceptional intervention he proclaims it to be, is perpetually on the cusp of becoming indistinguishable from the surroundings which it is to disrupt. Rather

236 The term is adopted from Michael Kirby, for whom it describes performative art eluding “a model of art-as-communication” based on transmission of information geared towards a “receiver (who decodes – at least to some degree – the message).” Michael Kirby. “Nonsemiotic Performance.” Modern Drama 25 (1982). 105–111. 105. 237 Anthony M. Ludovici. “An Open Letter to My Friends.” The New Age 14 (Jan. 1, 1914). 280. 238 Ludovici, “An Open Letter,” 280. 239 Ludovici, “An Open Letter,” 281.

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than attacking an extant order, the device threatens to become an objective correlative to a dissolution of order already under way. The impasses of inculcating the ‘shock of the new’ begin with the necessity for an audience. As Law shows, the terrorist event requires “a complete gesture in and of itself,” which “became the prototypical modernist exercise: an act of will meant to be understood by viewer and participant as a self-evidently significant piece of art.”240 In imagining an act beyond the confines of the conventional, the Professor relies on the assumption that his intended recipients are both reliant on an ideology of social order and receptive to a literal and metaphorical shock. Both assumptions, however, prove tenuous in the face of a mass society which proves much more intractable than his aesthetics would suggest. Instead of determinate addressees subjected to a violent disruption of their certainties, the people emerge as a “mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps.” (61) Similarly to Ludovici’s fears of a society already in the throes of breakdown – to which the ‘anarchic’ art is structurally homologous – the Professor is, thus, confronted with the impression that the crowd becomes the repository of the very traits that his terrorist aesthetics is designed to bring about. At the same time, the terrorist figure is beholden to validation of his status by the crowd: “What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly.” (51) As Alex Houen points out, that status of being ‘deadly’ falls short of the anarchist’s professed aims: “His death would remain the one thing that would exist only for others, then, a mediated after-image robbed of its social transcendence.”241 The Professor’s dependence on ratification by ‘those people’ comes back to haunt his individualist project of demarcation. After all, in order to evoke his desired radical identity, the extremist requires a means of bringing about a shift of their “impression.” It is not just because of the verbal echo that the project of literary impressionism is here inscribed in the egoist anarchist endeavour, once more bringing to the fore the coercive dimension of a poetics that aims to “make you see.”242 In John G. Peters’ terms, as opposed to positivism’s reliance on subject-independent reality and idealism’s folding of objects into unchanging subjectivity, impressionism implies entanglement, presenting

240 Law, Terrorism, 108. 241 Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 44. 242 Joseph Conrad. Preface. The Nigger of the Narcissus. London: Penguin, 1989. xlvii-li. xlix.

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“subject and object in constant change through their mutual influence. [. . .] Furthermore, subject and object blur with their surrounding circumstances, whether those be the object’s physical setting or the subject’s personal and cultural past.”243 This blurring is literalised and presented as a levelling of distinctions between the human and the material non-human in the case of the Professor. His own status and the instruments of his intervention merge to the point of indistinguishability, fusing him with the bomb and its tube “issuing forth from the armhole of his waistcoat” (49). What is more, while exalting his uniqueness, the character’s every vision of violence is geared towards an intermingling of human matter and objects, a conjunction of “smashed brickwork and mutilated corpses” (50). This image drastically literalises the fact that any attempt to demarcate a system from an environment in The Secret Agent ends up eliding the possibility of drawing differences altogether. In the process of an unwitting blurring of distinctions, Stirner’s ‘unique’ tips over into its unacknowledged Other. The fusion of bodies and things grotesquely resembles the terrorist’s own vision of mass society, in which “the roadway thronged with vehicles and the pavement crowded with men and women” (61). What is more, the Professor’s ‘impressionist’ technique cannot be distinguished from the very media practices directing the crowds. Specifically, mass media are presented as “the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper” evoking an effect of “indifference, of a disregarded distribution” (59). The eruption of the bomb appears as isomorphic with the narrator’s presentation of the distribution of information in the city, likewise blurring subjects and objects while signalling little beyond the loss of tightly coupled forms. The extremist version of political difference is presented, then, as the enforcement of a process of eroding differentiation already firmly under way in the city, structurally reproducing an ongoing destruction of residual illusions of identity. While the ‘perfect anarchist’ still negotiates the most efficient mode of dismantling the stability of society, the city is already presented at various stages of dissolution.244 The Professor has misread the social text, imputing stability where there is only an increasingly indiscriminate circulation of signs and matter.245 While he intends to replace social relations with an autonomous self,

243 John G. Peters. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 18. 244 Cf. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 17. “The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted the text in the first place.” 245 In Marx’s terms, the “definite social relation between men” already assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” where “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own.” Marx, Capital, 165.

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the character is shown to offer only the addition of one more object to an already indifferent admixture of the semiotic and the material. Thus, the Professor’s attempted differentiation of a self against an expansive alterity of society is shown to proceed from the mistaken assumption that there is such a thing as ‘social order’ in the first place. The character assumes a reified polity represented by the ‘brickwork’ to be combusted, or an authoritative order preceding his ‘device’. His targets – the “superstition and worship of legality” and “public faith in legality” (60) – are never borne out in the diegesis. Instead of the worship of any unitary law, we are confronted with a police apparatus eking out residual figures of alterity; with domestic arrangements predicated on the repetition that “things do not stand much looking into” (131); and with a Home Office which takes on “something of a forest’s deep gloom” (159), as incapable of differentiating identity and alterity as the “bizarre forest of wardrobes” (61) spilling out into the streets during the Professor’s own urban sojourn. The Stirnerian position – “no concept expresses me, nothing that is said to be my essence exhausts me”246 – is turned into the disavowal of essences which are already in the final stages of their discursive simulation. Evernew instances of merely conventional ‘phantasms’ have to be evoked and discarded in order to maintain the illusion that radical individualism is set against a coherent social order arrayed against it. This brings us back to the Professor’s account of the ‘ticket-of-leave apostle’, Michaelis. It is because he both invents a sovereign injunction and resists it that the Professor’s most vociferous invective is reserved for Michaelis’ “idea of a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital.” (221) This notion of an impending disciplinary, society-spanning institutionalisation is shown to entirely misunderstand the production of the utopian anarchist’s position. As shown above, the ticket-of-leave apostle “had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment, the same sentiment which had years ago applauded the ferocity of the life sentence” (78). Michaelis, then, is the result of mass-mediated ‘public sentiment’ — a process far less directed than the world-as-hospital abjected by the Professor. Rather than an augur of disciplinary power imposed from above, Michaelis stands for a process which resembles the ‘disregarded distribution’ of newspaper fragments far more than an impending ‘nursing of the weak’. Thus, the Professor’s scepticism is directed at an unduly hierarchical, statist, and sovereign mode of disciplinary power, itself a phantasm which can barely be evoked by the residual participants in the apparatus of demarcation.

246 Stirner, Unique, 377.

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As the embodiment of a critique that echoes Hobsbawm’s excoriation of the “very extremism of the anarchist rejection of state and organization, the totality of their commitment to the overthrow of the present society,”247 the Professor is associated with a paradoxically essentialist view of what, precisely, that society might consist of. The very attempt to stem the proliferation of traits associated with social norms imputes a degree of organisation which disperses as soon as focalisation is withdrawn from the Professor. Hence, while the ‘perfect anarchist’ attempts to devise the ‘perfect detonator’ in order to both represent and oppose society, the reader is made privy to the impossibility of achieving any position outside of a determinate, political antagonism. Crucially, the narrative alleges that any identity is a matter of political difference; the attendant boundary work stands in stark contrast to the the everexpanding alterity derived by the solitary, autonomous individual. The independence of the Professor’s extremist individualism is brought up short by the way in which, as Laclau puts it, “the presence of the ‘Other’ prevents me from being totally myself. The relation arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution.”248 The desire to erase the role of the constitutive outside in the determination of the self – to achieve ‘full symbolic identification’ – is presented as impossible. There is, in Laclau’s parlance, “no permanent attachment between the signifier of fullness and the various objects incarnating it,” with a gap remaining “between the jouissance expected and the jouissance obtained”249 — a gap which the ‘perfect anarchist’ cannot bridge. The return of the repressed dependence on the rejected multitude manifests itself as the time between the activation of the Professor’s device and the detonation. It is not instantaneous: “‘Far from it,’ confessed the other, with a reluctance which seemed to twist his mouth dolorously. ‘A full twenty seconds must elapse from the moment I press the ball till the explosion takes place.’” (50) What is imagined as a vanishing mediator indicating the absolute difference between the Professor and the multitude remains obstinately present, the anticipated distinction ineradicably deferred. Because any attempt to define a position against ‘present society’ implicates him in the very terms of that imagined society, the ‘perfect anarchist’ is caught in a process of

247 Eric Hobsbawm, “Reflections on Anarchism.” Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays. London: Phoenix, 1994. 82–94. 83. 248 Laclau/Mouffe, Hegemony, 111. 249 Ernesto Laclau. “Glimpsing the Future.” Laclau: A Critical Reader. Ed. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 279–328. 300.

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recursively articulating and disavowing characteristics of ‘the people’. This process culminates in his fantasies of extermination, of a final elision of the inconceivable urban masses. The novel presents the failure of the Professor’s extremism – the impossibility of attaining a position detached from society – as the incapacity of coming to terms with the contingency of any political project. It is because the Professor attempts to arrive at a foundationalist distinction that, ultimately, he is shown to not arrive at any distinction whatsoever. The modulation of his medium has to proceed indefinitely, never facilitating an escape from its contingencies, the interval before the explosion never reduced to zero. In the political imaginary of The Secret Agent – and, indeed, in the political fiction of early modernism more generally – the possibility of action depends on a preceding act of demarcation, the establishment of a bounded space set apart from its constitutive outside. Political identity is a construction naturalised for those shown to depend on illusions of coherence. Conversely, any attempt to proceed from the notion that society as such can be discerned in the manner of a ‘transcendental signified’250 culminates in depoliticisation, at the end of which the novel places fantasies of extermination and attenuated political agency.

4.3 States of Exception in The Secret Agent The Secret Agent traces the effects of an ever-receding distinction between a model of ordered identity and its anarchist outside. The heterostereotype of ‘anarchist’ cannot be upheld by the tenuous agreement of loosely coupled institutional actors ensuring its reproduction. To varying degrees, the arbiters of identity are confronted with the impasses of their own system of order. Finally, with the Professor, the strategy of demarcation reaches an extremist, foundationalist stage, at which the sought-after kernel of identity cannot be stabilised whatsoever. Thus, the replacement of a contingent, differential semantics with ‘doctrines felt as fact’251 makes for volatile ordering strategies. As characters rely on the very same “prison house of language”252 they have co-created, they are shown to be unable to subsist as soon as the demarcation of inside and outside becomes attenuated. Anarchists can no longer be transformed into signifiers of

250 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 916. 251 Hulme, “A Notebook,” 446. 252 Cf. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House, 1972.

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disorder under perpetual surveillance, with the result that the secure Otherness of anarchist alterity becomes subject to an anarchic – in the pejorative sense of disordered – distribution of traits resistant to procedures of demarcation.253 This collapse of political difference coincides with an alternative mode of rule, which is shown to take the place of the apparatus of demarcation. In what follows, such power without alterity will be analysed as a state of exception. This second model of power demonstrated in The Secret Agent no longer requires differential classifications whatsoever. Upon taking hold, the distinction of an inside and a correlative outside is replaced with an uncertain topology in which determinate political positions give way to a permanent threshold state. In the process, the differentiation between self and Other not only dissolves – a process already well underway as a matter of its internal deterioration – but is, instead, actively dismantled. Compared to Casamassima, however, the arbiters of this mode of rule are changed. In James’ narrative, the dissolution of relational political order is instantiated by an uncertain anarchist conspiracy, the status of which remains indecipherable. By contrast, The Secret Agent associates the impending state of exception with representatives of state and police, who create “a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations – and above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated.”254 That is, power predicated on the withdrawal of explicit norms (while maintaining a determinative ‘force-of-law’) is associated with representatives in the diegesis, who are shown to institute this status as a matter of political strategy. The state of exception redeploys the category of alterity and its anarchist representatives. Rather than excluding political alterity as the bearer of unwanted traits, post-binary rule creates a “zone of undecidability”255 in which it is no longer possible to determine a position within a defined rule of law. Nor do protagonists find themselves on the outside, however, or excluded from a representable regular functioning of society. As a result, rather than remaining firmly ensconced in an identitarian “social mechanism” (11) or experiencing the “air of moral nihilism” (10) ascribed to political alterity by the narrator, the state of exception “erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.”256 As a consequence, the entire

253 Cf. for the distinction between “anarchic distribution” of the nomos and the “wellorganised legal distribution of the logos”: Adrian Parr. “Nomos.” The Deleuze Dictionary. Ed. Adrian Parr. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. 189–191. 254 Agamben, State of Exception, 50. 255 Agamben, State of Exception, 2. 256 Agamben, State of Exception, 181.

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apparatus of demarcation, with its metonymical chains of identity and residual figures of alterity, is suspended. What takes its place, rather than a breakdown of order, is a deployment of power from an uncertain in-between state expended on figures that are, in turn, placed in a liminal position unamenable to identitarian elaboration or exclusion as alterity. The state of exception dispenses with the interlocking inclusions, exclusions, re-entries, and internal elaborations possible under the assumption of a fundamentally binary distinction of the polity. What vanishes with this model of demarcations, then, is the possibility for a self-appointed protector of society like Verloc to survey “through the park railings the evidences of the town’s opulence and luxury with an approving eye” (9). The railings are seen to not only include a scene of social harmony, but also inflect Verloc’s very perception of his environment: “Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding in the Row” (9).257 More than a model of political differences, the presumption of a stable social world, enacted by metonymical figures of a benign status quo, emerges as a fundamental category of perception. Whenever focalisation shifts to a detached point of view, however, these certainties evaporate. Most notably, as the perspective veers towards external focalisation,258 the reader is alerted to a loss of distinction, culminating in the description of a “victoria with the skin of some wild beast inside and a woman’s face and hat emerging above the folded hood” (9). As the perception of an ordered sphere in need of ‘protection’ is revoked, the result is a dissolution of the protagonist’s own metonymical logic. Rather than parts for a whole – with contiguous elements pointing to an ordered polity – the elements juxtaposed outside of both figural and authorial focalisation stand for the respective, literally adjacent object: the skin for the fur coat, the face and hat for the woman, the folded hood for the coach. The human, the animal, and the material cannot be set apart in this non-hierarchical substitutability, leading to interpenetrating assemblages which reserve no special status for the erstwhile ‘protector’. For the state of exception to exert its coercive function, it will be shown to dispense with any linear process in which the enforced dissolution of demarcations would be replaced with a renewed, ordered state, however authoritative.

257 The material support which the railings lend to Verloc’s political imaginary recalls Matthew Arnold, whose twin concepts of culture and anarchy receive synecdochal materialisation in the railings of Hyde Park. The oft-represented ‘Hyde Park riots’ of July 1866 concluded with a crowd gathering on occasion of a Reform League meeting allegedly ‘tearing down’ the iron railings surrounding Hyde Park. Cf. Clinton Machann. Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan 1998. 83. 258 Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 84–85.

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Instead, this second model of power is associated with the absence of any ordering instance. The arbiters of exception are shown to facilitate the loss of extant illusions of normative order and collective identity. Thus, the Assistant Commissioner will be shown to temporarily immerse himself in the dissolving urban sphere rather than subjecting it to an ordering distinction. It is from this vantage point of “evil freedom” (109), relieved from institutional constraints and, indeed, from the ordering function of a presiding consciousness, that the Assistant Commissioner is shown to determine the status of others. The urban sphere of interlocking ‘skin’, beast’, and ‘woman’s face’ is utilised rather than brought to an ordered state. In Agamben’s terms for such uncertain topology replacing the distinction of inside and outside: The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a complex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another.259

This model denies both a pre-political state of disarray and a linear event structure culminating in the establishment of a contractual order. Indeed, by drawing away from the protagonist’s notion of well-demarcated places beyond the railings, The Secret Agent already alerts the reader to the simultaneity of notions of contractual social space and the breakdown of order. The intermittent, externally focalised perspective places the “majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies” (11) just one perspectival shift away from the illusory social sphere — and, thus, from the normative place upheld by the apparatus of governance in which Verloc perceives himself to be involved. This notion of a barely sustained spatial and temporal distinction between order and its breakdown is analogous to Agamben’s model, in which, likewise, a pre-political state is not superseded by the establishment of norms. Rather, as Prozorov puts it, a state of nature “‘survives’ within this order in the form of the state of exception.”260 That is, power unalloyed by contractual arrangements remains bound to the continued exercise of power rather than being superseded by it. For Agamben, the most important feature of governance is not the application of particular norms, but rather their potential to be suspended. By

259 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37. 260 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 103.

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withdrawing laws – in our case, rescinding the railings that appear to enable political demarcations – the state of ‘inorganic matter’ and metonymic confusion can be brought to bear upon any subject at any time. This is what the image of the Möbius strip indicates: while Verloc still considers society in terms of inclusion and exclusion, the surface of this figure can be followed along the longest axis without having to traverse the border of the strip. As Michele Emmer puts it, “the Moebius Strip has only one side, and not two, an external and an internal one.”261 On this analogy, the “victoria with the skin of a wild beast inside” (9) is an immanent principle of politics, on the same ‘axis’ as the seemingly ordered spaces presumed by Verloc. In The Secret Agent, it is the possibility of bringing out this underlying disorganisation that is at issue in the transfer from political difference to the state of exception. The structure of exception is, thus, conceived as coercion predicated on the suspension of norms, with the result of a threshold state that binds together two unlikely structural positions. That is, the figure instituting the state of exception and the ‘bare life’ subjected to the suspension of norms are ‘symmetrical’. The assumption of a determinate order based on propositional norms is suspended for both. As a result, exertion of power and subjection to power both take place in threshold spaces in which the differential formulation of identity has been withdrawn. Crucially, it is not only the objects of the state of exception that are subjected to an uncertain, exceptional status, but the purported arbiters of authority as well. In the novel, this is already a matter of the position that exceptional power occupies in the diegetic political systems: the Assistant Commissioner will be shown to emerge as a bona fide representative of exception, suspended in-between the narrative present and internally focalised analepses, between institutional inside and urban outside, but also, discursively, between colonial and domestic frameworks of power. This chapter will argue that we are confronted with two modes of instituting a state of exception in The Secret Agent. For all of their structural similarities as far as the erasure of demarcations is concerned, both are accorded their own strategies, results and modes of representation. The first loss of demarcation is associated with the Russian ambassador, while its second iteration will be shown to be associated with the mode of policing established by the Assistant Commissioner. The Secret Agent, thus, redoubles the attempts to enforce the state of exception. These efforts to declare the suspended differentiation of self and Other are, consequently, a matter of antagonistic political

261 Michele Emmer. “Moebius Strip: From Art to Cinema.” Mathematics and Culture I. Ed. Michele Emmer. Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York: Springer, 2004. 147–152. 147.

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struggle in their own right.262 In both cases, “the rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it.”263 However, while Vladimir attempts to create a permanent state of exception, the Assistant Commissioner’s model retains illusions of identity — albeit only for selected social spheres.

4.3.1 Vladimir: Permanent State of Exception The analysis has shown that anarchists in The Secret Agent increasingly fail to accomplish the function assigned to them in reductive discourses of political radicalism: to provide a foil against which political identity can be defined. The traits previously identified with anarchism fail to yield a representable figure of radical politics from which a norm of statehood, politics, and a collective self could set itself apart. With the introduction of the Russian ambassador, Vladimir, we are confronted with the first protagonist in the novel who is shown to stake an entire mode of power on this dissolution of a distinction between norm and anarchist transgression. What is more, the character lays out a political practice which exacerbates the failure of differential order: a topology of demarcation is to be replaced with self-reflexive suspicion of the epistemological tenets held by the “middle classes” (24). This destabilisation is to affect not only an abstract ideology of order, but its concrete reification in the Greenwich Observatory. His attack on alleged British certainties, thus, aims to destroy collective identity and an ideology of scientific rationality alike. Specifically, Vladimir’s attack is directed against the assured mode of observation encapsulated by Heat’s assertion of every anarchist being ‘accounted for’.

262 In this, the novel can be seen to pre-empt a common critique of Agamben’s alleged teleological tendencies. Laclau criticises Agamben’s recurring formulation of oppositional terms (most prominently zoē and bios, but also populus and plebs) which the totalitarian logic of modernity seeks to overcome. Laclau claims that ‘homogenizing logics’ of this type can be “reductio ad absurdum, thoroughly totalitarian, but they can equally be emancipatory, as when they link, in an equivalential chain, a plurality of unsatisfied demands” (20), for the analysis of which Laclau proposes his own hegemonic schema. The double narrativisation of a state of exception on the part of Conrad’s Russian and English representatives allows for a way out of this impasse: rather than a mere default paradigm, the state of exception is itself a matter of hegemonic struggle; this antagonistism, contra Laclau, is, however, negotiated between structurally similar modes of power, both of which evince the shared characteristic of an effacement of classificatory borders. Ernesto Laclau. “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?” Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 11–22. 263 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 17.

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The proposed act of terror is designed to sever the association of pejorative ‘anarchy’ with a limited number of ‘anarchists’ under constant surveillance. This disruption of a specific relational Other, in a second step, is to motivate a search for coherence. Crucially, such an attempt to reconstitute an antagonism between a collective identity and its excluded Other – in binary terms of inclusion and exclusion – is to be precluded from ever settling on a differential signified. It is this perpetual, yet incomplete attempt to reconstitute alterity that makes Vladimir’s model particularly amenable to an analysis in terms of a state of exception. Both components of this model – the suspension of relational alterity and the incitement of a failing search for a position of Otherness – coincide in the ambassador’s model of power. At the same time, Vladimir’s medium of a lengthy, quoted monologue prefigures its intended outcome. That is: the collective effects of this mode of power are enacted in their individual effect on his addressee, Verloc. In tracing the test of the state of exception as applied to this character, the analysis will present the novel’s assessment of the withdrawal of extant political identities and their replacement with a status of ‘bare life’. 4.3.1.1 Dismantling Identity and Alterity The ambassador’s plan presents a fundamentally different model of power from the apparatus of demarcation associated with Heat and his institutional collaborators. Heat’s model still allows for anarchists as transgressive figures, enemies against which collective identity can maintain its coherence. By contrast, the Russian exertion of power attempts to dispense with the notion of determinable transgression. This is borne out by the extensive presentation of Vladimir’s “philosophy of bomb-throwing” (24). In outlining the intended effects of a bomb attack in Britain, any determinate transgression is to be avoided. After all, as the apparatus of demarcation has shown, the collective reresentation of laws depends on their occasional breach: the radical at the ‘frontier’ supplied by Verloc furnishes a signifier which, upon its transformation into the terms of anarchist alterity, can bring about and stabilise a normative signified. The figures invested in the maintenance of an inert supposition of identity require the occasional “very startling news” to signify their own capacity to “act [. . .] upon that information” (95). It is this functionalisation of anarchist alterity for the reproduction of ordered identity that is to be brought up short by the ambassador’s planned ‘dynamite outrage’, as a first step towards an expansive state of exception. At one and the same time, Vladimir attempts to preclude both the drawing of a distinction between identity and alterity and the internal elaboration of that rift on the side of the ‘law’. While, as the ambassador notes, it “would be

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really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics” (25), the planned attack is rather directed at the signs by means of which relational meaning is ordinarily (if just barely) maintained in the Britain of The Secret Agent. In this, the ambassador exploits the curtailment of political agency implicit in the paternalistic system of demarcation: he takes up and exacerbates a view of political subjects as unable to reconstitute order upon its destabilisation. The political ‘reception theory’ of the ambassador dispenses with Wolfgang Iser’s view, according to which whenever the “flow” of a story is “interrupted and we are led off in unexpected directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections – for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.”264 In confrontation with the “shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy” (25) to be constituted by the Greenwich attack, this faculty is to be exposed in its incapacity to ‘establish connections’. In contrast to the ‘accountable’ anarchists of Heat’s model of policing, the attack is to be “incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable” (25), a gap in the stabilising discourse of Britain that may lead off in ‘unexpected directions’ but cannot be recuperated in terms of any one model of political order. To achieve this unreadable sign, however, the ambassador first of all has to provide an analysis of the existing ideologies of coherence. Before the planned disruption, thus, the reader is made privy to a lengthy explanation of the discursive production of social order from the perspective of a theorist of symbolic violence, who attempts to determine how to bring out the immanent contradictions of that order. Primarily, Vladimir’s analysis asserts that the notion of a stable “social mechanism” (11) depends on contingent reifications of its own status. Rather than providing explicitly formulated principles, the coherent order thus created rests on a series of ideological complements. According to this view, society is constituted by metonymical chains, in which the respective signifiers of a collective self-image can be replaced by one another. Thus, instead of a foundational set of beliefs, the ambassador sees society as a series of contingent equivalences. Consequently, the target of his planned attack – the Greenwich observatory – is decidedly arbitrary. Stavrakakis presents the Observatory as a point de capiton in Lacan’s sense, a quilting point for a symbolic organisation of time and space. This stabilisation “is not a matter of mirroring a pre-existing objective reality but of hegemonic struggle.”265 The result of an 1884 conference, Greenwich as the 264 Wolfgang Iser. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1001–1014. 1005. 265 Yannis Stavrakakis. Lacan and the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 61.

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symbol of a set of “enlightenment principles of order, rationality, science, and technology”266 emerges as a matter of declaration, symbolisation, and, in the observatory, material reification. The ambassador’s attack, then, is geared towards bringing to the fore the contingency of these agreed-upon models of space and time. That is, he plans for scepticism to subsume the public sphere as a result of a symbolic act of terror, which cannot but lead to a decomposition of communal stability. What is more, after the reception of the shock, uncertainty is to be performed and passed on, undermining not only the reigning ideology in Britain, but also serving as the basis for international efforts against anarchy. In this, the ambassador’s inculcation of suspicion offers a reversal of the strategy displayed by Marlow in Heart of Darkness. When that figure of residual demarcation discovers the book “An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship,” the work ethics it encodes enable him to “forget the jungle” (38), rendering him only “dimly aware for some time” (38). By advocating the attack on Greenwich, the ambassador precludes precisely such work-based containment of scepticism regarding the progressive and rational underpinnings of colonial endeavours. Instead, he aims to dismantle an order of space and time which “was partly the result of the gradual hegemonisation of the use of nautical tables for navigation at sea by the Nautical Almanac which was printed in England and used the Greenwich Meridian as the universal reference point.”267 Thus, with the attack on hegemonic guarantors of the Empire, the ambassador counters not only an entire ideological contiguity of material dominance and collective identity, but also the strategies by means of which its breakdown is contained. To this end, the attack should be attributable neither to a radical Other, nor should it enable a coherent set of assumptions to be subsumed under one communicable rubric at all. Instead of securing external reference to an anarchist sphere, the attack targets what the ambassador identifies as the dominant discourses of stability. These, in Vladimir’s analysis, are centred on the “fetish of the hour” (23). In this context, ‘of the hour’ can be read as the current status of a society materially reifying its scientistic naivety; alternatively, the expression can connote fetishisation of the hour itself, a naturalisation of conventions of time. The reification of time in the observatory, after all, is only a metonymy for a wider belief in “learning—science. Any imbecile that has got an income believes in that. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow. It is

266 Christopher GoGwilt. “Subversive Plots: From Under Western Eyes to The Secret Agent.” Joseph Conrad: Bloom’s Critical Modern Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010. 89–123. 106. 267 Christopher GoGwilt. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. 176.

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the sacrosanct fetish.” (24) Vladimir’s attack, in order to evade ascription to a defined alterity, thus identifies an entire series of interlocking discursive operations that disavow the “material interests” (25) which the “great panjandrum” (24) of science ultimately serves. To its proponents, science furnishes a ‘mysterious’ belief that makes it possible to ignore the material interests undergirding it. Instead of revolving around the accumulation of “[p]roperty” (24), the British bourgeoisie can define itself in terms of a disinterested, rational pursuit: “They believe that in some way science is at the source of their material prosperity” (25). Faith in a set of objective facts undergirding social order, in this analysis, emerges as the central, unquestioned assumption uniting “damned professors” (24) with the “very boot-blacks in the basement of Charing Cross Station” (26). Shared as a foundational, cross-class tenet, this fetishised time – synecdochically encapsulating science and itself encapsulated by the observatory – makes possible redoubled stabilisation of the status quo. As a rational pursuit ranging from “astronomy” (26) to “mathematics” (25), science offers a pristine realm of inquiry outside of the realm of “personal grievance” (26), to which, as per the ambassador, class struggle has been reduced. At the same time, in addition to its explicit status as a disinterested realm of inquiry, it is a matter of unquestioned, implicit belief, an irrational presumption of causalities pursued in “some mysterious way” (25). What the ‘sacrosanct fetish’ offers is a code guaranteeing interpretation of the world in terms of unquestioned rationality. In the process, the Observatory serves as the very manifestation of the possibility of equivalence. Indeed, such “[e]quivalence itself becomes a fetish,”268 as Adorno puts it, in a manner analogous to Vladimir’s analysis of a belief in science as the source of ‘material prosperity’. Britain produces the ever-identical, rendering instrumental rationality and extant property relations equivalent processes in the self-reproduction of existing social conditions. What is more, rather than an imposition from above, this process is co-created by “[a]ny imbecile that has got an income” (24). Thus, instrumental rationality associated with ‘science’ appears twice in this model: it is both a fetishised belief and a series of metonymical procedures. These procedures are encapsulated by the equivalences between the observatory and the global organisation of time, as well as the transfer of these naturalised certainties to an account of the coherence of “the whole social creation” (24). Myth and rationality converge in a shared impulse to suborn the environment to

268 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. 12.

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predictable conceptual constraints. This precludes any alternative mode of reasoning from disrupting the reproduction of scientistic rationality. As a thought of ever-renewed ‘identification’, in Adorno’s terms, “[t]he multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter.”269 In Vladimir’s equivalent to such an analysis, a society presenting itself as scientific and rational has assured its circular self-confirmation: “They believe in some mysterious way science is at the source of their material prosperity. They do.” (25) As a result, the world is rendered calculable, with an entire imperial infrastructure depending on the Greenwich guarantee of an objective organisation of space and time.270 In the process of establishing a standard for nature, social systems, and the individual alike, reality is presented in terms of inevitability, with the recurrence of the new prefigured by the terms of the alreadyknown: “The subsumption of the actual, whether under mythical prehistory or under mathematical formulism, the symbolic relating of the present to the mythical event in the rite or to the abstract category in science, makes the new appear as something predetermined which therefore is really the old.”271 In this production of the knowable and the normative order governing it, “[n]othing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear.”272 It is here that Vladimir’s concept of political violence is to intervene, confronting such production of the ever-identical with the “incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable” (25). The attack is based on an analysis of the strategies by means of which a radical outside is always already subsumed under the aegis of concepts that reduce its concrete, individual characteristics. That is, for the British society emerging from Vladimir’s analysis, the new is already predetermined. ‘Bomb outrages’ themselves are subject to a set of regularised explanatory templates. This prefiguration allows for a “murderous attempt on a restaurant” (24) to be contained by the category of “non-political passion: the exasperation of a hungry man, an act of social revenge” (24). Due to such depoliticisation, no “outrage” (24) can ever be registered as an ‘outside’ of the known, since it has always already been integrated into a set of repetitive, stereotypical expectations. As a result, even political assassinations have become “almost conventional” (23). Political radicalism cannot impinge on a society in which “[e]very newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such

269 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4. 270 Cf. Karen Lynnea Piper. Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2002. 38. 271 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4. 272 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11.

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manifestations away” (24), fully ensconcing their recipients in a predetermined frame of the expected and the known. In light of the above analysis of the apparatus of demarcation, the account offered by the ambassador is not entirely unfounded. The production of certainty by Verloc and his associates is indeed shown to subsume any new phenomenon under a predetermined category, with political discontents only allowed to the extent that they can be integrated straightaway into the “close-woven stuff of relations between conspirator and police” (63). That is, the novel bears out the notion that a concept of order, in Adorno’s terms, “is held fast as that thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple, and disparate, from that which is known, single, and identical.”273 While the ambassador’s analysis is, hence, shown to be partly justified, the novel casts considerable doubt on the extension of the instrumental rationality that he presents as the dominant ideology by which the British bourgeoisie bolsters its pretensions to science and rationality. Vladimir’s analysis of the scientific fetish does offer a fitting description of the pervasive belief displayed by Ossipon, who “submitted to the rule of science” (217) with unquestioning certainty. However, regarding ‘degeneration’, this belief in biologistic certainty has already been shown to constitute a particularly unstable set of propositions, a classificatory impetus not even sustained by the narrator. Likewise, Verloc’s assumption of an ordered world, as the example of the ‘confusion between victoria, beast, and skin’ has shown, is perpetually on the verge of breakdown. Instrumental rationality, then, barely realises what Adorno calls the ‘mathematical formulism’ of conceptual thought and Vladimir deems the “pure mathematics” (25) undergirding society. Instead, the narrative presents such ideologies, firstly, as scarcely consistent results of political procedures. These are, in a second step, accepted as essential truths by those involved in their maintenance. Yet, these manufactured certainties can at any point dissolve into a state in which thought is no longer capable “of recognizing the logic of either/or, of consequence and antinomy, by means of which it emancipated itself radically from nature.”274 Most notably, during Verloc’s walk to the embassy – that is, in the scene immediately preceding the destruction of his certainties by Vladimir – the notion of conceptual control that Vladimir attributes to British society is already shown to be tenuous. Of two adjacent houses, “one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37,” with the latter ‘proclaimed’ by an inscription to belong to an adjacent

273 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21. 274 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 31.

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street due to “whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s stray houses” (11). Instead of an Enlightenment “system from which everything and anything follows,”275 the ‘straying’ houses indicate that residual concepts of order only barely impart residual coherence on the city. Any lingering assumption of rationality from which ‘everything follows’ depends on ignoring the gap in the urban topography here satirised as a fissure in reality itself, barely contained by an imagined ‘efficient authority’ adducing a sign to explain the misnumbering. While Vladimir, thus, invokes the “whole civilized world” (26) as proof of an ideology of scientific rationality, the self-proclaimed centre of that world is on the cusp of losing its foundational demarcations. It enters into a state in which differences between civilised and uncivilised become as untenable as the differentiation of the numbered and the ‘strayed houses’ or, indeed, the human and the sheer, disordered materiality of the city: “There were red, coppery gleams on the roofs of the houses, on the corners of the walls, on the panels of the carriages [. . .] and on the broad back of Mr. Verloc” (9). In view of this notion of a city already about to be “dissolved” (9) into a state of nonhuman aggregates, the novel restricts the possibility of maintaining illusions of collective identity at all. While the recursive affirmation of the self-created spheres of order indeed follows the structure of a belief, its reiteration as the “force of the collective” (22) is already tenuous. Vladimir’s grand gesture of a hermeneutics of suspicion runs up against a city losing its sense of “gleaming naturalness” (21). The novel, thus, confronts the ambassador’s analysis of hardand-fast ideology with the tenuousness of an unevenly distributed, diffracted identity. In this way, the narrative casts doubt on the very attempt to conceive of individuals as “nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them.”276 Amidst a city in which the “majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies” (63) has already dispensed with any all-encompassing instrumental rationality, the fabrication of residual order is presented as a fractured, residual ‘identity effect’ rather than cohesive common sense. While the ambassador alleges a unified discourse underwritten by the Observatory and its metonymical complements, the novel presents an order barely upheld by a loose association of individuals and fractured institutions. Hence, contra Vladimir, whenever the narrative perspective is detached from the characters in an extradiegetic tilt, we are made privy to the difficulties of maintaining what Levi Bryant deems the “minimal criterion for being a being,”

275 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4. 276 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21.

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which “consists in making a difference. If a difference is made, then that being is.”277 In The Secret Agent, that possibility of ‘making’ a difference from the outset transcends the political demarcation of anarchists and extends to the very constitution of the individual as an entity separate from surrounding urban matter — and that separation is in its last throes. In addition to dismantling the metanarratives of scientific rationality,278 Vladimir’s analysis does hint at a more thoroughgoing critique of the certainties of British society, including the very process of ‘drawing a difference’ upon which the national self-image depends. This second level of his analysis does not seek merely to replace a ‘liberal’ system with an authoritarian “suppression of political crime” (22). The ambassador does direct his efforts against the “imbecile bourgeoisie of this country,” who “make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim it is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches” (22). However, merely lobbying for harsher laws or executive measures would not suffice. Instead of charting a succession from one (disordered) state to a subsequent (ordered) state, the trajectory of Vladimir’s analysis, like Agamben’s contract theory, traces a mode of power in which such a passage never takes place. Nor would an eventful shift of this kind be desirable from the perspective of the Russian state representative. Rather than effecting a linear change from breakdown to autocratic order, the ambassador champions an “incorporation of the state of nature in society,” which leads to a “state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law, and this very indistinction constitutes specifically sovereign violence. The state of nature is therefore not truly external to nomos but rather contains its virtuality.”279 There is no mythical progression from a pre-social struggle to organisation in this model. Rather, the possibility of declaring a state of nature at any time rests on retaining an indistinction between both phases within the purportedly lawful state. In other words, what Vladimir seeks to ‘incorporate’ into society is the ‘virtual’ potential to expose as contingent any extant differentiations of self and Other. This is all the more catastrophic for most characters since, as the dissolution of the apparatus of demarcation has shown, their capacity to set themselves

277 Levi R. Bryant. “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re-Press, 2011. 261–278. 269. 278 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiii. “I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.” 279 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 35.

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apart from a clearly designated alterity is tenuous to begin with. As indicated by the example of Verloc’s walk to the embassy, after all, unruly hybrids – which combine a “victoria with the skin of a wild beast” (9) – already proliferate just out of eyeshot of the self-satisfied ‘protector’ of society. It is only by dint of residual demarcations (the ‘railings’) that the incursion of this diffusion of order is kept at bay. This possibility of distinction is precisely what Vladimir’s second analytical strand attacks. As his analysis turns to an equivalent of Bryant’s minimal criterion (‘making a difference’), the ambassador’s theory of destabilisation is shown to proceed from the very disorder it pretends to replace.280 For all the surface rhetoric of “universal repressive legislation” (19), then, he does not advocate the replacement of an ‘anarchic’ state with determinate judicial or disciplinary measures. Instead, the impending anarchy of the system he criticises is to furnish the very basis of a new mode of rule. Rather than establishing new laws, it is the impossibility of distinguishing violence and law that is to be inscribed into this polity, and by extension to international politics more generally. That is to say: the ambassador’s model is geared towards inscribing the pre-authoritarian state of nature into his very claim to authority. The resulting mode of power is predicated on the withdrawal of extant identities at any time; and since, as the shifts in focalisation have shown, any deviation from the presumption of ordered identity discloses the city as an inextricable mesh of nature and culture without precedence accorded to the human, it is a de-facto pre-political state of nature that forms the basis of Vladimir’s interventions. From this point of view, the “most alarming display of ferocity” (26) aims to attack the entire principle of differential meaning making. Critique of extant mechanisms of order, then, is presented as partisan and destructive in the Russian interlude. By attacking the very demarcation of alterity by means of which a hegemonic collective identity reproduces itself, Vladimir seeks to attenuate the “hermeneutic composability”281 of the political event. With this term, Bruner denotes the way in which a “surfeit of ambiguity” is replaced with the impression of immediate interpretability. A story thus set up “‘is as it is’ and needs no interpretation,” both momentarily pre-empting alternative interpretations and prompting the application of a “virtually automatic interpretative routine.”282 According to Vladimir’s critique, a specific ‘routine’ of this kind is constituted by explanations of political violence, which form a set of “ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away” (24).

280 Bryant, “The Ontic Principle,” 269. 281 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 8. 282 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 8.

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In the process, any “murderous attempt” (24) enhances rather than threatening ‘hermeneutic composability’, since it furnishes an alterity against which residual notions of political identity can be marked. Thus, demarcation of order is still residually successful in each of the ambassador’s examples, as is a consensual image of alterity. The well-worn production of cultural narratives achieves precisely what the apparatus of demarcation is set up to enable: by refashioning direct action as ‘non-political passion’, collective identity contains any anarchist gesture, rendering it the target of a sentimental mode of containment. The ambassador’s account is internally consistent: if explanations can be adduced to any disruptive ‘direct action’ without thereby obliging the British bourgeoisie to change its self-reproduction, the ‘anarchist’ has to be dislodged from the presiding interpretative framework. There is, then, a method to the British mediasphere laid out by Vladimir. It furnishes stable models of self by producing a consensual, simplified image of what it is not. If that alterity can be associated with elements of the prevailing collective identity, this selection only renders it all the more functional: the individual anarchist presents a figure of containment, taking on disavowed characteristics of the self. This is not depreciated by default in the novel. After all, The Secret Agent does not allow for an authentic anarchist sphere that would be misrepresented by these tactics. Instead, the novel casts suspicion on the gesture of unveiling, critiquing, and exposing those few remaining metanarratives that uphold a residual distinction of anarchy and order. After all, the exposure of false consciousness and the attack on shared ideological codes does not lead to a liberating re-negotiation of the known. Instead, in proposing to attack the few remaining, contingent strategies of deriving explicit ‘manifestations’ of alterity, Vladimir calls into question the very principle by means of which identities are derived in the novel. Without the “suggestion of non-political passion” (24), the novel shows, a countervailing, specifically political sphere is likewise unimaginable. In turn, it is only upon a suspension of differentiations between the political and the apolitical that the full range of the ambassador’s proposed measures can be established. His mode of power, like the ‘indistinction between violence and law’ in Agamben’s ‘virtual’ state of nature, induces a deliberate dissolution of demarcation. Similarly, rather than offering a temporal movement from one (insufficient) model of politics to an authoritarian alternative, Vladimir’s analysis prefigures the possibility of withdrawing extant differentiations of identity and alterity at will. The ambassador’s proposed act is, thus, designed to evade any discernible differentiation altogether: it is to refute the bolstering of alterity in terms of a “religious manifestation” (24) and “social revenge” (24) alike. Both of these interpretations would allow for political identity to be delineated against the

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transgressive “outrage” (24), with a whole host of discourses enlisted in defence of that boundary. The ambassador’s “philosophy” (24), by contrast, posits the autonomisation of political violence, a performance of unfathomable dissent that evades ascription to any determinate group. In this skirting of interpretability, Vladimir’s imagined, pseudo-anarchist agent provocateur reverses the terms in which ‘direct action’ was conceived in the historical instances when internationalists advocated ‘propaganda by the deed’. Although, as Graham points out, this concept is now synonymous with terrorism, for the activists in the antiauthoritarian International it “merely constituted exemplary forms of direct action intended to inspire and provoke the masses to revolt” — a practice that excluded individual acts of terror as “counterrevolutionary.”283 Further, when an anarchist congress advocated such tactics in 1881, its formulations retained external reference to the “spirit of revolt in those sections of the popular masses which still harbor illusions about the effectiveness of legal methods.”284 By contrast, the autocratic, statist version offered by Vladimir’s simulated act of terror is to enforce self-reference:285 A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object. (25)

Rather than fostering a determinate movement, thus, the attack is to refer only to itself, in a political reformulation of l’art pour l’art.286 However, as opposed to Conrad’s own explicit poetological formulations of the “supreme cry of Art for Art,”287 which present a solitary pursuit, the ambassador’s plan hinges on providing an event which, rather than referring to anything outside itself,

283 Graham, The First International, 261. 284 Cf. Andrew R. Carlson. Anarchism in Germany. Vol. 1. The Early Movement. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1972. 252. Carlson quotes the Resolution of the International Working Men’s Association in full. “It is absolutely necessary to exert every effort towards propagating, by deeds, the revolutionary idea and to arouse the spirit of revolt in those sections of the popular masses which still harbor illusions about the effectiveness of legal methods.” 285 These terms are here used in Luhmann’s sense: “[i]n the case of reference, a distinction must be made between self-reference (internal reference) and external reference.” Further, “[i]n the observation, the difference between observation and operation can be reformulated in an innovative way as the distinction between self-reference and external reference. Self-reference refers to what the operation ‘observation’ enacts. External reference refers to what is thereby excluded.” Luhmann, “The Modernity of Science,” 65. 286 Cf. Fothergill, “Connoisseurs of Terror,” 139. 287 Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, l.

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forces British society to bring to bear well-worn interpretative routines on an elusive Other which fails to be projected onto a constitutive outside. In this context, the innocuous formula ‘that, and only that’ provides a linguistic equivalent to the state of exception. Deixes – terms that link “utterances to the contexts in which they are produced via the three fundamental deictic dimensions” of the spatial, the personal, and the temporal288 – play a crucial role in Agamben’s account of language. Shifters of this kind constitute a threshold between the abstract system of rules (langue) on the one hand, and external reference to the ‘world’ on the other. In this system, deixes first and foremost merely indicate that language use is under way, a presupposition of communicability which underlies any propositional content as a premise of signifiability, of a potential meaning: “The sphere of the utterance thus includes that which, in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said and meant in it. Pronouns and other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place.”289 It is this potential meaning which, in Agamben’s account, is set aside in each concrete utterance, yet remains an absent ground — a “pure negativity”290 that disappears in discourse yet remains an underlying, unspeakable condition. It is such potential “without any determinate accession of meaning”291 to which the ambassador gestures by exposing the deixes as signs pointing to their own iterability rather than to the concrete discursive effects associated with the imagined attack. In addition to disrupting a precisely identified regime of truth, thus, Vladimir is shown to enact a mode of speech in which the ‘pure taking place’ of language cannot be set aside in favour of concrete indications of shared time as reified by the Observatory. His event is to obstruct the “passage from abstract langue to concrete parole in the ever-renewed practice, use, or ‘application’ of language in concrete instances of discourse.”292 By rescinding a shared discourse, and precluding the adaptation of differential schemas to the explosion, language reverts to an abstract presupposition of meaning, without a proper occasion for its shared application. Thus, ‘that, and only that’ ushers in a language which, in an analogy that is repeated throughout the Homo

288 Bill Richardson. “Deictic Features and the Translator.” The Pragmatics of Translation. Ed. Leo Hickey. Clevedon/Philadelphia/Toronto/Sydney/Johannesburg: Multilingual, 1998. 124–142. 124. 289 Agamben, Language and Death, 25. 290 Agamben, Language and Death, 35. 291 Agamben, Language and Death, 35. 292 Paul Livingstone. The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism. New York and London: Routledge, 2012. 40.

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Sacer series, can be compared to the state of exception. Just as the reiterated deixes indicate a negative foundation of language, the “state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law (which should therefore be written: force of law).”293 Whereas the apparatus of demarcation just barely allows for the assertion of positive identity against the negative markers of anarchist alterity, Vladimir’s performance – attempting to go ‘beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object’ – betokens a permanent suspension of a representable self, whether individual or collective. Over and above a mere disruption of scientistic doctrines, the “purely destructive” (24) attack is set up as an intervention in the very means by which identity can be articulated. The state of exception becomes a disruption of the possibility of maintaining the vestige of referential sign-use still associated with the apparatus of demarcation. 4.3.1.2 Prefiguring the State of Exception Vladimir’s attempt to dismantle well-worn interpretative routines is not only laid out as a manifesto of manufactured “outrage” (24). What is more, its intended collective effects are also prefigured individually by the impact of its formulation on his interlocutor. In the course of this trial run, specifically, Verloc’s perception of the ambassador’s speech already shows the characteristics of enforced ‘indistinction’ that is to be extended to society as a whole.294 The ambassador’s rhetorical opening salvo, then, not only sets out, but already enacts an “interruption of discourse, a break in the continuity of thought”295 to be achieved by his iteration of the state of exception. Mr Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in the nature of things it could not

293 Agamben, State of Exception, 39. 294 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 35. 295 Michael Levenson. Modernism. New Haven and London: Yale UP. 2011. 23. For Levenson, this emerges as a key feature of Modernism: “A culture of opposition that breaks the continuity of public discourse – this is one useful way of characterizing the late-nineteenth-century practice of Modernism.” Levenson does point out that “cultural revolt, in its specificity, had an unsettled correlation with social struggle,” so that the “conjunction of oppositional culture and discontinuous discourse placed an emancipatory Modernism in an unstable relationship with liberationist politics” (23). A version of this caveat is represented in The Secret Agent, where the disturbance of vaunted representational technique – the “question of meaning and unmeaning” (22) – is recast as an authoritarian strategy.

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exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. [. . .] He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention. (22)

Vladimir may be presented as a “cartoon of cynical cruelty,” who “in his scorn is also ignorant,”296 but in the context of his intended dissolution of the anarchist as a determinate figure of alterity, this performance of ignorance is apposite. What the ambassador brings to bear on Verloc is a political poetics, already indicated as such by the pithy formula of the “scorn and condescension” which is to preclude interpretation of the attack as tragic ‘pathos’. After all – in Vladimir’s estimation of the bourgeoisie – “[y]ou can’t count upon their emotions either of pity or fear for very long” (24). A structure of reception in an Aristotelian mold of ‘pity or fear’, then, is to be avoided altogether in this reception theory of terror.297 Catharsis thus having been evaded, what follows in Vladimir’s imagined ‘direct action’ is a replacement of narrativity more generally. The place of ‘plot’ is taken over by an undefined threat, a wholly selfreferential version of “outrages” (23) that cannot be traced back to an originator. The ambassador thus disavows any reconstitution of the “revolutionary world” as a sphere to which external reference is possible, and which can be investigated, infiltrated, or spoken of in terms of defined interests. Denying this notion of a ‘world’ of revolutionary commitments breaks with the collective manufacture of anarchists in which Verloc has been involved as a crucial purveyor of a radical sphere. Previously, the processes by means of which the initial sign of transgression could be transformed into institutional and personal micro-narrations offered a residual version of what Barthes calls “metalanguage.” In our case, this describes the language by means of which the distinction of order and anarchism can ensure the “language-object” posed by whichever transgression is to be connected to the connotations offered by the radical stereotype.298 The “associative total of a concept and an image”299 becomes a communicable sign in the subsequent systems, allowing for temporary stabilisations of shared meaning. This includes, not least, the secret agent’s personal version of the myth of order, according to which the language

296 Andrew Wright, Fictional Discourse and Historical Space. Defoe and Theroux, Austen and Forster, Conrad and Greene. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1987. 84. 297 Cf. Nic Panagopoulos. “Conrad’s Poetics: An Aristotelian Reading of Heart of Darkness.” L’Epoque Conradienne 40 (2016). 117–149. 298 Barthes, Mythologies, 114. 299 Barthes, Mythologies, 114.

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of a “social mechanism” (11) replicates itself as long as a minimal, anarchist departure is upheld. That, however, Verloc as the supplier of political difference is incapable of further elaboration of the identity thus derived is used against him as soon as Vladimir cuts across the inertly assumed categories of norm and deviation.300 Specifically, Vladimir’s introductory speech refuses any antagonistic determination of anarchism as the obverse of an appreciable norm. The evocation of ‘impulsive bomb-throwers’ may initially recall the variable positioning of the political radical as a figure of individual deviance (in Heat’s view of the Professor or Ossipon’s biologistic imagination), or as a broad index of destabilisation (in the previous ambassador’s “alarmist despatches” 132). Whilst the ‘apparatus of demarcation’, however, retained flexibility regarding the choice of alterity by selecting the appropriate stereotype from available discourses of radicalism, Vladimir’s speech collapses the paradigm onto the syntagmatic axis.301 By stringing incompatible ascriptions together, the speech foregrounds the internal contradictions of political alterity. In the process, Vladimir cannot be said to destabilise a secure radical Other. Instead, by performing abrupt shifts from the ‘social revolutionary party’ as a ‘perfectly disciplined army’ to “the loosest association” (22), he puts on display the heterogeneity that always already characterises the cultural image of the ‘anarchist’. Vladimir dispels the radical figure as an object of knowledge, turning it into an evidently discursive phenomenon which bares its own contradictions. On this account, anarchism refuses closure, as its characteristics become conspicuously incompatible. This goes against its previous functional incompatibility, a blurring of terms which, among more regularised institutional uses, bolstered Verloc’s own status as a double agent. Such functionalisation of the appropriate anarchist stereotypes for their respective discursive use is disrupted, as Vladimir shifts relations of equivalence from the axis of selection – that

300 In this way, Vladimir exploits the inability to increase “systematicity through further differentiation” by adding to “identity (as differentiated from something else) a second version of unity (as difference from itself).” Niklas Luhmann. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. 38. My trans. Orig. quote: “Das System gewinnt durch Differenzierung an Systematizität, es gewinnt neben seiner bloßen Identität (in Differenz zu anderem) eine Zweitfassung seiner Einheit (in Differenz zu sich selbst).” 301 This functions as a discourse-specific version of Jakobson’s ‘poetic function’: “The selection is produced on the basis of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” Cf. Roman Jakobson. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology. Ed. Robert E. Innis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 145–175. 155.

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is, selection of situationally appropriate ‘anarchist traits’ – to the axis of combination.302 The only remaining determinable logic is that of “confounding” (22) itself: the prospect of a metonymical “evocation of the whole by a connection”303 is held out — without, however, making the nature of that ‘connection’ explicit. At the same time, Verloc perceives the juxtaposition of “distinguished propagandists” with “bomb-throwers” (22) as “more than was excusable” (22). After all, the ambassador’s performance of indifferent equivalence lays bare that the radicals – whom the secret agent had selected from seemingly distinct sets – fail to exhibit any difference once they are laid out in a sequence. Presumed expertise on anarchist matters, then, is exposed as always having consisted of the construction of indifferent markers of political Otherness in the first place. The relationship between the incompatible ‘anarchisms’ ‘confounded’ from a position of “ignorance” (22) is further complicated by a gradual shift towards uncertain relationships of similarity. When Vladimir speaks of the anarchists “as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands” (22), the tertium comparationis – unorganised, non-hierarchical lawlessness – is recoverable. What cannot be determined, however, is who makes this comparison between ‘anarchists’ and ‘brigands’ in the first place. It can still be read as indirect speech, in which it is Vladimir who is understood to invoke the comparison. At the same time, it is also possible to understand Verloc as the one who associates anarchists with “outlaws.” According to this second reading as indirect thought, we are made privy to the disintegration of Verloc’s own categories, as he is shown to mentally reiterate the ambassador’s claims in a manner that foregrounds their inconsistency. That the speech concludes with an indeterminate relationship between speech and thought, offering either a close representation of the ambassadorial monologue or Verloc’s internally focalised reiteration of the inconsistent set of descriptors, prefigures the ambassador’s tactics of social destabilisation. If the undermining of categories of alterity, after all, were to be traced to the ambassador himself, he himself would furnish external reference, emerging as a determinate (national, Russian, autocratic) alterity in turn. To avoid such political difference, the self-referential dismantling of the ways in which ‘anarchism’ is constructed functions as internalised scepticism. Verloc, his thoughts indistinguishable from the ambassador’s speech, is goaded into “autodeconstruction” rather than having recourse to a “method or some tool that you

302 Cf. Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 155. 303 Chandler, Semiotics, 156.

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apply to something from the outside.”304 This enforced version of “[d]econstruction is something which happens and which happens inside,”305 as Derrida puts it. The dismantling of extant differentiations of self and Other can only proceed if the erstwhile anarchist expert is intimately involved in the unravelling of his own ideology. He is made to reproduce a transfer of traits from ‘anarchist’ to ‘brigand’ to ‘army’ and, consequently, to begin calling into question his own “organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist” (22). To sum up Vladimir’s production of indeterminacy, the “loosest association” (22) of anarchist signifiers, firstly, fragments the heterostereotype by bringing to the fore its internal inconsistencies. This is, secondly, followed up by the crucial step of bringing about the permanent dissolution of boundaries between self and Other. To this end, the dispersal into incompatible identifications as ‘bombthrowers’ and ‘propagandists’, ‘brigands’ and a ‘party’ is to incite the attempt to recombine these fragments, to make them cohere into a figure of political movements beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. In other words: after the anarchist stereotype has been sufficiently exposed to defamiliarising ‘ignorance’, its scattered traits are to become subject to an attempt at restoring consistency. The ambassador points to a metalanguage and a set of institutional practices, in which the dissolving parts of political Otherness can be reconstituted — while barring that future order from ever becoming manifest. The reactionary vision of certainty is to be deferred permanently, yielding ever-new groups to be assembled under the category of ‘anarchist’. This way, the fragments of the radical Other point towards an indefinitely expandable identity arrayed against it, too “universal” (22) to ever be granted definite articulation. The permanently deferred political Other is to both incite attempts to render it a narratable, stabilised transgression and bring up short any individual or collective attempt of doing so. Seeking a foil for its normative order, a British society in disarry encounters only a dispersed signifier of political radicalism. As a result of the failure to come to terms with unfathomable ‘direct action’, the polity asserted against the radical threat oscillates between the individual and the collective, “this country” (22) and “international action” (22), national laws and “universal repressive legislation” (23). Vladimir’s ‘confounding’, then, should be read as a refutation of any narratable, temporalised distinction in which a normative order can affirm itself at the very moment it is transgressed.

304 Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Ed. John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham UP, 1997. 9. 305 Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 9.

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In keeping with this strategy of deferring alterity, Vladimir’s “philosophy of bomb-throwing” (24) reiterates the effects of the simulated attack – “a howl from all these intellectual idiots” (24) – before imagining failing attempts to attribute a cause: “But what is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad?” (25). The strategy does not, however, stop at a reversal of hierarchy, in which precedence is given to the term previously defined against its privileged counterpart.306 A mere exchange of order and anarchy in favour of the latter, after all, would still function within the inverted conceptual framework of effect and cause. Over and above such an about-face of conventional categories, then, the ambassador’s mode of power requires reinscription to administer its intended, “purely destructive” (24) effect. What Vladimir outlines, in Derrida’s account of such reinscription, is the marking of “a new ‘concept’, a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime.”307 This genuine shift requires an overturning of “the entire system attached to it [. . .], thereby disorganizing the entire inherited order and invading the entire field.”308 Vladimir not only personifies an ‘invasion’ of this type himself, having immersed himself in the British salon sphere as a “favourite in society” (15). What is more, his philosophy foregrounds the privileged term of social order as already marked by the qualities of its supplemental term.309 Such a reinscription of the secondary, supplemental element (anarchy) into the primary one (order) can be traced through the ambassador’s consideration of the ‘effective’. Vladimir holds forth on the “sufficiently startling—effective” (23) nature of the outrages, before pre-empting the causes that can be ascribed to them from various ideological positions. An “outrage upon a church,” for instance, may be “[h]orrible enough at first sight, no doubt, and yet not so effective as a person of an ordinary mind might think” (24). The target of his symbolic violence – the audience initially taken to be affected by the ‘horrible’ act – is reinscribed into the performance of terror. As 306 Rodolphe Gasché. “Deconstruction as Criticism.” Jacques Derrida: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. 2nd vol. Ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 22–57. 307 If the strategy stopped at this, it would, in Gasché’s terms, perform “a reversal of the traditional hierarchy between conceptual oppositions (expression/indication, presence, sign) and a reinscription of the newly privileged term.” Gasché, “Deconstruction as Criticism,” 99. 308 Jacques Derrida. “Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta.” Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981. 37–96. 42. 309 The initial plenitude reveals its inherent absence, so that the supplemental extra becomes “an essential condition of that which it supplements.” Jonathan Culler. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. 104.

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persons of ‘an ordinary mind’, they are called upon to judge the efficacy of the very presentation to which they are subjected. In the process of adjudicating its ‘effectiveness’, they are imagined as incapable of applying well-worn categories of right and wrong. As a result, they reverse those conceptual pairs, before ‘disorganising the entire inherited order’: the effective or ineffective spectacle has to be rated according to an entirely new set of standards, which, however is to be kept from coalescing into binary stability. Those affected by Vladimir’s performance, then, are to supply their own appraisal of the effect of symbolic violence on themselves. Rather than a homogenous society disrupted by its transgressive Other, the purportedly ordered sphere is to enact complicity with the shock aesthetics of unaccountable political violence. This process of reversal and reinscription indicates the degree to which autocratic destabilisation instrumentalises the internal divisions already fracturing any assertion of social order. The ‘ordinary mind’, after all, is only capable of gaging its own reaction because its alleged ordinariness is, in turn, predicated on irrational acceptance of the fetishised “wooden-faced panjandrum” (23) of science. While these nested inconsistencies are ordinarily subject to resigned acceptance – “things do not stand much looking into” (131) – the ambassador’s intervention is to bring them to the fore. His manifestation depends on its co-production by those who are shown to depend on an ‘ordinary mind’ and its discursive complements. Forced to gage their own lack of conceptual distinctions, the targets of symbolic violence participate in the dismantling of their own certainties. It is in keeping with these heightened contradictions that, in a final turn, the ambassador’s strategy makes use of a reversed version of the reified scientific truths it is designed to dismantle. To this end, Vladimir closes his presentation with didactic insistence, offering a quasi-scientific summary of the “results” (25) he expects from his experimental intervention in a comprehensively analysed public discourse. In addition, he sets out the “higher philosophy” (25) underlying his approach, appraises his “serviceable arguments” (25), and pays “some attention to the practical aspect of the question” (25). The ‘irrational rationality’ proclaimed for the British public is countered with a performance of ‘rational irrationality’, a cohesive science of terrorist intervention: a precisely calibrated discursive interference to achieve a planned irruption of uncertainty uncontainable by any specific political measure. It is in this double reversal, finally, that Vladimir gives expression to the dissolution of boundaries enforced by this new mode of power. Rather than mere scepticism levelled at the false consciousness of the prevalent scientistic discourse, the self-ascribed notions of rationalism undergirding the dominant ideology are subjected to

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“extraction, graft, extension.”310 In this autocratic deconstruction of the rote production of political difference, Britain is to be confronted with an attack both repeating and emphasising its own alleged conceptual hierarchies. 4.3.1.3 Declaring the State of Exception Verloc’s trajectory throughout the encounter with the ambassador mirrors that of the “middle classes” (24) whose hegemonic certainties are to be dispelled.311 In addition to the internalisation and reinscription analysed above, the effect of the ‘philosophy of bomb throwing’ is, finally, extended panoramically to ‘humanity’ as such. Specifically, the “blows” of the false flag attack are to impinge on “something outside the ordinary passions of humanity” (24). This replaces any defined, class-based ideology with interpretative attempts in terms of shared ‘human’ characteristics — a process which, in its inconclusive selfreference, comes up short. The term is too broad: what ‘humanity’ might consist of fails to receive articulation against ‘something outside’, which no longer consists of the determinate alterity of anarchism but rather “some noise” (24). The dismantling of Verloc’s identity functions similarly to this shift from a specific class to indeterminate ‘humanity’. His self-ascribed identity as protector of the social mechanism is revoked; yet, at the same time, he is denied delimitation as a relational Other. As a result, the secret agent’s body provides the material equivalent to the pliable concept of ‘humanity’ unconstrained by identity or alterity, which, in the novel’s differential model, is vulnerable to unaccountable authority. Concomitantly, it is upon reducing the individual to undifferentiated ‘bare life’ that the state of exception is shown to take hold. Whereas in the first chapter, we have been confronted with a fantasy of demarcation, in which Verloc observes his imagined protégés through the literal, topographical boundary of the railings, the ambassador’s speech performs a loss of containment. Vladimir’s speech “filled the silent Mr Verloc with inward consternation,” and, at the very end of this first peroration, he “listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention” (22). We have already seen that shifts in focalisation suggest an indeterminate status of Vladimir’s ‘philosophy’, which is mentally reproduced by its target. Subsequently, this uncertain boundary between the self and its environment is further eroded. As a result of Vladimir’s jumbled syntagm of incompatible ‘anarchists’, the double agent emerges as split between his inner state and his outward “immobility” (22). This

310 Jacques Derrida, “Positions,” 71. 311 Cf. Bernard Porter. The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1987. 112.

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split is only increased by every subsequent stage of Vladimir’s explanation. The fissure between inside and outside is brought to the fore as the perspective increasingly centres on Verloc barely avoiding an expression of dismay in the face of the ambassador’s performative ignorance: “He was afraid to open his lips lest a groan should escape him” (23). While the passage already refocuses attention on the body, the fact that Verloc is ‘afraid’ still suggests a residual model of interiority and an ‘outside’ to which indices of interior states are communicated. Subsequently, however, this remaining dichotomy of inside and outside is replaced with a less linear, and decidedly somatic, topology: “For some time already, Mr. Verloc’s immobility by the side of the arm-chair resembled a state of collapsed coma—a sort of passive insensibility interrupted by slight convulsive starts, such as may be observed in the domestic dog having a nightmare on the hearthrug.” (25) In this ‘immobility’, body and mind can no longer be told apart. Instead, according to this image of stimulus and response, the physical reactions precede and prefigure any consciousness, exposed as they are to an external gaze before they even enter into the protagonist’s self-awareness. That is, the reaction attributed to Verloc presents the ‘convulsive starts’ as divorced from the set of beliefs still attributed to him at the outset of the novel. The redoubled comparison at first relates ‘immobility’ to a ‘collapsed coma’. Rather than Verloc refraining from giving expression to thought (thus emphasising the autonomy of mental processes taking place behind the ‘immobile’ façade), this comparison emphasises loss of consciousness altogether. What is more, however, the ‘coma’ is perspectivally inflected by the second simile of the dog’s nightmare: the passage draws attention to the observer’s position with the sententious assurance that such reactions ‘may be observed’. Proceeding from this general observation, the perspective switches to external focalisation, which registers ‘convulsive starts’ and attributes a “nightmare” to the insensate object of the now-disembodied gaze. The input in this stimulus-response model, meanwhile, is not issued from outside, but inheres inside the ‘dog’, which is neither aware of nor in control of its responses to its own internal states. Any change against which either coma or nightmare might be defined – such as waking up – is replaced with (1) bodily reactions determined by (2) an internal process which is, in turn, controlled, observed and interpreted from (3) an external vantage point. The body no longer appears in terms of delimited emotional dispositions to be given expression (‘escape’) or withheld, but ensconced in a separate reality – the ‘nightmare’ – relevant only insofar as it yields observable reactions. This image of the fully controlled body observed from outside initiates a metaphorical strain of canine characteristics throughout the remainder of the

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novel. That is, rather than attributing political opponents to antagonistic interests, various protagonists vie for the opportunity to interpret others in turns of domestic animality — and thereby exclude them from political articulation. This “zone of indistinction”312 between man and animal aligns with Agamben’s critique of the notion that a state of nature is succeeded by a contractual polity. Regarding this ‘mythologeme’, Homo Sacer argues that the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the City but a principle internal to the City, which appears at the moment the City is considered tanquam dissoluta, ‘as if it were dissolved’ (in this sense, the state of nature is something like a state of exception).313

The dissolution of the city – and the concomitant possibility to divest citizens of their political life – is exemplified by a “zone” in which erstwhile political subjects are “no longer distinct from beasts.”314 Similarly, Vladimir’s interview presents an attempt to inculcate a continuous transition between political life and depoliticised, animal life. After the threefold similarity has transformed Verloc’s immobility into the “domestic dog having a nightmare” (25), the secret agent is shown to enact that metaphor: “And it was in an uneasy doglike growl that he repeated the word: ‘Astronomy.’” (25). It is at this point that the planned act of terror and the effect of its explanation converge. Verloc, like the British public in the wake of Vladimir’s “series of outrages” (22), has been divested of his political identity — the speech has “overcome his power of assimilation” (25). Likewise, just as he repeats the word encompassing the “sacrosanct fetish of today” (23) – namely “astronomy” – Verloc is forced to enact the breakdown of his own fetishised mode of expression. His voice, “naturally trusted” (18) as he conceived it to be, is replaced with growls, giving audible expression to his status as bare life. That this “doglike” (25) mode of expression replicates Vladimir’s words recalls Agamben’s account of the constitutive proximity of the ‘state of nature’ and sovereign power. Verloc’s becoming-animal resembles the historical paradigm of the ‘wolf-man’, who – banned from the city and “considered to be already dead” – occupies “a threshold of indistinction between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion.”315 Just as the sleeping dog in Conrad’s metaphor is observed from outside and Verloc’s growls reiterate his orders, the animal/human hybrid in Agamben’s example maintains a relationship to the law, which yields its most unrestrained effects at the moment of its withdrawal. More generally, this ‘killable’ threshold existence is of a piece with 312 313 314 315

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 107. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 107.

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a political authority that does not succeed any natural state, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”316 as it may be, but requires such a ‘principle’ as the permanent potential of its own suspension. The possibility of a reduction to ‘animality’, to which laws no longer apply, is the very basis of an absolute claim to power: “What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured.”317 Who is able to designate whom as bare life becomes the defining political antagonism of the novel. The exercise of power beyond the allocation of identity and alterity is treated as the possibility to treat any notion of contractual order as void. What ensues is a struggle: it is contested who can be seen to be “dismantling the spatiotemporal distinction between the state of nature and the Commonwealth, and recasting the state of nature as a ‘principle internal to the City’.”318 The autocratic figure enacts such a ‘voiding’ first. In his ‘dismantling’ of Verloc’s demarcations, specifically, the reduction to a ‘natural’ status is prefigured as a loss of bodily agency. Verloc’s convulsive movement provides an individual correlative to the collective shock to be achieved by the “sufficiently startling—effective” (23) outrages. The “jolly good scare” (22) that is to become the principle of international politics is, first of all, written on the body of the mock-anarchist. Verloc is a test case; bare life, included in the political order by being excluded from any determinate norm, is to be barred from rearticulation in terms of individual or collective identity. The ensuing temporary “zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew.”319 As a result, rather than being cast out in a narrative border-crossing, ‘bare life’ becomes unamenable to signification. It follows that the type of reactionary power represented by Vladimir does not supersede depoliticised life in a new contract, but, in Agamben’s drastic formulation, ‘shatters it’ and disseminates it “into every individual body, making it what is at stake in political conflict.”320 For Vladimir’s model of power, this entails the need for an event illegible in terms of the familiar otherness of anarchist heterostereotypes. Such an uncertain change of state,

316 Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 89. 317 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110. 318 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 105. 319 Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 38. 320 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 124.

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at the same time, is designed to furnish an ever-expanding demand for reactionary politics. An ensuing call for order is then, however to be denied the closure of adequate institutional, legal, or executive expression. By analogy, Verloc’s reaction is presented as a ‘convulsive’, involuntary response which fails to coalesce into a determinate expression, much less a demand. To further this thematic literalisation of political ‘shock,’ the presentation of Verloc’s “collapsed coma” re-draws the limits of the body. As a crucial component of the drift from demarcation to exception, the subject reacting to Vladimir’s speech is shown to shift. In what is an escalation of his involuntary ‘doglike’ status, focalisation is not attributed to Verloc as a cohesive centre of consciousness. Instead, his response is externally focalised, “observed” (25), and presented as a mere recording of corporeal effects. In the course of this attribution of reactions to the observed body – irrespective of the identity selfascribed to that body – it is “[t]he lowered physiognomy of Mr Verloc” itself that “expressed a sombre and weary annoyance” (21). Whereas at the outset of the novel, Verloc perceives himself as a functional part of a “social mechanism” (11), the ‘collapsed coma’ induced by Vladimir’s speech anticipates a state in which a mechanism of response is outside of the control of the individual. Thus, as Verloc is “filled” (25) with a new set of reactions, he further internalises a mode of regulation. At the end of this introjection of an apparatus of control, “Mr Verloc obeyed woodenly, stony-eyed, and like an automaton whose face had been painted red. And this resemblance to a mechanical figure went so far that he had an automaton’s absurd air of being aware of the machinery inside of him.” (144) The ambassador’s techniques have yielded an effect more far-ranging than a mere dissolution of order: they are set up to reveal the dependence of their object – Verloc – on a limited set of foundational assumptions. Nothing remains of the secret agent’s fantasy of providing external reference to a social system, a function he attempted to exemplify with his voice spurring on the policeman. Rather, it is his own belief in a social mechanism of input and output that is literalised and relocated into the individual. The target of this shift processes and repeats information impinging on him from outside, yet no longer has recourse to an imagined collective identity to integrate these interests beyond his understanding. The exercise of power taking the place of a relational definition of identity and alterity is, furthermore, shown to be predicated on the creation of gaps in the (material and symbolic) order of the city. Under the conditions of the apparatus of demarcation, anything that resists inscription in the image of an exhaustively policed city emerges as “unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time” (63). In Vladimir’s post-binary mode, instead, such ‘holes’ are presented as the very precondition for control. In Agamben’s terms,

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“[f]ar from being a response to a normative lacuna, the state of exception appears as the opening of a fictitious lacuna in the order for the purpose of safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation.”321 To evoke this sense of safeguarding an elusive norm, then, pretensions to a totalising social mechanism and an ordered space no longer suffice. Consequently, as a result of the disruption of Verloc’s self-image as ‘protector’, Vladimir has effected a re-reading of the city in which the containment of the ‘park railings’ has been revoked. This loss of demarcation is provided with a correlative in Verloc’s domestic setting. Rather than an origin from which he can exert a function as a purveyor of alterity, the house in Brett Street fails to offer a material reification of a basic distinction between inside and outside. Mr Verloc made an effort, finished undressing, and got into bed. Down below in the quiet, narrow street measured footsteps approached the house, then died away unhurried and firm, as if the passer-by had started to pace out all eternity, from gas-lamp to gaslamp in a night without end; and the drowsy ticking of the old clock on the landing became distinctly audible in the bedroom. (43)

Given the impending attack on Greenwich as the spatialised standard of time, the connotations of ‘measured’ extend further than a slow or leisurely gait. What Verloc experiences here is that the possibility to conceive of the distance between the individual ‘illuminations’ as ‘measured’ according to shared standards is irretrievable. As a result, spatial distance between the lamps is converted into time: the interval between the fixed points in space begins to resemble the “drowsy ticking of the old clock,” the regularity of which “became” more or less marked depending on the listener’s perception. Set loose from shared and regular repetition imputed to the ‘social mechanism’, the time required to traverse the lanterns exceeds measure, restricting the certainty of determinate spatial distances with an “eternity” opening up in the margins of the now-temporal interval. A sense of intractable durée intrudes on the space outside of the domestic sphere mapped by an ordered placement of one gas-lamp after another.322 Such images of time as “flux and not a sum of discrete units,” as Stephen Kern puts it, are linked “with the theory that human consciousness is a stream and not a conglomeration of separate faculties or ideas.”323 This strand of

321 Agamben, State of Exception, 31. 322 Cf. Éric Alliez. “Aiôn.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Ed. Barbara Cassin. Trans. Steven Rendall et al. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2014. 24–30. 30. 323 Stephen Kern. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Harvard, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2003.

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modern temporality does feature in the novel — however, The Secret Agent appends to the temporality of ‘human consciousness’ the question whose consciousness is disclosed as an undifferentiated stream, and by whom. Verloc’s perception of time, unmoored from shared, preogressive linearity, begins to affect inside and outside equally, the measure of the footsteps being reproduced by the clock made “distinctly audible” (43). This transfers the outside into the domestic sphere, as the infinite divisibility of the period between the audible footsteps is reproduced in the interim between each “drowsy ticking” (43). This also proleptically points to Verloc’s death, during which his blood is perceived by Winnie (after severely delayed decodings) to proceed “with a sound growing fast and furious like the pulse of an insane clock. At its highest speed this ticking changed into a continuous sound of trickling” (194). The perception of continuity made possible by the transformation of rhythmic repetition into a “continuous sound” (194) dispenses with the illusory continuity to which the adherents of an identity/alterity split are beholden. What appeared as a homogenous social order is no longer available as the indivisible “eternity” between feeble (separate) gas-lamps opens up, disclosing the uninterpretable gaps between individual centres of consciousness and their limited constructions of social order. The diffraction of what appeared as a homogenous, protected social sphere is granted its second spatial equivalent as Verloc approaches the window of his bedroom in the wake of the confrontation with the ambassador: he pulled up violently the venetian blind, and leaned his forehead against the cold window-pane—a fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man. Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force approaching to positive bodily anguish. [. . .] The prospect was as black as the window-pane against which he was leaning his forehead. And suddenly the face of Mr Vladimir, clean-shaved and witty, appeared enhaloed in the glow of its rosy complexion like a sort of pink seal, impressed on the fatal darkness. This luminous and mutilated vision was so ghastly physically that Mr Verloc started away from the window, letting down the venetian blind with a great rattle. Discomposed and speechless with the apprehension of more such visions, he beheld his wife re-enter the room and get into bed in a calm business-like manner which made him feel hopelessly lonely in the world. Mrs Verloc expressed her surprise at seeing him up yet. (42)

Verloc not only mistakes his own reflection for the figure of authority, but that image is poised on the very threshold between the erstwhile security of bourgeois stability and the “night without end” (43) outside of its confines. The distinction of the private and the political is divested of its comforting dichotomy. As a result, the secret agent is (in Agamben’s terms) forced “to see these

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oppositions not as ‘di-chotomies’ but as ‘di-polarities,’ not substantial, but tensional. [. . .] [I]t is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances. Then you may suddenly have zones of indecidability or indifference. The state of exception is one of these zones.”324 In this instance, the zone is transformed from a method of political intervention into an enforced mode of perception.325 Vladimir’s speech having suspended any semblance of autonomy, in its aftermath the topology of inside and outside becomes tenuous. The notion of a ‘substantial’ place of interpersonal intimacy is no longer tenable, dispensing with Verloc’s status of having “no other idea than that of being loved for himself” (210). What is more, the reification of identity provided by the house is now only set apart from its environment by a mere “fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man” (42). The city without a framework of self and Other is disclosed in its materiality, which was previously only visible as soon as the narrator presented the “matter that never dies” (11) exceeding the centre of consciousness. Rather than a condition unveiled in flashes of external focalisation, in the wake of Verloc’s speech the “thingness of things in its unconditioned autonomy”326 becomes a matter of the character’s view of the world. What is more, this unconditioned status is also shown to be inexhaustible by the plethora of adjectives which are mobilised to contain it. Whereas during his initial urban sojourn, Verloc is shown to rely on the assumption of a city regulated by “whatever highly efficient authority” (11), the urban conceived as mere accumulation exceeds labels. Outside of a presumption of ‘authoritative’ order, urban space is diffracted into what Deleuze calls a “serial form,” which is “necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two series.”327 Dislodged from the background assumption of a fundamental material and political accord, then, the serial qualities assigned (‘cold’, ‘black’, etc.) and the series of components discerned in the city (‘bricks’, ‘slate’, ‘stones’, etc.) run concurrently. It is not disorder that is disclosed, consequently, but the impossibility of a fixed identity extended to the environment. The attempt to render urban materiality and the parallel attempt to ascribe traits to it are presented, respectively, as a matter of a repetition of equivalents. Purporting to describe the same city in a

324 Giorgio Agamben. “Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, a Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life.” Interview by Ulrich Raulff. German Law Journal 05 (2004). 609–614. 612. 325 Giorgio Agamben, “Private Life,” 612. 326 Bill Brown. Other Things. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. 39. 327 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 36.

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state of breakdown, the series are set apart from one another by the “accumulation” that mediates between them while belonging to neither. This mediator interspersed in the middle of both series features as a “supernumerary and nonsituated given,”328 an empty term across which connections between both equivalential chains can be established. Or rather, they can be established by the reader: there is little indication that Verloc is able to negotiate the heterogeneous serial logic of the city. His status in the apparatus of demarcation, after all, rests on the assumption that just as the city is ultimately subject to an “efficient authority” (11), his own status coalesces into one unified identity, despite its own serial ascriptions as anarchist, police agent and embassy informer. This premise is contrasted with a city that can only be perceived as an extended variability of traits. The ‘inhospitable’ outside emerges as a superfluity of possible relations between two series that disclose their disparity with each reiteration, establishing a movement of repetition with a difference that cannot be concluded by a final term. The concluding element in each accumulation (‘inhospitable’ and ‘stones’, respectively) does not occupy a privileged position with regard to its predecessors — and thus signals the possibility of ever-more potential variations to be added. This diffracted seriality resists interpretation by the paternalistic ‘protector’ of the social mechanism; it cannot be reduced to “the identity of the person as a well-founded agency; the identities of bodies as the base; and finally, the identity of language as the power of denoting everything else.”329 At the same time, however, the serial city cannot be consigned to alterity since, as the strategies of demarcation have shown, political Otherness depends on being disavowed and projected onto abjected radicals. As opposed to such projection, the series of the city are conspicuously heterogeneous, not only internally but also in their relation to each other across the intermediate ‘accumulation’. Thus, rather than included in an identity or excluded as an anarchic outside, the ‘inhospitable’ status defies differentiation. The ambassador’s strategies have produced a “threshold of undecidability,”330 in relation to which Verloc cannot clearly place himself. What emerges in this state of exception is once more a “threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable.”331 Thus, what the attack on ‘science’ is to accomplish for society at large is anticipated in Verloc’s perception, according to which the authority of Vladimir manifests as series of impressions which do not coalesce into a determinate sign.

328 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 50. 329 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 292. 330 Agamben, State of Exception, 23. 331 Agamben, State of Exception, 23.

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Crucially, the originator of the state of exception is not invested with a detached position from which the urban assemblage could be reconstituted. The position of intermediate power rather disallows an authoritative guarantee “that there is at base a sameness against which variation can be observed or deduced.”332 After all, Vladimir’s face appears “enhaloed in the glow” (42), emerging on the “fragile film” (42) between inside and outside. The city is seen through the ambassador’s image. As a result, Vladimir appears as a liminal “vision,” occupying the ‘threshold of indeterminacy’ rather than replacing it with determinate, if oppressive, authority. As the city fails to cohere, and the instigator of that process refuses to reduce urban complexity, space is presented as an accumulation of matter that, in Harman’s terms, “cannot be exhausted by any sum total of specific experiences or linguistic propositions, but to some extent resists all perception and all analysis, which forever fail to exhaust it.”333 The city thus rendered a space of exception is not meaningless, but harbours unfathomed depths — which Verloc as key actor in the policing of controlled Otherness can no longer sort into a symbolic framework. Things in their enumerative logic of ‘unconditioned autonomy’ resist the status of ‘substantial dichotomies’ indicated by Agamben.334 Matter is placed beyond the purview of protagonists previously involved in upholding (and, in a second step, presupposing) a complicity with a semio-material environment in their maintenance of a largely undisturbed identity. However, this state of undistinguished materiality is not an ontological status disclosed once the tenuous assertions of identity have dissolved. Instead, it bears emphasising that constructions of selfhood (which kept at bay insights into uninterpretable urban material) are dismantled as an exercise of power. The ordered city set against anarchists at the frontier is disturbed by Vladimir as the figure capable of stripping away the protagonist’s pretensions to political identity. In this, the presentation of the arbiter of power as a “pink seal” interspersed between inside and outside supports Agamben’s modification of the state of exception, particularly its departure from Carl Schmitt’s version of suspended law. For the erstwhile “intellectual spokesman” of National Socialism,335 after all, a sovereign “unites the legal and the non-legal by means of an extralegal decision

332 Paul Patton. “Deterritorialization + Politics.” The Deleuze Dictionary. Ed. Adrian Parr. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 72–74. 74. 333 Graham Harman. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Alresford: Zero Books, 2012. 237. 334 Cf. Agamben, “Interview with Giorgio Agamben.” 335 Chris Thornhill. Political Theory in Germany: An Introduction. Cambridge, Oxford, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2000. 55.

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‘having the force of law’.”336 This force of law attributed to the sovereign decision enables an order to persist even during a period in which the law itself is suspended. Schmitt emphasises that even in the absence of established ordering principles, certainty is assured by this sovereign instance, which itself is not bound to the rules it guarantees. In Schmitt’s Political Theology, then, “there cannot be a pure violence – that is, a violence absolutely outside the law – because in the state of exception it is included in the law through its very exclusion.”337 The authority deciding on the exception in this case stands outside of codified norms while, at the same time, remaining bound to the legal order by guaranteeing the latter’s continued existence and applicability. That is, the “exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical element – the decision in absolute purity.”338 Against this authoritarian notion of a pure decision maintaining norms by temporarily suspending them, Agamben (following Benjamin) points out the possibility of the exception becoming the rule, with a ‘normal’ application of the rule perpetually disallowed. If the fiction of a merely temporary distinction between the normal state and the state of exception is repudiated – and with it trust in a “sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists”339 – there is no guarantee that a difference between both states will be re-established at all. While Agamben also foregrounds the suspension of laws, his work denies that the exception to any norm will, ultimately, be “grounded in and committed to some sort of juridical, constitutional order.”340 Rather than any possibility to “maintain the law in its very suspension,” what emerges from this permanent suspension is “force-of-law,” an anomic zone in which a relation to the law is maintained, yet never made explicit.341 The topology established after Verloc encounters the new ambassador bears out a permanent anomic state of this kind, with the character rendered incapable of assuming that a ‘normal situation’ will be reconstituted. There is no ‘decisionist’ instance that could decide

336 Stephen Humphreys. “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception.” The European Journal of International Law 17 (2006). 677–687. 680. 337 Agamben, State of Exception, 54. 338 Carl Schmitt. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans George Schwab. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1985. 14. 339 Schmitt, Political Theology, 13. 340 Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 157. 341 Agamben, State of Exception, 59.

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on norm and exception.342 Instead, Vladimir has been shown to be “defined in his being by the exception,”343 by the attempt to suspend extant laws while preventing the emergence of new, explicit laws to take their place. Not only does his mode of power institute this status for others, but – in his appearance as the mediator between Verloc’s domestic sphere and the outside – the arbiter of the state of exception is himself associated with the “topological structure” of “[b]eingoutside, and yet belonging.”344 He is, thus, both placed outside of the normative sphere and appears inside it by having suspended Verloc’s self-definitions; Verloc, in turn, is positioned inside, yet confronted with an outside beyond an ‘ordering’ decision. He remains subject to the possibility of being divested of his self-identifications in the manner of the reduction to animal and machinic existence in the embassy. Thus, the literary incarnation of a state of exception, rather than designating a new, authoritative regime – in an act of decision that would institute the certainty of new foundations or a set of explicit commands345 – manifests as the “seal” upon the failure of demarcation itself. The narrative presents an indeterminate status between inside and outside which applies both to the originator and to those subject to the potential annulment of norms. If the outside space cannot be connected to a generalised alterity against which, in this case, the illusion of a stable domestic sphere can be defined, the relational topological structure threatens to be replaced by interchangeable objects. These can be enumerated – “bricks, slates, and stones” – but not narrated. Accordingly, non-demarcated space not only disturbs the internal focalisation of the narrated world, but also threatens eventfulness as such: the possibility of a border-crossing is on the verge of being replaced with the mere accumulation of nigh-synonyms, a paradigmatic chain with minimal variation. As per Andrea Wilden, “the delimitation against an outside allows for the temporary fixing of meaning and the closure of a self-identical discourse, system, or the creation of a collective identity claiming universality.”346 Instead of such

342 Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér. The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1991. 405. As per Heller and Fehér, Schmitt’s notion of ‘decisionism’ characterises “political theories with at least three features in common: they attribute central importance to decision in political matters; they conceive of sovereignty as the ultimate power of decision; and, finally, they see in the exceptional state (the state of emergency) the purest manifestation as well as the model of operation of that ultimate power.” 343 Agamben, State of Exception, 35. 344 Agamben, State of Exception, 35. 345 Cf. Sergei Prozorov. Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 86. 346 Andrea Wilden. Die Konstruktion von Fremdheit. Eine interaktionistisch-konstruktivistische Perspektive. Münster: Waxmann, 2013. 242. My trans. Orig. quote: “Einerseits ermöglicht die

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delimitation, the arbiter of autocracy ushers in a state of undecidability, both reflecting the protagonist and supplementing a “mutilated vision” (42). At one and the same time he is superimposed on the outside, reflects the inside, and hovers on the threshold between the two. It is the impossibility of attributing a position to the ambassador – and his effect of laying bare internal fissures that already structure the Verloc household – that place the “pink seal” (42) outside of Schmitt’s authoritative sovereign fiction. Since the outside becomes disclosed as inexhaustible materiality and the inside space is revealed, on Winnie’s side, as a contract of material security “loyally paid for on her part” (179), the intervention of Vladimir makes conspicuous an ongoing suspension of residual norms rather than dictating new ones in their place. In this way, the scene offers the topological equivalent to the application of power on a threshold where “inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.”347 The ‘pink seal’ as a structural equivalent to the state of exception does not inflict upon Verloc an explicit, hierarchical injunction. Instead, it functions as an objective correlative to the very impossibility of making sense by establishing a distinction. In addition to the individual refraction of a domestic sphere, the novel does suggest a collective response to the feigned terrorist attack instigated by Vladimir. While the dismantling of Verloc’s identity has provided a model case for the state of exception, the response of the British public sphere to an actual event departs from the predictions of Vladimir’s ‘philosophy of bomb throwing’. After all, the ambassador has been shown to attribute a linear model of communication to the “ingenuity of journalists” (26), which is to be disrupted by his intervention. In this unidirectional account, media attempt to “persuade their public” (26). This process is to be disturbed by the failure to convince their readers that “any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy” (26). Whereas Vladimir, thus, doubts the capacity of mass media to come up with and communicate an explanation for the Greenwich attack, the description of the actual aftermath of the explosion suggests a different response: In front of the great doorway a dismal row of newspaper sellers standing clear of the pavement dealt out their wares from the gutter. It was a raw, gloomy day of the early spring; and the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men, harmonised excellently with

Abgrenzung zu einem Außen die vorübergehende Fixierung von Bedeutung und Schließung eines mit sich selbst identischen Diskurses, Systems oder auch die Herstellung einer (auch kollektiven) Identität mit dem Anspruch auf Universalität.” 347 Agamben, State of Exception, 23.

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the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers’ ink. The posters, maculated with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone. The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded distribution. (59)

The effect of the simulated anarchist attack is a ‘disregarded distribution’ of phrases that do not require individual interpretative engagement. Far from an eventful disruption of a stable collective identity, this is a process of generating information which – once set apart from individual perception – functions in a manner that no longer relies on demarcations. Instead of ‘persuasion’, the journalistic account is shown to exacerbate the impossibility of differentiating between autostereotype and heterostereotype, raising Verloc’s failures of differentiation to the status of a collective media process. The ensuing loss of demarcation is exacerbated until mass-cultural signs, their carrier media, their mode of inscription, the city, and its inhabitants exchange traits. In this process, the ‘rags of the dirty men’ can pejoratively refer to (1) the inferior newspapers sold by the vendors, describe (2) their attire, or even point to (3) ‘rags’ as a mass noun; in this final reading, the groups of dispersed men themselves are in a state of “disregarded distribution.” The ‘effect of indifference’, meanwhile, can be taken to self-referentially reflect the absence of distinctions between these three possible series of metonymical signs, which mirrors the ‘indifference’ of mass-media communication regarding its individual participants. The explosion, designed to disturb the certainties of British society, is, first of all, traced quantitatively. Its effect is ascertained by the ‘eruption’ of printing and the distribution of the “real reality of mass media.”348 Specifically, as Luhmann points out, by disrupting direct contact between sender and recipient, mass media perform their own systemic differentiation of self-reference and external reference. As a result, a distinct code emerges: “the code available to the system of media is the distinction between information and non-information. The system can work with information. Information is the positive value.”349 Applying this code to the aftermath of the terrorist attack, the dispersal of information is traced internally, where the explosion appears as fluctuations in the information transmitted, traced by dint of the ‘trade in afternoon papers’.

348 Niklas Luhmann. Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 12. My trans. Orig. quote: “Die Realität der Massenmedien, ihre reale Realität könnte man sagen, besteht in ihren eigenen Operationen. Es wird gedruckt und gefunkt. Es wird gelesen.” 349 Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 36. My trans. Orig. quote: “Der Code des Systems der Massenmedien ist die Unterscheidung von Information und Nichtinformation. Mit Information kann das System arbeiten. Information ist also der positive Wert, der Designationswert.”

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Yet, observation is also turned outwards. This external reference of the media system is not, however, directed at the epistemological impasse of the seemingly unmotivated terrorist attack, but rather at the concomitant potential recipients of information pertaining to it. According to this vantage point from the inside of the “tapestry” of circulating signs, what the trade in information is compared to is not the gravity of the event in question; such upticks in informational value, after all, are already measured in terms of the eruption of signs. Instead, the momentary distribution of ‘papers’ is placed “in comparison with the swift, constant march of foot traffic.” The media observes its environment only with regard to the question whether the perishable commodity of new information has been received or not — the fine points of the ambassador’s attack on science do not enter into this calculus. There is no referential connection to the events of Greenwich Park, so that whether the media reports on it or not is irrelevant from this externally focalised perspective. That the view is momentarily uninflected by protagonists is central, since this shift demonstrates the production of selfreference and external reference as a distinction that takes place within the system of media itself. There can be no alterity in the environment of this system (after all, Luhmann asks, what would be ‘external’ and ‘self’ in an environment?).350 What counts is “that which appears as reality for them and for others on account of them. [. . .] In this understanding, the activities of mass media are not merely seen as a sequence of operations but as a sequence of observations.”351 The system of media reproduces itself and its difference from an environment — yet this observed environment is not the act of terror, but the public, in its informed or uninformed state. The media, thus, cannot be disturbed by the event from outside its purview. What Vladimir intends as the equivalent to a bomb thrown “into pure mathematics” (25) is immediately absorbed and integrated into the circulation of information, ‘harmonised’ by the impersonal mediasphere. Consequently, the sequence envisioned by Vladimir – an event takes place, a “howl from all these intellectual idiots” is raised, which, finally, “is bound to help forward the labours of the Milan conference” (25) – falls short. Contrary to such ‘shock politics’, absorption of uncertainty is the crucial function of second-order observations by mass media, based

350 Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 17. 351 Niklas Luhmann. Die Realität der Massenmedien, 14. My trans. Orig. quote: “Man kann aber noch in einem zweiten Sinne von der Realität der Massenmedien sprechen, nämlich im Sinne dessen, was für sie oder durch sie für andere als Realität erscheint. In Kantscher Terminologie gesprochen: Die Massenmedien erzeugen eine transzendentale Illusion. Bei diesem Verständnis wird die Tätigkeit der Massenmedien nicht einfach als Sequenz von Operationen angesehen, sondern als Sequenz von Beobachtungen, oder genauer: von beobachtenden Operationen.”

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as they are on constitutive instability.352 Instead of authoritatively ordained knowledge, the distribution soiling “grimy sky” (59) and “muddy streets” (59) alike, in Luhmann’s terms, replaces “monuments” with “moments in which a certain level of knowledge can be assumed; instead of opinions, one now has information that does not state how one could act correctly and consensually but fully suffices to reproduce itself.”353 Society receives the resulting information as reality — it appears as encompassing “tapestries” felt as fact, a process measured according to the (self-referentially appointed) task of including as much “foot traffic” within the dispersal of “rubbishy sheets of paper” as possible. When articles after Winnie’s death note that “[a]n impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair” (224), this is not indicative of a disturbance, but rather of the media absorbing ‘disturbing’ events into its own ‘leading distinction’354 of information and non-information, and of the degrees of circulation by means of which the former is tracked. In this model, noting the absence of information is sufficient. By constraining external reference to the calculus of ‘disregarded distribution’, and self-reference to ‘brisk trade’, the newspapers have sufficient options at their disposal to deal with the lacunae of Winnie’s narrative. The intimation of ‘destiny’ allows for possible affiliated information to be attached to the ‘mystery’ as long as the effect of novelty is kept up; interpretative options are communicated in bulk, pre-selected for possible further operations processing the self-created enigma. Walter Benjamin’s description of a shift from ‘storytelling’ to the selective mechanism of the media – information – attributes to newspapers the “claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appears ‘understandable in itself.’” As a result, “no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation.”355 In The Secret Agent, this fundamental gesture of explicability extends to the communication of the impossibility of an explanation. Whether a motivation is ascribed or causality recovered becomes secondary in the ongoing circulation of signifiers in a closed loop. ‘Shot through with explanation’ as any sign has to be to enter that loop, the ambassador’s 352 Cf. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 1103. 353 Niklas Luhmann. Theory of Society. Vol. 2. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012. 319. 354 In systems theory, one can speak of a ‘leading difference’ when all further theoretical decisions are organised by this underlying distinction. Cf. Georg Kneer. Rationalisierung, Disziplinierung und Differenzierung: Sozialtheorie und Zeitdiagnose bei Habermas, Foucault und Luhmann. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996. 309. 355 Walter Benjamin. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000. Ed. Dorothy J. Hale. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. 362–378. 365.

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scheme has, ultimately, not disrupted the functioning of British ‘society’ whatsoever. His aim of setting up an event eluding conventional means of interpretation, instead, is pre-empted by a media system that can work through the inexplicable by applying its leading distinction. Instead of communal time being out of joint after the the attack on the meridian, the media system’s distinctions affirm its ability to at least keep track of its own temporality. That is to say: old facts pass over into non-information, and new input is self-referentially transformed into news; if there is a remnant of time on a collective scale in The Secret Agent, these processes enable it. The ambassador’s suspicion that “[e]very newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away” (24) is, thus, borne out by a system that dispenses with the primacy of hermeneutics. The bourgeoning popular media associate signs and their referents in a distribution that leaves no room for individual responses — let alone a gap to be overcome in interpretative efforts. As a result, within the diegesis the simulation of an anarchist act of terror fails to exert its intended effect. It is not perceived as an attack on the “sacrosanct fetish of today” (23) or on the “wooden-faced panjandrum” of science (23). The minor “eruption” (59) of signs in the sphere of newspaper circulation offers a metonymical containment of the shock of the attack. Mass media, which the ambassador intended to merely transport his poetics of uncertainty, function as an adaptable system, providing its own distinctions of informational value whilst remaining impervious to any reference outside its purview. In other words: once the event is news, it is already contained. This distribution of information does elide distinctions between identity and alterity, but not in the manner of a traumatic break with a homogenous discourse that could be attributed to any one dominant social system. Instead, the circulation of information is presented as an elision of distance — it functions according to a logic of metonymical proximity. As Cole puts it, “Conrad presents the language of the press in a relation of adjacency to the reader’s consciousness (rather than as lodging within the mind, encased by it).”356 Signs, first and foremost, refer to each other, in an imitation of the characteristics demonstrated by Stevie’s artwork. Like the ‘coruscating circles’, metonymical cross-reference creates proximity of signifiers within one and the same system, on the basis of a homogenous selective mechanism. There is, hence, no need to grapple with the epistemological implications of an event happening ‘out there’, in a sphere to which external reference would be possible. Due to this overdetermined proximity of its elements, the reality of mass-media is, paradoxically, connoted with

356 Cole, Violet Hour, 137.

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unmediated truth; it emerges as an instant transferral by means of ‘printer’s ink’, smeared on sheets, sellers, and potential readers alike. This immediacy makes any further attempts to ‘explain’ the attack appear fatuous. The hermeneutic crisis envisaged by Vladimir comes to nothing if interpretation, strictly speaking, no longer takes place. The simulation of an anarchist act of terror is absorbed by the media system. Its capability of replacing redundant information with new information contributes to the novel’s version of “acceleration, expansion of simultaneity into the non-simultaneous.”357 While a political Other is not readily apparent in this self-enclosed circulation, the effect of absorptive media is not, however, a breakdown of alterity in the manner plotted by the ambassador. Vladimir, after all, plans a collapse of collective identity and a failing attempt to transfer its characteristics to a controllable Other. This breakdown of demarcation is to yield a catch-all political category for any potential transgression. ‘Anarchists’, in his vision of international politics, furnish “symbolically generalized media of communication”358 — a multiscale indicator of unrest ultimately agreed upon by a repressive compact among states. By contrast, the novel makes clear that the political as a separate sphere is no longer in charge of determining what is ‘symbolically generalisable’ in the first place. It is the mass-mediated loss of demarcation, instead, that both pre-empts and fully enacts this loss of boundaries. The press precludes the search for any alterity whatsoever, even in the broadly sketched reactionary terms planned by the ambassador. Rather than betokening a future collapse of political difference, the state of exception has, thus, already attained an equivalent in the indifferent circulation of information in Conrad’s London.

4.3.2 The Assistant Commissioner: Contained States of Exception The Assistant Commissioner is associated with an in-between version of both models of politics discussed in this study. That is, while he does preserve illusions of social order in a post-foundationalist manner, he does so only for a selected few, limited social spheres. Both features of demarcation (cf. chapter 2)

357 Cf. Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 44. My trans. Orig. quote: “Hinter den viel diskutierten Eigenarten moderner Zeitstrukturen wie Dominanz des Vergangenheit/ZukunftSchemas, Uniformisierung der Weltzeit, Beschleunigung, Ausdehnung der Gleichzeitigkeit auf Ungleichzeitiges stecken also vermutlich neben der Geldwirtschaft die Massenmedien.” 358 Niklas Luhmann. “Einführende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie symbolisch generalisierter Kommunikationsmedien.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3 (1974). 236–255. 236.

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are provided by his investigation: (1) he draws a distinction between a cultural inside and an anarchic environment, (2) whilst facilitating the re-entry of controllable and representable figures of anarchism into that self-created, ordered place. This assurance of the certainties of identity and alterity is, however, inculcated from a position which itself does not abide by such binary order. Instead, the character is provided with the political agency to dissolve extant boundaries between self and Other at any time. This ability to suspend the distinction between order and anarchy and conduct his investigation from an uncertain ‘zone of indistinction’ will be shown to be in keeping with the state of exception. The AC’s suspension of identities is not just imposed on others. Rather, this second version of the state of exception in The Secret Agent is itself performed from an in-between position. As soon as he enters the urban environment, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to act from a position of “evil freedom” (109), in which he is capable of suspending any ascriptions of identity or alterity. In terms of post-foundationalist politics, the character is, thus, associated with a double perspective: for a privileged group, the AC inculcates “new foundations for political life,” while the narrative presentation of his method simultaneously draws attention to the “constructedness, plurality, imperfection and ambiguity of these new foundations.”359 While enforcing a state of exception for others and acting from a radically uncertain position himself, residual certainties are enabled for those spheres in which the character has a personal and professional stake. In what follows, I will trace the types of exception presupposed by the Assistant Commissioner – the imperialist and the urban state of exception – before briefly indicating the reconstitution of limited demarcations. 4.3.2.1 The Imperialist State of Exception The first manifestation of the Assistant Commissioner’s version of the state of exception is presented by the dissolution of boundaries between the metropolis and colonial space. The character was formerly a policeman in “a tropical colony” where “[h]e had been very successful in tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret societies among the natives” (74). The novel does not represent him as a normative figure of colonial rule, however. Instead, as the internal elaboration of the institutional sphere in chapter 4.1.1.2 has already indicated, the AC is himself associated with stereotypes of colonial Otherness.

359 Patrick Hayden. Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2016. 35.

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He displays inscrutable ‘idolatry’ “bent over a table [. . .] as if worshipping an enormous double inkstand” (72) whilst also partaking in the circulation of cannibal imagery throughout the novel: his instinct for the discovery of “secrets locked in guilty breasts [. . .] fed, since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material” (87). Instead of relying on the discourses of anarchy produced by the apparatus of demarcation, his very reframing of the city as a colonial space grants the character the “evil freedom” (109) required to gather information himself. By falling back on this background, thus, the basic topological structure of the state of exception can be inculcated: “the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception.”360 In this case, a specifically colonialist transfer is presented, as a mode of ‘exceptional’ executive power is applied in a domestic, British setting. As Anderson and Killingray have shown, colonised spaces were historically treated as ‘testing grounds’ for technologies of power.361 In The Secret Agent, similarly, the imperial centre is overlaid by the normalised exception wielded in the supposed periphery. A set of elements of the policed colony, that is to say, has “transgressed its spatiotemporal boundaries and now, overflowing outside them, is starting to coincide with the normal order.”362 The AC, thus, no longer requires essentialist notions of identity and alterity in the manner still upheld by Heat. What is more, he also imports the suspension of laws by means of which colonial authority can proceed as a matter of executive decision. As the ‘Imperial type’ turns inward, towards the internal metropolitan reality,363 the juridically empty space created for the colonised can be generalised as a technique of domestic regulation, in which any assertion of identity is subject to potential revocation at any time. The stylistic experiments of literary modernism, as per Fredric Jameson, register the unrepresentable totality of Empire. That is, the impossibility to visualise and spatialise the global economic system finds its literary complement in images of boundlessness. Thus, verbal accounts of uninterpretable vastness 360 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37. 361 Regarding this “social regulation,” cf. David M. Anderson and David Killingray. “Introduction.” Consent, Coercion, and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire, 1830–1940. Ed. David M. Anderson and David Killingray. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991.1–17. 10. “Whether the East End of London was policed with any more consent in the 1890s than were the poorer areas of Bombay, Durban or Melbourne is to be doubted.” Further, “legislative control in these areas frequently gave colonial police greater powers than would be acceptable in London.” 362 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 38. 363 Fredric Jameson. “Modernism and Imperialism.” The Modernist Papers. London and New York: Verso, 2007. 152–170. 163.

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derive from the spatial totality of a colonialist regime, from the fact that “a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere,” in colonies whose life world remains “unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power.”364 The limit of metropolitan understanding is, then, brought back in altered form: as “modernist ‘style’,” which becomes “the marker and the substitute (the ‘tenant-lieu,’ or place-holding, in Lacanian language) of the unrepresentable totality.”365 Over and above any stylistic placeholding, however, Conrad’s early modernist narrative literalises such irrepressible yet unimaginable imbrication of the metropolis with an imperialist system. The Secret Agent allows for an explicit, non-metaphorical negotiation of elements of imperial rule, an application of colonial law (and its withdrawal) to the dissolving metropolitan space. Specifically, the AC presents the possibility of exerting power from the ‘margins’, in line with what Daly identifies as narrative work to “make imperialist expansion, and thus the destruction of the premodern, an adventure.”366 Instead of, however, expending residual heroism on an essential, pre-given ‘green world’,367 the margins themselves are a conspicuous construction. They are the result of a transfer of traits to briefly reconstitute the possibility of a pre-modern sphere in need of heroic exertions. The city as wilderness is the condition for selective control. In the case of the Assistant Commissioner, the totality of the colonial system is, thus, not unrepresentable in the manner presumed by Jameson. Rather, the character wields specialised knowledge. Although, due to the “systematic occultation of the colony from metropolis,” the “truth of metropolitan experience is not visible in the daily life of the metropolis itself,” his mode of investigation can apply an inofficial classificatory scheme.368 By introducing the language of colonial administration into the city, the Assistant Commissioner can both effect a loss of demarcations between identity and alterity and, at the same time, enforce a mode of reordering — the coloniser’s gaze brought to bear on British subjects. In connection with this police figure, the novel, then, presents ‘imperialist nostalgia’ as a strategy of reasserting a ‘condition of primitiveness’ in order to motivate dispersed ‘civilising’ gestures no longer bound to a specific territory.369

364 Jameson. “Modernism and Imperialism,” 157. 365 Jameson. “Modernism and Imperialism,” 163. 366 Nicholas Daly. Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. 118. 367 Cf. Daly. Modernism, 118. 368 Fredric Jameson. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003). 675–718. 700. 369 Cf. Dennis Walder. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. 109.

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Consequently, fragments of imperial romance are inscribed into the novel of urban dissolution; however, instead of relying on stable formulae of “empire and the English imperial endeavour, augmented with stereotypical characters,”370 the case of the colonial policeman at home involves the construction of racialised alterity. According to Purdon, the character represents “an earlier form of imperial law-enforcer, whose authority is predicated on individual action rather than the imposition of disciplinary systems.”371 While this is an apt description, the AC’s mode of enforcement is not quite supplanted by “rationalizing techniques” and the “technologies of surveillance” associated with Heat.372 After all, as shown above, the apparatus of control maintained by Heat is no longer capable of producing demarcation of alterity, since it fails to furnish communicable, transgressive figures. What is more, Heat’s policing essentialises its own foundational assumptions, deriving a personal and collective identity from his opposition to the default Otherness of the anarchists. Colonial authority dispenses with such ‘retroactive positing’ of certainties in the wake of their construction. Instead, the Assistant Commissioner turns inwards, investigating the institutional production of identity and alterity. Thus, confronted with his subordinate, the AC is shown to examine the institutional narrative presented to him, assuming the position of a second-order-observer who can “observe what a first-order observer cannot observe.”373 In order to analyse the “syntaxes of self and other”374 elaborated within the institution, he is shown to be capable of bringing to bear his background of colonial law enforcement in order to, first and foremost, suspend their validity.

370 Linda Dryden. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. Basingstoke and London: Palgrave, 2000. 37. 371 James Purdon. “Literature and Global Policing.” The Sage Handbook of Global Policing. Ed. Ben Bradford et al. Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/Melbourne: Sage, 2016. 136–151. 143. 372 Purdon, “Literature and Global Policing,” 143. 373 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. 18. 374 Richard Harvey Brown. “Social Reality as Narrative Text.” Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1992. 118–142. 122. “To institutionalize a behavior means not only to regularize its performance but also to provide models, normative justifications, and sanctions. In this sense social institutions, like paradigms in science, are expressive vehicles for exemplary definitions of normalcy and deviance, recipes of duties and obligations, and syntaxes of self and other.”

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While Heat is still involved in a presentation of his normative status, the Assistant Commisioner is shown to dismantle the differentiations between order and anarchy put forward by his subordinate: His memory evoked a certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the distant colony whom it was a tradition for the successive Colonial Governors to trust and make much of as a firm friend and supporter of the order and legality established by white men; whereas, when examined sceptically, he was found out to be principally his own good friend, and nobody else’s [. . .] He took some finding out. He was physically a big man, too, and (allowing for the difference of colour, of course) Chief Inspector Heat’s appearance recalled him to the memory of his superior. It was not the eyes nor yet the lips exactly. It was bizarre. But does not Alfred Wallace relate in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst the Aru Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage with a sooty skin a peculiar resemblance to a dear friend at home? (87)

A sweeping collapse of distinctions is introduced to overturn the differences between the subversive figure of colonial alterity and the representative of the British police department. To achieve this, the limits of imperialist imagination are folded back into the imperial centre: the inconceivable totality of non-Western rule becomes a trait of the city. Rather than merely ‘unimaginable’, however, Empire comes with its own strategies of simplification. That is, by condensing colonial resistance to a single figure of rebellious self-interest, the position of Otherness imported from the colonies is rendered controllable. Thus, the relationship of similarity alleged between the self-interested, yet easily detected transgressiveness of the colonial subject and Heat allows for the metaphorisation of the colonial metonym and, by extension, a controlled administration of knowable alterity. The Assistant Commissioner establishes the observation of such similarity on the basis of a levelling of distinctions. The remembered passage from Alfred Wallace’s account of the Malay Archipelago refers to a brief moment of ‘reverse ethnology’375 instigated by a ‘native’: “One funny old man, who bore a ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home.”376 While the description already suggests a detachment characteristic for a report that closes with extended race theory, the passage does briefly recount the Aru islanders’ incredulity in the face of British customs, relations to material objects, and (‘quoted’ at some length) the English language. “‘Unglung!’ said he, ‘who ever heard of such a name? – ang-lang – anger-lang – that can’t be the name of your country; 375 Cf. Michael North. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 44. 376 Alfred Russel Wallace. The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise: A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature. London: Macmillan, 1869. 247.

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you are playing with us.’”377 Before restoring the hegemonic epistemology of the British scientific gaze, that is, Wallace allows for a brief moment in which ‘England’ is foregrounded as a sign, a reiterated signifier made as strange as the habits associated with it. This brief dissemination into ‘ang-lang’ and ‘angerlang’ allows the Other to resemble the familiar, only to, conversely, render incomprehensible the familiar from the perspective of “ludicrous resemblance.” As North puts it, Wallace’s anecdote conveys that in this confrontation of mutual incomprehension “the conditions of colonial exploration can just as easily erase as solidify the difference.”378 In the case of the Assistant Commissioner, however, the alternation of erasure and solidification of differences is the very basis for the application of police power rather than its ironic reversal. The Assistant Commissioner intermittently acts from a marginal position in which he is never in danger of being ensconced by a hard-and-fast identity. Instead, he is able to redescribe characteristics depending on the exigencies of the situation, making Heat resemble an Aru Islander, or else (analeptically) ascribing to a native chief an illegitimate self-interest in excess of ‘order and legality’. In each case, he is shown to effect an estrangement from a “tradition of trust” (87), both on the part of previous Colonial Governors and his predecessors in the police department. The AC is shown to be capable of traversing an urban realm bereft of differentiation because these gestures of self-estrangement are applied from a point of view that does not require essentialist verities. The policeman acts, in other words, from the position of the “original political relation,” which Agamben describes as the “ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between inside and outside, exclusion and inclusion).”379 At the same time, however, he also occupies a similar position himself, in a variation of the structural homology between sovereign and the banned in Homo Sacer. In order for this relationship to function, the differentiation between the Western and the colonial subject, the policeman and the chieftain, England and ‘ang-lang’ is momentarily suspended. This effacement of distinctions subsequently allows the police observer to treat the city as a space in which demarcations between (Western, ‘cultural’) identity and (non-Western, ‘natural’) alterity can be withdrawn at will. This provides the AC with an expanded range of influence, since he can place urban space under erasure at any time, treating it ‘as if it were dissolved’.380 In the

377 Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 247. 378 Cf. North, Dialect of Modernism, 44. 379 Agamben, State of Exception, 181. 380 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 36. This follows Agamben’s argument that the state of nature is not to be placed in a linear succession followed by the establishment of the law; rather, the

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process, the political conditions of British colonialism and native resistance are recast as a state of nature – later imagined as a “jungle” (110) – that requires individual action. Thus, rather than a lawless condition superseded by the establishment of civil order, a state without determinable norms is the precondition for police action: “Far from being a prejuridical condition that is indifferent to the law of the city,” this iteration of a state of nature “is the exception and the threshold that dwells within it.”381 Once more, instead of a demarcation of identity and alterity, “what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception).”382 That is, far from dispensing with borders and boundaries, they merely become mobile, fluid, and ubiquitous, established circumstantially by the figure extricating itself from institutional constraints — and, as a result, switching back-and-forth between a domestic and an imperialist frame.383 This strategy of integrating a putative state of nature into a normative sphere takes up a recurring trope in the discourse on political radicalism: the combination of domestic radicalism and traits associated with the colonial, non-Western Other. The evocation of this combined alterity allows extensive executive powers to be defined. In the process, policing emerges as the means of maintaining a combined political and racial norm beset by a threat that is transferred from the periphery to the imperial centre. After all, if the colonial Other manifests on the inside, this topological indeterminacy can only be countered by measures which, likewise, transcend rigid distinctions between colonial violence and internal policing — or at least uphold the possibility of withdrawing any privileged legal process safeguarded within Britain. If, as Bignall asserts, “the (colonial) ‘politics of ban’ rests upon the classification and representation of an individual, a community, or a cultural way of life as unworthy of protection,”384 the combined anarcho-colonial threat enables the perpetual blurring of the target of this ban.

indistinction of law and violence is constitutive: “The state of nature is therefore not truly external to nomos but rather contains its virtuality. [. . .] Hobbes, after all, was perfectly aware, as Strauss has underscored, that the state of nature did not necessarily have to be conceived as a real epoch, but rather could be understood as a principle internal to the state revealed in the moment in which the State is considered ‘as if it were dissolved’” (35–36). 381 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106. 382 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37. 383 Cf. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, 171. 384 Simone Bignall. “Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming Community.” Agamben and Colonialism. Ed. Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. 261–284. 278.

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The result is an ever-changeable object of intervention: the political radical becomes colonial, the colonial subject becomes an anarchic figure, and any mode of control exerted upon these threatening hybrids cannot be subject to a legal procedure or determinate norms. As a case in point for this discursive strategy, the 1894 Times claims that there “is so little that is new under the sun that it would be rash to pronounce Anarchism a novel disease in the body politic.”385 The article proceeds to point out the shared, essential deviance binding implicitly archaic colonial violence and explicitly modern, anarchist direct action: “When the Malay runs ‘amok’ he is, after all, only a madman with a knife.”386 When, however, “civilized man runs ‘amok,’ as he does in one form or another quite as frequently as his uncivilized brother, he has ready to his hand appliances [. . .] that involve hundreds of persons in unexpected ruin.”387 This blurring of the boundaries between ostensibly ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ violence presents a redoubled, internal loss of differentiation.388 While the charge of a “sloppy and slushy sentimentalism”389 in Britain finds its verbal counterpart in Vladimir’s notion of a “sentimental regard for individual liberty” (22), it befalls the former colonial policeman to reproduce the strategy of introducing colonial signifiers into the imperial capital in decidedly unsentimental fashion. He does so not as a matter of restoring alterity, but in order to create a sphere in which the boundaries between identity and alterity can be re-negotiated in order to bolster his authority. After all, the AC does not assert an essential, shared identity between his subordinate and selfinterested chieftain. Instead, he can temporarily and strategically re-interpret Heat as the colonial subject, thus mobilising the colonial adventurer’s fantasy of ‘finding him out’ (87) — and thereby asserting control. The circumstantial determination of identities on the basis of a previous dissolution of distinctions between the city and the colonies renders London a metropolis, a term which, in Agamben’s usage, foregrounds the relationship between colonies and the urban centre. Metropolitan techniques see the copying of external techniques of the “government of the living and of things” into the

385 The Times 03 Jan 1894. 7. 386 The Times 03 Jan 1894. 7. 387 The Times 03 Jan 1894. 7. 388 The Times 03 Jan 1894. 7. “Anarchism in the usual meaning of the term is really only the correlative of anarchism in society at large: in other words, of a flabby and sentimental condition of the public mind, which refines away the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil.” 389 The Times 03 Jan 1894. 7.

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internal space previously defined against it.390 This re-entry entails the “impossibility of univocally defining borders, walls, spatialisation, because they are the result of the action of this different paradigm: no longer a simple binary division but the projection on this division of a complex series of articulating and individuating processes and technologies.”391 In The Secret Agent, internalising the techniques that establish outward political differences is a thematic matter, since the Assistant Commissioner brings to bear a semantics of similarity in order to police his own department. What is more – and this marks the specificity of the literary evocation of the state of exception – the imposition of similarity is also brought to bear on the internal focalisation of this strategy. Thus, at the outset of the passage, “[h]is memory evoked” (87) the comparison between Heat and the chieftain; together with the remark that the “appearance recalled him to the memory” (87), we are initially confronted with a presentation of his mental processes as autonomous. The AC does not actively ‘recall’. Instead, his memory as a separate instance is afforded active agency of recollection. As soon as the intertextual reference to Wallace’s book is brought up, however, the tense shifts, leading to the sudden rhetorical question whether the ethnographer “does not” relate that anecdote in his “famous book.” The homodiegetic and the heterodiegetic are intertwined in this sentence, which could both indicate a quoted thought on the part of the character or an address to the reader by an abruptly authorial narrator. Hence, at the same time as colonial policing emerges as a technique in the metropolis, the ethnographic intertext is copied into the novel, the character’s memory is transported into the narrative present, and the distanced, ironic narrator is projected onto the character. The relationship between the (1) historical status of ‘metropolis’ and ‘colony’ and (2) this constellation as an exemplary ‘paradigm’ is, thus, a matter of narrative form in the novel. That is to say: the character’s use of techniques aimed at the dissolution of demarcation coincides with a perspectival levelling of differences. For Agamben, as de la Durantaye points out, paradigms such as metropolitan power do not “function merely as lenses through which to see things that are already there; they not only render intelligible a given context, they ‘constitute’ it.”392 Similarly, the equivocations that initiate the AC’s state of exception are not only traced within the diegesis, but also ‘constituted’ as a sudden withdrawal of

390 Agamben, Giorgio. “Metropolis.” Transcribed and trans. Arianna Bove. generation online. . 03/03/2017. n. pag. web. 391 Agamben, “Metropolis,” n. pag. 392 Leland de la Durantaye. “The Paradigm of Colonialism.” Agamben and Colonialism. Ed. Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. 229–238. 234.

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a privileged, ironic stance and the concomitant reorientation of judgment in the novel. As the demarcation of identity and alterity is no longer necessary to determine others, the narrative begins to dramatise the ensuing state of exception rather than recounting it. Political identity is stripped away by the colonial gaze, leaving only purportedly racialised markers of “colour”, ‘eyes and lips’, as well as “sooty skin” (87). Interests or defined antagonisms are minimised in this inventory, enabling the AC’s memory to mark and deploy the status of the chief strategically. The “peculiar resemblance” (87) furnishes a movable ascription by means of which political subjection can be implied without being stated outright. Rather than a matter of a determinate transgression, the extraction of transferrable, visible indicators of alterity, thus, allows for depoliticisation. While the colonial figure is still associated with “legality established by white men” (87), the discursive transfer to the subordinate allows for a recursive application of traits that set apart the “old fat” (87) chieftain without thereby allocating a political position to him. The chief, like the Chief Inspector, is reduced to enumerated features of an immediately deviant body, the very description of which implies his transgressive status more readily than any explicit infraction he can be said to have committed. Thus, rather than drawing a distinction between an Other and a countervailing norm, the exchange of traits across past and present as well as centre and periphery hinges on evoking the indistinct status of a denigrated figure deprived of determinable interests. By means of this manufactured uncertainty, the bare life of the depoliticised colonial subject can be aligned with the subordinate. Heat and the native chief are fused into a variable signifier of marginal, tenuous equivalence: the “memory” (87) attributed to the Assistant Commissioner fuses racist pretensions to superiority and institutional rank into a momentary suspension of political motivation. The transfer of markers of aberrance, in turn, allows for a re-entry of modernist stylistic features into the diegesis. The uncertainty which for Jameson characterises the manner in which literature registers a colonial sphere beyond its representational capacities recurs as an explicit technique of depoliticisation. If “modernism is itself this very hesitation”393 in applying the imagery of pre-modernist spatial experience to the demands of a global Empire, The Secret Agent associates that hesitation with the former imperial policeman. After all, his system of classification precludes closure. Instead, it retains gaps and uncertainties that deny a straightforward, repeatable determination of self and Other. In this way, ‘hesitation’ in the Assistant Commissioner’s organisation of

393 Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 160.

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his environment becomes diegetically functional. It is because Heat is not quite like the Chief, and the Chief is not quite a colonial subject, that the policeman can exert authority over his subordinate. The AC operates in an in-between sphere of resemblances, in which identities are not fixed, but defined negatively (“Not precisely a traitor” 87), reiterated as series of bodily features, and repeated as a process of exploration (similarities are “discovered” 87). The novel presents a ‘manufacture of uncertainty’, the creation of a signifier exempt from a relational system of identity and alterity. The figures subjected to this process are not provided with further communicative recourse by means of which their contingent assumptions of order can be upheld. Instead, in a sudden instance of quoted thought, the AC mentally announces that he will turn Heat “inside out like an old glove” (87), thus creating a metaphorical equivalent to the uncertainty of inside and outside obtaining in the previous instances of suspended distinctions in the novel. The inverted glove evokes Verloc’s confrontation with the ‘pink seal’, Stevie’s fragmented insides in the park, or even the Professor’s imagined intermingling bodies in the wake of an explosion. In the policeman’s case, however, the suspension of binary stabilisation of meaning is not figured as a loss of order, but as the creation of a sphere in which he can redistribute traits to serve his oblique agenda. Political identities can be withdrawn or stabilised at the behest of a figure shown to functionalise the resulting indeterminacy as a mode of power. 4.3.2.2 The Urban State of Exception As opposed to the rival police figure, Heat, who is shown to proceed from the assumption of an ordered, observed urban space, the Assistant Commissioner immerses himself in the city. He even dresses down for the occasion, shown as he is to be “changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist” (163). This gleeful transformation already casts doubt on the degree to which the character is willing to restore political difference. Instead of placing the fragmentary characteristics of the city – its ‘anarchic’ breakdown – to one side of a reified demarcation, the Assistant Commissioner presents himself as just another vector of urban dissolution. The protagonist becomes subsumed in a collapse of boundaries rather than bolstering them, revelling in class-based alterity or his “foreign appearance” (109). Most of all, however, his urban experience revolves around the reconstitution of the city as a colonial sphere in a state of nature that poses a challenge for an imagined civilising mission. His urban exploration makes the Assistant Commissioner “light-hearted, as though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away from departmental desks” (110). The ensuing undercover mission,

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thus, veers away from Schäffner’s notion that this policeman embodies the principle of rationality and serves as a personification of English liberal democracy.394 While his ultimate, truncated account of the Greenwich affair is couched in terms of national security and a restoration of British autonomy against autocratic incursions, the process of detection itself is shown to be predicated on the dissolution of a rational self. This suspension of identity (rather than any default embodiment of order) forms the basis of the policeman’s mode of perceiving and interacting with the city. The loss of his institutional self literalises a previous metaphor for the Assistant Commissioner’s thought process. This model sharply distinguishes him from the Professor’s contention that policeman and revolutionary occupy complementary positions in a language game in which “both recognize the same conventions” (68). Instead of counters moved on a board, the Assistant Commissioner’s epistemology is predicated on remaining “poised on a word before passing to another, as though words had been stepping stones for his intellect picking its way across the waters of error” (73). That is, he does not assume an ordered sphere but proceeds from the assumption of limited, verbal constructions establishing momentary connections between elements that otherwise remain conspicuously disconnected. While in Verloc’s case, the movement of a passer-by “from gas-lamp to gas-lamp in a night without end” (43) presents the objective correlative to a catastrophic breakdown of identity, the process of the former colonial policeman is shown to bridge the gaps between disconnected elements. In this procedure, words precede thought and have to be examined separately (“poised”) before assessing any account (“passing”). This sequence prefigures the deliberate limitation of any account derived by the Assistant Commissioner. Traversing the steppingstones is a markedly individual endeavour, which does not yield a communicable account beyond the connections established by “his intellect” (73). This is borne out by the topographical literalisation of the model of reasoning: instead of remaining firmly set-apart from the “watery” (74) urban sphere, the AC’s quoted thought yields the notion that “I’ll get a little wet, a little splashed—” (109). The character is not distinguished from the ‘waters of error’. Instead, the Assistant Commissioner’s investigative endeavours rely on the denial of a reconstitution of certainty. He extracts from his immersion in the urban sphere the narrative material required for a limited story that benefits the Home Secretary and a privileged salon sphere. While assuring their certainties regarding the Greenwich case, he himself is shown to accept an incomplete account, as evidenced by the ellipsis after deciding on his short undercover foray. Rather than interpretative gaps

394 Schäffner, Anarchismus, 175.

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indicating imminent breakdown (as in the case of Verloc) or the “unexpected solutions of continuity” (63) (which threaten Heat’s demarcations), the AC is shown to always already presume the restricted scope of any one account. The novel, then, associates the policeman with a model which does not (like the ‘counters’ in the Professor’s allegory) assume complementary positions but allows for genuine ellipses. This is further indicated by the literal gaps in narrative structure that interrupt the mode of investigation pursued by the British arbiter of a state of exception. During the interrogation of Heat, the narrative intersperses lengthy, internally focalised interludes in-between every quoted statement (of both thought and speech), in which the character is shown to reflect on his own speaking position. Thus, in the gap between a remark on the lack of evidence in the Greenwich case and the summary of his impression of the city (“Horrible, horrible!” 74), we are made privy to a rundown of his personal stake in the investigation, presented in terse, paratactic syntax largely bereft of the ironic interruptions by the heterodiegetic narrator that mark previous instances of such origin stories. The first analeptic interstice of this kind summarises his police work in the ‘tropical colony’, where he “had been very successful in tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret societies amongst the natives” (74); his marriage and his “influential connections” (74); the “strange emotional phenomenon called public opinion” (74); and, finally, London as disclosed by a glance through the window, appearing “wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood” (74). Thus, the empty city as a space in which his ‘words’ are to establish momentary and contingent order is included in the very gap between definitive, quasi-official proclamations. As a consequence, the Commissioner stands for a model of interpretation in which the character bridges the gaps between his own statements, in a narrative correlative of the metaphor of the stepping stones. If, as Iser asserts, “gaps have a different effect on the process of anticipation and retrospection, and thus on the ‘gestalt’ of the virtual dimension, for they may be filled in different ways,”395 the policeman is shown to engage in their evocation before ‘anticipation’ and ‘retrospection’ proceed. Indeed, in confronting the “horrible” (74) view of the depopulated city, he includes further gaps in his mode of interpretation, leaving no remnant of the assurance of an ordered urban space disclosed to the skilled interpreter or produced by the apparatus of demarcation.

395 Wolfgang Iser. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1001–1014. 1005.

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The lengthy passage in which the AC responds to Heat’s framing of Michaelis constitutes the most sustained example of foregrounded “duration of events and pseudo-duration (in fact, length of text)”396 provided in the novel. This gap – opened up “[a]t the sound of that name” (76) when Heat mentions Michaelis as a potential culprit – initiates the analeptic presentation of the salon kept by the “lady patroness of Michaelis” (77). This patroness, in turn, is “one of the most influential and distinguished connections of the Assistant Commissioner’s wife” (77). Because of this connection, the character is shown to make “a reflection extremely unbecoming his official position without being really creditable to his humanity. ‘If the fellow is laid hold of again,’ he thought, ‘she will never forgive me.’” (83) In effect, the Assistant Commissioner investigates himself as he outlines his unofficial reliance on the anarchist as a controllable figure of alterity, exhibited for the amusement of the aristocratic patron and her hangers-on. As a result, the AC dismantles the notion of Michaelis as a figure of genuine anarchist Otherness; rather than presenting an ineffable, radical deviation from the status quo, in the salon a “certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the scale” (79). Thus, after the image of the gap between the stepping stones and the lacuna presented by the empty urban sphere, finally the Commissioner’s own position is shown to be undergirded by another, thematic fissure: his entangled personal and professional interests, which emerge during this extended break in the diegetic present. If his extended analepsis reflects on the “groundless fame of his [Michaelis’] condemnation” (79), it likewise establishes a ‘groundless’ status for the policeman. Not only are his actions predicated on personal ambition, but the personal and the political are shown to be inextricable, just as the anarchist and the patroness are exposed in their similarity. Rather than proposing renewed differentiations of self and Other, the Assistant Commissioner is, thus, shown to inculcate similarities, dismantling rather than bolstering political differences. The inclusion of lacunae in his very conception of executive regulation, in Agamben’s terms, “does not concern a deficiency in the text of the legislation [. . .]. Far from being a response to a normative lacuna, the state of exception appears as the opening of a fictitious lacuna in the order for the purpose of safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation.”397 The Assistant Commissioner is shown to act from such a position of indeterminacy. Gaps open up in the very text in which he is presented; subsequently, it is on the basis of the dissolution of binary

396 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 35. 397 Agamben, State of Exception, 31.

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differentiations presented during those gaps that the AC is shown to proceed. “‘You will want some conclusive evidence,’ came the observation in a murmur” (84). In this statement towards the end of the interview, the indistinct position of the policeman finds a formal correlative: he does not speak anymore, but rather disappears as the source of observations which ‘come’. The evidence required is not necessary for an evaluation of Michaelis according to defined norms, but on the contrary emerges as the culmination of the displacement of the policeman as a normative figure. The profusion of lacunae in connection with his individual mode of ‘picking his way across’ them makes the Assistant Commissioner appear as a figure incapable of reconstituting a sense of collective identity. He precludes what Benedict Anderson describes as ideologies that enable the “possibility of imagining the nation”398 as a ‘community in anonymity’ that makes up for the loss of a shared lifeworld. Such communal certainties, after all, are based on the broad notion of a “sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time” in a “precise analogue to the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”399 Contrary to such continuity, the Assistant Commissioner, is shown to already act on the presumption of a loss of an organising, communal sense of temporal order. The policeman’s foray into the streets relinquishes notions of transpersonal continuity through “homogenous, empty time.”400 If the time of the imagined community of the nation is a “complex gloss on the word ‘meanwhile’,”401 the policeman’s strategies are geared towards reducing the experience of such simultaneity. In keeping with the model of the stepping stones outlined above, he stands for an individual restriction of perspective conspicuously removed from (1) communal, (2) narratable, or (3) normative categories. The city, according to the character’s point of view, is organised spatially rather than in terms of a shared temporal development: “He advanced at once into an immensity of greasy slime and damp plaster interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated, choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water.” (110) The “interspersed lamps” introduce partial centres of illumination into an otherwise undifferentiated sphere in which the policeman does not reintroduce a demarcation of order.

398 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 2006. 36. 399 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26. 400 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26. 401 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25.

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As a result of the dwindling conception of homogenous time, during his urban foray the Assistant Commissioner is shown to imagine that any element escaping his apprehension thereby vanishes altogether. Dispensing with the communal simultaneity sketched by Anderson, the policeman is shown to register the presence of an urban public — only to indicate that it can be consigned to irrelevance at any time. Brett Street was not very far away. It branched off, narrow, from the side of an open triangular space surrounded by dark and mysterious houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of traders for the night. Only a fruiterer’s stall at the corner made a violent blaze of light and colour. Beyond all was black, and the few people passing in that direction vanished at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and lemons. No footsteps echoed. They would never be heard of again. The adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department watched these disappearances from a distance with an interested eye. He felt light-hearted, as though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away from departmental desks and official inkstands. (110)

The simultaneity established by a shared model of time is replaced with a radical restriction of scope to the individual perceiver.402 From the outset of his urban excursion, thus, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to dispense with the ‘gloss on the word meanwhile’ with which Vladimir still credits British society. Whereas the ambassador assumes that the “whole civilised world has heard of Greenwich” (26), and that, accordingly, a shared model of time can be presumed (and attacked), the policeman proceeds from an urban phenomenology in which the continued existence of an object outside of immediate perception requires no further consideration. His view of disconnected elements never to be heard of again dispenses with the notion that those “passing each other on the street, without ever becoming acquainted” can still be assumed to “be connected” in a shared, imagined community.403 Rather than an essential urban condition, however, this restricted view is presented as part of the policing strategies displayed by the protagonist. By reconstituting the city as a space in which the vanishing of an object of observation is absolute, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to give concrete topographical expression to the ascription of imperialist typology. That is, by treating the urban space as a “jungle,”

402 Hugo Letiche. “Situating Complexity: The Body (Nude).” Body and Organization. Ed. John Hassard, Ruth Holliday, and Hugh Willmott. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage, 2000. 87–107. 87. In Letiche’s terms, the disappearance which the policeman attributes to the “vanished” objects of his gaze who are never to be ‘heard of again’ makes “continuity, order, linear progress impossible; that is, everything which is individual (self, I, ‘me’) is relative, partial and limited.” 403 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25.

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the former colonial policeman can not only dispense with the strategies of a firmly constituted imaginary community, but also imagine that an emerging constitutive power is still to come.404 By suspending notions of shared time and community during his urban foray, the city can be reimagined as a space upon which social order is yet to be imposed. Thus, while he ultimately restores the felt demarcation of restricted spheres, the AC acts from a position in which the city is treated as disconnected from any collective, let alone national, identity and refigured as a depopulated, pre-civilisational space. Once the city is reorganised as a jungle, the policeman is enabled to treat its inhabitants in terms of their ever-impending possibility of “vanishing” (110) rather than as citizens. As a result, they are incompatible with what Foucault calls the ever-broadening reach of Polizeiwissenschaft. According to this analysis, the ‘police function’, as part of an apparatus of government, seeks “concrete, precise and measured knowledge as to the state’s strengths.” In this account, the police can be conceived as any “governmental technology peculiar to the state; domains, techniques, targets where the state intervenes.”405 The Assistant Commissioner ultimately does produce such targets, specifically regarding the question where the state should intervene (Vladimir), who it can afford to retain as an anarchist curio (Michaelis), and who can largely be left alone (Verloc). However, not only is the choice of these objects of intervention conditioned by the private entanglements laid bare in the gaps of his interview with Heat; what is more, the possibility of differentiation is predicated on a previous loss of identification and an insistent levelling of distinctions. The investigative gaze during the urban sojourn refuses the allocation of identity or alterity, literalising instead the suspension of a sense of self. In addition to the policeman’s own endeavour to be “a little splashed, a little wet” (145), the imagined disappearance of others imputed by the “interested eyes” (110) extends to other policemen: when a patrolman “entered Brett Street” the AC is shown to be “awaiting his return. But this constable seemed to be lost for ever to the force” (110). Rather than merely referring to the police “force,” the term can also be compared to the ‘force-of-law’ that remains in Agamben’s project of the state of exception. This concept describes what remains when a “norm is in force [vige] but is not applied” while “acts that do not have the value [valore] of law acquire its ‘force’.”406 As opposed to any pre-existing determination of identity and alterity, the Assistant Commissioner can, thus, be

404 Cf. Negri, Insurgencies, 7. 405 Michel Foucault. “Pastoral Power and Political Reason.” Religion and Culture. Ed. Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge, 1999. 135–153. 147. 406 Agamben, State of Exception, 38.

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seen to be able detach an “unofficial conduct” (150) from his official duties. Any figure he encounters in the urban sphere is primarily investigated with regard to the possibility of denying it a determinate status — a potential rescinding of norms that refuses to outline a transgression. As his ‘evil freedom’ allows the Assistant Commissioner to act without explicit reference to laws, the ‘force’ can also be aligned with the imagined, pre-civilisational wilderness that has been included in the city by the policeman’s gaze. In the manner of the “stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”407 that besets Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ‘jungle’ allows for a suspension of comprehensive surveillance in the manner suggested by Heat. What is more, the AC enacts the very ‘force’ that remains elusive for the Professor, in spite of the latter’s insistence (“I am the force,” 222). After all, the ‘perfect anarchist’ has been shown to strive for foundationalist certainties, a ‘lever’ by means of which to move society from a position uninflected by it. The policeman, by contrast, reserves ‘force-of-law’ for the repudiation of an overarching scheme for describing a polity. The Assistant Commissioner refuses any totalising description of the city, presenting instead a position in which the objects of his surveillance are primarily determined by the possibility of being lost or becoming inscrutable. While the Professor constantly adjusts his indexical bomb to the city, the AC has relinquished any claim to representation of the urban space. The British arbiter of the state of exception in The Secret Agent is, thus, confronted with a redoubled task: the city has to be conceived as ‘jungle’ so that it confronts the individual observer with an epistemological impasse in the first place. In other words: the Assistant Commissioner’s practice is not oriented towards a simulation of order, but founds itself on the city as a space of primordial flux. This contrasts with Stevie’s previous fantasy of the “metropolitan police as a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil” (127). The notion of ‘suppression’ accords with Foucault’s definition of the “negative elements – defenses, censorships, denials – which the repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism destined to say no.”408 Such repressive, or in Stevie’s words, suppressive, hypothesis is only partly replaced with a notion of productive, disciplinary power/knowledge which would “establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals.”409 While the Assistant Commissioner is concerned

407 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 34. 408 Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. 12. 409 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143.

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with presence and absence, his is not a form of minute knowledge yielding a grid of intelligibility, but rather a means of redacting identity. Concerned with what is lost to impersonal “force,” the police observer is beset by urban space as an enigma to be reproduced rather than solved. In this way, an analogue to mechanisms of colonisation is brought into the purported heart of the Empire. This takes up a long-standing material and discursive production of the concept of ‘wilderness’, which requires a deliberate erasure of native peoples. The observation of untouched wild places can be leveraged to selectively annul extant cultural and political practices in order to retroactively posit an unmarked space in need of control.410 In this context, the very assertion of an epistemological challenge besetting the individual emerges as a technique of regulation. It attributes to the Assistant Commissioner the power to deprive his targets of any political identity by relegating them to impersonal, barely controllable forces. In this way, the policeman restricts the extension of a “semiosphere” in the sense described by Joachimsthaler, for whom the project of national interiority is “half real by dint of being founded on an outside (after all, it is dependent on material carriers of meanings and signs) and half mental (the meaning of signs has to be activated in the consciousness of the recipients).”411 Such a place is resolutely refused by the Assistant Commissioner’s shifting urban space. Organised around its very unboundedness, it refuses an outside; as the policeman decides to get “a little wet, a little splashed” (109), he becomes contiguous with the fluid destablisation of the “wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water” (110). The AC stops his cab “by signal abruptly, nowhere in particular” (108) and it is this ‘nowhere’, spatially expressed as the sense of being “unplaced” (109), that he projects onto the objects of his gaze, in sharp distinction to the ‘material’ and ‘mental’ stabilisation of semiospheres.

410 Cf. Laura Wright. “Wilderness into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2010. 11. Cf. also the production of “primordial wilderness” as a “blank page” described in Andrew Sluyter. Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 15. 411 Jürgen Joachimsthaler. “Der Kultur-Innenraum.” Kulturwissenschaft(en) in der Diskussion. Ed. Jürgen Joachimsthaler and Eugen Kotte. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008. 46–71. 58. My trans. Orig. quote: “Semiosphären umgeben den Betrachter mit Zeichen- und Bedeutungsträgern, die ihn im Idealfall vollständig in das von ihnen evozierte Weltbild einhüllen. Der Kultur-Innenraum ist entstanden. Seine Bedeutungssphäre ist halb ‘real’ auf ein ‘Außerhalb’ gegründet (sie ist ja auf materielle Bedeutungsträger und Zeichen angewiesen), halb mental (die Bedeutung der Zeichen muss im Bewusstsein der Rezipienten aktiviert werden).”

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By rendering his own position indeterminate, the Assistant Commissioner can reorder the urban sphere decisively. In the most basic terms of his urban topography, he belongs neither to the “violent blaze of light and colour” (110), nor is he part of the “black” (110) space beyond which any urban subject is imagined to vanish. Instead, he occupies a marginal position of a “distance with an interested eye” (110). It is only fitting, then, that he sets himself apart by the possibility of selectively eliding his own characteristics. As Alex Houen notes, the Assistant Commissioner “is shown to depend on blurring the distinctions between crime and law, bureaucracy and the individual, public and domestic.”412 Crucially, he arrogates that indeterminacy to himself as well — with the result of “loneliness, of evil freedom” (109), which enables him to refrain from piecing together fragmentary urban impressions. Instead, he revels in their incommensurability. The novel, thus, connotes the emergence of an experimental perception of the city and its literary equivalent of “sombre and moving form[s]” (119) with a mode of policing. Similarly to the avant-garde stylings of Vladimir’s philosophy of terrorism, the ‘estrangement’ of perception is not a neutral result of literary experimentation. Rather, by associating impressionist techniques with diegetic representatives, the novel suggests that there are political stakes to the aesthetic defamiliarisation of familiar experience. The “pleasurable feeling of independence” (110) associated with the decomposition of the city into “blazing lights” and “shadows” (111) as well as the inhabitants’ ‘loss to the force’ hinges on an affirmation of uninterpretable space. This mode of policing, in other words, uses what in previous, foundationalist assumptions of order could only appear as “holes in space and time” (63) amidst an ordered, urban grid. Exceptional modes of power receive a formal equivalent at this point: during the internal focalisation of the AC’s foray, the narrator’s capacity for ironic detachment is suspended. Instead of laying bare the protagonists’ stock phrases and assumptions from a distance, in this case the narrative voice offers an equivalent to a suspension of identity and alterity. This in-between position, then, and its possibility to ‘make you see’413 (as per Conrad’s impressionist mission statement) is bound up with an exercise of power in the storyworld, once again foregrounding the imperative bent of Conrad’s poetics. The Assistant Commissioner, as the diegetic representative literalising the poetic call to perception, enacts what impressionism ‘seeks’: “it subordinates plot, fixes moments, fragments form, and intensifies affective

412 Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 50. 413 Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, xlix.

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response; it fuses subject and object, finds truth in appearances.”414 Copied into the diegesis, these strategies suggest a mode of power that can suspend demarcations of identity and alterity in order to replace the assumption of foundational differences with circumstantial, visual contrasts bound to oblique authority. During his city sojourn, the Assistant Commissioner is described as a “cool, reflective Don Quixote” (108) — whether by himself or by the narrator is increasingly uncertain as the ironic distance of the narrative voice falters in the face of the policeman’s strategies. If Don Quixote, broadly, maps the characteristics of one genre upon a diegesis shown to be incompatible with its founding assumptions, however, the Assistant Commissioner’s tactics have an inverted effect. In mapping colonial control onto the city, The Secret Agent does not stress the incompatibility of defined sets of conventions, but rather the impossibility of determining conventions in the first place. Specifically, the AC elides the characteristics of others, not only reducing them to presence and absence, as indicated above, but also interpreting the social sphere as bereft of characteristics to a degree commensurate with his own immersion in the “unplaced” (108) urban sphere. But these people were as denationalised as the dishes set before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability. Neither was their personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially. They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them. But that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere outside those special establishments. One never met these enigmatical persons elsewhere. It was impossible to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night. And he himself had become unplaced. (109)

The policeman’s perception of “these people” establishes a model according to which identity, firstly, functions as a ‘stamp’ imposed upon inert matter which is, secondly, withheld. The restaurant visitors remain featureless as long as they remain unaffected by any label imposing a determinate shape upon them. Particularly, such a descriptor would specify who they are, “professionally, socially or racially.” Such a set of governing characteristics is, however, not applied: the patrons are defined by a deficit, by the types of identity they fail to embody and the national specificity they fall short of with their “fraudulent cookery.” In registering this, the Assistant Commissioner does not suggest a hidden identity behind the ‘fraud’. Rather, according to the policeman’s gaze, the “personality” of the “denationalised” patrons becomes indefinable as soon

414 Jesse Matz. Literary Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 14.

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as no immediate classificatory template suggests itself. Their predominant trait is the absence of traits in conjunction with the absence of an institutional apparatus that could assign and interpret ‘professional, racial, or social’ qualities in the first place. The people are their deficit, a medium that communicates its absence of a message. It is this definition of the social sphere in terms of its lack of a bounded, organising signifier that renders its inhabitants “unstamped” and barred from being “stamped in any way.” Such a semantic blank functions in analogy to the previous evocation of a jungle and a force, both of which are associated with a colonial imaginary that elides existing identifications in order to depoliticise any intervention. Notably, before arriving at the “counterfeit form of life”415 of the Italian restaurant – in Haines’ terms, “‘enigmatical’ and ‘unthinkable’ life with no legal right to exist”416 – the policeman has to divest himself of his own “professionally, socially or racially” stamped identity, indicating the extent to which both elisions function in tandem. The Assistant Commissioner does not assign identity or alterity, placing instead any positive, articulable characteristic under the suspicion of ‘fraud’. This deception, rather than the concealment of a hidden identity, consists in the very claim to being ‘stamped’ at all, in contrast to the unstamped, empty sphere that forms the basis of the policeman’s mode of observation.417 In this, the Assistant Commissioner’s prefiguration of a state of exception reflects an isomorphism between the techniques applied to the colonial Other and the policing techniques employed against undesirables in London. This redoubled executive power is suggested by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, formally established in 1887. The targets of this proto-intelligence unit include Irish Republican groups and Indian students as much as anarchists.418 What is more, at the time of the composition of The Secret Agent, the term ‘anarchism’ has seen notable discursive expansion. As the analysis of The Princess Casamassima has shown, this process is already under way in the mid-to-late

415 Haines, “Life in Crisis,” 94. 416 Haines. “Life in Crisis,” 94. 417 Cf. Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 127. The malleability of identity which Ò Donghaile attributes to the novel is, thus, represented as an internally focalised imposition, in which “the Briton and the foreigner meet halfway in its interpenetrative process of mutual contamination and cross-fertilisation.” 418 Cf. Georgina Sinclair. “‘Hard-Headed, Hard-Bitten, Hard-Hitting and Courageous Men of Innate Detective Ability . . . ’: From Criminal Investigation to Political and Security Policing at the End of Empire, 1945–50.” Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950. Ed. Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 195–218. 198.

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1880s (during which Conrad’s novel is set).419 Rather than primarily referring to libertarian socialists, the designation is used to cast aspersions on a wide range of disavowed political movements. The label is applied especially in the context of Indian separatism, in which the designation ‘anarchist’ serves as a broad means of depoliticisation. Newspaper commentators use the term to charge the “imitative” Bengals with adapting European radicalism “without perhaps an altogether adequate understanding of their doctrines.”420 Further, journalists intimate vast, radical conspiracies421 or predict a global spread of anarchist ideas.422 In this, as Maia Ramnath has shown, a distorted account of anarchism works in tandem with “Orientalist fantasies” to suggest that the causes of “Indian unrest were not really political or economic grievances.”423 In keeping with this wider application of ‘anarchism’, the type of intelligence gathered by the AC does not proceed from the assertion of any determinate political identity, neither for himself nor for the ones he observes. Instead, the targeted area is treated as a semantic void, a blank to be asserted before any limited order

419 Cedric Watts. “Jews and Degenerates in The Secret Agent.” The Conradian 31 (2007). 70–82. 72. Though the plot is based on the 1894 Greenwich bombing, the novel takes place in 1887 (or, according to Watts’ convincing argument, in 1886, a “politically significant date” 73), not least because of “numerous acts of terrorism in England, usually employing dynamite.” While these were attributed to ‘Fenian’ Irish nationalists, the fact that “Conrad carefully evades or conceals the Irish problem” allows for a semblance of “England as a bastion of liberty” (74) to find representation in the novel. 420 “The Situation in India.” The Times 09 May 1908. 8. Other articles (such as “Anarchism in India.” The Times Feb. 15, 1909. 7.) also stress the “slavish imitation of Russian methods.” The Times 18 Dec, 1908 distinguishes between fears of a “general rising” and the “general panic” induced by “the terrorism of the anarchists” (11). Such redeployments of ‘anarchist’ (eg. “The Indian Anarchists.” The Times 01 May, 1909. 11.) describe the Indian manifestation of anarchism as a result of the “working of the Oriental mind”; this strand is also exemplified by an account of “Indian Anarchism” in The Times 20 Feb. 1909. 11. “The letter discloses the disastrous effects of contact with ‘advanced’ western doctrines upon Oriental minds wholly unfitted by tradition or by discipline to try them by a practical standard.” 421 “The Revolutionary Plot in India: An Anarchist ‘College’.” The Times, 11 May 1908. 5; cf. also “The Unrest in India: The Anarchist Conspiracy.” The Times 24 Jun. 1908. 9. The fear that anarchism could “spread far and wide” is raised in “Bengalis and the Reforms: Some Representative Opinions.” 23 March 1909. 10. 422 “Anarchism in India.” The Times 15 Feb. 1909. presents a travelogue of anarchist ideas: “Even now the Indian Anarchists are in touch with Continental groups, and some of the men who are in custody have learned to make bombs in Paris” (7). This is coupled with a call for further measures against refugees at home, and swift expansion of the Frontier Crimes Act, which enables trial and execution on the same day. 423 Maia Ramnath. Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle. Edinburgh: AK, 2011. 73.

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can be suggested. In Noyes’ terms, “[c]olonial discourse must construct a boundless, featureless, homogenous space which may serve as the stage upon which colonial desire may produce its phantasies.”424 The policeman’s tactics are geared towards the production of an urban sphere consonant with just such colonial featurelessness. Arata asserts that “[t]o become ‘unplaced’ in this manner is for Conrad always cause for horror.”425 However, the Assistant Commissioner functionalises such dissolution of a distinct sense of place as a bounded version of such ‘horror’, emblematically encapsulated by the “fraudulent cookery” (109). The ability to circumstantially ‘unplace’ himself and others emerges as the very precondition for the policeman’s reordering of the city for the select few who are exempt from this impending indistinction. The production of unmarked space, then, underpins the policeman’s tactics. While his subordinate upholds the notion of observable, ‘lunatic’ anarchists to be registered and placed under surveillance, the AC already operates on the basis of a broad concept of ‘anarchy’ — here conceived as an absence of order that renders any political identity contingent, be it the policeman’s own or the anarchists’. According to Agamben, “[i]f the sovereign, in fact, is the one who marks the point of indistinction between violence and right by proclaiming the state of exception and suspending the validity of the law, the police are always operating within a similar state of exception.”426 Similarly, the AC is connected to the possibility of creating an indistinct space in which he can act outside of the constraints supposedly imposed on him by the department. By ‘unplacing’ himself, the policeman disallows an institutional grid according to which identity and alterity are firmly allocated on the basis of a temporary friend/enemy distinction. Instead of such classification, the colonial policeman renders the entire city a space of potential intervention. As Maurizio Calbi has shown, such a “depopulated city fits with the logic of the exception which is a structure of de-localisation and dis-location creating an ‘empty space’, a temporal and spatial vacuum for the sovereign decision to be effectively exercised.”427 Accordingly, his ‘unplaced’ position and the reduced complexity of the objects of his observation allow the police figure to act in a space characterised by the subtraction of traits. Flexibly evoking associations of

424 J. K. Noyes. Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884–1915. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1992. 82. 425 Stephen Arata. “The Secret Agent.” A Joseph Conrad Companion. Ed. Leonard Orr and Ted Billy. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 1999. 426 Agamben, Means Without End, 103. 427 Maurizio Calbi. “States of Exception: Auto-Immunity and the Body Politic in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.” Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome. Ed. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Nancy Isenberg, and Maddalena Pennacchia. Göttingen: V&R, 2010. 77–95. 89.

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colonial control, the AC marks the very ‘indistinction’ that allows the police gaze to render its targets ‘unstamped’ and bereft of characteristics. In keeping with the structure of exception laid out by Agamben, both positions – that of the authoritative figure and that of the potential targets of the exception alike – are placed on a “threshold of indistinction.”428 By assigning and withdrawing identifications and indulging in the “evil freedom” (109) of the city, the AC can treat the urban space “as if it were dissolved”429 in the diegetic present already. As opposed to the ambassador’s fetishisation of a scientistic deep-structure which, upon its symbolic dismantling, would lead to the wholesale collapse of collective identity, the colonial policeman places any sense of self under erasure from the outset. If Vladimir’s demonstration, thus, ultimately stalls after the temporary reduction of Verloc to an animal status, the Assistant Commissioner’s intervention is presented as a sustained treatment of the state of nature not as an “epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal to the city” in the course of which “the state of nature is something like the state of exception.”430 Accordingly, while the character bolsters ideologies of order for the privileged few, we are also made privy to a “zone of indistinction between the animal and the human”431 that accompanies the Assistant Commissioner’s investigative endeavours. “Behind the Assistant Commissioner” – and, thus, conspicuously set apart from his strategies of projecting wilderness and colonial control onto the city – his reduction of complexity has little impact: “Behind the Assistant Commissioner the van and horses, merged into one mass, seemed something alive—a squarebacked black monster blocking half the street, with sudden iron-shod stampings, fierce jingles, and heavy, blowing sighs” (111). Turning from a simulation of community to ‘unplaced’ colonial policing comes at a price. The radical restriction of its scope leaves the Assistant Commissioner’s sphere of influence severely attenuated. “Behind” his back, London returns to its indissoluble ‘allatonceness’.432 Since during the Assistant Commissioner’s episode of slumming, focalisation has moved incrementally away from any interpretative authority of the heterodiegetic narrator, the final turn to the continued undifferentiated space ‘behind’ the character’s back serves as a reminder of the limited reach of

428 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. 429 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. 430 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. 431 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106. 432 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Madera, CA: Gingko, 2011. 26. This is McLuhan’s term for the “brand-new world” of nonsequential media, due to which time has ceased and “‘space’ has vanished.”

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his interventions. He may restore the most basic urban phenomenology of presence and absence in the de-semanticised city, but outside of his immediate interventions, his observations leave “one mass,” an overdetermined loss of differentiation not subject to his strategic suspension of demarcation. While the policeman is, thus, shown to revel in dispelling illusions of communal, ordered time, he does not replace this dissolution with an alternative, communicable model of temporal progression. He leaves in his wake a ‘monstrous’ indeterminacy of signs, not subject to an organising template. In the ensuing site, the “square-backed, black monster” is externally focalised — seen, that is, from an outside, uninvolved view which remains indifferent to any temporary restitution of order. In the further development of the plot, the equivalent to the monstrous urban space beyond the Assistant Commissioner’s gaze is presented by Verloc’s, Winnie’s and Ossipon’s interlocking descent into disorganised spaces, as outlined in chapter 4.2. When the Assistant Commissioner abruptly vanishes from the narrative, he is shown to consider that “[h]e had had a very full evening” (168). Contrary to this self-satisfied assertion of a completed plot, however, the remainder of the story consists of the Chief Inspector entering the Verloc household after his superior, eroding Verloc’s trust in any protections the Assistant Commissioner has offered, and apprising Winnie of her brother’s death. As shown above, these destabilisations manifest as gaps in the linear approximation of time. As opposed to the Assistant Commissioner, whose very mode of action is dependent on analeptic gaps during which self-reflexive consideration of his status is elaborated at length, the lacunae faced by Winnie and Ossipon are unbridgeable. There is no metaphor of the ‘stepping stones’ for the characters that remain after the Assistant Commissioner’s ‘full’ evening. What is ‘evil freedom’ for him manifests as the breakdown of a sense of self for them. While the policeman’s portrayal is ultimately more sympathetic than that of the other arbiter of a state of exception, Vladimir, the novel emphasises the degree to which the dissolution of order has not been stemmed by the former colonial enforcer. His reading of the city as wilderness allows for the suspension of identities, but neglects the restitution of a communicable determination of order without which agency is shown to be impossible in the novel’s political imaginary. While his final report to his superior suggests a well-arranged narrative, the remaining protagonists are suspended in spaces similar to the profusion of matter “merged into one mass” (111).

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4.3.2.3 Residual Stabilisation of Alterity For Jacques Rancière, ‘police’ is “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.”433 This definition applies to the literal, diegetic policing presented in The Secret Agent. Specifically, the production of ‘visibility and invisibility’ is already prefigured topologically by the stark differentiation of light and consuming black which the policeman extracts from the city reconfigured as wilderness. However, despite demonstrating the suspension of political identities, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to reconstitute limited social order for three separate spheres: the Home Office, the Explorer’s Club, and the salon. That is, while he dissolves identity and alterity during his urban foray – a dissolution that is only exacerbated in the wake of his departure from the storyworld – residual demarcations are restored for the spaces in which the Assistant Commissioner has a personal stake. These selective reconstitutions of barriers between a collective inside and an anarchic outside do not, however, restore certainty in the manner of the apparatus of demarcation. Heat and his associates, after all, uphold the ideology that in spite of their efforts of constructing anarchist alterity, radical traits can afterwards be referenced as if they presented a pre-existing reality. They perform, in short, the procedure of ‘retroactive positing’.434 By contrast, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to vary the determinations of selfhood and Otherness, providing each social sphere in which he is invested with the precise type of constructed boundary that it is shown to require. In the AC’s model, the state of exception presented during the urban excursion is, thus, not rendered a condition of the storyworld as a whole. Instead, while this figure of elusive authority functionalises the suspension of boundaries, he also restores contingent demarcations for privileged recipients of his intelligence. Those included in the places bolstered by these gestures of differentiation are spared insight into the contingency of their assumptions; they can proceed with the assurance of a shared, collective self. In this sense, the AC can be said to adapt the ‘order of the visible and the sayable’, assuring a division of an ordered inside and an anarchic outside that is tailored to the vested interests and ideological needs of the respective social sphere.

433 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 29. 434 Edelman, No Future, 8.

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The template for the demarcation of what is to be “understood as discourse” and what constitutes mere “noise”435 is provided by the Assistant Commissioner’s report to the Home Secretary, Sir Ethelred.436 In this case, the policeman’s reconstruction of the case is attuned to his interlocutor’s obsession with truncated narrative: “They’ll have to get a hard rap on the knuckles over this affair. We must be in a position to—What is your general idea, stated shortly? No need to go into details.” (102) Upon being asked this question, the Assistant Commissioner’s mode of narration adapts to Sir Ethelred’s ellipsis. After all, following a brief fantasy of disciplining Vladimir, the politician interrupts his own demand for a “position.” What this position is to allow ‘them’ to do is to be interpolated by the simplified formulae of the Assistant Commissioner: the Home Secretary demands truths “stated shortly” (102). In other words, information “passed along the line from Verloc, the secret agent, to Inspector Heat, to the Assistant Commissioner”437 is to be reduced in complexity at its officially sanctioned destination. The final, simplified report, thus, fills the gap between the Home Secretary’s own, tenuously connected statements. As a result, the policeman’s account of the urban wilderness renders a simple plot structure the very basis of governance. By supplying the absent information and filling the ellipsis left by his superior, the “unstamped” nature of the city during the state of exception remains implicit. Whereas the AC’s thought process has been shown to involve ever-expanding analeptic gaps in the narrative, the stabilisation of the Home Secretary’s sphere calls for reconstitution of communicable certainties. The report has to display “studious fidelity to a parenthetical manner, into which every little fact – that is, every detail – fitted with delightful ease” (101). This demand for epistemological certainty (and a far-from-obvious simplicity) evokes a key term in Conrad’s oeuvre: ‘fidelity’. This concept (“studious fidelity,” in this case) finds its programmatic expression in A Personal Record: “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; [. . .] It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.”438 In the political sphere represented by Ethelred, this foundational term has been demoted to the lower-case description of a style of narrative divested of complexity. ‘Fidelity’ in the

435 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 29. 436 Ethelred is modelled after Sir William Harcourt, Home Secretary “in Gladstone’s Government from 1880 to 1885 during which period he had to deal with the Fenian dynamite outrages.” Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, 287. 437 Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, 345. 438 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 14.

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autobiographical account establishes a contrast to the “revolutionary spirit”439 which Conrad’s authorial persona attempts to disavow. The ‘parenthetical’ manner of the Home Secretary, by contrast, does not allow for such explicit differentiations. Instead of considering and dismissing the ‘revolutionary’, the account in which ‘every fact fits with delighted ease’ is shown to proceed from the assumption that any narrative material brought into the office is already arranged in accordance with its requirements. Taking up the injunction to supplement the ellipsis left by Ethelred, the detective’s account excludes his own entanglement with the ambassador through the aspirational sphere of the salon — in addition to, unknowingly, eliding the ‘monstrous’ horse-cart hybrid and the disordered urban material outside of his scope. Instead, the radically attenuated version of his findings institutionally reproduces the perspectival limitation imposed on the urban sphere: “Only no details, pray. Spare me the details” (100). Since the AC’s simplified report takes the place of political action, the policeman is afterwards left to his own investigative devices, unmoored from any specifiable limit. He is shown to act in accordance with the reactionary fantasy of effective political acts having to take place outside of the constraints of normative “details.” This extra-instituitional leeway is likewise indicated by the ellipsis in Sir Ethelred’s specification of the “position to—” (102). It is on the basis of this gap that the AC is shown to make every detail “fit.” What is more, the lacuna in the speech of the authority figure also prepares the final, supplemental foray into the urban sphere, in which the Commissioner expels the ambassador. The interlocking reductions of complexity restoring certainty for the purposes of government yield a narrative mode attuned to the constraints of sanctioned clock-time.440 As opposed to the temporal gap experienced by Winnie and the circular, mechanical reiteration of newspaper phrases that closes the novel, the Home Office restores markers of shared time. These suggest residual organisation, as Anderson puts it, “not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.”441 Accordingly, the policeman is accorded “seven minutes” (101) to provide his report, the progression of his intradiegetic narrative minutely tracked by a “ghostly, evanescent tick” (100).

439 Joseph Conrad. A Personal Record. New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1912. 14. 440 Andrew Abbott. Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2001. 218. As Andrew Abbott summarises Bergson’s account, “[o]nly the mechanical necessity of interaction requires the imagination of a homogenous temporal medium – clock time – through which discussion becomes possible.” If “[s]ocial time is always enforced, always clock time,” Ethelred, presents an attenuated, almost parodic form of such a social function. 441 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.

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The remit of “[n]o details, please” enables the novel to trace the precise manner in which the visible and the sayable are distributed to assure the politician of the ongoing reproduction of a national sphere which, while imperilled, is located on a measurable temporal trajectory. Further, the Assistant Commissioner is presented with the “face of the clock behind the great man’s back—a heavy, glistening affair” (100). It is towards this face of a communally ordained, national time that the Assistant Commissioner directs his account, emerging in the process as a consummate storyteller. His sequential narrative offers the linear equivalent to the restricted scope of the Home Secretary’s sphere, shown as it is to depend on a ‘parenthetical’ differentiation of identity and alterity. Just as the ‘monstrous’ signs behind the AC’s back indicate the material excluded from his gaze of simplified presence and absence, however, the novel features a stark reminder of the narrative’s excluded elements. While the Assistant Commissioner acts as an intradiegetic narrator to fill the politician’s ellipsis and exclude any residual indications of non-discursive “noise,”442 we are made privy to a brief (‘unplaced’) return of Stevie. The victim of the explosion interrupts the production of unobtrusive, detail-free police reportage: “Though how, in that last case, he could hope to have his own share in the business concealed is more than I can tell,” he continued, in his ignorance of poor Stevie’s devotion to Mr Verloc (who was good), and of his truly peculiar dumbness, which in the old affair of fireworks on the stairs had for many years resisted entreaties, coaxing, anger, and other means of investigation used by his beloved sister. For Stevie was loyal . . . . “No, I can’t imagine. It’s possible that he never thought of that at all.” (161)

The detail-free narration is interrupted by a summary of Stevie’s entangled materiality, with its immeasurable surfeit of detail. Interspersed in the policeman’s report, attuned as it is to the reduction of complexity demanded of him, the narrator interposes an alternative knowledge unamenable to the official’s “investigation.” This gap differs both from the self-reflexive analepses characterising the Assistant Commissioner’s internal investigation of the police and from the the ellipsis offered by Ethelred. Rather, it presents one of the few instances in which the narrator establishes distance from the police protagonist. The mention of “devotion to Mr Verloc (who was good)” even features a brief return to internal focalisation of Stevie’s moral judgments. Winnie’s brother, thus, cannot be “fitted with delightful ease” (101) into the restitution of institutional certainties. The adequation of police discourse to the exact requirements of officialdom is confronted with Stevie’s refusal to offer explanations, in a recurrence of the ‘coruscating circles’ previously

442 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 29.

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disrupting the anarchists’ interpretative strategies. Thus, the figure of “peculiar dumbness” emerges as the one element that evades the policeman’s production of truth and its attendant narrative bolstering of Ethelred’s claim to representing normative identity and organised time. This interpolation of a non-discursive gap in the otherwise seamless fitting of “every little fact” (101) structurally repeats the undifferentiated ‘mass’ reconstituting itself outside of the policeman’s scope during his brief investigative slumming. One final time, by interspersing Stevie, the novel confronts the reader with the material that is excluded from the attenuated report. In Rancière’s terminology, this interruption of the policeman’s reassuring certainties constitutes narrative material that “makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise.”443 Just as ‘monstrous’ interminglings of signs and matter take place behind the policeman’s back in the streets, the interlude reiterating Stevie’s devotion reintroduces excluded, non-narratable ‘noise’ into the production of political knowledge. The return of Stevie, running counter to temporal sequence as it does, thus, reminds the reader of the selectivity of the information that is transferred from the urban outside into the sphere of officialdom. The tacit re-entry of Winnie’s brother serves as a rejoinder to the Assistant Commissioner’s brief summary of the entire novel: “From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama” (163). After all, the analysis of the apparatus of demarcation has shown that by no means can the ‘domestic’ be differentiated from the ‘political’ form of the narrative. The allegedly domestic sphere has not only been upheld by a set of unacknowledged contracts, but also literally finances Verloc’s activities as a secret agent. In this sense, the status of Stevie always already has been a matter of politics, of arrangements that refuse marginalisation as ‘noise’ in the Assistant Commissioner’s account. The explicit disruption of the smooth functioning of the policeman’s narration thus indicates the degree to which the AC creates the condition he purports to merely describe. After all, the description as ‘domestic drama’ diminishes the importance of the Greenwich event and gives the policeman leeway to intrude on the Verlocs’ sphere. Thus, the Assistant Commissioner asserts that Verloc will “be extremely startled to find his connection with this affair, whatever it may be, brought home to him so quickly” (104). Against this casually passive voice, the policeman literally ‘brings home’ the affair to the Verloc house, indirectly precipitating the catastrophic denouement. From an explicitly political perspective, the notion of a ‘domestic drama’ – in the sense of domestic policy within Britain’s borders – shows that the Greenwich

443 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 30.

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affair cannot simply be consigned to alterity in the manner of the AC’s account of Vladimir’s activities. While the ambassador’s planned state of exception constitutes the catalyst for the compounding dissolutions in the novel, the reader can, after all, clearly trace the responsibility for the explosion to English actors. It is Heat, after all, who has set up anarchists as ‘domestic’ foils (and the novel as a whole that has expunged any Fenian traces in its pursuit of a depoliticised, radical stereotype). Not least because of this entwined responsibility, the excluded outside is surreptitiously included in the ordered interior, despite the Commissioner’s truncated narrative filling the gaps in the Home Secretary’s monologues. Metaphorically, the impossibility of keeping at bay what has been excluded (including the very fabrication of ‘anarchists’) is reflected by the “great man’s” office, mired as it is in the characteristics of the wilderness obtaining outside its bounds: “Shades of green silk fitted low over all the lights imparted to the room something of a forest’s deep gloom” (159). After the connection between the unmarked ‘jungle’, alleged disorder, and the exertion of power has been firmly established, this combination of high politics and ‘gloomy’ nature is far from contradictory. As much as the the co-produced narrative – its ‘details’ redacted – works to project incommensurable material to the outside, the AC’s own strategies, after all, depend on confusing both semantic spaces. To wit: he has been shown to declare when a determination of an identity-bolstering ‘inside’ counts and when it can be treated as obsolete (or rather: ‘unstamped’). It is only consistent, then, that Sir Ethelred’s “social purity” (159), likewise, is placed in close proximity to the dissolution of order. Rather than a sign of breakdown, the ‘forest’s gloom’ indicates the exceptional, lawless states on which this oblique authority and its claim to national identity rest, the stabilising report of the AC notwithstanding. Like the AC’s efforts, the manifestation of sovereign power is not hindered by wilderness within its bounds, but consists precisely in “this very impossibility of distinguishing between inside and outside, nature and exception, physis and nomos.”444 In the manner of Agamben’s Möbius strip, the state of nature is folded into the functioning of government. The second restoration of a demarcation of self and Other is the result of a transfer of alterity from anarchist to Russian alterity. In the ultimate confrontation between the Assistant Commissioner and Vladimir, a differential order seems to be restored. The British policeman bars the Russian interloper from entering the Explorer’s Club. Because of this gesture, the Assistant Commissioner is invested with the capacity to restore – rather than merely suspend – differentiations between identity and alterity which are inertly presumed by others. Such passive

444 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37.

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presumption of demarcation is the hallmark of Ethelred’s “apprentice statesman,” (158) Toodles. For this up-and-comer, the fact that he has moved in the same circles as Vladimir emerges as “the beastliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life” (159). A brief glimpse into an intermingling of British parliamentary politics and barely considered political antagonists “revolutionised his idea of the Explorer’s Club’s extreme selectness, of its social purity. Toodles was revolutionary only in politics; his social beliefs and personal feelings he wished to preserve unchanged through all the years allotted to him on this earth which, upon the whole, he believed to be a nice place to live on.” (159) The character is shown to proceed from an assumption of functional differentiation. That is, without a “guidance system, an apex, or a center,” the political system to which he dedicates himself is “no longer able to generate a uniform claim to rationality for itself. This does not prevent functional systems, each for itself, from pondering the unity of the difference between system and environment.”445 In Toodles’ case, this ‘pondering’ leads to the assumption that the “watery atmosphere” (74) of the diegetic world can be organised by means of political procedures and trust in a democratic process, indicated synecdochally by the Home Secretary’s bill for the nationalisation of fisheries. However, such optimism regarding a ‘revolutionary’ development towards a general amelioration which can, at the same time, be constrained by the existing institutions, is undercut by the Assistant Commissioner’s comparison of the ambassador with a “dog-fish. You don’t perhaps know what a dog-fish is like” (158). Vladimir being an honorary member of the Explorer’s Club, the maritime imagery exceeds its bounds. No longer associated with “special books” (158), the environment with its “altogether detestable beast” (158) is shown to already suffuse the purported sphere of collective identity. Nonetheless, in the showdown between the Assistant Commissioner and Vladimir, the British policeman expels the Russian from the club, which, at the same time, suddenly appears as distinct from the city surrounding it. At the moment of differentiation, the building appears “of noble proportions and hospitable aspect, with the light of a great hall falling through its glass” (168). Against this abrupt return of light, it is Vladimir who emerges as a suitable heterostereotype, his status as Other suggested by renewed attention to his “Oriental phraseology. But in his heart he was almost awed by the miraculous cleverness of the English police” (166). The contemporary reader is here provided with the opportunity to re-draw distinctions, bringing to bear discourses suggesting an essential split of West and East in their own bid to establish “ready-made

445 Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1, 109.

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phrases.”446 This transfer of the position of an arbiter of destabilisation from anarchists to the character who views Europe “from its other end” (167) allows for a replacement: the anarchist as an “internal, not a foreign, enemy, an enemy created by the very structure of English society” is to be supplanted by markedly foreign alterity.447 That the second demarcation effected by the Assistant Commissioner pertains to an ‘Oriental’ agent reflects a discursive shift in the British response to anarchism: the supposed threat of radical interlopers from the continent is expanded to a more general suspicion of the comparatively liberal immigration policy of Britain. It is, notably, with reference to anarchist violence that the 1905 Aliens Act introduces restrictions on immigration which, ironically in light of the novel’s restitution of Russian alterity, at first affected Jewish refugees fleeing state persecution in Russia.448 Thus, by participating in the transfer of disavowed features from ‘anarchists’ to the ambassador, the Assistant Commissioner participates in a discourse which, paradoxically, achieves what Vladimir’s ‘philosophy of bombthrowing’ set out to accomplish. Though his response is far from the ‘universal repressive legislation’ envisioned by Vladimir, the AC performs an executive version of repressive measures on a small scale. These become even more marked in view of the tacit coding of Vladimir as Jewish: Descended from generations victimised by the instruments of arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was born to it. (164)

As Cedric Watts has shown, this description evokes the “racial victimisation” rampant in Tsarist Russia, with pogroms abetted by the police.449 It is, then, a redoubled alterity of ‘Russian’ and ‘Jewish’ that the policeman constructs as he expunges the interloper from the Explorer’s Club. This classification of ‘inherited’

446 Cf. Bernard Porter. Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1992. 108. In the wake of an influx of Irish officers into the Special Branch of Scotland Yard “prejudice within the British police hierarchy against what had used to be regarded as ‘underhand’ methods had melted away.” By 1910, not only did Britain have an equivalent to a secret police (cf. Porter 119), but also, in Melville Magnaghten, an “anti-anarchist agent” on the Continent, who, as Glazzard has shown, bears striking parallels to the Assistant Commissioner. Cf. Andrew Glazzard. Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels. London: Palgrave, 2016. 73. 447 Ruppel, Political Genealogy, 85. 448 Cf. Kathleen Paul. Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era. Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1997. 66. 449 Watts, “Jews and Degenerates,” 74.

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traits undoes the destabilisation of degenerationist discourse analysed above, which, far from pertaining only to anarchists, circulates throughout the storyworld indiscriminately. The contrast between this dismantling of biologistic taxonomy and the inborn Otherness imputed to Vladimir is not only a matter of plot; what is more, in the policeman’s russophobic and antisemitic gaze,450 the perspectives of the protagonist and the narrator, once more, align. Authorial judgment and internal focalisation collapse into one.451 The narrator’s ironic detachment momentarily suspended, the reader, like the members of the Explorer’s Club, is confronted with a world made to British measure, with signs of deviance legible to the perspectivally emboldened police observer. Despite this performative restoration of a split between normativity and aberration, such racist classification is, however, part and parcel with the exceptional use of power displayed by the AC throughout. After all, his association with the novel’s restoration of racial, biologistic taxonomy not only takes up the adapted colonialist strategy he used against Heat. The AC arranges alterity as a set of ‘floating signifiers’ – their “meaning [. . .] indeterminate between alternative equivalential frontiers”452 – which allow for shifting ascriptions, adaptable to the requirements of the interests he serves. In the process, the return of classification depends on the previous observation of personality not “stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially” (109) during his London walk. Only on the basis of such suspension of identity can an imposition of new markers of alterity proceed, as a ‘stamp’ left on the self-made, featureless blank. This dual strategy of dissolving and selectively observing Otherness enables the AC to impose ‘racial, national, and individual’ characteristics in the service of the remaining spaces of “social purity” (159). The strengthening of the imbrication of anarchism and foreignness participates in a discursive shift at the end of which Britain reneges on the very leniency bemoaned by the Russian ambassador. Although the residual determination of alterity is, thus, directed against the representative of Russian autocracy, the models of power negotiated in the confrontation are not entirely dissimilar.

450 This conjunction of two figures of Otherness responds to fabricated media outrage after Jewish immigration to England “reached the levels that would so alarm the English populace during the Russian and Polish pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s.” Jimmie E. Cain. Bram Stoker and Russophobia. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2006. 115. 451 As Martínez Lorente points out, “the neatness of the theoretical distinction between naratorial and reflector modes very easily collapses in practice, because (taxonomically) undesirable phenomena as double focalization and ambiguous focalization are not at all marginal exceptions but the inescapable norm.” Joaquín Martínez Lorente. “Blurring Focalization: Psychological Expansions of Point of View and Modality.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 9 (1996). 63–89. 80. 452 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 131.

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The “sentimental regard for individual liberty” (22) that Vladimir attempts to replace with the possibility of ever-renewed, extralegal definitions of groups to be branded ‘anarchist’ is taken up in modified form by the policeman’s project. The British arbiter of exception sets up ‘the Other’ as a variable indication of foreignness, finally unmoored from the residue of revolutionary anarchist thought which, however caricatured, still at least informed the rhetoric of the various radical figures populating the novel. Thus, what appears as a hard-and-fast distinction between British light and rationality against Russian irrationality and autocracy emerges as a subterranean affinity — a shared dependence on a state of exception. The renewed demarcation from Vladimir, spectacularly enforced though it is, falters in the face of this overarching equivalence traced throughout the novel. After all, while the state of exception has not yielded the large-scale political changes envisaged by Vladimir, the narrative demonstrates and enacts the reduction to bare life made possible by the dissolution of demarcations. Both in the ‘animal’ status imposed on Verloc and, more broadly, in the presentation of Winnie’s and Ossipon’s indistinct perambulations, the enforced modes of exception are shown to have left their mark on the storyworld. The Assistant Commissioner, rather than offering a communicable dichotomy of self and Other against the state of exception, has been shown to engage in his own mode of placing extant political identities under erasure. In a final iteration of this possibility of suspension, the confrontation in front of the Explorer’s Club reactivates the strategies he has used during his urban adventure. The “light of a great hall falling through [the] glass doors” (168) resembles the alternation of “black” and “violent blaze” (110) by means of which the Assistant Commissioner’s urban phenomenology has registered the vanishing of his objects of observation. What is more, just as he notes the ‘unstamped’ status of the restaurant patrons, his expulsion of Vladimir is likewise predicated on the dissolution rather than restitution of boundaries. To this end, he emphasises that the Greenwich attack was planned “[t]heoretically only, on foreign territory; abroad only by a fiction” (167). The restoration of the Club as a reification of residual national identity, thus, depends on rescinding the fiction of embassies as political entities “supposed to be part and parcel of the country to which they belong” (167). The very gesture of restoring a figure of alterity, thus, coincides with another effacement of classificatory borders. The redistribution of English light and ‘Oriental’ shadow is inculcated from a position which belongs to neither (“The Assistant Commissioner himself did not turn into the noble building” 168) and, likewise, suspends extant conceptual boundaries. It is from this threshold position that the Assistant Commissioner is associated with a final restitution of limited temporal order: “He looked at his watch. It was only half-past ten.” (168) As opposed to the dissolution of the

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temporal fetish that formed the basis of Vladimir’s planned state of exception, the Assistant Commissioner restores a personal version of clock-time. While the characters that exceed his notion of ‘domestic drama’ are thrust into an impersonal, threatening durée, the policeman’s account of temporal order is residually restored. Although the British arbiter of the state of exception accomplishes the expulsion of the Russian Other, thus, his modus operandi continues to be predicated on the suspension of boundaries rather than their material reification and internal elaboration on the side of identity. When he repeats a variation of Heat’s surveillance discourse (“we can put our finger on any anarchist here” 176) this assurance affirms the possibility of transferring the status of ‘anarchist’ at will rather than asserting a genuine radical outside. Accordingly, his strategy hinges on the withdrawal of Vladimir’s position rather than the simulation of a stabilising, relational foil. To return to the image of the stepping stones: while the excision of Vladimir from the Explorer’s Club asserts residual certainties for the likes of Toodles, who share in the the restricted narrative template by means of which the individual stones have been connected, the coda of the novel traces the results of an absence of such assurances. In the terms of the metaphor, the denouement takes place in the “waters of error” (73) that make up the gaps between the islands of coherence. Consequently, the very beginning of the chapter following the Assistant Commissioner’s rapid departure from the narrative opens with an image of failing topographical demarcation: Verloc from “time to time eyed his wife through the open door” (169). As in the beginning of the novel, the space left behind after the policeman’s exit is presented as porous, bereft of material borders. Anarchist characteristics can be transferred to the Russian figure of residual alterity; however, the deterioration and death of the remaining characters are unaffected by that figure of Otherness. Excluded from the Assistant Commissioner’s gestures of reconstituted demarcation, their respective catastrophes unfold as a result of compounding gaps in a borderless environment. The third and final residual stabilisation of a social sphere enabled by the AC’s foray into a space in which he “seemed to lose some more of his identity” (109) is constituted by the salon. The most extensive presentation of this space, in which his wife has been able to mingle with the ‘Lady Patroness’, is given in one of the analeptic gaps disrupting his conversation in the police department. During that interlude, we learn that Michaelis, the utopian anarchist who is to be framed for the Greenwich attack, is a fixture of that same salon sphere. In order to preserve its differentiation against an inchoate environment, this representative of political alterity is, thus, shown to have re-entered the space which draws differentiations on the basis of aesthetic appraisal. That is, “the difference system/environment occurs twice: as the difference produced by the system, and

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as the difference observed inside the system.”453 In the case of the salon, however, this distinction is subject to a further differentiation: it is the Assistant Commissioner who is shown to be able to ‘produce’ difference from his threshold position; conversely, the ‘observation’ of that same distinction is relegated to the denizens of the salon sphere themselves, who are shown to require representatives of their constitutive outside in order to exercise their discernment. To this end, “Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle” (31) provides not only a visual spectacle by dint of his overdetermined, grotesque physicality. What is more, his teleological view of a default movement towards a classless society provides a hermetic language game developed in “solitary seclusion” (31). Appreciating and financing the further production of this system is shown to be without material consequences, merely offering a signified of controllable, radical discourse received with fascination and revulsion in a space which purports to be “above the play of economic conditions” (79). Michaelis can be admitted into the salon as a curio, a controlled Other who remains appropriately “mild-voiced and quiet, with no more self-consciousness than a very small child, and with something of a child’s charm—the appealing charm of trustfulness” (79). It is this ‘trust’ that is upheld by the AC’s urban foray, which is, however, precipitated by a sceptical inquiry into his subordinate’s method of producing and elaborating figures of alterity. The prompt for this institutional auto-investigation “may be defined best as a sudden and alert mistrust of the weapon in his hand” (76). This ‘mistrust’ is not shown to originate from any particular misgivings about Heat’s fabrication of anarchist heterostereotypes. Indeed, during the final interview in the Home Office, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to defend his subordinate’s institutional production of truth. It is, rather, the momentary disruption of official truths that comes as a “physical shock” (76), and that causes an “improper sort of interest in his work of social protection” (76). The AC is shown to take such interest because his own interests are at stake: Michaelis is safely reinstalled in the salon sphere in order to maintain the policeman’s connections and his own marriage. Propping up a “grotesque incarnation of humanitarian passion” (80) in the salon, thus, emerges as a radically limited, residual strategy of demarcation. Instead of providing a generalisable demarcation between identity and alterity, the investigative foray that follows is organised around the exigencies of the AC’s domestic situation. The provision of a residual

453 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 45. My trans. Orig. quote: “Die Differenz System/Umwelt kommt zweimal vor: als durch das System produzierter Unterschied und als im System beobachteter Unterschied.”

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boundary between inside and outside is traced to the protagonist’s own (psychologically and intradiegetically) innermost motivation, expressed as the “secretly outspoken thought” (83) that his wife would “never forgive” (83) Michaelis’ incarceration. As a result, the novel establishes a remarkable similarity to Verloc, whose political entanglements the policeman presents as a “domestic drama” (163). Thus, as has been shown to be a consistent pattern for this model of power, the distinctions that are reinstated originate in a suspension of difference, as a result of which the personal and the political mingle freely. Accordingly, the AC’s position regarding the Lady Patroness, whose favour he maintains by shielding Michaelis from investigation, is presented as a “complex sentiment depending a little on her prestige, on her personality, but most of all on the instinct of flattered gratitude” (82). These mixed motives show that the demarcation of boundaries that concludes the Assistant Commissioner’s plot is, thus, once more predicated on the blurring of distinctions. The AC emphasises the protection of the privileged few to a greater extent than Vladimir’s planned permanent state of exception. Nevertheless, there is little indication of an enduring demarcation that would furnish an alternative to the looming loss of signifiable order associated with the city outside of the salon. Indeed, the Lady Patroness’ space is already shown to be on the cusp of intermingling with the dominant logic of circulating media that have been shown to impose their rhythmic template on Ossipon: “I thought you were going to stay and take Annie home,” said the lady patroness of Michaelis. “I find I’ve yet a little work to do tonight.” “In connection——?” “Well, yes—in a way.” “Tell me, what is it really—this horror?” “It’s difficult to say what it is, but it may yet be a cause célèbre,” said the Assistant Commissioner. (165)

The ‘horror’ is not supplanted by an explanatory account that would reconstitute a sense of demarcation. Instead, what “it” may “really” be is replaced with unstated ‘connections’ as well as an exchange of ellipses. What is more, the ‘horror’ – which evokes the Assistant Commissioner’s own quoted mental characterisation of the city as “[h]orrible, horrible” (74) – is replaced by a future, metonymical stand-in, the cause célèbre. The policeman advertises a mediated, public event, of the same kind as the failed attack that propelled the salon radical Michaelis into the public eye. What is more, the term anticipates the notoriety of the Greenwich case in the media — media which, as shown above, circulate information in a manner unamenable to demarcation, let alone individual interpretative engagement. The policeman, then, replaces the ‘horror’

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with its metonymical stand-in of an “eruption” of mediated matter. In view of the circulation of information through Ossipon, the reader can infer the similarity between the mediated event of Winnie’s death and the Greenwich event-tocome. It does not bode well for the continued certainties of the salon sphere that the multiple, oblique responsibilities for the explosion are to be transformed into circulating sensationalism of the kind that characterised its historical analogue, Martial Bourdin’s 1894 detonation. As Mulry notes, “[t]his curious explosion in Greenwich, central to the plot of Conrad’s novel and simultaneously intriguingly absent from it, was a cause célèbre in its day.”454 This absent presence is about to be reproduced as the event is ‘brought home’ by the newspapers. If, as the AC predicts, Stevie’s detonation will become a headline, another “impenetrable mystery” (227) constitutively averse to the entangled history of the event, the project of demarcation appears far less stable than the confident report to the Home Secretary suggests. The coming logic of media, after all, has been shown to circulate indiscriminately, eroding precisely the distinctions of norm and aberration that the policeman champions. The ‘horror’, that is, appears less dispelled than deferred; it consists in a chain of metaphors in which the distribution of the ‘cause célèbre’ resembles nothing so much as Stevie’s remains “which seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops” (65). These, in turn, structurally reproduce the “rags of the dirty men, harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper” (59). Though answering the question ‘what is this horror’ with ‘a cause célèbre’ is intended as reassurance, it appears doubtful whether the production of alterity can proceed once the novel’s pessimistic version of media erodes the carefully curated truths imparted by the AC. At the very least, the policeman’s announcement of the spectacle-to-come draws attention to the subterranean connections between the salon sphere and Stevie — and, thus, to the considerable ideological work expended throughout the novel to diminish those links in order for a sheltered social sphere to persist in its certainties. With Michaelis, the self-referential appraisal of the anarchist figure is ensured so that both elements of demarcation are superficially present: (1) a boundary between the salon and the anarchic outside as well as (2) a re-entry of the abjected Other. The latter exhibition of a conspicuously harmless theorist of anarchism, then, allows for internal elaboration of the founding political difference. However, the proliferation of ellipses and, particularly, the allusion to the impending media circulation indicates the residual nature of this last

454 Mulry, Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists, 1.

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vestige of political difference. While the Assistant Commissioner still performs his limited, post-foundational differentiation, the novel indicates that any order fabricated on the basis of the suspension of demarcations elsewhere is temporary and subject to erasure. Comforting signs of identity and alterity are residually assured. Yet, since the strategies that stabilise political difference are predicated on an underlying effacement of boundaries, the permanence of any resulting, differentially determined order is called into question.

4.4 Conclusion The Secret Agent presents attempts to institute a space in which norms are suspended, leading to a “zone of anomie, in which a violence without any juridical form acts.”455 Those subjected to such a state of suspended norms are divested of the certainties of lawful identity or lawless alterity. Positioned in-between, they are compelled to infer norms that are neither formulated explicitly nor applied to any specific case. The text, thus, foregrounds the consequences of a collapse of alterity. Without a position of Otherness – and be it the controllable anarchist at the ‘frontier’ upheld by the apparatus of demarcation – the very concept of a self becomes untenable. Further, in the absence of categories of relational alterity, the very classificatory terms previously applied to an alleged, constitutive outside recur self-referentially within an undifferentiated space. Thus, Verloc’s breakdown is initiated as the material border between inside and outside breaks down; Winnie, meanwhile, acts in a state of delayed decoding, in which she tries (and fails) to interpret her own thoughts and actions — a process that is permanently extended rather than closed off by the media’s account. As anarchists cannot be conceived as irreducibly Other, the traits formerly consigned to transgressive radicalism reappear in the familiar settings of institutional certainty and domestic stability. Thus, in the absence of comforting demarcations of alterity, the protagonists are not at leisure to develop new models of identity of the type indicated by Winnie’s assumption that (upon the end of her domestic contract) she is a “free woman” (187). Instead, she and her husband are both ‘excepted’ from any order and fully determined by absent modes of authority. What emerges in place of illusory Otherness is a form of power which determines its targets by destabilising distinctions and withdrawing constructions of identity. It is not only the interstitial authority of the ambassador and his regime that exerts this

455 Agamben, State of Exception, 59.

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oblique determination. Rather, the representative of a peculiarly British state of exception deploys colonial knowledge for the targeted dissolution of domestic differentiations. Thus, as contingent as the production of transgressive, anarchist alterity may have been, the novel confronts the reader with a social sphere dependent on the residual notion of a radical figure beyond the pale. After all, any sense of identity, both collective and personal, depends on successive differentiations from an Other, in a process of marking identity against relational alterity. As this mediation fails, the result is presented as mechanical repetition, in which mass media constructions of truth circulate unimpeded through bodies and texts alike — as well as a mode of rule that is shown to exacerbate rather than contain this breakdown.

5 Politics beyond Demarcation? Loss of Alterity in Conrad and Chesterton Both novels considered so far present residual attempts to maintain the possibility of a differential political sphere. The Princess Casamassima and The Secret Agent allow for the stabilisation of individual and collective identity as long as a sense of self is demarcated against its relational obverse of radicalism. In both cases, the notion of an uncontainable dissolution of order is temporarily projected onto a constitutive outside, so that identity can at least temporarily be defined and elaborated against a countervailing alterity. By contrast, the novels analysed in the following – Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G. K. Chesterton – preclude such demarcation from the outset. Both texts demonstrate the impossibility of establishing a differentiation between a normative inside and an anarchist outside. Instead of presenting and evaluating strategies of maintaining shared illusions of an ordered sphere, their respective diegetic worlds veer towards a wholesale collapse of any politics predicated on classificatory boundaries. Following Laclau and Mouffe, “a formation manages to signify itself (that is, to constitute itself as such) only by transforming the limits into frontiers, by constituting a chain of equivalences which constructs what is beyond the limits as that which it is not.”1 In turning to these concluding novels, I will outline the consequences that ensue once what is ‘beyond’ the limits of political contestation can no longer be defined. Specifically, in both texts, disintegration of order fails to be relegated to an anarchic outside. After narrating the collapse of demarcations, the mode of rule that subsequently takes hold in each novel, however, is presented in terms of fundamentally different versions of a state of exception. Conrad’s and Chesterton’s iterations of a post-binary model of politics yield uncertain positions of authority of the kind I have already shown to coincide with the breakdown of relational alterity in the early modernist political imaginary. However, they do so in polarised form, leading to sharply distinct trajectories towards a state in which anarchy can no longer be placed beyond the pale. Under Western Eyes accentuates the emergence of perpetually absent modes of determination which replace any stable assumption of a normative sphere. In the process, the novel presents a literary version of autocracy which systematically dismantles the possibility of

1 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso, 2014. 130. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-005

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defining a collective identity against anarchist or revolutionary figures. While Conrad’s novel, thus, emphasises totalitarian modes of subjection, The Man Who Was Thursday embarks on a literary project that sets it apart from the other representations of post-binary rule indicated so far — it attempts a positive reevaluation of the state of exception. As order and anarchy are disclosed as indistinguishable, this opens up possibilities for new social arrangements predicated on negotiation and deliberation rather than a split of self and Other.

5.1 States of Exception in Under Western Eyes Already in its frame narration, Under Western Eyes foregrounds the difficulties of determining political Otherness. Conrad’s ‘Russian’ novel begins with a disavowal by the extradiegetic ‘teacher of languages’, who maintains the editorial fiction of merely releasing texts left behind by the novel’s main character, Razumov. These have been relinquished for reasons the narrator, who distances himself from its contents, cannot fathom: “To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor – Kirylo Sidorovitch – Razumov.” (4) This disclaimer is followed by strategies of denying narrative authority. The teacher presents a theory of language according to which a “wilderness of words” (4) precludes him from ‘creating’ the protagonist for his readers. Initially, this language scepticism appears as a professional affliction. ‘Man’ is a “mere talking animal” to a “teacher of languages” engaged in an occupation inimical to “imagination, observation, and insight” (4). While the teacher retracts narrative authority because of such profusion of signs, however, he nonetheless proposes sententious certainties with remarkable facility: “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality” (4), as he can disclaim with an aphoristic claim to common-sense. The decentred speaking position, thus, does not diminish the possibility of passing judgment. On the contrary, immediately after holding forth on the impossibility of ascertaining truths, the narrator transfers that uncertainty of language to the object of his description, namely Russia. Consequently, it is that country specifically, rather than language more generally, that is imagined to dispel ‘reality’: “The illogicality of their attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional” (5) exceed the understanding of the Western observer. In a gesture familiar from the instances of oblique authority analysed above, ‘disclaiming’ is a mere prelude to all the more expansive claims. After stressing

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the unavailability of truths, Russia can be maintained as a space that constitutively exceeds understanding altogether. Thus, despite the impossibility of establishing certainty by means of the “sweeping abundance” (4) of words, the narrator perpetually passes judgments — which are, in each case, accompanied by asseverations regarding the very impossibility of doing just that. Already in the figure of the frame narrator, the novel, then, shows that scepticism does not impede epistemological hegemony. While this does not equate the AngloRussian teacher of languages with the figures of autocracy presented in the embedded narrative, the simultaneity of suspension and exertion of authority establishes a template that remains a constant feature of state power in Under Western Eyes. The analysis will trace the representation of this dialectic of withdrawing certainties whilst imposing authoritative judgments, which, in turn, never disclose themselves as such. As alterity cannot be pinpointed, the protagonist is suspended in spaces in which no boundaries can be drawn, and, concomitantly, no revolutionary alterity emerges as a foil against which to define the self. Of the political novels of early modernism, this state of suspended boundaries comes closest to a literary evocation of a state of exception, in which power becomes the more determinative the less explicitly it prescribes its laws of application. To supply a brief account of the political discourses regarding Russia which inflect this loss of demarcation, the analysis of the novel is preceded by a brief account of Conrad’s 1905 essay “Autocracy and War.” In this text, the very possibility of recovering certainty by setting up a sphere of Otherness – which the diatribe on Russian “arbitrariness” (4) by the language teacher still attempts to maintain – is presented as an irrecoverable ordering strategy. Instead of supplying an absent context, the text performs a dissolution of boundaries in the course of which identity and alterity evade the essay’s analytical terms. In “Autocracy and War,” as in Under Western Eyes, the more uncertain the differentiation of self and Other becomes, the more authoritarian and inescapable the ensuing regime turns out to be.

5.1.1 The Dissolution of Alterity: “Autocracy and War” This dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul.2

2 Joseph Conrad. “Autocracy and War.” Notes on Life and Letters. London: Gresham, 1925. 90–113. The essay was published in the Fortnightly Review and the North American Review in 1905 and first collected in the 1921 edition of Notes on Life and Letters. All future references are to the page-numbers of this edition and will be provided parenthetically in the text.

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In this description from Joseph Conrad’s essay “Autocracy and War,” Russia is presented as featureless; rather than a defined space afforded straightforward negative connotations of autocracy, the country is defined by its semantic impoverishment. Its profusion of weapons and religious paraphernalia hide its tenuousness as a mere ‘apparition’ that ‘ravenously’ tries to make up for its fundamental spectrality. About to be replaced by Germany on the world stage, Russia, according to the essay’s argumentative thrust, can only exert an influence as long as it is falsely presumed to possess an essentialist identity. This definition of a featureless state also prefigures the mode of representation enacted by the essay: a state conceived as “phantom” (91) is not to be countered by denigrating concrete policies or attacking any specific geopolitical strategy. Instead, the text performs failing acts of description, evading coherence by applying increasingly incommensurable metaphors and metonymies to the Russian state. The process by means of which an appropriate descriptive mode is to be established breaks down. However, this failure paradoxically emerges as the only appropriate means of coming to terms with the spectral status attributed to Russia. The country’s position, as Conrad’s authorial persona argues, is afforded undue substance as long as it is associated with extant personifications indicating a remnant of unified intent. Thus, “Autocracy and War” involves the reader in a performative contradiction which allows the speaker to “purposely conjoin [. . .] contradictory notions in order to problematise them” instead of “operating within a ‘conceptually satisfying’ philosophical framework, where all ideas have their appropriate place.”3 A plethora of metaphors points towards the absence of a defined tertium comparationis, while ever-renewed metonymies fail to establish a remnant of contiguity. As the imagery works against itself, the essay sets up a failure of description that constitutes a much more fundamental critique of Russia than the more superficial imagery of bloodshed and imperial ambition would suggest. The autocratic state emerges as an epistemological impossibility rather than an interested actor in a political context. In a further step, this renunciation of presence cannot, however, be contained. The evocation of a “negation of everything worth living for, an empty void” (100) describes an entity twhich – despite escalating attempts at re-description – refuses to be restricted to the Russian state. The essay suggests that a linear process, in which the phantom-state of Russia can be dismantled in what amounts to geopolitical exorcism of “the ghost of Russia’s might” (90), is too simplistic a model. A straightforward dichotomy between the ineluctable rise of Western rationality

3 Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. 22.

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and the receding structure of Russia is shown to be untenable. Setting aside Russia as a ghostly aberration turns out to be as much of a losing strategy as the narrator’s attempts in Under Western Eyes to establish specifically Russian “tones of cynicism and cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe” (121). Instead of assurances of this kind, the essay performs the lingering possibility that exposing the “fantasy of a madman’s brain [which] could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument of fear and oppression” (91) is, ultimately, not a tactics reserved for Russia. Instead, this nested metaphor is appropriate for statehood more generally. While the essay is prescient about the German Empire harbouring ambitions to outstrip its “old accomplice” (95), the speaker, thus, surreptitiously performs a more fundamental anxiety: just as there is “no new Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation” (91), there is no model of a state that would furnish a foundational political identity defined against the spectral alterity of the Russian state.4 No “idea at the back of it” (in the manner of Marlow’s estimation of British colonialism) is forthcoming.5 If one autocratic regime can wield influence for centuries, “as inexplicable in its persistence as in its duration” (90), there is no reason to assume that any contemporary state asserting its presence against the autocratic Russian spectre could not be subjected to the same suspicion. This possibility of dismantling the foundations not of any state in particular – Russia as aberrance from a stable, statist norm – but of the very concept of statehood builds towards a progressively more ambivalent political conclusion. The essay offers a stereotypical ‘two-worlds thesis’, a stark opposition between Eastern destructiveness and Western civilisation, which, in a second step, cannot be upheld by the speaker.6 Instead, the ‘two worlds’ are subjected to performative contradictions: they fail to yield appreciable dichotomies, casting suspicion on the epistemological certainty upon which their polarised formulation depends.

4 This analysis makes use of the terminology of a ‘speaker’ rather than attributing the essay to ‘Conrad’. The approach to the essay as a performance attributed to a speaker takes its cue from Harrison’s notion of ‘essayism’: figurative language, informality, and a dialogic structure contribute to an ‘essayistic style’, which, as an “open, self-seeking form – more digressive than systematic, more interrogative than declarative, more descriptive than explanatory – tends to be antigeneric.” Thomas Harrison. Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. 3. 5 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 7. 6 Keith Carabine. The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s ‘Under Western Eyes’. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996. 85. “A ‘two-worlds thesis’ is central to the St. PetersburgGeneva axis of the plot and it informs one of the old teacher’s editorial models in Under Western Eyes, which insists on the otherness of the Russian character and on the great differences between her political and historical traditions and the West’s.”

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The first performative contradiction performed by the essay has been shown to be the result of metaphorical excess in the service of describing Russia as a semantic zero-degree, a motiveless, unaccountable political void. In light of the impossibility of restricting this spectrality to Russia as a transgression from statist normativity, however, a second-order performative contradiction can be attributed to the essay. Not only does the text posit that the organicist notion of “the felicity of greeting with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great State” (91) may never come to pass, but, what is more, the speaker anticipates that “we are destined for another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances” (91). This perpetual destabilisation not of any one state but of states in general calls into question the fiction of an originary founding gesture. The notion that “inspiration springs from the constructive instinct of the people, governed by the strong hand of a collective conscience” (91) is increasingly subjected to the same fundamental suspicion — whether it applies to the Russian state or any other nation vying for dominance. The notion of a collective founding is a fictive origin exerting effects for a limited amount of time, comparable to Saul Newman’s assertion that “the social contract was never intended to be anything other than fiction,” the Leviathan existing as pure, ungrounded power for “the suppression of violence and disorder.”7 On the basis of this broader doubt about statehood arising after the collapse of appreciable Russian deviance, any founding myth can be exposed to the anti-essentialist perspective of historical analysis. After all, the purported, communally agreed-upon tenets of a state remain implicit and can, if ever, only be extrapolated in hindsight: “the position of a State in reference to the moral methods of its development can only be seen historically” (91). In this second performative contradiction, the essay, thus, surreptitiously dismantles the very identity that it sets out to define in contrast to the absent “portent” (90) of Russia. Initially, the speaker promises a simplistic fairytale structure for the act of dispelling autocracy: “the twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition has vanished – never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze at it with vague dread and many misgivings” (90). However, the ‘apparition’ does not follow such linear narrative development. Instead, the speaker only ever encounters the absence of foundational certainty – a “black abyss” (89) – at the foundation of every state.8 Rather than a

7 Newman, Anti-Authoritarianism, 45. 8 Cf. Oliver Marchart. Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. In this, Conrad comes to a similar conclusion as Oliver Marchart in his heterodox reading of Marx: “social change is instigated not by a positive, ontic instance but by an ontological discrepancy without any content of its own. The economic base turns out

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defined, national alterity, “Autocracy and War” confronts the reader with the possibility of what Hardt and Negri term the “passage to Empire [which] emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers.”9 In “Autocracy and War,” a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule”10 of this kind is assigned the name of various historical states, but is not exclusive to any one nation: state founding and state rule emerge as unconstrained by any political, economic, or social foundations that could be posited as the basis of their internal coherence. Biographical and contextual criticism points out the determination of Conrad’s views on Russia by the Polish question as well as his father Apollo Korzeniowski’s ‘political romanticism’, an “eschatology” which, as Carabine points out, Conrad resists while at the same time “he keeps his ‘thinking inviolate’” by embracing his father’s “bipolar stereotypes.”11 Despite this historical and biographical inclination towards polarised views on Russia, the essay’s performative contradiction undercuts any certainty in the matter of Russia’s status: the initial political Gothic notwithstanding, the country fails to cohere as a de-historicised semantic blank amidst essentialist national identities. If “Autocracy and War” is attributed to a speaker rather than expressing the political stance of an author, the redoubled performative contradiction traces the vagaries of staving off uncertainty. In other words, the strategy of projecting illegitimacy and corruption onto the convenient alterity of one autocratic regime fails to yield convincing alterity. The breakdown of this political distinction – the antagonism between Western self and Russian Other – finally yields the observation that “Russia’s influence in Europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own” (92). At the same time, the text raises the possibility of states being “baseless” (91) qua statehood, from the fiction of their foundational identity to their ever-deferred political teleology. The “perfect fruition of a great State” (91) fails to be incarnated by the erstwhile Western self and the phantom of Russian Otherness in equal measure.

to be grounded on an abyss.” (46) Once more, however, it should be noted that “Autocracy and War” is at pains to show that the absence of an ultimate foundation undergirding statehood “does not imply that societies are able to make do without any foundations, principles or norms. It is only to say that none of these norms can claim to have super-temporal validity [. . .]. Every norm, ground or principle can always be displaced, potentially at least, by competing norms, grounds and principles.” (15) 9 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2001. xii. 10 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii. 11 Keith Carabine, The Life and the Art, 86.

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In the course of the essay, the very concept of the state is subjected to a process of defamiliarisation. The only difference between the regimes of the past and the conflicts of the future will be constituted by the different degrees of explicit, ostentatious display of national intent. After the “unscrupulous desires of glory or greed” (105) of monarchical rule have already been supplanted by “the special intensity” of nationalist “hate” (105), the speaker anticipates a new phase. In this global order to come, the residual ideologies which the assumption of national characteristics has still furnished in the past is relinquished in favour of an open struggle for resources: “The virtuous, industrious democratic states of tomorrow may yet be reduced to fighting for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate, ferocity, and fury that must attach to the vital importance of such an issue” (106). As in the narrative representation of residual political communities, the ideological framework is presented as tenuous, a set of assumptions barely upheld. As per the speaker, the primary political challenge does not lie in exposing the contingency of signifiers of identity. After all, any semblance of ‘virtue’ and ‘industry’ is presented as a limited set of shared agreements to begin with: such labels are momentarily superimposed upon material interests, and can be rescinded at any time. Instead, the perpetuation of contingent identity takes precedence, the fabrication of a cohesive symbolic framework, however tenuous the obfuscation of its material underpinnings may be. The maintenance of constructed foundations, then, is a more pressing issue than a sceptical dismantling of such certainties. On a macro-political scale, thus, the essay furnishes a structure comparable to the narrative constellation enacted in the political novels: the dissolution of differential order instigates an increasingly recursive process of self-perpetuating scepticism, which undoes fictions of communal belonging in the past and a “fruition” in the future alike. The successful simulation of teleological timeframes by historical monarchies at least provided “seeds of wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses” (97): a difference was drawn and a form observed, even if its unmarked side was a barely upheld supplement to an overwhelmingly acquisitive, ‘mistake-prone’ line of development. This boundedness sets the essay’s version of ‘monarchical’ politics apart from the expanded template of the Russian model of the state, which “by no fantastic stretch of benevolence” can be “presented as a phase of development through which a Society, a State, must pass on its way to the full consciousness of its destiny” (96). It is this model of time – as much as the essay works towards restricting it to Russian autocracy – that threatens to exceed its containment as a particular property of the autocratic void and become a more general model of statehood. After all, the contemporary powers vying for material interests are shown to be closer to the supposedly Russian model than to providing residual certainties of a linear, teleological timescale

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towards ‘full consciousness’. While previous forms of political organisation had “a past and a future; they were human” (97), the present state undergoes a process similar to the one the speaker himself has previously demonstrated regarding Russia: “A swift disenchantment overtook the incredible infatuation which could put its trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition” (106). Detached from myths of development, the West, too, yields imagery of ‘disenchantment’. It was only the ‘apparition’ of progress that furnished a threadbare impression of cohesion, which, upon vanishing, discloses an empty, self-sustaining and featureless mode of organisation that refuses containment. As the contrast between Russian alterity and British identity diminishes, new signifiers of Otherness have to be specified in order to inculcate different operations of closure — if illusions of normative foundations are to persist at all. Regarding bygone feudal systems, again, the essay presents such an impression of coherence as a matter of display, a half-remembered aggregate of loyalties that require no explicit justification. This exhibition had a defined function: it provided a spectacle of identity. The modern alternative to such a conspicuous ideology of collective selfhood can no longer be derived by discovering a first principle upon which collective identity could be reconstructed but, instead, by the successful evocation of such a principle. According to “Autocracy and War,” essentialist identity has to be painstakingly simulated rather than inertly presumed. Consequently, the “common conservative principle” (111) proposed by the essay does not conserve an extant cohesive identity but, instead, constitutes a successful fabrication, a floating signifier “abstract enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint of particular ambition” (111). However, such a principle of communal organisation cannot be formulated, let alone enacted: “Whether such a principle exists–who can say? If it does not, then it ought to be invented.” (111) So far, the speaker admits, “there is no trace of such a principle anywhere in sight” (111). As in the case of the “disenchantment,” this absence of an organising principle resembles the previous evocation of the Russian “phantom which is disappearing now” (94). Once more, the criticism of a state is transformed into a critique of statehood in general, which fails in its task to provide ideological justification for its reproduction and material development. As a result, the selfperpetuating German “Welt-politik which desires to live” (113) is met by no alternative model that would go beyond unfettered (and, even worse, undisguised) “economical conquests” (112). The vanishing of the Russian “phantom” (113) is mirrored by the disappearance of any European counter-model. Beyond the hope that a cohesive principle may be invented and perpetuated in the future, “[i]l n’y a plus d’Europe” (112). The breakdown described in the essay,

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thus, reiterates the terms of a loss of demarcation negotiated by the political novels: the speaker withdraws the notion of a victory of one essentialist political system over another, emphasising instead the impossibility of sustaining an antagonistic model in the first place. In their state-sponsered capitalist accumulation, all states are alike, with no fundamental ideological disparities at stake in their conflict. The initial demarcation of identity against the relational alterity of Russia is replaced with an increasing indistinguishability. The essay performs a third loss of demarcation in sketching the development of international politics. In this panoramic view of the future, the transferral of characteristics – or, to be precise, of a lack of characteristics attaching to the ‘void’ or the insubstantial ‘phantom’ – from Russia to Europe is imagined to recur internally, within the previously demarcated sphere of identity. In a drastic conclusion, “Autocracy and War” replaces Western pretensions to foundational, substantial identity with a model of auto-colonisation. This shift proceeds according to a changing definition of Empire. Jameson has shown that concepts of imperialism between 1884 and World War I still proceed from a notion of the “rivalry of the various imperial and metropolitan nation states among themselves.”12 The ideology of a contest between imperial powers “tended to repress the more basic axis of otherness, and to raise issues of colonial reality only incidentally.”13 In Conrad’s version of a departure from such ‘rivalry’ – in which the antagonism between states can no longer be delineated as a fundamental friend/ enemy distinction – the exploitative relationship of coloniser and colonised can no longer be occluded. The essayistic equivalent of Heart of Darkness’ foundational (though not signifiable) “idea at the back of it” (7) becomes attenuated.14 This is because such an identitarian idea was solely upheld by its demarcation against the Russian void. That is to say: its presence was only ever a function of the overdetermined absence of an autocratic ‘idea’. As a consequence of the expansion of erstwhile alterity, the colonial exertion of power becomes internal to the conceptualisation of statehood. The essay stages a metaphorical re-entry of the disavowed colonial endeavours into the selfreproduction of states. This drift is evoked as the speaker suggests that “industrialism and commercialism” (107), in conjunction with the “severe and disdainful figure of science” (107) and “democracy” (107), have resulted in the “supremacy of

12 Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 157. 13 Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 157. 14 Marlow’s attempted, redemptive vision of (British) imperialism specifies: “An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . .” Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 7.

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material interests” (107). This is the point at which, as a final attempt at reinstating a demarcation of controllable political units, the speaker’s proposal suggests the delimitation of spheres of trade all over the earth, on the model of the territorial spheres of influence marked in Africa to keep the competitors for the privilege of improving the nigger (as a buying machine) from flying prematurely at each other’s throats. (107)

While it takes up (and reinforces) racist terminology, this passage is set up to function as a parodic imitation of imperialist assumptions, which are here applied to the space from which they were promulgated. Why not, the essay asks, direct the European ‘civilising mission’ towards its own, exploitative state forms instead? After all, not only is the entire colonial project the result of blatant material interests but, what is more, the ideology of civilisational development, despite its acquisitive economic base, emerges as a residual communal myth preserving a “temporary European peace” (107) — the colonisers’ conflict has been outsourced. Rather than an alternative to the vanishing Russian phantom state, Europe is, thus, recast as a space that not only fails to keep up remaining illusions of progressive development elsewhere, but is itself the embodiment of those stereotypes previously relegated to non-Western alterity. The colonisers themselves, then, are experimentally submitted to their own violent ideology of ‘development’. The alternative to what Yael Levin calls the “hauntological matrix”15 of Russian might is provided by a space in which only an imagined autocolonisation can furnish residual order. Any pan-European “common conservative principle” (111) beyond this paradoxical project of a West in need of colonising itself is rendered unattainable. Divested of its externalised myths of Others not yet or no longer civilised, the concept of the European state eludes description in a manner that resembles the initial evocation of the Russian void. In the process of this auto-colonial dissolution of an exploitative spatial order, the “inviolable Temple” (107) of states operating according to an ideological precept is not only rendered impossible: “the very ground for its erection has not been cleared of the jungle” (107). This spatial imaginary is a further step away from the model of containment that has been shown to exert its lingering function in Conrad’s narrative models of political order. Its unboundedness, in Barrows’ terms, renders it an “index of a culture simply unable to visualise – and thus spatialise – the global economic system upon which it depended.”16 Topographically, 15 Yael Levin. “The Interruption of Writing: Uncanny Intertextuality in Under Western Eyes.” Under Western Eyes: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons, J. H. Stape and Jeremy Hawthorn. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. 23–41. 23. 16 Adam Barrows. Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn: The Chronometric Imaginary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 5.

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the remnants of ‘imperial romance’17 allow Conrad’s fictional arbiters of containment, such as the Assistant Commissioner in The Secret Agent or Marlow in Heart of Darkness, to assert residual illusions of stability pertaining to a restricted standin for the nation state. Such ideologies are always already the result of a carefully reinstated apparatus, a “formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.”18 The universal validity of this production of needs and the measures of meeting them is dismantled as soon as metaphorical guarantees of stability are relinquished. As long as the production of identity and alterity is maintained, however, imperial romance still establishes a domestic ideology characterised by the “solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums” (HD, 49). Outside of that space, by contrast, it is still possible to posit “the particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into” (HD, 49).19 Similarly to this boundedness amidst an expanding flux, the Home Secretary in The Secret Agent is assured that, upon the expulsion of foreign interlopers, the ‘national spectacle’ can proceed apace. It is precisely this notion of a binary order constructed for the sake of those depending on it – namely the objects of sovereignty for whom, in this model, “the element of arbitrariness in its formation and maintenance ha[s] to be obscure”20– that is relinquished in “Autocracy and War.” Europe’s material interests (described, paradoxically, in terms of immaterial aspirations allaying a “haunting fear of the future” 109) have created an ostensibly pre-civilised state of nature in which growth “in strength, in wealth, in influence – in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge” (109) is not only an end in itself but, what is more, an ostensible end in itself, bereft of any stabilising illusion of progress. The imagery of ‘haunting’ associated with Europe’s own conception of its future illustrates the degree to which the essay dissolves the very opposition which it sets up at the outset. Rather than an antagonism between a fading ‘Eastern’ state 17 Dryden, Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance, 4. “The focus on male adventure reflected the belief that the English were the superior imperial power and that Englishmen presented an example of moral uprightness and physical excellence to all peoples of the Empire. It all amounted to a desire to explore the geography and peoples of those parts of the world that the expanding British Empire was bringing to the attention of those at home.” 18 Michel Foucault. “The Confession of the Flesh.” Interview with Alain Grosrichard et al. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans Colin Gordon et al. New York and Toronto: Pantheon, 1980. 194–228. 195. 19 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 49. 20 William E. Connolly. “The Complexities of Sovereignty.” Sovereignty and Life. Ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 23–43. 25.

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and defined ‘Western’ interests, Europe and the underlying principles associated with it are, ultimately, presented as equally spectral, bereft of any ideological stabilisation. That is to say: the essay fails to cast Russia in the role of “a negation of everything worth living for” (100) while also performing the failure of attributing any collective identity to the Western counterparts. Not any one state, but all states that the speaker’s descriptive attempts run up against emerge as negations of articulable characteristics beyond their self-sustaining acquisitiveness. By no means does “Autocracy and War” restrict the status of “Néant” (95) to any one particular system — instead, the very principle of the nation state emerges as insubstantial, an ideological facade prone to collapse. This fundamentally anti-statist (and, solely from this point of view, almost ‘anarchist’21 ) perspective of the essay casts doubt on the similarly confident assertions of a divide between Eastern and Western politics promulgated by the unnamed teacher of languages introduced as the homodiegetic narrator (and extradiegetic editor) of Under Western Eyes. The following analysis of this novel will take its cue from the possibility of a wholesale scepticism of statist politics established in “Autocracy and War.” That is, similarly to the initial classification by the essay’s speaker, the protagonists proceed from the assumption of a defined state, a sovereign political unit which follows a teleological trajectory.22 However, the attempts to stabilise this unit, refracted as it is by uncertain chronologies and nested narrative perspectives, are confronted with a more intricate version of the same double impediment as the one outlined in “Autocracy and War.” Not only does such a defined state fail to cohere in the case of Russia but, what is more, any statesponsored, collective identity becomes increasingly untenable. However, just as material acquisition proceeds apace in “Autocracy and War,” as an economic substratum laid bare, the end of political demarcation in Under Western Eyes does not entail a cessation of coercive power. On the contrary: the mode of authority that takes the place of state power is not restricted to any one nation state whatsoever. On the contrary, the state of exception that supplants sovereignty functions in a borderless, undifferentiated environment of semantic paucity resembling the European blank evoked at the end of “Autocracy and War.”

21 The anarchist critique of the state, however, goes further: “Anarchists do not simply disapprove of the state; they disapprove of it as a particular (if particularly important) and unjustifiable instance of a more widespread social phenomenon. It is this phenomenon, namely authority, which is of fundamental interest to anarchists.” McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority, 28. 22 Cf. Richard J. Watts. Language Myths and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 12. “Since the nation-state ideology promoted competition between states, the vast majority of nineteenth-century historians applied this teleology not to human progress in general but to the progress of the nation-state of which they were citizens.”

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5.1.2 Autocratic Exception In order to trace the receding state in Under Western Eyes, this analysis turns to models of sovereignty discussed in political philosophy. While each instance of early modernist political fiction features the rise of exceptional modes of power, Conrad’s ‘Russian’ novel prefaces this with the most sustained treatment of an expectation of sovereign order. It is, however, precisely this trust in normative figures and institutions that is leveraged into a state of exception. More specifically, the state of exception provides an analytical framework for a mode of rule that no longer functions in accordance with explicit criteria of inclusion. The state is, firstly, divested of determinate qualities which, secondly, does not impede its functioning at all. On the contrary, as “Autocracy and War” has shown, the absent state is connected to perennially renewed attempts at producing and delineating its characteristics, which will, however, be shown to merely bring to the fore the absence of a communicable order. This model of a “Néant” (100) – which continues its self-reproduction after its absence of founding principles has been exposed – can, in Agamben’s terms, be described as a permanent state of exception. Agamben’s version of the state, like Conrad’s, is primarily defined by what it is not rather than by what it professes to be, by the suspension of its laws rather than by their regular functioning. According to this model, whoever is capable of suspending the regular rule of law wields a vastly expanded array of power over others. It is this model of a state defined by its interruptions rather than by a determinate set of explicit laws or communicable norms that will be traced in Under Western Eyes. The novel presents a range of possible interactions with authority that becomes the more all-encompassing the more it recedes. Since the state of exception is inflected by the political form that it replaces, the analysis will trace two models of power in Under Western Eyes. Firstly, the novel’s protagonist, Razumov, harbours hopes of a normative state.23 According

23 Cf. Ernst Fraenkel. The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Trans. Jens Meierheinrich, E. A. Shils, Edith Lowenstein, and Klaus Knorr. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. This concept is adopted from Ernst Fraenkel’s discussion of the ‘dual nature’ of National-Socialist Germany: “By the Prerogative State we mean that governmental system which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees, and by the Normative State an administrative body endowed with elaborate powers for safeguarding the legal order as expressed in statutes, decisions of the courts, and activities of the administrative agencies.” (xxiii) Crucially, the “Normative State, however, is by no means identical with a state in which the ‘Rule of Law’ prevails, i.e. with the Rechtsstaat of the liberal period. The Normative State is a necessary complement to the Prerogative state and can be understood only in that light.” (71) This interdependence explores in a specific historical context the relationship between norm and exception that Agamben presents as the basis of sovereignty.

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to this model, the state can still be defined in accordance with certain identifiable features, against which equally identifiable exceptions can be defined. This is, in a second step, replaced by a permanent state of exception,24 enforced with a totalitarian scope unmatched by its previous iterations in the corpus. This concept, originally proposed by Carl Schmitt, goes beyond the extension of the power of government in the wake of a proclamation of political crisis. Instead, he proposes that the potential for declaring exception forms the basis of sovereign power as such: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”25 Agamben attacks this notion that the proclamation of exception constitutes a bulwark against a mechanical reproduction of a status quo. Contrary to Schmitt’s insistence that the “dictator/sovereign unites the legal and the non-legal by means of an extralegal decision ‘having the force of law’” through which “the juridical order is preserved even when the law itself is suspended,”26 Agamben posits a permanent suspension and an enduring state of exception.27 The model of the (1) normative state – bound up with an authoritarian expectation as it is – alleges sustained order amidst a state of exception that already underlies its functioning. In other words, this model posits that “because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.”28 Contrary to this, in the second model that will be demonstrated for Under Western Eyes – the (2) permanent state of exception – the reproduction of the exception in perpetuity does not provide any defined order whatsoever. Neither does this state posit explicit laws or norms to which the subject can lay claim, nor procedures by means of which they would be applied to individual cases by an identifiable figure of authority. This second model of the state, instead of providing a normative framework, functions by simultaneously receding and prompting inscription — not only of identity but, biopolitically, of life itself. 5.1.2.1 Demarcating Normative Identity Nothing would change. There was the familiar gateway yawning black with feeble glimmers marking the arches of the different staircases. The sense of life’s continuity depended on

24 “The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that [. . .] nevertheless claims to be upholding the law.” Agamben, State of Exception, 87. 25 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 26 Humphreys, “Legalizing Lawlessness,” 678. 27 Cf. Andreas Heuer. Carl Schmitt: Die Dialektik der Moderne: Von der europäischen zur WeltModerne. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010. 28 Schmitt, Political Theology, 12.

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trifling bodily impressions. The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul. And this thought reinforced the inward quietness of Razumov as he began to climb the stairs familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand on the familiar clammy banister. The exceptional could not prevail against the material contacts which make one day resemble another. Tomorrow would be like yesterday. (40)

This passage describes the attempt of the student at the centre of Under Western Eyes, Razumov, both to contain a political quandary in which he is already embroiled and to recover a normative state. Razumov reacts to an event which, on the face of it, has irrevocably changed the semantic spaces by means of which he had previously made sense of his environment. His fellow student Haldin has mistaken him for a covert sympathizer of revolution and – after killing a political official with a bomb29– seeks shelter at Razumov’s lodgings. Although it occurs at the very outset of the histoire, this intrusion can already be described in terms of a meta-event “which involves not only the passage of the protagonist from the first to the second subset as a result of his boundary crossing, but also a modification of the entire field, the world order itself.”30 After all, previously the semantic field was organised by Razumov’s assumption of a straightforward opposition of inside and outside. In this ideological classification, the inside of his lodgings represents dedication and intellectualism, while the outside signifies (largely dismissed) revolutionary tendencies. Razumov’s interior space is, in addition, assumed to function in accordance with a continuous model of time. His room is organised in terms of metonymical objects upholding a contiguous relation with an entire projected course of increasing integration into a well-ordered social structure: “he would now devote his time to the prize essay. He hankered after the silver medal; the names of the competitors would be submitted to the Minister himself” (9). The essay and the medal, he imagines, will set in motion an inexorable rise to an eminent academic position. These assumptions (as well as their firm entrenchment in material signifiers) are shattered by Haldin’s presence in the room. An element from the outside has impinged upon his stable spatial order and, what is more, proceeded to redescribe Razumov in terms of revolutionary values. As the initial quote has shown, however, the protagonist does not merely accept this potential metaevent, predicated on a misreading of his political allegiances as it is. Instead, in a

29 Haldin refers to the bombs as “engines,” in an echo of both the journalistic lingo associated with the anarchist terrorist and the late-Victorian conventions of the dynamite novel. This expression serves as a marked contrast to the mystical pretensions which the revolutionary associates with the attack. A detailed account of the ‘peccant engine’ as a material signifier of “that popular hybrid, the socialist and anarchist,” cf. Melchiori, Terrorism, 59. 30 Hühn, “Event and Eventfulness,” 92.

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lengthy passage of free indirect speech – which surreptitiously reduces his distance from the narrating voice by relinquishing the past tense – he is shown to come up with a strategy to counter the turn of events and recover his notion of a topographical order functioning as an immediate expression of a macrostructural, normative state. The crucial feature of this strategy is constituted by the self-assurance that “[t]he exceptional could not prevail against the material contacts which make one day resemble another” (40). Razumov’s scheme in this passage, then, is predicated on marking the episode as a mere exception. By assuring himself that the exceptional cannot prevail, he is shown to be initially hopeful about the possibility of a small-scale version of Schmitt’s authoritarian bearer of sovereignty, who is capable of explicitly delineating the exceptional: “The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”31 In other words, confronted with the possibility of a meta-event, Razumov attempts to interpret the episode as an exception which not only proves the rule but generates renewed certainties in the process. Thus, to keep up his hope of a model of the normative state and to make “one day resemble another” (40), he attempts to define a version of ‘exception’ which proves the continued applicability of the norms he lives by, stabilised by the exclusion of the revolutionary as a heterogeneous element. Razumov’s statement of the iterative similarity of successive days, however, is the first of two inconsistencies which cast doubt on the possibility of returning to a regular order by consigning the event to a simple, excluded exception. Firstly, the resemblance of ‘one day to another’ is already different from the initial temporal model he sought to establish when the dichotomy of inside and outside was still successfully upheld. The aspiration to write a prize-winning essay and gain the medal as a metonymical indication of progressive social integration was not predicated on an unbroken succession of similar days. Instead, it hinged on a temporal model of teleology, on a movement towards incrementally improved social standing — with the final, projected vignette of a tacit acknowledgment by his biological father, in spite of his illegitimate status. After all, “[t]he winner’s name would be published in the papers on New Year’s Day. And at the thought that ‘He’ would most probably read it there, Razumov stopped short on the stairs [. . .]. ‘This is but a shadow,’ he said to himself, ‘but the medal is a solid beginning’” (11). Thus, while on the stairs he assures himself of the return to a stable temporal progression in his original semantic space, Razumov’s evocation of this model is already

31 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.

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modified. While promising the original plans – “a solid beginning” – the protagonist’s reiteration of his future development constitutes a repetition with a difference, raising suspicion concerning the containment of the meta-event by means of a decision on its merely exceptional status. The second inconsistency is created by the terms in which Razumov delineates the norm that is to be recovered by excluding the exceptional event. The exception that Razumov attempts to define is, after all, an abstract one, including (but not limited to) political violence, the status of revolution, the nature of the misunderstanding between him and Haldin, as well as his own divided allegiances. Although this array of factors already calls into question the division of semantic spaces that Razumov presumes at the beginning of the narrative, their reduction to the status of a singular exception raises the expectation that they can, nonetheless, be contained. Razumov’s domestic version of a sovereign decision on the exception, however, fails to recreate a rule defined against this multivalent exceptional event. Rather than recovering certainties of the kind associated with the essay and the medal, Razumov resorts to “trifling bodily impressions” (40), rendering the body and its fragmentary impressions the last vestige of a defined identity. This indicates the connection of the collapse of normative order and literary impressionism in Conrad’s political fiction. Rather than merely the reader being ‘made to see’ in Conrad’s programmatic mode, the focus on the sensory is copied into the diegesis, with the protagonist rendered unable to do anything but feel, hear, and see — in stark contrast to his previous assertions of the ‘shadow’ of the metonymical logic of the medal and the ‘solid beginning’.32 Rather than enabling liberating subjectivity, the focus on the ‘bodily impressions’ has to stand in for a perennially absent norm, thereby surreptitiously politicising the body. The attempt to recover a clear differentiation between norm and exception, thus, fails in Under Western Eyes. The suspension of the norm does not, in Schmitt’s terms, ‘prove everything’. While the exception already traverses the boundaries that the protagonist attempts to re-establish, the norm is reduced to the non-discursive level of the body, making it impossible to establish a clear division between the normative and the exceptional, the common case and the aberrance. The exception takes over while its normative obverse can no longer be signified. This uncontainable status of the exception calls into question the entire model of the normative state that has been assumed by Razumov at the beginning of the novel, based as it is on straightforward differentiation. In the absence of his own capacity to

32 Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, xlix. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.”

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formulate an exception that would prove a recoverable rule, Razumov expects an authority to take over and reconstitute these certainties in his stead. Accordingly, when he betrays Haldin to the regime, he anticipates being sized up according to an explicit set of laws. In other words, if he himself has failed to define a norm, at least the representatives of sovereignty should be able to do so. In this, Razumov’s expectation is similar to the function of the sovereign asserted by Schmitt with authoritarian certainty: “In the moment of exception, the sovereign unites the legal and non-legal by means of an extra-legal decision.”33 Even if Razumov were to be rendered a suspect in the course of a decision of this kind, this status would still at least confer on him a defined position in a pre-constituted order.34 Instead of this disclosure of sovereignty by means of which Razumov could be rendered a suspect, however, his status remains implicit, undecided, and unstated. The resulting permanence of the exceptional state is much closer to Agamben’s formulation than to Schmitt’s valorisation of the sovereign decision. As the figures of authority refuse labels as much as the formulation of explicit rules, “sovereignty is not the power to create exception, but is the operating of the exception.”35 As opposed to the mutual reinforcement of norms and the exceptions undergirding them, Razumov is relegated to a threshold state – “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, chaos and the normal situation – the state of exception.”36 5.1.2.2 The Permanent State of Exception The emergence of a permanent state of exception, which defers the expectation of a sovereign decision indefinitely, is preceded by a final attempt to recover the model of the normative state. Once more, the protagonist ventures a differentiation of inside and outside, and, by extension, law and exception. This endeavour to reconstitute ‘foundational norms’37 by provoking a sovereign decision culminates in 33 Stephen Humphreys. Theatre of the Rule of Law: Transnational Legal Intervention in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 101. 34 Paul Hegarty. “Giorgio Agamben.” From Agamben to Žižek. Ed. Jon Simons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 14–28. 25. 35 Hegarty, “Giorgio Agamben,” 25. 36 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19. 37 Bleiker, “Globalizing Political Theory,” 133. Bleiker (following Lyotard) calls this a “foundational authority as an attempt to ground and legitimize knowledge in reference to a grand narrative, a universalizing framework.” While “the modern state was at least able to provide a strong institutional framework through which the recurring quest for foundational certainty could be politically implemented and masked,” the “state is gradually losing its concealing power.” Razumov, thus, strictly speaking, is not divested of normative propositions but comes to understand that there were none to begin with.

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Razumov’s abrupt and unauthorised departure from the interview with Councillor Mikulin, the figure of bureaucratic authority who questions him after the execution of Haldin: “He walked to the door, thinking, ‘Now he must show his hand. He must ring and have me arrested before I am out of the building, or he must let me go. And either way . . . ’” (73). Razumov’s assumes that while he may be incapable of differentiating norm and exception – as has been shown by his inconsistent demarcation of the exceptional meta-event – a transgression of the rules of the official investigation will prompt such a differentiation in his stead. The informer attempts to incur punishment, forcing state authority to disclose itself in a display of its sanctioning capability. This event of transgression, however, fails to transpire: An unhurried voice said— ‘Kirylo Sidorovitch.’ Razumov at the door turned his head. ‘To retire,’ he repeated. ‘Where to?’ asked Councillor Mikulin softly. (74)

The bureaucrat’s reaction is an initial indication that there is no marked exceptional case in this system. Instead, this model of opaque authority renders transgression itself impossible. Norms are no longer defined at all, nor does a sovereign decision establish the bounds or duration of an exception. Instead of reinstating grounds for a decision, neither Razumov nor the reader is ever apprised of the criteria upon which Mikulin decides to punish, interpellate, or use opponents of the state. Such a disclosure would, after all, make it possible to anticipate the application of laws, which this second model of the permanent state of exception denies altogether. As the suspension of the law becomes permanent, there is no indication of an exceptional figure of sovereignty restoring demarcations. An authority issuing ‘extraordinary’ measures fails to manifest.38 That is to say: no sovereign steps in to provide decrees carrying force of law once the letter of the law

38 On Schmitt’s account, “[t]he ordinary legislature can intrude on the basic rights only on the basis of the statutory reservation. However, it cannot [. . .] set them aside. The extraordinary lawmaker, by contrast, can do both and, apart from everything else, thereby already surpasses the ordinary legislature and is superior to it in a novel way.” Carl Schmitt. Legality and Legitimacy. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004. 71–72. In the absence of law, that is, Schmitt argues for the normative precedence of decrees. In Conrad’s version, however, it is this expectation of exceptional authoritarian powers that leads to an anticipatory submission to oblique decrees that remain unspoken and have to be inferred.

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is rescinded.39 What is more, as there is no starting point (in the manner of the “solid beginning”) and no explicit speech act signalling the beginning of an exceptional phase, the suspension of norms is bereft of a founding gesture. It is without any origin to which it could be traced. Thus, instead of being applied, the law is permanently repealed, with the remainder of the novel taking place in a “zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation.”40 Such a ‘relation’ – and this is the paradox of the state of exception – is enabled by the very suspension of extant laws. It is by denying any concrete application that the law can recede into potentiality, functioning in an anomic zone that is neither spatially nor temporally circumscribed. In its suspended, implicit form, it can always potentially apply, as it “affirms itself with the greatest force precisely at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything.”41 If norms no longer apply (but also do not explicitly not apply), their overturning cannot be clearly delineated, potentially relegating anyone to the status of exception. Demarcation of a disruptive event in the manner unsuccessfully attempted by Razumov – the presumption that “[n]othing would change” (40) – is no longer possible in this permanent state of exception. What Mikulin’s question (‘where to?’) indicates is an in-between state in which norm and exception can no longer be told apart. Rather than being punished for transgressions, the individual is subjected to an abandonment by the law: He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order.42

In what follows, the topographical structure of Under Western Eyes will be shown to literalise the ensuing abandonment of Razumov. Rather than a mere abstract inapplicability of the law, the ensuing threshold state is provided with spatial equivalents. After demonstrating the dissolution of spatial order which

39 Cf. Johan van der Walt. Law and Sacrifice: Towards a Post-Apartheid Theory of Law. London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2005. 198. “In both ancient and modern times the phrase [i.e. force of law] has also had a technical meaning that referred to the legal validity and enforceability attributed to the decrees of a ruler, most notably in a state of exception. These decrees had the ‘force of law’ but they were not strictly speaking law; they were not part of the body of law of general applicability.” 40 Agamben, State of Exception, 59. 41 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 51. 42 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 28.

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accompanies the permanent state of exception, two further characteristics of the literary incarnation of this mode of power will be traced, namely the denial of language and the production of bare life. These elements combine to provide the most sustained narrative equivalent to a state of exception in the corpus. 5.1.2.2.1 Dissolution of Spatial Order Spatially, the question ‘where to?’ creates a constellation that is entirely different from the attempt at recovering a binary topological order in response to the revolutionary in Razumov’s room. The effort to contain the event by rendering it ‘exceptional’ still upholds the notion that a twofold spatial structure is recoverable in the first place. On this account, the border differentiating inside and outside may be more porous than originally presumed, but is still assumed to be salvageable. By contrast, under the conditions of the permanent state of exception, the dissolution of spatial order is more fundamental: the very possibility of investing space with meaning is under threat in the wake of Mikulin’s question. Thus, the state of exception dispenses entirely with the possibility of demarcation upheld before the incursion of Haldin. During Razumov’s analeptically summarised studies, his “closest parentage was defined in the statement that he was Russian” (8). This interrelation of the national and the parental still allows for continued interpretative activity, rendered spatial by the attempt to superimpose his room both on the nation and on the intermediate aristocratic sphere, where he imagines his father’s “white shapely hand extended to him” (9). That is, demarcation allows for a place, with the attendant possibility to embody “feelings, images and thoughts in tangible material. [. . .] Progress here is from inchoate feelings for space and fleeting discernments of its nature to their public and material reification.”43 In the state of exception, conversely, ‘inchoate feelings and fleeting discernments’ replace the ‘public and material’, a change of place into space that is part of the very functioning of this indistinct mode of power. The in-between status to which Razumov finds himself exposed is rendered equivalent to a literal threshold state that resists spatial demarcation.44 The protagonist is not merely abandoned by the law but also relegated to an undifferentiated environment in which the very attempt to reify norm and

43 Tuan, Space and Place, 17. 44 The novel is replete with “figures of liminality, in-between zones, either in figural space, as in the case of staircases and bridges, or, as in the case of Haldin’s phantom, in being neither alive nor dead. We are in deep in the Conradian territory of the uncanny.” Erdinast-Vulcan, “The Conradian Subject-in-Process,” 99–100.

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exception is rendered futile. In the micro-topography of the official’s space, the loss of topographical difference is encapsulated by its overt openness. Rather than being forced to remain within spaces of authoritative sanction, Razumov is allowed to cross the threshold of the interrogation chamber in which his second interview has taken place. However, “before he got to the end of the passage he heard heavy footsteps, and a voice calling upon him to stop” (218). The redoubled acoustic impression of the Councillor disrupts an ocularcentric mode of supervision that is still an overdetermined aspect of the first figure of authority encountered by Razumov. Seeking a figure to whom he can betray Haldin, the protagonist encounters General T—, whose “goggle eyes” are perpetually “waiting for him—the embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible” (62). What is more, this interrupted movement sets a template for threshold states that characterise the literary topography of Under Western Eyes in the wake of the bureaucratic intervention. Razumov is not only exposed to the receding of a defined law in the absence of the authority he desires, however ‘grotesque’ it may be; he is also spatially abandoned to corridors, anterooms, waiting-rooms, temporary abodes, and islets, to spaces in-between that disallow the establishment of classificatory boundaries. This model of undifferentiated space exerts an effect of suspended linearity. It precludes a defined destination, both in the storyworld and the reader’s anticipation of the plot-to-come. After his release from the second interview, “Razumov started off rapidly, without caring for the direction” (219). At the same time, however, amidst this imposed aimlessness, unmarked space creates the desire to search for an originary political place, for a defined position from which orders would issue — in other words for an interpellation by the very official whose innocuous question does not explicitly order Razumov anywhere: “in a little while the consciousness of his position presented itself to him as something so ugly, dangerous, and absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing himself from the toils of that complication so insoluble, that the idea of going back and, as he termed it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin flashed through his mind” (219).45 ‘Abandonment’ is disclosed as an ongoing relation rather than an expulsion, entailing what Agamben calls “simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together the two poles of the sovereign exception:

45 Andrew Long places confession front and centre in his analysis of interpellation as a “kind of subject formation new and intrinsic to modernity” (492). Rather than being compelled, Razumov acts in accordance with a “new form of confession,” wherein “the role of the confessor is increasingly internalized. Confession now involves self-discipline or self-interrogation and is diffused out into the institutions and practices of everyday life.” (479) Andrew Long. “The Secret Policeman’s Couch.” Studies in the Novel 35 (2003). 409–509.

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bare life and power.”46 In this, it constitutes an erasure of semantic spaces as well as of an abstract political relation. ‘Where to?’ can, as the narrator notes, be “taken in a merely topographical sense” (216), whilst also indicating the abandonment by the law (as well as to the law in its very withdrawal) facing Razumov. The lack of topographical differentiation which undergirds the permanent state of exception cannot be countered with a macro-structural return to national oppositions. This is not for lack of trying: the hapless homodiegetic narrator attempts at length to convince his readers of the possibility of rendering Russia an alterity of unbridled cynicism and spirituality beyond the pale of rational Western epistemology. Contrary to this strategy – which recalls the beginning of “Autocracy and War” with its initial insistence on “Russia as a nation so difficult to understand by Europe” (98) – the most explicit representations of Razumov’s abandonment are not attributed to the Tsarist state at all. Instead, they are connected to the outskirts of Geneva and Razumov’s activities as a secret agent infiltrating the revolutionary sphere. Its inhabitants are associated with a whole host of anarchist clichés, which intermingle with contemporary notions of socialism and Russian nihilism.47 The members of the Geneva circle are rarely labelled in the manner of the radical figures in The Secret Agent, who, for all their incompatible rhetoric, share the designation ‘anarchist’. Instead, they are characterised by their transnational mobility, with the figure of Julius Laspara combining the anarchist heterostereotype with an overt instance of the “covert plot” of particularly Jewish radicalism48 braided through Conrad’s political fiction: “Polyglot, of unknown parentage, of indefinite nationality, anarchist, with a pedantic and ferocious temperament, and an amazing inflammatory capacity for invective” (210). While the enumeration by the narrator juxtaposes multiple traits, Razumov attempts to consign Laspara to alterity “with an angry mutter—‘Cursed Jew!’” (212). This anti-semitic label is shown to be unable to come to terms with a figure that might, as the narrator goes on to speculate, “have been a Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian” (212).49 The drift of attempted denigration shows that the radical sphere confronts Razumov with the insufficiency of his stereotypical repertoire. Ill-equipped as he is to come to terms with the ‘radicals’ by means of racist invective, the Geneva group exacerbates Mikulin’s question (“Where to?” 74) rather than containing it by offering

46 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110. 47 For this intersection, cf. Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State, 105. 48 Watts, “Jews and Degenerates,” 75. 49 Cf. Valentine Cunningham. “Sticky Transfers.” Real: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 10 (1994). 325–355. 329.

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a determinate, anarchist underground.50 Against Razumov’s original selfidentification, in which the nation replaced his parentage, the anarchists appear to render contingent the ascription of national identity altogether. As a result, they contribute to the dissolution of any lingering notions of an essential Russian self as encapsulated by the metonymical chain from the essay to the father’s hand. Yet, their cosmopolitan radicalism also fails to yield a transnational Other against which Razumov could define his political agency — at least not one that could be circumscribed by a reactionary or antisemitic descriptor. The permanent state of exception instituted by the Russian bureaucrat, thus, finds its equivalent in the descriptions of the revolutionary sphere. Its spaces do not counter the loss of differentiation initiated by Mikulin but adduce further topological models to it. A paradigm for the ensuing permanent threshold spaces is furnished by the Château Borel, the headquarters of Madame de S—, “a gothic caricature, or rather inversion, of Madame de Staël,”51 which is described as both open and closed at the same time. Notably, this mock-Gothic space has two entrances, one of which “looked as if it had not been opened for a very long time” (150), while the other “looked as though it had not been closed for a very long time” (150). Razumov is not exiled in the manner he is shown to temporarily envisage, an expectation summed up by his exasperated insistence that Mikulin could send him “straight from this room to Siberia,” which, at least, “would be intelligible” (73). Instead, he is cast into an in-between sphere unintelligible to his expectation of ‘canonicity and breach’.52 Abandonment to the Genevan threshold space is neither punishment nor exile, resembling instead a “mockery” (73) or “comedy of persecution” (73). Rather than subject to straightforward expulsion in an eventful border-crossing that would sanction and make representable the original transgression of Haldin, Razumov is neither fully within a revolutionary space nor immersed in its normative obverse.

50 That the purportedly Jewish character evades classification while recalling anti-Semitic stereotypes fits the status of Jewish anarchism in Britain: as Bantman has shown, while British anarchism went into a decline, an avowedly “Jewish anarchism was on an ascending phase from 1885 to 1914.” Moreover, “Jewish anarchists consistently decried propaganda by the deed and terrorism, advocating instead permeation and education” and “organizing labour protest.” (34) The discursive default of casting out anarchism as terroristic or degenerate is, thus, complicated by the historical variability of the movement; likewise, in the face of manifestly organised Jewish labour, the strategy of downplaying the anti-capitalist, class-based orientation of anarchist movements is likewise impeded. Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists, 34. 51 Susan Jones. “‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad.” The Modernist Party. Ed. Kate McLoughlin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 25–45. 29. 52 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 11.

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The desire for a defined spatial order of norm and transgression governed according to “intelligible” and, most of all, explicit rules goes beyond the hope for a determinate place of exile. It extends to a more general yearning for punishment in a disciplinary order: “To what is intelligible I can submit” (73), as Razumov assures his official interlocutor. Confronted with the threat of abandonment, he is shown to envisage a conspicuous sentence. Even if the authority imposing such sanction were to be exposed as unjust, this would at least entail the regime displaying a procedure of writing and applying laws in the first place, hence disclosing a process of rule-governed interpretation. In his desire for punitive clarification, Razumov goes as far as to seek a prison sentence as the material equivalent to such a process of explicit deliberation and decision. As a mode of containment it could furnish a concomitant, determinative ‘prison house of language’, in which the dispersal of identity threatening Razumov, in Nietzsche’s terms, would be “subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts.”53 That is to say: the carceral imaginary allows for the inside of a disciplinary space and its outside to be told apart. As a result, it maintains a determinate, if restrictive, array of propositional statements, chief among them the sentencing itself. Consequently, when Razumov is exposed to the threshold state of the Château Borel, the prison emerges as an almost utopian model of spatial demarcation: “He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime” (183). If such a carceral space were to be defined, at least the opposite of its characteristics could be extrapolated in turn. Already the act of imagining a literal prison, after all, generates a polysyndeton of straightforward negative traits applied to the anarchist space, opening up the possibility of the obverse conditions obtaining on the other side of the literal bars and figurative ‘ephemeral concepts’. If the negative connotations of the ‘grounds’ were to be asserted with confidence, the passage suggests, the outside could be imagined to express its binary counterparts. Against “blindness, villainy and crime” (183), that is, their opposites of visibility, heroism, and the law could be posited ex negativo. The marked subjunctive, however, dispels this reverie of literalised sanction, exposing Razumov’s continuing topographical threshold position. As a result of this abandonment, the protagonist is relegated to the role of a co-creator of his own position, an

53 Friedrich Nietzsche. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The Nietzsche Reader. Ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell, 2006. 114–123. 121.

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enforced collaboration which effaces the possibility of setting himself apart from the “appalling presence of a great crime and the stunning force of a great fanaticism” (18). Simultaneously, he is not included in the ‘crime’ — since such a judgment of his transgression in accordance with adjudicable criteria is likewise withdrawn. Instead of a recovery of semantic spaces, Mikulin’s ‘where to?’ informs Razumov that he has not crossed the border between inside and outside, law and transgression at all. He is instead released into a borderless environment, a state in which the reification of norms is provided by semi-permeable, revolutionary spaces; these, in turn, structurally repeat the official space in which the anticipated submission to “what is intelligible” (73) is impeded. Even outside of the anarchist space, this withdrawal of discernible norms finds its equivalent in Geneva, evoked as a blank space of semantic impoverishment. Thus, when the narrator walks the streets with Haldin’s sister, “lofty piles of hotels on our right” (243) take the place of the “‘unstained, lofty, and solitary existence’” (101) which a letter by Haldin had imputed to Razumov, thereby assigning a false revolutionary commitment to the protagonist. The connotations of inauthenticity and treachery, then, is materialised, spreading to the otherwise bland placidity of Geneva. This entanglement of ‘lofty’ buildings and ‘lofty’ lies is confounded by the absence of an interpretative challenge posed by liberal-democratic Switzerland. There are not even “imperfect disclosures” (242) in the offing; instead, “two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect. And the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness.” (244) This environment “without a glean” (24), rather than establishing a normative counterpoint to the revolutionary sphere, is shown to advertise its features outright, requiring no further hermeneutic engagement. This distinguishes it from the anarchist sphere, which, for all its indeterminacy, at least affords the narrator the residual hope of “something like a glimpse behind the scenes” (24). In Bruner’s terms, the rescinding of the protagonist’s initial view of Russia as a space of increasing social integration still presents one final eventful shift, a ‘breach’ in the wake of which the previous ‘canonicity’ can be presented as irrecoverable. The Genevan space, by contrast, refuses equivalent changes of state.54 Presented as a topographical equivalent to the ellipses and semantic blanks suffusing the novel, the “inexpressible dreariness” (244) of the city appears as an extension of the question ‘where to’ rather than an answer allowing for

54 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 12.

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further elaboration of its traits. The Western city, then, poses a suitable background for the state of exception under which Razumov has been placed, establishing no alternative demarcations to offset his suspended identity. 5.1.2.2.2 Denial of Language The denial of judgment indicated by Mikulin’s question ‘where to?’ contrasts with Razumov’s previous expectation of the national characteristics of Russia. According to the protagonist’s initial beliefs, a nation functions in accordance with underlying, yet expressible laws of development. The resulting assertion of a specifically Eastern identity is considered to be within the purview of an inspired patriot — and, in particular, can be described in a messianic evocation of an idealised, anticipated order. This certainty is mobilised during an interim, after Razumov, having failed to secure the means of escape for Haldin, considers his own conversion to a reactionary political mode. The accompanying epiphany transforms his surroundings into a topographical model for the writing of history: Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history. It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin— murdering foolishly. (25)

This image of Russia as a blank slate awaiting inscription by a nationalist language to come is a counter-model to the mystical template offered by Haldin. The ‘agitator’, whom Razumov aims to consign to alterity in order to justify his impending betrayal, offers a vision of a transference of souls as well as revolutionary ancestry. Both components suggest an essential identity encompassing the personal and the collective alike (“don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul” 17). For Razumov, excluded from collective identity by his circumstances, this certainty is inconceivable. Accordingly, he develops a model that reverses the epiphanic sequence. As opposed to Haldin, whose initial assertion of a vision determines his further actions and the perception of his surroundings, Razumov is shown to extrapolate his model from an “almost physical impression of endless space and of countless millions” (25), rendering his political principles an epiphenomenon of an imagined sensory input. Following this first ‘impression’, his political model is self-perpetuating, leading from an initial “sacred inertia” (25) to direct quotation of the thought-processes assuring him that “[o]bscurantism is better than the light of incendiary torches” (25). In its interruption of the previous preponderance of free indirect thought, this shift betokens the explicit creation of a pre-emptive justification for his actions.

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This constitutes a reversal of the process of certainty offered by the Assistant Commissioner in The Secret Agent. In the 1907 novel, the process of fostering illusions of social coherence for the sake of others not only depends on the demarcation of spaces in which distinctions of identity and alterity can be safely negotiated; what is more, the AC as the one formulating and materially reifying its tenets is not himself part of the ensuing order. After restoring the differentiation of the salon from its surroundings, the policeman remains on its threshold. As opposed to such limited preservation of a coherent ideological space, Razumov elaborates a self-perpetuating epiphanic vision of a community, the foundational traits of which are unaffected by lightly sketched institutional flaws: “despotic bureaucracy . . . abuses . . . corruption . . . and so on” (26). He envisages a future in which these drawbacks can be overcome — an anticipated order that would, crucially, include Razumov himself. Instead of relinquishing customary bounds in order to restore their validity for the select few (in the manner of The Secret Agent’s Assistant Commissioner), the protagonist reserves for himself intimations of a symbolic reintegration to come. This process of self-deception hinges on two central rhetorical strategies. Firstly, it is predicated on a homogenous and essentialist national identity. Although Razumov’s thoughts are quoted, the homogeneity of the epiphanic Russian self is already undercut by the marked use of verba credenda.55 Phrased laboriously in the passive voice or with an added adverb (‘mentally’), these introduce the protagonist’s all-encompassing conclusions while foregrounding their narrative mediation. That is to say: these contrived authorial additions expose his train of thoughts as an uncertain process of crafting an identity. “He was persuaded,” (27) we are told. Each successive link in the following disjointed chain of metonymies is likewise overdetermined in its laborious constructedness by informing us of the manner in which “he observed mentally” and “remarked to himself” (27). This failing attempt to conjure nationalist homogeneity reaches an early culmination in a succession of three quoted conclusions, which in their disconnected formulation cast doubt on the project of finding an inscription for the “blank page” (25) — let alone one that would embed Razumov’s personal identity in a teleological national trajectory:

55 I.e. the replacement of the inquit-formula by “verba credenda (lat. credere, think, believe, assume), by verbs of thinking, perceiving or feeling” (157, my trans.). This, as per Vogt, is a technique that allows for the representation of unsaid thoughts, impressions, and feelings of characters, following the tacit assumption that these are in principle expressible. Jochen Vogt. Aspekte erzählender Prosa: Eine Einführung in Erzähltechnik und Romantheorie. Opladen and Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998.

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‘That’s patriotism,’ he observed mentally, and added, ‘There’s no stopping midway on that road,’ and then remarked to himself, ‘I am not a coward.’ And again there was a dead silence in Razumov’s breast. He walked with lowered head, making room for no one. He walked slowly and his thoughts returning spoke within him with solemn slowness. (27)

The paratactic juxtaposition surreptitiously foregrounds the discordant elements making up the rhetorical invocation of homogeneity. What is more, a profusion of deixes points towards a foregone conclusion. “That’s patriotism” (26) is both uncertain in its reference and appears as an insufficient, empty signifier incapable of encompassing the disjointed teleology that precedes it. The same deictic confusion applies to “that road” (27): the certainty of the demonstrative obscures that in this context the image of the ‘road’ is awkwardly poised between metaphor and metonymy, between a tertium comparationis of teleological national progress on the one hand and the literal contiguity of his path towards the officials on the other. As opposed to the metonymical certainty of the medal and the welldemarcated room, then, the passage displays the hesitation between contiguity and similarity that Fredric Jameson presents as a characteristic modernist feature: “it is at one with the contradiction between the contingency of physical objects and the demand for an impossible meaning.”56 In the case of the minute transcription of the effort to induce epiphany, metonymical reification is no longer possible, as evidenced by the “dead silence” that follows the juxtaposition of ‘patriotism’, the ‘road’ and Razumov’s own denial of ‘cowardice’. At the same time, understood metaphorically, the terms invoked fail to yield a determinate tenor in which ‘patriotism’ would lay bare its numinous similarity to the ‘road’ that has to be pursued to its end.57 It is no wonder, then, that Razumov concludes with an assertion of what he is not (27). His heterogeneous semantic material fails to bridge the gap between his personal decision and the collective trajectory that would justify it. Rather than the foundational certainty of ‘patriotism’, the road stands for the mere absence of cowardice, never denoting a positive trait apart from that individual lack. Patriotism cannot close the series of epiphanic elements; the concept obtains the properties of the ‘road’ that mediates it, which, in turn, is primarily defined by the absence of features.

56 Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 160. 57 As Schwarz has described the relationship of the ‘figurative term’ (vehicle) and the ‘literal term’ (tenor’) in Conrad: “The vehicles of a metaphor do not simply express a quality to be associated with the tenor, but replace the tenor as the essential quality of the represented world.” Daniel R. Schwarz. Conrad: Almayer’s Folly to Under Western Eyes. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan 1980. 162.

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As a result, the initially decisive indication “[t]hat’s patriotism” fails to restore the presence of any determinate set of qualities undergirding the protagonist’s course of action. This failure to attain a suitable language of communal identity once more proves a significant departure in Conrad’s political fiction, which otherwise does feature remaining sources of imagined order. To return to the comparison with The Secret Agent, the Assistant Commissioner is shown to offer just such stabilising images of identity for the social systems under his protection. This process in Conrad’s earlier novel, however, begins not as a matter of selfdeception but precisely at the point at which residual dependence on the functioning of institutions has been shaken, and the policeman develops an “alert mistrust of the weapon in his hand” (SA, 76) — the weapon in this case denoting the officer under his command. All his successive acts are informed by this initial scepticism of the regular functioning of society and its sub-systems. In fact, it is only by losing this ‘trust’ that he can assure ongoing ‘trust’ on the part of privileged social spheres. This double structure is entirely absent from Razumov’s epiphanic language. He is shown to be unaware of the constructedness of his self-made essentialist order and its teleology. Rather than the Assistant Commissioner’s ‘alert mistrust’, the Russian protagonist, then, attempts to persuade himself that he can trust in the efficacy of a process by which “absolute power should be preserved—the tool ready for the man–for the great autocrat of the future” (26). Thus, contrary to the self-reflexive defamiliarisation of the vaunted ‘tool’ in The Secret Agent, Conrad’s Russian novel introduces as a political ‘tool’ the notion of a future master signifier aligning incompatible demands. However, this constitutively potential authority (which would be marred by its actualisation) merely adds to the images of ‘levelling’ and ‘obliteration’ that serve as stand-ins for Razumov’s imagined collective identity in the diegetic present. Razumov’s attempted messianic narrative, then, fails to provide a suitable framework of collective justification for individual action. On the contrary: it displays two further features that predispose it for the permanent state of exception instead. The avowed trust in teleological necessity, after all, does not follow from Razumov’s self-ascribed “cool superior reason” (26). Instead, the reader is confronted with a brief interlude in which [h]e ceased to think for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete. But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place—the irrational feeling that something may jump upon us in the dark—the absurd dread of the unseen. (26)

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In the middle of the evocation of doctrinal certainty – disconnected as it is from Razumov’s reasoning – this interruption emphasises the ephemeral nature of the inner voice of reason. Specifically, the argument for a grand national identity is shown to collapse as soon as it is no longer reiterated. Thus, the interlude underscores the processes of disavowal upon which the construction of national identity is based in the first place. The “absurd dread of the unseen” (26) draws attention to a very concrete alterity surreptitiously undergirding Razumov’s reverie of national unity and messianic expectation. After all, the image of an assault in an ‘unlighted strange place’ evokes Razumov’s own previous actions in the stables of a “low eating-house” (20). When he finds the coachman Ziemianitch (who is to bring Haldin to safety) drunk and asleep, a “terrible fury” leads the protagonist to beat “the prostrate body with inarticulate cries. After a time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and shadows of the cellar-like stable” (22). It is this action of abject violence that precedes Razumov’s betrayal of the revolutionary. Before his nationalist declaration, then, he assures himself that he is “glad he had beaten that brute—the ‘bright soul’ of the other” (23). That ‘other’ is Haldin, whose notion of a soul of the people is assumed to have been disproven by its bedraggled, manifest representative. Ziemianitch, included in the imagined polity by abjection, shows that the very mission statement of Razumov’s messianic authoritarianism is founded on a body divested of its political identity. By exerting ‘terrible’ violence, Razumov is shown to prove to himself that the ‘soul’ of the people, an essential identity of the Russian populace as evoked by Haldin, can be dismantled in an ‘inarticulate’ act — which, in turn, disarticulates the political ideology “of the other” (23). That his own, reactionary position relies on the unacknowledged supplement of the abused body comes to the fore in the elaboration of his nationalist narrative, with the imagined ‘unlighted strange place’ (26) internalising the “cavernous place” and “gloom” (22) of the scene of sheer violence. The vision of national unity and messianic temporality, then, includes within it an unacknowledged figure of alterity. Rather than an oppositional, antagonistic political position, however, what is included in Razuomov’s belaboured epiphany is the exclusion of Ziemianitch from political identity. The protagonist has “beaten that brute” (23) to sever the coachman’s body from Haldin’s notion of a “spirit” that “shall go on warring in some Russian body” (16). If the manifest body is to be disbarred from the body politic, however, what results is far from the intended “record of an inconceivable history” (25) purged of its material substrate. On the contrary, the result of this act is the wholesale unavailability of any signified of nationalist signifiers. Razumov’s constructive process is interrupted by a reminder of his own act of violence at the limits of representability, which brings home the potential suspension of identity, including his own.

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What remains is a sphere in which that “violence” is, in Agamben’s terms, “situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between exception and rule.”58 The intrusion of the scene of the crime upon Razumov’s ad hoc political theory discloses that the possibility of suspending identities and exerting violence on a de-politicised body is already part of the protagonist’s selfcreated ideology. Instead of producing a signifiable and communicable relational Other, Razumov has merely internalised the absence of a determination of identity and alterity, leaving an auditory equivalent (“silence in his breast” 26) to the previous, visual vacancy of the “whiteness, like a monstrous blank page” (25). The establishment of a classificatory border between his ideological certainties and the deficient example of hypostasised Russianness fails. This disturbance of his messianism by the figure of the coachman anticipates a more wide-ranging collapse of the differential construction of identity. As in the initial suspension of foundational identity, the protagonist is intimately involved in this breakdown: rather than conceiving a normative state to come, Razumov pre-empts the state of exception to which he is exposed, and which he enacts himself. The second aspect of Razumov’s language of unity which prefigures its use in the permanent state of exception is constituted by the absence of eventfulness. After all, in addition to denying the necessity of alterity (only to prompt its tacit return with the ‘unlighted strange place’), his model also rejects determinate stages of development. Apart from the notion that “[t]he logic of history made him unavoidable” (26), the only indication of the arrival of the autocratic leader envisioned by Razumov is a presumed unification of any social contradictions: “‘Who else,’ he asked himself ardently, ‘could move all that mass in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will.’” (27). This evocation of the impossibility of change without a unified will structurally reproduces the topographical image that initiates Razumov’s political epiphany, namely the “monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history” (25). Whether Razumov asserts the inscription of a definitive past (“history”) or a messianic future (“single will”) — in both cases the notion of momentous change is preceded by an imagined, pre-discursive state, a blank in need of inscription. Anticipating scrutiny by state officials, the protagonist himself produces a version of such a surface devoid of content, as he writes a manifesto in order to clarify and (by pinning it to the wall) exhibit his newfound convictions: “History not Theory. Patriotism not Internationalism. Evolution not Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption” (49). The aim of his gesture is a reduction of complexity, in which messianic uncertainty is replaced by a

58 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 65.

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determinate struggle between opposed grand narratives, requiring the individual to choose a side in a pre-existing political antagonism. However, instead of stabilising Razumov’s position – and consigning the anarchists to alterity – the paper, despite the written slogans, is overdetermined as conceptually empty by a circuitous description of its blankness prior to his “unsteady, almost childish” (49) burst of political sloganeering: the paper is “like the pile of sheets covered with his neat, minute handwriting, only blank” (49). In other words, the very notion of ‘political difference’ expressed by the manifesto is a function of a preceding invocation of “an original and in a sense originary blankness that is never merely a material blankness.”59 That is, as in the case of the final tally in The Princess Casamassima or the declaration of a pre-colonial state of nature in The Secret Agent, political contestation is not a matter of entrenched positions of the kind the manifesto lays out in binary simplicity. Rather, power is exerted by any instance that determines a pre-discursive blank. Instead of positioning themselves in a contested terrain, effective authorities in the early modernist political imaginary draw attention to a medium awaiting form rather than the form itself: “their arsenal of possibilities is generally large enough to prevent fixation on a few forms.”60 In these tropes of mediated power, whoever erases existing signs and returns a seeming political difference to a pre-discursive, potential state is shown to exert greater influence than anyone who, like Razumov, seeks to take an explicit position in a political antagonism. Consequently, the blank page serves as a reminder that whatever Razumov writes, he is not in charge of the underlying conditions of that writing — and, that conversely, he cannot write his way out his predicament. Even Razumov’s failing attempts at a manifesto surreptitiously express this logic of empty mediality. Rather than bolstered by foundational beliefs, his political self, too, is based on a blank space voided of content rather than founded on differential stabilisation. Accordingly, “[w]hen he wrote a large hand his neat writing lost its character altogether” (49), thus calling into question the performative restoration of differential order and the possibility of inscribing himself within it. The expectation of clearly demarcated opposed terms is, thus, already undercut during their formulation as a messianic vision and a manifesto, respectively. In both cases, the expectation of certainty is replaced with the indication of temporary identity, subject to erasure at any time. Razumov is shown to co-produce this suspension of an anticipated plenitude of identity. Both the re-entry of the

59 Michael Fried. “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1990). 193–236. 213. 60 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 105.

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body of the coachman in his messianic reverie and the ‘blank pages’ of the manifesto prefigure a mode of rule based on the potential to annul any demarcated sense of self. This potential to revoke political self-descriptions is made explicit by the reception of Razumov’s manifesto without ‘character’ by the arbiters of the state. The official in charge of his case is shown to redouble the production of empty media which foreground the potential for inscription rather than offering determinate statements. This rejection of any explicit – let alone binary – articulation of political certainties becomes evident after Razumov’s room is searched by the police. His exhibited articles of faith are neither confiscated nor punished but, instead, displayed a second time, arranged so as to be re-read by himself. His screed is neither confirmed nor rejected: When he had taken it down the day before he had folded it in four, absent-mindedly, before dropping it on the table. And now he saw it lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even and covering all the confused pile of pages, the record of his intellectual life for the last three years. It had not been flung there. It had been placed there—smoothed out, too! He guessed in that an intention of profound meaning—or perhaps some inexplicable mockery. (57)

The representatives of the state of exception do not produce texts themselves. As a result, neither the anticipated writing of an “inconceivable history” (25) upon a de-historicised “blank page” (25) nor the laws of development projected onto the future “single will” (27) are borne out. Instead, the permanent state of exception requires its subjects to interpret a featureless, “smoothed out” (57) reproduction of their own language. While the inscription of signs on a surface is deferred, this mode of power redoubles the surface itself, foregrounding the absence of signs. Thus, by covering the “confused pile of pages” (57) with the very manifesto previously described as ‘blank’, the regime repeats the gesture of Razumov instead of resolving it. Neither is either term (i.e. ‘Evolution’ or ‘Revolution’) affirmed or repudiated, nor can the protagonist be sure whether this distribution of political concepts is accepted in the first place. If Razumov has been “awaiting the record of an inconceivable history” (25), that wait is prolonged indefinitely by confronting him with his own, inconclusive, literally ‘characterless’ attempts of expressing it. Throughout, the protagonist is never told why the manifesto is left for him in the first place. Instead, he is abandoned to a state in which “profound meaning” and “inexplicable mockery” (57) are indistinguishable. Both interpretations are just as possible as the truth of ‘Evolution’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Direction’, or ‘Destruction’. While Razumov still attempts to perform an identity, the mode of power he encounters has arrogated to itself a position of indifference. Agamben

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describes the “indifference of Being and Nothing” as a “mode of Being of potentiality that is purified of all reason.”61 In its Conradian iteration, however, the capability, “in pure potentiality, to bear the ‘no more than’ beyond Being and Nothing, fully experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both,”62 is claimed by the state. If “[t]o lose this space – the blank page, as it were – is to lose a dimension which constitutes us as human beings,”63 Under Western Eyes traces precisely this process; however, rather than a ‘loss’, the novel narrates a deprivation of potentiality by state authority, the existence of which beyond its oblique representatives is increasingly in doubt. Razumov’s suspicion that he is being mocked already anticipates the “mockery” that has been mentioned in the context of the absence of explicit disciplinary spaces (“Why all this mockery?” 73). In the permanent state of exception, perceived derision functions by first redoubling statements and afterwards surreptitiously destabilising their validity. The erstwhile target of these processes is subsequently implicated in their reproduction. That is to say: Razumov can be seen as fully subjected to the new regime not when any particular course of action is enforced, but rather when he himself engages in versions of such ‘inexplicable mockery’. Thus, as he is sent to Geneva in order to infiltrate the radical sphere, he is shown to use language which, while overtly describing his revolutionary commitment and thus expanding on his cover story, can also be understood as a confession to his status as an agent of the state. Then aloud, with a satanic enjoyment of the scorn prompting him to play with the greatness of the great man— Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the force which drew—no, which drove me towards you! The irresistible force. [. . .] I have been impelled, compelled, or rather sent—let us say sent—towards you for a work that no one but myself can do. You would call it a harmless delusion: a ridiculous delusion at which you don’t even smile. It is absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you shall remember these words, I hope. Enough of this. Here I stand before you—confessed! But one thing more I must add to complete it: a mere blind tool I can never consent to be. (168)

61 Agamben, “Bartleby,” 259. 62 Agamben, “Bartleby,” 259. 63 Werner Prall. “To Be or Bartleby – Psychoanalysis and the Crisis of Immunity.” Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought. Ed. Lene Auestad and Amal Treacher Kabesh. London: Palgrave, 2017. 57–72. 65.

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In this speech to the ‘anarchist’ figure Peter Ivanovitch, a composite stereotype parodying, among others, Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Bakunin,64 Razumov is shown to produce ambivalent signs in his own right. At this point in the plot, the protagonist has insinuated himself into anarchist circles as an informer. Thus, the ‘force’ propelling him can be understood to refer to the autocratic state releasing him on condition of cooperation, while also representing the ‘irresistible force’ of revolution that he is expected to invoke as an undercover anarchist. His ambiguous speech expresses a “compulsion to choose between mutually exclusive hypotheses,”65 which is only ever one disclosure away from functioning as a confession of his status as a secret agent. This culminates in the radically ambivalent final sentence. By placing the ‘blind tool’ at the beginning of the second phrase, it can firstly (as part of the predicate) indicate that Razumov does not ‘consent’ to such an instrumental status. At the same time, however, understood as an object, it can be connected to the phrase before the colon, rendering ‘I can never consent to be’ a relative clause. On this second reading, Razumov requires (rather than constituting) the ‘blind tool’ provided by his interlocutor as well as the other anarchists on whom he informs. In this double discourse, the protagonist is shown to reproduce the state of exception, which, rather than having explicitly forced him to become a secret agent, “impelled, compelled, or rather sent” him. Hence, just as the already ‘characterless’ pages of the manifesto are neither affirmed nor denied but merely exhibited, the protagonist himself engages in a ‘mockery’ of the possibility of expressing a political identity, even a feigned one. Once the expectations of an autocratic imposition of order have been suspended, the individual is thrust into a mere repetition of the ambiguous mode of rule to which he has been subjected himself. Thus, the perennial self-subversion of identity that characterises Razumov’s behaviour in Geneva is prepared by the official’s refusal of signs — by the blank slate being produced at the very moment at which the reader and the protagonist expect the autocratic regime to display its authoritative power. As the delineation of norm and exception recedes, the protagonist replicates that blurring by verbally ambiguating his own status, grafting confessions upon his revolutionary rhetoric. In this way, he not only suspends his cover identity, but also reiterates the very autocratic strategy of rule that erased his own sense of self.

64 Cf. Margaret Ann Rusk White. “Peter Ivanovitch’s Escape: A Possible Source Overlooked.” Conradiana 12 (1980). 72–80. 72. Hampson reconstructs the context of anarchists in political exile: “Bakunin, for example, whose escape from Geneva perhaps contributed to Peter Ivanovitch’s story, sought refuge in Geneva.” Hampson, Conrad’s Secrets, 228. 65 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. 9.

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In Agamben’s model, the state of exception still at least “claims to maintain the law in its very suspension” at the very moment at which it has “shed every relation to law.”66 In Under Western Eyes, however, there is rarely any recoverable position at all. State representatives neither disprove claims nor do they give any particular grounds for their decisions. What is more, the state of exception is never declared. Whereas Agamben describes the non-linguistic nature of a threshold at which “pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference,”67 in Conrad’s novel this unexplained violence disconnected from any explicit laws is literalised. The state is a-textual, rearranging and displaying pre-existing discourses but never providing an indication whether the quoted and reported statements accord with any underlying principles. This logophobic refusal reaches its apex in Mikulin’s speech during the interviews. Here, too, the official’s language does not directly interpellate. His is a receptive mode of power, a strategy of control centred on his overdetermined status as a listener. His assurance of receptivity even caps off passages in which nothing seems to have been said at all. Thus, Razumov’s “great flow of words” (65), by means of which he complains of “being totally misunderstood” (65), suddenly ceases as he is “seized with fright before the attentive immobility of the official” (65). As a result, he is shown to experience an extended vision of “his brain suffering on the rack” (65). The train of thought ensuing in the wake of this initial image confronts the reader with a marked preponderance of narrative time over narrated time, which creates a considerable gap between the report of Razumov’s speech and the Councillor’s response. In the wake of the lengthy, internally focalised passage, the narrator attempts to explain the protagonist’s mental state with explicit reference to Razumov’s retrospective notes, their immediacy conveyed by a shift to the present tense: “Yet he is certain that he never lost the consciousness of himself on the sofa, leaning forward with his hands between his knees and turning his cap round and round in his fingers.” (65) Mikulin’s assertion that he has “listened with interest” (65) creates a metaleptical effect: rather than referring to the protagonist’s speech, Mikulin’s receptivity seems to extend to Razumov’s thoughts – or the frame narrator’s notes – as if the official had privileged access to Razumov’s psychological state in the manner claimed by the narrator: “I comprehend in a measure your . . . But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you . . . ” (65) The ellipses make the reach of the Councillor’s ‘comprehension’ appear ambivalent, potentially including the protagonist’s last diegetic statement, his thoughts inferred by the

66 Agamben, State of Exception, 59. 67 Agamben, State of Exception, 40.

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listener, or the very narrative we have just read. Such unbounded receptivity, rather than explicit judgments, are the crucial feature of the statist ‘enunciation without real reference’. In addition to the official’s overdetermined status as a listener, his statements constitute another reproduction of the model of the semantic blank awaiting inscription. Not only are we told that “[e]verything vanished at the voice of Councillor Mikulin” (65) but, what is more, his ensuing statements consist of fragmented, disjointed speech which Razumov has to complete in perennial attempts at inscribing himself in the gaps. The protagonist is not confronted with specific injunctions but rather with the instigation to turn disjointed, fragmentary “series of broken sentences” (65) into homogenous discourse of the type he has imagined during his auto-conversion to the reactionary cause. In Žižek’s terms, the protagonist is confronted with a coercion which differs from the explicit, symbolic injunctions of the Law: “One does not become a full member of a community simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted ‘between the lines’, through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition.”68 That such a “superego obscene code is essentially spoken”69 is literalised by the vocal transmission of the bureaucrat’s fragmented language, set apart as it is from the written cohesion and material reification, the literal inscription sought by means of Razumov’s prize essay. Where the essay promises the presence of the absent father, the official spoken language is predicated on absence, on the ever-renewed production of gaps. Mikulin forces Razumov to create himself as a suspect rather than conferring any determinate status upon him, a tactics that Razumov falls for every single time.70 In the process, the very desire for an unambiguous identity which previously animated the epiphany of national homogeneity is used against him: But I put it to you whether it was a form which would have been used to secure the attendance of a . . .

68 Slavoj Žižek. For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London and New York: Verso, 1991. lv. 69 Žižek, The Parallax View, 370. 70 Cf. Yael Levin. Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 80. Levin shows that in the novel “silence is always perceived as a figure of signification. More importantly, however, Haldin’s words attest to the fact that silence is a deceptive mode of signification. Insofar as it is a signifier forever divorced of its signified, silence offers an inevitable and indelible source for the inception of erroneous interpretations.”

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‘Suspect,’ exclaimed Razumov, looking straight into the official’s eyes. They were big with heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim, steadfast gaze. ‘A suspect.’ The open repetition of that word which had been haunting all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort of satisfaction. Councillor Mikulin shook his head slightly. ‘Surely you do know that I’ve had my rooms searched by the police?’ ‘I was about to say a ‘misunderstood person,’ when you interrupted me,’ insinuated quietly Councillor Mikulin. (66)

Razumov has to cast himself as a subject in this mode of interrogation, even deriving satisfaction from the elusive sense of certainty his brief interruptions confer. Notably, Mikulin is rarely explicitly represented; just as he “insinuated” in this dialogue, later passages describe his mode of utterance in terms that deny explicit statements. The official “murmured” (67), “observed [. . .] parenthetically” (68), “went on reading monotonously” (69), “added in easy, explanatory tone” (69) or, most notably in view of his doubling of Razumov’s gesture of display, ‘repeats’: “‘Why should it be forbidden?’ he repeated” (67). The function of this haunting by repetition is already indicated by the difference between Razumov’s first (“suspect”) and second (“A suspect”) pre-emptive completion of Mikulin’s sentence. The second iteration takes over the indefinite article from the Councillor’s sentence, already grafting elements of the receding, authoritative discourse onto his own speech. If this repetition with a difference denies determinate suspectsubjecthood, the further replacement with “misunderstood person” wholly dispenses with any indication of closure. It is not certain, after all, by whom Razumov is misunderstood; in addition to the police, the term cannot but evoke Haldin and the catastrophic misunderstanding of Razumov’s silence as a mark of tacit anarchist sympathies. Instead of dispelling the ‘haunting’ by conferring a political or legal status, the Councillor introduces a radically ambivalent term, ‘insinuating’ the figure of the revolutionary (which previously ‘haunted’ Razumov) into official language use. The notion of a fragmentary regime that prompts attempts at self-inscription without issuing explicit commands is accompanied by the absence of ocularcentric modes of control. Razumov feels observed, yet the above passage is just one of several in which Mikulin merely “looked at him dimly” (67). While Josiane PaccaudHuguet emphasises constant supervision on the part of “the Other’s inhuman, protruding gaze proliferating on both sides, [. . .] making communal exchange impossible,”71 Razumov is also prompted to voluntarily display himself to an

71 Josiane Paccaud-Huguet. “Conrad Our Contemporary? The Case of Under Western Eyes.” Under Western Eyes: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons, J. H. Stape and Jeremy Hawthorn. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. 115–127. 118.

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uncertain gaze. We have little reason to distrust Mikulin’s assertion that Razumov will not be placed under direct, literal observation: “But you may rest assured that I never thought of having you watched. You are a young man of great independence. Yes. You are going away free as air, but you shall end by coming back to us” (95). Observation is internalised: the result of this non-ocularcentric mode is a linguistic equivalent to the permanent state of exception. Razumov is relegated to an indecisive position in which he is permanently aware of the information he has to hold back. This manifests in physical reactions, a veritable somatic threshold state: “I must positively hold my tongue unless I am obliged to speak” (67). At the same time, this urge to speak never quite finds a vent, an absence which, in turn, prompts the protagonist’s desire to explain himself. Amidst the gaps of officialdom and his own bodily reactions, Razumov responds to Mikulin’s label of “‘misunderstood person’” (66) with a full confession: “‘Hadn’t I better tell him everything?’ presented itself with such force that he had to bite his lower lip” (67). Here, too, it is the continued absence and deferral of the all-encompassing ‘everything’ that defines Razumov’s position and compels his further actions. Razumov is never told in what way, precisely, he is “misunderstood,” just as Mikulin mentions a ‘mistake’ before desisting from further explanation: “I comprehend in a measure . . . But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you . . . ” (65). This is in keeping with the extreme form of the state of exception in Under Western Eyes. If Razumov’s mistakes and misunderstandings were to be clarified, this would make the countervailing deduction of laws possible and raise the possibility of being both ‘correct’ and ‘understood’. However, in accordance with Agamben’s formulation of exception, Mikulin neither posits laws nor does he differentially include them in the polity by explicit suspension: Just as between language and world, so between the norm and its application there is no internal nexus that allows one to be derived from the other. In this sense, the state of exception is the opening of a space in which application and norm reveal their separation and a pure force-of-law realizes (that is, applies by ceasing to apply [dis-applicando]) a norm whose application has been suspended.72

In its narrative iteration, such an evocation of the state of exception as the paradoxical creation of “the law that suspends the law, and cannot be understood in purely legal terms”73 is performed as the simultaneity of incompatible impulses of disclosure and secrecy, which is confronted with a permissive mode of power inciting permanent, faltering self-representations. Openly, without even simulating terms and procedures of a regular, repeatable process, the

72 Agamben, State of Exception, 40. 73 Morton, States of Emergency, 8.

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Councillor’s tactics bear out the notion that in the state of exception “the application of a norm is in no way contained within the norm and cannot be derived from it”74— as much as the protagonist attempts to induce a disclosure of such derivation. 5.1.2.2.3 Production of Bare Life The receding structure of the law and the abandonment to the state of exception do not, as especially Homo Sacer is at pains to point out, imply a straightforward structure of exclusion from the rule of law. Such a process would conversely enable the inference of an alternative set of rules, as Laclau has indicated in his renunciation of the concept of the state of exception: Agamben has not seen the problem of the inscribable/uninscribable, of inside/outside, in its true universality. In actual fact, what the mutual ban between opposed laws describes is the constitutive nature of any radical antagonism – radical in the sense that its two poles cannot be reduced to any super-game which would be recognized by them as an objective meaning to which both would be submitted.75

This notion of antagonism, of a “re-negotiation and re-grounding of the social bond,” however, is hard-won in Conrad’s fiction.76 After all, an act of ‘re-grounding’ is precisely the mode of reconstituting order just barely upheld in The Secret Agent — at the cost of constructing fatuous anarchist alterity. In this political imaginary, the parameters of an ordered space have to be defined for the re-negotiation of antagonism to be possible. ‘Politics’ as defined by antagonism is, hence, a carefully constructed effect in Conrad’s political fiction. There is a “super-game” in Laclau’s sense, but this overarching position from which the shared framework of opposed positions can be perceived is restricted to individual arbiters of demarcation, who resist the temptation to expose this framework to those who ostensibly depend on it. This possibility of deriving and maintaining demarcation, already in its final stages in The Secret Agent, is further attenuated in Under Western Eyes. Whatever the status of Laclau’s argument regarding antagonism “in actual fact,” Conrad’s literary model is closer to Agamben’s state of exception: antagonism is not possible in the wake of the self-inscriptions prompted by Mikulin and a state that re-deploys blank media instead of disclosing political positions.

74 Agamben, State of Exception, 40. 75 Laclau, “Bare Life,” 15. 76 Laclau, “Bare Life,” 15.

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The possibility of antagonism – and, hence, in Laclau’s terms, the possibility of politics as such – becomes increasingly fraught in the novel. By tracing this deterioration, the last step in the evocation of featureless political power can be given its due, namely biopolitics. In terms of this politicisation of life, Razumov’s mobilization of his “sense impressions” against “the exceptional” has already shown the degree to which the body is rendered political in the attempt to demarcate norm and exception. As the permanent state of exception does away with lingering notions of constant norms, Under Western Eyes raises the question of the political status of ‘life’ as such. The situation of Razumov can be read in terms of Agamben’s notion that “those who have been banished are not simply outside the law but paradoxically included by virtue of their exclusion. To cast out, in this sense, is also to capture.”77 This capture by means of a threshold – which the analysis has demonstrated for space and language – also applies to the category of ‘life’. That is to say: Razumov’s status can be analysed in terms of “the instability that strikes the category of ‘human’ whenever one’s life is no longer qualified by the political identity that comes with membership in a political community.”78 The absence of a political sense of self is overdetermined in the protagonist’s case: both currying favour with the anarchists and compulsively indicating his betrayal, Razumov is cut off from any ‘membership’ by default. In order to describe the politicisation of the private, Agamben expands on the concept of bare life. By way of introduction to this model, Homo Sacer sets forth a classical differentiation: between zoē, which describes a concept of ‘natural’ life before communal specification, and bios, political life tied to language and the polis. There is, however, a third term in Agamben’s model, in-between bios and zoē but distinct from both, namely vida nuda, naked – or bare – life. Bare life is not the same as zoē, despite their apparent similarities: it can, instead, be understood as the result of forcibly removing bios. It emerges, in other words, upon the elimination of political ascriptions and a communicable identity. This ‘stripping away’ leads to a double exclusion: bare life can be killed at any time – without thereby transgressing any law – but it cannot be sacrificed, whereby it is also excluded from any extramundane, divine law. Homo sacer (the legal figure that serves as the paradigmatic bearer of bare life) is, as Agamben puts it, in a “zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide.”79 This redoubled status is constitutive for the type of sovereignty upheld in the

77 Peter Nyers. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. New York: Routledge, 2006. 74. 78 Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 74. 79 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83.

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permanent state of exception: “The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred – that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed – and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty.”80 This model of sacrifice differs from any theories of the sacrificial act as a passage, which fail to acknowledge the ongoing centrality of a sphere of the sacrificial in the constitution of power. The sacrificial subject is not neatly transferred from the mundane to the divine. Instead, the ongoing production of a sphere in which life can be wrested from symbolic valence constitutes the primary activity of sovereign power. The sacrificial individual is banned from explicit norms. That is to say: homo sacer can be killed — yet, crucially, not in any fashion that renders this act legitimate or illegitimate. This abandonment underlies the very functioning of sovereignty in Agamben’s model. Only some individuals or groups are abandoned in this model; yet, rather than serving to strengthen the symbolic identity of the remaining subjects, the creation of bare life serves to inculcate an abandonment that can potentially befall anyone at any time. It is this potential to strip away political identities and render anyone “life that may be killed but not sacrificed”81 that constitutes the “original spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and territorialization.”82 Thus, Agamben’s concept of exception replaces any notion of a founding act of violence with an emphasis on the simultaneous emergence of sovereign power and violence. The originary practice of sovereignty is the creation of a sphere outside of acknowledged legal or divine right. As a result, explicit laws can be rescinded at any time, which transfers normative force to unaccountable state actors capable of withdrawing bios — with the result of bare life exposed to a violence outside of any symbolic framework. This, it is crucial to add, is not incidental but rather a hidden connection binding together the position of power and the object of its activity. Sovereign power is founded on the separation of bare, de-politicised life from any legal status; bare life exposed to absolute violence, in turn, is the result of an abandonment which, nonetheless, retains a relation to the power that has withdrawn.83 There is, thus, no founding violence instituting order; instead, sovereign power is characterised by its reference to bare life outside of whichever symbolic, explicit norms have been avowed. Rather than superseding a ‘state of nature’, exceptional power, in Agamben’s account, only ever founds itself by demonstrating its ability to recede,

80 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83. 81 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83. 82 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 111. 83 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110.

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thus excluding life from symbolic ascriptions of identity as well as legal or normative protections. Haldin, the revolutionary in Razumov’s room, still espouses a linear model in which exceptional violence and reconstitution of norms neatly succeed one another. Thus, he can assert with confidence that he will function, to use a term by Fredric Jameson, as a vanishing mediator: “a bearer of change and social transformation, only to be forgotten once that change has ratified the reality of the institutions.”84 Haldin aims to usher in a new age through an act of self-sacrifice: “Men like me are necessary to make room for self-contained, thinking men like you. Well, we have made the sacrifice of our lives” (15). Against this projected linear event structure, an overt “disnarration”85 of such a concept of sacrifice is already performed by one of the first instances of Razumov’s compulsive “mockery” (73), of his parodic reiteration of revolutionary phrases in a manner that ambiguates their claim to referentiality and covertly implicates him as a secret agent. Their mere repetition with “satanic enjoyment” (168) is to expose the degree to which ‘anarchist’ slogans constitute a genre, referring to previous instances of radical rhetoric as much as to any idealised, post-revolutionary status. Thus, already when he betrays Haldin to General T—, the second representative of autocracy to whom he appeals, Razumov is shown to repeat the revolutionary’s words almost verbatim: “‘They have made a sacrifice of their lives beforehand,’ said Razumov” (37). Reiterating sacrificial rhetoric in a changed context already already suspends Haldin’s claim to symbolic efficacy. What is more, this repetition is placed in-between two almost identical phrases by the General: “They shall be destroyed then” (37) and, “repeat[ing] as if to himself, ‘they shall be destroyed’” (37). Given the structure of repetition in the novel, this surplus language serves to erase rather than affirm the existence of ‘destructible’ alterity. The reiteration already points towards the Geneva scene, since it is accompanied by the “malicious pleasure” (37) that marks the compulsive parody during Razumov’s stint as an anarchist infiltrator. The pleasure derived from repeating and ambiguating revolutionary phrases is constitutive for the type of compliance incited by the state of exception. As Razumov becomes a parodist of sacrificial fervour, he begins to co-create his own “comedy of persecution” (73). This strain of political comedy extends to the very process of reducing protagonists to bare life, a process already given a manifest 84 Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator,” 333. 85 Gerald Prince. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22 (1988). 1–9. 2. This concept covers “all the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text.”

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equivalent in Razumov’s violent revocation of Haldin’s mythology of the sacred Russian people. From the beating of Ziemianitch onwards, the protagonist partakes in rather than being subjected to the capacity of “political figures enjoying unlimited power to kill, to imprison, to whip you to death” that Paccaud-Huguet traces throughout the novel.86 Razumov’s reaction upon hearing of Ziemianitch’s suicide (which removes any immediate danger of being exposed as a traitor) spells out a final reduction to bare life: “He felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above–like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny” (209). As the death of an individual is equated with the insensate life of a multitude, it is no longer subject to ethical concerns, nor does violence directed against the separable element of the unconscious mass violate any identifiable norm. In addition, by invoking processes on a vast scale, Razumov dissociates Ziemianitch’s suicide from his own act of violence. The equation of the coach driver with a killable, biological multiplicity suspends any personal responsibility. It is important not to mistake Razumov’s internally focalised reaction – which in its attribution of neutrality and featurelessness constitutes another repetition of a semantic blank in the manner of Mikulin – as an individual, sudden epiphany. Arriving at this conclusion is, after all, connected to a topologically specific image: it is the result of a view “from above” (209), of a degree of distance that allows for abstraction and generalisation. This distance – without which bare life is inconceivable – is the end-point of an enforced process that has been staged throughout the novel rather than a sudden and temporary insight. Assuming this distanced position can be understood as the negation of the founding act in early modernist political fiction. These narratives, after all, revolve around the possibility of at least simulating a model of community set apart from an anarchic outside of political Otherness. What is derived in this fashion, in Althusser’s terms, “is the formalism of law” that “makes sense only to the extent that it is applied to defined contents that are necessarily absent from the law itself”87— in our case allowing for the notion that anarchy has been expelled from a normative sphere. Establishing a contingent and limited

86 Paccaud-Huguet, “Conrad Our Contemporary,” 118. 87 In Louis Althusser’s terms, this position can be compared to the “effect of law’s formalism [. . .] to bracket, in law itself, the different contents to which the form of law is applied. But it by no means makes these contents disappear by enchantment. Quite the contrary: the formalism of law makes sense only to the extent that it is applied to defined contents that are necessarily absent from the law itself.” Louis Althusser. On the Production of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso, 2014. 59.

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social order, in the manner vestigially performed by Hyacinth in Casamassima and the police figures in The Secret Agent, emerges as the stabilisation of a space in which not only political action but the very possibility of eventfulness is assured. It is the absence of such a founding gesture, its sheer impossibility in the state of exception, that is brought to a head in the concept of “large neutral pity” (209). Suspicion of the state as an essentialist unity is a central concern of Conrad’s political imaginary, as indicated by the transference of traits from Russia to statehood as such in “Autocracy and War.” However, this dismantling has to be restricted. Rather than revelling in the confused “working out [of] destiny” (209) implied by Razumov’s image of the ants, it is the reconstruction of a concept of destiny – however contingent and temporary – that is presented as the defining political gesture in the political novels considered so far. By contrast, the metaphor of the multitude seen from above emerges as a reproduction of the state of exception rather than a politically constitutive differentiation between the normative and the exceptional. An equivalent to this distant, epiphanic vision is provided by the Professor in The Secret Agent, that figure of perennial, potential violence, who likewise conceives of the “mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps.” (61) In both cases, we encounter a version of the trope Mary-Louise Pratt has called the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey scene’.88 In this case, such a self-ascribed superior vantage point allows for the evocation of iron-clad, historical laws which extricate the individual from responsibility. Reduction of political subjects to the status of a biological multitude, thus, functions as a depoliticisation of the position from which it is invoked. It is, after all, only from a position of ‘neutral pity’ that Razumov can disavow his own distinctly political choice, presenting his actions as part and parcel with an unfolding of processes of depoliticised life beyond any individual’s control. The more the protagonists in Under Western Eyes are abandoned to the state of exception, the more do they, in turn, replace imagined political communities with evocations of bare, killable life — biopolitics tips over into ‘necropolitics’.89 This variation of the ‘mass of mankind’ – as opposed to the causality of transgression and punishment envisaged by Razumov – is not a direct exercise of

88 Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 208. 89 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14. At least conceptually, that is, this rhetoric suggests the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.”

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power traceable to state authority. After all, enforced as it may be, the protagonist himself takes this view as a means of diminishing political responsibility — as do the ‘anarchists’. Thus, Sofia Antonovna, a leading figure among the émigré revolutionaries (and the only ‘radical’ whose cause is treated with some seriousness in the novel) is shown to partake in the logic of the state of exception rather than opposing it with any political ‘grounding’ of her own. Despite her assertions of political motives, she, too, bases her most strident pronouncements on an imaginary of bare life exposed to violence. According to the revolutionary, there is no reason to preserve what she calls “the subservient, submissive life. Life? No! Vegetation on the filthy heap of iniquity which the world is” (192). This description is given ample justification in the extended account of her precarious conditions and gradual radicalisation. However, her account of ‘life’ does not meet Laclau’s criteria of a political relation, which assumes a “radical opposition between social forces and, as a result, a constant re-negotiation and re-grounding of the social bond.”90 Instead, the self-correction performed by the revolutionary – ‘life’ is still too much of a defined identity and has to be replaced with undifferentiated ‘vegetation’ – denies “the moment of negativity, of frontier construction and of the development of antagonisms,” in which, as Norval points out, the “‘friend/enemy’ relation is treated as constitutive of politics as such.”91 Antonovna, like Razumov in his evocation of a killable multitude, relinquishes antagonism between political positions and their attendant material interests. Her repeated slogan “[c]rush the infamy” (194) indicates an abstract, dehumanised struggle, in which the establishment of a boundary setting apart a defined position of identity against a constitutive outside is precluded. In other words: this notion of revolution is based precisely on the abolishment of such political difference amidst a generalised ‘iniquity’. Natalia Haldin’s outlook at the end of the novel, likewise, does not raise hopes that the mystical and utopian strand of of political radicalism will replace the “ferocity and imbecility of autocratic rule”92 (as it is called in Conrad’s “Author’s Note”) with a model of political life. A recovery of the distinction of bios and zoē, in Agamben’s terms, appears inconceivable. When she exalts her version of the coming community, assuring the narrator that she “shall never give up looking forward to the day when all discord shall be silenced” (276), this

90 Laclau, “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy,” 15. 91 Aletta J. Norval. “Trajectories of Future Research in Discourse Theory.” Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change. Ed. David J. Horwarth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 219–237. 223. Norval is critical of the reduction of politics to such antagonistic terms. 92 Joseph Conrad. “Author’s Note.” Under Western Eyes. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 281–283. 282.

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ominously recalls the manner in which the state of exception has been evoked in the course of novel. Given the extended gaps in Mikulin’s statements or the “silence of the room [. . .] like the silence of the grave” (32) associated with Razumov’s father, Natalia’s notion of a silent utopia can be read as another suspension of antagonism — and, hence, as another strategy of precluding the stabilisation of identity on the basis of a contingent act of demarcation. The similarity to the silence of the paternal figure, that perennially receding figure who is shown to be “silent with a grand air” (32) whilst later functioning as a mere fauxaddressee through whom Razumov’s missives are forwarded to Mikulin, adds sensory specificity to the novelistic evocation of the state of exception. The nonocularcentric mode of power, centred around ‘silence’ and ‘silencing’ in its orientation towards enforcing obedience by prompting self-inscription, is reproduced rather than countered by Natalia’s evocation of a utopian state in which “many ideas have perished for the triumph of one” (276). Finally, the production of bare life does not preclude figures of authority from subjection to the same destruction of bios they themselves initiate, as the example of Councillor Mikulin – the bureaucrat who offers the “soft unanswerable ‘Where to?’” (227) – shows. In a brief prolepsis, we are told that a “terribly heavy sentence turned Councillor Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict” (225). There is no political identity that would preclude this reduction to the status of bare life, to “something” rather than ‘someone’. Instead, any residual markers of identity have already been reconstituted as the points at which the stripping away of bios can be applied most forcefully. This accords with the Councillor’s own practices: after all, Razumov’s status as an illegitimate son and the resulting “suppressed paternal affection” (226) are diagnosed by Mikulin himself, in the manner of a psychoanalyst. By way of therapy, the official stages a scene of filial recognition for Razumov, in which a fleeting impression of his father’s “soft grey whiskers had brushed against his cheek” (227). The personal becomes the basis of interpellation, brought to the fore not in a display of power but rather in an environment (as Long points out) “more like an analytic session than an interrogation, their positions paralleling those of analyst and analysand rather than a prisoner facing an inquisitor.”93 This session is in keeping with Mikulin’s penchant for syntagmatic rearrangement of Razumov’s intended paradigms of ‘Evolution’ and ‘Revolution’. The Councillor’s strategy proceeds by extending Razumov’s own metonymical chain from ‘the essay’ through ‘the prize’ to a touch by the father’s “white shapely hand” (9). All Mikulin has to do is

93 Andrew Long, “The Secret Policeman’s Couch,” 500.

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arrange for the paternal “soft grey whiskers” (227) to function as the next link in this chain of contiguous stand-ins for the absent referent of fatherhood and social integration. This deployment – and immediate withdrawal – of Razumov’s own, imagined process of social integration makes it possible to ensure voluntary self-inscription into the absent regime: “Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command” (26). The politicisation of the personal which enables such “solid grasp” leads to Mikulin conceiving of his patient/subject as a “tool so much finer than the common base instruments” (226). This formulation marks the final reversal of Razumov’s attempt of reconstituting a normative state. Previously, after all, the protagonist indulged in an internal monologue, assuring himself that “[t]he form of government is the shape of a tool” (26) and that “absolute power should be preserved–the tool ready for the man” (26). As against this assertion of loyalty to a future cohesion, the novel shows that in the state of exception power does not compel loyalty at all. A display of allegiance would evoke a complementary notion of disloyalty and, hence, precisely the type of political antagonism dissipated by the regime. The potential convertibility to the status of a tool for the utility of perpetually absent state entities, however, includes Mikulin rather than merely being applied by him. The reduction of the Councillor to “something very much like a common convict” resembles Razumov’s own status after the rescinding of bios, which leaves him “a corpse obeying the summons of judgement” (223). It is only fitting for this imagery of undead political actors that the nature of this judgment is never explicitly stated, just as Mikulin’s sentencing and further fate remain irrecoverable for the narrator. What we can reconstruct, however, is the operation of an authority for which “there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men.”94 As a result of a state “no longer capable of taking on historical tasks, [. . .] peoples themselves were bound to disappear,”95 as Agamben puts it in The Open. In the absence of a task or essence capable of hiding a fundamental human ‘inoperativity’, then, Conrad’s Russia provides a literalisation of such a disappearance of ‘peoples’. Capable of ‘making disappear’, the nation state – the paradigm of Russia, but also statism more generally – can only ensure its continuing self-reproduction by reference to life and its absence. The only remaining ‘historical task’ it assigns to subjects is a necropolitical one: to vanish, to become like a corpse, with death itself becoming uncertain in this uncertain simile.

94 Agamben, The Open, 76. 95 Agamben, The Open, 76.

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The brief enumeration of the few known facts about Mikulin’s downfall also indicates – in a similar manner to the reversals performed by “Autocracy and War” – that the state of exception does not obtain for a specific, topographically limited regime, but is evoked as a more general statist principle. The concept of a potential power fully determining its subjects cannot be written off as radical aberrance in the manner of Casamassima. Nor can the state of exception be consigned to a reconstituted Russian alterity: after all, there is no one bearer of Russophobic Otherness on the model of the ambassador in The Secret Agent. Instead, attenuated versions of the state of exception recur in the Genevan space in which the narrator assembles the story. The teacher of languages, instead of maintaining the perpetually repeated difference of Russia, has to concede that “the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well” (225). Under Western Eyes, thus, traces the loss of a distinction, in the course of which not only do national heterostereotypes falter, but, what is more, any self-ascribed political identity becomes relegated to a “zone of indistinction”96 in which the status of ‘citizen’ can no longer be ascertained. Instead, the state has ‘friends and servants’, social roles articulable as such only as they are placed under erasure. The liberal West, then, has little to offer as a counter to the suspension of political life in the purportedly incomprehensible autocratic East. Indeed, increasingly the teacher of languages loses track of the determination of alterity that previously allowed for a notion of the unique opacity “of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic” (279). Instead, neither side retains a model of political demarcation: whereas in the Russian context, the state of exception is presented as a residually eventful breach of the expectation of authoritative order, however, the Swiss “divine democracy” (225) is characterised by the absence of alterity from the outset. As a “drab and pedestrian depiction of political stability,”97 Swiss society has levelled any sense of political antagonism. There is a return of this repressed Otherness on the inside, in the form of the Gothic dilapidation of Château Borel, “embowered in the trees and thickets of its neglected gounds” (105).98 As opposed to the re-entry of the radical sphere into culture through Hyacinth’s narration in Casamassima, or the exhibition of manageable anarchism in the salon of The Secret Agent, the radical Gothic, however, remains unobserved by the Genevans, a ‘neglected’ parallel world 96 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 149. 97 Schwarz, Conrad, 208. 98 These Gothic resonances are traced by Daniel Darvay. Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 85.

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not utilised for the re-drawing of political boundaries. Although it is not as readily connected to genocidal exploitation as Brussels in Heart of Darkness, Geneva’s well-managed placidity, then, likewise serves as an attempt to obscure the very possibility of political difference. If Russia is the space of enforced, bare life, the West emerges as deprived of appreciable political identity in the first place. Its bourgeois self-sufficiency leaves little explicit tenets to either affirm or disavow. As a consequence, structures of exploitation proceed freely within this space, in which, particularly, Peter Ivanovitch’s feminist rhetoric hides the systematic exploitation of his assistant, Tekla. Although the other anarchists offer alternatives to his domineering hypocrisy, in Geneva his mode of oppression unfolds without impediment. Its owners absent and its grounds untended, the Château serves as the scene for political conflicts that feature Geneva as a mere background. For all the disparity between the “respectability of Geneva and the fervid hopes and conspiracies of the Russian exiles,”99 then, the city is another in a long line of empty media begun by the “uniform whiteness” (25) of the imagined nation and the blank paper ‘lying uppermost’ in Razumov’s study: “The whole view, with the harbour jetties of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering quality of a very fresh oleograph.” (149) The oleograph – i.e. imitation oil painting – stands for a culture reproducing itself. The city is a repetition of the ever-same, unalleviated by any indication of what it is not. It is this absence of negation that makes it appear as “the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture” (150). This account of the bourgeois status quo,100 hovering uncertainly between Razumov’s diary entries and the Teacher’s mediation, anticipates the critique of the culture industry by Adorno and Horkheimer: “no limits are set to cultural progress. But the tendency is immanent in the principle of entertainment itself, as a principle of bourgeois enlightenment. If the need for entertainment was largely created by industry, which recommended the work to the masses through its subject matter, the oleograph through the delicate morsel it portrayed, [. . .] has always borne the

99 Carabine, The Life and the Art, 7. 100 In this, the novel enacts what Watts attributes to Conrad: “contempt for the bourgeoisie.” What is more, since alternative ethics have become anachronistic, he shows “intermittent complicities with those who attacked the bourgeoisie from a socialistic standpoint.” Cedric Watts. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextal Discussion. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. 4.

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trace of commercial brashness.”101 In our case, the profitable picturesque of the Genevan scene, like the ‘portrayal’ of the oleograph, is glibly self-referential, reproducing a ‘morsel’ that is pre-selected by a purported original. Its contrast between ‘white stone’ and ‘dark front’ fails to yield oppositional semantic spaces, nor do the differential sides cohere into ‘character’ (149) at all. Quite literally, then, as a medium the scene and the city fail to express anything beyond resemblance to an absent original — nor can the “promontories of no particular character” (149) restore the inscription of determinate identity effaced as Razumov’s “writing lost its character altogether” (49). The well-honed perfection of a “fate [. . .] made secure from the cradle to the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions” (129), thus, is removed from any restorative ideology of order as envisaged in “Autocracy and War.” The democratic lack of differentiation means that it cannot refer to anything outside itself; without alterity, however, as the speaking tubes in the Assistant Commisisioner’s office in The Secret Agent have shown, institutional self-reproduction cannot be taken to refer to anything except its own previous iterations. As far removed from post-foundationalist ‘grounding acts’, as possible,102 then, the Genevan model of history is circular. It features no fictions of order and anarchy to simulate the illusion of antagonism which the novel posits as central for the formation of political identity. This differs from the autocratic “relation of ban (or abandonment) with itself in order to realize itself as absolute actuality (which thus presupposes nothing other than its own potentiality)”103 in degree rather than kind. In Geneva, there is nothing to be abandoned in the first place, since the city and its politics prescribe nothing. The ‘Western’ space emerges, in the terms of “Autocracy and War,” as a Néant (95) in its own right, replacing contingent foundations with oleographic reproduction. This “very perfection of mediocrity attained at last” (150) is narratively reproduced by the deferred clarification that Razumov is a tsarist spy: while readers appreciate the ironies of Haldin’s murderer rising in the anarchist ranks, we remain ignorant of Razumov’s specific situation until a final, analeptic resolution. Rather than the forcible removal of demarcations in the first part of the novel, then, Geneva is the space of occluded political contestation from the outset. This also means that no transgressive events register as deviations from norms. If the autocratic performance of bare life has brought to the fore

101 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Malden, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell, 2006. 41–72. 56. 102 Cf. Marchart. Post-Foundational, 8. 103 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47.

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the potential suspension of laws, thus, in Geneva it is not certain which laws are in place; functioning as it does with orderly self-sufficiency, no breach disturbs its indifference. Though the exceptional Russian state divests its subjects of political life, in the ‘West’ such foundations are indiscernible from the outset. Despite their differences, the establishment of contingent political alterity is precluded in the ‘autocratic’ East and the ‘democratic’ West alike. 5.1.2.3 The Literary State of Exception For all its imagery of ‘bare life’, the “corpse obeying the summons” (223) does not serve as a mere illustration of the theory of the state of exception. By presenting and evaluating the incursion of post-binary political power, the literary text, instead, functions as a negotiation of this concept in its own right. The emplotment of the movement from the assumption of a stable, hierarchically ordained social sphere to a zone of indistinction offers an extended political model specific to narrative. Particularly, both stages of the transfer from the expectation of patrilinear integration to receding autocratic regulation are correlated with distinct modes of narration, primarily centred on the question what constitutes a political event in the first place. The correlation of a model of identity with tellability (and the state of exception with a breakdown of eventfulness), then, provides formal equivalents to political models rather than merely including ‘politics’ as subject matter. The literary text, rather than offering exemplary instances of Agamben’s model, constitutes a presentation, negotiation, and evaluation of the state of exception, which brings to the fore features not reducible to the conceptual terms of its philosophical formulation. Firstly, the narrative treatment of politics after alterity differs from its philosophical formulation by its possibility of representing strategies of disavowal. After all, for a good part of Under Western Eyes, the Teacher of Languages holds on to the assumption that Russian alterity can be observed and expressed in a hermeneutically secure manner, an assurance that recalls the initial certainty of Russian Otherness evoked in “Autocracy and War.” According to such a view, the ‘East’ may produce structures of lawlessness, but a ‘Western’ observer can ultimately find appropriate means of describing these states which, by extension, do not include that same observer. However, from the outset the speaker of the essay engages in a process of “stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless” (83), describing journalistic accounts as “reflection seen in the perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence, through the veil of inadequate words” (83). By contrast, the narrator of Under Western Eyes, despite his lengthy asides regarding the uncertainties of language, continues to interpret these “inadequate words” from his extradiegetic vantage point.

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When Razumov – the primary specimen in the narrator’s attempts to arrive at sweeping generalisations about Russian Otherness – confronts him with the question “[h]ow can you tell truth from lies?”, the Teacher affirms his trust in contextual clues guiding his interpretative process: “‘Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration of the motive, and so on’” (139). In this passage, the narrator certainly does display a position which Greaney convincingly identifies as “rational scepticism.”104 At the same time, however, the assertion that “[o]ne way of reading Under Western Eyes is as a book-length attempt to adjudicate this debate between the teacher’s gentle scepticism and Razumov’s incipient paranoia”105 runs the risk of reproducing the teacher’s own certainties, his assurances that while he may not be able to understand the mysteries of the “Russian soul” (16), there is such a thing as a Russian soul in the first place, prior to its evocation as a convenient marker of alterity. Such a position, with all of its associated advantages of binary order, recalls the oppositional terms of the manifesto that Razumov pins to his wall: it ensures a clear divide between the understandable and the mysterious, the rational and the irrational. In the same way that Razumov’s attempt to define his certainty against revolutionary agitation falters, however, the Teacher’s position of English scepticism is likewise destabilised, not least by the object of his observation returning his gaze: “Slowly his sudden eyes moved in my direction. ‘How did this old man come here?’ he muttered, astounded.” (261) The nigh-metaleptical reversal undercuts the narrator’s ‘gentle scepticism’, folding it back into the diegesis, where it appears as an intrusive imposition of ill-fitting certainties onto another’s situation. In the course of Under Western Eyes, the possibility of establishing a defined alterity of Russia is replaced with increasingly repetitive assurances of the impossibility of even beginning an interpretive process when it comes to the East. The autocratic state of exception, for one, resists the narrative reduction which the narrator (and fictional editor) attempts to impose upon it, leading to Razumov’s protestation: “I am not a young man in a novel” (98). The conditions of rule besetting the protagonist cannot be described by the Teacher any more than they are explicitly declared by Mikulin or any other representative of this mode of power in the novel. The state of exception not only recedes from perception in the diegesis but also becomes withdrawn from its narratorial abjection as the result of a specifically Russian temperament. As opposed to Agamben’s concept of exception as a hidden deep-structure of sovereignty, the novel increasingly withholds analytical

104 Greaney, Conrad, Language, and Narrative, 154. 105 Greaney, Conrad, Language, and Narrative, 154.

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distance from which to ascertain surface and depth. The perspectival security of the philosophical concept is, thus, complicated by the uncertain status of the homodiegetic narrator in this narrative equivalent to the state of exception. Rather than a privileged exegete of unthinkable autocracy, the Teacher’s development in the course of the novel restages the increasingly fraught differentiations between West and East in “Autocracy and War,” at the end of which no state form offers foundational certainty. As a result, the narrator’s attitude should not be rendered unduly stable. His own assertions of a homogenous distinction between a cynical East beyond understanding and a sceptical Western perspective, after all, are formulated from the vantage point of the semantic paucity of Geneva — which includes within itself spatial models of impossible distinction to rival the ones besetting Razumov during his Russian ordeal. Secondly, Conrad’s literary model adds performativity to the certainties of Agamben’s account. Laclau’s criticism of Agamben has already indicated the degree to which the model of the state of exception – including the camp as the nomos of the modern106 – can itself appear as an example of all-too-broad universality. The sheer dispersal of the reduction to bare life across several protagonists in Under Western Eyes supports Laclau’s critique of the concept of exception: “it is a non-sequitur to assume that such a control has to crystallise around a tendentially totalitarian instance.”107 The proliferation of de-politicised, ‘excepted’ life – as a self-imposition by the subject as well as a re-formulation by the revolutionaries – denies a recoverable sovereign agent of exception. Determining a “place of power”108 is further hampered by the novel’s refusal to connect the state of exception to any decisive, recoverable starting point. Although Agamben also qualifies the notion that a state of exception would be declared, on occasion his texts present the suspension of extant legal protections as an explicit, performative speech act: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law.”109 The exception as an exclusion which retains a relation to a suspended law is pithily summarised by this formulation. However, the form of declaration reintroduces confidence in the possibility of describing the paradoxical status of sovereignty as a transhistorical constant. It is an explicit, sovereign ‘pronouncement’, however, which is at issue in Under Western Eyes. After all, Razumov attempts to arrive at just such an unequivocal statement in order to induce the disclosure of a sovereign figure — only to be met with extended silences, gaps, and oblique signs of an absent paternal figure.

106 107 108 109

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166. Laclau, “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy,” 18. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 2. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15.

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Rather than a normative framework being suspended, then, the novel presents the incursion of exceptional power in the political life of a figure who, as he tells Haldin in a futile attempt to justify his actions, never experienced such norms outside of his own, threadbare state ideology: “I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your future?” (45) Under these conditions, a sovereign declaration that ‘there is nothing outside the law’ would offer precisely the assurance of foundational norms that he seeks. Even the explicit dissolution of norms would serve as an assurance that a ‘domestic tradition’ had, previous to that performative, been in place, and that Razumov’s inclusion or exclusion proceed as eventful changes of state. In the absence of such sovereign authority, exceptional power is co-constructed by the protagonist to the same degree as the ‘national past’ (“all this land is mine—or I have nothing” 45) he attempted to make his own before. It is, hence, precisely what Laclau criticises about the model of the state of exception, namely “the myth of the fully reconciled society [which] governs the (non-)political discourse of Agamben”110 which Under Western Eyes dramatises as a compelling myth. In the novel, the myth of integration into a homogenous social structure functions as the primary means of compelling acquiescence by causing the subject to desire a communal identity. As a result of this anticipated sense of belonging, Conrad’s narrated state of exception prompts a confessional impulse – “Go back! What for? Confess! To what?” (219) – which (until the final chapter) never elicits an actual confession. Rather, as we learn analeptically, Razumov is given the impression that there is nothing to disclose in the first place. After all, he is already addressing the Councillor with “the greatest openness” (219). Thus, [a]ccording to Agamben, [e]very attempt to rethink the political space [. . .] must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoē and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city.111

Contrary to this assertion that “we,” as Agamben’s contemporaries, no longer know of a possibility of differentiation beyond the “threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life,”112 Conrad’s evocation of states of exception does allow for such distinctions at the beginning of

110 Laclau, “Bare Life,” 22. 111 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 187. 112 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 187.

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the novel. At the very least, Razumov’s imagined differentiation between his private ambition and politics ‘out there’ is made plausible at length. It is because he holds on to this distinction that the protagonist attempts to maintain zoē and bios as distinct categories and, to that end, defines Haldin’s intrusion as a mere exception to a regular course of events. While Agamben identifies bare life (and its exemplary manifestation in the figure of the homo sacer), Conrad’s narrative stages the desire for sovereign injunctions that, upon their strategic withdrawal, prompt a process of ‘baring’ life. In this, the novel presents the perspective of a figure ‘excepted’ from the law, one who is both subjected to the state of exception and co-creates it at the same time. A third literary inflection of Agamben’s postulates is constituted by the novel’s perspectival specificity. Rather than one, monolithic exception, the novel diffracts both the intradiegetic realisation and the reader’s understanding of the removal of “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group.”113 In this, Under Western Eyes is no more optimistic about straightforwardly opposing the receding regime of power than Agamben’s Homo Sacer or State of Exception. After all, neither Razumov’s final, quasi-suicidal confession nor the questionable exile under the care of Tekla qualify as alternatives to the state of exception. What the novel does allow for, however, is a staging of a specifically political permutation of “delayed decoding,” which, according to Watt, serves “to put the reader in the position of being an immediate witness of each step in the process whereby the semantic gap between the sensations aroused in the individual by an object or event, and their actual cause or meaning, is slowly closed in [. . .] consciousness.”114 In Under Western Eyes, these steps of ‘closing the gap’ are presented when Razumov realises that not only has he been divested of his political identity but, more importantly, that his identity never had any essentialist validity in the first place. Structurall, this redoubled realisation is produced by the temporal structure of the novel. Razumov’s actions in Geneva are narrated before the chronologically prior interview with Mikulin. That is, the entire mission is described before the reader – who is not explicitly made aware of Razumov’s status as an “agent for ‘European supervision’” (227) – is made privy to his mission statement. It is only after the extended analepsis has described the manipulation of Razumov during the second interview in the oculist’s office that a whole host of seemingly contingent details – not least his involuntary bodily convulsions or the ‘mocking’ repetition of revolutionary phrases – becomes explicable. Thus, Razumov’s waning belief in a normative state is structurally reproduced by the

113 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1. 114 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 270.

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reader’s delayed realisation that the entire episode in Geneva has already constituted an enactment of a state of exception. Such “retroactivity of a gesture which (re)constitutes this past itself”115 is literalised as the reader is forced to reconsider Razumov’s behaviour. The nonchronological arrangement of the plot, thus, renders unstable a position of observation that is taken for granted in Agamben’s model, with its assured synthesis of obscure historical sources and philological marginalia into a clearly delineated deep-structure of increasing power over a category of ‘life’. In the novel, delayed realization first within the diegesis and, in a second step, on the level of narrative transmission stages the struggle of representing the state of exception which, after all, is defined by the absence of an explicit declaration. What the novel represents can, with Žižek, be described as the “reversal of contingency into necessity,” whereby a “contingent process takes on the appearance of necessity: things retroactively ‘will have been’ necessary.”116 The reader is confronted with the retrospective realisation that the protagonist had already been divested of political life at a point at which he plausibly could be assumed to act as a recalcitrant convert to the anarchist cause. This reversal of contingency into enforced necessity offers a formal correlate to the suspension of political life: retrospectively, political action is shown to always already have been impossible in the first place. Razumov’s behaviour must be entirely reinterpreted in the wake of the realization that his behaviour, down to the way he increasingly loses control over his body, is already the result of a forcible stripping away of political identity. “Life is a public thing” (40) — and, we realise, has been a public thing all along. Thus, as opposed to the philosophical concept of the state of exception, Conrad’s literary politics (on the level of histoire) trace the production of empty mediality, constitutive gaps, and modes of enforcing self-inscription; on the level of discours, meanwhile, their effects on the protagonist are structurally reproduced as a political iteration of delayed decoding. In this regard, Under Western Eyes can be read as “a philosophy with historical awareness and a detailed narrative dimension”117 in its own right. The difference between the state of exception in Under Western Eyes and its philosophical formulation, then, is not only constituted by the specific context of statehood and sovereignty obtaining at the beginning of the 20th century. The more significant dissimilarity

115 Slavoj Žižek. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London and New York: Verso, 2012. 214. 116 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 213. 117 Jill Larson. Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 4.

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emerges in relation to the novel’s temporal organisation and perspectival refraction, which multiply the range of reactions to the state of exception and emphasise the enforced co-creation by its sufferers. Reading political theory through the lens of political fiction, thus, avoids positing the state of exception as a pre-discursive deep structure epiphenomenally manifesting itself in literature. Against any treatment of the concept as “secret essence, the ‘hidden structure’ of power”118 (in Christos Boukalas’ critical terms), the novel posits a number of centres of consciousness perceiving the separation of life itself from bios, the form of life. These, in turn, are nested, with no definitive possibility of separating, most notably, the Teacher and the object of his narrative, Razumov. It is this entangled perspective which, in addition to the novel’s concrete historical and social contexts, adds specifically literary, formal complements to an exception-based mode of rule. As a result, Under Western Eyes presents the state of exception as the result of contingent political practice and concrete social circumstances rather than a transhistorical political ontology. Instead of, then, supporting a “primordial, a-historical mystification”119 of bare life, the novel shows that the withdrawal of normative order functions only because concrete assumptions of decisive sovereignty are taken for granted; these prospects, in turn, are tied to individual and collective political identities and the material conditions on which they depend. For instance, as we have seen, Razumov’s imagined messianic future is set up so as to avoid Haldin’s mysticism and the reality of the Russian populace alike. It is the respective, particular expectation of an ordering, sovereign instance that leads to “an increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order,”120 which only becomes more pronounced the more validation by a hierarchical, political order is deferred. In stressing the degree to which the attempt to regain a demarcation of identity and alterity influences the suspension of that same demarcation, Under Western Eyes bears out an aside in Agamben’s genealogy of the state of exception. The discussion of the history of the concept is at pains to do away with any linear event structure according to which – as Schmitt still asserts – the

118 Christos Boukalas charges Agamben with the theorisation of “pseudo-entities, and their interrelation in ‘normal’ or ‘exceptional’ modes. [. . .] In trying to uproot the liberal mystification of a rule of law situated outside and against state power, Agamben replaces (or couples) it with a primordial, a-historical mystification: the exception as the secret essence, ‘the hidden structure’, of power.” Christos Boukalas. Homeland Security, its Laws and its State: A Design of Power for the 21st Century. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 98. 119 Boukalas, Homeland Security, 98. 120 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 121.

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law is temporarily suspended to allow for its continued validity.121 In contrast to such re-grounding of the law, the state of exception as per Agamben (who follows Walter Benjamin in this) is a “space devoid of law,”122 to which the law nonetheless retains a connection by allowing both for its own suspension and its application to a life denuded of legal protection. Despite this insistence on the void at the heart of the legal order, which renders it an unrepresentable, “unthinkable thing,” Agamben also, however, points out the importance of the respective “fictions through which law attempts to encompass its own absence and to appropriate the state of exception, or at least to assure itself a relation with it.”123 Political novels present and evaluate precisely these fictions. In other words, by tracing the development of perpetually renewed ‘fictions encompassing the absence of law’, Under Western Eyes can contrast the respective “function they perform in the law’s long battle over anomie.”124 This is a diffracted, halting process that fails to yield a justificatory grand narrative. Thus, Razumov constructs an ideologial rationalisation of his assault on the unconscious coachman Ziemianitch and mounts a defence of eradicating the “contagious pestilence” (27) of revolution. Just as a quintessential image of life stripped of attributes appears to be at hand to encompass the void posed by his violence, however, the ‘unthinkable thing’ returns as a vision: Suddenly on the snow, stretched on his back right across his path, he saw Haldin, solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands over his eyes, clad in a brown close-fitting coat and long boots. He was lying out of the way a little, as though he had selected that place on purpose. The snow round him was untrodden. (27)

The symbolic fictions justifying the violent suspension of norms are interrupted by this spectral figure of unrepresentable, bare life. As a result, Razumov’s attempt to ‘retroject’ reasons into his unsymbolisable violence breaks down. By confronting this justification with a spectral reminder of bare life, the novel stages the surreptitious connection between normative fictions and the state of exception that takes their place. Razumov’s unsanctioned violence paves the way for the state killing of Haldin. Furthermore, rather than propelling the protagonist into patriarchal acceptance as a reward, his betrayal discloses the absence of a normative framework to be affirmed or redacted in the first place. It

121 Schmitt, Political Theology, 6. “Because a general norm, as represented by an ordinary legal prescription, can never encompass a total exception, the decision that a real exception exists cannot therefore be entirely derived from this norm.” 122 Agamben, State of Exception, 50. 123 Agamben, State of Exception, 51. 124 Agamben, State of Exception, 51.

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is under these conditions that Haldin’s spectral bare life appears as an unsymbolisable breach in the fictions of necessary exception formulated by Razumov. Reading Agamben’s model with Conrad should, thus, caution against deciding the ‘gigantomachy concerning a void’, as State of Exception names the (implicit) debate on the status of constituent power in Schmitt and Benjamin, all-too unanimously in favour of the latter. The novel does bear out the notion that, as Benjamin’s tenth ‘Thesis on History’ would have it, “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”125 However, Under Western Eyes simultaneously traces the abiding attempts by those subjected to the exception to imagine a decision in the vein of Schmitt’s sovereign figure guaranteeing the law. Such an authoritative imaginary allows Razumov to envision himself as someone who (at least by proxy, standing in for absent sovereign figures) “within the political order was invested with certain powers.”126 The contours of the state of exception are inflected by this expectation of a hierarchical frame, so that the appearance of Haldin as a figure of bare life – “solid, distinct, real” (27) as it is – appears as the spectral excess of an imagined body politic, in which “he” (Haldin) “is the withered member which must be cut off” (27). In an instance of what Miéville calls a “politics of sensory perception,” it is the very tangibility of the body interrupting Razumov’s “unbroken track of footsteps” (28) that abandons him to the status of bare life: an early modernist “haptos, with little to do with human somaticism, and everything to do with the horror of matter.”127 Haldin has a “solidity of aspect” (27) that makes it impossible to consign him to death, let alone to the part-whole relationship of the body politic from which he is to be excised in Razumov’s vision of authoritative justification. It is little wonder, then, that the protagonist concludes that “[t]here are phantoms of the living as well as of the dead” (165). At the very moment at which a transition from the pathological to the normal is imagined – the social body cured – the apparition of Haldin cuts through this linear development, presenting a body “[e]xactly as if alive! Seemed to breathe!” (28). Thus, the body of the Conradian homo sacer appears as a tangible concretisation of the very terms of the body politic and the decisionist sovereignty tasked with maintaining its coherence.128 Through a Conradian lens, the “zone of indiscernability between nomos and physis, in which the State tie, having the

125 Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1973. 253–264. 257. 126 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 12. 127 China Miéville. “M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire. Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?” Collapse IV (2008). 105–128. 120. 128 Regarding ‘decisionism’, cf. Hayden, Political Evil, 68.

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form of a ban, is always already also non-State and pseudo-nature,”129 has to be supplemented: in the novel, the state of nature produced by the selfsuspension of political order presents itself in the very terms of that same social order. The suspension of laws hinges not only on the withdrawal of legal principles, but to a greater extent on an anticipated sovereignty-to-come. It is this very expectation of reconstituted certainty that prefigures the appearance of the element it cannot encompass. The desire for an authoritative injunction produces its own, specific anomie. Razumov, then, is not only subjected to a dismantling of identity and alterity but also imposes a status of bare life on others: an implication in the production of bare life that is the fourth specific emphasis in the narrative’s negotiation of states of exception. That is, Conrad’s autocracy “does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body.”130 While the novel indicates the degree to which any political identity can be stripped away, this process is shown to rely on the reproduction of sovereign violence by the individual. If the “body is always already caught in a deployment of power,” the Conradian version of this “indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life,”131 to a greater extent than in Homo Sacer, emerges as the result of a complicity of political subjects who reproduce the logic of sovereignty. This is not only the case in the attempts to stabilise a nationalist epiphany of Russia by means of which Razumov adduces political grounds to his betrayal, but also in his interactions with the representative of state power. The protagonist becomes an informer in part because Mikulin, occupying a “position not obscure, not occult, but simply inconspicuous” (224), is invested with the possibility of restricting the significance of the betrayed revolutionary: “Whatever troubling power he exercised in all the other places of the earth, Razumov knew very well that at this oculist’s address he would merely be the hanged murderer of Mr. de P— and nothing more. For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of life imparted to them by the living.” (224) The state representative is assumed to be capable of depoliticising the revolutionary, with ‘murder’ offering a minimal event structure. At the same time, the tangible spectre of Haldin is divested of its life-in-death; the sovereign reduction of complexity is expected to exorcise the undead remainder. The Councillor’s version of Haldin’s transgression is a “sort of shelter” (224). This is a last vestige of authority just before the paradigm of bare life

129 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109. 130 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 124. This is, specifically, Agamben’s account of the state of exception under democracy. 131 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 187.

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encompasses Mikulin and Razumov as well. It is, then, through the promise of relegating the political dissident to irrational, violent alterity that the very possibility of alterity is, subsequently, revoked. What implicates Razumov in bare life is the promise that the “Haldin adventure” (224) will be assigned narrative form: an adventure, after all, is not least determined by the possibility of a return to the sphere of origin.132 This expectation of an adventure plot is dispelled once Razumov embarks on his mission: “Zürich, Geneva – still a dream, minutely followed, wearing one into harsh laughter, to fury, to death – with the fear of awakening at the end . . . ” (232) Instead of the “exact intensity and quality of life” (224) that is to be associated with the dead, life and death are re-distributed in ambivalent terms. Rather than adhering to a course of action “on foreseen lines, inexorably logical” (232), Haldin refuses to be consigned to death as Razumov’s undercover mission begins. Instead, the revolutionary’s post-mortem state becomes a perpetual object of debate: with Natalya, for whom death is “not as shameful a thing like some kinds of life” (191), and with Haldin’s mother, who “seemed to think that her son was living” (148). What is more, the anarchist sphere, in turn, is shown to evade determinations of life and death, with the patroness of the radical scene “like a galvanized corpse out of some Hoffman’s Tale” (159). That is, the very expectation of a differentiation of life and death not only reanimates the figure to be consigned to death, but also, despite Razumov’s insistence that he “can’t speak for the dead” (192), requires him to do just that: he has to associate himself with Haldin’s actions in order to infiltrate the revolutionary sphere of the “dead-faced, glassy-eyed Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch” (119). The uncertainty of the living and the dead proliferates, exceeding the assurances momentarily glimpsed during the interview with the Councillor. “Being-outside, and yet belonging,” which, according to Agamben, forms “the topological structure of the state of exception,”133 becomes the condition of Razumov’s entire mission. As a result, his every statement is designed to indicate his revolutionary commitment at the same time as it takes on a second meaning regarding his true convictions — and a tertiary dimension indicating the perpetual absence of the expected “shelter” consisting of the demarcation between the first two meanings. As shown above, Razumov attempts to avoid “that degrading method of direct lying which at times he found it almost impossible to practice” (206). Instead, among the anarchists, he makes statements

132 Joseph A. Kestner. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 15. 133 Agamben, State of Exception, 35.

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that offer tacit justifications of his betrayal while, at the same time, being grafted onto the radical context in which they bolster his cover identity. Thus, after assuring the one authentic revolutionary figure in the novel, Sofia Antonovna, that he “can’t speak for the dead,” Razumov adds: “As for myself, I can assure you that my conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of—well—retributive justice.” (192) ‘Retributive justice’ is not only a description of Haldin’s motivation and a tacit legitimisation of Razumov’s betrayal, but also stands in for the “shelter” in which the execution is ‘justified’ by its allocation of the status of “murderer” (224). Thus, not only is Razumov thrust into a “zone of anomie, in which a violence without any juridical form acts” but, what is more, he is himself called upon “to annex anomie through the state of exception.”134 As an informer, the character is shown to co-create a position in which his every sentence displays multiple, potential meanings which, in addition, take up and ambiguate the terms of the fantasy of authoritatively ordained distinctions of murder and “retributive justice” as well as death and life.135 The paradigm of the informer in Under Western Eyes, thus, decenters the model of the state of exception. Razumov has previously already been presented as a figure attempting to violently reduce others to a bare, featureless life. After all, his act of violence against “that brute” (22) Ziemianitch is perpetrated specifically to dispose of the political life which Haldin’s mystical nationalism accords to the nation. As against this ‘inarticulate’ attempt to reduce a class-based figure of alterity to an equally inarticulate status of a “vile beast” (22), the reduction of Razumov himself to bare life is presented as markedly articulate. He takes up the terms of an (illusory) model of demarcation promised by the state representative and adapts them to his position as informer, thereby rescinding their reference to a clearly demarcated figure of Otherness. Instead of reasserting the “shelter” of a distinction of self and Other, his every speech inculcates the impossibility of drawing a difference of this kind. With the quotation of ‘retributive justice’, the character is shown to suspend its validity and undermine his own claim to a political identity. As opposed to an imposition from above, the literary state of exception, thus, foregrounds its reliance on the very terms of lawful order, which are perpetually brought up at the same time

134 Agamben, State of Exception, 35. 135 Cf. Long, “The Secret Policeman’s Couch,” 490–509. Long argues that “Conrad is interested in the informer as a modern political type,” with informing presented as “constitutive of modern subjectivity.”(490–491). Informing provides the model for “the complex of psychological and ideological determinations that induce people to answer the call of the state without direct solicitation.” (491)

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as their validity is ‘deactivated’.136 The “threshold in which law and life, outside and inside, become indistinguishable”137 becomes a matter of a micro-politics, of speech re-produced moment-by-moment. Razumov’s performance as a revolutionary keeps “so close to the truth, departing from it so far in the verisimilitude of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion of the invincible nature of human error, a glimpse into the utmost depths of self-deception” (208). Consequently, the protagonist is involved in a constant process of dismantling any stable political identity, including his own. If “the structure of the sovereign ban” is “that of a law that is in force but does not signify,”138 Under Western Eyes presents the language of the informer as its formal complement, perpetually evoking certainties of a ‘retributive justice’ while multiplying the potential signified to which it could be applied. The narrative enactment of the state of exception as (1) disavowal, (2) performance, (3) perspectival inflection, and (4) implication shows that, regarding contemporary political theory, the literary model can ‘write back’. Rather than simply illustrating the state of exception, the novel can, thus, be said to further the concept. Specifically, it presents the influence of the respective expectation of political order on the specific characteristics of the state of exception. This adds a veritable phenomenology of bare life, in which, as Haldin’s phantom shows, it appears as the manifestation of the breakdown of fictions of justification. The absence of the anticipated form of sovereign decisionism becomes a spectral presence in its own right. What is more, Under Western Eyes intimately involves its protagonist in the suspension of political demarcation, thus presenting the state of exception as a matter of collaboration. The “violent aspect of being stripped of all protections and abandoned to the force of law whose positive content has been suspended”139 is imposed on political subjects whose attempts to regain political identity create the conditions for the subjection of others to the same procedure. This interdependence of authorities and their targets complicates the status of a literary character as a stand-in for political models. This difficulty, however, is entirely in keeping with the method underlying the project of the Homo Sacer series. After all, Agamben’s own exemplary method has drawn criticism, especially his use of specific historical examples as indications of large-scale

136 To use Agamben’s term from his translation of Paul’s term katargeō, which expresses the “effect of the messianic on works of law” (96): “I make inoperative, I deactivate, I suspend the efficiency.” (95) Agamben, The Time That Remains, 95–96. 137 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 28. 138 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 51. 139 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 102.

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permutations of law and sovereignty.140 However, just as the literary protagonist is shown to be entangled with the state of exception, contributing to it whilst being subjected to it, Agamben’s own methodological concerns prohibit elevation of any single one of his paradigms to the status of an ultimate correlative to the state of exception: Paradigms obey not the logic of the metaphorical transfer of meaning but the analogical logic of the example. [. . .] [M]ore akin to allegory than to metaphor, the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes. That is to say, to give an example is a complex act which supposes that the term functioning as a paradigm is deactivated from its normal use [. . .], to present the canon – the rule – of that use, which cannot be shown in any other way.141

That is, the individual instances of the state of exception – homo sacer, bare life, the camp, etc. – foreground that they stand for a certain set of structurally similar manifestations of the state of exception. In being put forward as examples, however, their normal, denotative functioning is also deactivated: “The example is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it.”142 Although it is no longer part of the set from which it is dislodged as an exemplary element, the paradigm at the same time presents the characteristics of that very set. In this way, the example functions similarly to the exception: “While the example is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it.”143 This ‘paradigmatic’ method, thus, furnishes formal equivalents to the state of exception rather than simply expounding on the structural features of the conceptual edifice. Agamben’s philosophical project revolves around a position of indistinction, in which erstwhile political subjects are precluded from ascertaining whether a set of norms is in force or not. The structural correlative within his very method is a paradigm which both functions as a manifestation of the state of exception, yet is also positioned as excluded from it by sheer dint of its specificity as a historical, contextual instance.144

140 Cf. Jef Huysmans. “The Jargon of Exception: On Schmitt, Agamben, and the Absence of Political Society.” International Political Sociology 2 (2008). 165–183. 177. 141 Giorgio Agamben. The Signatiure of All Things: On Method. Trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone, 2009. 18. 142 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22. 143 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22. 144 As Watkin puts it, this method is not a misuse of historical sources (as per a recurring criticism especially of the paradigm of the camp) but rather a “fundamental reconsideration of what

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A similar effort to present formal correlatives to the state of exception is achieved by their narrative presentation in Under Western Eyes. This finally brings us back to the Teacher of Languages and his attempts to communicate his theories about the status of the protagonist – which are otherwise mostly confined to extradiegetic editorialising – within the narrated world. In response to the narrator’s commonplaces regarding Razumov’s relationship with Natalya, the protagonist denies his very status as a literary figure: “I really don’t care what you think of them. I—I am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a novel.” (137) While the narrator attempts to cast him as a typical Russian figure and to associate him with a romance plot, the protagonist contests his own legibility in conventional, generic terms. In addition to repudiating the narrator’s concrete appraisal of the situation, this charge is also directed against the entire narrating, editorial iteration of the Teacher of Languages, who is shown to have assembled Razumov’s scattered notes and assembled them into a novel. As Armstrong puts it, we “recognize him in a role, that of a character in a novel, which he explicitly repudiates – even as he does so as a character in a novel.”145 In Agamben’s terms, Razumov as a literary figure “is deactivated from its normal use,”146 since he both protests against the interpretative templates that the narrator imposes on him, yet in doing so only exposes himself all the more as a character in the novel manifestly in front of the reader. This constellation provides another correlative to the state of exception in the aforementioned passage in which the Teacher’s interpretative authority is revoked; he is registered by Razumov with some delay: “Slowly his sullen eyes moved in my direction. ‘How did this old man come here?’ he muttered, astounded.” (260) Like Mikulin, however, it is precisely from this position of suspended authority that the Teacher gains control over Razumov’s account. He proceeds to reconstruct the scene after the dismissal by his own protagonist, without clearly delineating what is to be imputed to Razumov, what is quoted from the notes he has left behind, and what should be seen as pure conjecture by the narrator-cum-editor. Thus, we are confronted with a narrative setup in which the protagonist protests against his paradigmatic status (as a protagonist in the novel) and against his involvement in a larger paradigm (of the Teacher

constitutes the historical, our intent towards it in the contemporary moment and the means by which systems of intelligibility are [. . .] ultimately suspended.” William Watkin. Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 5. 145 Paul Armstrong. Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press., 2005. 84. 146 Agamben, Signature, 18.

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as another instigator of the state of exception). The narrator as a figure of exception, in turn, continually resists his status as interpretative authority, assuring us that he is singularly unsuited to any position of oblique authority whatsoever: “I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man.” (3) In this novel of disavowals, not even the textual remains of Razumov are a clear example of a set, presenting as they do “something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not exactly that in its actual form.” (3) It is in this refusal of simple exemplarity – more than in the represented political quandaries – that the novel comes closest to Agamben’s own paradigmatic method. What the philosophical concept accomplishes with lengthy asides on the status of the example as “exclusive inclusion” mirroring the “inclusive exclusion (which thus serves to include what is excluded)”147 of the state of exception, the novel models by narrative means. Particularly, the narrative withdraws the certain exemplary status of any of its characters and its narrator alike. While gesturing towards a state of exception, the novel inculcates scepticism regarding the degree to which any textual element can be taken as a model for a wholesale political deep structure. That is, the narrative refuses to follow the “logic of the metaphorical transfer of meaning,” adapting instead an uncertain “analogical logic of the example”148— and this makes the novel amenable to Agamben’s own paradigmatic method. In its explicit refusal to fully elaborate a political model, thus, Under Western Eyes comes closest to offering a literary equivalent to the state of exception.

5.2 The Anarchist Deep-Structure in The Man Who Was Thursday With Under Western Eyes, the early modernist political imaginary has reached a turning point: the narrative barely allows for the differentiation of a stable autostereotype against an anarchic heterostereotype at all. The permanent threshold state disassembling Razumov’s political demarcations dispenses with each and any vestigial attempts to stabilise a collective identity. The ensuing state of exception appears inescapable, since both form and plot of Conrad’s novel present a position of power that can “maintain itself indefinitely, without ever passing over

147 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21. 148 Agamben, Signature, 18.

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into actuality.”149 In Agamben’s Homo Sacer, however, this account of potential power refusing disclosure is followed up by a parenthetical addition that offers a rare indication of resistance: “(The troublemaker is precisely the one who tries to force sovereign power to translate itself into actuality).”150 If a normative system rests on the potential of self-suspension rather than positive laws, any ‘translation’ into signifiable form can be conceived as a possibility of contestation in its own right. After all, “[i]n the decision on the state of exception, the norm is suspended or even annulled; but what is at issue in this suspension is, once again, the creation of a situation that makes the application of the norm possible.”151 It is a decisionist speech act of this kind – an announcement of suspended norms – that Razumov is shown to anticipate, but which perpetually eludes him. Under these circumstances, the imagined translation of a suspended norm into the ‘actuality’ of an explicit suspension is to restore a modicum of political agency. Whatever brings to the fore an actualisation of sovereign power, thus, serves as a counter to the withdrawal of the law and the concomitant exposure to ‘violence outside of the law’.152 However, in Under Western Eyes, no ‘troublemaker’ steps up to effect such disclosure of sovereignty. The protagonist is, instead, exposed to empty media, transmitting nothing but the possibility of inscription rather than the desired actuality of power, however punitive or arbitrary. The political imaginary of early modernism reaches an impasse at this point of exception out of bounds. James’ and Conrad’s previous narratives still feature a ‘tellable’153 movement from the model of demarcation to the state of exception. The ‘Russian’ novel, by contrast, reduces the possibilities of determining alterity to a bare minimum. Razumov’s betrayal enforces a perpetual self-positioning as well as – in the case of the “mocking” (70) speech during the undercover foray – a loss of control over his very means of expression. In what follows, however, I will show that this complete loss of political agency is one of two possible end points in this group of political fictions. Conrad’s novel constitutes one side of a dichotomy, in which the possibility of demarcation against anarchy has been reduced and exposure to the state of exception has become ubiquitous. Chesterton’s fiction presents the other side.

149 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47. 150 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47. 151 Agamben, State of Exception, 36. 152 Agamben, State of Exception, 53. 153 “Tellability is a quality that makes stories inherently worth telling, independently of their textualisation.” Marie-Laure Ryan. “Tellability.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge 2005. 589–591. 589.

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With Chesterton’s 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, the political imaginary of early modernism offers another resolution to the dilemma of receding demarcation and an impending state of exception. It is precisely the position of “troublemaker”154 that is negotiated in the narrative. The novel does feature a figure of authority that withdraws from representation and dissolves the characters’ extant differentiations of identity and alterity in the manner by now familiar from James and Conrad. However, in a marked departure from the telos of the state of exception, Thursday does not conclude with increasing subjection to non-dichotomous modes of control. Instead, the narrative locates the dissolution of a two-sided distinction between political identity and alterity in a receding figure of authority that is attributable to neither side. Specifically, in Chesterton’s narrative an anarchist council turns out to consist in its entirety of undercover policemen. This revelation coincides with the insight that the leader of the council, the elusive figure of Sunday, is also the head of police who recruited the undercover detectives in the first place. Law and anarchy are firmly intertwined. To begin with, my analysis will show that the novel stakes its aesthetic strategies on this increasing entanglement of identity and its ostensible anarchic obverse. Secondly, this chapter will trace the function of Sunday, the absent figure both underlying stabilising distinctions and suspending them. In a productive spin on Agamben’s ‘translation hypothesis’,155 it is the impossible, yet ever-renewed attempt to translate the figure beyond law and anarchy into intelligible terms that becomes the basis for a new politics — and a way out of the deadlock of exception. Instead of tracing the inexorable emergence of a state of exception, for Chesterton it is on the basis of a suspension of differential order that a new, dialogic mode of political contestation can be indicated. As in the other texts in the corpus, the analysis will, firstly, attend to the attempts to shore up identity against a constitutive, anarchist outside. Although Thursday features endeavours to cast off ‘anarchy’ – stigmatised as a threatening encapsulation of modern relativism – the ensuing differentiation does not hold. In breaking down stable political difference, the narrative is at odds with its protagonist’s own ‘anarchophobia’. Rather than being discarded to a political outside, disavowed, ‘anarchist’ characteristics are subsequently integrated into the autostereotype. At the same time, manifest anarchists in the narrated world are successively divested of their disguises, revealing various normative – ‘sane’, in the novel’s vocabulary – figures beneath. Anarchism, thus, cannot be set apart as a set of radical figures. Instead of evoking the imagined horrors of ‘anarchy’

154 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47. 155 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47.

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(in the pejorative sense of ‘chaos’), the novel, then, foregrounds the narrative and political possibilities created by a collapse of differential politics. The diffusion of anarchy enables modes of literary experimentation that are foreclosed as long as an impenetrable boundary is assumed to clearly distinguish figures of breakdown from arbiters of the law. This process gives rise to a model of the political which renders Thursday the second resolution of the development of the early modernist political imaginary. To the inescapable state of exception in Under Western Eyes, Chesterton’s ‘Nightmare’ adds a sharply different political and literary constellation. Instead of presenting the dissolution of political demarcation as debilitating, the novel brings forth a mode of politics founded on the presumption of a combined figure of law and anarchy underlying any language game. This foundation underneath presumed antagonisms – enacted by the figure of Sunday – is shown to increase rather than restrict the range of political thought. Uniquely in the corpus of political fiction, hence, the breakdown of demarcation does not constitute the prelude to the emergence of unconstrained modes of control. Instead of a coercive state of exception, we are confronted with a constitutively uninterpretable deep structure that will be described in terms of alienity rather than relational alterity. If this is a political theology, it is an oblique one, offering an irreducible hermeneutic challenge rather than divine revelation. Sunday inculcates ever-renewed attempts at translating into actuality an unrepresentable “central signified, the original or transcendental signified [. . .] never absolutely present outside of differences.”156 Yet, intimations of Sunday do not dispense with the drawing of distinctions nor suspend extant concepts of identity in the manner of the receding figures of authority in Under Western Eyes. Rather than a totalitarian “normal and collective (and hence political) organisation of human life founded solely on bare life,”157 we are confronted with a reinstatement of differential political identities which exceed reducibility to bare life.

5.2.1 Dissolution of Anarchist Alterity The beginning of Thursday sets up an attempt to establish a binary distinction between order and anarchy. In the manner of demarcation in James and Conrad, the main protagonist, Gabriel Syme, attempts to style himself as a “poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a poet of respectability” (11).

156 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 916. 157 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 134.

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To attain this position, he sets himself apart from a counterpart described as “the anarchic poet,” (11) Lucian Gregory. As a self-ascribed incarnation of lawful thought, Syme presents an entire poetics of order, proclaiming that the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it [. . .]. Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. (13)

Although Syme presents himself as a participant in a Manichean struggle between forces of order and chaos, his presentation of ‘hitting the mark’ does not assure any fundamental certainty. Instead, as against a comically overdetermined ‘chaos’, any declaration of predictability can be infused with a rhetoric of mockepic grandeur. In similar fashion to the residual alterities in Casamassima and The Secret Agent, this proposal requires a foil. To this end, the heterostereotype negatively stabilising ‘magical’ order is represented by Lucian, a fin-de-siècle aesthete who not only proclaims the superiority of an ‘anarchist’ artistic practice, but is set against the very possibility of drawing distinctions at all: “‘An artist is identical with an anarchist,” he cried. “You might transpose the words anywhere.’” (12) Syme needs this stance: he can claim the imposition of the ‘rare strange thing’ of order only by distinguishing it from Lucian’s ‘transposition’ of anarchy and art. This strategy is, however, shown to be more unstable than the initial triad of law, order, and respectability suggests. Instead of performing his poetics of ‘hitting the mark’, Syme’s attempt to set himself apart from the “gross, obvious” (12) anarchist stereotype is itself shown to break down, failing to coalesce into the differentiation to which the poet-policeman aspires. This dissolution of heterostereotypical anarchist figures already begins during Syme’s first foray into the revolutionary underground. What he seeks is an anarchist counterposition sufficiently broad to function as a complementary Other to his ideology of order. Instead of such malleable alterity, however, he encounters a radical sphere displaying every conceivable stereotypical image of popular anarchist novels. These, crucially, are exposed as stereotypes, with their blatant citation of popular clichés stymying their utility as metonymical condensations of diegetically real socialists. As Shpayer-Makov puts it, “Chesterton exposed the anarchist stereotype, suggesting that the anarchist peril was nonexistent; the myth was perpetuated by political institutions motivated primarily by inner fears divorced from any grounding in reality.”158 A grand revolutionary

158 Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion,” 506. For the hallmarks of anarchism as a synonym for dynamite, violence, and terror in popular literature, cf. Schäffner, Anarchismus, 188.

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‘machine’ (still imagined in Hyacinth’s account in Casamassima) is unavailable amidst this ‘radical’ pageantry. Specifically, the anarchist underground is literalised: Syme and his contact, “with their chairs and table, shot down through the floor as if the earth had swallowed them” (22). In this literally subterranean lair, every major discursive feature of the anarchist heterostereotype is exhibited in rapid succession, foregrounding (rather than allowing Syme or the narrator to functionalise) its contradictory characteristics. Thus, the association with a threat from outside Britain is taken up (“A heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him who he was” 22); simultaneously, the secret codeword for the radical sphere is “Joseph Chamberlain,” associating the anarchists with a figure that every contemporary reader of Chesterton’s journalistic and essayistic texts would recognize as the primary target of what Vaninskaya calls his ‘patriotic anti-imperialism’.159 To add to this profusion of traits, anarchism’s association with science as a proxy for disenchanted modernity features as the “appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre” (22) in which the congress takes place. Most notably, however, the passage overdetermines the heterostereotypical association of the anarchist with dynamite:160 “round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb.” (23) This latter image already demonstrates the tenuousness of an anarchist Other so readily and self-reflexively exposed as the product of ‘dynamite fiction’. After all, the bomb-lined wall is only identified after three preceding descriptions as ‘shape’, ‘bulbs’, and ‘eggs’ — the straightforward identification is only just added to stem the proliferation of associations in the interlude of ‘delayed decoding’.161 Rather than providing the constitutive Otherness to offset the regularity praised in Syme’s poetics of order, the markers of anarchy exceed his vaunted control by their sheer hyperbolic abundance. Even before this anarchist carnivalesque, the narrative shows that the storyworld resists a strictly relational order. Thus, immediately after proclaiming

159 Chesterton’s anti-imperialist activism is mostly focused on the unsuitability of Empire for patriotic cohesion and the issue of the Boer War. Cf. Anna Vaninskaya. “‘My mother, drunk or sober’: G. K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-Imperialism.” History of European Ideas 34 (2013). 535–547. 544. “Much as he may have disliked ‘greater England’, the coloured populations of the colonies were low on his scale of interest.” In Thursday, indeed, the anarchist heterostereotype is blithely racialised: “another said that if they blacked my face I might look like a Negro anarchist.” (104) 160 Cf. Melchiori, Terrorism, 9. 161 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 175.

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himself a ‘poet of law’, the ‘suburb of Saffron Park’ through which Syme moves is associated with the terms raised by his rival, the ‘decadent’ poet162 who contrasts “anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself,” with “that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren” (17). For all his proclamations of order, Syme finds his surroundings “for the moment empty. Then he realized (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a living silence than a dead one” (16). If nothing else, ‘anarchy’ and ‘silence’ share in common a semantics of ‘life’, a term that crosses the boundary proclaimed by the protagonist. These unstable descriptions attenuate distinctions of order and anarchy from the outset. The protagonist fails in his efforts to construct hard-and-fast political difference163 of the kind barely upheld by Hyacinth Robinson (Casamassima) or the Assistant Commissioner (The Secret Agent). Because Syme’s dichotomy is too inflexible and essentialist by default, it fails to impose order on a diegesis that constantly evades his conceptual grasp. Indeed, we are provided with a brief psychobiography of the protagonist’s avowedly reactionary ‘revolt against revolt’. In a brief analepsis, the narrative summarises the development of his all-too facile demarcations. In order to achieve this, the novel takes up another cluster of features associated with the anarchist Other, namely the notion of anarchism as the sum of “all the newest notions” (41).164 Syme’s parents are shown to subscribe indiscriminately to any “reformist impulse” that (as per Tim Armstrong’s account of modernism) “energizes a cultural field,” thereby “making problematic common distinctions between a ‘political’ avant-garde [. . .] and a later modernism in which politics and aesthetics are divorced.”165 Syme, however, summarily dismisses these reforms as a succession of passing fads. Whether it be revision of domestic hierarchies or gender relations, this striving after novelty culminates either in “pagan latitude” or “Puritan abstinence” (41) as far as he is concerned. In a late recurrence of Lombroso’s anarchist degenerationism, Chesterton’s parental figures are surreptitiously shown to lack “misoneism, the horror of novelty”

162 William Oddie. Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874–1908. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. This figure shows that anarchy, “a term which clearly had a much wider philosophical remit” also includes “another facet of what was for Chesterton part of the same essentially un-English intellectual culture, Wildean aestheticism.” In a newspaper interview, Chesterton “inaccurately but revealingly described Gregory, ‘the real anarchist’, as ‘a decadent artist’ (in Thursday he is actually a poet)” (329). 163 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 8. 164 This charge is also remarkably similar to the characterisation of practically every member of the intentional community in Ford Madox Ford’s (pseudonymous) novel Simple Life Ltd, which also lumps together any type of ‘reform’ as novelty for novelty’s sake. Daniel Chaucer [Ford Madox Ford]. The Simple Life Ltd. London: John Lane, 1911. 165 Armstrong, Modernism, 64.

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that keeps healthy individuals in the bounds of tradition. Syme attempts to compensate for this lack of parental misoneism with his own, decidedly ‘misoneist’ reaction.166 After witnessing an act of ‘dynamite terror’, these factors culminate in “a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.” (42) The problem that the implicit author identifies in this biographical interlude is not so much that Syme superimposes racist and political stereotypes to derive an oversimplified, macroscopic differentiation. Rather, the ‘commonsense’ of the way ‘most of us’ see anarchists at least necessitates the interpretative connection between two terms (ignorance and intellectualism), whereas Syme’s model creates an all-too simple topography of ‘invasion’. This, the novel suggests, does not do justice to a narrated world which, as the above example shows, exceeds his heterostereotypical ascriptions the more forcefully he asserts them. Instead of bringing about the announced ‘poetry of law’, the protagonist projects disavowed characteristics onto ‘anarchists’ that have long-since devolved into cliché. As a result, this foil fails to bring about a sustained alternative to the “lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness” (10) proclaimed by the anarchist rival. The insufficiency of Syme’s order is further foregrounded by his recruitment into a police unit tasked with investigating anarchist tendencies. During his induction, he is shown to attempt an expansion of the anarchist Other to such a degree as to encompass any broadly sceptical, modern philosophical movement. Syme’s eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity. “What do you do, then?” he said. “The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. (44)

Whereas Syme has been associated with a simplified, Manichean worldview, the constable’s hermeneutics aim for a more thoroughgoing demarcation: the police opposes scepticism itself by ascertaining an ‘origin’. On this reading, ‘sceptical’ or ‘pessimist’ philosophies deny the very possibility of achieving an “essential

166 Cf. Lombroso, “Anarchists,” 339.

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idea of man” (45). By contrast – similarly to the position of Chief Inspector Heat in The Secret Agent – “burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men” (45). After all, the argument goes, by traversing a boundary, the common transgressor differentially affirms the principles by means of which that very limit is established. Contrary to such bounded alterity, modern “philosophers hate life itself” (45), a position that has to be painstakingly recovered rather than presumed to always already constitute a negative counterpart to ‘order’. The “origin of those dreadful thoughts” (45), however, proves elusive. Indeed, the “purely intellectual conspiracy” (45) attributed to the anarchists begins to recur in the reactionary discourse that is to be set apart from it. Specifically, the “policemen who are also philosophers” (44) are to oppose “a crusade against the Family and the State” (44), undertaken by anarchists as stand-ins for ‘the moderns’. At the same time, Syme bemoans that the police itself is habitually involved in problems of unequal distribution (“harrying of the poor”) while neglecting its proper object: “It has given up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else.” (46) The foundationalist discourse turns against itself: the ‘origin’ of scepticism is found in the ‘Church’ and ‘State’ themselves. These institutions produce their own heresies while, at the same time, investing the policemen with the power to seek those heresies on the outside. The anarchist “evil philosopher” is, thus, recoverable only as a deviation from an already-deviant orthodoxy. That is to say: the totalitarian thought police emerges as an attempt to determine an ‘origin’ of modern thought while itself remaining conspicuously devoid of an origin outside of another play of differences. It posits the ‘modern’ interdiction on punishing heresies against the (negatively formulated) doubt whether anything else should be conceived as punishable. As a result, the philosophical policemen are shown to formulate a system at odds with itself: they set up the state both as the foundation and the distant aim of policing. Similarly, the imagined social order is conceived both as the principle underlying executive power and a certainty to be recovered from metonyms of anarchy — where, after all, the “origin of those dreadful thoughts” (45) is situated. The police are incapable of curtailing these compounding substitutions. Their paradoxical remit besets the sleuths of scepticism with an uncontainable “movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center of origin,” which Derrida calls a “movement of supplementarity.”167 Not only does

167 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 923.

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the philosopher-policeman supplant the regular police. What is more, he invokes an original police power invested in a ‘State’ — which is the very target of the protectors’ investigations. In other words: the power invested in the philosophical police emanates from the very ‘traitors’ that it would be best placed to combat. The interpellating constable’s answer to Syme’s profession of antiheretical enthusiasm is telling: “But this is absurd!” (46) can refer both to Syme’s doubts whether punishment is possible at all; or else, the exclamation describes the entire failing attempt to arrest the supplementary logic of the police. In the latter sense, the police strategy becomes all the more contradictory, since the demarcation of order and anarchy proliferates ‘absurdly’, while the sphere of anarchy requires interpretative charity: after all, it is not the state, but the anarchic “book of sonnets” (44) that is to provide an immediate, unambiguous “origin” (45). Žižek asserts that “[w]hat Chesterton fails to perceive is that the ‘universalized crime’ that he projects into ‘lawless modern philosophy’ and its political equivalent, the ‘anarchist’ movement, [. . .] already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law, so that the antagonism between Law and Crime reveals itself to be immanent to crime.”168 What is more, however, Syme’s introduction to the philosophical police corps reveals a conceptual breakdown of the differentiation between order and anarchy that dramatises precisely the impossibility of keeping both spheres – Law and Crime – distinct. As Syme’s interpellation by the philosopher-policeman shows, the investigation of modern scepticism questions its own foundations, undermining not only the justification of its totalitarian thought policing of the Other, but locating that Other at the root of its own mission. The endeavour of hermeneutic policing, thus, structurally repeats the incapacity of differentiation already shown regarding Syme’s attempt to formulate the tenets of a poetry of order. In Luhmann’s systems-theoretical terms, this can be seen as a failure of a second-order differentiation. After all, the philosopher policemen observe ‘how others observe’, uncovering, for instance, the alleged ‘anarchist’ belief “that rules and formulas have destroyed human happiness” (47). Such “[s]econd-order observation recognises (and experiences in observing itself) that the total information contained in the world cannot be concentrated in one point – unless one assumes a God. But as second-order observation, it can at least thematise the improbability of first-order observation (including its own).”169 In Thursday, it is the police-philosophers’ failure to ‘thematise’ the improbability of their own observations (for instance regarding

168 Slavoj Žižek. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin, 2014. 102. 169 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 62.

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the question “whether we have the right to punish anybody else” 46) that leads back to Luhmann’s caveat: the concentration of the ‘total information of the world’ can be reasserted only if ‘one assumes a God’. It is precisely the possibility of this totality that the novel turns to after the compounding displacements of the philosophical unit’s ‘origin story’. After his recruitment, Syme is confronted with the uncertain divinity of Sunday, who is both the chief of police and, as is revealed towards the end of the novel, the ringleader of the anarchists. Instead of the desired illumination, or ‘origin’ posited by the hermeneutic endeavours of the philosopher detectives, however, the divine figure appears as a literal blind spot: “suddenly shown into a room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light. It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced; it was like going suddenly stone-blind.” (48) What is more, in “some strange way” Syme knows “that the man had his back to him” (48). The figure in the dark is contrasted with the synecdochic certainty promised by the constable recruiting Syme, for whom every sonnet, if approached correctly, can stand in pars-pro-toto for the modern dissolution of order. Instead of functioning as a guarantor of such hermeneutic optimism, the police chief’s double refusal of disclosure indicates that “[w]hen handling a distinction, you always have a blind spot or something invisible behind your back.”170 The chief of police’s ‘blinding darkness’, thus, contradicts the totalising ambitions of the philosopher-policeman, who still labours under the hope for a “comprehensive enlightening [. . .] of the world as the totality of things or forms or essences that could be worked through piece by piece.”171 Rather than providing the foundation for a transcendental distinction between order and anarchy, the divine figure undergirding that split brings into presence nothing but the impossibility of ascertaining any one differentiation. In other words: the non-appearance of Sunday in his police incarnation discloses the very impossibility of distinguishing order and anarchy. Syme’s enthusiastic assent to his initial recruitment – “I have felt it from my boyhood, but never could state the verbal antithesis” (46) – is not granted a suitably ‘antithetical’ formulation of order and anarchy, at least not one capable of countering contemporary relativism. Rather, he becomes subject to a re-entry of the excluded characteristics of anarchy into his very self-conception. It is this proliferation of anarchist traits on both sides of a self-created demarcation that

170 Luhmann, Introduction, 104. 171 Luhmann, Introduction, 105.

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also motivates the generic shifts of the novel itself.172 As long as Syme attempts to translate anarchism into a “huge and pitiless peril,” (42) he unwittingly takes on the very characteristics he disparages: “brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he” (42). The narrative result of this reduction of complexity is an environment which becomes indistinguishable from the protagonist’s mental disposition: The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country. (42)

The passage posits a threatening loss of distinction, rendering the diegetic world a ‘reflection’ of the character’s consciousness. As a result of his dichotomisation of his parents’ ‘anarchic’ dabbling, Syme is shown to have developed a frenzied reactionary autostereotype which, rather than stabilising a sense of self against an abjected alterity, brings about the exact opposite: a constraining reflexiveness producing variations of the ever-same. In addition, the profusion of reflections is presented as a constriction of narrative possibilites, which are reduced to rendering the character’s point of view. The relation of ‘river’ and ‘sky’ is subordinated to their joint function of ‘reflecting his anger’, restricting the storyworld to an objective correlative expressing Syme’s anti-anarchist affect.173 Due to this perspectival narrowing, the remainder of the passage appears as an internally focalised extension of the character’s views: the “fiercer flame” of the river is granted priority despite its merely reflexive status, effacing the “sunset” that it reproduces. This reversal – an image assuming the place of its referent – aptly describes an all-too facile demarcation of alterity. Like the Professor in The Secret Agent, Syme becomes incapable of establishing a sense

172 Cf. Kevin Belmonte. Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G. K. Chesterton. Nashville/Dallas/Mexico City/Rio de Janeiro: Thomas Nelson, 2011. 128. Belmonte’s monograph shows that the importance of the generic shifts is also noted by more autobiographical approaches in the (remarkably hagiographic) tradition of Chestertonian criticism: “Chesterton’s purpose was nothing less than to deal moral relativism and parlor nihilism a death blow through a novel that was one part farce and one part metaphysical thriller.” 173 Matthias Wörther summarises Syme’s condition as follows: “For Syme, the world is divided. There is his own world and the world of anarchy, to which he cannot establish a relation. [. . .] The novel demonstrates that such a bifurcation is out of touch with reality, precisely because the world is not held together by an all-encompassing conspiracy.” Matthias Wörther. G. K. Chesterton: Das unterhaltsame Dogma. Bern: Peter Lang, 1984. 283. My trans. Orig. quote. “Für Syme ist die Welt zweigeteilt. Es gibt seine eigene Welt und die Welt der Anarchie, zu der er keinerlei Beziehung herstellen kann. [. . .] Der Roman demonstriert die Realitätsfremdheit einer solchen Zweiteilung der Welt, weil die Welt eben kein Verschwörungszusammenhang ist.”

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of personal and political selfhood. Instead, he perpetually casts out characteristics associated with an imagined Other, investing the entire storyworld with the specific traits he is shown to abhor instead of determining his identity on the basis of a self-drawn boundary, however contingent it may be. This representation of space in the ‘mirror-stage’ of redoubled reflections not only develops out of a starkly dichotomous worldview within the diegesis. What is more, the passage can also be read in broad terms of psychological realism.174 Thursday associates an inordinately stark distinction between self and Other with a literary mode that relegates readers to the character’s consciousness. As a consequence, the diegesis is governed by pathetic fallacy subject to individual epistemological constraints.175 Syme’s model, in which anarchism is reduced to an all-too convenient foil, is presented as a deadlock. As reflection takes precedence over the reflected political difference, we are relegated to a stagnant, self-referential worldview producing the ever-same in perpetuity. What is required instead of such “unending, unresolved interaction with alterity,” as Horstkotte puts it, is a “finite confrontation with alterity, a resolution, or, at least, an acceptance of indeterminacy.”176 This ‘growing acceptance’ that anarchy should not be disowned out of hand is demonstrated by an alternative spatial model which replaces the psychological realism of the reflexive self-river-sky aggregate. This second literary topology is granted paradigmatic expression after Syme’s infiltration of the anarchist sphere. In what will become a recurring theme throughout the novel, his performance of hyperbolic radical rhetoric proves to be more convincing than an ‘actual’, self-identified anarchist’s retorts. Passing as radical is from the first a matter of props, necessitating the accoutrements of potboiler anarchists: “The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his more healthy romance” (50). As a result, both inductions – into the unstable “New Detective Corps” and the equally unstable “romance” of a self-consciously artificial anarchist role – contribute to the following transformation of narrative space: When Syme stepped out on to the steam-tug he had a singular sensation of stepping out into something entirely new; not merely into the landscape of a new land, but even into the landscape of a new planet. This was mainly due to the insane yet solid decision of that evening, though partly also to an entire change in the weather and the sky since he

174 For an account of psychological realism and Modernism, cf. J. M. Bernstein. The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. 237. 175 Cf. Paul Peppis. Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 240. 176 Cf. Peeren/Horstkotte, Introduction, “The Shock of the Other,” 14.

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entered the little tavern some two hours before. Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight. Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some sadder star. (50)

In the wake of Syme having been named ‘Thursday’, the newest inductee into the anarchist conspiracy, the representation of space veers away from the exclusive reflection of the character’s differentiation of order and anarchy. The “entirely new” environment is explicitly not the mere result of his “insane yet solid decision” but also distanced from the protagonist’s state of mind: “An entire change in the weather and the sky” has taken place, which, as an impersonal shift at a remove, is set apart from the reflector figure.177 No longer is the sky a matter of a “passionate plumage” (49) of consciousness. Instead, the merely reflexive relationship between represented space and mental disposition has been interrupted. In accordance with this move away from ‘psychologically realist’ epistemological models, the moon no longer merely reflects, but constitutes an altered repetition, a “weaker sun” producing “dead daylight.” In contrast to the mirror image of the river taking the place of the sun under the conditions of reactionary binarism, this second environment presents an ontological rather than an epistemological dominant. That is, instead of posing questions of interpretation and reliability, the passage suggests what Brian McHale calls ‘post-cognitive’ questions, such as: “What is a world?; What kinds of worlds are there?; What happens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?”178 Instead of reflecting the protagonist’s self-reflexive worldview, then, the city is redoubled in this “entire change,” which is to be approached not as an altered vantage point but rather as a “new planet.” This reconfiguration of London as a ‘planet’ marks the novel’s departure from a concept of ‘blank space’ expressing an epistemological dominant, in which the urban topography functions as a ‘screen’ upon which a mental disposition can be projected.179 Instead of the 177 I.e. as part of a “third person or heterodiegetic narration in which events are refracted through the vantage-point of a particular consciousness or ‘reflector’.” David Herman. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Blackwell, 2009. 58. 178 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 10. 179 In the manner of the map of Africa in Heart of Darkness, which “appears here as a screen upon which the young Marlow projects his fantasies of adventure and (no doubt) conquest.” McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 54.

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city as a correlative to the anarchy Syme inscribes upon the river and the sky, the model of the ‘emptier planet’ offers a “strategy of superimposition. Here two familiar spaces are placed one on top of the other, as in a photographic double-exposure, creating through their tense and paradoxical coexistence a third space identifiable with neither of the original two – a zone.”180 This zone, rather than a direct expression of a ‘dogmatic image of thought’181 oriented towards binary order, incites modes of representation that exceed the anarchy/ order split. This trajectory beyond differential models is reinforced by the uncertain constitution of the narrated world. Specifically, the novel’s subtitle announces a ‘nightmare’. The contours of that nightmare, however, remain undefined. At the very end of the narrative, we are told that “[w]hen men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in some place” (182), with a clear differentiation drawn between that ‘place’ and the preceding dreamscape. Not so, the narrator informs us, for Syme, whose “experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through” (183). Blurring the lines between the diegetically ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, this uncertain awakening indicates a number of possible worlds and their relations. After all, the reader cannot be sure when, precisely, the oneiric narrative (whether ‘psychological’ or ‘unreal’) has begun. As a result, wherever we establish the transition from one semantic space of ‘reality’ to another of the ‘dream’ has profound consequences for the conception of the fictional world. The entire histoire could constitute a dream — or else, the dreamt storyworld could be narrowed down to the final chapter, in which each detective is assigned a day of creation, robed accordingly, and associated with a fractured allegoresis. Alternatively, a passage like the one above, in which Syme is shown to step out into the “entirely new” (50), could already mark the transfer to the dreamscape with equal plausibility. In that case, the primary storyworld would be one that allows for anarchist stock figures to conspire in a bomb-laden underground; the anarchist conspiracy afterwards infiltrated by Syme, by contrast, would initiate a representation of anarchists in a more unstable mode. The ‘new’ (and potentially dreamt) world, then, would replace an already heightened diegetic reality with successive unmaskings of anarchists, building up to the conclusion mentioned above: that there are only policemen engaged in mutual observation.

180 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 46. 181 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 236.

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In this instability, the novel approaches Todorov’s ‘Fantastic’, oscillating between the explicability of phenomena by new laws (‘the Marvelous’) and the decision that laws of reality as established initially remain intact and explain any supernatural phenomena (‘the Uncanny’). The Fantastic “occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the Uncanny or the Marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”182 Because the boundaries of the dream can be drawn so variously, however, we are never made privy to any ‘laws of nature’ operating in the storyworld in the first place. The “emptier planet” (50) into which Syme steps, and the plot that follows, can be understood to negotiate a prior ‘real’ reality taken up in “subworlds within the [. . .] ‘higher-order’ storyworld.”183 In this case, connected as it is to the experiencing characters’ waking adventures, the narrative maintains a broadly epistemological dominant: the recurrence of anarchists reflects the character’s waking preoccupations. The ‘new planet’ can also, however, be part and parcel with a world which changes its properties between “entering the little tavern two hours before” (50) and leaving it, either as a result of always already having been dreamt or as a matter of its ontological instability expressed in generic shifts. Thus, this passage, which departs from internal focalisation and a world ‘reflecting’ the character’s disposition, ambiguates the location and status of diegetic reality. The ‘new planet’ not only renders unstable the relationship between primary storyworld and dreamt secondary worlds, but also calls into question the validity of such hierarchies of worlds in the first place. The reader is primed to at least consider a protean narrated universe subject to radical shifts, which are not to be contained by the character’s consciousness or a cordoned-off, dreamt subworld. Thus, from an anarchist heterostereotype placed in a diegetically real underground, the narrative shifts towards self-referential considerations of the status of the narrated world, its relationship to preceding worlds, and the waking state presented at the end — as well as the implications of these incongruous worlds for the possibility of investigating anarchy as a localisable threat or index of modernity. Instead of sifting “through evidence of witnesses of different degrees of reliability in order to reconstruct and solve a

182 Tzvetan Todorov. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975. 25. 183 Jan-Noël Thon. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. 50.

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‘crime’”184 in the manner of the epistemological dominant, the novel places at the forefront the question in which order of reality the crime of ‘anarchism’ has been committed in the first place, if at all.185 Most prominently, one of the “entirely new” (50) ‘alien spaces within familiar space’186 is constituted by “the disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of” (50). The Miltonian intertext not only imbues the urban sphere – previously only refracted by a centre of consciousness – with epic significance; what is more, it enables an experimental identification of the protagonist with Milton’s Satan in his appearance as “dread commander” in Book 1 of Paradise Lost. It is this figure that is associated with a sun which, “[s]horn of his beams, or from behind the moon / In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds.”187 The ‘zone’ is a conspicuously literary space, then, in which, rather than interpreting the world in terms of set-apart order and anarchy, the policeman can try out the position of the arch-rebel, thus assuming formerly disavowed traits to re-negotiate his identity. This satanic role-play in a changed narrative space requires the momentary breakdown of internal focalisation. With its diminishing focus on ‘knowing’, then, the novel evokes a collapse of what Rimmon-Kenan calls a dichotomous “ideological position” presented through a “way of seeing the world,”188 as well as the breakdown of its reflexive, perceptual correlates. The function as an arbiter of law and order, already diminishing during Syme’s induction into the philosophical police force, is replaced with a dialogic reorganisation of signs. As a result, the mirrored repetition of the ever-same dialectic of identity and alterity is replaced by what Bakhtin calls “the novelistic hybrid”, i.e. “an 184 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 9. This is the activity McHale attributes to “characters in many classic modernist texts – Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s, for instance.” 185 Cf. China Miéville. Introduction. “Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy.” Historical Materialism 10 (2002). 39–49. 45. For Miéville in “a fantastic cultural work, the artist pretends that things known to be impossible are not only possible but real, which creates mental space redefining – or pretending to redefine – the impossible.” Similarly, the self-ascribed ‘modern fantastic’ copies this process into the text itself. After all, the characters themselves assume anarchist roles and treat them “systematically and coherently within the fantastic work” (45), assuming that the next in the line of ever-escalating anarchist grotesques is real and will disclose a radical sphere. 186 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 46. 187 John Milton. Paradise Lost. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 23. 188 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. Narrative Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 84. As per Rimmon-Kenan’s broad interpretation of focalisation, “[t]he overall language of a text is that of the narrator, but focalization can ‘colour’ it in a way which makes it appear as a transposition of the perceptions of a separate agent.”

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artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another.”189 In this case, what up to this point prevaricated between ‘dynamite fiction’ and modernist subjectivity is intersected by the logic of epic, which not only introduces a stylistic shift away from psychological realism but also reorders political demarcations. The epic allows temporary identification with the side of ‘revolt’ previously excoriated (“Revolt in the abstract is revolting. It’s mere vomiting” 13). What is more, the critique of upheaval at the beginning of the novel was directed at Syme’s rival, Lucian Gregory. In the final ‘masque’ that closes the dream narrative, this anarchist poet is identified both as “the real anarchist” (181) and, also, as indicated by a quotation from Job 1.6, as Lucifer.190 The constraints of binary order, then, are left behind in this dialogic, intertextual ‘zone’, compounded as it is by the added uncertainty regarding the beginning and extent of the ‘nightmare’. As a result, anarchy can be admitted into the self-image, as long as it is selfreferentially designated as a matter of generic shifts. The ‘radical’ sphere, then, is not transmitted as one, negated foil but rather diffracted into a multiplicity of ‘different languages in contact with one another’. Rather than uncovering the ‘origin’ of anarchic dissolution underlying modernity (as initially advocated by the philosophical policeman), the novel proliferates modes of representation as it expands its generic possibilities. The ‘zone’ cannot be relegated to a clearly demarcated, constitutive outside. Political difference wanes in the wake of dressing up as an ‘anarchist’ straight out of the popular literary (and filmic) treatments of dynamite fiction,191 the assumption of a Satanic role, and the approach to the city as a “new planet.” Already consisting of a series of variable modes from the beginning on, radicalism cannot be restricted to a set of ressentiment-laden anarchist discontents.

189 Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 361. 190 Cf. The Book of Job. Ed. G. K. Chesterton. London: Palmer and Hayward. 1916. 1. “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.” 191 The representation of the individual anarchist types assumed by the undercover policemen follows the tradition of dynamite fiction, notably by Robert Louis Stevenson, but also Ouida, George Griffith, Edward Douglas Fawcett, and various others classified under the moniker ‘trivial literature’ by Schäffner, Anarchismus, 189. Cf. also Richard Porton. “Film and the Anarchist Peril.” Terrorism, Media, Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 37–55. 39. Porton traces the development of the anarchist theme in commercial cinema, demonstrating “the staying power of the wildeyed, homicidal anarchist as a popular cinematic stereotype.”

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This anarchy outside of the bounds of political difference is finalised by a turn to the fantastic.192 Specifically, in an extended metafictional comment, the reader is instructed to bring to bear a set of ‘fantastic’ genre staples on the narrative: “For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really human.” (50) While the return to ‘sanity’ hints at a differentiation between the normative and the aberrant,193 these instructions counsel readers to approach the dialogic disorientation of the ‘zone’ anew. After all, the ‘inhuman landscape’ does not yield a criterion that would set apart the sane/orderly from the insane/anarchic once and for all. Instead, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, the fantastic as a ‘covert’ metafictional genre already foregrounds its “ability to force the reader (not overtly ask him) to create a fictive imaginary world separate from the empirical one”194— only that, in this case, the ‘empirical’ components are already shown to be well-worn anarchist clichés from the get-go, which are redeployed in a self-evidently ‘fictive imaginary world’. To this redoubled emphasis on an unstable narrative world, the narrator’s explanation of ‘modern fantasies’ adds an overt metafictional appeal to realign our understanding of the protagonist. No longer a psychologically complex character grappling with the dissolution of the modern world, we are to re-read him as ‘older and simpler’ in order to restore dichotomies. After all, we are told, without the ‘sane adventurer’ the alterity of the ‘dragon’ likewise does not emerge with sufficient ‘grotesqueness’. In this, however, the instructions undercut their own professed simplicity: the description of fantasy opens up the possibility that the specifically modern incarnation of the hero constructs (rather than merely discovering) significance by ‘imagining’ an anarchic obverse. Rather than partaking in an age-old struggle, the dragon, on this reading, is a variable signifier that imparts momentary narrative progression on Syme’s quest. Indeed, his actions are only readable as a quest once a fantastic template has been grafted onto the modern world. Once more, it is the storyworld as a whole that is inflected by these generic shifts, without any one figure of sanity

192 Linda Hutcheon. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. “In the kind of metafiction which structures its temporal and spatial relations with the reader on the model of fantasy literature, the act of reading [. . .] involves (perhaps at a more fundamental level) the very act of imagining the world, of giving shape to the referents of the words that go to make up the whole of the world that is the ‘concretized’ text being read.” (76) 193 This term also recurs as the watchword of Chesterton’s economic ideology of ‘Distributism’. cf. G. K. Chesterton. The Outline of Sanity. Norfolk, VA: IHS, 2001. 194 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 32.

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or anarchy emerging as a consequence. As a consequence, this metafictional account of the fantastic construction of evil casts doubt on the hero’s involvement in a foundational struggle with the very principle of anarchy. The Man Who Was Thursday, then, literalises the increasing impossibility of setting up an anarchist Other as the encapsulation of chaos, scepticism, and modernity. One anarchist after the other is disclosed as a policeman who, with only perfunctory ‘disguises’, passes for an anarchist. In the run-up to each scene of unmasking, the arbiters of the law assume that finally an arbiter of anarchist dissolution has been identified. Such anticipated unveiling resembles what Sedgwick criticises as the aim of ‘paranoid reading’. A key component of such practices (adapted from Ricoeur’s ‘masters of suspicion’, namely Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx) is an effort of “placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure.”195 In Syme’s case, if an identifiable figure of anarchist chaos could only be ‘exposed’ as the hidden source of the alleged ills of modernity, the apparent groundlessness of social formations could be associated with a cause. A paranoid reading of the kind pursued by the philosophical police force prefers the critical ‘exposure’ of a violent, authoritative antagonism to an oblique dissolution of collective identity that never coalesces into differential signs at all. It is thus not an anarchic deep-structure that the novel presents as a fundemantal threat, but the notion that there is nothing to be paranoid about in the first place. The horror, that is to say, lies in the emergence of just another normative figure beneath the masks. An anarchist conspiracy brought to light by paranoid reading/detecting would at least offer the assurance of a determinative structure on which to pin all the perceived woes of modernity. Anarchy at the root of a world gone awry could, then, be approached in an ‘exercise of suspicion’. A method of this kind would “clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.”196 In this procedure, as Ricoeur puts it, “[if] consciousness is not what it thinks it is, a new relation must be instituted between the patent and the latent.” Accordingly, “the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested.”197 In Thursday,

195 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 124. Cf. also Mark Knight. Chesterton and Evil. New York: Fordham UP, 2004. 115. For Knight, Syme is caught between “two problems: first, that his perception of the world is impressionistic and uncertain; and second, that the world is a totalizing system that does not make sense even if it can be perceived objectively. The conflation of these problems lies behind the paranoia with which Syme struggles.” 196 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33. 197 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 34.

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however, paranoid exegesis is not rewarded with such ardently desired glimpses of ‘latent’, determining anarchy. Not only does the police philosopher fail to explain how to recover marks of the anarchic in every suspicious ‘book of sonnets’. What is more, each anticipated unveiling of manifest anarchy yields the opposite: beneath the anarchist masks lurk figures of devastating regularity, each associated with a blithe, narratable origin story outlining how they came to pose as an anarchist. As a consequence, the system of interpretation organised around the ‘latent and the manifest’ is perpetually in danger of stalling: instead of a distinction between order and deep-structural anarchy, the investigators reveal iterations of the same (and variations of themselves) beneath each successive concealment. Suspicion, then, does not ‘clear the horizon for a more authentic word’ in the manner of Ricoeur’s sceptics — not even for the word ‘anarchy’ as the negative counterpart to the representatives of the law. The paranoid procedure is beset by a homogenous diegesis, uninterrupted by signs of the Other. This constant refamiliarisation of alterity coincides with the return to what Virginia Woolf deems ‘Edwardian tools’ of overwrought descriptiveness. As the police multiply and anarchy recedes, the novel veers away from the possibility of representing ‘new planets’, ‘dragons’, and the polyphonic genre distortion of the modernist fantastic outlined above. In place of such unstable storyworlds, what looms is, in Woolf’s terms, “an enormous stress upon the fabric of things.”198 The result of that stress is, for instance, a descriptive inventory of “a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the living beings who live there.”199 Similarly, when confronting the anarchist “Dr Bull,” Syme initially associates him with images of ‘universal reason’ that he associates with the “half historic memory” (98) of the “French Revolution. There should have been the black outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning.” (98) What is more, the tenement in which this ‘scientific’ type of anarchist is located (and from which Syme tries to ‘deduce the living beings’) resembles an “empty infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. [. . .] He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.” (97) All of the components of a stabilising heterostereotype appear to be at hand, with the ‘unthinkable yet necessary’ house of abstract reason providing a foil to a countervailing faith in order. What is more, the association with ‘universal reason’200 fulfils the function that has been

198 Virginia Woolf. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. The Hogarth Press, 1924. 19. 199 Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, 19. 200 Cf. Nick Nesbitt. “Which Radical Enlightenment? Spinoza, Jacobinism and Black Jacobinism.” Spinoza Beyond Philosophy. Ed. Beth Lord. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. 149–168. 158. Nesbitt traces the history of thought supporting this radical heterostereotype;

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shown to attach to radical alterity time and again: it allows the arbiters of a collective identity to project their own disavowed traits onto the anarchist Other. In this case, Syme’s guiding notions of “tidiness and propriety” (15) are recast as excessive, amoral rationalism and attributed to radicalism beyond the pale. Projected onto Bull, the protagonist’s own “battle against chaos” (13) can be divested of its excessive impulse towards order, which becomes externalised as a ‘revolutionary’ impulse intrinsic to anarchy. In turn, Syme’s own pursuit of “things going right” (14) can arrogate to itself productive irrationality set apart from ‘hideous reason’. Rather than a simple bulwark against ‘anarchy’, an identity based on this dichotomy allows for re-entry: the distinction order/chaos is introduced into the set-apart order itself. Observed from within, an order/anarchy split can be elaborated as the difference between rational order (Bull) and fantastic order (Syme) — the latter of which, in turn, takes on characteristics of the disavowed, chaotic outside. Demarcation, then, emerges as a constant performance of boundary work, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘having’. Syme “defended respectability with violence and exaggeration” (15), yet actively refashions that same violence and exaggeration as a trait of anarchist alterity. The anarchist figure, however, fails to instantiate this hope for a stabilising, relational figure of Otherness. Instead of a bearer of inhuman rationality, the impassive Dr. Bull stands for an “unbearable reality” (99). He traverses boundaries instead of being confined by re-entry into a restored concept of order. Specifically, he is associated with a surfeit of materiality not subsumable under the rubric of anarchy. Thus, in a hyperbolic version of Woolf’s ‘Edwardian tools’, the “Doctor’s complexion, the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too important in a realistic novel.” (99) As opposed to the polyphonic interaction of genres in the explanation of “modern fantasies” (50), the anarchist figure appears as a bathos201 of descriptive matter opposing further interpretation. Fragments of ‘realistic’ fiction (and their self-referential foregrounding as realistic fiction) impinge on the production of an anarchist heterostereotype, thus precluding the ‘dragon’ required for the ‘modern hero’. There is a brief return of genre fiction during the exposure of Dr. Bull as another undercover policeman, a brief passage that cycles through imagery of dynamite fiction (“Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical lecturer from a successful explosion,” 101) and fairytale (“as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad” 102). However,

after all, “[t]he Revolution is, for Robespierre, the immanent accomplishment of universal human reason in the political, social mode.” 201 i.e. “a form of irony which results from build-up (towards a climax) followed by let-down (or anticlimax).” Geoffrey Leech. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 150.

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this unveiling – like the other ‘paranoid readings’ of the seven mock-anarchists – only reveals a “commonplace” (102) figure that is unusable for the construction of alterity. As Dr. Bull takes off his tinted glasses, he emerges as a “boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an open expression, Cockney clothes like those of a city clerk” (102). While the “light-headed certainty” (101) of revealing another undercover policeman is greeted with relief in the diegesis, the novel also marks the loss of a figure of anarchist alterity. Without Bull, there is no suitably abject figure to be identified with Enlightenment reason gone awry, excessive materiality, nor with an impersonal calculus of abstract rationality. As a consequence of this failure of negation, Syme is “a little distrait” (103): “‘if this is all right, there were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the damned Council!’” (103) This surplus of order is all the more pronounced because it comes on the heels of a preceding collapse of racist alterity. This is not to say that the association of anarchist stereotypes with a non-white Other is questioned fundamentally by the novel. Rather, the problem set up by the narrative is that another white, male figure of the law lurks under the guise of “something merely grotesque, like a golliwog” (99). The appearance of another policeman underneath the ‘blackface’ masquerade undercuts the discursive conjunction of radical and racial Otherness which was to enable a countervailing self to signify its biologistic and political normativity in one fell swoop. It is crucial to pinpoint the political imaginary at work here: the exposure of the stereotype is presented as a reason to be ‘distrait’, while the racist imagery itself is not. The vanishing Otherness is just another step in the novel’s staging of the dwindling possibility of a “founding difference that has to be conceived as negativity, by which the social (in the sense of society) is prevented from closure and from becoming identical with itself.”202 As the ‘white’ face emerges from the minstrelsy203 and the figure of Bull discloses a material world beyond interpretation, that ‘self-identity’ can no longer be obfuscated by reference to an outside. In other words: without alterity, the ordered system exposes itself as closed and self-referential.204

202 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 5. 203 Michael Pickering. “‘Fun Without Vulgarity’? Commodity Racism and the Promotion of Blackface Fantasies.” Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism. Ed. Wulf D. Hund, Michael Pickering, and Anandi Ramamurthy. Münster: LIT, 2013. 119–144. 123. 204 Cf. Gunther Teubner. “Dilemmas of Law in the Welfare State.” An Introduction to Law and Regulation: Text and Materials. Ed. Bronwen Morgan and Karen Yeung. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 70–74. 70. “[S]elf-referential systems, being closed systems of self-producing interactions, are, necessarily at the same time, open systems with boundary trespassing processes.” It is

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These failures of maintaining an Other can be extended to the disguises chosen by the policemen more generally. In each case, one distinguishing feature suffices to create the impression of an anarchist heterostereotype. Each secret agent displays a “demoniac detail somewhere,” something “perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human” (58). These departures from the ‘norm’ include: the pose of “intellectual torture” (58) displayed by the pathological sceptic; the discursive conflation of Russian nihilism and anarchism evinced by “Gogol, a man more obviously mad” (59); the excess of Orientalist clichés associated with the French Marquis; the vaguely Schopenhauerian philosophy of the ‘German’ anarchist;205 and, finally, the scientistic rationalism of Dr Bull, underscored by the mere addition of his spectacles: “When once my eyes were covered, all the rest, smile and big shoulders and short hair, made me look a perfect little devil” (104). The “queer difference” (102) of radical cliché allows for a broad range of Otherness, briefly evoking entire alternate genres. For instance, the Marquis prompts the historical reverie of “some swarthy despot, half Greek, half Asiatic” (110), which leads Syme to imagine an exoticised image of the “brown-gold face of such a tyrant [. . .] shown against the dark green olives and the burning blue” (110). What is gained by these extensions of the anarchist heterostereotype is the ongoing possibility of depoliticisation. That is to say: in the novel’s political imaginary, anarchists are to be dissociated from the historical demands and tactics of radical movements. By removing concrete revolutionary politics, the heterostereotype is geared towards a “de-politicisation” which seeks, in Rancière’s terms, “to secularize politics, to demilitarize and diminish it, to remove everything in it which is not functionally ordained for maximizing the chances of success for collective being.”206 Amidst the proliferating clichés, that is to say, the critique of the state and redistributive ideals of anarchism are lost entirely. This strategy, which deprives anarchism of political relevance (and of its resurgence around 1908207), however, functions too well for its own good. this “linkage between internalizing self-referential mechanisms and externalizing environment exchange mechanisms” that comes under pressure during these final unveilings: the environment is shown to always already have been a part of the ‘self-producing interactions’ of the policemen. 205 Cf. Michael Shallcross. Rethinking G. K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. 46. 206 Jacques Rancière. On the Shores of Politics. Trans. Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso, 1995. 11. 207 Richard Bach Jensen. “The United States, International Policing and the War against Anarchist Terrorism, 1900–1914.” Terrorism: The First or Anarchist Wave. Ed. David C. Rapoport. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 369–400. Especially in the US, this period marks a

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Instead of ‘diminishing’ anarchism, the policemen’s charade only expands the discursive areas no longer consigned to alterity once the masks come off. The eventual removal of ‘queer difference’ precludes the possibility of antagonism altogether. Unmasking each other, the protagonists reduce the political “to its function as a pacifying procedure between individuals and collectivity by relieving it of the weight and symbols of social division.”208 What materialises as a result is the unitary “One of rational coming together”209— a far more forbidding prospect than any threat of anarchist ‘dynamite outrage’ could ever be. Without the dragon, there is no heroic myth, as the narrator explains early on; concomitantly, without a “perfect little devil” (104) there is no heroic posture of upholding order. To keep depoliticisation from becoming too successful, the unmasking, then, has to be connected with ever-renewed prospects of alterity in the offing, a deferred Other who can incarnate the ‘weight and symbols of social division’ without actually endangering the normative side of that division. Only on this condition can anarchism furnish symbolic alterity: the movement is reconfigured as artistic practice, racial stereotype, or grotesque physicality, as whatever is to be excluded from an ever-changing, dynamic norm — whilst being denied any antagonistic political status. This depoliticisation works against the abovementioned gesture of suspicion, which purports to disclose the ferment of revolution beneath the surface of society. According to such a view, as a rather dramatic 1871 interviewer puts it to Marx, the working class can appear as a “Janus figure with a fair, honest workman’s smile on one of its faces, and on the other, a murderous conspirator’s scowl.”210 Chesterton’s literary ideology offers two strategies of depoliticisation by means of which this disclosure can be put off. Firstly, the novel enacts a (1) reversal of fearmongering journalistic accounts of internationalist socialism. Rather than suspecting a revolutionary substratum beneath the placid surface of society, the novel’s successive reversals accomplish the opposite: beneath every ‘conspirator’s scowl’, it is the ‘honest workman’s smile’ that discloses itself as soon as the anarchist disguise is removed. This about-

popular resurgence of anarchism (as a popular mode of thought and organisation), with Emma Goldman touring the country to great popular acclaim: “During the winter of 1907–1908, a severe economic crisis and resulting unemployment left many workers receptive to the ideas of the ‘reds’, the anarchists, socialists and other radicals.” (386) 208 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 11. 209 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 11. 210 R. Landor. “Interview with Karl Marx, Head of L’Internationale.” New York World 18 July 1871. Qtd. in Matthew Beaumont. Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005. 148.

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face, however, proves threatening to ongoing relational self-determination, which, after all, requires anarchist transgression to evoke a normative status. Thus, what emerges from the unveilings is the possibility of finding beneath the rote stereotype a set of norms that do not require any further interpretation whatsoever. Hidden behind the reflexive surface of the anarchist’s spectacles, there is a figure so ordinary as to disincline the narrator to go to further descriptive efforts. The same goes for the conversion narratives, which recount how each character came to inhabit an anarchist role. These become more perfunctory with each unmasking. Instead of belabouring their origin stories, narrative emphasis shifts to the second strategy of depoliticisation, namely (2) elaboration. Sepcifically, stereotypes are expanded to include ever-more expansive domains. For example, the intradiegetic story of the anarchist impostor who impersonates “the great German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms” (89), remains markedly paratactic and linear — until the moment he adopts the “caricature” (90) of the Professor, which enables him to invent pseudo-philosophical jargon with illicit glee. As a result, he proves more convincing than the template he is based on. In order to enable such play-acting, this model holds at bay the mere reversal of the heterostereotype of the ‘Janus-faced working-man’. Instead, the plot relies on each unmasking being succeeded by a renewed set of associations applied to the next figure of alterity. This multiplication of alterity is maintained against the horizon of a normative sphere that remains unmarked, allowing no progressive differentiation from a figure of Otherness. Anarchism – in this literary iteration which expands its discursive reach yet sublates its political content – is presented as a necessity, to be approached in ever-new endeavours of extracting it from “demoniac details” (58). The anarchist council is required so that the protagonist, while seated at the conspirators’ table, can be shown to feel “his sense of something spiritually queer return” (58). The very itemisation of the types of deviation allows for the “tenth or twentieth glance” (58) to be applied over and over, with scopophilic pleasure. In the early modernist political imaginary, invoked once more with hyperbolic emphasis, only the determination of what is ‘not normal’ leads to variable attempts of determining a countervailing norm.211

211 In Burrow’s terms, the “queer sensations” associated with a council made up of hypostasised, conspicuously literary, and generically productive figures of Otherness are aligned with the “‘irrealist’ strand in Chesterton’s fiction,” which “serves a conservative – even, perhaps, defensive – tendency to disavow a queerness that nonetheless remains at all times proximate.” Merrick Burrow. “Queer Clubs and Queer Trades: G. K. Chesterton, Homosociality and the

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The depoliticised anarchist stereotype allows for the exploration of ‘queer’ identities on the condition of the ongoing fabrication of political alterity. Simultaneously, however, this need for the Other casts doubt on the possibility of a normative identity that would be ‘tellable’ in its own right.212 Accordingly, while still in disguise, one counterfeit anarchist structurally prefigures the dual status that is, ultimately, accorded to the God-like figure of Sunday: “But the head upon that bounding body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a lecturer upon the body of a harlequin.” (78) It is this incongruity, for all its diegetic horror, that constitutes the function of anarchism; the ‘harlequin’, after all, provides the body that cannot be reconciled with the assumption of a default order underlying the world of the novel or, indeed, the novel itself. Without the carnivalesque anarchic supplement, what remains is a proliferation of order, an uncontainable readability of the self. Anarchism, thus, has to be doubly removed to make it productive for non-realist generic diffusion. Only if it is both disavowed from its principles (“self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid,”213 in Graeber’s pithy definition) yet nonetheless maintained as variable Other striating any determinate identity can it be made functional for the re-definition of the main protagonist and narrative form alike. Anarchy assumes the role of expansive difference that Julian Wolfreys has shown for Chesterton’s London: “its strangeness and charm, however occasionally threatening in Chesterton that might seem, is in what comes to pass, perceived in a moment or not at all between the materiality of place and the perception of the subject open to chance, alterity and the apperception of difference.”214 Thus, the maintenance, or even expansion of anarchism to transcendent proportions depends on the possibility of estrangement, and with it the possibility of ever-renewed, normative ‘refamiliarisation’. Neither the narrative nor the pursuit of order in the storyworld can do without adding the harlequin’s body to the lecturer’s head, the spectacles to the bland clerk, and, ultimately, the “back” to the kindly, paternal “face” (169) of God — who, without an anarchist strain, would disclose a merely human norm, as bathetic and disappointing a theodicy as the individual explanations of how regular citizens came to go undercover as anarchist grotesques.

City.” G. K. Chesterton, London, and Modernity. Ed. Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 113–134. 114. 212 Ryan, “Tellability,” 589. 213 Graeber, “The Twilight of Vanguardism,” 303. 214 Julian Wolfreys. “The Unremarkable Chesterton.” G. K. Chesterton, London, and Modernity. Ed. Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 229–244. 231.

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What is required as an alternative to self-referential normativity is an alterity that remains constitutively undisclosed. In this reconstitution of anarchy, masks incite further reckoning with an oppositional Other rather than hiding variations of a monotonous order. Alterity of this kind offers the opportunity for an ongoing reckoning with the outside of normativity. This return to relational self-determination by way of anarchy is prefigured in the description of Saffron Park opening the novel. The view that is required to appreciate the architectural result of a “speculative builder” (9) requires an adjustment of perspective: “The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream.” (9) This mode of ‘regarding’ doubles as the model for the restitution of an anarchist Other. Instead of a ‘deception’ hiding a normative sphere, the ‘dream’ of alterity has to be placed outside of the purview of unmasking. To delay the unproductive presence of self-same identity, anarchy is to be internalised — as a “dream” reappearing both in the individual worldviews of the characters, in the oneiric narrative itself, and ultimately in the figure of Sunday. The latter guarantee of difference is crucial: an undivided divine presence beyond law and anarchy would render both sides deceptions, and the disclosure of the divine just another deflationary loss of alterity. To avoid this, the mask of the anarchist is (literally and metaphorically) expanded to prevent the possibility of unveiling. Specifically, in his final appearance before Syme’s awakening, Sunday’s face “grew larger and larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky” (183). This, then, is the final transposition of anarchy offered by the novel: against an insistently interpretable world on the verge of toppling into homogenous identity, anarchy is required not as a political movement, but as the very principle of difference interrupting the reproduction of the self-same. The expanding mask is all the more necessary in light of the transformation of the final anarchist figure into a literally card-carrying figure of the law: “‘I am a detective from Scotland Yard,’ and he took a small blue card from his pocket” (150). It is here that the story reaches its anticlimax: “‘There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council’, he said. ‘We were all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other’.” (150) This disclosure of the constructedness of the anarchist heterostereotype threatens to collapse the novel’s very capacity of ensuring plot progression. After all, in the characteristic manner of the early modernist political imaginary, the notion of an eventful border-crossing requires, first and foremost, the creation and reification of a boundary — an anarchist sphere set off from its lawful counterpart. As ‘anarchism’ becomes a single, differential sign in the diegesis, a ‘queer difference’ as easily removed as it is added, Syme finds himself in an environment in which it no longer appears

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possible to draw a distinction between self and Other at all: “He felt almost inclined to ask after all these bewilderments what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that was apart from what it seemed?” (127). As the protagonist finds himself bereft of the ascription and elaboration of anarchism, he not only loses track of contingent political differences, but of political difference as such: the failure to discern the ‘what’ (rather than the specific ‘who’) of friend and foe indicates, in Marchart’s terms, the loss of “the principle of autonomy of politics, or the moment of institution of society.”215 No longer can Syme engage in the perpetual chase after a figure of Otherness in hopes of demarcating, in return, his own self-image as representative of order. As a consequence, we are told, “[h]e had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe” (127). ‘Impressionism’ here betokens the return to the novel’s initial representation of the diegetic world filtered through the protagonist’s consciousness, without any hope for external reference to an essential Other. As ‘nothing is apart from what it seems’, Syme is once more confronted with the constellation of the “red river reflect[ing] the red sky, and both reflect[ing] his anger” (42). Wherever he turns, he sees variations of himself — including the narrator, whose distance is relinquished in favour of internal focalisation. In contrast to the previous instance of a subjective world, however, this all-pervading subjectivity – which cannot be displaced onto a deviant anarchist – remains unalleviated by the polyphonic mingling of Miltonian epic or the fantastic. No disruption of identity is forthcoming. What results is a world confusingly extended across mixed media, both a “chaos of chiaroscuro” and the “dizziness of a cinematograph” (126): Even the solid figures walking with him Syme could hardly see for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them. Now a man’s head was lit as with a light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated; now again he had strong and staring white hands with the face of a negro. The ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and the black shade of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that it seemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their pursuers. The fancy tinted Syme’s overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men’s faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and turned into other people. (126)

215 Marchart. Post-Foundational, 8.

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This intermedial confusion intercuts categories which, in the insistently racialised imaginary of the novel, should appear distinct: the ‘lit’ man’s head appears in conjunction with the ‘face of a negro’, with the latter thereby appearing as a special case of ‘man’ as such. This blurring with an imagined racial Other cannot, like the temporary appearance of one of the disguised detectives as “something merely grotesque, like a gollywog” (99), be dispelled by reverse paranoid reading. That approach had previously revealed a white, “very good and rather commonplace” (102) cockney everyman, an unthreateningly docile worker underneath the guise of the racist stereotype. As against such successive unmaskings, the impressionist chiaroscuro – in Urmila Seshagiri’s terms – “suggests the multilayered racial modes that constitute the modern subject” in the manner of painterly “works that would depict a single figure through simultaneous, competing, and racially coded perspectives.”216 In Thursday’s impressionist loss of order, this ‘racially coded’ instability is presented as distinct from the previous attempts to stabilise a doubly threatening figure, rejected as nonwhite and politically radical alike. In the forest, the discursive juxtaposition of anarchism and race gives way to a flickering between identity and alterity. As the traits condensed in the political and racial Other circulate indiscriminately, the arbiters of political difference lose track of the norms they claim to enforce. What sets the impressionist breakdown apart from the preceding shift in the novel, in which its narrative pivots from an epistemological to an ontological dominant? Previously – like the ‘evil freedom’ displayed by Conrad’s Assistant Commissioner in the anarchic cityscape – the dissolution of ordering categories in Thursday could still be imagined as a mere prelude to their reconstitution. The polyphonic “landscape of a new planet” (49), that is to say, was still oriented towards the possibility of reconstituting ‘sanity’ against a monstrous alterity of a ‘dragon’, a reconstituted, stabilising image of “grotesque” evil standing in for the more thoroughgoing scepticism of the “evil philosopher” (46). In this way, anarchism was functionalised for a ‘re-enchantment’ of a world which at the beginning of the novels appeared on the

216 Urmila Seshagiri. Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2010. 45. Seshagiri does not restrict this to ‘impressionism’, but extends it to “cubist, vorticist, and futurist” art. In an art-historical context these can also be seen to be implied in the overarching ‘impressionist’ descriptor, not least since the concern with masks and race could also refer to the recurring ‘African theme’ in the work of Picasso (from 1906–1909). Cf. also David Richards. Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 293.

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verge of a reduction to abhorred materiality.217 In contrast to the Impressionist levelling of distinctions, such re-enchantment requires the protagonist to posit a stark conceptual difference between order and anarchy, as well as a descriptive mode fitting even ancillary details of the storyworld into this imagined antagonism. Thus, the“lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren” (17), an all-too material marker of disenchantment, cycles through iterations as a “strange ecclesiastical lamp” (138) in a confusing darkness, before it finally enters the carnivalesque scene of “a dancing lamp-post, a dancing apple-tree” (177) in the post-binary realm of Sunday. These processual identity-stabilising distinctions ensure “semiotic dynamism.”218 By constructing and discarding anarchists, the representatives of order ensure the perpetual search for new signs of alterity that require complementary self-definition. This function of anarchy, however, is far off in the intermedial, impressionist chiaroscuro: there is nobody left to unmask, leading not only to fragmentation of the represented world but to the recurrence of the limit figure of racial (rather than anarchist) Otherness in the self. As a result, Chesterton’s figure of normative order finds his very process of relational self-definition arrested: “faces turned black and white by turns,” what is more, are not presented as conspicuous clichés in the manner of the policemen’s farcical removal of “beards and their spectacles and their noses” (127) or the literal underground. As opposed to those modes of semiotic play, the black mask does not come off. What is more, its circulation dismantles the dichotomy between disguise and reality entirely: “Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything?” (126) The re-entry of ‘blackness’ into the chiaroscuro contrasts with anarchism as political Other. The radical sphere, after all, is disclosed as hyperbolic and fictional from the outset. Precisely because the anarchists are inititally stereotypical figures meeting in bomb-lined caves, however, the notion of a root cause underlying these dynamite fictions could be upheld: underneath the play of fictions, the policemen sought the “origin of those dreadful thoughts” (44), a comprehensive theory of all that has gone awry in modernity. Such detection of determinable origins is precluded by the racist nightmare of a ‘black face’ appearing where a “man’s head” (126) was expected.219 The Impressionist impossibility of demarcation relegates Syme to a sphere in which he can no longer embark on his processual detection of figures safely cordoned-off beyond the pale of his normative identity.

217 Cf. Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. 218 Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. London and New York: Tauris, 1990. 134. 219 Despite its ostensibly anti-impressionist impetus, the evocation of ‘impressionism’ in the novel is subject to the same critique Achebe levels at Heart of Darkness: It reduces non-

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Can demarcation be restored after the chiaroscuro? To answer this question, the novel follows up the impressionist shock with an ekphrastic image which appears to return the visual field to a relational and negotiable image of Otherness. Specifically, after the dissolution of the self in the forest, the group encounters a French peasant in a pastoral scene. In contrast to the previous confusion of racial identity, this figure offers a salvaging of “good sense” (128): “his swarthy figure stood dark against a square of sunlight, almost like some allegoric figure of labour frescoed on a ground of gold” (128). ‘Allegoric’ does double duty in this sentence. Not only does the figure allegorise a banal image of rural, rooted, and endemic prosperity, replacing the identity crisis of impressionism with a facile emblem of belonging. What is more, the peasant is associated with the very possibility of allegory as such. Allegory – as opposed to the chiaroscuro’s “patterns of sun and shade” (128) and its levelling of semantic hierarchies in rapid metonymic series – here maintains the possibility of a latent meaning underlying and generating the manifest image. This hope for allegory revives what Scott Freer calls the task “of the allegorical interpreter [. . .] to bring to the surface an assumed pre-existent truth,” with a “logical correlation presumed between what is manifest and latent.”220 In this, the ‘allegorical figure of labour’ is not unlike the masks that Syme misses during the foray into the ‘floorless’ universe of the woods. The very return to an explicitly allegorical mode appears to enable a autostereotype of someone who, “at least, will never be an anarchist” (128) against racially charged impressionism. After all, the manufactured conjunction of blackness and anarchism – “if they blacked my face I might look like a negro anarchist” (104) – becomes unstable in the chiaroscuro. Against this predicament, the “swarthy” (yet reassuringly white) “Norman” of “good sense” (128) provides a normative counter-model. The allegory of correct seeing, however, ultimately fails to entirely dispel the dispersed woodland signs. After all, the “almost awful actuality” (128) of the allegorical figure is itself associated with the “bottomless gravity of small necessary toils” (129), a formulation that recalls the preceding “scepticism which can find no floor to the universe” (129) — ‘bottomlessness’ replaces ‘floorlessness’

Western peoples to “props for the break-up of one petty European mind.” Chinua Achebe. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 1783–1794. 1790. Cf. also Jesse Matz. Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Comtemporary Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. 133. 220 Scott Freer. Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2015. 78. This is Freer’s summary of a ‘modern metaphorical schema’ enacted by Freud (which is destabilised by ‘modernist mythopoieia’).

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without restoring certainty. The return to normativity, whiteness, and certainty proves tenuous. Rather than returning to a ground of political difference, the allegorical figure extends scepticism to the reading process as such. After the series of unmaskings, no singular, normative figure can embody lost assurances of ‘sanity’. What follows once more shows the ineluctable necessity of alterity in the early modernist political imaginary: even this image of completed, allegorical meaning must be diffracted by ineradicable anarchist traits. If the forest marks the absolute loss of distinctions, the Norman allegory indicates the opposite danger of an overly simplistic identity. Undivided and static, the emblem blocks any further interpretative engagement — which is reignited only by interspersing traits previously consigned to the ‘radical’. The consequent introduction of the anarchic into the allegory does not stop at an indication of its ‘bottomlessness’. What is more, the woodcutter later appears as a part of the pursuing mob, which, in a final act of unmasking, is shown to consist of figures of ‘sanity’ who have, in turn, mistaken the detectives for anarchists. In this way, instead of a straightforward “allegoric figure of labour” (129) in the diegetic sense of unalienated labour, the farmer also emerges as an allegory of interpretative ‘labour’. A temporary reintroduction to “The Earth in Anarchy” (134) is required to keep the novel from coalescing into the harmonious arrangement of an autostereotypical figure replacing the dissolution of the self in the chiaroscuro. Thus, the allegory has to “almost” (129) – but not quite – coalesce into a vision of rooted identity. The ‘almost’ keeps certainty at bay and inculcates the necessity to interrupt the allegory of selfhood with further approaches to anarchist alterity, without ever coalescing into a stable (and, most egregiously, static) image.221 After all, while Syme “had found in the heart of that sunsplashed wood what many modern painters had found there” (127), the novel has, in that extended passage, self-referentially provided an equivalent to the anarchic aesthetics that its protagonist has disavowed in the first chapter. While diegetically destabilising, the forest chiaroscuro, then, appears as a more valid ‘allegory’ of the reading process of Thursday as a whole than the stable allegorical reference to idealised rural labour ever could. After all, the latter closed, allegorical system dispenses with interpretation, as opposed to the

221 Cf. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 205. For de Man, likewise, the allegorical emerges as the impossibility of totalisation rather than a guarantor of closure: “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration. As distinguished from primary deconstructive narrative centred on figures and ultimately always on metaphor, we can call such narratives to the second or the third degree allegories.”

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profusion of questions (“Was there anything that was apart from what it seemed?” 127) occasioned by impressionism. It is precisely this questioning mode that also characterises the final appearance of Sunday as the figure underlying order and anarchy. While allegories do appear in the final chapter, they are not of the “almost” (129) closed, self-explanatory variety offered by the “heavy French peasant” (129), but rather presented as an unstable system, in which each allegorical position is beset by a constitutive, ‘anarchic’ destruction of its interpretative closure. Thus, impressionism is given its due: the questioning scepticism it inculcates makes Syme feel “[a]s a man in an evil dream” (127), just as the entire novel presents a “Nightmare” of universal anarchy in order to occasion the renewed determination of identity against it. The experience of anarchist aesthetics (in the diegesis and its formal equivalents) ensures an active interpretative engagement that can rest neither on any transcendent assurances nor on a self-evident allegorical reading. At this point, Thursday emerges as the polar opposite to Under Western Eyes and its presentation of the state of exception as a default mode of modern power. The absence of determinate alterity in Conrad’s novel culminates in the question ‘Where to?’ and the impossibility of maintaining the qualified, political life that Agamben describes as bios. In contrast to that resigned presentation of an exception-based mode of rule, Chesterton introduces a figure that supplies the absent ‘floor to the universe’: Sunday himself, the figure in the carpet of law and anarchy alike. This strange god restores the gurantees that appear lost after the processual unveiling of anarchist Others has stalled. He does this by supplying an absent ground and reinstating proliferating figures of relational alterity. At the same time, however, Sunday remains an unrepresentable figure of alienity inaccessible to metaphorical or allegorical recuperation.

5.2.2 Recovery of the Anarchist Deep-Structure The function of Sunday is introduced during the “Pursuit of the President” (151) that makes up the novel’s penultimate chapter. Having exposed their mutual reliance on anarchists as fabricated heterostereotypes, the policemen finally turn to the anarchist ringleader in a last effort to reinstate a “floor to the universe” (129). They seek, in other words, what Oliver Marchart describes as the ‘ground’ required by ‘foundationalist’ politics: “a principle is sought which is to ground politics from without. It is from this transcendent ground

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that the functioning of politics is claimed to be derived.”222 Instead of supplying the principle for restoring political identity and alterity, however, not only does Sunday flee from the policemen who aim to include him as the last element of their series of unmaskings; in doing so, he is also shown to present a polyvalent sign, deferring the hope that an ultimate ground (or ‘floor’) might be restored to any social sphere: “I? What am I?” roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. “You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. [. . .] Before one of them could move, the monstrous man had swung himself like some huge ourang-outang over the balustrade of the balcony. (154)

Sunday explicitly disavows the search for an “origin” (45) that was presented as the motivation for Syme’s recruitment to the police force. The hermeneutic optimism of his recruiting officer implied that the play of signifiers could at last be arrested by a negative principle of anarchy detected in modernity and recovered from the symptomatic reading of a sonnet. Sunday’s monologue dispels this possibility of authoritative demarcation, whether it be sought in science or poetry. Crucially, this avowed impossibility, however, is not presented as a matter of resigned acceptance, but as the incitement to an ever-renewed negotiation of antagonistic positions. 5.2.2.1 Sunday as Excess The proscription against unequivocally coming to terms with Sunday as the figure who both “made you all policemen” (155) and presided over the anarchist council is formulated as a challenge. This is not only a result of the imperative form of Sunday’s speech, but also a function of his description as an ‘ourangoutan’ directly after asserting the inexhaustible multiplicity of meaning he incarnates. The narrative has already presented the anarchist poet Lucian as a “blend of the angel and the ape” (10) in the first chapter, thereby reproducing the stereotypical association of anarchists with Social Darwinist regression.223 From this angle of ‘degenerationist’ discourses, the ‘apish’ status of Sunday dispels an immediate identification as a divine figure. The reader is incited to bring to bear cultural knowledge regarding anarchism, only to be brought up short in these attempts to constrain the range of Sunday’s suggested meanings — or rather,

222 Cf. Marchart, Political Difference, 12. 223 Nordau, Degeneration, 409.

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absences of meaning in “the roots of those trees” and the “morning clouds” alike. Thus, apart from an orang-utan, Sunday is also a “wolf” hunted by “kings and sages, and poets and law-givers” (155) a scenario loosely associating him with a Hobbesian state of nature.224 As a wolf evading capture, Sunday incarnates a pre-cultural stage ostensibly replaced by the rule of law, yet remaining as an ineradicable remainder. Lest this turn into a fully-fledged allegory, however, the strange divinity is also shown to be “bouncing on the stones below like a great ball of india-rubber” (155). Political theology and a rubber ball — no stable tertium comparationis immediately connects these contrasting ascriptions. This incongruity is all the more acute because the attributes are introduced on different narrative levels: the epic scope and elevated register of Sunday’s homiletic self-description is immediately contrasted with his movement in the diegesis and the farcical ‘bouncing’ qualities ascribed to him by the narrator. The figure at the origin of civilisation runs up against Sunday’s flight in the storworld, the latter of which involves narrow escapes via balloon or elephant escalating into all-out “slapstick modernism.”225 Fleeing from recuperation by the present-day ‘law-givers’ surrounding Syme, Sunday maintains polyphony as a productive principle inciting and deferring interpretation.226 That he does occasionally touch the floor in his bouncing-ball flight, however, shows that he offers occasional grounds for ongoing speculation. His different incarnations introduce jarring shifts of tone and genre, yet provide

224 Cf. Thomas Hobbes. “The Epistle.” De Cive. Ed. Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 23–28. 24. “To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe.” For Chesterton’s criticism of Hobbes’ “despotic theory of the State,” cf. “March 2, 1935: The New Interest in History.” The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Vol. XXXVII: The Illustrated London News, 1935–1936. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2012. 225 William Solomon. Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2016. The very description of Sunday bounding like ‘India rubber’ not only echoes the “India rubber ball” (94) that serves as a fetishized detonator in The Secret Agent. What is more, the comparison of the god with a commodity – the components of which are the result of colonial extraction no less – also supports Solomon’s contention in Slapstick Modernism that “the differences and similarities between modernist writing and slapstick film can be measured most effectively when both are understood in critical relation to socioeconomic forces of capitalist modernity” (7). 226 Cf. Bakhtin, Problems, 18. Polyphony “is constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other.”

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enough fragments so as to suggest that they could, conceivably, coalesce into a quasi-divine authoritative centre. In other words: Sunday can be traced, a process that the novel opposes to the impressionist wavering between different perceptual modes without any “floor” (127) whatsoever. As opposed to the loss of a determining principle during the forest chiaroscuro, Sunday is associated with the certainty of a final, determining deep structure — albeit one that remains constitutively unreachable. In contrast to a controlled Other defined solely by its relationship to an autostereotypical identity, meanwhile, Sunday is in excess of any closed system. To this end, it is only upon withdrawing that his ineffable truth can be approached in ever new, failing interpretative endeavours. Although these can only ever produce self-referential models of truth (the “roots of those trees” of science; the “truth of the last tree” assigned to poetry; 154), such attempts can at least point to an ever-receding ‘origin’ beyond contingent determinations of self and Other. This approach, to be pursued by each protagonist by their own lights, grants a unique ‘indicative’ function to each style of thought brought to bear on the fleeing divinity. That he emboldens each particular mode of inquiry – and affirms their incommensurability as the very condition of their approach to his own, paradoxical status – fundamentally sets apart the interpretation of Sunday from the enforced citationality of Under Western Eyes. While Sunday instructs his interlocutors to “grub” and “see” (154) – however unsuccessful the result – Conrad’s political novel never replaces the dissolution of the initial patrilinear, state-bound mode of political thought with any viable alternative. 5.2.2.2 Sunday as Absent Author These renewed interpretative possibilities are established programmatically in the course of Sunday’s escape. Pursued by all six former undercover detectives, not only does he abscond with an escalating series of escape vehicles, which far remove him from any lingering realist constraints. What is more, it is the very announcement of his own quasi-authorial role in the entire narrative (“I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen” 155) that paradoxically denies his status as an authority plotting the remainder of the novel. Instead of such foundational certainty, Sunday replaces any intention with a disconnected array of texts. During his flight, Sunday leaves behind literal textual fragments which further refract the polyvalent status introduced by the incompatible descriptions as wolf and rubber-ball. A “bulky parcel,” for instance, “was found to consist of thirty-three pieces of paper of no value wrapped one round the other. When the last covering was torn away it reduced itself to a small slip of paper on which was written: The word, I fancy, should be ‘pink.’”

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(160). This “bravado of meaningful meaninglessness,”227 as Caserio calls it, is accomplished by the allusion to a contextual environment which, upon its disclosure, would make sense of the fragments. In this case, such context would be provided by the question to which the missive might be the ‘answer’, or the sentence in which “[t]he word” (160) could be ‘fancied’ to be correct. The inquiry, then, is redirected in the way R. G. Collingwood describes in his Autobiography, in which he counsels against confusing meaning with a “perfectly truthful intention” that could be conveyed “with perfect command of language.” Collingwood instead conceives of an artist’s creation as the answer to an absent question: “In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer.”228 From this angle of inferred questions, the policemen may be too quick to dismiss the “thirty-three pieces pf paper” surrounding the note as having “no value” (160). After all, as per Collingwood (and Sunday), the contextual and interpretative presuppositions made on the part of the originators and interpreters of a message alike are more relevant than any kernel to be extracted from it.229 The process of surmising a question, however, already takes us far afield from an author conveying a ‘perfectly truthful intention’. What is in the originator’s ‘own mind’ is tenuous, changeable, inflected by material circumstances and changing aesthetic preoccupations — and, in this, resembles the interpretative processes that attempt to uncover it. In Thursday, this is literalised by another fragment, this one addressed to Dr Bull, with a very long, and it is to be feared partly ironical, string of letters after his name. Dr. Bull’s address was, at any rate, considerably longer than his communication, for the communication consisted entirely of the words: What about Martin Tupper now (156)

In this note, authorship and oeuvre are offered as the context which would supply the missing answer to the riddles performed by Sunday. After all, the 227 Robert L. Caserio. “G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism.” Bloom’s Critical Views: G. K. Chesterton. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2006. 151–170. 164. 228 R. G. Collingwood. An Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1939. 31. 229 It is in this sense that Thursday can be tentatively reclaimed for modernism, despite Chesterton’s extraliterary excoriations of avantgarde aesthetics and the satire of the “revolting” ‘decadent’ artists in the first chapter. Thursday negotiates a concept of modernism as a ‘two-sided’ structure: “a side that is multiple and ambiguous in meaning, and a side in which there is a contrasting unequivocal resolution of multiplicity and ambiguity.” Robert L. Caserio. “G. K. Chesterton and the Terrorist God Outside Modernism.” Bloom’s Critical Views: G. K. Chesterton. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2006. 151–170. 155.

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reference to the once-popular 19th century author indicates a body of work attributed to that name, thus promising a much-needed causal connection. What is specific about this author, however? Martin Tupper enjoyed enormous publishing success with his Proverbial Philosophy in 1838, yet had long since fallen out of favour at the time of the composition of Thursday: “by the end of his life, ‘Tupperish’ was a term of literary derision.”230 In this vein, Karl Marx invokes the didactic commonplaces of the Philosophy to undercut the discursive authority of classical political philosophy: “Jeremy Bentham, that soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle of the ‘common sense’ of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie” is “among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.”231 Under these circumstances, the promise of authorship, as well as the implied homology with Sunday ‘authoring’ the police/anarchism plot, becomes tenuous. Referring to the waning authority of Tupper, Sunday’s question parodies the notion of a constant attribution of value unaffected by changing circumstances. As a metonym for his works, ‘Martin Tupper’ is subject to a drift of reading habits and interpretations that makes erstwhile commonplaces far from commonly accepted in the diegetic present. The author, then, is as mutable as his work: “Martin Tupper now” is fundamentally distinct from what ‘Martin Tupper’ evoked then. While the seemingly immediate association of author and work suggests an abiding present in which commonplace causality between sign and meaning is assured, ‘now’ extends the temporality of text, context and interpretation: it could refer to contemporary assumptions about the author more generally, to the immediate context of the chase, or even to the position of this fragment in a series of notes, in which ‘now’ marks the purely relational meaning determined by the notes ‘before’ and ‘after’. Authorship – and the expectation of an origin and an authoritative meaning to be recovered – becomes irretrievable as ‘Tupper’ recurs at different times of writing and interpreting. In almost programmatic contrast to ‘commonplace’, Sunday’s note diffracts any reading that woul bestow stable meaning on the textual remnants. With each added missive, Sunday raises such an expectation of a kernel of truth that would not only be synonymous with his design, but also with Chesterton’s. However, instead of finally uncovering a deep-structure apart from the sign systems by means of which it is expressed, each successive note establishes Sunday as a bricoleur. That is, in Barthes’ 230 Brent L. Gibson. “Tupper, Martin Farquhar (1810–1889).” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. 747–748. 747. 231 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 758.

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terms, he creates a fractured, “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. [. . .] His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them.”232 Any critical approach to Thursday has to resist the association of Chesterton with the “message” of the “Author-God”233 translated via the divine proxy of Sunday. At the very least, such hermeneutic optimism is dispelled by the narrative itself, in which the expected context never materialises, the innermost kernel of each package requires further unpacking, and the ultimate authorial intention quite literally cannot be arrested. Sunday’s represented signifying practices associate this god with nested intertexts. He relinquishes any originality outside of cut-ups of other texts. These are detached from any reading communities and contexts in which they might have been understood. Sunday’s fragments, then, are “never unitary.” They would be so only as an “abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it.”234 However, they refuse such a level of abstraction — just as Sunday himself appears primarily as the rupture of any abstract conceptual system. This does not devalue the protagonists’ efforts or even disparage their respective ideological systems. Rather, the proliferating fragments show that the context capable of suturing the bricolage into a temporary alignment cannot come from without. As Marchart puts it, from a post-foundational perspective, ‘partial groundings’ take the place of foundationalist certainty “within a field of competing foundational attempts.”235 In just this manner, the competing attempts to connect the ‘competing’ notes and fragments to the underlying authority of Sunday provide a self-referential equivalent to the novel’s overall generic assemblage. His snippets take up poetry, proverbs, novelistic fragments or nonsense verse in the same way the text as a whole intermingles genres, without any of them providing a ‘foundationalist’ generic template. As per Bakhtin, this generic instability marks the “stratified and heteroglot” function of literary language more generally, as “[c]ertain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre.”236 In analogy to the rapid succession of features of detective

232 Roland Barthes. “The Death of the Author.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 874–877. 876. 233 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 876. 234 Mikhail Bakhtin. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259–422. 288. 235 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 7. 236 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 288.

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and dynamite fiction, epic, allegory, or psychological realism, the ultimate anarchist/policeman emerges as the sum of the incompatible accounts he leaves behind. Consequently, the quasi-divine figure is conspicuously dispersed into post-fundational literary signs and their competing interpretations, all of which remain partial and contingent. God, that is to say, appears as the destabilisation of sign systems rather than an affirmative guarantor of a transcendental sphere exceeding the characters’ language games.237 He ‘exists’ only as the excess of any norm, and as that norm’s attempt to recapture its own outside. This process, in bulk, points towards a potential “site of knowledge that is self-evident or indubitable,”238 and which Sunday both guarantees and withdraws. Sunday’s appearance as a fractured manifesto puts paid to the police model of interpretation, which originally sought to discern a stable alterity in any given ‘sonnet’. That such hermeneutic optimism is unwarranted finds programmatic expression as he throws one of his parcels “far up into the air, as a boy does a ball, meaning to catch it again. But at their rate of racing it fell far behind.” (160) This practice of mediation functions as a parody of the Enlightenment assumption that “the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly.”239 This, as Harvey puts it, “presumed that there existed a single correct mode of representation,”240 which, upon uncovering it, would yield categorical fixity. By contrast, Sunday’s presentation of the difference incurred by sheer reiteration makes it impossible to ‘catch again’ a self-same meaning through repeated procedures. The message, once it is subject to time, cannot be decoded in order to yield a kernel of truth; after all, upon its descent and deciphering, the context for the encoding of the next message has shifted irretrievably. Encoding and decoding are circumstantial, both taking place in irrecoverable environments composed and decomposed anew as the participants of the communicative situation ‘move’ through time. This process not only precludes direct communication of an unchanged message, but also alienates that very

237 Cf. Lucas H. Harriman. “The Russian Betrayal of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.” Comparative Literature 62 (2010). 41–51. As Harriman puts it, “Thursday appropriates the form of the detective novel – the classic vehicle for progression from unknowing to knowing – while repeatedly emphasizing the undecidability of any final epistemological conclusion.” (48) 238 J. Wentzel van Huysteen. Introduction. Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmanns, 1997. 1–8. 2. 239 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 27. 240 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 27.

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message from its originator as soon as it is granted medial form. This replacement of authority with circulation is, ultimately, not figured as a crisis, but rather offers respite. In a departure from the rhythmic circularity of mass culture at the end of The Secret Agent, Sunday offers a transfer of interpretative control. That is to say: his model of media shows the impossibility of ‘representing rightly’. If not even the divine figure reproduces the same meaning twice, there can be no catastrophic loss of binary order in the manner of Conrad’s political fiction. Rather, the poetics inscribed in Sunday’s media practice foster the acceptance of the merely partial meaning encoded in each sign system and transmitted by media. Rather than a fall into heterogeneity, the parcel thrown and left behind furthers efforts to recombine the extant material: “the recipient of the Chinese-box style package” says “nothing, but the movements of his hands and feet were like those of a man urging a horse to renewed efforts” (161). Thus, in Armstrong’s terms, the subject emerging from the Sunday collage “identifies the contingent and changeable with modernity and projects the unchangeable onto a ‘beyond’ which can never be achieved”241 — with the difference that this ‘beyond’ is also the ‘contingent and changeable’ within. Rather than eulogising lost unity, the fragment prepares its recipients for a permanent deferral of a complete account. As a result, rational detection is given up, at least insofar as it leads inevitably to an “epistemological conclusion”242 in the manner of detective fiction. The failure to encode a determinate kernel of truth, thus, lays the groundwork for the disclosure that the ‘perfect anarchist’ is at the same time the ultimate figure of police authority. 5.2.2.3 Sunday as Supplement After Sunday’s initial flight, the detectives attempt to come to an agreement on the essential characteristics of this figure instituting a play of differences yet exceeding any one positive formulation. Specifically, they do so after all the policemen have been unmasked and ‘anarchism’ has been exposed as the fabricated Other designed to prop up imagined selves. As a result, what was imagined as a foundational political difference has become a language game; and a particularly self-referential one at that: whereas in The Secret Agent, a residual system of demarcation still produces “[r]evolution, legality—counter moves in the same game,” Thursday allows for no such antagonism to be

241 Armstrong, Modernism, 9. 242 Heather Worthington. Key Concepts in Crime Fiction. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2011. 179.

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readily identified. If what remains of the Manichean split of order and anarchy is the addition of a single surplus sign – a mask, glasses, or a hat – in order to occasion each protagonist’s switch from alterity to identity, the very possibility of ascertaining classificatory order is no longer assured. What the characters are, consequently, shown to require is a transcendental signified guaranteeing ‘structurality’ from outside the set of differences that so far appeared to make up the storyworld. It is at this point that Sunday emerges as a guarantor of differential signs by sheer dint of remaining unamenable to reincorporation as just another difference. In Derrida’s terms, the impossibility of unmasking him in the manner of the faux-anarchists creates a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure – one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure – but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.243

During the pursuit of the bricolage deity, each character gives an account of such a ‘point of presence’ — however, as these are shown to be mutually incompatible, they fail to arrest the ‘freeplay’ of signs. The ‘fixed origins’ multiply, each detective’s monologue foregrounding a different “Nature of Things” (166). For the sceptically inclined Secretary, whose ‘real’ self is barely distinct from his assumed anarchist role, such a ‘point of presence’ is provided by imagining Sunday as “loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of everything I had ever read about the base origin of life – the deep sea lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like the final form of matter, the most shapeless and the most shameful.” (166) This strategy attempts to distance Sunday from a differential ‘freeplay’ of signifiers by placing him outside of the describable altogether, rendering him what Meillassoux calls an ancestral figure preceding any conceptual language and, thus, exceeding it.244 The ‘Professor’, meanwhile, is shown to avail himself of a different strategy. His rendering of Sunday aims for anthropomorphism, which is brought up short by its referent being “too large” and “too loose” (167). The individual components evade metonymical contiguity and are uncoupled from the ‘face’ by means of which the observer attempts to turn him into an interlocutor on a human scale: “The face was so big that one couldn’t focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away from the nose that it wasn’t an eye.” (167) Each of these accounts shares in the attempt to define Sunday as a structuring principle, only to encounter an excess that escapes

243 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 915. 244 For an account of the ‘ancestral’, cf. Quentin Meillassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London and New York: Continuum, 2009.

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the confines of the respective worldview. This appearance as a gap in the systems of knowledge negatively inscribes Sunday in the differential epistemology upheld by each detective. This conspicuous absence, in Slavoj Žižek’s terms, marks the “very point of utterly meaningless voidance brought about by a negativity which explodes the frame of balanced exchange.”245 This ‘voidance’ narrated in each of the policemen’s retrospective accounts shows that the failure of putting together the fragments in the diegetic present is not a one-off breakdown of interpretation. After all, there is no Sunday apart from the precise point at which he precludes protagonists from stabilising their respective model of understanding. At this point of incommensurability, the strange divine appears both as the apogee of the type of description employed and as the encapsulation of all that such a description cannot conceive on its own terms. Thus, rather than an Otherness impinging from without, the appearance of Sunday effects an alienation from within the respective system of language and thought. And, structurally, from within the storyworld: the estrangement that Viktor Shklovsky claims for art (and that modernist literature enacts as literary form) is here copied into the storyworld. Each character “describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time,” without having recourse to a second-order emerging context of literary experimentation that would allow the up-to-date reader to appreciate the effort “to make things ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult.”246 It is this diegetic defamiliarisation of hermeneutic routines, then, that puts the reader on equal footing with the protagonists: we have little reason to assume that our own, necessarily partial interpretation takes precedence over the grounding attempts that fail in the storyworld. In this performance of failure, Sunday allows his pursuers and his readers alike to assume a changed relation to their own meaning making. Sunday’s appearance as an excess internal to their own categories prompts an investigation of the autostereotypical assumptions they hold dear. For this reason, the Secretary perceives Sunday as “something both gross and sad in the Nature of Things” (166). From the first, this undercover anarchist selects the specific characteristics of the ‘dynamiter’ from the range of available radical stereotypes. To this figure, an explosion is an objective correlative to a sceptical inquiry which dismantles vaunted certainties. In other words: he extols the violent enactment

245 Slavoj Žižek. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 23. 246 Viktor Shklovsky. “Art as Technique.” Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3–25. 12–13.

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of the absence of an ultimate foundation (a “floor to the universe” 127) experienced in the chiaroscuro: “‘A man’s brain is a bomb,’ he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. ‘My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.’”(6) Approaching Sunday by means of this “sheer destructiveness of rationalistic scepticism,”247 the policeman-anarchist, however, encounters matter which resists the will to expansion of the human ‘brain’. The indivisible totality impervious to his violent proof, notably, is not an immaterial transcendence, but confronts the Secretary as an excess on his own, materialist terms. If the Secretary, that is to say, constructs a regress in which he destroys his objects of inquiry by attempting to bring them under his conceptual and material control, the divine counterpoises matter that cannot be ‘broken up’. Sunday, then, poses an immanent limit, which disabuses each protagonist in turn of their hetero-referential grasp of a “‘reality outside’ a semiotic system.”248 Thus, to the ‘Inspector’, Sunday appears as an excess of administrative banality: in an “ordinary office” (166), the divine appears as a fittingly commonplace figure in a “grey check coat, in broad daylight” (243). Here, it is is by the addition of “absent-mindedness” (167) that Sunday is estranged, bureaucratic “abstraction” becoming “innocent and pitiless” (243) in the wake of this detachment. In each of these cases, Sunday emerges — the hermeneutic system produces its own uninterpretability, on its own terms. This internal limit of the respective systems has to be differentiated from alterity (to wit: a relational Other functionalised for the stabilisation of an individual or collective self). Any possibility of setting apart an anarchic foil in this manner has been voided in the course of the unmaskings, not least since the figures of normativity emerging from the radical guises are beholden to incompatible ‘functional systems’.249 Whether they subscribe to administration, science, or poetry: no one figure of anarchist deviance can serve as the shared outside of all of these strategies of making sense. Thus, to differentiate it from relational

247 William L. Isley Jr. “Knowledge and Mystery in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.” Christianity and Literature 42 (1993). 279–294. 288. 248 Wolf, “Metareference,” 18. 249 “Functional differentiation means above all the operational closure of functional systems, too. This produces subsystems with capabilities that the overall networking of society – we could also say on the basis of language alone – could not supply. Subsystems assume universal competence for their specific functions.” Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1, 75. It is this assumption that is destabilised by the confrontation with other sub-systems with equal claims to ‘universal competence’; and that is dismantled entirely by the extraneous component of Sunday emerging from within the supposedly closed system.

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alterity, Sunday’s status as the limit of any one system is best-described as alienity. As Rottenburg puts it, alienity refers to phenomena regarding which “it seems highly unlikely that we could ever approach the absolutely strange or strictly heterogenous.”250 This approach is not least precluded since “if we can only talk about that which is strange in our own terminology, its strangeness threatens to be lost in the process.”251 While alterity, in Horst Turk’s use of these terms, describes “varieties of the same” on the basis of one system, alienity arises from different ‘systems references’ – and, consequently, refers to an Otherness not beholden to the requirements of a self.252 Since Sunday appears precisely as the impossibility of forming a systems-immanent alter ego, his “most shapeless and most shameless” (166) form can be taken to mark the end of complementary differentiation and the tipping-point into alienity. The policemen are estranged from their own categories, yet, to make matters more disconcerting, this estrangement is expressed in the very terms they assume to accurately describe the world. What ensues, then, is an ‘alienisation’ of alterity.253 Against the protagonists’ referential illusions, the alienity of Sunday is disclosed in the very “Nature of Things” (166), or indeed as the Nature of Things.254 In each of the conceptual systems in which the alienity of Sunday appears, he is presented in a manner that, in Derrida’s terms, can be described as “a fatal necessity inscribed in the very functioning of the sign.” He ensures, in other words, “that the substitute make one forget the vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements.”255 In this supplemental logic, the appearance of Sunday occasions frantic attempts to find “one thing to compare him to – the universe itself” (168). This sought-after universal referent

250 Rottenburg, “Social Constructivism,” 27. 251 Rottenburg, “Social Constructivism,” 27. 252 Turk, “Alienität,” 11. My trans. Orig. quote: “So ist der andere als alter ego ein ego wie ich, nur eben anders, d.h. dasselbe in einer Varietät.” 253 Turk, “Alienität,” 10. My trans. Orig. quote: “Denn die Entwicklung erschöpft sich nicht in einer fortschreitenden Einbürgerung oder Alterisierung des Alienen, sondern sie umfaßt auch eine beständige Fremdsetzung oder Alienisierung des Alteritären.” 254 Cf. also Cascardi’s contention that “the various modern disciplines and art forms were transformed by an engagement with the limits of the very elements that are most essential to them and by a discovery of their surprisingly intimate connection to those things that might have appeared most alien.” Anthony J. Cascardi. “Wittgenstein and Modernism in Literature: Between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.” Wittgenstein and Modernism. Ed. Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2017. 23–40. 24. 255 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144.

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“adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.”256 Rather than filling the empty place in a conceptual system, then, Sunday occupies that very gap, as a placeholder for an emptiness of which he remains a painful reminder. He stands for the incompleteness of expansive rationalism or administrative order, retroactively indicating the limits of their potential to ‘expand’. Accordingly, while Sunday is to guarantee a plenitude of meaning, he also appears as a “mark of an emptiness.”257 Rather than providing certainty, the emergence of Sunday, then, varies between two poles of ‘supplementarity’. Firstly, he does promise to quell the characters’ mounting uncertainties as he appears at the limits of their modes of knowing. That is, he appears as an element from outside, superadded to a system that would, without this supplement, remain woefully inadequate.258 After all, the Secretary, “a trifle morbid from the first,” suspects that there is “something in me that answered to the nerves in all these anarchic men” (166), a radical misalignment that Sunday merely “expressed to me” (166). As a result, for all that the Secretary’s “smile went crooked” (166), Sunday can be invested with the hope of explaining this condition, presenting a totality that the merely responsive nerves of the petitioner never could. It is Sunday in this sense, as ‘substitute’ for a lack, to whom the Secretary addresses his “most passionate appeals, and asked [his] most eloquent appeals.” (166) Sunday here incarnates “some secret malady” from which his interlocutor can take the solace “that it was something at least that such a monster could be miserable” (166). In other words: the anarchist/policeman encounters in Sunday something that responds to his appeal and substitutes for what is wanting in his system. However (and this introduces the second sense of supplementarity), Sunday does not commiserate: “And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me.” (166) Sunday’s laughter marks him as “a plenitude enriching another plenitude”259 rather then the answer to the Secretary’s pleas. Most notably, rather than a missing element added from outside, the temporality of the encounter becomes paradoxical at this point. After all, the strange God’s laughter precedes and includes the Secretary: “It is no small thing to be laughed at by something at once lower and stronger than oneself.” (166) Sunday, in this latter sense of ‘supplement’, does not fill a void but rather emerges from within the system that is to describe him.

256 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 145. 257 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 145. 258 For a precise account of this first sense of supplementarity, cf. Vernon W. Cisney. Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. 167. 259 Derrida, Grammatology, 144.

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The very element which is beyond the Secretary and subject to ‘eloquent’ questions turns out to be located within the question itself — and, by extension, in the questioner. The ‘bestial mountain shaking’ marks the surplus disrupting the explanatory system as an outgrowth of its own self-reproduction. That is to say: the laughter pre-empts both the commiseration and the answers sought by the Secretary, forcing him to ‘expand’ his materialism to an unthinkable scale below and above his mode of inquiry. Destabilisation by a surplus inside of the materialist imaginary, then, makes possible the appearance of Sunday as an outside, as a multiscale plenitude beyond understanding. This is no longer only the substitution for a lack, but a Sunday-shaped abundance that leads the Secretary’s system beyond its original purview. Consequently, like the supplement of Derrida’s Grammatology, the strange deity follows a logic whereby “[s]omething promises itself as it escapes, gives itself as it moves away, and strictly speaking it cannot even be presence.”260 In each of the reminiscences, the divine is both disturbingly present and was never there to begin with. Thus interspersed between external reference and self-reference, Sunday as alienity (rather than alterity) provides an ambivalent ‘re-enchantment’. Although Landy and Saler restrict this term to “secular and conscious strategies [. . .] held together by their common aim of filling a God-shaped void,”261 the supplemental (dis-)appearance of Sunday in each of the conceptual systems presents a more entangled trajectory: the void is a retroactive result of its supplementation by an element that supplants it — and that is, fundamentally, beyond ‘secular and conscious’ control. This, however, is the very condition for Chesterton’s version of reenchantment. A closed-off conceptual system unencumbered by the emergence and intervention of Sunday threatens to become eventless. Just as the the plot of Thursday structurally supplements the unmasking of all anarchists with the

260 Derrida, Grammatology, 154. 261 Cf. Landy/Saler, The Re-Enchantment of the World. For Landy and Saler, “there is a variety of secular and conscious strategies for re-enchantment, held together by their common aim of filling a God-shaped void” (2). To this end, “diversity is a positive requirement, since as Nietzsche understood so well, the God to be replaced served multiple functions simultaneously” (2). The plethora of biblical allusions, especially the template of the book of Job and Sunday’s final exclamation (“Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of” 183), does not detract from the commitment of Thursday to the perpetuation of a ‘God-shaped void’, and its focus on the strategies of ‘meaning making’ on secular as much as biblical grounds. Since the Secretary, for instance, relies on an evolutionary point of view, he perceives Sunday in terms of unformed biological matter. This dimension of a necessity of imputing a deep structure from within limited conceptual systems should dissuade us from the more hagiographic readings of Chesterton as a saintly proponent of Catholic dogma.

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frantic chase after Sunday, the redoubled breach of extant ideologies is necessary to avert the hubris of a world comprehensively explained. Sunday as a dissemination of disconnected signs and, conversely, as the gap disallowing the systematic closure of the respective conceptual systems, presents a counter-model to the mass-media fragmentation at the end of The Secret Agent. Conrad presents a city without illusions of order, as a result of which the mass-mediated repetition of headlines repeats indifferent alternatives rather than choosing between them. ‘This Act of Madness and Despair’ reverberates ad infinitum. Chesterton’s model of political authority is similarly predicated on a dispersal of signs, as the enactment of bricolage and ‘slapstick modernism’ have shown. However, rather than figures of uncertain authority exerting unaccountable authority in the wake of such loss of cohesion, Thursday interpolates the supplemental role of the strange divinity. That is: Sunday compounds fragmentation in order to restore to the individual the potential for certainty within their specific horizon. This process takes place on the basis of the awareness that any epistemological (let alone political) model will remain partial, contingent, and limited. Rather than an explicit agenda, this function of Sunday is inscribed in the very form of dissemination he enacts. In Antin’s terms, “collage elements are more or less free,” since they enable a “suppression of the ordering signs that would specify the ‘stronger logical relations’ among the presented elements.” Instead of “relations of implication, entailment, negation, subordination,” collage, then, enables a set of “ensemble relations.”262 Both Sunday’s flickering between external and internal supplement and his discarded hints create an ensemble of this kind. The most important ‘logical relation’ relinquished in the process is ‘negation’: Sunday affirms each model of understanding, after all, his destabilising laughter emerging as a result of incarnating it to a hyperbolic extent. In similarly unsettling acts of affirmation, the collage of fragments left behind by Sunday indicates a totality in which they might be integrated — while, at the same time, they exhibit the absence of that totality in the present configuration of recipient, textual tidbit and medium of deliverance. 5.2.2.4 Sunday as Post-foundational Deity In keeping with the impossibility of reducing the context-sensitive parcel to a message and his permanently supplemental status, Sunday’s appearance in the final chapter proliferates differences. He does not resolve his identity, restore

262 David Antin. “Some Questions about Modernism.” Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2011. 197–226. 211.

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lost authorship, or divulge a context in which his fragments would coalesce. Instead, the strange god keeps at bay any resolution to the questions of theodicy levelled at him. These questions, after all, are far from uniform: each detective/anarchist formulates a concern fundamentally tied up with the respective worldview that Sunday has disrupted. This variation already indicates the difference that Sunday has made for the oppressively similar norms unveiled beneath the masks. The self-assured split of identity and alterity has been replaced with an indication of the extent to which transcendence of the characters’ diffracted epistemologies is impossible. Accordingly, the questions range from accusations (“If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy”) to the “absolute simplicity of a child: ‘I wish I knew why I was hurt so much’.” (181) Crucially, as the narrative multiplies the “passionate appeals” (166) addressed to the entity underlying law and anarchy alike, it also refuses a return to ‘anarchism’ as disavowed alterity upon which these inconsistencies could be projected. After all, Sunday himself is associated with the anarchist notion of modernity even after he has disclosed his position as an unlikely head of police. Features consigned to alterity turn up in the fleeing figure’s own semantic space. For instance, the pseudo-anarchist ‘Professor’ laments that “Sunday’s face escaped me; it ran away to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his face has made me, somehow, doubt whether there are any faces.” (168) The appearance of Sunday here has the same effect as the forest chiaroscuro, which not only led to an equal distrust of ‘faces’, but also culminated in a similar doubt: “Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anything anything?” (126). If on that occasion we were told that impressionist perception denies a ‘floor to the universe’, such uncertainty is only exacerbated by Sunday. His visage appears and vanishes whenever the vantage point is slightly altered, thus estranging the observer from the very recognition of a ‘face’. The early triumph of Syme’s self-fashioning as ‘poet of order’ is superseded entirely at this point. After all, the very figure beyond his contingent demarcations displays the very traits that he had dismissed by placing them beyond the pale of “respectability” (15). It is only fitting, then, that during the final appearance of the “real anarchist” (181), the focus on Lucian’s “broad, almost ape-like face” (10) recalls the pre-civilisational state of nature that Syme associates with Sunday: “His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god.” (245) As the anarchic and the divine exchange characteristics, Syme has to contend with the disruption of the very system of demarcation by means of which the anarchists could be made to stand in for his own, disavowed traits. No longer can he deflect from the “spot on his mid that was not sane” (41) as the deep-structure of Sunday appears to incarnate the anarchic as much as the order to which Syme has pledged himself.

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By repeating and reaffirming the constitutively split nature of the figure of Sunday, Syme has to begrudgingly concede an anarchist element to the receding god. Admitting his ‘devolved’ apishness is a stage in a never-concluded attempt to bring him into presence. In this way, the breakdown of differentiation narrated in the first part of the novel is redeemed retrospectively. Just as anarchism failed to be consigned to only one side of a determinate split, the figure of Sunday cannot be made to signify order alone. Rather than the certainty of deep-structural divinity, the narrative performs the perpetual re-entry of anarchism as a supplement that calls into question the closure of any conceptual system. As a result, the anarchic is assigned a role that goes beyond merely furnishing a stabilising heterostereotype in the manner of James’ and Conrad’s fiction. As a perpetual “destroyer” (261) of any closed system, anarchism upholds the notion that the ‘floor in the universe’ has not been found yet, but has to be approached in ever-renewed speculative endeavours. These attempts inculcated by ‘anarchic’ disruption have to make do without “firm support outside of the rupture-prone world of dialogue,” or a “monologically all-encompassing consciousness.”263 Instead of such a “point of view of a nonparticipating ‘third person’,”264 it is by refusing to appear in monologic form that Sunday dislodges the individual from assumptions of order; the police from its anarchist heterostereotype; each detective from their respective thought-system; and, finally, divinity from itself. Although elements of the ‘anarchist’ stereotype re-enter the representation of Sunday, the loss of differential order cannot be compensated by drawing a new distinction. Indeed, the ultimate policeman/anarchist casts doubt on the entire early modernist project of simulating order by setting apart a political outside. That the novel replaces such convenient alterity with ‘alienity’ does not, as Rottenburg cautions, “imply naïve realism or some other form of essentialism. Rather the opposite is the case: Only those who believe that they possess a universally valid explanatory schema will regard everything that eludes that schema not merely as irreconcilably strange, but as something that cannot even exist.”265 To reach a solution to the deadlocks of a politics of demarcation, then, ‘universally valid explanations’ are precluded. Towards the end of the novel, the ensuing concept of alienity permanently beyond understanding both ends the titular ‘nightmare’ and supersedes any hard-and-fast friend/enemy distinction. This is not to discount that, throughout the narrative, the characters encounter what Lynne Hapgood calls the terror “in having to face the loss of what

263 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 18. 264 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 18. 265 Rottenburg, “Social Constructivism,” 30.

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is knowable.”266 However, what besets them even more is the prospect of an exhaustive, self-enclosed system of organising identity and alterity. Whether it is the initial attempt to circumscribe a ‘poetry of order’, the psychological realism entailed by a reactionary hatred of anarchism, or the search for an ‘origin’ of modernity in a sonnet: in each case, the heterostereotype of ‘the anarchist’ – that catch-all label for whichever aspect of modernity is to be disparaged – presents an illicit simplification. Fabricating a radical foil not only turns out to be a political cul-de-sac in the storyworld, but also narratively dispenses with the novel’s polyphonous aesthetics. Sunday’s emergence as the supplemental limit of each conceptual system, then, avoids both of these outcomes of rigid demarcation. This is because these limits, as in the case of the “loathsome and living jelly” (166) or the non-anthropomorphic face (167), can themselves only be defined differentially. After all, the “odd thing” that Syme notices about the various descriptions is that “[e]ach man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can only find one thing to compare him to – the universe itself” (168). The difference of Sunday (and by extension of the universe he resembles), then, is turned to the advantage of the protagonists. Since alienity appears as a separate limit of the sayable for each conceptual system, no protagonist can presume that his particular mode of indicating the absolutely Other can exhaust the ineffable deep-structure posed by the strange god. Solidarity, then, is fostered not by identitarian assurances, but by the radically dissimilar form that finitude and ignorance take for each participant in the chase after Sunday. Furthermore, pursuant to this comparative unsettling, the individual systems become subject to further internal adjustments. Thus Syme, who closes the series of productively inconclusive representations of alienity, formulates the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained. (169)

This conception of alienity (itself only one of six) resists the possibility of unmasking that characterises the previous, mock-anarchist arbiters of (merely relational) alterity. Syme’s understanding of Sunday, instead, reflects the very procedures of differential meaning making that have been shown to predominate in the early modernist political imaginary. Specifically, Sunday makes perceptible that the

266 Lynne Hapgood. Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture, 1880–1925. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2005. 240. For Hapgood, “in Chesterton’s moral narrative of resistance to modern chaos, it was the inner voice of individual conscience which refused to abandon a belief in the beauty of order.”

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marking and re-marking of difference is the very condition of possibility for understanding. In this sense, the only foundation that Sunday offers is the continuation of demarcation, albeit in a manner that is (1) processual, never culminating in a static boundary; (2) incomplete, drawing attention to the supplements that escape identity and alterity alike; and (3) self-reflexive, foregrounding the perspectival limitation of any attempt to differentiate identity and alterity. On the basis of these these caveats (process, incompletion, self-reflection), Sunday indicates the manner in which every ascription of an identity produces its own negation. A concept of the ‘good’ can only emerge in contrast to the back of Sunday appearing “brutal” like “some apish god” (169). Such disclosure of an indifferent, determinative force (replete with Darwinist connotations), conversely, can be considered a ‘jest’ once the ‘face’ of Sunday has been disclosed. That face, after all, is associated with an ‘explanation’ of evil and, thus, with the attempt of finding an ‘origin’ of the very anarchist philosophies that incited Syme’s detection plot in the first place. Alienity cannot be stabilised. However, each of the accounts of its emergence poses a dialectical negotiation rather than an inert assumption of truth. Accordingly, in approaching the absolute Other, the policemen grapple with a foundational entity that is itself inexorably differential, riven by characteristics from both sides of any boundary of order and anarchy. This foundational difference, finally, makes the novel amenable to postfoundationalist distinctions. After all, as Marchart shows, post-foundationalism proceeds from the acknowledgment that a final ground for any system of thought is unattainable. Different versions of such “final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe” (127) establish the premise that systems cannot be grounded [. . .] – not by chance but by principle (a lack which in turn leads to an endless supplementary play of substitutions). [. . .] The ultimate grounding of a system is not impossible because the latter is too plural and our capacities are limited, but because there is something of a different order, something lacking, which makes pluralization itself possible by making impossible the final achievement of a totality.267

In Chesterton’s novel, likewise, it is precisely because Sunday remains a gap in the respective conceptual systems, yet never coalesces into the ‘final achievement of totality’, that a renegotiation of self and Other can begin anew. Rather than elevating a ‘chance’ norm to the status of ‘ground’, this is a ‘plural’ process. Prompted by Sunday, it proceeds on the basis of the ‘limitation of the capacities’ of any order that defines itself against a relational obverse — and afterwards essentialises that 267 Marchart, Political Difference, 17.

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self-drawn boundary. Only if alienity has emerged as a supplemental limit of binary ideological difference can a politics of relational, and temporary, alterity begin anew. The protagonists, then, are not impelled to stop drawing distinctions. They are, however, apprised of the fact that none of their delimitations of identity and alterity can encompass the excess of Sunday’s supplementarity, and, hence, have to remain provisional. Thus, only by encountering an Otherness that exceeds not just one conceptual system, but any discursive construction of truth whatsoever, can a process of deliberation be initiated. To this end, rather than granting disclosure of a divine truth, Sunday indicates that closure of any one mode of thought or action is impossible. This necessity of grounding politics on the ever-imminent intrusion of “something of a different order”268 is finally encapsulated by the accusation that Lucian levels at Syme. The anarchist poet reappears in the final chapter as “the real anarchist” (181) — an allegorical representation of anarchy in its pejorative sense of disorder. His charge against Syme presents a stark dichotomy between order and anarchy, a mirror-image of the initial Manichean distinction assumed by Syme himself. ‘You!’ he cried. ‘You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are, all of you, from first to last – you are the people in power! You are the police – the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken.’ (182)

In light of Sunday’s supplemental appearance, this return to the previous, superseded model of order and anarchy cannot be left to stand as the narrative’s ideological coda. After all, Lucian makes the accusation after Sunday has already been disclosed as alienity, an Other beyond relational meaning. During these disclosures, Syme, as shown above, is forced to acknowledge the limited reach of his own differentiation of order and anarchy. In his conceptual system, too, Sunday appears as a dialectical alternation of brute materiality and the ‘good’ immediately rendered a “mask” (169). Since, thus, alienity can merely be inferred, the protagonists are tasked with the formulation of ordering principles in full view of their contingency — a process described by Sunday himself as a “whole cosmos turned to engine of torture” (179). Instead of ‘being the law’, as per Lucian’s criticism, Syme and his fellow “men in blue and buttons” have suffered their every certainty to be “broken.” What is more, rather than subsisting in ‘unbroken’ lawfulness, they are far from an immediate identity as “smiling men in blue and buttons.” After all, the policemen themselves have been subjected to a process of ‘becoming-anarchist’. Not only do they have to assume an

268 Cf. Marchart, Political Difference, 17.

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anarchist cover identity, but they are also inducted into a philosophical police which, as the recruitment scene has shown, paradoxically includes the disavowed anarchist sphere in its very self-conception. Contrary to Lucian’s charge, the effort of demarcation – in full view of the absence of foundations on which to ground it – has not been resolved by the presentation of Sunday’s alienity, but has become all the more acute. In other words, against the imagined end of history in one, determinative stage of development, Sunday posits himself as the guarantor of an ongoing “process without a telos or a subject.”269 Under these conditions, the very model of conceiving of radical Otherness is fraught, processual, and requires an ongoing attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable; to combine, in other words, anarchy (Sunday as a “beast dressed up in men’s clothes” 169) and order (Sunday appearing “like a father playing hide-and-seek with his children” 170). Both components call for an alignment which can neither be attained by external reference to an ‘Archimedean point’ nor on either side of the distinction, since Sunday disrupts each detective’s conceptual system in turn.270 Catching up to Sunday, thus, has not at all relieved the characters of the necessity to redefine the bounds of identity and alterity in the manner demonstrated in each of the early modernist political novels. On the contrary: Syme is enabled to refute Lucian’s accusation on the basis of disruptive alienity and the concomitant necessity to redefine identity in a processual demarcation denied the “final achievement of totality.”271 After the disclosure of Sunday as the “indissolubly enigmatic”272 supplement, then, Syme denies that he represents a “Law” that has “never been broken” (182). Against this charge, the protagonist intones that he sees “everything that there is. Why does each thing on earth war against each other thing? [. . .] So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.” (182) Further: “It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel.” (183) Here, Syme finally summarises the model of demarcation instituted by 269 Louis Althusser (1973), Réponse à John Lewis, qtd. in Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 13. 270 This failure to account for alienity can be compared with the trial in the book of Job; as Chesterton’s introduction puts it, “[t]he refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design.” Cf. G. K. Chesterton. Introduction. The Book of Job. Ed. G. K. Chesterton. London: Palmer and Hayward. 1916. xxii. For an extensive account of the reworking of the Book of Job, cf. Mark Knight. “Chesterton and the Problem of Evil.” Literature and Theology 14 (2000). 373–384. 381. 271 Marchart, Political Difference, 17. 272 Rottenburg, “Social Constructivism,” 39.

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Sunday and reiterated throughout the novel: antagonism is necessary so that ‘order’ can be made to appear in the first place. It is for this reason that order has to be set apart from an anarchist outside to which it is relationally bound. As a result of such differentiation – which is also a surreptitious connection – elements from the outside of a normative sphere can re-enter that same norm. The dynamiter’s ‘glory and isolation’ cross over into law, which, without the anarchist influx from outside its bounds, threatens to coalesce into an undifferentiated ‘everything’. From this point of view, in order to enable the selfdetermination of “each thing,” difference has to be perpetuated: the law is broken rather than incarnated in the manner alleged by Lucian. This necessity of breach retroactively validates the destruction of Syme’s initial certainty of order and anarchy. It is only upon the breach of his essentialist distinction that Syme can assume features of the previously disavowed anarchist sphere. Even when confronted with Sunday as a deep-structure underlying any contingent formulation of self and Other, the only means of representing the deity is in the manner of another breach, a rift in the very nature of the divine. The result (as far from an incarnation of law as possible) is the multistable figure of the “apish god” and “the face of some ancient archangel” (169). There may be a foundational set of underlying truths undergirding the storyworld, but it can never be encompassed in language — except at the point of its breakdown. In other words: in any distinction, the position beyond the opposed terms cannot be found on either side, but only ever ‘flares up’273 at the very point of the movement from ape to angel, from policeman to anarchist, or from interlocutor to ‘protoplasmic’ thingness (cf. 166). As Sunday speaks, we are told that “the incomprehensible went on” (179). It is precisely on the basis of this foundational incomprehensibility – and its reentry as paradox in the policeman’s conceptual systems – that a new mode of deliberation is founded. The strange deity, then, shifts the terms of both political models we have encountered in early modernism. Neither does he simply stand for a loss of demarcation nor does he suspend extant laws in the manner of the state of exception. Instead, Sunday combines the appearance of a foundational figure with the simultaneous assurance that no conceptual system can take immediate recourse to this foundation. In Oliver Marchart’s post-foundationalist terms, this does not make all contingent grounds established on the basis of that

273 In the manner of Foucault’s ‘transgression’: “its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arrive.” Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” 35.

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conspicuous absence equally valid. Rather, attention is redirected “to a better understanding of the empirical context through which certain grounds become dominant.”274 In Thursday, several such potential foundations vie for preeminence. In the process, however, the materialist and the poet, the bureaucrat and the policeman are equally confronted with the impossibility of encompassing the receding, ultimate foundation of Sunday. Precisely because of this failure, such guarantee of an absent first cause proves productive. Indeed, the incomprehensible divine serves as the spur to deliberation, albeit of a kind that can no longer claim foundational certainty. As Marchart puts this: “if one has to accept both a plurality of contingent foundations which ‘empirically’ – if always only temporarily – ground the social and the impossibility of a final ground for that plurality, it follows that this impossibility cannot be of the same order as the empirical foundations themselves.”275 In Thursday, this ‘impossibility’ of a final ground is ensured not only by the absent god, but also by the split divinity in its double aspect of order and anarchy. As he moves backand-forth across the protagonists’ self-created demarcations, those ‘empirical’ groundings are manifestly of a ‘different order’ than Sunday’s underlying fragmentation — and, as a result, are put on the same footing as equally contingent, negotiable foundations. What results from this constellation is an “interrogative stance,” which, as per Hutcheon, signals neither the assurance nor the decline of order, but rather “a challenging of the very concept upon which we judge order and coherence.”276 Since Sunday’s foundation, after all, can only become indicated as a supplement of extant ordering systems, he occasions ever-renewed attempts at instituting hegemony. None of these, however, can arrogate to themselves the authority of the figure of alienity. Through Sunday’s split, then, the novel can maintain the interpretative dynamism begun by its turn away from the selfsufficient culture/anarchy binary in which the “red river” reflected “the red sky, and they both reflected his anger” (42). Denying closure of any one order, the “elemental elf”277– as Chesterton glosses Sunday in a later article – reinstates what Jervolino calls the “conflicting, tensional” conception of the interpreting subject: “This taut, unquiet, dual subject must lose itself in order to

274 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 15. 275 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 15. 276 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 58. 277 G. K. Chesterton. “Extract from an article by G. K. Chesterton concerning The Man Who Was Thursday published in the Illustrated London News, 13 June 1936.” The Man Who Was Thursday. London: Penguin, 1986. 185–186.

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find itself again, step forth from itself, opening toward the other.”278 By rendering that ‘Other’ an irrecoverable deep-structure, the narrative can disavow the countervailing temptation of the subject to “shut itself up inside, proclaim selfsufficiency.”279 After all of the individual systems of thought on offer have been split by the supplemental disruption of Sunday, and the presence of the divine figure is inextricably bound up with the destructive impetus of the “real anarchist” (181), such ‘self-sufficiency’ is emphatically denied by the novel. Any renewed construction of a personal or collective identity has to proceed on the assumption that what Marchart calls a ‘ground’ and Thursday deems a ‘floor to the Universe’ is unreachable. After precluding any reference point outside of restricted conceptual systems, the conclusion of the novel is far from resigned: the ‘taut, unquiet’ process of interpretation becomes a process of deliberation across previously uncrossable boundaries.

5.2.3 Literature and Politics beyond Exception The unstable figure of Sunday gives rise to a new politics. As opposed to the initial “hatred of modern lawlessness” (41), this divinely sanctioned model dispenses with the necessity of determining a self once and for all against a fixed, political Other. Uniquely among the novels in the early modernist corpus, such relief from the necessity of maintaining an essential identitarian order against “modern lawlessness” (41) does not precipitate the rise of unaccountable, exceptional authority. Rather, Thursday offers a political outlook that replaces the inexorable rise of a state of exception with a self-consciously limited, conversational politics. Specifically, it outlines a mode of deliberation that proceeds on the basis of the absent deep-structure of Sunday, “which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality” (184). In what follows, I will specify the conditions which the novel puts in place for this political imaginary beyond exception. The ‘triviality’ of the attempt to hegemonise any one political project depends on the attenuation of antagonism in Chesterton’s implicit political model. This does not mean that the various attempts to attain a ground for society are mutually interchangeable. However, the contingency that becomes manifest through Sunday diminishes the urgency of extrapolating a fully-fledged friend/

278 Domenico Jervolino. The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur. Trans. Gordon Poole. Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1990. 13. 279 Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics, 13.

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enemy distinction. Instead, it is, first and foremost, language that is valorised as the appropriate space for the articulation of self-consciously limited demarcations. That the confrontation with alienity coincides with the rise of political language games is explored in a brief coda after Syme’s ‘awakening’ from the nightmare. In the pastoral scene in which the protagonist finds himself, Lucian – the “real anarchist” (181) of Syme’s nightmare – is freed from the semantic constraints of allegory. That is to say: he appears as “a part of his recent drama” (184) rather than a determinate heterostereotype invested with the dissolution of order. Just as the essentialist anarchist Other is relinquished, the necessity for an identity defined against it is likewise abandoned: “Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did” (184). This ‘clarity’ makes a rigid symbolic identity unnecessary, particularly one that would claim to concretise the “earth-shaking abstraction” (64) of Sunday. Instead, as a result of the supplemental structure of the strange god, Syme can convert the “experience of crisis (of the absence of ‘ground’) and the realization of that crisis as necessary contingency”280 into a potential identity. This self-to-come no longer has to be exhausted in the actuality of a symbolic order. It is, thus, on the basis of the figure of Sunday, placed beyond the demarcation of self and Other, that the very drawing of political distinctions can be embarked on without any pretensions to a permanent normative order. This approach to processual identity on the basis of the seventh day can be clarified with Agamben’s concept of the ‘sabbatical’, which is central to his thought on evading the state of exception. The sabbatical runs counter to the process by which “the law employs the exception – that is the suspension of law itself – as its original means of referring to and encompassing life.”281 It does so, firstly, by recuperating ‘pure potentiality’. Such potentiality interrupts the function of exception which, as shown above (cf. chapters 3.2, 4.3), is never transferred into actuality. In the literary version of this logic of sovereign power, as demarcations of political life are erased, James’ and Conrad’s protagonists find themselves determined by a mode of power beyond identity and alterity. This position is figured as a space in which “pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable, and the sovereign is precisely this zone of indistinction.”282 The state of exception, thus, functions on the basis of an everimpending possibility to withdraw political identity at any time, whereupon a

280 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 29. 281 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1. 282 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47.

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residual sense of self is replaced with a potential normative order that is never actualised. This is a constellation that removes the protections of positive laws or explicit norms — only to expose the targets of this suspension to a nonsemiotic ‘force-of-law’ that manifests itself as ever-potential violence.283 Functioning by means of ‘indistinction’ as it does, the state of exception hinders the determination of transgression: “it becomes impossible to distinguish between observance [osservanza] and transgression of the law. When the law is in force only in the form of its suspension, no matter what mode of behavior appears to be in line with the law in a normal situation – like walking peacefully down the street – this behavior might also imply a transgression.”284 Any behavior might, but also might not, constitute a breach of the suspended norm. Yet since there is no explicit formulation of the law, a position ‘within’ or ‘outside’ of a normative framework cannot be ascertained by the individual — an uncertainty that finds its most sustained narrative equivalent in the anarchist roleplaying and compulsive confessions of Under Western Eyes. In The Man Who Was Thursday, however, this suspension is no longer a necessary outcome. While at the end of the novel, Sunday is in a ‘potential’ state which resembles the undetermined figures of the state of exception, every formulation of his status is itself markedly transgressive. Rather than being suspended in a structure of neither/nor (as “a limit or threshold which one can place neither within nor without the life or system that it defines”285), the divine figure emerges as the incarnation of both anarchy and order. After all, he offers the supplemental completion and constitutive gap in each ideology on which personal and political identities are staked. Instead of withdrawing into potentiality, then, Sunday himself spectacularly breaches any order he is imagined to represent. Against the impossibility to ‘distinguish between observance and transgression of the law’, the strange god proliferates this very distinction. Thus, every attempt to reconstruct his angelic “face” requires the simultaneous effort to extrapolate his “[h]ardly human” back, which makes him appear as “a beast dressed up in men’s clothes” (169). And vice versa: the confrontation with a state of nature in which “each thing on earth war[s] against each other

283 “Force of law that is separate from the law, floating imperium, being-in-force [vigenza] without application, and, more generally, the idea of a sort of ‘degree zero’ of the law – all these are fictions through which law attempts to encompass its own absence and to appropriate the state of exception, or at least to assure itself a relation with it.” Agamben, State of Exception, 51. 284 Agamben, Time, 105. 285 Andrew Norris. “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead.” Diacritics 30 (2000). 38–58. 42.

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thing” (182) motivates Syme’s attempt to turn “his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday” (183) and accuse it of indifference. Sunday is not a law beset by anarchy, but constitutively bound up with his own ever-imminent collapse into disorder. In this constellation, the anarchic serves to counter the notion that a set of laws has been formulated, systematised, and now merely awaits application. It is this priority of the normative – and the alleged supersession of the state of nature that coincides with it – that gives rise to the state of exception once its validity is withdrawn. Upon this suspension, in Agamben and the political fiction considered so far, sovereignty “presents itself as the incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law, and this very indistinction constitutes specifically sovereign violence.”286 In contrast to this indistinction, Sunday ensures distinction. Every norm formulated by the policemen is interrupted by the alienity of the divine supplement. Conversely, any anarchic outside that the lawmen proclaim contains the potential for an emergent order. As Syme puts it: “Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front – ”(170) They cannot do so, however, and the dash stands precisely for this impossibility: the policemen have to seek the face ever-anew, and attempt to reconcile their partial knowledge. In other words: due to Sunday, there is no communal identity (in a foundational sense) to be suspended; nor is there one ‘state of nature’ incorporated within it — both are on the side of the hidden face, unsettled and open to a renewed, differential approach. Without one grounding norm, there can also be no decisive withdrawal, an impossibility that precludes once and for all the sovereign imposition of a state of exception. The ensuing, post-foundational deliberation is made possible by Sunday’s own fraught status. He can incarnate a variety of laws, all of which exhibit their contingency. Likewise, by being presented as internally split between order and anarchy, like each of the figures chasing after him, he becomes isomorphic with their own failing attempts to define ordered identity against a constitutive outside. Since he is supplemental to any system of knowledge, the strange divinity, then, presents a determinate impossibility of closure. By reiterating his fundamentally split nature, each contingent attempt at demarcation must necessarily exclude an aspect of Sunday, and hence fall short of a stable dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion. This is a very different constellation from a state of exception based on the potential suspension of the law. Sunday, after all,

286 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 35.

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incites attempts to make him intelligible rather than merely suspending an existing mode of intelligibility. As each protagonist finds himself in an allegorical robe at Sunday’s estate, the ensuing masque elevates each mode of inquiry to the level of equally legitimate pursuits. This only remains the case, however, as long as the exegesis of their respective roles is interrupted by the unruly figure of Lucian and by Sunday himself — anarchic supplements that disrupt the final allocation of roles. As per Agamben’s aside quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the “troublemaker is precisely the one who tries to force sovereign power to translate itself into actuality.”287 Paradoxically, this position of the troublemaker is, in the narrative, instituted by the sovereign power of Sunday himself, who recruits anarchists and policemen alike, and thus incites the process at the end of which the detectives, essentially, seek to arrest God and attempt to ‘translate’ his transgressive status into intelligible and communicable terms. In this, Thursday bears out Prozorov’s rejoinder that there is no “hope of evading the state of exception by opting for the uncontaminated normativity of bios or the pure naturalism of zoē.”288 Instead of, thus, countering the everimpending dissolution of the very distinctions between “private life and political existence”289 with yet another set of political demarcations, Agamben traces a rather more oblique resistance to the state of exception. After all, identities (bolstered by laws or norms) cannot be relied upon, since upon their inevitable suspension they lead to the possibility of an entirely unprotected status. What is required instead is an assumption of potentiality. Specifically, this requires subjects to relinquish the very concept of identity: “such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as this or that set.”290 In a 2000 essay, Agamben terms this reclamation “form-of-life,” which can “never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.”291 Rather than returning to normative life or natural life, such a concept of life is constitutively unrepresentable “in terms of

287 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 47. 288 Sergei Prozorov. Agamben and Politics, 115. The reason for this is the ‘removal of zoē’ (i.e. ‘natural life’ as distinct from political life) that founds political existence for Agamben. There is no clear point of divergence between both forms of life, since the only possible reappearance of ‘natural life’ is through “‘dehumanisation’ practised in the [. . .] loci of the state of exception.” (115) 289 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188. 290 Agamben, The Coming Community, 1. 291 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, 2.

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positive predicates (‘what one is’) but consists in the sheer facticity of its existence (‘that one is’).”292 Due to its “originary worklessness”293 that resists actualisation, this type of life can no longer become subjected to the state of exception. After all, the exceptional mode of power functions by separating bare life from its political determinations, whereas ‘form-of-life’ indicates “beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.”294 Since any demarcation of self and Other remains potential for such ‘beings’, there is no longer any identity to suspend. The potential power of the state of exception to render null and void extant identities cannot succeed if its targets have already renounced their dependence on those very identities. What replaces the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of bare life, then, is “the essential function that the tradition of Western philosophy has assigned to contemplative life and to inoperativity: properly human praxis is sabbatism that, by rendering the specific functions of the living inoperative, opens them to possibility.”295 The novel shows Sunday to introduce just such sabbatism. He does so not by offering a new, divine norm but rather by positing himself as the impediment to any of the individual systems of thought reverting to ‘specific functions’ and identitarian assurances. Under Western Eyes has presented a world in which such ‘inoperativity’ is impossible, as Razumov is forced to lay bare his political life to the gaze of the state, exhibiting his belonging to one side of a distinction (“Evolution not Revolution. Direction not Destruction” 39). This attempted actualisation of his latent reactionary potential not only proves an ineffectual attempt to foreclose on the alternative potentiality (Revolution, Destruction) that he attempts to render unrealisable in his dichotomous pamphlet. What is more, the uncertain state actors immediately revert the declaration to a state of potentiality by exhibiting it for his own perusal and holding in suspension Razumov’s emphatic self-identification. Chesterton’s political imaginary counters such appropriation of potentiality. That is: Thursday at least adumbrates the possibility to think “the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of the law (even that of the empty form of law’s being in force without significance)” in order to move

292 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 122. 293 Sergei Prozorov. “The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political.” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2009). 327–353. 346. 294 Giorgio Agamben. Means Without End, 107. 295 Giorgio Agamben. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 251.

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“towards a politics freed from every ban.”296 How to go beyond ‘every idea of the law’, however? The novel alleges that the answer cannot lie in radical anarchist practice, which would only acknowledge the immutability of what it attacks. Instead, the ‘anarchic’ is functionalised as the guarantee that no order can arise in the first place — at least not one founded on an ineffable, foundational certainty. Such foundation, after all, can only be achieved on the condition of its everpossible suspension in a state of exception. The anarchic precludes such suspension by ensuring the permanent deferral of any notion of a divine law, or, in the case of the protagonist, of a self-definition as a ‘poet of order’. Such positions are barred by the disclosure of disruptive elements of anarchy within those who assume them. As a result, every positive formulation of a law, be it by the protagonists themselves or even by Sunday, is ‘destroyed’ in its consistency by an anarchic supplement. Each one of the detective’s insights just yields another potential form of Sunday rather than his epiphanic disclosure. Notably, Sunday himself is in the business of denying any determinate actualisation. He emphasises that while he appeared as a “voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue” (179), when “I met you in the daylight I denied it myself” (179). His potential status is transferred to the protagonists themselves, who no longer require an essential distinction between orderly selfhood and anarchic Otherness. It is only on the basis of such an absence of any final ordering system that Syme, for one, can be associated with a new, potential self that is predicated on the “abandonment beyond every idea of the law.”297 After all, in the room in which he gives Syme his orders in his role as head of police, the incarnation of the law appears as “abrupt blackness” which “startled him like a blaze of light” (48). Likewise, in Sunday’s final expansion beyond the visible and understandable, “everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice” (182). In both cases, Sunday is a potential rather than a disclosure — however, in the paradoxical fashion now familiar to us, the awareness of that potential is itself the significant message (the ‘blaze of light’) imparted by Sunday. This potentiality is reproduced by each impasse in the detectives’ signifying systems, as the ‘brain-destroying’ dark of Sunday-as-law turns into a productive blind spot in their respective system of meaning making. In Agamben’s terms, this reformulation of politics on the basis its impossible actualisation in any one identity allows for a new formulation of political potential: “Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability

296 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 59. 297 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 59.

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[inoperosità] of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics because human beings are argōs-beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation – that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.”298 This ‘inoperative being’ is contingent on the notion that any actualisation of a projected course of action is not a conversion of potentiality into actuality, but is best described as a process of setting aside the potential not to speak or act.299 That is, potentiality cannot be exhausted in any one set of actions, let alone a ‘proper operation’ which would be defined as the realm of the political. In Thursday such inoperability – the absence of a task and a potential refusal to act – is ultimately preserved by Sunday’s vanishing. That he once more removes himself from any further appeals ensures ongoing attempts to exhaust his meaning, none of which can subordinate him to a specific ‘historical project’. By becoming inoperative, no ‘proper task’ can be deduced from his absence. Chesterton’s narrative is distinguished from Agamben’s philosophy by literalising the preservation of potentiality in an outside figure that guarantees an ongoing ‘being-without-work’. After all, the pursuers’ own absence of a ‘proper task’ emerges only in confrontation with the divine supplement. This simultaneously opens up a potential for the reader, an equivalent to the protagonists’ understanding of the inexhaustible split between order and anarchy embodied by Sunday. One side of the readerly equivalent to this double vision is, firstly, an allegorical reading in which Sunday is fully subsumed under a model of conceptual language. He is a stand-in according to this reading, a supplemental element ensuring the ongoing differential functioning of signs. Secondly, however, Sunday can also be read in terms of the ‘modern fantastic’ outlined above. From this perspective, which emphasises the diegetic reality of storyworld entities, Sunday is first and foremost a quasi-divine figure, whose ultimate task is merely too far removed from human categories to impinge on their status as ‘being-without-work’. That both readings are possible (Sunday as allegory, Sunday as god) finds its corresponding, mundane equivalent in the “impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality” (184). By not specifying Sunday’s status until the very end, the novel renders inoperative a purely allegorical or merely Catholic/exegetic reading, thus maintaining its own status as a text without ‘proper operation’. The Sunday-shaped void in the storyworld ensures an absence of a readerly task as much as it guarantees the

298 Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 182. 299 Agamben, “Bartleby,” 264.

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radical ‘being-without-work’ of the diegetic figures. In this way, the hermeneutic gap of the changeable “Sabbath” (180) is extended to the reader. According to Slavoj Žižek, “the detectives are surprised to see the division in God because, from their perspective, they expect to see a pure One elevated above conflicts, while God in himself is the absolute self-division.”300 Sunday, however, suffers from that division, as his final, New Testament line affirms (“Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”301). Since the divine is in revolt against itself – divided to the last by its association with anarchy and matching the anarchist masquerade with the “mask of Memnon” (183) – the impossibility of resolving antagonism has received sanction. Sunday has taken on the ultimate irreconcilability of law and anarchy. As a result of that sacrifice, after the ‘nightmare’ of chasing and confronting Sunday has ended, deliberative politics can proceed in the waking, mundane storyworld.302 Any principle is up for debate, as the participants are no longer beset by the expectation of an ultimate identity, of a final mask of anarchy taken off to reveal “the peaceful mediumbackground of the conflict of particularities.”303 As the figure of divine violence has been shown to ‘suffer’ from its own split, nobody else has to, so that the search for an ultimate self under anarchist masks can be discontinued by Syme and his undercover colleagues. It is on the basis of this gage of foundationally irreconcilable difference, then, that Lucian as the representative of anarchy can be approached as an interlocutor. No longer standing in for anarchy as such – since that characteristic has been taken on by Sunday to the same extent that the god incarnates order – he is cut loose from the political demarcation so central to the early modernist political imaginary. In the post-Sunday world, the 300 Slavoj Žižek. “From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton.” St. Paul Among the Philosophers. Ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 39–58. 45. 301 Cf. Matt. 20.22. The Scofield Study Bible. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 1338. The quote refers to Christ’s response to the request of the mother of James and John, who wishes her sons to sit at his side in his kingdom: “But Jesus answered and said, ‘You know not what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’ They said to Him, ‘We are able.’” 302 This accords with Cavendish-Jones’ observation that “Chesterton’s books are full of opponents who are far closer to one another than the apathetic and conventional figures who surround them. Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne eventually discover that they are two lobes of the same brain, and this might also be said of Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme.” Colin Cavendish-Jones. “Estranging the Everyday: G. K. Chesterton’s Urban Modernism.” G. K. Chesterton, London, and Modernity. Ed. Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 183–203. 197. 303 Slavoj Žižek . “From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton.” St. Paul Among the Philosophers. Ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 39–58. 45.

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anarchist is no longer required as an absolute Other against which purported norms can be determined. At this point, the functionalisation of anarchism as a relational foil is utilised a final time. After all, the last appearance of Lucian Gregory in the dream features a reversal of Syme’s initial attempt to ascertain order. Indeed, the anarchist attempts to restore the distinction of order and anarchy that Sunday’s double iteration as policeman and anarchist has interrupted. To this end, Lucian’s accusation invokes an essential position of order so that he can motivate his own revolutionary impulse: It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. [. . .] You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I – (182)

As Ralph C. Wood has shown, Gregory’s charge hinges on the assumption “that the faux anarchists have too easily embraced the irony that they were working against themselves, too quickly welcomed the discovery that they were preventing evils that never existed.”304 In other words: against the self-referential critique offered by Syme, Lucian maintains an image of authority as ‘suppressive’. In Todd May’s analysis of classical anarchism, “[p]ower [. . .] constitutes for the anarchists a suppressive force. The image of power with which anarchism operates is that of a weight, pressing down – and at times destroying – the actions, events, and desires with which it comes in contact.”305 While May’s analysis is far too broad to encompass the immense range of anarchist thought, it does capture the top-down hierarchy bemoaned by Chesterton’s fictional anarchist. We encounter, in other words, the absurd situation of the anarchist figure mounting a defence of the need for demarcation, insisting on the absolute difference between law and anarchy; the lawman, meanwhile, confronted with the mutability of Sunday, has long since given up on restoring such boundaries. By thus associating an essentialist view of law and anarchy with the figure of anarchism, Syme’s rebuttal can dismiss an entire relational mode of order. By affirming that the “guards of Law” (183), himself included, have “descended into hell” (183), a dialectical negotiation of order and anarchy can emerge as a process of determining identity.

304 Ralph C. Wood. Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God. Waco: Baylor UP, 2011. 216. 305 May, Poststructuralist Anarchism, 61.

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This process proceeds from the lesson imparted by Sunday: the policemen have fallen from their ‘elevated’ position in the manner that Lucian denies, since their every ordering attempt only brought out their own anarchic supplement. The formerly normative figures, in other words, had to face up to the intermingling of demarcated spheres, with all the grotesque horror that entailed in the case of the laughing mountain or the ‘apish’ face of Sunday. There is no turning back from that supplemental disruption. Consequently, a new politics is only possible on one condition: the anarchist’s charge of distinct identity and alterity has to be disavowed. What Lucian, then, comes to stand in for is a model in which anarchism and law can still be set apart as distinct antagonists. He represents a vestige of demarcation, brought up in order to offset Syme’s own acceptance of constitutively unsolvable “enigmas concerning the fearful nearness of good and evil.”306 In a self-subverting twist, Lucian, thus, provides a foil upon which an all-too certain distinction of order and anarchy can be projected. In contrast to his certainty of ‘suppressive power’ and ‘oppressed revolutionaries’, the novel affirms a paradoxical interrelation of identity and alterity, in which the former only ever appears as a brief, momentary differentiation from the latter. The deliberative, conversational coda of the novel affirms Syme’s model. Contrary to Lucian’s renewed struggle between the ‘supreme’ and the ‘suffering’, politics after Sunday inscribe an ultimate incommensurability of opposites in the very foundation of any polity, where it is incarnated by the absent god. If not even the transcendental signified of Sunday promises certainty, contingency is inescapable — and the protagonists’ surface-level negotiations can proceed apace, liberated from any claim to truth. The novel, as a result, ends on a processual model of identity and alterity, in which both can be brought into conversation. After all, the narrative concludes in a scene that shows, in Caserio’s terms, that “the means to certainty is equivocal, but only equivocation can clear a path for certainty, which then subordinates equivocation.”307 This is by no means a level playing field: the conditions for this exchange exclude Lucian’s antagonisms, which are too stark to be open to deliberation. The inclusion of Lucian in the final chapter indicates that this ‘equivocation’ – instigated by the equivocal void of Sunday – still requires a brief foray into alterity. Rather than restoring a fabricated anarchist stereotype, however, the terms of Otherness are shifted: what is excluded from the conclusion is Lucian’s position of the ‘unpardonable sin of governing’ (182). The assumption of a fundamental friend/enemy distinction underlying an antagonistic struggle between

306 Wood, The Nightmare Goodness of God, 216. 307 Caserio. “The Terrorist God,” 152.

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impacable antagonists is relinquished.308 That this staunch belief in a struggle between law and anarchy is, in turn, projected upon an anarchist accords Lucian a key role in the novel’s conclusion. The unconsoled interlocutor maintains constitutive doubt in the narrative’s resolution: it is only in response to Lucian’s charge of power without ‘agony’ that Syme redeems the transgressions built into the universe itself, which does not tend towards a harmonious order but produces unceasing antagonism “so that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist” (182). The divine law is in a state of constant transgression against itself, so that, in Garry Wills’ terms, “Sunday is Lucian Gregory, the anarchist poet. The Accuser.”309 Even this fundamental split, however, has to be kept from aphoristic certainty in the same way the conceptual systems of the expolicemen have suffered disruption. To this end, the anarchist accusation is internalised within the formulation of the anarchic divine ‘warring against itself’ (182), with Lucian ensuring that the revelation is not inertly assumed as dogma, but rather prompts renewed assertions of contingent orders. The “brave and good” (183), that is to say, requires reconstruction after its arbiters (contra Lucian) have ‘suffered’ the breakdown of their vaunted norms. Lucian’s accusation is especially crucial since despite the disclosure that “each thing in the world war[s] against each other thing” (182), the spectre of a closed system looms once more. Just as each disclosure of a policeman behind the anarchist mask opens up the possibility of an unbroken world of stultifying identity, Syme’s final model appears all too much like a complete revelation of God’s plan. It is here that Lucian comes in. At the precise moment Syme’s speech purports to “answer for every one of the great guards of Law” (183), it is disrupted: “At least–” (183). Like the anarchist’s speech before, Syme’s expostulation has to remain incomplete. If it did not, it would perform what Boltanski calls the ‘coup de théâtre’ concluding the ‘conspiracy form’ of detective fiction: “reality, social reality as initially perceived by a naïve observer (and reader), with its order, its hierarchies and its principles of causality, reverses itself and unveils its fictional nature, revealing another much more real reality that it had been concealing. This second reality is inhabited by things, acts, actors, levels, connections and especially powers whose existence, indeed whose very possibility, had not been suspected by anyone.”310 In a conclusion of this kind, Sunday would be successfully investigated and his transgressive status receive a final, communicable form. In order to avoid such conclusiveness, which goes against the very principle of foundational

308 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 42. 309 Garry Wills. Chesterton. New York, London, and Toronto: Image, 2001. 291. 310 Luc Boltanski. Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2014. 13.

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antagonism just unveiled, the divine figure has to be reconstituted once more, in response to the anarchist figure’s scepticism.311 To preclude a “second reality” of the kind described by Boltanski, then, the anarchist’s condemnation of the purported self-sufficiency of the law disturbs Syme’s bourgeoning dogmatic assurance. The policeman, in other words, has to deploy the anarchist line of inquiry himself. To this end, Syme takes up the question Lucian has posed and directs it at the divine figure: “‘Have you,’ he cried in a dreadful voice, ‘have you ever suffered?’” (183). Immediately after having devised a theological frame for suffering, this reiteration of the anarchist’s inquiry allows for a ‘dreadful’ inquiry into its certainties — and, thus, for the protagonists’ imitation of the very supplemental disruption to which they have been exposed by God himself. By adapting the anarchist’s doubt, Syme is enabled to ask whether Sunday is positioned outside of the ‘tortuous’ dialectics of order and anarchy he occasions, or whether God is, by dint of suffering, immanent to it. The anarchist demand for authority to justify itself,312 thus, serves as the final impediment to an exhaustive account of divinity. In light of this function of Chesterton’s literary anarchism, Lucian’s first appearance prefigures this template of productive dissent, already inscribing it in the design of the narrative while its protagonist, Syme, still asserts hard-and-fast boundaries between his poetry of order and the Other’s anarchy. While self-fashioning himself as a decadent poet, Lucian is already metonymically associated with a space that withdraws from narrative scene-setting: but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. (11)

It is this ‘secrecy’ that can be reconstituted by Syme, as he temporarily adopts Lucian’s scepticism of the divine figure and experimentally reasserts the unbridgeable gap between anarchy and the ‘suppressive force’ of noxious authority.313 Only after following Lucian in demanding a justification from Sunday (and not receiving it) can Boltanski’s ‘real reality’ be placed beyond description. Further,

311 This at least introduces the staunch scepticism of authority shared by many anarchist thinkers: “The basic philosophical procedure of anarchism is to question or raise doubts about the bases of all authority and to challenge those forms of authority that it sees as illegitimate.” McLaughlin, Anarchism and Authority, 31. 312 Cf. Noam Chomsky. “Marxism, Anarchism, and Alternative Futures.” Language and Politics. Ed. C. P. Otero. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK, 2004. 775–786. 775. “That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.” 313 Cf. May, Poststructuralist Anarchism, 61.

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the final, appended pastoral scene can take on the ‘secrecy’ of the anarchist rather than perpetuating the epiphanic disclosure in which Syme exclaims “I see everything” (182). The anarchist’s scepticism, thus, ensures that Syme does not assume to have fully grasped the foundational split of the divine. As a result, Lucian is indispensible for the final glimpse of a new politics, in which deliberation attains an urgency that was lacking at the point of divine omniscience. By both taking up anarchist scepticism and, ultimately, recasting it as a position of relational alterity to be approached in a dialogic ‘agonism’,314 the disclosure of an underlying, homogenous identity can be warded off a final time. The impasses previously disavowed as a matter of psychological realism (the rivers and the sky), misplaced hermeneutic stability (the order to be gleaned from a sonnet), a shared norm of common sense (beneath each anarchist mask) or failing allegory (the French rustic) can, in this concluding constellation, be affirmed as the basis for any further politics. By disallowing closure, anarchism has, however residually, been accorded a role in Chesterton’s political theology. This function of anarchism as a practice of sceptical inquiry should also be understood as a self-referential injunction for the reading of the novel as a whole. The reader is dissuaded from replacing the strategy of bricolage displayed by the fleeing Sunday with a definitive scheme gleaned from the final, allegorical chapter. The novel indicates, in Benjamin’s terms, that allegory “is a schema; and as a schema it is an object of knowledge, but it is not securely possessed until it becomes a fixed schema: at one and the same time a fixed image and a fixing sign.”315 As such, while the narrative offers allegory as one explanatory scheme, it is denied precedence over the proliferation of genres that preceeds it. Instead of supplying a biblical “schema” for the elements to be integrated into a “fixed image and a fixing sign,” Thursday is as concerned with the possibility of unfixing the allegorical mode.316

314 “While antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents.” Mouffe, On the Political, 20. 315 Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 1998. 184. 316 Allegory is thus more unstable than presupposed by Lynette Hunter’s contention that “[a]llegory is externally inspired rather than personally created alone. It cannot, therefore, degenerate into impressionism or rationalism.” (71) Here as in any other supplemental appearance by Sunday, “overriding control by Chesterton” or his authorial stand-in is relinquished; as per Hunter’s own caveat: “the control is constructed as ritual so that a lot depends upon the connection the reader makes with a meaning beyond the story itself.” (73) Lynette Hunter. G. K. Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan 1979.

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Initially, the appearance of a unitary allegorical mode appears to assuage the ‘pain’ of the failure of limited interpretative systems. In the final chapter, each of the policemen is assigned a day of creation, with a costume and a seat expressing their respective position. What is more, each is accorded a brief allegoresis. The Secretary, for instance, whose vision of Sunday yielded images of evolutionary horror, finds himself “the mere creation of light out of darkness” (176). Syme approves of the re-christened ‘Monday’: he “felt also how perfectly the pattern of pure white and black expressed the soul of the pale and austere Secretary with his inhuman veracity and his cold frenzy, which made him so easily make war on the anarchists, and yet so easily pass for one of them” (176). The narrator, likewise, embarks on an extended interpretation of the allegorical figure, comparing the dichotomies of light and darkness of the ‘first day’ to the materialist philosophy of its representative. This account, in turn, is compared to Syme’s role. Now christened ‘Thursday’ once more, the erstwhile poet of order is associated with ‘love of the finite’ and the “creation of the sun and moon” (176). At this point, however, the novel introduces perspectival constraints: “If Syme had been able to see himself, he would have realized that he, too, seemed to be for the first time himself and no one else” (176). He is not able to engage in such self-observation, however, and thus, amidst the authorial allegoresis, remains beholden to limited, halting interpretations. This restriction once more extends to the reader, who is confronted with progressively more truncated explanations. In contrast to the step-by-step interpretation of the meaning attaching to the Secretary’s and Syme’s respective roles, the subsequent allegoreses no longer explain why a vestment of “goggle-eyed fishes and outrageous tropical birds” would represent “the union in him of unfathomable fancy and of doubt” (178). This matter in excess of point-by-point explanation is compounded by a passage in-between the first mode of allegoresis (exhaustive yet perspectivally restricted) and the second mode (fragmentary and insinuated). Here, the novel intersperses another representation of Sunday’s sphere, which resists retrieval into any unitary allegorical schema: They were led out of another broad and low gateway into a very large old English garden, full of torches and bonfires, by the broken light of which a vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress. Syme seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume. There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man dressed as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon; the two last, together, seemed to keep the thread of their farcical adventures. [. . .] There were a thousand other such objects, however. There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing apple tree, a dancing ship. One would have thought that the untameable tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and street dancing an eternal jig. (176)

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With this carnivalesque interlude between both parts of the allegory, Thursday parodies an overarching interpretative schema. While parts of the ‘carnival of people’ re-stage the preceding “farcical adventures,” even that connection is only established between the “last two” elements, the elephant and the balloon both having featured in Sunday’s escape. Here they are preceded, however, by a supplemental “windmill” without a discernible connection to that slapstick chase. The elements displayed neither settle into a metonymical scheme, nor do they reliably re-stage the narrative that came before. The carnival does include a “dancing lamp-post” and a “dancing apple tree” (177), however, which evoke the very objects of contention in the debate between Syme and Gregory in the first chapter. There, the anarchist presents the lamp as a reification of “your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren” (17). To this charge, Syme retorts: “I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree” (17). While this is a witty rejoinder in the language game of Saffron Park, on that occasion the ‘poet of order’ only reverses the terms of his anarchist antagonist. Consequently, he remains in an expository mode which fails to offer a sustained alternative to Lucian’s evocation of “anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself” (17). By contrast, the carnival in Sunday’s garden ensures the reentry of the anarchic multiplicity of possible combinations into a closed system of allegory and allegorical interpretation. In this, the carnival resembles Bakhtin’s concept of the “feast” as a “temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom. The very brevity of this freedom increased its fantastic nature and utopian radicalism, born in the festive atmosphere of images.”317 The recombination of images in the costumed dance particularly resists generic closure; it ensures that the template of the book of Genesis cannot be imposed on the narrative’s mesh of genres by allegorical fiat. Interrupting the tableau of seven days, in which each sign contributes to an overall totality of God’s plan, the interacting objects function as another fragmentation of the divine figure. Consequently, just as in Bakhtin’s carnival, the transcendent can be suspended.318 Amidst the concluding masque, and before the enthronement of Sunday, the carnival opens up a gap. This lacuna of unruly objects, what is more, is reproduced rather than closed by the sabbatical figure — and, ultimately has to

317 Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. 89. 318 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 197.

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be reiterated by the protagonist himself. Thus, in Agamben’s terms, the carnival renders the novel’s allegorical scheme ‘inoperative’: This essential inoperativity of man is not to be understood as the cessation of all activity, but as an activity that consists in making human works and productions inoperative, opening them to a new possible use. [. . .] [T]he feast is not only defined by what in it is not done, but primarily by the fact that what is done – which in itself is not unlike what one does every day – becomes undone, is rendered inoperative, liberated and suspended from its ‘economy,’ from the reasons and aims that define it during the weekdays (and not doing, in this sense, is only an extreme case of this suspension). If one eats, it is not done for the sake of being fed; if one gets dressed, it is not done for the sake of being covered up or taking shelter from the cold; if one wakes up, it is not done for the sake of working; if one walks, it is not done for the sake of going someplace; if one speaks, it is not for the sake of communicating information.319

If one puts on a costume, we might add in the above context of the carnival, it is not for the sake of imparting an allegorical approximation of a divine plan; “dancing” in the manner of the lamp-post and the apple tree, meanwhile, is not for the sake of ‘encoding information’, but offers a “liberation of the body from utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure inoperativity.”320 This goes further than the ‘slapstick modernism’ of the chase through London, which was still directed towards a telos: the anarchist ringleader was to be apprehended to secure a determinate alterity. In the carnival, conversely, that goal is replaced with a potential to relate the individual carnival figures to the preceding narrative — which, at the same time, is a potential not to assign them such a metonymical role For Agamben, sovereign power is based on the possibility of a state of exception, a conjunction largely borne out by Under Western Eyes. Specifically, the connection between sovereignty and exception follows a recurring pattern: “something is divided, excluded, and rejected at the bottom, and, through its exclusion, is included as the foundation.”321 In Conrad’s narrative, accordingly, the autocratic regime is predicated on divesting the individual of political life, replacing it with “bare life as the product and object of sovereign power.”322 If, indeed, Chesterton presents a counter-model to this ‘exclusive inclusion’ of life, his novel cannot simply describe an identity that resists being reduced by

319 Giorgio Agamben. “What is a destituent power?” Trans. Stephanie Wakefield. Agamben and Law. Ed. Thanos Zartaloudis. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 511–520. 515. 320 Agamben, “Destituent power,” 516. 321 Agamben, “Destituent power,” 512. 322 Sergei Prozorov. Ontology and World Politics: Void Universalism I. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. xxvi.

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sovereignty — such a self, after all, would render another form of life subject to potential removal. Instead, the feast indicates the collective need to suspend any identity that is derived on utilitarian, or more generally goal-oriented terms. Instead of assuming a new identity, any previous ascriptions are rendered inoperative, without thereby refusing any definitions outright. After all, a refusal of a demarcation of self and Other runs the risk of negatively affirming the validity of ‘historical tasks’ imposed on the subject. Inoperativity rather evades the position of authority altogether, both its affirmation and its rejection of identity. Only on this evasive footing does it become possible to “deactivate every juridical and social property, without establishing a new identity.”323 In a similar sense, the carnival interspersed in the allegory offers the possibility of rendering inoperative the ascriptions that follow. To accomplish such deactivation of allegoresis, the costumes are divested of an immediate metaphorical function. The “fairy dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl dancing with the moon” (178) refute the expectation of a closed allegorical system associated with the “severe ecclesiastical vestment” worn by the detectives, which “itself would alone have suggested the symbol” (176). Attention to the unordered concatenation of elements in the carnival, with one supplemental element always in excess of a fully-fledged order, allows for a readjustment of the role of Sunday. Following Agamben, since “power (arché) constitutes itself through the inclusive exclusion (the ex-ceptio) of anarchy, the only possibility of thinking a true anarchy coincides with the exhibition of the anarchy internal to power.”324 Rather than a reaffirmation of a distinction of ordered self and anarchic Other, that is, the carnival lays bare the internal recurrence of anarchy in precisely this way: after the carnival in his garden and the carnival interlude in his divine scheme, the figure of order also appears as the embodiment of disorder. Sunday includes anarchy to proscribe a universal scheme — and thereby allows others to likewise relinquish their ostensible tasks in order to embrace the ‘true anarchy’ of a politics that dismantles its own foundation. This is (literally) out in the open: there is no claim to having replaced lawless disorder, which, in the state of exception, makes it possible to surreptitiously institute that lawlessness as the basis of unconstrained authority. Rather, the series of elements in the garden never coheres in the first place, thus introducing contingency into the innermost place of ostensible power and passing on the equally contingent creation of limited order to the former lawmen.

323 Agamben, “Destituent power,” 517. 324 Agamben, “Destituent power,” 518.

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The carnival, then, fulfils a dual function: its anarchic profusion of elements unamenable to a single, divine order brings home that the figure of authority relies on a suspension of laws, including its own. At the same time, allegorical closure can be interrogated and, ultimately, rendered inoperative. Thus, the “eternal jig” of “all the common objects” (176) suspends the semiotic ‘economy’ of the allegorical schema while prefiguring the refusal of any determinate identity that is, ultimately, enabled by Sunday’s revelations. Neither in Chesterton’s nor in Agamben’s account is this process conceived as subversion. Rather, the garden performance reveals what was already at the heart of Sunday’s status as lawgiver: “it brings to light in a parodic form the anomie within the law, the state of emergency as the anomic drive contained in the very heart of the nomos.”325 By making the protagonist an observer of this anomic zone within Sunday’s space – and formally introducing it as a literal, textual zone in-between the allegorical schema – the threshold of indifference between law and anarchy, determination and suspension of order can be exposed. By extension, if the law has been shown to depend on the anarchic carnival in its midst, the detectives can, likewise, suspend the search for determinate laws. An absolute self-determination against an anarchist Other is replaced with the possibility of attaining “the glory and isolation of the anarchist” (182). This assumption of the anarchic position, however brief, renders inoperative any essence, task, or historical project. In this way, the carnival at least indicates “pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.”326 It offers the potential not to consider an object (such as the lamp-post debated by Lucian and Symes and now dancing in Sunday’s garden) the manifestation of ineffable order, and not to replace the anarchist masks with allegorical vestments. Rather than a sovereign removal of assumed identity (as in Under Western Eyes), the “vast carnival of people” who are “dancing in motley dress” (177) disables the enforcement of the law, the exaltation of order, and the concern with fixity originally displayed by Syme. In other words: through the liberation of ‘lamp-post’, ‘apple tree’, and ‘ship’ from their particular uses and their animation by “the untameable tune of some mad musician” (176), the novel avails itself of “one of the ways in which inoperativity has been thought,” namely “the feast [la festa], which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has been conceived essentially as a temporary suspension of productive activity.”327

325 Agamben, State of Exception, 72. 326 Agamben, Means without End, 140. 327 Agamben, “Destituent power,” 515.

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The inoperativity thus achieved does not culminate in a passive state. By offering respite from “positive signified content,”328 politics begins anew as agonistic deliberation untrammelled by oppressively self-same identity, alterity, and the latent possibility of erasing their difference. The carnival finds its structural equivalent in the setting of the final trial of Sunday: “The men for whom these thrones were reserved were men crowned with extraordinary laurels. But the central chair was empty.” (178) For Agamben, the “majesty of the empty throne” (a paradigm traced through various theological and political discourses) captures “within the governmental machine that unthinkable inoperativity – making it its internal motor – that constitutes the ultimate mystery of divinity.”329 The vacant seat of power is, thus, bound to the fundamental condition of human life, which is “inoperative and without purpose.”330 However, once a sovereign power ‘captures’ this purposelessness within itself, it can be used as the basis of authority. Specifically, a ‘governmental apparatus’ functioning on the basis of this void operates by receding, in the manner already demonstrated by the state of exception. Under those conditions, inoperativity cannot be put to use as the basis of a ‘coming community’ freed from the strictures of identity. This is because the absence of a task or essence, rather than enacted communally, is cordoned off in a “special ‘sacred’ sphere where it can be marvelled at but never used.”331 This passivity in the face of the empty throne has to be overcome, so that any ascription of an identity can be suspended. To achieve this, the inoperativity that had been relegated to the empty throne must be reclaimed. The potentiality thus opened up refuses definite articulation in the terms of any governmental apparatus. Such evasion can, in the terms of Thursday, be considered a specifically anarchist circumvention of a particular identity vested in the now-allegorical detective figures. The anarchic component of sovereign power is reappropriated, both by the individual and, as Agamben’s work on the Coming Community shows, in forms of life in which “such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property.”332 That is, the protagonists have to take over the lack of a single organising principle presented both by the carnival and by the empty throne — and make that lack the principle of a politics-to-come. To this end, the sudden, conspicuously divine and a-temporal presence of Sunday has to be rejected: “he saw on the sea of human faces in front of him a frightful and

328 Cf. Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 42. 329 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 245. 330 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 245. 331 Prozorov, Agamben and Politics, 39. 332 Agamben, The Coming Community, 1.

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beautiful alteration, as if heaven had opened behind his head. But Sunday had only passed silently along the front like a shadow, and had sat in the central seat” (178). The past perfect of ‘had sat’ threatens to extend the bounds of a singular, completed action, and to imbue Sunday with a timeless presence. Sunday, from this vantage point, had always occupied the ‘place of power’,333 which is not least contrary to his own self-description as a wolf hunted by “kings and sages” (155) in a lawless past. To contest this atemporal power, it becomes all the more crucial to counter the image of the occupied throne with the empty throne preceding it. To this end, the lack of foundational validity of rule disclosed by Sunday’s absence is carried over into the confrontation with the figure of the divine. If this is an anarchic gesture, it is so in the sense in which Agamben uses the term: “Anarchy is that which becomes possible only in the moment that we grasp and destitute the anarchy of power. The same goes for every attempt to think anomy: It becomes accessible only through the exhibition and the deposition of the anomy that law has captured within itself in the state of exception.”334 This concept is crucial for a novel which up to this point has disabused its protagonists of any possibility of drawing a dividing line between order and anarchy once and for all. Instead of such stabilising dichotomy, the exhibition of the anomie grounding any norm becomes momentarily possible in Thursday. Sunday’s empty throne and the carnival no longer occlude their own grounding in an anarchic, lawless state, but offer objective correlatives to the absence of order, almost didactically exposing their own suspension. If, then, the figure of the divine sovereign exhibits its grounding in potential force rather than actual laws, it falls to the protagonists to arrogate to themselves that absence of a determined identity or vocation — and make it the basis for a new politics. That the structure of government is itself anarchic becomes the basis of the suggested mode of deliberation at the end of the novel.335 Only if the void underlying the claim to divine power becomes conspicuous can the absence of an essence be assumed and put to use by the protagonist. Syme/Thursday does not leave the council of days with a new task or any need for a re-definition of identity. Instead, the very ordering impetus associated with the character from the first is rendered inoperative. By making the absence of a determining sovereign truth visible by means of the bathos of the empty chair, the anti-essentialist lack of a telos can, in a further step, be transferred from a separate, divine sphere to

333 Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 2. 334 Agamben, “Destituent power,” 518. 335 John Lechte and Saul Newman. Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights: Statelessness, Images, Violence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 134.

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the profane space “outside a fenced garden” (184). The novel almost has to conclude at this point, at which the previous identity of Syme has been suspended on the basis of the self-suspension of the empty seat of power; and, indeed, the narrative concludes at a point at which he does not articulate any particular sense of self. At the same time, he relinquishes his previous, sharply dichotomous position by treating the anarchist as “an easy and conversational companion” (184). Whether and how he will define his position with or against Lucian is still up in the air, and remains so, becoming the matter of a projected (or rather potential) plot. This potentiality restored to the protagonist in a transfer of the characteristics of the empty throne is best expressed by denying any further narrative actualisation of the story of Syme — and ending the novel. It is on the basis of this perpetual absence of a “floor to the universe” (127) that Syme’s own self-serious invocation of order becomes as moot as a heterostereotypical realm of anarchist conspirators. The receding ‘sabbatism’ of Sunday bears some “impossible good news” (184), which consists in the very impossibility of expressing those same ‘good news’ in the terms of the divine sphere. This renders them the concluding indication that the protagonist is no longer beholden to the “awful actuality” (128) characterising the previous, looming disclosure of Sunday-as-God. This potential for ‘profanation’336 of the divine news precludes all identitarian certainties upheld by the protagonist: his artistic practice as a “poet of law, a poet of order” (11); the hermeneutics of suspicion locating a deviant modernity in a “vast philosophic movement consisting of an outer and an inner ring” (47); the production of an “allegorical figure” (129); and, finally, the notion of a complete view of the face of Sunday (154). All of these practices depend on an identity that presupposes its disconnection from a radical outside. By contrast, towards the end of the narrative, in Agamben’s terms, [t]here can be no true human community on the basis of a presupposition – be it a nation, a language, or even the a priori of communication of which hermeneutics speaks. What unites human beings among themselves is not a nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the vision of language itself and, therefore, the experience of language’s limits, its end. A true community can only be a community that is not presupposed.337

336 Cf. Giorgio Agamben. Profanations. New York: Zone, 2007. 74. “The thing that is returned to the common use of men is pure, profane, free of sacred names. But use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrives at it only by means of profanation.” 337 Agamben, “The Idea of Language.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 39–47. 47.

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In Thursday, this presupposition is offered by the anarchic supplement, which disrupts any notion of a final, identitarian ‘ground’. ‘Community’ can only proceed on the basis of a perpetual absence that exceeds any attempt to presuppose a collective identity binding its members. In this, the novel offers a unique solution to the problem that Agamben inherits from Benjamin, namely how to break out of a dialectic in which any (apparently settled and codified) constituted power seemingly replaces constitutive power, i.e. the “potentiality of radical political change.”338 This “unceasing, unwinnable, desolate dialectic”339 is expressed by the anarchist Lucian’s charge: “You are the law, and you have never been broken” (182). Throughout, the narrative performs not only the impossibility of drawing a distinction of this kind, but also the reductive, change-averse politics that follow the attempt to do so. Thus, rather than distinguishing authorised and revolutionary power, the narrative performs a model that recalls the state of exception: any constituted power preserves within itself the revolutionary, pre-juridical violence which has brought it about in the first place. As Illan rua Wall summarises a constellation of this kind, constitutive power “never truly escapes the legal, and remains ultimately determined by its relation to the constitution.”340 It is just such an inscription of anomie into constituted power that recurs throughout early modernist political fiction, which over and over presents figures of authority acting from an uncertain, suspended position. And vice versa: Casamassima, for instance, features elements of constituted authority being integrated into purportedly revolutionary practice — with the result of ostensible anarchists espousing state violence and a carceral logic. Rather than hiding or reversing the hidden nexus of constituted and constitutive power, Chesterton’s novel provides narrative equivalents to their inextricable connection. Not only is the “secret solidarity between the violence that founds the juridical order and that which conserves it”341 reiterated with every unmasking of anarchist impostors, but it is also made explicit by the empty throne and staged by the carnivalesque dance. Rather than confronting a “supreme power” (182), the fracture within constituted order becomes readily apparent. As Sunday displays his anarchic side as much as his promise of eventual disclosure of universal laws,

338 Illan rua Wall. “A Different Constituent Power: Agamben and Tunisia.” New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political. Ed. Matthew Stone, Illan rua Wall, and Costas Douzinas. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012. 46–66. 46. 339 Giorgio Agamben. The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV, 2. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2016. 266. 340 Wall, “A Different Constituent Power,” 59. 341 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 268.

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an apparent outside of politics is re-located to the inside. However, Chesterton’s conclusion desists from making this movement appear as a “mechanism through which the juridical order captures life, nullifying the possibility of a nonjuridical politics.”342 On the contrary: politics are still possible for Chesterton. However, they depend on the inclusive exclusion of the state of exception being passed on to the protagonists, as a predicament that can be approached with ever-renewed scepticism. This culminates in Syme’s realisation that “each thing that obeys laws may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist” (182). Rather than a sovereign annulation of identity, then, the protagonist is emboldened to cross and contest his own own ideological system, introducing into it the anarchic scepticism outside its purview. In Conrad and James, protagonists are relegated to an identity that is perpetually withdrawn. Subsequently, they attempt and fail to be reinscribed in a collective task. Contrary to this recursive search for substantial identity and confrontation with the self-suspension of law, Sunday offers a “lucid exposition of the anarchy internal to power,”343 so that the novel can at least gesture towards a liberation of “human beings from every biological and social destiny and every predetermined task.”344 There are no more anarchists to unveil, since anarchy has been shown to be imbricated with the functioning of power. In the wake of this attenuation of demarcations, the novel gestures towards “that peculiar absence of work that we are accustomed to calling ‘politics’ and ‘art’.”345 Specifically, it is this state without vocation, telos, or identity that is briefly adumbrated in the concluding pastoral scene. However, in order to maintain a position that cannot be encompassed by any one identity – that, in Agamben’s terms, “holds its own impotential or potential-not-to firm”346 – the conclusion of Syme’s Bildungsroman development must itself remain a potential one. The protagonist, returning to the novel’s initial setting of Saffron Park, “found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory” (184). Yet, Syme does not cross the differential boundary. The eventful border-crossing remains in suspension, allowing for the semantic spaces to remain distinct: the space of the initial dispute between the poets of order and anarchy on one side and the garden on the other. In this, the novel arrests the rapid succession of events, presenting a potential event – a crossing of the border between the

342 Jessica Whyte. Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben. New York: SUNY Press, 2013. 60. 343 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 275. 344 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 278. 345 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 278. 346 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 276.

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policeman and his erstwhile antagonists — without settling on any one conclusion that would counteract the potentiality bequeathed by Sunday. After Syme wakes up from the ‘nightmare’, we are briefly introduced to the emerging mode of deliberation based on the ‘inoperativity’ of any one identity. The absence of a foundation – as embodied by Sunday – inculcates a conversational mode which no longer presumes to identify self and Other once and for all. In keeping with the supplemental appearance of the divine, the “foundationalist horizon” governing both Syme’s order and Lucian’s anarchy “starts expanding into a new horizon right from the gaps and fissures within the old foundations.”347 Quite literally: in response to Syme’s anarchist scepticism, Sunday “grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky” (183); what he leaves behind, however, is the same “blackness” (183) that already obscured him during the recruitment scene. Sunday is defined by absence: “A breeze blew so clean and sweet that one could think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky” (184). A ‘hole’ rather than a ‘whole’, this is an equivalent to Marchart’s ‘gaps and fissures’, an absence made productive as a basis for deliberation without foundations. What is crucial about this final episode is the third incarnation of Lucian Gregory after his previous iterations as rival poet and anarchist accuser. Now he is shown to accompany Syme as the latter finds himself “walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality.” (184) The ‘conversational’ nature of the exchange is key, since it marks a generic break with the lengthy pronouncements of the ‘real anarchist’ during the allegorical dream. Consequently, on the basis of the alienity of Sunday, the protagonists are enabled to engage in a mode of deliberation that dispenses with the absolutes of order and anarchy introduced by Syme at the beginning of the novel. The exchange about ‘trivialities’ instead evokes Sunday’s notes left behind during the chase. Just as those snippets of proverbs, commonplace books, or doggerel rhymes were to prompt further interpretation precisely because they advocated their incompleteness and withheld context and reference alike, the final ‘conversational’ mode opts for a possibility of communicative rationality between good-faith actors. In this, the model resembles David L. Hall’s account of ‘philosophical anarchism’, which proceeds from the attempt to be “an-archai”, that is “without principles as determining sources of order since, with Aristotle, we believe that an arche is that from which a

347 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 33.

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thing can be known.”348 This is accompanied by the loss of meta-rules, which state that rules can be exchanged only if one believes that the replacement would “better accord with ‘the world’.”349 Instead of rules and meta-rules, “[w] hat conduces to conversation is to be enacted; what impedes it is to be avoided.”350 A conversation in this sense becomes possible in the narrative coda; rather than ‘abolishing’ meta-rules, however, they have been relegated to an unreachable background, which itself is riven betweens intimations of order and anarchy. Thus, the Sunday horizon, assumed yet unspecified as it is, not only allows for the most hopeful instance of ongoing deliberation in any of the novels discussed. What is more, the narrative allows for a redemptive concept of ‘anarchism’. This literary version of anarchist thought is no more faithful to the tenets of libertarian socialism at the time of Thursday’s writing than Conrad’s or James’ literary radicalisms, since it lacks reference to social organisation or economic redistribution. Nevertheless, the narrative allocates to anarchy the role of anti-foundationalist scepticism. By prompting the transformation of Sunday into ‘blackness’ and “some hole in the sky” (184), this critique prepares the ground for the intimation of post-foundational deliberation that closes the narrative. The final mode of conducting conversational politics, with its pastoral setting, intimation of friendship, and a final sentence promising societal and heteronormative reintegration in the manner of a Bildungsroman (“There he saw the sister of Gregory”) does seem a blithe solution to the preceding representational impasses. However, the possibility of dispensing with essentialist distinctions of self and Other and a return to established language games (such as the “impossible good news” as a direct reference to the Gospel), is a unique conclusion in the corpus of political fiction. Whilst James and Conrad trace the rise of the state of exception as the inexorable result of the failure of demarcation, Thursday reshapes that very failure into the escape from circular self-reference. Politics, as a consequence, becomes possible on the basis of the loss of a figure of closure. An “easy and conversational” (184) deliberation is achieved by the thoroughgoing suspension of foundational truth at the end of the ‘nightmare’. Yet, the result is not anti-foundationalism, a political ‘anything goes’ as Lucian (in his role as anarchist poet) would have it: “An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder” (12). Rather, since Sunday himself justifies his own suffering (“Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” 183), the possibility of a determining

348 David L. Hall. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994. 114. 349 Hall, Richard Rorty, 114. 350 Hall, Richard Rorty, 114.

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ground for future deliberation, as per Marchart, “remains present in its absence.”351 This resolution is only at hand because Sunday has indicated the impossibility of ever arresting the differential negotiation of truth; the “quasitranscendental impossibility of a final ground” which “cannot be of the same order as the plurality of empirical foundations”352 has found its disruptive correlative in the divine figure of alienity. The perennial absence of the god underlying order and anarchy consigns any assumption of identity and alterity to “necessary contingency and groundlessness,” which, in turn, displays itself “from within a specific context, that is, from the ontic observer position of a specific discourse” in “terms available within the specific discourse.”353 It is only after Syme’s system of order has been exposed as one among many (or rather: six paradigmatic ones) – and after the supplemental figure of Sunday emerges from within its procedures – that the novel can associate him with the ‘conversational’ mode of conduct. This is not to say that “‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries)”354 cannot be part of the final horizon of a politicsto-come. After all, the transfer from Sunday’s realm to the purported diegetic reality does not render the former “unreal, in the earthly sense” (183). Indeed, Syme recognises that the anarchist “had been a part of his recent drama” (184), acknowledging his own intermittent adoption of the anarchist’s sceptical inquiry in his accusation levelled against God. For all this continued lip-service to the reality of political difference, however, the novel suggests that in order to engage in a conversation with an anarchist, the ex-policeman has to dispense with the notion that a stable boundary between order and anarchy is possible. In this way, the novel functions as an implicit riposte to the focus on the demarcation of self and Other in the political novels by James and Conrad. After all, the preceding narratives connoted the loss of distinctions with breakdown, with a catastrophic disintegration of hard-won selves under the conditions of a state of exception, and with a loss of linear narrativity in the recounting of these travails. By contrast, The Man Who

351 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 18. 352 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 17. 353 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 30. Cf. also. Slavoj Žižek. “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. By Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek . London and New York: Verso, 2000. 90–136. “The political struggle for hegemony whose outcome is contingent, and the ‘non-historical’ bar or impossibility are thus strictly correlative: there is a struggle for hegemony precisely because some preceding ‘bar’ of impossibility sustains the void at stake in the hegemonic struggle.” 111. 354 Chantal Mouffe. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London and New York: Verso, 2013. 7. In this model, “[a]dversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position.”

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Was Thursday suggests that a reckoning with the limits of an ordering system, and with the very terms on which it has fabricated its enemies and self-images alike, can lead to a renewed negotiation of political dichotomies. Politics are reconstructed against the background of the the collapse of any one system in the face of Sunday’s absolute Otherness. It is only if the negotiation of identity and alterity is seen as contingent and limited that it can begin anew.

5.3 Conclusion The analysis of Conrad’s “Autocracy and War” and Under Western Eyes as well as Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday has yielded two opposed end points for the political models in early modernist narrative. In Conrad’s case, the remaining demarcations of alterity, barely upheld in The Secret Agent, are shown to collapse entirely. The state of exception disclosed as a result is a comprehensive mode of rule, in the course of which any claim to personal or collective identity can be withdrawn. Instead of furnishing difference from grotesque anarchist figures, the novel stages an abandonment of the individual to a borderless space in which self and Other cannot be told apart. Although revolutionaries are presented, the targets of the state of exception are unable to determine a countervailing norm in opposition to them. While Conrad, thus, confronts us with the possibility of a reduction to bare life, Chesterton’s model is, ultimately, restitutive. The novel does feature an extensive literalisation of the Professor’s analysis in The Secret Agent — namely that the seemingly hardand-fast distinctions between anarchy and law constitute a contingent distribution of signs. However, this insight is shown to prepare the formation of an order that accepts and functionalises this contingency. The generic syncretism of Chesterton’s ‘modernist fantasy’ allows the novel to feature an objective correlative to the impossibility of closure. That is: Sunday acts as a divine guarantor of the unavailability of a fixed distribution of self and Other. A political theology of this kind is unavailable in Conrad’s case. Indeed, the very attempt to attain it only ever serves to further embroil the represented world in a state in which explicit authority recedes and potential power takes hold of life itself. While both models, thus, feature a state of exception, it is only in Under Western Eyes that this status is figured as a permanent destabilisation. For Chesterton, by contrast, a suspension of extant ordering systems is the necessary condition for renewed, tentative determinations of order and anarchy.

6 Conclusion The representation of anarchism entails a choice. Understood as a mode of political philosophy and activism, it questions the foundational validity of coercive authority; it advocates prefigurative politics, in which means and ends are aligned; and it places the burden of justification on whoever claims the legitimacy of authority.1 This study has shown that early modernist fiction sets itself against libertarian socialism in this sense of a social movement that contests authoritarian oppression by state and capital and seeks to organise social relations as “decentralised, voluntary, and cooperative structures.”2 That is to say: anarchism as a mode of political thought and action is disavowed in the political fiction of James, Conrad, and Chesterton from 1886–1911. Instead, the depiction of anarchism in political narratives revolves around the containment of anarchist thought and practice. Instead of dismantling authority, the texts have been shown to be concerned with the possibility of fortifying hierarchical modes of order. To achieve this, a collective identity is set apart from the relational alterity of anarchism. According to the variable distinction emerging from this narrative strategy, anarchists are represented as arbiters of discontent, disorder, and chaos. If, then, the discursive environment of the turn of the century presents the choice between anarchism as a movement and anarchism as a fabricated Other, political fiction opts for a justification and elaboration of the latter. The stereotype is accorded a function: anarchism is presented as alterity in order to distinguish a coherent image of cultural identity, its values and norms. Although they share a common radical theme, the novels analysed in this study dismantle the notion that its readers will gain insight into a genuine, bona fide anarchist underground: a political version of a ‘reality effect’ is consistently withheld.3 Accordingly, the analysis of the political novels The Princess Casamassima, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and The Man Who Was Thursday has taken as its starting point the interdiscursive treatment of political radicalism.4 I have proceeded from the hypothesis that early modernist literature sets up anarchism as a variable marker of alterity against which concepts of identity 1 Cf. Noam Chomsky. “Goals and Visions.” Chomsky on Anarchism. Ed. Barry Pateman. Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2005. 190–211. 192. 2 Saul Newman. “Research Methods and Problems: Postanarchism.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism. Ed. Ruth Kinna. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. 41–50. 41. 3 Cf. Roland Barthes. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989. 141–148. 4 Cf. Link/Link-Heer, “Diskurs/Interdiskurs und Literaturanalyse,” 92. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-006

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are upheld. The distinction is shown to be functional, yet tenuous: as a result of its collapse, modes of authority emerge which dispense with oppositional concepts of selfhood and Otherness altogether. The analyses of The Princess Casamassima and The Secret Agent have traced the movement from a model of (1) demarcation (identity against anarchist alterity) to a (2) state of exception in which political difference collapses. The first part of each analysis (cf. chapters 3.1 and 4.1) has yielded the strategies by means of which anarchism is used to residually stabilise a scheme of ‘Us vs. Them’. The second part, chapters 3.2 and 4.2, respectively, has demonstrated the diegetic and narrative consequences of the breakdown of imagined demarcations. Chapter 5 places its emphasis on this collapse of political difference from the outset: while both The Man Who Was Thursday and Under Western Eyes share a concern with the loss of a controllable anarchist Other evinced by Casamassima and The Secret Agent, they draw disparate conclusions from such failure of representing alterity. While the collapse of the confected anarchist Other is contained by a deep-structural authority in Chesterton’s text, Conrad’s account of Russian autocracy traces the emergence of ‘exceptionalism’ — power unmoored from the socially conducive foil of relational alterity. Each novel, thus, provides an account of the functions of anarchist ‘heterostereotypes’ for the maintenance of normative autostereotypes,5 both on the level of histoire and discours. The narratives outline the interests associated with the construction of a crudely fabricated version of radicalism. The analysis has shown that the represented normative orders, barely maintained against anarchy as they are, yield two models. For all their individual variations, these models – demarcation and the state of exception – consistently structure the storyworld and its narrative evocation. The first model, discussed as the demarcation of anarchism, allows for a distinction to be drawn between identity and alterity. Anarchism emerges as the Other against which variable concepts of personal and residually collective identity can claim legitimacy. That is, the various iterations of this first model proceed from a relational definition of alterity. Such a concept of the Other, with Hastings and Manning, makes it “impossible to talk about identities except by explicit reference to alterity, and yet it is remarkable how often we talk of identity as if it were absolute and not relational.”6 The processes of demarcation represented by James, Conrad, and Chesterton do not present it as ‘remarkable’ that a relational

5 Cf. Pfister, The Gift of Beauty, 4. 6 Adi Hastings and Paul Manning. “Introduction: Acts of Alterity.” Language and Communication 24 (2004). 291–311. 293.

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definition of alterity comes to appear absolute and natural. Rather, it is the very procedure of constructing a relation between both sides of a self-drawn politicial distinction that maintains identity-based order — and allows its representatives to act on the assumption of the essentialist validity of their contingent language games. According to the second model put forward by the narratives, the distinction between identity and alterity, however, is fragile. The representation of this loss of differentiation varies, yet in each instance maintains a common characteristic: the result of the breakdown of a relational system is not a wholesale dissolution of order but, instead, the starting point for modes of authority no longer predicated on such differentiations. As a consequence, the border between oppositional concepts is no longer traversable by the protagonists nor narratable on the level of discours. As this boundary is attenuated, the novels evoke variations of an authority that becomes the more absolute the more it withdraws. The study has analysed this mode of power in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception. Agamben’s account has offered conceptual tools to analyse the “disappearance of meaningful political action.”7 With varying degrees of concern, each novel associates this loss with an evocation of politicised life that is no longer subject to explicit laws.

6.1 First Model: Demarcation against Anarchy In early modernist fiction, anarchists are associated with a whole set of clichés, preconceptions, and stereotypes, ranging from their role in global conspiracies to their exclusive concern with violent ‘propaganda by the deed’. The question ‘what is anarchism?’, then, is not so much answerd by its diegetic representatives, but always already posed with an eye to the possibility of demarcation. The narratives have been shown to present, negotiate, and evaluate these negative representations of anarchism as well as the functions they serve for the respective normative identity that defines itself against ‘radicalism’ beyond the pale. What ‘anarchism’ means in the context of this distinction is not defined by its proponents within the represented world, nor less by an implicit author sympathetic to its concerns; instead, libertarian socialism is observed and assessed from the point of view of the possibility of drawing a distinction. In other words: the novels consider the utility of defining a norm against a radical sphere challenging that norm.

7 Stephen Humphreys. “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception.” The European Journal of International Law 17 (2006). 677–687. 678.

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The original usage of ‘anarchy’ offers a way into this operation of difference: the Greek term arché denotes a foundation, essence, origin, or truth, while an-archy describes states without such an organising principle.8 The narratives revolve around the relationship between such terms, between foundational order and its anarchic obverse: “If it is true that an apparatus always separates what it captures from a presupposed outside, then each arché is always related to an an-arché (anarchy) through its exclusion.”9 This exclusion precludes ‘anarchy’ as positive organisational form “on the basis of liberty and equality.”10 Rather, any definition of anarchy, an organisational form without coercive authority, is bound up with the type of political power and its attendant norms to be established in its stead. The overarching question posed by the novels from 1886–1908 is whether such delimitation is possible. The plot and presentation of these narratives alike revolve around the exclusion of anarchy from a residual sphere of order defined against it. Consequently, whenever the novels pose the question of how society and politics can be founded on principles that are incontestable, immune against revision, and outside of society and politics,11 they demonstrate the degree to which such an order depends on a mechanism of exclusion. In this model, any boundary can only be maintained if its contingency is systematically occluded. To this end, the anarchic outside is associated with traits of anarchy in a negative sense of ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’, so that on the inside the notion of an ‘incontestable’ identity can be generated. In Oliver Marchart’s terms, such acts of drawing and maintaining borders can be called ‘post-foundational’: the “primordial (or ontological) absence of a final ground” constitutes the “condition of possibility for grounds in their plurality.”12 This means that the differentiation between inside and outside is not only marked but also, subsequently, treated as immutable. As soon as the cultural inside has been demarcated, the boundary is performatively strengthened in order to render inconspicuous the contingency of the original founding acts and, by extension, of the fragile orders that depend on those performances of political difference. Protagonists ensure the naturalisation of this distinction whenever they subject elements from the constitutive outside to a re-entry into the cultural inside, where they become

8 Thanos Zartaloudis. Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. 141. 9 Zartaloudis, Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism, 141. 10 Newman, “Research Methods,” 41. 11 Cf. Marchart, Die Politische Differenz, 59. 12 Marchart, Die Politische Differenz, 63. My trans. Orig. quote: Die “primordiale (oder ontologische) Abwesenheit eines letzten Grundes” stellt “selbst die Ermöglichungsbedingung für Gründe in ihrer Anwesenheit” dar.

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a matter of observation, classification, and denigration.13 By observing, for instance, the grotesque anarchist in the salon of The Secret Agent, the differentiation of contingent orders from their anarchic outside can be stage-managed as a reassuring spectacle. Anarchism has been shown to function primarily as a relational obverse in political literature, an alterity which has to be disavowed so that a collective identity can be defined. This identity is shown to be without essential characteristics. Its traits emerge as the result of a differential operation: they are set apart from an anarchist outside connoted with breakdown and chaos. This boundary work is, overwhelmingly, not performed by the fictional anarchists themselves. Rather, demarcations are drawn and re-drawn by protagonists who require a heterostereotypical counter-image of political radicalism in order to set apart an autostereotype: a normative and authoritatively bolstered sense of collective selfhood. Attention to the making of alterity, here defined as a relational obverse of identity, allows for an analysis of the functions of Otherness. Only on the basis of a binary distribution of what belongs to the self and what can be consigned to the political Other is a perpetuation of self-reference against a relational obverse possible. That is: an ‘inside’ is derived by reference to an anarchist ‘constitutive outside’ — an obverse that has to be observed, classified, controlled, and, generally, defined against whichever set of norms is to be established. The anarchist as a constructed figure of alterity is associated with three recurring characteristics that render him or her a useful arbiter of Otherness in the early modernist discursive environment. Firstly, an expandable discourse of radical alterity is already in place. It extends from the individually deviant body of the degenerate anarchist criminal to the macro-political concern with ‘aliens’ who, as per bourgeoning mass circulation newspapers, exploit the comparatively liberal immigration policy of Great Britain. What is more, anarchism can be located at home, and associated with (politically and literally) domestic concerns. Thus, for instance, the necessity of demarcating an Other can be conceived as a matter of mapping the city – and pinpointing anarchist alterity in the manner of Heat in The Secret Agent – but it also recurs in the literal domestic situation of protagonists. After all, in order to sustain the illusion of shared values, it is not enough to establish a semantic opposition between representations of the self and the disavowed Other: this distinction has to be supported topologically and topographically. Such reification of difference recurs in the novels as the task of establishing a place of residually shared norms, values, or

13 Luhmann, Gesellschaft, 45.

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at least communicative conventions against a space given over to anarchy, in the pejorative sense of an incipient dissolution of order. At the same time, anarchist alterity is also a means of depoliticising antagonisms. In an extension of strategies weaponised against non-Western colonial subjects or Irish Republicans, fabricated radicals lend themselves to exploitation as a ‘floating signifier’ of Otherness.14 The libertarian socialist stereotype is deprived of political demands, with the result of a political version of selfreferential l’art pour l’art — an avant-garde aesthetics of political destruction without articulable political goals. Anarchism allows the novels to represent an opposition to normativity as such. Thus, it is rarely the case that any political radical in the novels formulates a sustained theory undergirding their position. Instead, Henry James’ anarchists orchestrate a vague conspiratorial change which is as all-encompassing as it is vague. The Professor’s plan in The Secret Agent, like the crossed-out imperialist tract in Heart of Darkness, exhausts itself in the repeated injunction to “Exterminate! Exterminate!” The representation of anarchists as relational alterity therefore revolves around the question whether it is possible to define a political opponent while simultaneously depoliticising that opposition. Properly demarcated, the radical figure emerging from these procedures cannot be associated with an equivalent position in an antagonistic struggle. Whoever is designated ‘radical’ remains a placeholder beyond the pale, against which a consensual norm can be made to appear with each transgression that is narrated. Thus, the representation of anarchism centres around a differential operation. “Draw a distinction!”15 as Spencer-Brown puts it in his instructions for the creation of a boundary that enables the difference between an unmarked state and its marked opposite. Further: “Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by that distinction.”16 Such a space ‘cloven’ by manufactured antagonism – and dislodged from anarchism’s historical concerns and social struggles – is at stake in all of the novels analysed, yet its successful evocation is not guaranteed in any of them. This is not to say that the storyworlds are free from conflict. On the contrary, they are always already riven by inequality, exploitation, class difference, and its political expression. Instead of finding sustained literary correlates for these material struggles, however, the novels trace a process of obfuscation by means of which such antagonisms are projected onto alternative, controllable sites of difference. For instance, a revolutionary

14 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 131. 15 Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 3. 16 Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 3.

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act is perennially anticipated: Hyacinth attends the meetings of vaguely defined radical activists, hoping for an event in which the anarchist ‘heteroglossia’ can be condensed into a single, revolutionary transgression; the plot of The Secret Agent revolves around the simulation of a transgressive border-crossing; Haldin in Under Western Eyes attempts to galvanise an essential identity of the people by means of his attack, underestimating the exceptional potential of the state; and, finally, Chesterton’s Syme proceeds from the assumption that by going undercover in an anarchist sphere, he will become privy to and intercept an anarchist attack on order and propriety. In each of these cases, characters assume that manifest transgression would yield stable signs. An eventful act of ‘propaganda by the deed’, most notably, would function as a signifier of the very order it disrupts. Upon being breached, representatives of that order, in turn, could set about naming and controlling the transgression — and, in the process, define the normative signified arrayed against it.17 The drawing of a difference stabilises meaning and allows for the subsequent production of relational signs. Once the event has been named and communicated, the differential sign combining order and breach assumes its form as reproducible relational alterity. In this way, the anarchist stereotype represents the very norm it attacks. This process of a relational production of order from signifiers of disorder has to be temporalised. After all, the moment the sign of transgression has been derived, interpretative activity stalls. Political fiction, then, addresses how transgression can be recouped as a renewed irritant and a spur to ordering activities. This problem arises because as soon as the anarchist Other is stabilised – with an entire set of police knowledge tasked with the production and containment of transgression – normative procedures become routine. Radicalism no longer impinges on the social system, so that self-appointed arbiters of order can, conversely, no longer appear against the background of their political foil. This is the situation we encounter in the storyworld of The Secret Agent, where the production of anarchists by an apparatus of demarcation has become a regular, iteratively narrated occurrence. The sense of shock is gone and the norm cannot be signified. Accordingly, the institutions reproducing themselves through the policing of anarchist difference are on the verge of breakdown. As a result, the representation of anarchists as alterity brings to the fore what Foucault notes for the “play of limits and transgression,” which “seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy. Transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return

17 Cf. Linder and Ort, “Übertretung,” 35.

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once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable.”18 In keeping with this ‘closing of the line’, the political imaginary of the novels not only fails to do justice to anarchism as a political philosophy and a mode of prefigurative action. What is more, the narratives question whether the fabrication of anarchist stereotypes still exerts its function of yielding a negative counterpart in the first place. While they trace differential mechanisms, thus, the texts cast doubt on the possibility of stabilising a norm as against a political Other — and demonstrate the degree to which vaunted identities become fraught as the distinctions that made a ‘sense of self’ representable begin to disintegrate. As a consequence of this concern with demarcation, the challenge dramatised in the novels can be summarised as follows: the “system is not a unity but rather a difference, and, as a consequence, we have to face the difficulty of conceiving the unity of a difference.”19 There is no normative order unless it can be constituted as a series of distinctions between system and environment. While the analysis has shown that such distinctions are tenuous in each of the novels, they just barely impart the impression of foundational validity within the momentarily distinguished order. To summarise the first demarcation analysed in this study, The Princess Casamassima maintains the notion that there is ‘culture’ in the first place – organised around a sphere of aesthetic hierarchies – as long as the protagonist’s situation is describable as a dilemma: will Hyacinth Robinson follow his maternal, revolutionary impulses or tend towards the aristocratic sphere of idealised culture he has inherited from his father? The connotations accorded to each side of the distinction are subordinated to the maintenance of the difference itself. As long as both sides can be set apart and discussed in terms of heredity or associated with topological, topographical, and semantic spaces, the protagonist can continue to negotiate his ascriptive identity. Each decision in favour of culture over anarchism also perpetuates the notion that there is a fundamental rift in the first place. For however long this ‘play of limits and transgression’ is kept up, anarchism can be conceived as the outside of a cultural, aesthetic, and experiential sphere — and, by means of furnishing an imagined, chaotic outside, signify that very sphere. In Henry James’ novel, the internal elaboration of the demarcated culture depends on a sophisticated account of media; in order to bolster his identity, Hyacinth is shown to require mediated distance between himself and whichever instance of cultural identity is to be represented.

18 Michel Foucault. “A Preface to Transgression,” 34. 19 Niklas Luhmann. Introduction to Systems Theory. Trans. Peter Gilgen. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2013. 63.

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Similar mediations can be shown to organise the system of policing in The Secret Agent, in which the sense of collective identity depends on the assumption of a language game upheld by loosely associated institutional actors. These conventions – predicated on the supposed need to intercept transgressive anarchists – require a signifier of transgression. As per the template of differentiation organising these texts, anarchism furnishes controllable representations of Otherness against which self-referential elaborations of loosely associated ‘normative’ actors are defined. In each of these cases of demarcation, apart from the thematic association of the political imaginary with an explicit, radical Other, a narratological structure is at stake. Specifically, the ‘tellability’ of an eventful traversal of a semantic border depends on the maintenance of anarchism as a relational obverse of identity. Without anarchists, there is no story to be told. After all, the very development of the plot hinges on a differential sujet: a represented world segmented into at least two subsets and a movement of an element from the first sphere to its complementary opposite, to summarise this basic condition of eventfulness.20 Since at the specific cultural moment of early modernism, the role of ‘binary opposite’ is filled by anarchism, such a border-crossing movement depends on the preservation of a separate sphere of radical politics, the traversal of which is registered in the narratives as a marker of narrative progression. This also works in reverse: in the form of political crimes or acts of terror, elements from the alleged anarchist sphere cross the border separating the constitutive outside from semantic spaces of social order and normativity. These movements fulfil the double function of maintaining confected antagonism in the storyworld and, narratively, just barely keeping up the expectation of an eventful change of state.

6.2 Second Model: State of Exception The analysis has shown the degree to which the novels increasingly attenuate an eventful movement between two distinct spheres. Specifically, as the difference

20 Cf. Lotman, Structure, 1977. 240. For a summary of the concept, cf. also Christiane Hauschild. “Jurij Lotmans semiotischer Ereignisbegriff: Versuch einer Neubewertung.” Slavische Erzähltheorie: Russische und tschechische Ansätze. Ed. Wolf Schmid. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 141–186. 141. “Firstly, Lotman defines a narrated event as a character’s crossing of the border of a ‘semantic space’. The presence or absence of an event characterises a text in terms of a ‘sujetfulness’ or ‘sujetlessness’. Secondly, Lotman determines sujetfulness in a gradable sense: the event manifests as the disappointment of an expectation, as deviance from a norm.” My trans.

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between identity and alterity is dismantled, ‘impressionist’ self-reflection takes the place of plot progression. The narratives, after all, are tentative as far as anarchist transgression is concerned: there is no spectacular precipitating act of terror on the model of the ‘dynamite fiction’ of the 1880s and 1890s. In popular novels such as Hartmann the Anarchist or The Angel of the Revolution,21 the eventinducing status of anarchists is never in doubt, as the transgressive capacities of political radicalism are spectacularly realised in the toppling of governments, the eradication of British landmarks, and sudden acts of violence that permanently alter the diegetic status quo. Anticlimactically, there is no equivalent to such spectacular changes of state in early modernist fiction. Instead, the novels by James, Conrad, and Chesterton set up an entire second model of power that takes hold in the aftermath of disintegrating political difference. In other words, the novels negotiate what follows if no boundary can be established between culture and anarchy (James), the British state and its outside (Conrad), or even order and anarchy per se (Chesterton). A paradigmatic encapsulation of this encroaching loss of differentiation is provided in “The Informer,” a 1906 short story by Joseph Conrad.22 In this narrative, the homodiegetic narrator imagines anarchists as monstrous, obscene figures, clearly set apart from the norms of aesthetic appreciation on which his identity hinges. Yet, once he gets acquainted with an anarchist, he realises that a demarcation of this kind – an expectation of relational alterity also varied in each of the political novels – fails entirely: “He was not even Chinese, which would have enabled one to contemplate him calmly across the gulf of racial difference. He was alive and European; he had the manner of good society, wore a coat and hat like mine, and had pretty near the same taste in cooking. It was too frightful to think of.” (24) It is a version of such a ‘frightful’ loss of differentiation that initiates the second model set up by the novels: a narrative equivalent to the ‘state of exception’. Each text traces variations of this concept to a loss of classificatory boundaries, both within the diegetic world and regarding a narrative mode that can no longer present the unfolding of events. The relational distinction of the model of demarcation, then, can only be upheld under temporally and spatially limited circumstances. The state of exception takes hold precisely whenever the differentiation between a normative interior and an anarchic outside threatens to dissolve. As soon as no complementary Other can

21 Douglas E. Fawcett. Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City. London: Arnold, 1893. George Griffith. The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror. London: Tower, 1894. 22 Joseph Conrad. “The Informer.” The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad: The Stories. Vol. II. Ed. Samuel Hynes. Hopewell: Ecco, 1992.

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be identified, the result is represented as a threat to any stabilising, seemingly universal self-image. Rather than a liberation from the need to construct radical alterity, what ensues as a result of waning distinctions is a permanent fracture within any purported order, a rift “between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by [. . .] a zone in which application is suspended, but the law [la legge], as such, remains in force.”23 The structural equivalents to this model in the novels not only impede the ongoing reproduction of political difference, but are also correlated with the impossibility of ongoing narration. As soon as a differential field collapses (and anarchism no longer takes on whichever characteristics are to be extracted from the cultural selfimage) the novels trace the rise of structures of power that become the more allencompassing the less they can be attributed to singular figures, institutions, or authorities. This, in turn, goes both for the hierarchies within the storyworld and for the possibility of an authorial account of events. Thus, as the fabricated performance of anarchist destructiveness becomes unstable, what follows is a political model that goes beyond differential boundaries, yet becomes all the more expansive for exactly that reason. Each narrative, specifically, has been shown to present the repercussions incurred whenever an expected figure of authority fails to step in to draw a stabilising distinction between the ‘normative’ and the ‘anarchic’. For this situation to arise, first of all, the demarcation of identity and alterity has to diminish. Thus, the political imaginary of James, Conrad, and Chesterton calls into question the possibility – let alone validity – of a ‘final vocabulary’ made plausible in a series of differentiations. Richard Rorty uses this concept to denote foundational terms which are “‘final’ in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse.” Beyond this final vocabulary there is “only helpless passivity or a resort to force.”24 In a similar vein, the continued validity of a noncircular foundation is called into question in early modernism. In other words: not only do differentiations fail, but, moreover, the process of their construction becomes increasingly conspicuous. Each novel stages a process whereby the separation of a norm from its obverse is exposed. Once, however, the contingent demarcations undergirding the distribution of identity and alterity become visible, political difference can no longer function as a set of unexamined background assumptions. Of the novels included in this study, The Princess Casamassima shows the most sustained attempt at shoring up a distinction. In this narrative, a cultural

23 Agamben, State of Exception, 41. 24 Rorty, Contingency, 73.

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norm is set apart from an anarchist conspiracy for a significant section of what amounts to the protagonist’s Bildungsgang. However, this boundary breaks down in the face of an anarchist sphere which is presented as too indeterminate to contain. The very degree to which the radical underground exists in the first place cannot be determined. Its status is subject to abrupt shifts in the perception of the focalising protagonist, making it appear alternately as a paltry revolutionary façade and a world-spanning network. Yet, precisely this status in-between radical scam and global conspiracy precludes its function as a foil against which cultural pursuits can manifest their ostensible legitimacy. Anarchism thus detached from political difference imposes its own calculation of worth in an uncertain reckoning that dismantles any painstakingly determined restitution of cultural values. This anarchist calculus, what is more, functions on the very model of the exchange value of labour that was to be excluded from a ‘disinterested’ cultural sphere — the sublimated material relations undergirding vaunted culture return as an ‘anarchist’ assessment of worth. Confronted with this anarchy out of bounds, James’ arbiters of ‘doctrines felt as fact’25 are forced to engage with a recursive application of their own means of political distinction. Their strategies of imagining and communicating the reality of their self-made distinctions, then, are directed against themselves. While the breakdown of differential certainty proves destructive in the diegesis, this collapse does allow for experiments on the level of discours. In these novels, modernist style is a function of a loss of hard-and-fast ordering categories in the narrated world. In Henry James’ text, the imagined anarchist revolution allows for a sudden epiphanic vision beyond the constraints of the working-class protagonist — a heightened register and prophetic sweep of which the narrative has previously been deprived. In the case of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, meanwhile, the breakdown of order allows for a narrative imitation of the diegetic explosion: well-worn discourses of degenerationist radicalism circulate throughout the storyworld and narratorial commentary alike, irrespective of political differentiations. As anarchists exceed their bounds, their erstwhile characteristics recur as metaphors; as terminology used and criticised by the anarchists themselves; as conspicuous modes of interpretation by a narrator whose omniscience is suddenly constrained; or, with a shock of abject corporeality, as sudden literalisations on the grotesque bodies of the protagonists. If, as the study has argued throughout, the differential operation is geared towards setting apart ‘unmarked’ norms from the ‘marked’ transgression of alterity, the distinction between both sides becomes increasingly fraught. As a result, the monologic

25 Hulme, “A Notebook,” 446.

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repetition of certainties stalls. From the fragmentation of Stevie onwards, every further interpretation is equally fragmentary, tenuous, and unbounded by the distinctions of identity and alterity. As anarchism cannot be relationally determined, its traits recur with aleatory profusion, appearing in spaces and inflecting vantage points previously assumed to be ordered by common, normative assumptions. The breakdown of a final vocabulary finds its material complement in the collapse of literal boundaries between the spaces of The Secret Agent. One such boundary, the glass between Verloc’s bedroom and the uninterpretable chaos of the outside world, demonstrates that the dissolution of distinctions in these novels is not a matter of course. The face of the autocratic ambassador is reflected in the “fragile film” (42) between inside and outside. His appearance at this point of indeterminacy shows that in early modernist political fiction the breakdown of differential identity inaugurates a state of exception. As inside and outside commingle, the reader can no longer determine whether an injunction is in force or not. This absence of explicit commands emerges as a mode of determination which compels its targets all the more. In Agamben’s words, this post-binary mode of power is determined by the topological structure of “[b]eing-outside, and yet belonging.”’26 That is to say, the determination of protagonists by elusive figures of authority is achieved by withdrawing determinate symbolic identity. Power operates on a threshold: by suspending explicit rule, elusive authority operates in an unconstrained manner, to the point of reducing protagonists to literary equivalents of biological, non-symbolisable life. We have encountered two versions of such a “threshold where law and life become undecidable”27 in The Secret Agent. The first leads to the explosion, an absent narrative core that irrevocably disrupts the linear course of events. Any attempt to recover a differential scheme afterwards only increases the suspension in an urban space bereft of classificatory boundaries. The British policeman responsible for the second model of exception, meanwhile, makes the suspension of political difference – in this case enabled by the transposition of unaccountable colonial control – the very basis of his interventions. By acting from another threshold between norm and transgression, this figure stands for a state of nature which, far from superseded, remains the innermost source of executive power. In Under Western Eyes and Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, more so than in the previous novels, the loss of demarcation structures the presentation of the narrative from the very start. In Conrad’s novel, the

26 Agamben, State of Exception, 35. 27 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29.

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narrator loses track of his account of an incomprehensible Russian alterity, while in Chesterton’s narrative, any semblance of a ‘reality effect’ of radical politics is withdrawn from the outset. Thursday hyperbolically reiterates every sign of popular dynamite fiction as the protagonist delves into a literal underground made of (equally literal) dynamite. In the wake of this already comical recurrence of anarchism as alterity, the novel withdraws the distinction between the everyday world aboveground and the anarchist sphere — the anarchists are disclosed as “a lot of silly policemen looking at each other” (150). The erasure of diegetic anarchists, however, serves a function: the mystery of Sunday, the figure of divine inscrutability underlying both anarchism and the police, serves as the basis for a new dialogic engagement between ideological opponents. What is a critical analysis in The Secret Agent – that revolution and legality are “counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical” (52) – is turned into a model of dialogic ethics. In Oliver Marchart’s terms, this reconstitution of politics is only possible because of an absent grounding principle embodied by the receding divinity: “it is precisely the absence of such an Archimedean point that serves as a condition of possibility of always only gradual, multiple, and relatively autonomous acts of grounding.”28 Chesterton counters the state of exception, then, by the introduction of conspicuously absent, and internally divided, sovereignty. This position of a nascent commonsense undergirded by the divinely sanctioned, inextricable connection of order and anarchy sharply delineates Chesterton’s narrative solution from Under Western Eyes. Conrad’s 1911 novel forms the second resolution of the loss of discernible alterity in early modernism. In Conrad’s narrative, an act of political violence is contained by an autocracy which, within the corpus of texts, emerges as the most sustained literary equivalent to Agamben’s state of exception. The autocratic mode of power applies by not applying with any explicitness. As a result, the novel presents a permanent state of exception in which the protagonist co-creates his own subjection. Any assertion of a split between identity and alterity (“Evolution not Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption,” as Razumov’s manifesto puts it) only precipitates further inscription in a borderless sphere of control. Negotiating the same problem of an impossibility of demarcation, Conrad’s and Chesterton’s narratives reach fundamentally different conclusions. Thursday enables political surface differentiations based on the deep-structural, god-given contingency of the world. In contrast to this productive negotiation of order and anarchy, Under

28 Marchart, Post-Foundational, 155.

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Western Eyes shows that authority in the wake of demarcation becomes the more inescapable, the more it suspends its explicit use of force. Narratologically speaking, tellability itself dissolves in Conrad’s literary state of exception. Once his ‘Russian’ novel presents a sphere without semantic borders, anarchist plots can barely be narrated. In an exemplary scene, the main character himself contests his role as protagonist, asserting that he is not a ‘young man in a novel’. The state of exception, then, is also a state that can no longer be told. This literary presentation of exception, for all its instructive parallels to Agamben’s concept, departs from its philosophical counterpart at this point of ‘unnarratability’. After all, the novel emphasises that those who ultimately fall victim to power over life paradoxically co-create the suspension of stabilising boundaries. Both Chesterton’s and Conrad’s narratives, then, present a phenomenology of exception in the storyworld and in the reader’s expectation of narrative coherence alike. They trace the experiential contours of a search for a constituted power that could reestablish the boundaries of identity and alterity. However, while Thursday traces the insight that no final grounds for political difference are forthcoming, Under Western Eyes offers narrative equivalents to the permanent suspension of such articulable differences. What remains of the distinction of order and anarchy is, ultimately, either a self-reflexive game in which anarchists and policemen become indistinguishable (Thursday), or else an ever-potential suspension of any personal or collective identity (Under Western Eyes). This concern with a failure of demarcation runs counter to readings which accord any of the novels, especially The Secret Agent, privileged insight into the psychological disposition of so-called extremists, terrorists or political radicals. The narratives resist the assertion of essential ‘anarchist’ traits as much as any political diagnosis which would attribute ‘radicalism’ to the “weakness of the political system in the country.”29 Nor do the novels simply reiterate the reactionary panic which – stoked by the mass-media signifier of anarchism – contributed to the 1905 Aliens Act. Instead of granting its readers a glance behind the curtains of radical politics, each of the novels has proved to be much more concerned with the processes by means of which transgression is marked in the first place. They show how distinctions between order and an empty signifier of anarchism serve to ensure residual certainties. In this way, the narratives do not inquire into the immutable characteristics of monstrous anarchists, but rather

29 Antony Taylor. London’s Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. 162.

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trace the function of fabricated heterostereotypes. Though at the turn of the century anarchists are singled out, these mechanisms are adaptable and apply more broadly to whichever group is recast as the representative of a ‘constitutive outside’ beyond the boundaries of normative order. The analysis has demonstrated that early modernist political fiction is concerned with the possibility of order – defined against anarchy – as well as the consequences of a collapse of relational signs maintaining such a distinction. In other words: this genre does take up contemporary stereotypes, availing itself of the body of knowledge discursively associated with anarchists in newspapers, short stories, and novels. However, the narratives are concerned with the function of these reiterated images of Otherness instead of merely perpetuating their circulation. The representation of social breakdown and disorder is less a result of anarchist acts than the consequence of a failure to provide controllable signs of alterity — to define a collective self against a political Other. Conversely, the dissolution of an anarchist foil gives rise to unconstrained anarchy, in its pejorative sense of a breakdown of order. Rather than allowing for forms of egalitarian and antiauthoritarian organisation as envisaged by historical anarchism, an uncertain mode of rule takes the place of contingent demarcations in this body of fiction. According to the political imaginary of early modernism, this emerging exceptional power has the potential to suspend any system of selfhood and Otherness at any time. In view of this horizon of a state of exception, the novels justify the perpetuation of any classificatory border, however contingent, limited, and temporary it may be. The representation of order is dependent on signs of anarchy beyond the pale.

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Acknowledgments My thanks first of all go to Prof. Anna-Margaretha Horatschek for the opportunity to pursue this research project. Her support, guidance, and our discussions have helped me to shape my thoughts and writing. I am grateful to have been able to rely on her mentorship as well as intellectual and moral support during the composition of this study. I have greatly benefitted from the possibility to test my notions about literature and analysis in conversations with Prof. Jutta Zimmermann. Her scholarly approach has been a constant influence and I would like to give my thanks for her readiness to offer forthright appraisals of the advantages and drawbacks of my critical approaches. Furthermore, I would like to thank the series editors, Dr. Milinda Banerjee, Dr. Julia Schneider, and Dr. Simon Yarrow for taking an interest in my work and providing insightful reviewers’ comments. Milinda encouraged me in my approach at an early stage and made valuable ‘Agambenian’ suggestions – thank you! I am honoured to be a part of what is shaping up to to be a wonderful series crossing disciplinary and national boundaries. I also want to thank everyone involved at de Gruyter, particularly my editors Bettina Neuhoff and Elise Wintz, for support throughout the publication process. Thanks go to my colleagues at the English Department of Kiel University for fostering an environment of cooperation and the pursuit of quality in teaching and research. Three reading groups have been a vital forum for the exchange of theories and ideas. For impassioned debates on the basis of the unspoken agreement that these things matter, I would like to thank especially Prof. Christian Huck, Manja Kürschner, Prof. Claus-Michael Ort (not least for the reminder that Schiller said it first), and André Schwarck. Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich and Tristan-Emmanuel Kugland have been wonderful colleagues, collaborators and comrades in organising our (Im)possible conference. My thanks go to Julia Ingold, Gerrit Lembke, and Susanne Schwertfeger, my co-founders of the Closure Journal, for enabling me to participate in an immensely rewarding project, pursued with an inspiring degree of commitment and enthusiasm. I wish to thank the German Academic National Foundation for its support of this project, particularly for the opportunity to present my work to its incisive group of up-and-coming scholars. I am particularly grateful to Rosa Wohlers, who accompanied this work with indispensible conversations about the work and the world, a much-needed critical https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-008

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perspective, and encouragement, all of which made ‘Arbeit und Struktur’ a worthwhile pursuit. Thanks are due to Dr. Charles Moseley, who encouraged me to pursue work on Conrad during my undergraduate days at Cambridge. His approach to literature and scholarship has given me a model to which I can only hope to aspire. I wish to thank my parents, Traute and Claus Casper, for their inexhaustible support. I am indebted to my siblings, Ann-Christin Casper, Eva-Marie CasperWilliams, Jan-Christoph Casper-Lahann, Carl-Martin Casper, and Claas-Hinrich Casper for their good cheer and constant reminders of the world beyond the books. My profoundest thanks go to Lisa Maria Reck, who deserves my wholehearted gratitude for her encouragement and unconditional support, her ideas, and the right suggestion at the right time. Without her, this project (or indeed any once and future project) are unimaginable.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 373–376, 500–501 Agamben, Giorgio 15, 35–36, 85–95, 125–126, 174–177, 181, 193, 202–205, 212, 230–233, 242, 247–248, 254, 331, 365, 367, 377, 381–382, 391–401, 412–413, 423, 430–431, 462–463, 469, 471–472, 484, 489–492, 505–520, 575–581, 590–597 Alienity 562, 567–571 Alterity 2, 12–26, 29–30, 34–36, 42–44, 46–52, 62–63, 68, 76, 111–113, 126, 155, 162, 165, 227–228, 257–259, 262–264, 269, 271–273, 278, 284–285, 288–290, 312, 337, 379, 407–410, 433, 438, 440–443, 499, 519–520, 528–530, 543–544, 547, 549, 561–562, 584 Anarchism 4–13, 71–72, 236–237, 251, 343, 351–352, 541–546, 567, 587; as alterity 26–27, 40–43, 45–51, 62–63, 68, 70–77, 80–82, 99–100, 148, 196–198, 211–212, 244, 256, 260, 267–269, 315, 318, 384–385, 414, 428–430, 499, 522–523, 540, 583–584; and terrorism 167; and conspiracy 173–176, 209; and activism 183–185; and indeterminacy 190–191; and form 359 Anarchy 3, 4–12, 14–16, 23, 27–30, 35, 43–44, 47–48, 53, 64, 71–77, 88–89, 97–104, 125, 131–134, 167–170, 175, 178, 180–181, 193, 203, 209, 214–215, 217–218, 241, 246, 252–253, 258, 261, 271, 276, 292, 309, 319–323, 359, 378–379, 407–408, 430, 449–450, 519–538, 543–544, 547, 549–551, 559, 566, 569–573, 576, 577, 580–589, 591, 594, 597–600 Antagonism 1–2, 17–19, 28, 32, 41, 46–48, 65, 71, 79, 181, 197, 234–236, 256, 301, 313, 349, 392, 416, 455, 458, 460, 482, 490–491, 496–499, 501, 520, 526, 536, 541, 547, 558, 572, 574, 582, 584–587, 607 Apparatus 16, 52, 119, 252, 257–369, 271–273, 279, 281–282, 286, 289, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645873-009

290–293, 296–298, 301–304, 310, 314–315, 337, 348–349, 362, 370, 384, 393, 397, 437, 455, 460, 493, 605, 608 Arnold, Matthew 9, 16, 98, 102–103, 121, 131–134, 168, 366n257 Assemblage 138, 152, 198–202, 207, 333, 366, 398, 556 Authority 4–5, 9, 12, 24, 35, 45–46, 56–61, 64, 69, 71–73, 78, 87, 91–92, 95, 108, 132, 139, 173, 181, 187, 224–225, 228, 230–235, 254–255, 286, 288, 312, 314, 332–337, 359, 368, 376–378, 389, 392, 395–399, 408, 410, 417, 427, 431–435, 438, 447, 449–451, 461–463, 467–468, 471, 474, 479, 474, 496–498, 505, 511, 516–520, 553–558, 565, 573–574, 583, 586, 591–596, 600–603 Autocracy 48, 95, 401, 441–442, 451–462, 471–472, 493, 499, 504, 511, 603 Bare life 36–37, 86, 181–182, 191–193, 218, 230–233, 248, 368–370, 391–392, 416, 442, 472, 490–494, 497, 504, 508–515, 579, 590 Benjamin, Walter 35, 140–142, 399, 404, 509–510, 587, 596 Biopolitics 36, 244, 245, 463, 491, 495 Colonialism 25, 77–78, 344, 408–409, 413, 441, 453 Commune 30, 71, 127, 136–145, 235–239, 244 Culture 3, 5, 16, 22, 28–29, 53–54, 60, 97–108, 115–122, 129–136, 139–140, 146–160, 168–173, 178, 193–196, 207–210, 250, 263, 459, 500–501, 609 Debt 205–210, 212, 225 Degeneration 14, 74–77, 280, 320, 322–340, 375, 523, 551 Deleuze, Gilles 225, 228, 396–398 Demarcation 2, 8, 14, 18–34, 42–83, 97–104, 131, 135, 138–139, 158, 166, 169, 178, 252, 255–257, 262, 282, 289,

658

Index

379, 407, 433–434, 438–442, 459, 474, 508, 523–524, 538, 548, 569, 571–573, 575; loss of 34, 50, 81, 191, 205, 306, 331, 340, 368, 394, 402, 406, 451, 458, 614 Depoliticisation 13, 46n46, 78, 100, 138, 144, 168, 337, 364, 374, 416, 429, 495, 540–542 Derrida, Jacques 65, 136, 147, 152, 253, 264–265, 350, 364, 386–387, 525, 559, 562, 564 Distinction 3–22, 34, 39–48, 52–54, 62, 75–76, 82–83, 91, 98, 100–102, 104, 106–108, 114, 116–117, 131–134, 139, 141–142, 146, 161, 169, 171–172, 179–180, 252, 259, 279–280, 291–293, 312–314, 328–332, 335, 364–367, 379–380, 383, 402–405, 407, 442, 444–447, 527–529, 547, 569–572, 577–580 Eliot, T. S. 3n6, 124, 180–181 Event 15, 38, 66–68, 92–94, 127–129, 157–160, 164, 177, 192–196, 200, 202, 209, 237–238, 241–243, 271–274, 286, 310, 400–406, 446, 464, 465–466, 502, 506, 597, 608, 610 Eventlessness 92–94, 209, 564 Floating Signifier 72, 180, 290, 441, 457, 607 Focalisation 94, 147, 165, 208, 210, 226, 261, 265, 297, 265, 297, 312–313, 333, 363, 366, 378, 389–390, 393, 396, 400, 415, 426, 431, 436, 441, 532–533, 545 Foucault, Michel 24, 59–60, 151, 227, 229, 244–245, 286, 288, 291, 299, 301, 312, 423–424, 608 Haunting 129, 136–137, 158, 230, 239, 348, 360, 454, 459–460, 487–488, 510n127 Hegemony 9, 31, 48, 57, 327, 451, 573 Hermeneutics of Suspicion 168, 304, 376, 595 Homo Sacer (Agamben) 87, 91, 202, 204, 242, 391, 412–413, 490–492, 506, 510–512, 514–515, 518 Hulme, T. E. 41, 301–304, 364n251

Identity 1–4, 10–17, 19–24, 32–38, 41–51, 55–56, 57, 73, 76, 84, 97–109, 116–120, 123–126, 134–136, 148–151, 159, 162, 169–170, 179, 212, 233, 255–259, 261, 263–265, 270, 282, 289–290, 293–299, 311–313, 341, 348–349, 351–352, 397–398, 437–438, 443–444, 452–453, 456–458, 476–477, 480–482, 514, 519, 538–539, 547–550, 569, 571, 575, 581–583, 591–598 Immediacy 104–105, 108, 113, 121, 156, 159, 226, 229, 264, 265, 309, 406, 486 Impressionism 38, 45, 156, 160, 324, 360–361, 426–427, 466, 545–548, 550, 566, 611 Institution 16, 20, 55–56, 58, 64, 129, 164, 190, 215, 241, 257–264, 272–275, 277–278, 279–283, 288–290, 297–298, 303–304, 307–309, 367–368, 383–384, 410, 424, 444, 477–479, 493, 501, 525, 608 Interpellation 52, 119–120, 190, 202, 234–235, 276, 471, 526 Jameson, Fredric 19, 194–195, 310, 408–409, 416, 458, 478, 493 Kropotkin, Peter 4, 5–6, 8–9, 12, 71–73, 241n379, 613n25 Laclau, Ernesto 57, 62–64, 73, 260, 261, 350, 363, 494, 490–491, 496, 504–505 Levinas, Emmanuel 22–23, 30, 162, 165 Luhmann, Niklas 53, 83, 259, 284, 285, 330, 380n285, 402–404, 526–527 Marchart, Oliver 19–21, 31, 34–35, 41–43, 46–47, 54–55, 58, 63, 70, 134–135, 349, 545, 550–551, 556, 569–570, 572–574, 598, 600, 605, 615 Media 107–109, 114–116, 121–122, 161, 179, 283–287, 289, 320, 331–335, 345, 355, 361, 401–406, 445–446, 558, 565 Mediation 113–114, 118, 121–124, 128, 141, 156, 164; multiple 109, 126, 129, 164, 179

Index

Metonymy 1, 40, 64, 122, 128, 139, 150–152, 179, 183, 186, 192, 213–215, 221–222, 238–239, 257, 264–267, 303, 309–310, 325, 343–344, 352–353, 357, 366, 371–373, 385, 402, 405, 445–446, 452, 464–466, 477–478, 497, 521, 525, 548, 555, 559, 586, 590 Mouffe, Chantal 48, 56–57, 169, 256, 350, 494 Modernism 3–4, 19–24, 27–29, 39–40, 51, 79, 127, 217, 301, 359–360, 408–409, 416, 478, 523, 552, 560 Modernity 14, 16, 29, 33, 39, 51, 56, 75, 77, 98, 102, 128, 139, 181–183, 191, 216–217, 242, 244, 280, 336, 522, 532, 534, 536, 547, 551–552, 566, 568, 595 Outrage 11, 269, 370, 374, 380, 382–383, 387, 392, 541 Police 25, 81–82, 143, 234–235, 257–259, 265, 277, 279–291, 298, 301, 321, 352, 408, 412, 418–419, 423, 428, 430, 436, 440, 524–528, 537 Political, the 15–21, 32, 34–35, 44, 54–56, 58, 81–85, 138–139, 144, 162, 168–169, 184, 341, 346, 379, 395, 406, 420, 445, 520, 541, 581 Political Fiction 2–3, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 17, 39–40, 49, 52, 57–59, 69, 81–82, 89, 95, 364, 462, 466, 472, 479, 490, 494, 508, 518, 520, 558, 577, 596, 599, 602 Politics 2–3, 8–11, 15, 17–21, 28–37, 45–50, 54–59, 72, 84–85, 144, 175, 201, 251–252, 263–264, 284, 349–350, 368, 392–393, 403, 406–407, 413, 437–439, 456, 458, 461, 490–491, 496, 502, 514, 519–520, 540, 545, 550–551, 570, 574, 580–582, 587, 591, 593–597, 599–601, 605, 610, 615 Post-Foundationalism 19–20, 31, 34, 41–44, 51, 54–56, 58–60, 66, 121, 135, 347, 556, 569, 572–573, 577, 598–600, 605, 615 Potentiality 165–166, 174–179, 197, 321, 469, 484, 501, 575–581, 592, 593, 595–598

659

Prefiguration 6–8, 72, 144, 237, 374, 602 Prison 223–225, 227–230, 234–236, 239–241, 268, 283, 286, 356, 474 Radicalism 1, 10–11, 15–16, 31, 55, 69, 77–78, 93, 97, 100–101, 127, 168–169, 173, 182–184, 186, 188, 191, 216, 224, 253, 260, 277, 285, 290, 413, 429, 472–473, 496, 534, 599, 602 Rancière, Jacques 81, 111, 143, 433–434, 437, 540–541 Re-Entry 32, 48, 53–54, 83, 279–281, 407, 415–416, 437, 446, 458, 482, 527, 538, 547, 567, 589, 605 Revolution 7, 30–31, 51, 69–71, 82, 88, 99, 101, 121–148, 155, 158, 166–180, 183–189, 192, 197–207, 210, 214, 217–223, 235–239, 242–249, 257, 267–268, 274, 300, 316–319, 354, 382–383, 435, 439, 464–466, 475, 481, 485, 493, 496, 509, 512, 537–538, 541, 583–584, 596 Rorty, Richard 212, 268, 313, 315–316, 612 Russia 13, 254, 438–443, 450–461, 472, 475–476, 495, 498–500, 503, 511 Sacrifice 111–112, 242–245, 248, 491–493, 582 Schmitt, Carl 35, 87–88, 398–401, 463, 465–468, 508, 510 Self-Reference 82–83, 169, 320, 358, 380, 389, 402–404, 564, 599, 606 Sovereignty 23, 59–60, 82, 95, 193, 231, 455, 460–462, 465, 467–468, 491–492, 503–504, 507–508, 510–511, 515, 518, 577, 590–591, 615 State of Exception 15–17, 34–38, 73, 84–90, 90–96, 181–183, 193, 203–205, 223, 230–233, 243–244, 254, 364–370, 381–382, 389, 391, 396–401, 407, 412–413, 423, 428, 430–434, 442–443, 450–451, 461–463, 469–473, 483–499, 502–517, 518–520, 574–580, 590–594, 599 State of Nature 88–89, 202, 231, 318, 367, 377–379, 391–392, 413, 417, 431, 438,

660

Index

460, 482, 492, 511, 552, 566, 576, 577, 614 State, the 5–10, 16, 59, 61, 71, 103, 132–133, 142, 183, 202, 223, 237, 240–241, 244, 265, 301, 343, 423, 452, 456, 462–463, 483–484, 495, 498, 511–512, 525–526 Stereotype 2, 9, 11–16, 21–22, 26–30, 34–44, 52, 62, 65, 71–72, 77–78, 80, 99, 167–169, 173, 206, 217, 226, 240, 262, 269–270, 289, 364, 383–384, 402, 438–439, 455, 472–473, 517, 521–524, 537–544, 567–568 Stirner, Max 342, 343, 347–349, 356–357, 361–362 Tellability 93, 502, 518n153, 543, 610, 616

Terrorism 26–27, 79–80, 284, 358, 360, 380, 429; terrorist 69–70, 237, 267, 272, 280, 299–300, 310, 328–329, 360–361 Transgression 15, 66–70, 87, 91, 94, 262, 271–274, 283, 290–292, 296, 301, 323, 327–328, 352–353, 370, 383, 406, 468–469, 473–475, 511, 572, 576, 585, 607–610 Urban Space 135, 139, 147, 166, 219, 235, 350, 357, 396, 412, 417, 419, 422, 424, 425, 431–432, 614 Woolf, Virginia 306–307, 537–538 Žižek, Slavoj 58, 148, 159, 295, 487, 507, 526, 560, 582