The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment 0674035224, 9780674035225

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THE DIALECTIC OF COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

THE DIALECTIC OF COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

q CHRISTIAN THORNE

H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2009

Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thorne, Christian, 1972– The dialectic of counter-enlightenment / Christian Thorne. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03522-5 (alk. paper) 1. Skepticism—History. I. Title. B837.T56 2009 149'.73—dc22 2009008529

For my father and my father’s good name

q Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 1

I

PYRRHONISM 19 1 2 3

II

Skepticism and Rhetoric 21 Skepticism and the Subject 52 Skepticism and the State 85

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 117 Introduction: The Question of Natural Philosophy 4 Skepticism and Utopia 125 5 Skepticism and the Theater 148 6 Skepticism and Science 178

III

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 7 8

223

Skepticism and the Public Sphere Skepticism and the Novel 262

Epilogue: The Antinomy of Antinomies Notes

327

Bibliography Index

375

361

225

310

119

q

Acknowledgments

Debts pile up. This book would simply not have been possible without my friends and colleagues at Duke, Syracuse, and Williams. Love and thanks.

THE DIALECTIC OF COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

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Introduction

1. A scene from 1676: Two young men are visiting Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, a gentleman scientist, a virtuoso of the natural arts. They have gained access to Gimcrack by counterfeiting a curiosity philosophic, though they are in fact only after his nieces. Gimcrack has one of the finest amateur laboratories in London, and now, on the prowl through the house, in the two men step to find Sir Nicholas sprawled across a table, his belly pressed against the wood, legs flailing, arms akimbo, a string in his mouth; and across the room, at the far end of the string, a frog in a tub, lassoed about the midriff (if frogs have midriffs), trying over and again to spring from the tub as though from a boiling kettle, only to be tugged each time back into the water with a jerk of the scientist’s jaw. Sir Nicholas’s eyes are trained upon the frog. He is learning how to swim. The visitors approach. Sir Nicholas pivots upright and lets the frog loose. “Have you,” asks one of the young men, “have you ever tried in the water, sir?” “No, sir, but I swim most exquisitely on land.” “Do you intend to practice in the water, sir?” “Never, sir. I hate the water. I never come upon the water, sir.” “Then there will be no use of swimming.” “I content myself with the speculative part of swimming,” Sir

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Nicholas, briskly. “I care not the practice. I seldom bring anything to use; ‘tis not my way. Knowledge is my ultimate end.”1

A half century later, a scene from 1726: An English surgeon is visiting an island on the far end of the world and is taken by the local bigwigs to inspect the kingdom’s philosophic academy, a vast hive of scientific hubbub with more than five hundred scientists in five hundred laboratories, a tower of dabble. There the Englishman finds scientists contriving to plow farmland with pigs; to spin silk from spiders; to build houses from the roof down; to sow farmland with chaff instead of seed; to breed a race of naked sheep; to cure the body politic by dispensing free medicine to the kingdom’s senators; to transmute ice, at high temperatures, into gunpowder; to soften marble for use as cushions; to teach the blind to mix paint; to test a subject’s loyalty by examining his stool; to build an automatic writing machine, able to generate tenuously grammatical sentences without human aid; to abolish language altogether in favor of communication with real things, to be carried always and everywhere in sacks slung across one’s back; to extract sunbeams from cucumbers; to transform excrement back into its original foodstuffs; to perform, by halves, mutual brain transplants on pairs of politicians from opposing parties, so that, in each parliamentarian, the two hemispheres may bicker, factionally, in the skull’s hollow.2

Some hundred and thirty-five years earlier, a scene from 1590 or thereabouts: There is a German scholar, a commoner, base of stock. He was educated at Wittenberg, which means he is, by association, as Protestant as they come. And this scholar is in the grips of a thrilling class fantasy: He wants complete knowledge of the natural world and with it command over nature’s treasury, all things that move between the quiet poles— he calls this “magic,” but there will soon be other words for it. This is a fantasy, first, of political transformation. Such universal knowledge will give the middling Protestants dominion over Catholics and aristocrats, emperors and kings. It will drive the Spanish Papists from Holland and steal from them their American empire. It is to that extent a commercial

Introduction

3

fantasy, as well, a fantasy that knowledge will deliver to the Protestants of Europe’s north tropical plunder of their own, to match Catholic booty—gold from Asia, pearls from southern oceans, princely delicates from all corners of the newfound world. Command over the natural world will mean colonies, new Protestant colonies, able at last to trump the historical alliance of Spanish might and Italian capital: “From Venice shall they”—the spirits of knowledge—“drag huge argosies, and from America the golden fleece that yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury.” And barely does the German scholar utter his wish than the devil grants it, and one of Satan’s great occult feats will be, in the dead of a German winter, to import grapes from India, as though hell were the Reformation’s own United Fruit Company, dissenting and diabolical in equal proportion.

2. I begin with these three scenes—the first from Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the second from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the last from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus—because they pose a challenge to any student of early modernity. The period’s conventional historical designations, for England as for Western Europe more generally, seem to tell a single story: the Renaissance, the Revival of Learning, the Great Instauration (or “renewal”), the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. These names all conceive of Europe’s early modernity as a philosophical awakening. Whatever its other achievements, such a modernity is distinctly epistemological, consecrated to knowledge, its accumulation and classification; and the philosopher, the scholar or scientist, is its fittest emblem. There is no point more familiar than this—if we know anything about modernity it is that knowledge or science or rationality has played a decisive role in it—and yet there is something curious about these terms all the same, since on a second look, they don’t so much tell a single story as they tell the same story over and over again. These designations, after all, may all come under the umbrella of early modernity, but they don’t really refer to the same period at all. Reduced to their historical caricatures, they name distinct, if marginally overlapping, blocks of time: the fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Renaissance (extended in England to the civil wars), the squarely seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, the eighteenth-century

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Enlightenment. And what’s strange is this: these aren’t merely terms from intellectual history, christening each century after its distinctive doctrine or world view. Each term suggests that its period was newly intellectual, newly philosophical, that knowledge began then and there, or at least began anew—as though knowledge needed first to be reborn, then revived, then renewed, then revolutionized, and only then, slowly, would enlightenment dawn. These terms, arranged in series, suggest less the triumphant emergence of reason than an embarrassing intellectual fitfulness, less a scholarly awakening than a philosophical narcolepsy, so that we must imagine Europe dozing off, repeatedly, only to jog itself freshly awake after each new nodding. Perhaps that point is best left to one side. We can take these terms at face value and still feel, in the face of those three scenes—Shadwell, Swift, Marlowe—that there is a deeper problem. The terms Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment conjure up a story of Europe’s intellectual flourishing, with all the entanglements such flourishing entails, but there is a different story to be told. The scenes recounted here parade forth three satirical effigies against the philosopher, against the scholar as villain or fool. They and countless other scenes like them point to an alternate history or shadow tradition, in which men and women fought Europe’s flourishing, seeing in the new philosophy only a babe to be smothered in its cradle. There is a large body of writing premised on the notion that knowledge is either unattainable or undesirable and aiming therefore to snuff out the enlighteners’ torches, to launch a scientific counter-revolution or induce a miscarriage before the renascence could come to term. In the early modern centuries, “philosophy” was a capacious term, referring not only to speculative or theoretical knowledge, but to nearly any systematic intellectual project, of whatever kind, so that what the nineteenth century will reconceive as “science” was generally termed, by its early modern practitioners and opponents, natural or mechanical philosophy. The term “skepticism,” in its classical guise, was similarly broad, designating any project that aimed to shut philosophy down, especially if it attempted to do so by turning philosophy’s methods against itself. There were, in this sense of the word, many skeptics, many who responded to philosophy with alarm and scorn. This book means to make sense of that alarm and parse that scorn. Skepticism is not a historical constant. It has to come into being. One wonders why and to what ends.

Introduction

5

3. So why oppose philosophy? This is not an easy question to answer, if only because there are too many answers at hand. Too many possible reasons suggest themselves at once. The problem, I think, has something to do with the word “theory.” Let me explain: if somebody asked us to define the word “theory,” there are a few different ways we could proceed. We could, for a start, hazard a positive answer: theory, broadly, means speculative thought or ideas systematically arranged. More specifically, within the literature departments of the English-speaking world, “theory” has come to name a distinctive amalgam of critical Marxism, post-structuralism, and neopragmatism. But surely to say even this is already to explain little and assume much. Alternately, then, we could inch forward with a negative definition, by distinguishing “theory” from the other concepts with which it is easily linked. When you say you are “theorizing” or “doing theory,” what do you take yourself not to be doing? Here the hallowed distinction is between “theory” and “practice”— between mere thought and concrete action in the material world. But this pair actually fails to answer the question as posed, since when I say that I am theorizing, I don’t usually mean that I am not engaged in practice. On the contrary, theory and practice, far from being simple opposites, are antitheses and in that sense necessary companions. Theory is thought that knows itself to be tethered, to be already practice (or a prelude to practice or practice’s underpinning). To pair theory with practice, then, doesn’t provide us with a clarifying opposite; it merely pushes us further on in search of that contrary, not for theory’s antithesis, but for the cancellation of the couple of which it is a part—the negation of theory and practice both—for a form of thought, in other words, that does not know itself to be already practice. Our ordinary word for such thought is, of course, “philosophy.” Philosophy, which might have seemed to be theory’s near-synonym, turns out to be its competitor or evil twin, cognition that believes itself unconstrained. To call a body of work “theory,” then, is to say—tendentiously—that it is not philosophy. Theory is thought struggling to be something other than philosophy. There have been moments when the term “theory” has stepped forth with polemical clarity, announcing for all to hear its determination to supplant philosophy. In France, “theory” made its programmatic entrance in 1963, in Althusser’s great essay “On the Materialist Dialectic,”

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which proposes on its first page that the term “Theory” designates all properly radical thinking; the word “philosophy,” by contrast, should be reserved for “ideological philosophies,” a phrase that Althusser thereby renders redundant.3 Althusser’s project always turned around getting us to read Marx again and to read him properly for once—and to hear him tell it, this always meant reading Capital above all else. Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which Marx’s Capital can be read. It can be read, first, as producing a new concept, as finding a new way to conceptualize capitalism, as producing watertight concepts that will be serviceable for revolutionary thought, so that after Marx, the word “capitalism” will be available as an answer for any number of possible questions. Q: Why did Roman law re-emerge in Europe after centuries of obsolescence? A: Capitalism. Q: Why did recurrent drought in the nineteenth century kill upwards of thirty million Asians? A: Capitalism. Q: Why did Balzac write ninety-some interwoven novels and novellas? A: Capitalism. Marx’s central achievement, in sum, was to put “capitalism” at the center of a new, explanatory apparatus. Alternately—and the contrast here could hardly be greater—Capital can be read as an attack on its own eponymous concept, which, after all, was hardly Marx’s coinage. Capital, one might say, is less concerned with producing new concepts than with performing a second-order operation on an already existing term. The problem with bourgeois political economy was precisely that it leaned so heavily on the concept of “capital.” It hilariously thought that the word “capital” actually named something real, a financial instrument that one either had or didn’t have. Marx’s primary achievement, then, was to show that “capital” is not an item but a system of human relationships; and his procedure, accordingly, was not to proclaim the rule of “capital” or “capitalism,” but to gill, gut, and fillet those very terms; to reconstruct, over thousands of pages, the conflictridden social networks that make it possible to mistake capital for a simple thing. The term “capital” in this sense can’t really account for anything at all. It answers no questions. Our Marxism depends on our never granting “capitalism” explanatory force. If you chalk something up to “capital,” Marx says, you haven’t looked hard enough. This same choice (between Marx as producer of concepts and Marx as demolisher of same) repeats itself at the level of intellectual history, in which case it is a matter of deciding just who Marx’s methodological precursors were: you can decide either that Marx was the last German

Introduction

7

idealist, the Youngest Hegelian, still providing a more or less philosophical account of the world, trying to name its deepest essences, its secret laws or innermost aspirations; or you can decide, as Althusser does, that Marx was a materialist to the marrow: Marx was the anti-capitalist Machiavelli, which is to say that he was a special kind of political materialist, doggedly hostile to the ideologies and abstractions by which political life is typically explained, choosing instead to describe all politics as a matter of contingent and contesting forces. In this sense, Marx actually retreats away from the nineteenth century and the sublime nonsense of its great philosophical systems. One of the principal fascinations of Althusser’s early prose is watching him put together a pre-modern Marx along these lines, a Marx who owes more to Italian humanism or the empiricist eighteenth century than he does to his immediate precursors and nominal masters—a Marx, that is, who must be ranked, not among the great speculative H’s of German philosophy (Hegel to his rear, Husserl and Heidegger down the line) but among the silent H’s of French materialism (Helvetius, Holbach).4 “Theory” is Althusser’s term for this materialism—for any thought trying to find its way back to the concrete—and under its banner he will issue his call for an empirically enriched Marxism (or, if you prefer, open the gates of Marxism to scientism’s Trojan horse). Marxist thought will now have to abandon its still philosophical addiction to social laws and historical necessity and let chance, contingency, and difference swarm across its pages instead, reckoning squarely with “the infinite diversity of [any] historically given society.”5 Theory will be a higher positivism. It wasn’t always this way. In Germany, “theory,” as though heeding the crudest national stereotypes, had emerged a generation earlier as positivism’s negation and not its better self. Max Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory,” first published in 1937, couldn’t even bring itself to call philosophy by its proper name, lest, in that address, it capitulate to the latter’s constitutive self-delusions; and the philosophy that Horkheimer had in mind—the “traditional theory” that he took to be central to modern European thought—was what now gets called the philosophy of science: that theory, in other words, polemically associated with Descartes, Comte, and other names from west of the Rhine, which aims to organize the world into observable states of affairs, to delineate science’s underlying epistemological principles and codify its

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experimental procedures.6 On this view, the problem with any thinking that calls itself science is that it tends to conceive of the world, even the social world, as given, natural, always preexisting the human actors who merely inhabit it, as though they had been abandoned in this world when their spaceship broke down or their leaders left for the home planet. Philosophy in the service of science has been utterly inattentive to the ways in which the world is produced or constructed by the same subjects who struggle to comprehend it. Thought, in other words, has withdrawn from history—the history of a world perpetually under construction—and it has done so in two distinct but complementary ways: first, it has looked on the world as simply there, an inert positivity alien to human practice. This then leads straight to the second point, for if the world is alien to human practice, then it makes no sense to conceive of thinking as itself a practice. The mind must content itself with describing the world, with classifying the multiple but essentially unchanging things within it. And if thinking is not itself a practice, then it, too, need never change. It can make do with spelling out the static and universal categories by which the world will be fixed in thought. “Critical Theory,” then—there is an essay to be written about how and when “Theory” lost its capital T—names the return of this vanished historical intelligence. “Theory” is what you get when you substitute “society” or “history” for the eternal essences or spirit that philosophy takes to be the object of all thought; when, in place of philosophy’s tableau vivant, you conceive of the world as produced in history and attempt to grasp it with concepts that are themselves history’s creations. Theory, in short, is philosophy that recognizes itself to be a form of social and historical thinking—the historically changing attempt to comprehend historically changing things. In that recognition, moreover, lies thought’s claim to preside over the material world. This may not be intuitively clear: if philosophy is thought that doesn’t know itself to be practice—that thinks it is merely describing the world—then theory’s commission must be to take thought outside itself, to re-immerse it in the world that is secretly its ground. But the problem with such philosophy is, in some related but antithetical sense, that it has been too close to the world all along; that it is content merely to replicate the world in thought, in which case thought doesn’t need to be escorted back to the world; it needs to be urged further away from it, to be cut loose from the atrocities of a damaged world. It

Introduction

9

is important at this point to be clear what one means by “thought.” There is a sense in which philosophy—and not the philosophy of science, now, but philosophy in its most profligate forms, metaphysics, say, or theology itself—has always been another name for human freedom, for thought that cannot be reduced back to the blind necessities of some putatively natural world. What we have customarily called philosophy is that one indispensable discourse that insists on the autonomy of human thought, that refuses to reduce thought back to some behavioral reflex or ideological tic. The category of the sacred, like the category of reason, once designated that which did not exist, or did not exist yet, that which nature and society could not deliver. Philosophy tries to imagine a world suffused with human intentions and ideas, a world that has been transformed by thought. It wants the world to correspond to its own best concepts, which is to say, improbably, that its nearest synonym is revolution. All human practices and projects and politics, in this sense, come under the rubric of “thought”; human action can never be, in any narrow sense, “materialist.” If science issues injunctions to only ever name what already is, then philosophy is what helps us name the not-yet. Philosophy is prophesy or at least possibility, the voice of an open future. Seen in this light, critical theory does not obliterate philosophy; it does not dissolve it in the acid bath of ideology critique or tie it back to its social locations. It aims rather to redeem philosophy, to make good on it, not by denouncing it as untrue, but by sympathetically detailing what it is that prevents philosophy from coming into its truth, from sufficing as an adequate description of the world. But this means that philosophy, once it realizes that only a reconciled society could realize its claims, must come to an end as an autonomous sphere. “Theory” is what remains of philosophy once it has passed its baton to a transformative politics. It is the utopian vocation of thought. But what if the revolution never came? What if it were betrayed or preempted or indefinitely postponed? Here’s the problem: if the reconciled world never comes, and if you abandon philosophy in sanguine anticipation of the revolution (or in disgust at the revolution’s nonappearance), then you have nothing—neither the revolution nor the philosophy that was the revolution’s harbinger. Under these circumstances, philosophy will re-emerge to mock us for our wretchedness, our missing freedoms and disappointed happiness; and “theory,” under these circumstances, which are our own, will name not philosophy’s

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revolutionary fulfillment but its hideous afterlife, its angry persistence after it should by all rights have been put to rest. “Theory” is philosophy undead. All theory promises to undo the false distinction between thought and action; and yet theory under these circumstances is a parody of what that Aufhebung might once have been, a travesty of its promised reconciliation. For when the revolutionary possibility disappears, theory becomes the only viable practice, a compensation, however inadequate, for a utopia gone missing. Theory will cup between its hands the spluttering flame of historical change until such time as politics proper can start again. The antithesis between theory and practice evaporates because theory is forced to absorb into itself all the misplaced practices. Everything that passes for theory today—whether Marxist, postMarxist, feminist, queer, anti-racist, or postcolonial—is marked by this double movement, this twofold resolve to plunge thought back into the material world so that it may, at last, spring it loose therefrom. Theory is a Push-Me-Pull-Me beast. It is philosophy’s negation, its culmination, its unpropitiated ghost.

4. The question remains: Why oppose philosophy? Why, in particular, did so many early modern men and women oppose philosophy? Why did they think of philosophy only as a catastrophe? And my suggestion has been that this is a hard question to answer because we have too many possible reasons. We won’t have understood anything until this is absolutely clear. It doesn’t matter where your theoretical interests lie: Chances are you are in some broad sense of the term an anti-foundationalist. Almost all critical theory is grounded in a hostility to—pick your terms—fetishism, reification, facts, science, positivism, realism, representation, mimesis, logocentrism, presence, rationalities instrumental and otherwise, concepts, abstraction, essentialism, grand narratives, metanarratives, the Enlightenment, the human sciences, truth claims, foundational knowledge, or metaphysics—this last, of course, is simply all the others distilled into some lethal epistemological liquor. Caution is no doubt in order. Poststructuralism, neopragmatism, and their cousins are all distinct projects, with different aims and different histories—each of them, indeed, further encompasses several distinct projects within it, and in a different context,

Introduction

11

everything would hinge on specifying these differences. But to so much as speak of “theory,” and not even to endorse it, but merely to take it seriously as a social fact—as a practice with its own journals and conferences and hiring lines—is to posit a realm in which critical Marxism, post-structuralism, and pragmatism form a common stock of arguments, an arsenal of more or less exchangeable notions, linked by association. At some general level, then, it doesn’t matter how you define the object of your attack: underlying theory’s several different projects is a pronounced philosophical skepticism. So why oppose philosophy? One might ask in response: Who even needs to ask that question any more? Skepticism came into being because it was right. Here’s the problem, as bluntly as I know how to put it: the classical skeptics—the Pyrrhonists of antiquity or early modern Europe—were not critical theorists. We want to figure out why some early modern men and women thought knowledge would ruin Europe, and the problem is that we have entirely too many reasons that we can ventriloquize on their behalf. Classical skepticism forces its present-day readers to come to grips with a form of anti-foundationalism—I hesitate to use the word, because it can mislead so easily—a form of anti-foundationalism that has nothing to do with “enlightenment” or “epistemological regimes” or any other such philosopheme. The constant temptation is that we will merely rediscover our skepticism in theirs, and to that extent theory can only get in the way. And, indeed, when theoretically learned scholars have studied older skeptics—my chief examples will be Sextus Empiricus, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne, though others could serve just as well—they have almost never resisted the urge to transform them into so many dummy versions of their own projects.7 So here, in a nutshell, is how classical skepticism works—its distinctive features, I hope, will be immediately apparent: early modern skepticism is, on the whole, a kind of authoritarian pragmatism, a means of defending established (but increasingly contested) practices without claiming these practices to be true. It offers an exhaustive critique of knowledge in order to discredit the opponents of state or church orthodoxy and then offers a utilitarian rationale for continuing on with these customary forms of government and social life. This skepticism plainly struggles for coherence as it positions itself against emerging canons of knowledge, but throughout, skepticism’s express aim is to shut critique

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down, even as it pioneers many of the tactics by which later antifoundationalists will press their own radical projects. Classical skepticism makes the seemingly corrosive argument that all knowledge is a fiction—that even the knowledge on which social life is typically thought to depend is a fiction—but it then sets out to negate any fiction that is not what it takes to be the original fiction. Althusser makes a point that might, because wrong, clarify the matter. Ideology, he argues, is never purely instrumental; it is never simply a tool wielded by elites to control their subordinates: “The ruling class does not maintain with the ruling ideology, which is its own ideology, an external and lucid relation of pure utility and cunning. . . . In reality, the bourgeoisie has to believe in its own myth before it can convince others, and not only so as to convince others, since what it lives in its ideology is the very relation between it and its real conditions of existence. . . .”8 There is no easier way for me to explain what I’m trying to do here than to rewrite these sentences: classical skepticism is the exception to Althusser’s description, probably even its refutation. Pyrrhonism’s project—though I suppose it’s a separate question whether this project ever really succeeded—was to establish a ruling class that approached this impossible condition of lucid and cunning externality, an elite that did not have to believe its own myths, that did not live its own ideology. So in one sense, this book is an old-fashioned exercise in ideology critique; my primary aim is to reconstruct classical and early modern skepticism as a political project of a special kind. But in a more important sense, this book is something like the opposite of ideology critique. A careful consideration of Pyrrhonism should help us specify the limits of ideology critique by bringing us face-to-face with a version of orthodoxy for which ideology critique yields no surprises or holds no menace.9 There is also a second project hitching a ride on this first, like a remora—and that is to distinguish classical skepticism from the poststructuralism that is ever eager to claim it as an ally. There is an argument, one too widespread to need much elaboration here, which claims that a radical epistemology is the key to a radical politics. Antifoundationalism is, in these terms, typically thought to possess a coherent political profile. The Frankfurt School and its successors have tried to put the critique of knowledge in the service of an anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic politics. Post-structuralism aligns its version of that critique with what used to be called the new social movements. And

Introduction

13

even neopragmatism tends to call for a Left-liberal politics on Deweyite lines. Each of these projects can be traced back to the notion that philosophical skepticism is the hallmark of a Left intellectual. Only if we critique the foundations of knowledge, the theory goes, can we critique capitalism or the state or cultural norms of various descriptions. It is the burden of this book to show that such theories amount to an epistemological determinism fully as egregious as the economic or technological determinisms that have preceded it. If recent theoretical readings have tended to convert early modern skeptics into post-structuralists before the fact, just so many “forerunners” to critical theory, then this book offers in response a historical account of skepticism, in a manner that demonstrates that anti-foundationalism is not everywhere the same. But what does it mean to say that anti-foundationalism is not everywhere the same? That observation, I think, has far-reaching consequences. If the following chapters offer some portable lesson, some moral of the story to be retained once their more local arguments have faded from memory, it is this: that skepticism or anti-foundationalism is not the guarantee of a radical politics. My procedure here is straightforward: If anti-foundationalism is not everywhere the same, then it cannot function as a political guarantee. It simply cannot be taken to have coherent or consistent political effects. Classical skepticism is Left antifoundationalism’s negative case. In this sense, the book’s aim is quite modest: to reconstruct, around a handful of examples, a form of skepticism that palpably, viscerally resembles Left anti-foundationalism in its rhetoric or basic argumentative strategies, but which sponsors an utterly unrecognizable political project, a project wholly unlike critical theory’s own. The list of skeptics I treat is short, without the merest claim to comprehensiveness; the following chapters don’t, in this sense, offer a history of skepticism. They are, rather, a series of case studies or core samples, meant to suggest what it might mean to think historically about skepticism. But case studies, in this instance, will do the trick. They are enough to unsettle anti-foundationalism’s remarkably old-fashioned assumption that if you can just get the epistemology right, everything else will follow from there, even if, in this case, “getting the epistemology right” means learning to loathe epistemology and all its trappings. I can put this all in another, more provocative way: if there is in critical writing today one widespread notion that is demonstrably wrong— one notion whose wrongness this book aims to demonstrate—it is the

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idea that there exists something called “Western thought.” This is about as reductive a claim as a scholar can make, but it still gets made habitually. The writings I consider here are squarely in the European canon— all too much so for some tastes, I suspect—and yet they are, for all that, impeccably anti-foundationalist. They simply have nothing to do with “metaphysics” or “presence” or whatever else it is that is generally taken to contaminate the thinking that has radiated fatally out from the Mediterranean basin. There is and always has been a multiplicity to European thought; there are and always have been all sorts of non- or anti-metaphysical thought—the type of thought that European theorists, in recurring bouts of primitivism and orientalism, generally look outside of Europe to find; the type of thought, in other words, that LéviStrauss associates with tribal peoples, or Roland Barthes with Japan. Post-structuralism, in ways that it is hard not to applaud, wants to bring radically new forms of thought into being; it wants, at the very least, to push European thinking beyond itself. And yet the forms of putatively non-European thinking that it typically champions have a history, in Europe, that is as long as metaphysics’ itself. And the important point is that this realization should bring no comfort: this multiplicity-that-hasalways-been offers no relief at all, because it does not point to a set of political alternatives. These alternative forms of thought—the antifoundationalist thinking that Europe has always produced as a kind of philosophical counter-tradition—can be shown to have served precisely the same institutions and practices that are always being lain at metaphysics’ door. Alternative forms of thought do not, in every case—do not I think, typically—lead to alternative political projects. Sameness reappears at a different level—at the level of politics and the social, where it is most fearsome. Most of what passes for theory actually only rehearses some very old philosophical (or anti-philosophical) strategies. Much of the criticism that takes itself to be breaking with “metaphysics” or “epistemology” is merely taking up residence within epistemology’s oldest and most convenient alternative, which, in that sense, is less an alternative than a longtime companion. The moment of high theory, it is true, has passed. No one in AngloAmerican theoretical circles is talking much about “knowledge” or “reason” any longer, and I can’t say that I am much interested in re-animating that line of inquiry. On the contrary, I am hoping, in some roundabout way, to account for the exhaustion of that discourse, to sort through the

Introduction

15

upshot of arguments provisionally settled. Of course, my primary concern here is not so much knowledge as the critique of knowledge, and so one might say that the task at hand is to change subtly the object of investigation. Call it a post-structuralist postmortem, if you like, though I don’t think that quite captures the sweep of the thing. To the extent that we have all assimilated the findings of anti-foundationalism— transformed its arguments into assumptions—these questions should be as urgent as ever. I am writing, in fact, about a style of thought whose status has in its way never been higher. The moment of a barn-storming post-structuralism may have passed, but this is only to say that most of its tenets have set down roots, have taken on an air of self-evidence. We may not be preaching anti-foundationalism from the pulpits, but most of us are still humming its doxology. That said, I tend to think of this argument through a set of interlocking terms. I take my cues, first of all, from J. G. A. Pocock, who has repeatedly made the point that the story of early modern political thought is not the uncontested triumph of the bourgeois subject or liberal ideology.10 Pocock demonstrates that to the extent that liberal ideology ever really wins out, it does so only when gauged against other, contending discourses—republicanism or civic humanism—which have always coexisted alongside it. I would like to insist in this vein that we can discover in early modern philosophy more than the rigid imposition of tyrannical epistemologies, the single-minded clampdown of a claustrophobic empiricism and a one-eyed reason. In other words, I am arguing not only against the assumption that skepticism is inherently “radical,” but also against the undifferentiated view of early modern intellectual history that makes this claim possible. One of the things that makes early modern and eighteenth-century studies so compelling is that, in them, all the post-structuralist commonplaces take on the form of historical propositions, so that we are able to catch some glimpse of what an antifoundationalist grand narrative might look like. It is a narrative I mean to take a few whacks at. To say this is, in turn, to open up a set of Adornian terms that will demand consideration. Adorno, after all, would seem to be one of the theorists most responsible for an anti-foundationalist grand narrative. The primary polemic of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is directed against a form of discursive reason that Adorno and Horkheimer label “bourgeois” and “totalitarian”—and which they then trace straight back to

16

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Homer. They are careful, however, in a way that few of their successors have been, to point out that rationality is not the bourgeoisie’s only resource. There is a second bourgeois tradition that Adorno and Horkheimer identify alongside enlightenment, a species of bourgeois anti-foundationalism that works to preempt any radical critique of bourgeois enlightenment we might attempt. Their list of anti-foundationalists isn’t very long—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mandeville, de Sade, Nietzsche, the “dark writers of the bourgeoisie”—and they don’t back this roster up with anything by way of historical detail.11 It’s little more than a sidebar. I would like to suggest, however, that when a rejection of knowledge becomes axiomatic, as it has today, then it becomes crucial to take the critical emphasis off of enlightenment, to turn our attention instead to that other tradition, to begin a second project, a companion piece to Adorno and Horkheimer’s, a “dialectic of skepticism,” if that doesn’t sound too grandiose. If you prefer your theory with the Hegel left out, I can make the same point in Althusser’s language. If one follows the later Althusser, the chief task of Marxist philosophy is to provide a “history of the theoretical.” Its brief, in other words, is not to establish a single, rigid epistemology by which all of human history can be known and explained, but to reconstruct the history of epistemology itself, the history of paradigms and problematics and epistémés. Marx’s true philosophical inheritors are Kuhn and Foucault and Canguilhem, critical historians of science who have produced a kind of second-order epistemology, an account of the changing ways in which human societies have known or claimed to know. This book can, if you like, be understood as a complement to Althusser’s project, as a “history of the theoretical” in some opposite sense—a critical history, that is, of Althusser’s own anti-epistemological impulse, an account of the changing ways in which human societies have refused to know.12 But perhaps I should say at this point what I mean by “history.” This book aims to understand skepticism-in-history, skepticism as a historical practice. This can be understood in a few different senses. In what I consider a curious argumentative turn, there seem to be many now who suppose—unwittingly, or perhaps in bad conscience, without ever voicing the assumption—that to the extent that anti-foundationalism seeks to deny the autonomy of thought, to lay bare thought’s institutional and historical determinants, it is liberated from precisely these constraints.

Introduction

17

Anti-foundationalism engenders a special kind of self-consciousness, so it alone is immune to the kind of historical scrutiny that it would ply against all other modes of reasoning. It is the last refuge of pure thought. Any history of anti-foundationalism would therefore have to be intellectual history of the most rarefied kind, because there is no way—there is no reason—to conceive of anti-foundationalism as involving changing practices or interests. At some broad level, then, this book seeks to confront anti-foundationalism with its own history. And to that end, it sets early modern skepticism against a concrete historical backdrop, which is the making of our epistemological modernity. If skepticism emerged as a pressing project in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, this is only because those centuries also saw the emergence of some utterly distinctive epistemological institutions— philosophical academies, information-gathering bureaucracies, and such—institutions that invested knowledge or philosophy with new political force. Skepticism, it will surprise no one to hear, can only be understood in this setting. It only takes on urgency when learning itself is poised to get out of hand. But skepticism also changes as circumstances change. In different historical situations, knowledge will be deployed to quite varied ends. We can say, broadly, that one of the features that distinguishes modernity from earlier historical periods is the decisive role it grants knowledge, but then we must grant, equally, that it does so in any number of different ways. Skepticism, plainly, will have to change in a response to its adversary’s mutations. This book aims accordingly to understand the shifting face of skepticism as it positions itself alongside and against empire, the state, the public sphere, capital, the advanced division of labor, each of which poses novel epistemological problems. To treat knowledge as a separate category, an abstract and autonomous thing—even in order to negate it—is purest metaphysics. To attack knowledge is always to attack the institutions of which knowledge is a (sometimes quite substantial) part. Most of all, though, I mean to demonstrate that skepticism has no choice but to see itself as historical. I am, in other words, less concerned with imposing on early modern skepticism some pet historical scheme imported from outside its discourses than with showing that skepticism itself possesses a narrative and historical vocation; that any attempt to shut down knowledge or philosophy operates, necessarily, within a historical master-narrative, a story designed to explain where knowledge

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The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

came from, what it is now up to, and what further devastation it will wreak if left unchecked. To reconstruct these narratives, which for the most part are covert or suppressed, is the only way to convert skepticism from a philosophical curio into an intelligible project. And such is, finally, the ambition of this book—not to shut down anti-foundationalism, but to find new ways to take its measure. It has come time, I think, to investigate the skeptical categories through which many of us still think, through which it seems we must still think—through which many of us register our outrage at the continuing degradation of our common lives—but whose multiple political valences we do not get to dictate or control, leaving them forever in excess of our utopian indignation.

I

q

PYRRHONISM

1

q

Skepticism and Rhetoric

1. Anyone who inspects the history of formal rhetoric from its earliest instances must be struck by its penchant for the ornery and the perverse. For every Aristotelian or high humanist who has sought to reconcile rhetoric with the quest for virtue and the good, there has been a rhetorician willing to scuttle that project, pressing language beyond any recognizable ethical or epistemological standard. It is already from the classic rhetorical texts of antiquity—and not simply from this season’s vanguard—that we learn that it is better to give our body to a person who doesn’t love us than to one who does; that mathematical techniques like addition and subtraction are mere tricks performed upon the unwary; and that patricide, properly considered, is a good way of spending a lazy afternoon.1 You just have to stop and think about it, urges the rhetorician. Are you with me? It is audacious moments such as these, of course, that have always sent into a snit the traditional opponents of rhetoric—Platonists, puritans, positivists of various stripes. The philosopher’s temptation is always to write off such radical arguments as teasing provocation. Why grant the dignity of a reasoned response to the vagaries of a contrarian? the philosopher might well ask. Why not call a sophist a sophist and have done with it? As any number of rhetorical theorists have been quick to point out, however, there is a method, maybe even a kind of doctrine, behind these seemingly disparate and wild-eyed arguments. Call it what you will— antilogy, aporia, the argument ad utramque partem—motivating even the most extreme flight of rhetorical fancy is the notion that the orator must

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The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

be able to argue with equal facility on either side of a question, and it is a tenet generally cited as one of the key components of the classical rhetorical education. To argue both sides of an issue, any issue, is to hone your mind to purely rhetorical strategies; it is to devote your attention to the sheer language of argument regardless of the end to which that language is put, and hence to forestall our habitual urge to uncover the truth of the matter. The success of the classical rhetorical education was thus gauged by the student’s budding ability to argue the counterintuitive, the blasphemous, or the downright absurd; and we might imagine that a sort of final exam arrived when the student was called upon to speak a few words on behalf of, say, incest.2 This still doesn’t tell us, though, why a philosopher might care about any of this. Arguing out of both sides of your mouth—to allow the philosophers their jibe—may be systematic, but surely it’s a systematic game or prank. As several commentators on the rhetorical tradition have suggested, however, there is much more at stake in the argument on both sides of the question than a lawyer’s verbal slickness. Richard Lanham, for one, sees the classical rhetorical education as an initiation into a comprehensive “rhetorical view of life”—a far-reaching iconoclasm that has given up the search for virtue or knowledge as such.3 The rhetorician’s taste for the offbeat argument is thus of a piece with the potentially troubling realization that rhetoric will always resist philosophical review; that it is less a subsidiary to philosophy or a corrupt version of real thought than philosophy’s menacing other; that, in Lanham’s words, the “Homo rhetoricus cannot . . . be serious,” and is thus a threat to any version of the common life that depends on our civic earnestness.4 The very existence of rhetoric as a discipline distinct from philosophy would suggest that language is always autonomous, that it cannot finally be governed by formal logic or any other such philosophical stricture and is thus an unreliable vehicle for communicating truths about the world. Lanham’s “rhetorical man” is a de facto Epicurean, “acting for pleasure,” characterized by a patrician tolerance itself founded on the conviction that the philosophers should all just lighten up. He is a skeptic even more so, doggedly resistant to the lure of wisdom and its therapeutic rigors; and it is at this point, at the very latest—when we find in rhetoric the specter of skepticism—that its threat to philosophy comes to seem very real indeed. Most of this is, no doubt, old news; critical theory is, after all, largely founded on the skeptical menace of rhet-

Skepticism and Rhetoric

23

oric, in the form of écriture or discourse or some other notion of the materiality of the sign. But the significance of the rhetorical tradition is that it gives grand intellectual precedent to anybody working under the banner of critical theory; it makes critical theory seem rather less like the love child of May ’68. Indeed, to hear some commentators tell it, the history of European thought would be best reconceptualized as a single running battle between philosophy and rhetoric, reconceptualized now as a kind of counterphilosophy.5 We are all latter-day humanists on this account, seeking in our own ways to replace the imperatives of classical logic with the study of verbal habits. The linguistic turn of so much late-twentiethcentury thought was merely the most recent skirmish in an ongoing war, the resurgence of a luxurious anti-foundationalism that had been latent in our rhetorical practices all along. In many respects, this account has the great virtue of seeming obviously true; what’s more, it possesses the clarifying advantage of bringing the rhetorical tradition back into discourse, however tentatively, with philosophy itself. Philosophy cannot ignore rhetoric if the latter sponsors a full-bore skepticism and thus threatens to negate philosophy as such. And sure enough—it seems easy to locate echoes of the rhetorical tradition in any number of modern thinkers conventionally deemed skeptical: Montaigne, for one, or Nietzsche, or your favorite post-structuralist. And yet however persuasive this account, doubts remain, as skepticism tells us they must. For if we find ourselves within the rhetorical world view, the question becomes: Why assent to the obvious appeal of this argument? Once Lanham and Co. have set forth their position, seeing in rhetoric a kind of spontaneously generated skepticism, obviousness no longer counts for much; indeed, shouldn’t we feel compelled by the rhetorical tradition itself to argue the other side of the question, if only to be obstinate? If the orator, on a lark, can argue that no mother is related to her children and cannibalism is good nutrition, then surely we can argue that rhetoric is not what it seems.6 This, then, is my argument ad utramque partem: that skepticism in its most elaborate, radically rhetorical form is no longer rhetorical at all.

2. If, within the rhetorical tradition, there is one real sore point for a rhetorical man such as Richard Lanham, it is rhetoric’s defensiveness in

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The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

the face of those who would denigrate it. Many of the great rhetorical texts display a tendency, openly lamented by Lanham, to make concessions to philosophy; the classical rhetorician is all too prone to make excuses for his regrettable-but-temporary lapse into skepticism, insisting in the end that rhetoric is best harnessed to a strong notion of wisdom or virtue.7 It’s easy to see how the rhetorical world view might skid into skepticism, and yet the most prominent members of the rhetorical tradition—Aristotle, Quintilian, and so on—are only reluctantly or guardedly skeptical, if at all; and for Lanham, it’s as if the rhetoricians at this point lacked the courage of their (lack of) conviction. “The contribution rhetorical reality makes to Western reality as a whole,” he writes, “is greatest when it is most uncompromisingly itself, insists most strenuously on its own coordinates.”8 Perhaps the most striking instance of Lanham’s defiant, red-blooded rhetoricism can be found in the writings of the third-century Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus. Sextus’ most influential work, the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, is a kind of skeptical handbook, a compendium of arguments designed to fluster the philosophers. This point requires special emphasis: the Outlines aren’t exactly a work of philosophical argument. They mean rather to teach a set of techniques along the lines of: If a philosopher says x, you say y. It is in Pyrrhonist skepticism, then, that rhetoric gives up the pretense of accommodation and goes on the offensive against philosophy, systematically attacking school after philosophical school, going after sense perception, the habits of philosophical abstraction, and finally the integrity of language itself. For Sextus, the philosopher is simply “the Dogmatist,” and, like his hapless sidekick “the Logician,” he is condemned in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism to forever play the dupe.9 The Skeptic does not conduct his life according to philosophical theory, Sextus announces baldly. It would be pointless, in this sense, to conceive of skepticism as an alternative conceptual system, a philosophy of negativity perhaps. If skepticism is to take its own injunctions against philosophy to heart, it must not mirror philosophy’s penchant for serious argumentation; it must, rather, become rhetorical. It is doubly important, in fact, that we take stock of classical skepticism’s rhetorical cast, because the first error that conventional accounts of skepticism make is to assume that skepticism is straightforwardly philosophical—that it is little more than an extravagant form of epistemology, say.10 But if skepticism posits itself as philos-

Skepticism and Rhetoric

25

ophy’s antagonist—if its aim is to shut philosophy down—then we need to hesitate before bringing philosophical modes of reading to bear upon it. Skepticism is always striving to position itself beyond philosophy or at its margins, cheerfully taking hold of any philosophical arguments that it can turn against philosophy itself, but taking easy recourse to other modes of writing, as well, to the rhetorical or, later, to the literary. This is not to say that skepticism is not, in a complicated sense, still philosophical, but we must work to see this as skepticism’s lapse, not its vocation. Pyrrhonism, in short, offers itself not as a school of thought but as a state of mind—one that refuses to get lured into the philosopher’s search for the good life, however defined. If there is one belief that Pyrrhonism remains willing to endorse, it is that, whatever counts as the good life, it certainly isn’t debating the good life with some Platonist. That said, it must be noted that the rhetoric that characterizes Sextus’ writing is itself rather unusual. In taking such pains to distinguish itself from philosophy, Pyrrhonism chooses as its most distinctive rhetorical figure one little encountered in the mainstream rhetorical tradition: the disclaimer. Sextus is forever keeping his own arguments at arm’s length, so that he has no compunctions about drawing to a close several pages of agitated discussion, seemingly full of substantive claims, with the straight-faced assertion that “we”—the skeptics—“say all these things without belief.” (1:11) Indeed, even when wrapping up seemingly conclusive arguments against the philosophers, he will always pull the punch: no belief is justified, “I suppose”; there are only impressions and perspectives, “perhaps.” Upon first reading, such weasel words may seem like a failure of nerve (or simply nonsensical), but collectively they serve as a command to the reader not to take the skeptic’s arguments seriously—which is to say, as anything other than rhetorical devices. It is often remarked that the aim of the rhetorical education was to instill within students a self-consciousness regarding language, and for the Pyrrhonist, this means developing a language that has been purged of assertion and affirmation.11 But why go to all this trouble? Why the elaborate caution entailed in these qualifiers? The answer lies in one of the logical snares that so often hobbles skepticism. In the debate that usually surrounds skepticism, there inevitably arrives a moment when the philosopher points out that the skeptic’s claim that “all assertions are false” is incoherent.

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The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

“What about the assertion that ‘all assertions are false?’ ” asks the philosopher. “You say that knowledge is impossible. How do you know?” The customary skeptical response to this challenge has been to cry foul, but the philosopher is likely to claim victory all the same. Michel de Montaigne—one of Sextus’ most attentive modern readers—offers a fine gloss on this dilemma: “I can see why the Pyrrhonian philosophers cannot express their general conception in any manner of speaking; for they would need a new language. Ours is wholly formed of affirmative propositions, which to them are utterly repugnant; so that when they say ‘I doubt,’ immediately you have them by the throat to make them admit that at least they know and are sure of this fact, that they doubt.”12 Ever lurking in skeptical texts is the fear that skeptics can always be transformed back into reasoning philosophers—that they can be nailed to their dubito as surely as any Cartesian ever clung to a cogito. Pyrrhonism is acutely aware of such second-order dilemmas; and Sextus’ solution to the problem is to compulsively repudiate his arguments in the very process of making them.13 Skeptics, he writes, may make assertions; but “we absolutely do not firmly maintain anything about their being true, especially since we say that they can be confuted by themselves, as they are included among the cases to which they apply.” (1:28) Indeed, so allergic is Sextus to truth claims that he refers to Pyrrhonism’s core tenets—“Everything is indeterminate,” for instance, or “to every argument an equal argument is opposed”—not as assertions but as phoné—“slogans” or “sounds.” (1:18–28) The effect of this renaming is to cancel the semantic force of the skeptic’s own statements, to downgrade one’s own speech to the status of mere noise, growls, and clicks whose truth claims cannot be tested, let alone defended, though they may nonetheless have effects in the world, the way whistles can summon dogs without having to mean anything.14 This may seem like the philosophical equivalent of crossing your fingers behind your back, and in a sense, the skeptic’s disclaimers are rather like that schoolyard ruse. The implication here is that the Pyrrhonist’s utterances are not subject to what are otherwise taken to be the normal rules of discourse. The skeptic, according to Sextus, is only ever reporting on appearances; yet even these appearances have the status of mere path¯e—sensations or feelings—and in this sense aren’t exactly the appearance of anything at all. It seems to Sextus that when the skeptic

Skepticism and Rhetoric

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speaks, “he is saying what seems to him to be the case and is reporting his pathos without belief.” (1:7) For the skeptic, the statements “I am in pain,” “The honey is sweet,” and “Philosophy is a boondoggle” all possess the same discursive status. They merely signal states of mind, implicitly carrying the qualifier: “It appears to me that. . . .” Taken on their own terms, then, the skeptic’s propositions are immune to epistemological review; they are exempt from authoritative categories of truth and falsity. “It appears to me that Stoics are dumber than dogs.”15 Strictly speaking, you just can’t argue with that. There’s more. The disclaimer is also the false front behind which Sextus smuggles philosophical argument back into his writing. The Pyrrhonist may strive to speak a language devoid of truth claims, but he remains willing, up to a point, to play philosophy’s game against itself; for if all language—even philosophical language—is a kind of rhetorical performance, then the skeptic is free to employ all manner of arguments, pretty much willy-nilly, without regard to conceptual precision or syllogistic rigor. Pyrrhonism dances on the fringes of philosophical argument, employing any arguments it finds useful in undermining the claims of others, only to relinquish that argument as soon as it is challenged. The Pyrrhonist portrayed by Sextus is a rhetorical gadfly and gleeful obscurantist, militating against transparency like some philosophical smoke machine, piling on claim after claim until thought has more or less fogged over. Sextus, this is to say, may not make substantive arguments of his own, but he does stage a series of rhetorical setpieces designed to reveal the hollowness of all dogma. Pyrrhonism, in this sense, is a single-minded act of persuasion, striving to keep its readers out of the Dogmatist’s hands, regardless of whether or not they assent to the proposition “Philosophy is bankrupt.” Typically, Pyrrhonist argument—if argument, indeed, is the word—is a kind of counterintuitive tour de force. Sextus is a master of the argument on both sides of the question, a device he uses to lure readers, repeatedly, into philosophical culs-de-sac. Sextus can demonstrate why, given the contradictory accounts of human nature, human beings are “inconceivable” (2:5) or why a whole can never have parts. (2:19) Once articulated in the form of argument, he seems to suggest, even self-evident truths can be undermined with a flick of the wrist; but far from actually disproving such truths, this would seem only to reveal the vapidity of the arguments that would claim to do so.

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This is already bound to set the philosopher’s teeth on edge, but it gets worse. Sextus’ favorite trick is to generate his counterarguments out of philosophical propositions themselves, and in this decidedly limited sense, we might say that the Pyrrhonist attack on philosophy employs a philosophical method of sorts. Sextus’ strategy here is, in effect, to radicalize the Socratic method of interrogation, to redirect dialectical reasoning to skeptical ends. This is not to say, of course, that the Pyrrhonist has any underlying faith in this philosophical mode: the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, predictably, contain a slapdash critique of the dialectic. It’s just that this doesn’t prevent Sextus from using the dialectic like a beartrap. Taking Sextus as a model of skeptical discourse, we can see that what the skeptic does is invite the Dogmatist to set the terms of the debate, only to then demonstrate the ways in which those terms are unable to support the claims the Dogmatist purports to make. The philosopher is thus forced to watch his argument collapse on its own terms. Unlike Socrates, however, Sextus never intends his humbled interlocutor to meditate tranquilly on the good. His aim is to shut cognition down altogether, to transform argument into unknowing. Thus, where the Platonists are generally eager to differentiate between rhetoric and the dialectic, the Pyrrhonist boldly reverses this strategy, reducing the dialectic to just another rhetorical noose. It is precisely “if we go by the Dogmatists’ account” that we are able to craft logically consistent, philosophically unimpeachable absurdities—that two bodies can never touch, for instance. (3:7) Fredric Jameson writes somewhere that every philosophy gets its Marxism. Pyrrhonism ensures that every philosophy will also get its skepticism—an epistemological parasite or viral infection that survives by commandeering the doctrine’s innermost machinery. The various skepticisms that have emerged in history typically take root within the operations of a given philosophical method; but in a procedure that is equal parts dialectic and satire, they expand that method’s claims until they hemorrhage, until they come to seem absurd and self-refuting. Sextus, for his part, is a virtuoso of the kettle logic that Derrida, following Freud, discovers in Plato’s Phaedrus—that pig-pile of contradictory claims which a defendant assembles to shore up a failing argument. Freud’s classic example runs something like this: (1) The kettle was in perfect condition when I returned it to you. (2) The holes were already there when you gave it to me, anyway. (3) What kettle? I never borrowed a kettle. Now when Derrida detects such a logic in Plato, he can

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claim a certain triumph: he has unearthed the buried incoherence of Plato’s thought (writing is an indifferent thing, neither useful nor harmful; no, wait, writing is a threat; no, wait, writing is a supplement).16 But Sextus is not Plato, and his use of kettle logic is neither surreptitious nor inadvertent. Pyrrhonist kettle logic is a forthright argumentative ploy, a taunt, as though to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter where you cut into the circuit of philosophical reasoning—it is perpetually on the verge of breaking down. You can carjack the Dogmatist’s reasoning at any point, and you will still be able to drive his argument straight off a philosophical cliff. Thus Sextus: (1) There is no such thing as the art of living. (2) And you can’t learn it. (3) And once you’ve learned it, it will wreck your life. Sextus wants to demonstrate that one can grant the philosopher as many of his presuppositions as he wants, and he still won’t be able to bring his argument to a close. We’ve just shown that the art of living does not exist, Sextus writes, but “for good measure, let us allow its existence, and teach that it is unteachable.”17 We must consider the scorn that is packed into that “for good measure.” Kettle logic is the ne plus ultra of skeptical contempt. So the art of living is unteachable. Sextus, of course, denies that anything can ever be taught, for if there is no such thing as knowledge, then there is clearly no knowledge to impart. This last absurdity is particularly intriguing, for in some sense, Sextus’ is clearly a pedagogical project. Indeed, the Outlines of Pyrrhonism might be said to fulfill at least two functions; for if, on one level, it sets out to discredit philosophy, it is concerned, on a second level, that its rhetorical strategies be replicable. The book, this is to say, seeks not only to warn its readers of the dangers of dogma, but also to train them in the language of skepticism, so that once properly disillusioned, they may take the fight against dogmatism to the streets. Sextus, in this sense, offers the Pyrrhonist a formalized rhetorical education, and we might think of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism as nothing more than a classical rhetorical manual of a particularly radical cast. Not only does Sextus survey the ancient philosophical canon, culling from each of its schools attacks on the others, forming a kind of anthology of counterarguments; he also codifies these counterarguments into a series of seventeen rhetorical “modes” or “tropes,” each of which describes a strategy or technique, some rhetorical feint or parry that, once mastered, can be tailored to any occasion. The modes are engines of counterargument, urging the Pyrrhonist to exploit, in his battle

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against the philosopher, the seeming unreliability of the senses or the seeming mutability of objects or the seeming multiplicity of cultural norms.18 When the Dogmatist tells you over lunch that his soup is too hot, you reply that if he were on fire, his soup would seem cold. If he condemns homosexuality as unnatural, you say that pederasty is the cornerstone of some societies you know. If he claims that human bodies need a certain diet to be healthy, you reply that “some digest beef better than rock fish or get diarrhea from the weak wine of Lesbos.” (1:14) As tropes, however, these counterarguments—more often than not, they are actually facts or anecdotes rather than arguments proper—don’t really convince the Pyrrhonist of anything; they simply announce the insistent possibility of multiplicity or discrepancy. Indeed, Pyrrhonism does not, in this sense, even mean to convince the Dogmatist of anything, exactly. Pyrrhonism is taste-aversion therapy for the philosopher, saturating him with argument to a point past satiation, to the point where disputation, if it is going to be dogged at every point by uncertainty and incongruity, no longer seems worth the trouble. Some readers may suspect that there skulks behind this noncommittal perspectivism a hard, epistemological core, whatever Sextus’ strenuous claims to be wholly free of philosophy; and in a sense they’d be right. Most of the Pyrrhonist tropes rely on a single insight into the static quality of classical logic, its inability to theorize change in matter or experience. If matter is always transforming itself, then it seems futile to stake our knowledge on some fixed epistemological cross section, which will become superannuated in the very moment of its positing. It is not difficult to detect traces here of the Heraclitean flux or some such philosopheme; but however tempted we may be to extrapolate, Sextus never allows this notion of change to become a positive claim about the nature of reality. “Skeptic”—a word first introduced in Pyrrhonist writings—means “inquirer”; and the contention driving Sextus’ critique of logic is that any positive assertion calls an arbitrary halt to the process of inquiry and is thus ultimately unfounded.19 Arbitrariness, in fact, is a big deal for Sextus; it is an all-purpose charm to keep the Dogmatists at bay. Pyrrhonism, this is to say, keeps in its rhetorical reserve a fallback strategy—a failsafe instrument to haul out when the mock-dialectic falters—and this is that philosophical headache known as the infinite regress. Sextus delights in demonstrating the ways in which any claim to knowledge must be founded on some prior claim

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to knowledge, which in turn can only be assessed in the context of some third claim, and so on, ad infinitum. Montaigne’s version of the infinite regress is typically elegant. He sets it out in one short sentence—“No reason can be established without another reason”—and to this he appends a kindred conundrum: “To judge the appearances that we receive of objects, we would need a judicatory instrument; to verify this instrument, we need a demonstration, an instrument: there we are in a circle.”20 This latter isn’t so much an infinite regress of fact and judgment but the immediate collapse of the same, a hamster’s wheel in which neither term can ever vindicate the other. Regress of this kind is ever-lurking in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Sextus makes frequent and explicit reference to the phenomenon;21 but it also serves as the implicit menace motivating his even more pervasive appeals to cultural and intellectual multiplicity. Sextus is constantly calling the Dogmatists’ attention to the lack of agreement between the various philosophical schools or to the bewildering variety of practices and beliefs found in the ancient world; and so we learn that one philosopher believes the world is fundamentally fire, a second that it is water; that the Thracians thrive on dog meat, though we prefer lamb chops; that we prohibit families from offing their own children, whereas Solon thought that parents should make up their own minds. (3:24) Such comparisons invariably strike the modern reader as liberalism in seed form, but the immediate polemical impact of such passages is in fact considerably more narrow.22 Tolerance is a concept wholly absent from the Pyrrhonist scheme. For Sextus, there is nothing to be learned, exactly, from surveying the diversity of cultural practices; the joy of pluralism is in fact its utter pointlessness. The contrasts between different schools or cultures serve only to tempt the reader into a fruitless search for a position beyond culture from which competing claims or lifeways could be judged; and this is yet one more way of initiating the infinite regress and the dizzying sense of groundlessness that attends it. To attempt to adjudicate between competing beliefs is to search for a criterion according to which they could be judged; but to craft such a criterion is only ever to invoke a second criterion, which must likewise be assessed, and already you have been sucked into the spiral. For the Pyrrhonist, the startling upshot of all this is that the very existence of disagreement means that the issue in question is ultimately irresolvable, so that once, at some ominous later date, we place a Catholic and a Protestant in the

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same room, God will sneak out the window. In interpretive questions of value or meaning, the thinking person is simply stranded; for “if he is a philosopher, he will be part of the controversy and instead of being a judge will be subject to judgment himself.” (2:6) To participate in a dispute is by definition to be unable to proclaim upon it. Any attempt to reason out the answer to a question is thus less a claim to knowledge than a confession of impotence, an admission that one lacks the kind of authoritative insight that, striking the mind with immediate force, would render argument unnecessary. Pyrrhonism would thus seem to commit us to a devastating series of reversals. For if reflection is as fatally ungrounded as this, then philosophy can only ever be a selfaggrandizing exercise in ignorance; to even call philosophy the “the love of wisdom” begins to sound like a cruel joke. Worse still: to call the Pyrrhonist a skeptical “inquirer” is to assent to a notion of “inquiry” that is so open that it cannot, in fact, discover anything at all; it cannot achieve even provisional closure. The “inquirer” has rendered inquiry wholly vacuous. It is perhaps here—in the comprehensive emptying out of inquiry— that Pyrrhonists have their surest claim to a place among the dissenters and rebels of rhetoric. Skepticism is forever on the lookout for ways and reasons to disagree, and it is precisely in this obsessive facility with counterarguments that the skeptic might just reveal himself to be the finest rhetorician of them all. To quote Cicero, himself a skeptical rhetorician of some repute: “If there has really been a person who was able in Aristotelian fashion to speak on both sides about every subject and by means of knowing Aristotle’s rules to reel off two speeches on opposite sides of every case, or in the manner of Arcesilas and Carneades argues against every statement put forward, and who to that method adds the experience and practice in speaking indicated, he would be the one and only true and perfect orator.”23 If the skeptic does indeed deserve this Ciceronian title, then this is because the multiplicity of opinions on a subject—what Sextus simply calls “the opposition of things”—provides Pyrrhonism with its most basic argumentative forms. The “skeptic Way,” Sextus writes, “is a capacity for bringing into opposition, in any way whatever, things that appear and things that are thought, so that, owing to the equal strength of the opposed items and rival claims, we come . . . to suspend judgment”—to achieve what the Pyrrhonists call epoch¯e.24 Pyrrhonism, this is to say, takes the argument on both sides of a question

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and transforms it from a humble pedagogical exercise into a therapeutic program. To rehearse without end the clash of opposing viewpoints is to induce in oneself and one’s listeners a condition which, in Pyrrhonism, is known as aporia—“being at a loss” or “stumped.” (1:3) The rhetorician that Pyrrhonist training produces is the nightmare interlocutor who in his programmatic petulance will cripple every conversation. Governing the skeptic’s every utterance is the concomitant search for its obliteration. Pyrrhonism, in this sense, is less a philosophy than a balancing act, a concerted exercise in the equipollence of arguments and the suspension of judgment that attends it. It is here, at the very latest, that it becomes necessary to distinguish Pyrrhonism from a modern, Cartesian skepticism. In either version, one of skepticism’s central notions is the suspension of judgment or epoch¯e, that moment in which dogmatic knowledge claims loosen their grip on cognition. But what kind of skepticism you get depends entirely on where in your philosophical narrative you place this epoch¯e. Descartes, like Husserl after him, installs epoch¯e at the beginning of the philosophical project: philosophy begins when you agree to set aside everything you think you know about yourself and the world. Pyrrhonist skepticism, by contrast, thinks of epoch¯e as the trapdoor out of philosophy. To suspend judgment is to have no epistemological questions left to ask. It is the skeptic’s chance to set about other, nonphilosophical projects.25 If we go by this thumbnail scheme, it seems fair to say that Cartesian skepticism isn’t really skepticism at all: its doubt is there only to be overcome. It is a straw target in an elaborately orchestrated anti-skepticism, engineered to find a way out of doubt. If the Cartesian search for certainty is not skeptical, then so much the worse for skepticism—or so we might be tempted to say. To many readers, Pyrrhonism is bound to seem an unfair trade: Sextus has dethroned philosophy, and all he has offered us in its stead is confusion and ignorance. If this is where the “rhetorical world view” leaves us, then the Pyrrhonist would seem to be a pretty grim case. The pressing question that the Outlines of Pyrrhonism poses us, then, is: What happens to people once they are robbed of all authoritative standards by which they might otherwise resolve disputes and doubts? And the obvious answer to that question, one immediately available within the Outlines itself, is: nothing much. To be persuaded into Pyrrhonism, this is to say, is to realize that living in a world devoid of transparent, foundational truths is nothing to worry about. The radically rhetorical world, Sextus

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suggests, poses no threat to the life lived modestly—without, that is, the arrogance of philosophy. To suspend judgment across the board is to free oneself from the excessive demands of knowledge or virtue. The examined life, in other words, is not worth living. This is a conception of doubt almost wholly foreign to modern readers schooled in the confrontational strategies of contemporary skepticism. And yet the upshot here is hard to mistake: in Pyrrhonism, aporia is the point where confusion passes into calm. It is the very key to the peace of mind—or ataraxia—that Sextus takes as the sole end of human endeavors. Rhetoric, this is to say, may in one sense govern Pyrrhonism; but in another sense it is a mere tool whose function is to assist us toward that highly desirable moment of perplexity in which knowledge no longer seems to matter. In the Gorgias, Socrates claims, in a famous phrase, that rhetoric is mere cookery, a kind of philosophical confection that corrodes the mind as surely as sugar rots teeth.26 Philosophy, just as famously, is medicine, the nutritional science of the soul. One of Pyrrhonism’s most distinctive features is that it seizes hold of these Platonic figures—figures that are widespread, in fact, throughout Hellenistic philosophy—but reverses their priority, so now it is rhetoric that has the power to heal and philosophy that promotes infection.27 Sextus, in other words, retains Hellenistic philosophy’s favorite description of itself—that it is a form of therapy—but then turns this idea back upon philosophy itself, debunking it as something really quite nefarious, a disease masquerading as therapy, in which case Stoicism or Epicureanism are guilty of what we might call philosophical malpractice.28 As best as anyone can tell, the Pyrrhonist school was literally a school of medicine—it educated doctors, treated the sick, and all that29—and it approaches language accordingly, with an eye for its salutary, pragmatic effects. Skeptics make assertions only in order to defeat the very idea of philosophical assertion, “just as cathartic drugs not only flush out the bodily humors, but expel themselves as well.” (I:28) Skepticism, in short, has a pharmacy of its own, but it serves up harsher potions than Plato ever did. It does not deal in good, square philosophical meals. It spoons out epistemological castor oil in their stead. The Pyrrhonist can thus employ arguments without being committed to them any more than a physician is in some abstract way committed to the penicillin he prescribes. He uses doubt like morphine, to dull the mind, and for Sextus, this is plainly a philanthropic project: “Because of his love of humanity the Skeptic wishes to cure

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by argument, so far as he can, the conceit and precipitancy of the Dogmatists.” (3:32) But this still leaves us with something of a puzzle, for if the express aim of Pyrrhonism is to persuade its interlocutors to suspend all judgment, then surely we have a problem on our hands. For what is this Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment—this epoch¯e—but a kind of unpersuasion, an attempt, that is, to forestall the moment of conclusion or assent upon which the successful rhetorical act generally relies? Conventional rhetoric depends, after all, on my being able to persuade somebody of something. I haven’t done my fellow rhetoricians much of a favor if I have convinced you, my listener, never to agree to anything at all. This is just another way of saying that, if the Outlines of Pyrrhonism is a kind of rhetorical manual, it is a decidedly odd one, designed as it is not to provide a mastery of public language, but to unmask the rhetoricity of language in all its forms. The question becomes, then, not what are the consequences of the “rhetorical world view”—can skeptics endure their own skepticism?—but rather: What happens to that very “rhetorical world view” when it is radicalized to the point where it can conceive of itself only in negative terms? The Pyrrhonist may be a good physician, employing rhetoric like a purgative, but this is nonetheless to have discovered the curious moment of rhetoric’s abnegation, in which persuasion gives way to comprehensive withholding of judgment. It is to have discovered, in short, a little-discussed work by Sextus, curiously entitled Against the Rhetoricians.30 And the unsettling upshot of this discovery is that Cicero’s “true and perfect orator”—the one who can match any argument with a counterargument and thus perpetually postpone the moment of persuasion—turns out to be rhetoric’s fiercest enemy of all.

3. Skepticism, of course, is famously omnivorous, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to see rhetoric fall into its maw. It’s not as if the skeptic couldn’t find reasons enough to oppose rhetoric. The skeptic is the devil’s most loyal advocate, the twelfth angry man, the contrarian who can hang any jury. So on some level, a work such as Sextus’ Against the Rhetoricians is merely confirmation of this cussedness—proof that a world-class sophist can make the case against sophistry itself. Sextus’ skepticism, in fact, never stops at philosophy. He devotes much of his

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corpus to extending the Pyrrhonist critique beyond philosophy into the classical liberal arts—geometry, grammar, and so on—which are themselves shown to be rank with dogma.31 Why should the orators expect special treatment? The affair, however, is considerably more complicated than this; for if, faced with Sextus’ denunciations, the rhetoricians feel betrayed by their brother sophist, they may have only themselves to blame. What Sextus does, in effect, is exploit an ambiguity inherent in the notion of the “rhetorical world view” itself. Rhetoric, of course, is the business of persuasion. But persuasion can only transpire if somebody, somewhere is acting non-rhetorically—reasoning or holding beliefs, willing one way or another to assent to some claim about the world. To ply their trades, politicians, priests, and sundry other orators must be able to think that the rest of us are to some extent ensnared in seriousness, that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that what they say carries some real weight. Indeed, the most canny rhetoricians have always recognized this, denouncing rhetoric in what is itself an antique rhetorical convention—exposing the arguments of others as mere flattery, the better to convey their own seeming sincerity.32 The properly rhetorical text would therefore have to be an ambitiously esoteric document, refusing in any obvious way to call itself by name; for rhetoric is otherwise perpetually in danger of lapsing into enlightenment, which would render the practice of rhetoric ineffective. And the notion of a “rhetorical world view uncompromisingly itself” à la Lanham is thus oddly self-defeating. How, this is to ask, could the wholly rhetorical man, the protean orator who never indulges in the fiction of seriousness, persuade anybody of anything? “We must not believe every man, says the maxim,” Montaigne reminds us with his usual second-hand economy, “because any man may say anything.”33 The effect of Pyrrhonism may be to turn its readers into rhetoricians, but by thus initiating them, it evangelically spreads its resolve to withdraw assent, inoculating its acolytes against rhetoric itself, and thus robbing the orators of their audience, one member at a time. In our very discussion of skepticism, we would seem to have reached a moment of Pyrrhonist aporia in which it has become impossible to judge whether Pyrrhonism is “truly rhetorical” or not. It’s as if, just when rhetoric promised to become most uniquely itself, it began to resemble philosophy all over again. Indeed, this is at least one way of

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characterizing the peculiar flavor of Against the Rhetoricians: that it is a palpably Platonic work. The reasons for this, however, may be close at hand, for surely it comes as no surprise that Sextus makes his attack on rhetoric with the same blithe lack of discrimination that characterizes his assault on everything else. Just as his favored method of discrediting the philosophers is to play one philosophical school off of another, so too does he scour Greek philosophy to gather his anti-rhetorical arguments. And what better site to go harvesting anti-rhetorical arguments than Plato’s Gorgias; Sextus cites it in the opening sentences and never looks back, following Socrates in virtual lockstep over the course of a few dozen pages. Rhetoric, we learn from Sextus as from the philosopher, is not a proper art; it is merely a trick of the tongue. Rhetoric is like thievery; it codifies our worst instincts, teaching us the bitter business of manipulation. Wholly indifferent to virtue, it can only dehumanize the rhetorician and injure the polity he supposedly serves; it is “sycophancy and mob-courting.”34 In and of themselves, these arguments have too familiar a ring to be compelling. The question remains, however: What business do they have in a rhetorician’s mouth? To pose this question is not to suggest that the Pyrrhonist is merely a Platonist in disguise, at least not quite. It is to suggest, rather, that Sextus has driven us once again into an untenable impasse. Pyrrhonism accepts the critiques that philosophy and rhetoric launch upon one another, so that we can just sit watching while the rhetorical critique of philosophy surpasses itself to encompass language in all its forms, coming to approximate, if only in a negative fashion, the very philosophical positions it so strenuously rejects. The skeptical critique of philosophy is largely an assault on abstraction. It condemns philosophy as so much arid thought-mongering, mere ideas amputated from the diverse particularity of lived experience. But this critique finds its counterpart in the metaphysical critique of mere language, which distrusts words for their failure to adequately convey the concepts and things they are meant to name. Pyrrhonism, in these terms, is a spectacle of mutual recrimination. It reveals that these two positions—the anti-conceptual and the anti-linguistic—are, in fact, easily conflated. Sextus’ primary target is always the arrogance of philosophy, yet he discovers in rhetoric’s profligacy an exacerbated version of this haughtiness. And of course, Sextus could just as soon reverse this formulation; the point is that his strategy for rejecting one term is to

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equate it with the other, so that to find in rhetoric philosophy’s arrogance is just a corollary of the suspicion that philosophy was nothing more than a rhetorical racket to begin with. This, in fact, is a strategy that we will discover over and over again in subsequent skeptics: you begin by reducing all intellectual endeavors to their rhetorical coordinates, and then, in one final, ruinous stroke, you denounce rhetoric. What vexes Sextus, then, is not so much that the philosophers preach philosophy, but that they preach sophistry masquerading as philosophy; it’s just that he can’t imagine what a genuine philosophy could possibly look like. In this sense, Pyrrhonism is little more than a coping mechanism, a way of enduring a deeply felt absence—the absence, that is, of philosophy itself. And this, finally, is what is so bizarre about Pyrrhonism. Its sense that language is compromised or even degraded is, in Lanham’s terms, fundamentally “serious.” Pyrrhonism is “seriously rhetorical”—embracing rhetoric, to be sure, but with the overriding aim of articulating its disillusionment with it. Thus, though it may be tempting to dismiss Sextus’ use of Plato’s arguments as just another instance of the skeptic’s rhetorical opportunism, to do so would be to ignore the philosophical residue that dogmatism leaves throughout his writings. Why, this is to ask, should we feel compelled to suspend all judgment unless we have a prior commitment to the notions of honesty or truth implicit in that refusal? The Pyrrhonist drive to epoch¯e and tranquillity signals a retreat from language. But all this means is that the Pyrrhonist mistakes the absence of philosophical foundations for the impossibility of discourse altogether. “For some people,” Sextus writes, “honey seems pleasant to the tongue, but unpleasant to the eye; consequently, it is impossible to say without qualification whether it is pleasant or unpleasant.” (1:14) One option that modern epistemology will provide is to reclassify sense data as events to be explained. The philosophers will no longer say that honey is essentially one way or another. They will ask, rather, in a speculative and analytic mode, how the world has to be in order for it to produce the sensation of sweetness in beings that have bodies like ours (at which point they can also speculate calmly about why some bodies might react unusually). There’s no use chastising the ancient skeptics for not hitting upon this solution, but we can still follow out the consequences of their not doing so. Far from being the champion of multiplicity that liberal scholars would have him be, Sextus would seem to be so troubled by

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difference that the merest whiff of disagreement, however banal, immediately provokes epistemological crisis.35 Why, after all, is it the essential nature of honey that is at stake? What would it even mean for honey to “be pleasant” in some essential way? And is the complete suspension of cognitive activity an appropriate response to the absence of honey essence? Sextus and his kind, this is to say, insist on performing in each and every sentence the drama by which they see through the contingency of all knowledge or speech. But this very drama is founded on the conviction that the only alternative to an authoritative, self-evident epistemology is complete intellectual abdication, and Sextus thus remains helplessly bound to the very dogmatism he rejects.36 “Truth must have one face,” notes Montaigne in this vein, “the same and universal. If man knew any rectitude and justice that had body and real existence, he would not tie it down to the condition of the customs of this country or that.”37 The giveaways here are, of course, the words “knew” and “had”—signposts to a hypothetical truth whose non-appearance must be exhaustively demonstrated. Pyrrhonism is shot through with this kind of subjunctive foundationalism, the petulant sense that truth matters, even when AWOL. Why, to pose but one further question, does Sextus insist on keeping his language so pristine, so immaculately free of assertion? Pyrrhonism refuses to entertain a notion of productive or persuasive discourse, choosing instead to cow its interlocutors into the exalted silence of ataraxia. But underlying this literally quietist imperative lies a frustrated longing for a transparent language in which every object wears its name like a skin. It is in this (admittedly complicated) sense that the radical rhetorician is, in fact, a kind of closet Platonist. Faced with the absence of authoritative truths, Pyrrhonism falls into a smug hush, and this reticence is, in the end, what the skeptic has instead of virtue. In urging ataraxia upon us, Sextus asks us to sign on to his principled refusal of the compromise that is inherent in all language. If we cannot discover binding truths, then at least we can flaunt the purity of our unbelieving silence. It is surely tempting, then, to ascribe to Sextus a negative ethics of sorts, a theory of virtue in absentia, not least of all because the alternative seems so dire. For if we are unable to find an ethics in Pyrrhonism’s reticence, then it would seem also that we have a political problem on our hands. Skepticism, this is to say, would seem to come at considerable

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ideological cost. The high road of political theory tends to conceive of political power in terms of sovereignty and legitimacy. It seeks to identify the persons or institutions on which power should be fixed and to explain the principles that would justify that fixing. But it is hard to see how, in the face of Pyrrhonism, any such arguments could be sustained, since any claim to legitimacy would simply be cancelled by one of many possible counterclaims. The word “legitimacy” names the epistemological moment in any political order, that moment when it steps forward and makes truth claims about itself, and it is hard to see why political truth claims should fare any better than their apolitical analogues in skepticism’s acid bath. Worse still, if a political order couches its legitimacy claims in terms of knowledge—if it not only makes truth claims about itself but actually claims to merit power because it has, in the manner of philosopher-kings or technocracies, special access to some body of knowledge—then the Pyrrhonist is sure to claim a double victory. You can just hear the kettle coming to a boil: politicians cannot possess knowledge. And when they do possess knowledge, they cannot derive power from it. And when they do derive power from it, they will drive the state into political ruin. Such, then, is one way of imagining the skeptical menace: to deny the possibility of knowledge is simultaneously to deny the possibility of authority, and the Pyrrhonists must emerge therefore as epistemological anarchists, coining insurrection out of their principled ignorance. Pyrrhonism says to any political actor, in a categorical act of political demystification: “You do not hold power for the reasons you claim to.” It is against this threat of political disorder that the Pyrrhonist’s refusal of language demands careful explanation. There are versions of skepticism that end up reaffirming conventional versions of religious doctrine and then, by extension, the political formations that religious orthodoxy generally helps support. Such skepticism usually operates, roughly, by showing that all knowledge claims are just a species of belief, in which case specifically religious belief can no longer be derided as an intellectual aberration—“superstition” or what have you. And once shielded from philosophical examination, religious belief can be rehabilitated on something other than philosophical grounds. Such, then, would be one way of putting skepticism to conventional political ends. Sextus’ reliance on Plato in Against the Rhetoricians may seem to point to a reading of Pyrrhonism as a negative theology of this kind, and thus provide some

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ground from which to imagine a functioning political order. It would be shaky ground, however, because Sextus’ sporadic Platonism is ultimately a red herring: Sextus, we must note, actually takes the Academic philosopher Arcesilaus to task for allowing skepticism to pimp for Platonism. (1:33) The Outlines of Pyrrhonism is not a Hellenic Praise of Folly, and it is not trying to imagine a non-philosophical version of piety. But then neither is Pyrrhonism a species of philosophical anarchy. Consider in this light two substitutions that Sextus makes in Against the Rhetoricians—two creative misreadings of his source texts which, taken together, have much to say on the subject of authority or social order. There is, first of all, a lengthy passage in Against the Rhetoricians where Sextus ascribes to Plato a most un-Socratic argument. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates had suggested that rhetoric corroded civil society because it was unrelated to virtue, knowledge, and skill, indifferent to the ends to which it was put. Sextus, in a passage that, like so much of this work, seems to be quoting Socrates, suggests that the real damage rhetoric does to civil society lies in its indifference to the law. It is in this defacement of the Gorgias—this substitution of law for virtue or knowledge—that we discover Sextus’ most distinctive move.38 His second substitution concerns a tried-and-true rhetoricist convention. There is a myth of origin common in the humanist tradition of rhetoric—one often traced back to Cicero—which maintains that it is language and language alone that separates human beings from beasts; that, indeed, it was rhetoric that first made civil society possible by galvanizing the wild hordes of early humanity around a single, smoothtalking leader. Sextus, for his part, seems to invoke this fable, but will have none of this civilizing mumbo-jumbo, with its suggestion that all that keeps us from tearing out one another’s larynxes is the poetry that issues from them. In Sextus’ considerably starker version of this origin myth, it is the frank imposition of the law that separates humans, albeit tenuously, from a state of original lawlessness; and this is a process that, far from requiring rhetoric, both precedes rhetoric and is wholly inimical to it. For rhetoric, Sextus writes, “was brought to the front in opposition to the laws. A very strong proof of this is the fact that amongst the barbarians, amongst whom there is either no rhetoric at all or very little, the laws remained unmoved, whereas amongst those who cultivate rhetoric they are altered daily.”39 If unerring obedience to the law is the only reliable warrant of social order, then rhetoric is always a breach; rhetoric

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is relapse. And worse still, what commonly passes for civilization is a vicious mockery of itself. Its most characteristic institutions—those meant to ensure legality, such as the courts or government by assembly—merely codify debate and disagreement. This, ultimately, is what grounds the Pyrrhonist rejection of philosophy and rhetoric alike: in the most hallowed sites of public life, philosophy and rhetoric come together in some horrible, insurgent pact, opening up power to epistemological review, and thus placing the locus of authority permanently, perilously in question. Indeed, it would seem to be the startling upshot of Pyrrhonism that authority itself is an impossible concept; it is literally unthinkable, because the attempt to derive power from some prior term—to legitimize it with reference to something that is not itself power—can only serve to unsettle the social order, to make it contingent, or rather to publicize a contingency that Pyrrhonism secretly concedes. The anarchist, in this view, is not the radical skeptic who, in his aphasia, is incapable of mounting a sustained challenge to any political order. The anarchist is his seemingly more moderate confederate, the rhetorician. Rhetoric is just sedition by another name, and orator a fancy word for rebel, “depraving the crowd by his doctrines, using flattering words, and setting them against the better class by his slanders.”40 Herein lie the implications of Pyrrhonist silence: in the face of epistemological chaos, it is the proud absence of both philosophical critique and political noise, a bid to return to the condition of the barbarians, who have not yet allowed philosophy to supplant the law, understood as custom, a practice that simply obtains without need of further explanation. The project of Pyrrhonism is the maintenance of social order in the absence of metaphysical guarantees. Sextus proposes a kind of authoritarian pragmatism which does indeed attempt to disassociate knowledge from sovereignty, as the Dogmatist fears, but only as part of a more comprehensive project to replace knowledge with command. Skeptics, he writes, may not have a philosophical system, but they do have a code of conduct: “a certain rationale, that, in accord with appearances, points us toward a life in conformity with the customs of our country and its laws and institutions.” (1:8) This is not a negative ethics in an Erasmian vein. It is a default ethics—and everything that is proper to Pyrrhonism rides on that distinction. Pyrrhonism’s celebration of ataraxia—of peace of mind, of tranquillity—is simply an analog of its commitment to existing political and social arrangements. When it asks us to suspend

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judgment, it means simply to lure us back into the confines of the common forms.41

4. It is at this point that a rhetorical reading of skepticism (of the kind I have been pursuing here) must cede way to other approaches. History encroaches in the guise of “customs” and “laws” and “institutions.” Sextus recommends skepticism, finally, because he attributes to it a set of consistent political effects, and with this realization, it becomes necessary to go back and refashion the entire argument with an eye toward Pyrrhonism’s social and historical locations. This, it must be noted immediately, is thankless work, since nobody really knows anything about Pyrrhonism’s social and historical locations. Here’s everything the scholarship tells us about Sextus: he was a physician, he lived somewhere in Greece—or perhaps in Alexandria—and he flourished, as the classicists like to say, around 200 CE, under the Roman Empire.42 That’s not a lot of oxygen to feed the historian’s fire. We will have to proceed, then, by indirection. If we know almost nothing about Sextus, perhaps we can get a better handle on his antagonists. What was the social and political location of Hellenistic philosophy under Roman rule? What were its characteristic projects? And what would it mean to want to terminate those projects? Let’s first walk down a dead end. The most familiar arguments against philosophers generally paint them as quiescent and idly theoretical— statuesque thinkers snoozing on their fists. The relevant words come tripping off our tongues: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. . . .” Philosophy’s signal failing, on this view, is what the Marxists like to call “contemplation.” Perhaps the accusation is a strange one. You might think that Marxists would have more pressing problems to worry about—that faced with colonial brutality and the factory’s killing floor, nobody would much bother attacking contemplation, which, as political sins go, is pretty venal. And yet there is a long line of Marxist thinkers for whom “contemplative” is an especially ugly epithet. What, then, is so bad about contemplation? We might take a hard look at the word itself. The argument against contemplation was pioneered by Georg Lukács, writing in German, though the English translation is, for once, marvelously apt.43 “Contemplation” means both the rapt consideration of an idea or thought

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(as when one sits in contemplation) and the steady regard of an object (as when one contemplates a painting)—and this dual meaning already telegraphs the problem. In the word “contemplation,” cognition and perception begin to overlap. Thought is in danger of caving in and becoming mere observation. To contemplate an object is to become ensnared in its thingness, to fasten it with a fixed and reifying gaze, a gaze that discovers in the object only its preexisting and seemingly permanent features, thereby stripping persons of any claim to have made the contemplated world, and stripping them, too, of the possibility of remaking it. Contemplation is positivism in a poetic mood. The word itself will only yield so much, however, for the objection here is in reality a historical one—trebly so, in fact. It is historical, first, because the Marxists’ grievance is less with contemplation itself than with the practices and institutions that promote contemplation and thus deprive thought of its critical and transformative vocation. Contemplation is something more than an ethical lapse or philosophical perversion. It is a feature of the social order, arising only when the contemplator is embedded in the world in distinct and disabling ways. What, then, are the institutions that promote contemplation? The answer may come as a small surprise, since Lukács aims to show that contemplation has its proper home not, as one might expect, in the university or some other pensive nook, but amidst the mechanized bustle of the factory. Contemplation is the condition of factory workers in a rationalized workplace, assigned to a station in the industrial mechanism and engrossed by its machines, which elicit peoples’ attention but not their capacities. Rather than exercise any control over their labor and materials, workers might be said merely to contemplate them—to regard them, for hours on end, as already given, governed by laws of their own; machines ask to be worked, but not altered. Contemplation, it turns out, deserves to be considered alongside exploitation because it is simply one version of it. To observe is to serve. But factory workers are not alone. They function as an index for a whole range of professional types—the bureaucrat, the philosopher, the scientist, just so many isolated consciousnesses confronting a seemingly alien and independent world, a world that can only be known. Science and philosophy are factory-thought, systematically pursued. But that’s only part of the story. The argument against contemplation is historical as well, because there are certain historical situations in

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which the argument does not hold; situations, that is, in which contemplation is a vital political act, a lungful of meaningful leisure in a regime of coerced hyperactivity, what Marcuse once called “the rediscovery of quiet.”44 And it is historical, again, because there is a get-upand-go, pragmatist critique of contemplation whose political valences are rather different, though here we have less an argument than a string of commonplaces, in whose lights the philosophers stand accused of navel-gazing, of wanting moxy, of being insufficiently entrepreneurial or dilettantishly unproductive. The important point, for our purposes, is that none of this has anything to do with ancient philosophy and its critics. The critique of contemplation needs to be described, homeopathically, so that it can be flushed away. It is the specificity of ancient philosophy that should concern us here. Can we conceive of a critique of philosophy that has almost nothing in common with the critique of contemplation? We owe to Pierre Hadot the indispensable notion that ancient philosophy did not see itself as trading in theories or abstractions. It did not conceive of itself as a system or doctrine, a set of technical arguments about language or epistemology. It did not even take knowledge to be prominent among its concerns. Ancient philosophy saw itself rather as a way of life, by which Hadot means not so much a moral code as a way of being in the world, an art of living designed to transform the philosopher, radically, in each of his particulars.45 A philosophical school required of its followers not just reasoned agreement, and not just a shared vocabulary, but a kind of devotion, a zealous adherence to its key tenets. Stoicism or Epicureanism, then, look less like what we know as modern philosophy than they do a monastic calling, based on an initial conversion and reinforced regularly by what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” They resemble therapy, too—a kind of ancient psychoanalysis, if you like—in which philosophers learn to cure their afflictions, to master their passions and achieve peace of mind, through protracted dialogue with their intellectual masters and then habitually through dialogue with themselves. There is little in Hadot’s account that will surprise a reader of Sextus. Pyrrhonism plays out just the way that Hadot says an ancient philosophical school should: it abjures knowledge for its own sake and offers its followers a set of techniques instead, techniques designed to bring them peace of mind by curing them of their dogmatic “afflictions” and “distress.” (3:32) It’s just that what is true of Pyrrhonism is, at this

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level, largely true of the ordinary philosophical schools as well— Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, even, if we follow Hadot’s account, Aristotelianism. But then isn’t this in itself more than a little surprising? Isn’t it odd that Pyrrhonism should fall in so neatly with the philosophies it is nominally out to annihilate? If the ancient philosophical schools all tend to the condition of Pyrrhonism, if they share with it most of the features that seem, by modern standards, distinctively skeptical—its indifference to theory, its therapeutic vocation, its persuasive proclivities—then wherein lies Pyrrhonism’s constitutive difference? Hadot points the way: [T]o be a philosopher implies a rupture with what the skeptics called bios, that is, daily life. . . . This very rupture between the philosopher and the conduct of everyday life is strongly felt by nonphilosophers. . . . Philosophers are strange, a race apart. Strange indeed are those Epicureans, who lead a frugal life, practicing a total equality between the men and the women inside their philosophical circle—and even between married women and courtesans; strange, too, those Roman Stoics who disinterestedly administer the provinces of the Empire entrusted to them and are the only ones to take seriously the laws promulgated against excess; strange as well this Roman Platonist, the Senator Rogatianus, a disciple of Plotinus, who on the very day he is to assume his functions as praetor gives up his possessions, frees his slaves, and eats only every other day. Strange indeed all those philosophers whose behavior, without being inspired by religion, nonetheless completely breaks with the customs and habits of most mortals. . . . It is the love of this wisdom, which is foreign to the world, that makes the philosopher a stranger in it.46

The difference between the skeptic and the philosopher lies in the philosopher’s strangeness. Ancient philosophy’s arguments aim to remake the person, the self, or the soul. They demand a radical transformation, a break with ordinary life, habits, customs, beliefs, modes of description. They leave the philosopher atopos—it’s a word that Plato often uses to describe Socrates and which is usually translated as “unclassifiable,” though it literally means “out of place.”47 Being a philosopher means never being at home. So the philosopher is atopos, just a vowel’s length from utopia. The philosopher is out of place or of no place, as when Diogenes says that he is “without a city,” and to hear him say this is to allow ancient philosophy’s

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political or social profile to edge into view. For the Hellenistic philosophies were, in fact, more than just callings or therapies, more, that is, than just techniques of the self. At the collective level, they smacked of the cult or the counterculture. This is obviously true of the Cynics, those ranters or philosophers of the street, who cultivated an ethos of shamelessness to fling in the face of custom or official Roman culture and whose exploits read today less like philosophy than they do guerilla theater— living in a wine tub, gnawing at raw meat, a lot of public nudity. Cynicism demanded a life dedicated to parody, outrage, provocation, a total break with convention that was to be acted out over and over again, a daily willingness to spit in the eye of gravitas and decorum.48 Cynic hi-jinx can sound so zany that it is tempting to write them off as an anomaly or a limit case. But Cynicism is, in its very bizarreness, indicative of everything that is most distinctive about Hellenistic philosophy. For the conflict between philosophy and convention was hardly less pronounced for the Epicureans, about whom it is less important to understand this or that argument about pleasure or the motion of atoms than to understand that they actually tried to restructure their daily and common lives in keeping with those arguments, withdrawing from their cities into small, egalitarian cooperatives, where they could reverence Epicurus as a sage, pursue the modest gratifications of barley cake and water, celebrate an alternate calendar of festivals, and engrave Epicurean slogans onto household objects—a hairbrush, say, sporting the words “death is nothing.”49 With the Stoics, similarly, it is less important to get a grip on this or that proposition about the passions or the nullity of worldly goods than to register that their characteristic moral severity and notions of duty were often understood, by themselves and doubly so by their opponents, as a challenge to the official creeds of the Roman Empire. This is a tricky point, since for much of the Empire’s first two centuries, Stoicism was the Empire’s official creed, or nearly so. For a period, Stoicism provided the hegemonic language in which the Roman elite fought over the Empire; it provided the terms in which the new imperial arrangements could be alternately exalted and derided. The Empire was, for Rome, a novel political order. It owed its existence to a gradual coup— Augustus’ slow seizure of state power in the 40s and 30s BCE—and it sought, over time to centralize all authority in a single bureaucracy

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organized around the imperial court. The important point for our purposes is that it did so at the expense of the Senate’s republican aristocracy, which had, until the civil wars of the first century BCE, exercised effective control over Rome’s notoriously complex political institutions. Stoicism, in these terms, gave Rome’s new imperial elite a way of disclaiming their own novelty. Against the popular perception of the new imperial court as a place of intrigue or sybaritic excess, official Stoicism struck a pose of ethical seriousness, and thus allowed the imperial elite to portray the Empire as dedicated to the highest old-Roman standards of manly virtue. The Empire, Stoicism allowed one to say, was like the Republic, only more so. But then Stoicism could serve equally as the medium of elite dissent, the dissent of the traditional gentry shut out by the new imperial regime. Stoicism, in fact, was what substituted for dissent in a historical situation that made open disagreement impossible. Dissent in the Roman Empire generally announced itself through a distinctive set of historical emphases or easily discerned cultural codes: the high-minded celebration of the younger Cato, implacable defender of the Senate and its republican oligarchy, who, so at least the story went, killed himself rather than live under Caesar’s command; or the more obviously seditious celebration of Brutus, who had murdered Caesar rather than let Rome pass out of aristocratic hands. Dissenting Stoicism, in a sense, was the modulation into ethics of these Brutus and Cato cults. Its rigorism allowed the displaced aristocracy to denounce the Empire for being insufficiently Roman; it provided the language with which imperial wealth and station could be spurned. Stoics were thus unable to shake the widespread perception that they were nothing more than well-bred Cynics, less liable to masturbate in public, perhaps, but every bit as uncertain in their loyalties. Stoicism’s famously exacting notion of duty is, in this sense, potentially misleading, since it did not, as might be expected, guarantee allegiance to the state. On the contrary, Stoic duty could easily sponsor resistance, as long as one decided that a given emperor had neglected his imperial duty or that one’s duty to some vanished republican Rome outweighed one’s duties to the really existing Empire. Stoicism, this is all to say, pointed to a growing rift in the structure of power at Rome, a fissure between the old elites and the state’s increasingly military command. It was—or was always in danger of becoming or was often suspected to be—a philosophy of disaffection,

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a republicanism for an era in which republicanism was no longer an option; a republicanism, that is, largely shorn of its politics, with little left but a lingering tetchiness about tyrants.50 So what would it mean to drop the curtain on these philosophies— Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, all three of them at once? Consider the following: Sometime about the year 70, the emperor Vespasian rounded up all the philosophers in Rome and expelled them, sent them into collective exile. And in 93, the emperor Domitian did the same, except that he made a point of killing several of them first.51 In those crackdowns, I think we can get a sense of what is at stake in Pyrrhonism and its rejection of philosophy in favor of “the customs of our country and its laws and institutions.” Sextus gives us absolutely nothing that would count as a political particular, but in Pyrrhonism’s outlines we can see flickering the broadest trends in Roman political history: the transformation of the early Empire, which made a show of deference, at least, to Rome’s republican past, into the late Empire, which was fully a military, dynastic, anti-republican, and absolutist state. If Stoicism was the forum in which the early imperial elite fought for the mantle of the Roman past—with both imperial and anti-imperial groups claiming Stoic and thus old-Roman virtues—then the outright stifling of Stoicism signaled, on the part of the imperial court, a concomitant stifling of Rome’s residual republican self-understanding. Skepticism’s distinctive achievement is to re-create this ban on philosophy within philosophy itself, though its strategy here is somewhat different from the imperial one: the emperors were content to drive the Stoics and Cynics from the city, but the Pyrrhonist strategy is, on the contrary, to summon the philosophers back to their place, back from no-place or atopia. In a manner that is likely to remind the modern reader of Burke or Wittgenstein, Pyrrhonism means to recall philosophy’s victims back to the texture of their ordinary lives. If we follow Hadot’s point—that ancient philosophy is a way of life, a calling—we can make one important point: Pyrrhonists do not reject philosophy the way a modern pragmatist might, for being inconsequential, “merely theoretical.” They reject it, rather, for being all too consequential, for the radical transformation it attempts on those who heed its call. Philosophy is a cult, skepticism a deprogramming. We can return reinvigorated to one of our standing questions. Is Pyrrhonism rhetorical or not? Pyrrhonism’s political vocation suggests

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that it is, in some limited sense, a project of persuasion after all; but this is only because Sextus has already introduced a crucial distinction into his concept of persuasion along the way. Thus Sextus: “ ‘To be persuaded’ has different senses: on the one hand, it means not to resist but simply to follow without much proclivity or strong pro feeling, as the child is said to be persuaded by or obedient to his teacher; but sometimes it means to assent to something by choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire, as when a profligate man is persuaded by one who approves of living extravagantly.” (1:33) The distinction here is between persuasion as a form of obedience and persuasion as a form of choice, and Sextus, plainly, wishes to sacrifice the latter to the former, to engineer a kind of non-philosophical way of life that is capable only of acquiescence, that can never be exhorted out of orthodoxy. The difference between fideism and Pyrrhonism again becomes apparent: Fideism dispenses with philosophy by substituting faith for knowledge, but Pyrrhonism goes fideism one better by making a less familiar switch: It seems to replace knowledge with faith, but then, at the last minute, replaces faith with compliance, which need not include faith of any kind.52 It is conspicuous, in this light, that the very last bit of business that the Outlines of Pyrrhonism undertakes is to destroy the idea of teaching, as though to say: I have taught you nothing—go back to the life you had before. In that imperative we catch a glimpse of what a governing order might look like when it takes no recourse to knowledge and makes no truth claims. Pyrrhonism, this is to say, is a stinging rebuke to an antifoundationalism that is convinced of its own radicalness. Critical theory has, by and large, been too eager to caricature the totalizing tendencies of its opponents. For Adorno and Derrida and all of us who have followed in their wake, the charge leveled against hegemonies, however named, has always been their fatal allegiance to metaphysical totality, naïve teleology, conceptual self-identity. Of course metaphysical narratives play a decisive ideological function, and when they are lacking, Left and Right alike tend to perceive a crisis. But if anything, Pyrrhonism demonstrates that obedience need not be wed to an epistemological order, that it doesn’t have to quake in the face of historical contingency— that, indeed, a settled order can display a skeptical self-consciousness that anticipates and diffuses critical reproach. This skepticism may stand

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in contradiction to that order’s epistemological tendencies—the truth claims it continues to make while attempting to justify its constitution— but this is precisely the point: that hegemony does not demand consistency, but is rather differentiated, paradoxical, and can weather its contradictions with considerable ease.

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1. What do we mean when we use the word skepticism? One of the chief virtues of Sextus Empiricus is that, in his thoroughness, he allows us to take the full measure of that term. All skepticism has something to do with doubt—that much should be clear. But what kind of doubt? Doubt directed against what? The word skepticism is often used to refer to doubt of selective kinds. So one might speak, loosely, of skepticism concerning religion, in which case skepticism is basically just a synonym for atheism. Analytic philosophy, in turn, is singularly obsessed with a veil-ofperception skepticism that doubts the existence of objects outside the mind; skepticism here becomes a synonym for solipsism, a bizarre and extreme form of alienation, a science fiction scenario, in fact—brains in vats, realities virtual or psychotic or otherwise hallucinated. (This is a position that, as best as I can tell, no self-proclaimed skeptic has ever actually held, not a single one.) The term skepticism, in each of these cases, designates a systematic attack on a particular canon of knowledge: atheism is skepticism to the extent that it undermines customary claims to know God, and solipsism is skepticism to the extent that it undermines ordinary claims to know the external world. But the most bracing feature of Pyrrhonism, by contrast, is that it admits of no half measures. Skepticism in its most general form suggests that knowledge of any kind is impossible. No knowledge claim, no matter how intricately justified, will withstand scrutiny, because we lack the stable criteria that would determine, without fear of contradiction, what knowledge is. It may be that an all-encompassing skepticism of this sort is going to get itself in

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trouble over time, that it will buckle under its own contradictions, but these will be contradictions born of its extremity and not its compromises. There is surely good reason not to dismiss out of hand established uses of a word, but one might say all the same that neither atheism nor solipsism is really “skepticism” to the extent that they are both restricted in scope. They do little more than mark a shift of epistemological emphasis, in a manner that leaves many knowledge-claims unscathed. Atheism allows us to retain our belief in the material world, and even solipsism, having painted itself into a tighter corner, grants us knowledge of our own mental states. This isn’t to say that atheism and alienation have nothing to do with skepticism. It’s just that the relations here are more involved than they at first appear, the mediations more difficult to trace. Consider alienation: the first thing that comes to mind when discussing alienation is that it is a concept very much out of favor. There is a widely accepted sense that the notion of alienation cannot help but be regressive and nostalgic in a way that makes it useless for critical thought. Here’s the problem: in order to have a working concept of alienation, one would need to attribute to its theorists, most notably to Marx, a theory of human nature, some preestablished vision of human flourishing against which the social pathology of alienation could be denounced. The humanist Marxism of the Cold War was happy to do just that; one way of announcing its break with Stalinism was to embrace the theory of alienation, anchored in the language of “species being,” the free subjectivity of persons coming to consciousness while they labor or create. But one of the lasting achievements of anti-foundationalism has been to put the brakes on humanism of this kind, to establish an uncompromising skepticism toward such anthropological claims, so that we might imagine some new, collective state of affairs in which it is not a person’s humanity that is always at stake. Alienation, from this perspective, becomes the signature theory of the “young Marx”—a set term in which the word young is meant to denote a temporary and excusable immaturity, which means that we can discard the theory of alienation as so much juvenilia, or at least relegate it to an appendix, like a master poet’s adolescent sonnets. It may be worth noting, at least in passing, that the Marxist theory of alienation was never as simple as all that. Marx’s notion of alienation is one component of his comprehensive critique of abstraction. It invites

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us to treat “subjectivity” or “the individual” as what Marx elsewhere calls a real abstraction, a historically created sameness, which is to say that it becomes possible to talk about human subjects as more or less the same only to the extent that capital and the state have already made them the same—or to the extent that capital is able, in defiance of their singularity, to treat them and their labor as equivalent. In the rationalized workplace, the individual “has been reduced to performing undifferentiated work on humanly indistinguishable objects among people deprived of their human variety and compassion.”1 This is Bertell Ollman’s definition of alienation, from a book that most post-structuralists wouldn’t be caught dead citing. It is remarkable, then, just how much Ollman’s humanist critique of alienation shares with an anti-foundationalist critique of humanism. It is unmistakable in Ollman’s vocabulary: the state of alienated factory-work coincides with the state of a softhearted humanism: they are each without “differentiation,” “distinction,” or “variety.” We can say, then, that if orthodox Marxism does in fact posit an abstract human nature, it does so in such a way that it can only play a negative or critical function in Marxist theory as a whole. “Humanity” is not a condition to aspire to. It is, rather, the form of alienation itself. Under capitalism, the subject comes, appallingly, to approximate the condition of “human nature.” To be alienated is to be rendered abstract, and to be abstract is to be in a state of mere human nature, sundered from the specificity of this or that social arrangement. The essence of human subjectivity is not to have an essence, which means that alienation names not the violation of human nature but any approximation of one. It seems possible, then, to grant a humanist Marxism one of its least attractive points and still find within it a fundamentally historical—and antihumanist—account of the subject.2 At this point it becomes possible to ask a difficult question: we can find in Marx, as in a dozen other sources, a historical account of subjectivity, one that remains resolutely skeptical toward any fixed notion of humanity. But are we able to give a historical account of that skepticism itself? Is the skeptical critique of subjectivity as historically conditioned as its object? Of course, ahistorical critiques of the subject—and these, too, abound—need not trouble themselves with this line of inquiry. It is possible, after all, to say in some vulgarly Lacanian fashion that the notion of a coherent, particularized subjectivity is just plain wrong, that it is a narcissistic illusion, in which case we have no choice but to treat the

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post-structuralist critique of subjectivity as a coming-into-truth, a belated moment of insight in which some theorists are at last able to perceive what has really been the case all along: that personhood is nothing more than the transient effect of language. For a post-structuralism of this kind, the critique of subjectivity is a form of wisdom; or better still, it is a political aspiration or ethical ideal in which virtue accrues to those able to wash their hands of the imaginary order, such that those who retain retrograde notions of selfhood must be talked out of them. If, however, we hold to the notion that subjectivity is a historical product and not just some retrospective fiction, then we must see the theoretical debunking of the fixed subject as connected in complex ways to the historical dissolution of the same. Such a position would grant a certain coherence to what was once, in the early stages of European capitalism, the lived experience of subjective autonomy. The important point, on this view, would not be that the classical bourgeoisie’s experience of subjectivity was delusional—a construct or collective fantasy—but that the bourgeoisie’s primary institutions were able to lend that fantasy some degree of efficacy, to transform subjectivity from a middle-class myth into, at the very least, an operative fiction. Such, then, was the combined effect of the nuclear family, regional markets, civil bureaucracies, schools, hospitals, prisons, the new religious confessions. They produced a certain narrowly bounded class of subjects who were able, at least, to feign a free individuality, who knew its rituals and could reap its rewards. What we see in the history of bourgeois personhood, then, is a twofold structure of loss and compensation—two moments of loss, two ensuing compensations. Here’s the first loss: the autonomous individual was able to emerge as the subject of capital only once it had been shunted out of communal forms of production (and the shared identities that came with them) and into the city, the factory, the office, and the contract. The systematic construction of a domestic market, such as Britain undertook in the eighteenth century, heralded the extension of capitalist relations into the farthest corners of the national territory, into highlands and marshes and assorted rural fringes that only then, once they had been made dependent upon the metropolis, could be called peripheral. And this process spelled the slow ruin of customary forms of collectivity (regional identity, rank, status, and so on). So there was loss, but then also compensation: the important point for present purposes is

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that this divestiture found immediate restitution, at least for some, in the form of a tangible and self-governing subjectivity, however partial, fleeting, and unevenly distributed that subjectivity may have been. The post-structuralist critique of subjectivity, in this light, helps mark a second moment of loss, the disintegration of this very individualism, which had seemed to be the middle class’s proudest cultural achievement. It is possible, should anybody have a taste for such things, to find in this development a fine, dialectical figure, in which the continued advance of the marketplace comes to knock out its own ideological struts: the organization of markets on a world scale, the emergence of global bureaucracies, the positioning of lives within ever more intricate technologies—these have all eroded the notion of free and deliberative actors, which had been the market’s preferred image of its own members. But we need to introduce further distinctions into this reversal, nifty though it is, because it should already be apparent that this rather sketchy narrative need not, in and of itself, entail a political position. A few different moods are logically possible within it, depending, first, on whether one affirms or repudiates the social system to begin with, and second, on whether one welcomes or refuses the passing of the autonomous subject. If we run through the permutations, it becomes clear that at least four positions on the “death of the subject” are easily available: (1) You can stick up for capitalism and deplore the death of the subject. This is the one position that aligns itself squarely with the traditional vocation of the middle class. It posits a necessary correlation between capitalism and autonomy and then sets out to contest those alien social “trends” that are eroding middle-class individuality: the decline of the family, the betrayal of the humanist university, and so on. (2) You can stick up for both capitalism and the death of the subject. This is perhaps the only one of this quartet that has yet to find its master theorist, though there is surely a Deleuzean out there somewhere equal to the task. This position has hovered into view, however, if only incidentally or accidentally so, in that brand of cultural studies that posits consumption as the vehicle for new and liberating forms of collective identity—that sees commodity-driven subcultures, in other words, as the sites in which the otherwise atomized subjects of capitalism overcome their alienation. The market doesn’t simply dissolve communities; it

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reconstitutes them around the rituals of consumption. Capital, on this view, is self-redeeming. It will provide its own solutions. (3) You can deplore capitalism and stick up for the death of the subject. This is undoubtedly the most familiar position within critical theory today, in which this second loss, the loss of the bourgeois subject, is made to yield a second compensation in the form of new political possibilities, new and beautifully freakish forms of personhood, perhaps even new collectivities. This notion, it goes without saying, shares its most basic assumption with the first, conventionally right-wing position outlined above: that capitalism depends on middle-class subjectivity to such an extent that any crisis of subjectivity will automatically point us beyond capitalism. Perhaps this, too, is a matter of the market providing its own solutions, but now in some more nearly dialectical and self-canceling way. (4) Finally, you can deplore both capitalism and the death of the subject. This is a position chiefly associated with a certain strain of Marxist melancholia, which sees in the dissolution of an older subjectivity little more than the continued advance of capitalist abstraction, the penetration of commercial circuits into the subject’s very tissues—beyond alienation, beyond Adorno’s damaged life, into an utter and depoliticizing fragmentation of the self, in which schizophrenia is not some novel form of political authenticity, but rather the subjectivity proper to consumer capitalism, retrofitting the subject into an infinitely mutable network of desire. At its most reductively hostile, this position shows the death of the subject to be little more than a class experience of a special kind—a specifically consumerist and First World asubjectivity, the affectless irony of cosmopolitan professionals.3 I rehearse these familiar positions not to add to their number, and certainly not to adjudicate between them, but to tease out of them a tricky problem for anyone interested in the history of skepticism. This problem goes by the name of Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne is one of the great philosophers of the anti-subject. In terms that to any contemporary reader will seem palpably post-structuralist, he offers up a self that is, depending on your idiom, decentered or schizophrenic or queer. Here is a passage, from an essay titled “On the inconsistency of our actions,” which impresses by its very familiarity: “In view of the natural instability of our conduct and opinions, it has often seemed to me that even good authors are wrong to insist on fashioning a consistent and

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solid fabric out of us. . . . We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”4 There is something undeniably compelling about these lines. To the extent that the Essays as a whole make good on their claims—to the extent that they deliver a self that is quilted and motley— they seem to pull off a nearly impossible project: They tell a Lacanian life story. They produce a memoir of the barred subject. A statement such as this might seem flagrantly anachronistic—Montaigne a Lacanian!— but then that’s precisely the problem. Montaigne seems to fit beautifully into any account of the death of the subject, until you realize that such accounts usually key into a theory of late capitalism and its kindred institutions, in which case the Essays, first published in the 1580s, skitter outside of our usual narrative schemes. Indeed, if we choose to talk about Montaigne in terms of the death of the subject, then he threatens to damage our usual historical frameworks altogether, for how can we chalk up the death of the subject to global capitalism (or an advanced consumer culture or digital media or the postmodern Völkerwanderung) if Montaigne has so dramatically jumped the gun? Why not ascribe the death of the subject to the French sixteenth century instead, to the Huguenots and Spanish silver and the noblesse de robe? If we find ourselves recoiling from that last question, then it would seem that the Essays have referred us back to the very first, ahistorical position outlined above—that there never was such a thing as a centered subject, or at least that a thoroughgoing critique of the subject was always available—and in this case Montaigne becomes a kind of hero, the pioneer, the one who first cottoned onto what it took the rest of us entirely too long to figure out. And indeed there is a familiar reading of Montaigne, perhaps the most common reading of the Essays currently available, that celebrates the man for his critical foresight. Montaigne is now a member in good standing of the post-structuralist canon, not as wicked as Nietzsche and de Sade, but still deserving of their company. It is, above all, the essay form itself that has earned Montaigne this distinction. Impish and tentative, the Essays are a protracted lesson in what thought might look like if it bound itself neither to Aristotelian logic nor to Cartesian meditation. As the founding documents of a genre, if something as changeable as the essay can be called a genre, Montaigne’s writing demands our praise for having, in Réda Bensmaïa’s words, “re-

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nounced the economy of the philosophical ‘system’ commanded by the idea of Mastery.” The Essays introduced a “unique Form” that opened up “the possibility of a ‘plural’ text made up of multiple networks,” like Bakhtin’s heteroglossic novel, only more so and impressively earlier.5 Better still, Montaigne’s Essays offer us a glimpse of a subjectivity that has handed itself over to contingency, that has given up the search for Stoic self-sufficiency and is content rather to chart its own idiosyncrasy. Lanham’s homo rhetoricus is obviously an ideal type, but if ever fleshly man seemed to fit the bill, then surely it was Montaigne. The Essays are a case study in the life lived rhetorically, in which the argument on both sides of a question is made to govern every mental act until the self fades away into a gossamer of contradictory opinion. There is no way to call such a book “autobiography,” what with that word’s connotations of narrative coherence. Nor will “self-portrait” do the trick, as though a single image could stand in for this ragtag subjectivity. It is best, then, to think of this work as a psychic kaleidoscope, whose signal contribution is precisely to make the more conventional forms of literary self-scrutiny seem simpleminded by comparison. This isn’t yet to declare the content of Montaigne’s thought wholly irrelevant, however, for he does seem to cough up a few useful notions along the way, as though despite himself. So it is that we learn, for instance, that reason is itself a kind of rhetoric, a pliable, manipulable instrument that, far from dictating our earthly ends, is indiscriminately able to serve a thousand different purposes. Or that universalism is a sham, for if any doctrine were truly universal, then it would receive universal assent, and there would be no need to insist on its universality. Or that philosophy is an assault on the very body, a doomed attempt to regulate the living organism. These lessons may never quite achieve the status of philosophy in Montaigne, and yet they warn us against drawing too strong a contrast between philosophy and essay-thought. The Essays are not simply a literary project, at least not in the trivializing sense of that word. They demonstrate that a thinking person, rather than play dupe to reason, can immediately take up the critique of reason itself. And so it would seem as though there were thrillingly little to explicate in these writings, so neatly does Montaigne anticipate the achievement of critical theory. He draws up for us a protocol that seems to preempt the dreary history of thought yet to come. All that’s left is to welcome an ally. Witness Maurice Blanchot, in the opening paragraphs

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of The Infinite Conversation: “In contrast [to the ‘Western philosophy’ of Aquinas and his ilk], Montaigne’s Essays escape the demands of the thought that claims to have its place in the University.”6 I don’t suppose there’s any need to dwell on the frankly emancipatory thrust of this sentence: Montaigne has decamped from school thinking and into the open, eastward fields of écriture. This reading of Montaigne is available in several different versions. And so we might look beyond Blanchot to Lévi-Strauss, who provides a structuralist variation on this Pyrrhonian theme. In the penultimate chapter of what was effectively his last book—in the final pages, in other words, of the man’s life’s work—there appears, as though out of nowhere, a long encomium on Montaigne.7 There is nothing to prepare the reader for Montaigne’s appearance. Lévi-Strauss has spent the entire book charting a slow course through the myths of the Pacific Northwest, and after a dozen chapters on the Tlingits, the turn to Montaigne seems as sudden as the turn of a page. And yet there is a certain rationale behind this shift: Lévi-Strauss, it quickly becomes clear, turns to Montaigne as a way of putting forth, as though for one last time, his own signature argument—that myth functions to provide imaginary resolutions to contradictions that cannot otherwise be undone. Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism is of decisive interest for Lévi-Strauss to the extent that it can be shown to have set a remote precedent for his own work: Montaigne is the great, clear-headed examiner of myth, straining to register the alterity of the New World, collating the practices and beliefs of the Americas, prosecuting the case against Europe’s colonial reason. Better still, Montaigne grants the full seriousness of myth and custom, but he does so without letting their antitheses collapse into some fabular and ontological unity. Montaigne is the one thinker in the European library who refuses to resolve the binaries, the persistent contradictions, that Lévi-Strauss has identified throughout the world’s narratives. The Essays choose instead to snap those antitheses to attention; they teach us to abide in contradiction. “Montaigne’s philosophy,” in short, “states that any certainty has the a priori form of a contradiction and that there is nothing to seek underneath it.”8 Such is the “radical intent” of the Essays, which “would have been better understood in the Far East.”9 So why this minor Montaigne revival? And why its whiff of orientalism? What makes Montaigne Europe’s very own Asian, a homegrown emissary from beyond the borders of Western philosophy? And

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what are the historical and social coordinates of this particular plaudit? Jean Starobinksi provides perhaps the clearest answer to these questions, though his explanation is unlikely to come as much of a surprise. In Montaigne in Motion, Starobinski heralds Montaigne as the indispensable thinker for a post-socialist era, a Nietzsche without the inconvenience of fascism.10 Montaigne, he suggests, has been waiting there for us all along, biding his time until the tiresome projects of modernity had exhausted themselves, until we had learned to stop holding ourselves hostage to the future; and he will step forward now to teach us how to live in the present, without pretense. Montaigne emerges here as the great and necessary anti-utopian, though each of these projects— Blanchot’s, Lévi-Strauss’s, Starobinski’s—obviously carries a utopian charge of its own, a secret wish; a longing gaze, over the shoulder, at the turn we overshot; a sense that we could have had from Montaigne a different modernity, one not given over to instrumentality and discipline and empire. Montaigne, in short, has come to name a missed opportunity, a regret. He names the desire for an alternate and imagined history— not the history of some future happiness, but a surrogate past, a less arduous path to the present.11 For anyone interested not only in this hypothetical history, however, but in the cheerless history of subjectivity itself, Montaigne and his readers continue to pose a problem: For what could it even mean to discover a post-structuralist (or structuralist or phenomenological) critique of subjectivity in the French sixteenth century? I might as well say it up front: it is the task of the current chapter to find a way not to answer that question, to insist rather that we must resist the temptation to deploy Montaigne as proxy or ventriloquist’s dummy, so that we might discover instead what a skeptical critique of subjectivity might look like that is not in fact our own. In the last chapter, I suggested that Pyrrhonist skepticism is a form of authoritarian pragmatism. I would be the first to grant, however, that it is hard to see what this could mean with reference to Sextus Empiricus. Classical skepticism offers, among other things, a political doctrine of sorts; but it remains difficult, for lack of sociohistorical detail, to gauge the consequences of this doctrine for Greece in the era of Roman rule. The present chapter, therefore, will sketch the ideological contours of classical skepticism by examining Montaigne, its most celebrated modern exponent. The choice of Montaigne is an easy one: his work was at the

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vanguard of a widespread Pyrrhonist revival in sixteenth-century France, a revival largely associated with the Counter-Reformation, and thus openly, bruisingly political in its aims. It is this unlikely conjuncture of skepticism and Counter-Reformation that I hope to account for here. My basic contention is clear: anybody invested in the notion that skepticism, in practice, is necessarily seditious is bound to misread Montaigne rather badly. This isn’t to suggest that it will be any easier to explicate Montaigne than it was to explicate Sextus in the first place. The Essays are a tricky bit of work. They are notoriously labile, for a start, variable in a manner characteristic of skeptical writing; but it is my burden here to show that this protean quality itself has a rather precise ideological valence. In the face of a plethora of projects that celebrate Montaigne’s carefully staged indeterminacy, it’s about time that we tried to wrestle the shapeshifter. Proteus, remember, was just another thug of the gods.

2. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. —“To the Reader” (2)

There may be good reason to follow the post-structuralist line as far as it goes, but it seems to me that as a full account of Montaigne it rather underestimates the extent to which the Essays come to approximate, through effort, what we have come to know as the Cartesian subject. I don’t want to place too much emphasis on the word “Cartesian” in this formulation. It is a convenient epithet, but other pejoratives could serve just as well: autonomous, liberal, centered, bourgeois, depth, master, or simply modern. Indeed, there are several competing models from which we might take our cue: the Cartesian cogito, the internality of Erasmus’ moderately reforming Catholic Platonism, the rigors of Protestant selfscrutiny. The point is less to discover which of these notions of the subject corresponds most neatly to Montaigne’s than to point out that he shares with them their inward turn, and that he does so in defiance of the customary Christian prohibition that would prevent authors from writing about themselves in anything but a confessional and self-

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mortifying mode. This observation may come down to the simple point that there is a considerable difference between reading Montaigne against the modernity that succeeds him (where it is the provisionality of Montaigne’s subject that will grab the reader’s attention) and reading him against the conventions of humanist rhetoric, out of which he provides a kind of exit (where what is striking is that he chooses to lavish such attention on himself at all). Montaigne, in other words, may take a peculiar delight in watching his subjectivity unravel, but it’s worth remembering that this is only possible because he considers the subject the proper object of investigation in the first place. Indeed, whatever the local instabilities of the work, one consequence of the Essays is the idea that the protean self demands of us a special kind of labor—the labor of achieved coherence. The integrity that is not inevitably the subject’s must be pursued through force of will, though from where this will derives, if not the subject, is for the moment unclear. This labor, at any rate, is expended in the very act of observation. By attempting to scrutinize and document the unfinished and fluctuating self, one develops a capacious self-consciousness capable of outflanking any mutation, of rendering consistent any inconsistency, at least in the way that any member of a set, however arbitrary, shares with other members the set itself. The Essays may not attempt to deduce any substantive theory or rigid endoskeleton of the self, but they do in fact posit the subject as a formal structure, a point of observation that, while not reducible back to any one of its mutable features, persists all the same, precisely in the inward gaze that sets about charting those transformations. These may be inconsistencies, the Essays seem to proclaim, but they are, in some newly decisive way, my inconsistencies. “Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself.” (2.10 / 296) There is in the annals of Montaigne criticism an oft-encountered liberal Montaigne, a Montaigne who stands in for everything that Blanchot would indict, and he finds his home in lines such as these, or in this celebrated and Whitmanesque couplet from “Of Experience”: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.” (3.13 / 821)12 It’s a hard point to deny: Montaigne sings a song of himself and contains multitudes, and would seem therefore to offer up a subjectivity more fully liberal than any his contemporaries can

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muster—tolerant, ironic, politically restrained. The Pyrrhonist epoch¯e transforms itself in the Essays into a philosophical fallibilism, an elastic thought that has given up any claim to final judgment. Again and again, Montaigne will make a proposition and then immediately renounce— not so much the proposition itself—but the conviction that in ordinary speech usually accompanies a proposition.13 To judge by the scholarship, one of the features that continues to attract readers to Montaigne’s writing is the affable modesty with which he withdraws from his own arguments. It would seem easy, then, to locate in Montaigne the now familiar notion that to recognize the contingency of our beliefs, to discover their origins not in truth but in habits or local histories, should cause us to hold those beliefs less strongly.14 Montaigne, in sum, already seems to fire off the first shots of the great intellectual campaigns of a bourgeois modernity, and especially of the empiricist projects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Essays work to develop a language of startling directness, purged of abstraction, sifting restlessly through the accumulated detritus of received philosophical vocabularies in order to lay out new protocols of description. We might also think, in this light, of Pierre Charron, one of Montaigne’s most noted disciples, whose central work, De la sagesse, attempts to transform Pyrrhonism back into a philosophical system. “Know thyself” is Charron’s first principle, and on the evidence of the Essays, of which it is meant to be a kind of summary, it is surely tempting to give this maxim more of a Humean than a Delphic gloss, in which selfknowledge steps in to replace all more speculative knowledges, offering up an epistemology of sensation, of immediacy, of vitality in its discrete and irreconcilable moments.15 Or perhaps, in a rather different vein, we can cast Montaigne as Rousseau—as a theorist of savages and civilization, cannibals and courts, teaching us to admire human association as it takes shape outside of European society and its bogus refinements, a human aggregate made up of bare bodies, unadorned and guileless. Indeed, the Montaigne we first meet in the Essays seems intent on tearing flowers from chains, on stripping down artifice, ornament, and custom until one reaches the truth of a self at home in its body—stout, whiskered, impotent. The Essays make themselves conspicuous, in this light, by constantly reassuring readers of their own veracity or sincerity; they give off an air of having let slip more than one meant to say. This, too, is part of the ideological force of

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vernacular prose, of which the Essays are such a famous early example, refusing Latin or the Ciceronian high style in favor of a beguiling and conversational plainness.16 We mustn’t be too quick, however, to think that Montaigne’s plain style stands in simple opposition to the lofty abstraction of philosophical prose, although it is a mistake that Montaigne would happily have us make. His entire project is organized around an antithesis of this kind: let the others get bogged down in their concepts and their doctrinal categories and their learned disquisitions—I will speak to you of tangible things. The opposition, however, will not hold. For if in one sense, Montaigne’s writing, like the empiricism that it anticipates, flies in the face of the exorbitant abstraction of philosophy, scholastic or otherwise, in another sense, it merely reinvents that abstraction at another level, the level of the formal subject, the barren and deictic “I”, that is the subject of Montaigne’s every sketch. Montaigne’s writing holds out the promise of the concrete, but it does so at a certain cost, because once remanded back to its multiple contingencies, the variable “I” shows no relation to anything—“each bit, each moment plays its own game.” Montaigne’s subject is nothing more than a sequence of discombobulated instances and might be best described therefore as a kind of number, the heap of its iterations. Indeed, one of the most unnerving features of Montaigne’s writing is the manner in which its emphasis on the singularity of the unique individual can itself stand in the service of abstraction. Consider the following pronouncement: “I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others.” (1.37 / 169) That last phrase should sound the alarm. Montaigne’s nominalism, far from producing a richly concrete account of the subject and its determinations, actually expels the subject from all social relations. Montaigne grants his fellows their difference at the cost of disarticulating them from the practices and institutions within which their subjectivity takes shape. This, in turn, is also to say something about the strange place of history in the Essays. For the Essays, if only to judge by their chronology, must surely be the great text of the French civil wars, the central document of forty years of slaughter and revolutionary crisis. What is most

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telling about them, in this light, is the scant attention they pay to those conflicts, their tendency to treat the wars as just another source of amusing incident, easily folded back into the fund of humanist anecdote.17 But this is actually to understate the matter: the Essays, in fact, contain a repeated denunciation of public history, of political life and its rhetorical treachery, its hypocrisy, deceit, and brutality in a time of national strife; and this denunciation might help further account for the ideological force of Montaigne’s uniquely lapidary style. If the Essays seek to establish something like a plain empiricist textuality of the subject, trying to name the various moments of a self-present experience, then we might say that they also set out, as a corollary project, to destroy the public languages of the day, the better to excavate the integrity that now belongs to the subject alone. But this project has as its precondition the systematic (if never complete) repression of Montaigne’s public functions: his status as nobleman, as magistrate in the regional courts, as mayor of Bordeaux, as councilor to Henri of Navarre and the Valois kings. These public personae are relegated to the margins of the writing, made subsidiary to the minutest description of the author’s moustache, much as the disintegration of France is reduced to the status of narrative ornament. The Essays are, among other things, a document of retreat and isolation—and in that sense, too, they are a document of abstraction, their most famous image a single man in a solitary tower.

3. But where, on Montaigne’s account, does this isolated subject come from? The Essays insist everywhere on their own novelty, which is to say that they posit, as any claim to novelty must, a history—a history, in this case, of the autonomous subject stepping into sight as it withdraws from collective projects. This narrative, admittedly, is hard to locate in the Essays, often evoked but rarely elaborated. Montaigne faces the reader with the difficult task of reconstructing a historical narrative out of his resolutely non-narrative materials. Perhaps, then, we might find a way of piecing the story together by considering the following question: If the Essays are a document of retreat, then what are they inviting their readers to retreat from, and what is the history implicit in that evacuation? Let’s not bother with the French civil wars for the time being; there will be time enough for them later. I want to focus, rather, on two

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points that can be made straight away about Montaigne’s secret history. First, whatever story the Essays have to tell transpires in an unexpectedly precise social setting: Montaigne’s landed estate outside of Bordeaux. For anyone interested in the history of subjectivity, this surely comes as something of a surprise. The isolated subject of the Essays, which Montaigne scholars often call “bourgeois,” takes up residence here in an aristocrat’s chateau. It does not breathe the free air of the city. It’s as though the word “bourgeois” were reverting here back to its etymology, to the German Burg, the castle or stronghold. Montaigne’s “bourgeois subject”—it is hard now to even persist with this appellation—steps forth in the Burg, not the burgh, and this is bound to present all sorts of problems for our conventional histories of subjectivity. For present purposes, however, it is enough to make a more discrete point: Montaigne’s sense of himself as a subject outside of social relations depends in a strong way on his being within some rather determinate social relations. Whatever claim he has to self-sufficiency depends on his position as lord of the manor, the economic details of which are as systematically sidelined in the Essays as those of Montaigne’s more public functions. There are a few titles that one cannot but help feel are missing from among the Essays contents: “Of Seigniorial Rights,” “Of the Profit from Wine,” “Of the Collection of Rent from Peasants.” This brings us to the second and more important point. Montaigne may locate the Essays in a particular social setting, but he does not in fact tell his story primarily in terms of that setting. The isolated subject, to hear Montaigne tell it, is born of epistemological, not political, crisis—and to the extent that we might wish to say that epistemological crisis has a bearing on political crisis, then those connections will have to be drawn out separately. But what does it even mean to speak of epistemological crisis in the French Renaissance? This has something to do, for a start, with the crisis of humanism, which specialists in the field tell us was widely perceived at the time and which found its clearest index in the decline of the regional humanist schools, established with great fanfare in the early sixteenth century, but in chaos by century’s end, strapped for funds, strapped for teachers, abandoning their ambitious program of classical scholarship in favor of a rote curriculum of theological platitudes.18 Humanism had its origins, in France as throughout Europe, in a collective pedagogical project. It attempted to resurrect a community of knowledge, to re-establish a polity of shared and ancient wisdom. The

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Essays’ insistent first person—the pronoun I spoken over and over again from the seat of aristocratic retirement—marks the renunciation of this civic endeavor. But this still leaves some basic questions unanswered. How did the crisis of humanism come to pass? What was humanism’s vulnerability? Montaigne never says, at least not in so many words, but the outlines of the crisis are apparent throughout his writings in a hundred incidental comments. Here is a passage from the most substantial of the Essays, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”: “The writings of the ancients, I mean the good writings, full and solid, tempt me and move me almost wherever they please; the one I am listening to always seems to me the strongest; I find each one right in his turn, although they contradict each other. The facility that good minds have of making whatever they like seem true, and the fact that there is nothing so strange but that they undertake to color it enough to deceive a simplicity like mine, shows evidently the weakness of their proof.” (2.12 / 429) Two features distinguish this passage at the outset: it begins with a promise, and it begins with praise. First, it bears a promise of an evaluative criterion by which good writing might be told from bad, writing of clear and palpable power as against writing that is equivocal and insipid. This is a vague and conventional distinction, to be sure, but it is probably already enough to make the reader trained in humanism feel that there is something wrong here, that Montaigne, as a representative modern reader, has set himself up not to learn from ancient writings, but to be their judge. The praise implicit in these opening phrases, after all, is praise not only for the Greeks and Romans, but also, at least implicitly, for the new-model reader who is able to answer their excellence. Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, that this praise, so arrogant in its first formulation (“I mean the good writings”), will not even survive the sentence in which it gets articulated. For by the time the reader makes it past both semicolons to the end of that first long period, the very preeminence of ancient writings will have become a problem: they are all equally compelling and thus “contradict each other.” The sentence, then, begins with praise and ends in paradox, and it is hard not to admire the ease with which Montaigne pulls this sting: the classical texts are weak precisely to the extent that they are persuasive. What’s more, this accusation clearly signals an attack, as though out of nowhere, on the idea of the humanist canon, so dear to Renaissance pedagogy, because the more writers who

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achieve distinction, the less impressive their collective contribution will seem.19 And once this charge has been sounded, the second sentence will take back everything that the first sentence had set out to accomplish. The register of praise is immediately transformed into a register of complaint, of deception and strangeness and arbitrary power. It turns out now that whatever humanist readers discover in the ancients by way of “fullness and solidity” merely lets them in for a con or a bully’s cowing. This is not, however, to let those readers off the hook, for if the passage’s original praise worked in two directions, so too will its rebuke: the ancient writers may be swindlers, but then this means the readers most able to respond to their fraud are the ones most willing to be duped, the ones who share what Montaigne calls his simplicity. The chief characteristic of humanism, on this account, is not so much its erudition as the gullibility with which that erudition, because indiscriminate, is permanently linked. And with that observation, the criterion upon which the entire passage seemed to depend undoes itself. When Montaigne “means the good writings,” he actually means the bad writings, since the former, when viewed as a group, are actually identical with the latter. The force of this passage lies not in the keeping of its initial promise, but in that promise’s breach. The pattern of this passage is the pattern of the Essays as a whole— and in it we can glimpse a short, implied history of humanism in crisis, the sequence by which ancient wisdom, once accumulated, comes to discredit itself. The important point here is in fact a formal one: Montaigne does not so much narrate this crisis the way a chronicler might. He re-enacts it for each new reader. Montaigne, in other words, rather than point to the decline of the humanist schools or the mounting attack on Aristotle, or the Protestant schism or any of the other signs of the sixteenth century’s epistemological undoing, distills from these several developments a rhetorical procedure that he means to initiate again and again with every humanist bibliophile who makes the mistake of picking up his book. He will pander to those readers’ deepest humanist instincts, tricking each essay out in a pageant of ancient citation, moving learnedly from one civic-minded topic to another, only to demonstrate in the end that the humanism he so convincingly mimes will default on its every assurance. An attentive reading of the Essays, in short, will follow a trajectory of its own—and it is this experience of reading that tends to substitute

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for any overt historical narrative of decline. Consider the humanist reader who opens up Montaigne’s book to the essay on pedantry (1.25). The title itself is already sending cues. Presumably, the essay that follows will trace a conventional distinction between different forms of knowledge: pedantry—that is, ostentatiously irrelevant learning—and true knowledge (or perhaps even wisdom), which it will be Montaigne’s business to define. There is a clear tradition, in fact, to account for Montaigne’s practice here—the humanist attack on scholasticism—and it will provide a ready-made distinction of its own: a distinction between a practical and humble wisdom in the service of the polity and the turgid philosophy of the schools, with their servile syllogisms, their monastic adherence to church doctrine, and their over-elaborate argumentative forms. Perhaps some more wary readers, concerned that Montaigne’s critique of pedantry will be less finely tuned than all that—for critique it must be; do any of us really expect Montaigne to write in praise of pedantry?—perhaps some readers will let their eyes drift across the essay’s first few pages, where they will take comfort in finding all the signposts of humanism securely in place: a smattering of Latin; citations from Plutarch, Rabelais, and others; biographical allusions to Heraclitus, Empedocles, and other Greek bigwigs. We are among friends here, these references seem to say. Let’s go tell those schoolmen what for. Thus emboldened, we can proceed to the essay itself, which begins by identifying a problem: Why are people so often scornful of learning and the learned? “I was often annoyed in my childhood,” Montaigne writes, “to see a teacher always the butt in Italian comedies.” (97) This problem the essay immediately tries to solve by setting up a distinction— a distinction, namely, “between the common herd and people of rare and excellent judgment and knowledge.” (97) This may strike us as odd, since it in no way resembles the distinction that the title had led us to expect. If there is a problem surrounding knowledge, Montaigne first seems to suggest, then it lies less with knowledge itself than with what we might call knowledge’s public. Instead of a distinction between forms of knowledge, Montaigne offers a sociological distinction between those classes who are so ignorant that they do not recognize knowledge even when faced with it—the plebs who enjoy low Italian comedy—and a literate elite capable of finer pleasures, the pleasures of a knowledge we can still imagine as undifferentiated and uniformly rewarding. In its opening sentence, then, the essay would seem already to have let its

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readers entirely off the hook—to have flattered them shamelessly, in fact, with their most ardently held prejudice about themselves, that they are distinguished by their erudition. But this first paragraph comes with an implicit warning, a warning not to take its propositions at face value; and that warning is its tense, this emphatic past, which already declares the distinction in question to be childish and superannuated. “I was often annoyed in my childhood . . .”. The intimate register so typical of Montaigne’s writing has a precise function here: it trivializes the essay’s own opening argument, positing and abandoning its central distinction in a single stroke. And indeed, Montaigne will have expressly retracted his rudimentary sociology by the time the first paragraph is over. The distinction will not hold: “I was wasting my Latin, since the finest gentlemen were those who held teachers most in contempt.” (97) Men of quality, Montaigne has had to learn, despise the learned every bit as much as the rabble do. This has the effect of putting pressure back on the readers, who, coming to the text with the expectation that they will be edified, will now have to learn to wear their learning lightly. At this point, the essay proceeds to replace its first distinction with a second. The problem lies not with the common herd. The problem is rather that “the greatest scholars are not the wisest men.” (98) We seem now to be on the ground to which the title had directed us. The distinction as drawn here may still be imprecise, but at least it is reassuringly familiar: the essay is asking its readers to choose between arcane, impractical book-learning and sound judgment in worldly affairs—and this is a distinction that any humanist worth his Seneca is going to be able to play to his own advantage. Here too there is a problem, however, because this second distinction quickly takes on a sociological character of its own. Montaigne goes on to differentiate between, first, the “great counselors in affairs of state”—who are capable and learned at once— and, second, the philosophers, who “are remote from all public occupation” and who, “disdaining public actions,” set themselves “above the common fashion.” (98–99) The essay would seem to turn now on a distinction, not between forms of knowledge, but between the ends to which knowledge is put. The term “pedantry,” in this case, would name not a separate, superfluous body of knowledge, but an attitude, misguided because self-indulgent, toward knowledge as a whole. Knowledge, Montaigne seems to be suggesting, can only be justified by some end extrinsic

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to it, what the essay calls “profit and gain” or “action” or simply “the more useful things.” This may be the first indication the humanist reader will have that something is seriously amiss. But we will not have begun to grasp the historical specificity of that unease until we can sense, as many sixteenthcentury readers would have sensed immediately, a contentious bit of social history shouldering its way into the essay at this point. For the distinction drawn here between a plastic wisdom and insubstantial book-lore is the central point around which a properly aristocratic critique of humanism revolves, a critique firmly associated, if only at the level of stereotype, with the military nobility or noblesse d’épée.20 The question of class, already broached in the opening paragraph, thus reappears here in changed form. It is worth considering this as a general point: Any question of knowledge in the French Renaissance is going to be bound up with matters of class. Humanism sponsored any number of different ideological projects, both the philosophically minded absolutism of Guillaume Budé and an aristocratic and Italianate classicism; Protestantism itself was merely an ad fontes humanism of a special kind. But institutionally, humanism in France had a fairly stable class profile. This was apparent above all in the proliferation of humanist colleges throughout the French provinces, funded by the high bourgeoisie and the administrative nobility, the noblesse de robe, and geared toward educating a new national elite, a professional rather than a military caste, ready to serve the centralizing state as its office-holders. It is easy, of course, to overplay the antagonism between sword and robe, which as a historical concept is rather shopworn; but to whatever extent the rise of humanism did in fact seem menacing to the military classes, to whatever extent it threatened them with obsolescence or aggressive re-education, then the mere image of the “great and able counselor,” as it appears in “Of Pedantry,” may be said to constitute something of a counterattack, a feudal sally against the trivium and its trivia. The cliché that circulated about the military nobility in France, not least within humanist polemics themselves, was that their hostility to letters fully matched their hostility to infidels and the English. The sixteenth century thus appears as a singular historical moment in which the figure of the chevalier and the figure of the philistine are actually one and the same, in which the man of arms, not yet fully reconceived as a “gentleman,” was as imperiously uncultured as any Babbit ever would be, keeping just two books in the

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great house: a Bible for mass and Aristotle for when the fire went out.21 If we quote the passage here in full with this martial register in mind, then the essay is likely to take on the quality of a military summons: “In the examples from olden times, we see as further proof to the contrary that able men in the handling of public matters, great captains, and great counselors of state, have at the same time been very learned.” The passage is trying to show that knowledge and action need not be in conflict—or it is making a show at least of trying—but the kicker comes toward the sentence’s end: at the same time. This is the best Montaigne can do—mere simultaneity. Even in these exceptional cases, it is not that learning actually informs public action or helps solve public problems. It can only be said that erudition, for once, didn’t get in the way. And this, of course, is still to posit, if not an incompatibility, then at least a cleavage between public action and learning—a cleavage which these men, in their unusual excellence, once managed to endure, but in a way that still renders learning incidental, something that happened to accrue to great men concurrently, alongside their worthier endeavors. We might, finally, for the purposes of specificity, juxtapose this figure of the “great captain” against his historical fellows: against the received image of the medieval knight, who does not feel the same need to distinguish himself from the scribal and illuminated monk, in whom he sees no class competitor; or against the bumpkinish gentry of eighteenthcentury English fiction, the Squire Westerns and Roger de Coverleys, whose unapologetic ignorance no longer even qualifies them for public service but rather consigns them to rustic irrelevance and comic relief. The notion of a practical wisdom that does not require learning, then, is the modulation into Pyrrhonism of Montaigne’s persistent Spartanism, his preoccupation with generals and statesmen and battlefield strategy, which occasionally makes the Essays read like a military treatise of an unusually belletristic kind.22 These are the coordinates of a critique launched on behalf of “our ancestors”—the phrase is Montaigne’s—in which learning is denounced for making “men’s hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike.” (1.25 / 103, 106) Such is the residual feudal ideology that this one essay, at least, can be said to reconfigure, offering it now as a humanist commonplace in its own right. And for any humanist reader, this of course is precisely the problem—the strange pressure that “Of Pedantry” exerts, its pervasive

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dissonance. For if the military critique of humanism becomes audible in “Of Pedantry,” it does so from within an obligato of humanist citation— and the essay offers no obvious way to reconcile these two discourses. Montaigne does not in fact write, as I have it, “the greatest scholars are not the wisest men”—nor does he write its French equivalent. He writes: “magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes.” We will have understood nothing about the difficulty of reading Montaigne until we have understood that this simple statement, which the essay borrows from Rabelais, broadcasts at least two signals at once. It articulates the conventional distinction just elaborated between wisdom and mere erudition, a distinction that, as the essay proceeds, is rapidly disclosing a feudal and nostalgic tenor. Yet in its (bad) Latinity, it reincorporates that proposition into a humanist framework of argument, within whose bounds even the aristocratic attack on erudition must now be made. The essay thus opens up a rift between at least some of its propositions and the form in which those propositions get enunciated. Montaigne, in sum, has put two rather different discourses in play, and with them two different sets of social cues—the aristocratic critique of humanism that we can read off his sentences and the humanist glorification of knowledge that is entailed in those sentences’ very form—and the reader is faced now with the difficult task of adjudicating between these divergent positions. That rift is only going to widen as the essay continues. What follows next is a series of questions: “Do you consider someone greater for owning two thousand acres of land? They mock him. . . . Do you boast of your nobility because you can count seven rich ancestors? They think little of you.” (98) This sequence draws the same distinction as the passage that precedes it, but it does so through a new set of referents, or rather through a different set of pronouns. The opposition between the “great counselors” and the anti-social “philosophers” gets rewritten here as an opposition between “you” and “them,” and this has the clear effect of exculpating the readers all over again, but only to the extent that they are able to reposition themselves as landed noblemen rather than scholars. The very problem with philosophy, in fact, is that it encourages such divisive social distinctions, enticing its adherents out of the “common fashion” or “common herd,” of which the genteel reader can now be considered just one more loyal member. These lines work to bring all readers temporarily back into that fold. Whoever the pedants are, they clearly aren’t us.

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The essay is ready at last to get down to the business of defining pedantry. Its current course—the one that makes knowledge subsidiary to some practical end—cites a passage from Aristotle in order to draw a distinction between “wisdom” and “prudence.” This may seem like just the distinction we’ve been looking for, but it’s alarming to note that this is not the distinction with which the essay began; Montaigne had initially asked that we distinguish between wisdom and scholarship. The second distinction, in fact, has pretty much turned the first on its head. The first critique had denounced scholarship-without-wisdom, in which knowledge piles up like so much learned lumber. But now this second critique is denouncing wisdom-without-prudence, in which prudence seems to name some capacity for judgment, based, presumably, on concrete experience and whatever non-academic knowledge can be attributed to it. So there are now two competing critiques in play—one against wisdom, one for it—though the reader doesn’t have time to sort this all through, because immediately with this second point, Montaigne claims that he cannot “very well digest this distinction in terms.” (99) Wisdom and prudence will stand or fall together. It is hard, at this point, not to embrace Montaigne’s exasperation as our own, if only because he has himself nearly identified the recurring pattern of the essay, in which distinctions are thrown up only to be instantly dissolved. Montaigne seems to be drawing a distinction between good forms of (genuine or useful) knowledge and bad forms of (pedantic) knowledge, but by the time the essay is finished, he will have allowed the latter category to swallow up the former. The essay’s awkward fumbling with definitions should, in this light, call the readers’ attention to a conspicuous absence: the words “pedant” and “pedantry” hardly appear anywhere in the essay proper. They simply don’t show up—no one form of learning is ever scapegoated, made to accept the designation “pedantic” so that other forms of learning can be declared authentic. And the upshot of this absence is fairly severe: the term “pedantry,” for lack of any particular instance, can only serve as a general designation for the several forms of learning that the essay enumerates, among which no distinction is finally possible—the quibbling endeavor to draw theoretical distinctions being one of the more salient forms of pedantry that the essay means to undermine. Once Montaigne has disavowed Aristotle’s attempt to distinguish between forms of knowledge—or at least declared it indigestible—then

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the distinction that will reassert itself in the essay is the distinction between “knowledge” and “ability” or between “knowledge” and “judgment and virtue.” (100) But these couplings, of course, merely provide a new set of oppositions between a knowledge that is uniformly pedantic and something that is other than knowledge; and with that, the essay can now set out to reincriminate its readers, who, as long as they are merely reading, merely trawling for knowledge, risk becoming bookish in precisely the way that the essay warns against. We’ve already seen that, as Montaigne’s argument unfolds, we do not get the attack on scholasticism that we might have expected, but rather an attack on humanism itself. That attack is now specified as an attack on humanist borrowing, on the methodical and obsequious pilfering of ancient texts. “We know how to say: ‘Cicero says thus; such are the morals of Plato; these are the very words of Aristotle.’ But what do we say ourselves? What do we judge? What do we do? A parrot could well say as much.” (100) We may note in passing another treacherous shift in the pronoun. The essay has returned to the “we.” The readers are no longer landed aristocrats. They are back to being pedants, foolosophers, learned oafs: “Even if we could be learned with other men’s learning, at least wise we cannot be except by our own wisdom. ‘I hate the wise man who is not wise for himself.’ ” And with that last citation—it’s from Euripedes—the essay reaches a climax of sorts. I don’t suppose the joke will be lost on any reader: Montaigne uses a citation to disclaim the humanist practice of citation, and in case we’ve missed the point, he promptly follows it with three more, from Ennius, Juvenal, and Cicero, forming an unsightly clot of quotation, as though the Essays were about to lapse back to the status of commonplace book, here of all places, in the process of denouncing learned unoriginality.23 Now, at the latest, the reader is going to realize that this is what Montaigne has been doing all along: in this as in every other essay, Montaigne has been assembling a humanist bricolage, to the tune of nearly 1,400 citations in the Essays’ final, posthumous edition. When Montaigne condemns the practice of citation as “this dependent and mendicant ability,” the force of this self-indictment is to separate the text out into at least two different modes, which can now be seen to contradict one another. (101) The Essays’ most apparent formal principle is its humanist mode of citation, which sometimes seems geared to give the impression that the world’s great writers all spoke in the same voice. But the Essays also work in the mode of first-person

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narration, which it is hard not to call proto-bourgeois, but which is superimposed here on the aristocratic critique of humanism, in which the writing voice shakes off the accumulated weight of antiquity, steps forth from all this citational bric-a-brac, and decides to play custodian to what is now little more than a humanist curiosity shop. This moment of satirical discord—in which readers are commanded via citation to exercise their own wisdom—shows these two modes to be irreconcilable. Something has to give, though the discrediting could conceivably go either way. Thinking subjects—writers or readers—could allow themselves to be subsumed again beneath the detritus of humanism. Alternately, humanism could give way before the autonomous subject who no longer has need of its props, so that humanism can be seen to smother, not the thinking mind, but its own practices, its free-wheeling citations, in a sacrificial act of auto-asphyxiation. And this latter is one way of describing the overall rhetorical effect of the Essays: Montaigne takes up the humanist tic of quoting the ancients wherever they’ve said anything even remotely pithy. He bombards his readers with this Mediterranean shrapnel, showers them with such an indiscriminate heap of citation that classical wisdom comes to disgrace itself, comes to seem arbitrary and infinitely malleable, providing any text for any occasion, like greeting cards. It is worth underscoring that this is a general and formal feature of the Essays, and not simply the effect of some local argument. Students of the Renaissance are understandably reluctant to make general pronouncements about Montaigne. Even those readers who don’t bring their own nominalism to a reading of the Essays are forced to reckon with the author’s own. There is a sense that Montaigne’s is one of those books in which you can find nearly anything if you look long enough, and this tends to make readings of the Essays as a coherent whole seem automatically suspect. But for anyone familiar with Pyrrhonism, the Essays’ nominalism discloses patterns of its own. The many incompatible stances that Montaigne adopts, like the humanist citations that he always brings in to batten down these vagaries, make up a running and many-sided exercise in the argument ad utramque partem; and once we’ve recognized as much, it becomes possible to say that such antinomy, as a historically specific rhetorical form that organizes the experience of difference and contradiction, assigns to Montaigne’s very mutability a fairly precise set of ideological valences.

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Of course, Montaigne’s procedures have a specificity of their own. They do not simply rehash the strategies of Sextus’ Pyrrhonism (though Sextus, it should be noted, is always one of Montaigne’s central reference points). Montaigne is in a novel position in that he need not generate the argument ad utramque partem on his own, as Sextus would teach him to. He no longer needs a mock-dialectic to spin out his antithetical arguments—Montaigne’s writing is distinguished, in fact, by a near total avoidance of formal, philosophical argument—because he can discover those arguments ready to hand in the repository of ancient writing, whose contradictory elements need now merely be inventoried. One suspects, in this light, that the many scholars who unabashedly admire Montaigne’s virtuoso command of his classical sources have altogether missed the point, which is that virtuosity is its own insult; or that the sheer massy weight of humanist learning makes knowledge seem gross and ephemeral at once; or, again, that the unchecked proliferation of knowledge actually makes knowledge impossible—this last is reminiscent of Pope’s attack on the scholars who “explain a thing till all men doubt it,” or at least of the old joke about the man with two watches.24 Montaigne posits what we might call the zero-sum game of philosophical authority, so that every time he includes a citation, it must steal its portion of credibility from its many fellows, until that authority gets spread so thin that no citation can really claim it at all. At that point, the entire classical canon gets redefined as something other than authoritative, as entertainment or divertissement. This, finally, helps account for the central place of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” which is something like skeptical ground-zero in the Essays. It is far and away the longest of Montaigne’s pieces, and rightly so: the “Apology” condenses the entire volume’s procedures into a single tract, tamping them down into a barrage of contradictory arguments meant to strip its learned readers clean. The effect of Montaigne’s writing can be felt here as nowhere else: to make the wealth of humanist learning transform itself before the reader’s very eyes into “an accumulation of the asininities of human wisdom.” (2.12 / 408) This phrase should allow us to distinguish now, should any distinction still be necessary, between humanist anti-scholasticism, which stands opposed to an excessive, quibbling rationalism, and Pyrrhonism, which discovers scholasticism in any systematic display of erudition. And this, in turn, should allow us to approximate an answer to the question with which

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we began: What are the features of a critique of subjectivity that has nothing to do with late capital and the decline of middle-class individualism? Montaigne may help produce something like an autonomous subject, but he does not produce an epistemological subject, a subject of knowledge. On the contrary, the Essays work to purge readers of their knowledge and thereby to destroy the public, humanist languages of the day. They are predicated on the collapse of the humanist community, a collapse they are largely content to re-enact. They aim to leave the humanists standing at least temporarily alone, exposed and uncertain, without a via activa in which to display virtue and gain glory, but equally without a via contemplativa in which to cultivate some more private knowledge. It is in this project, I think, that anti-foundationalist readers and their allies mistakenly recognize their own procedures.

4. Montaigne’s Essays are a perpetual insult to the humanist reader. But of course, this isn’t yet to say why anybody would wish to mortify the humanists in this fashion. Why dismantle the subject of knowledge—or, rather, to what effect? It is in this context that the place of contingency in Montaigne’s thought may usefully be re-examined, for surely this is one way of describing the effect of Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism—that it shatters the philosophical coherence of the humanist canon into fragments, so that what had once seemed to be the humanists’ sumptuously ancient inheritance appears now as just so much Greco-Roman flotsam. We can proceed by way of an example. There is a brief item in the Essays entitled “On the Custom of Wearing Clothes.” It is a roundup of Renaissance couture, surveying the diversity of dress in Europe and the New World only to conclude that no one style is more natural or necessary than any other; that clothing is nothing more than a taffeta of arbitrary tastes and taboos; that “it is custom”—and no particular custom, but a wide range of varied regional customs—“that makes impossible for us what is not impossible in itself.” (1.36 / 167) That statement functions as a general gloss on one of the most regular features of Montaigne’s writing, what we might call its anthropological slideshow, the paratactic review of the world’s cultures, which is meant not so much to vitiate the readers’ allegiance to their own practices as to recall those readers to their own irreducible Frenchness: the Swedes wear wool and

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the Brazilians wear nothing at all and we wear cambric, which is how we know we are Frenchmen. Montaigne’s examination of clothing, then, is part of a more general insight into the contingency of all cultural practices. The fabric of society is nothing more than the figure suggests. If we want to know what Montaigne is after here, it will be useful to keep in mind what he is not saying. A number of different ways of thinking about fashion are, after all, readily available. The most philosophically respectable position has always opposed fashion as a snare or surface illusion, a barrier to discovering the truth of a person’s character (as revealed by his actions or innermost thoughts): hence the homespun woolens of republican ideology, the prairie garb of ascetic Protestantism, hence, too, the gray flannel of an older capitalism that still saw itself as republican and Protestant—un-consuming and duty-bound— the idea being that simple clothing would function as a blank screen on which to let virtue flicker. This idea remains visible now, in an era of generalized consumption, almost only as a Left position—Oregon hippies wearing hemp shirts, the feminist’s un-mascara’d face—though the more properly radical position has always been more interested in the strangeness of clothing as such, determined more to liberate desire than virtue, and convinced that most garments, as carriers of shame and discipline, are merely variations on the corset. This position refuses to discriminate between modes of clothing, distinguishing, rather, between the artificiality of all costume and the free pleasures of the naked body. It will accordingly receive its comeuppance from a third position that objects to this distinction as itself artificial, on the grounds that bodies— or at least our usual modes of inhabiting bodies—are themselves fully conventionalized or fashion-bound, so that we need to be liberated not only from fashion, and not only from open-weave cotton and other forms of clothing that pose as natural, but also from an erotics that masquerades as spontaneous but is actually just another tailored outfit. The naked body must remain free to reinvent and transform itself. At this point, the critique of fashion goes all the way down, but in doing so, it opens up a fourth possibility, which is that if everything is costume—the body fully as much as its coverings—if we have no experience of our physicality in the world that is not mediated, swaddled in code, then we might as well find pleasure in those very codes, in play, in fashion, which is thereby recuperated.

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The important point, then, is that none of this has anything to do with Montaigne. “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes” simply isn’t about fashion in any of these senses. On the contrary, it will be impossible to appreciate this essay until we can see that it is grounded in an attitude toward clothing that consumer society has long since rendered obsolete; or more precisely, until we can see that it draws a historical distinction that is no longer operative, a distinction between two very different ways of conceptualizing the multiplicity of dress. When Montaigne surveys the diversity of costume, he is enumerating a series of external differences—those differences, typical of a pre-capitalist society of orders, in which styles of dress vary chiefly between regions or ranks. This is a culture in which the etymological link between costume and custom is still vital, a culture of sumptuary laws and regional dress, in which clothing carries determinate and narrowly circumscribed social meanings, signifying station above all: the peasant’s smock and the feudal tartan, a servant’s livery, tonsures and swords and robes long and short. The traditional vocabulary of rank, in fact, is largely pegged to its metonymic garments, which are not fashion, not what Barthes once called the fashion system, which names rather a series of internal differences, a sprawling combinatory of more or less interchangeable and commodified signs— leather belts, leather boots, fur boots, fur hats, felt hats, bowlers, boaters, bonnets—whose unity must now be sought in some underlying cultural grammar. Only in this latter, of course, is it possible to speak of a person’s style, of fashion as a vehicle of self-expression or social aspiration. Such, then, are two alternate ways of organizing sartorial variation: on the one hand, we can posit difference in the service of hierarchy and locality, and on the other hand, we can posit difference in the service of elective identity and class mobility. Montaigne’s essays on clothing are of particular interest because these two different sumptuary modes can be seen as coming into conflict within their confines. Montaigne’s primary interest lies in geographical and sociological variation, but he is attentive, as well, to individual deviations. More to the point, it is Montaigne’s stated project to sacrifice the latter to the former, to eradicate fashion—these “newly introduced and vicious practices”—in the name of some older sartorial order. (1.43 / 197) We need to pay careful attention to the poles around which Montaigne’s argument revolves. He does not offer the reader a choice between meretricious fashion and the plain, honest body or even between

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gaudiness and calico. He offers the reader a rather less generous choice between polymorphous fashion and the customary hierarchy of dress. Montaigne may put little faith in the permanence of fashion, but he remains fearful of a radical philosophy that would tear off all the decent drapery of life. The social practices that make up the cultural wardrobe are instruments of social cohesion, contingent though their individual forms may be. And if the political order can only be made manifest in the icons that cluster around it, then any effort to strip away these emblems doesn’t so much reveal society’s material underbelly as it creates a terrible void. If society is founded upon cloth, then to go tugging at its threads is to jeopardize the very possibility of human coexistence. For Montaigne, therefore, the nominalist obsession with the variability of fashion is predicated on the fear that the naked body, divested of signs, is incapable of authority. A naked king is not “just a man.” He is a bad king. This, then, is one way of distinguishing the early modern skeptics from later anti-foundationalists: that their skeptical insight into the contingency of signs is always followed by a second move—an insistence that, if signs are arbitrary and transient, then their permanence must be legislated. They must, through an act of political will, be made to bear the authority that is not naturally theirs. Montaigne considers: “no plague in the world more harmful . . . than this: to let the young change at will from one fashion to another in dress, gestures, dances, exercises, and songs, shifting their judgment now to this position, now to that, running after novelties and honoring their inventors; whereby morals are corrupted and all ancient institutions come into disdain and contempt.” (1.43 / 197) It is a commonplace among social historians that fashion makes possible the confusion of ranks. Fashion allows the moneyed bourgeois to wear aristocratic red or to serve the king’s turbot at table. Montaigne’s argument against fashion clearly aims to arrest such social change by freezing in place its most outward signs. It is a check on mercantile ambition. We need to proceed with caution here, however, because this is not to say that Montaigne is in favor of the sumptuary laws that became increasingly common in the late sixteenth century. The matter is more complicated than that. Montaigne actually makes a point of censuring fashion and the sumptuary laws in a single polemic, so that the challenge of reading these passages lies in reconstructing a standpoint from which those two can be seen as equally reprehensible,

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and not as simple alternatives. The problem that Montaigne identifies here is twofold. The simple problem is that sumptuary laws, like fashion itself, overvalue superficial indicators. By officially restricting luxury goods to the aristocracy, they inadvertently strengthen the perceived link between nobility and opulence. They give credence to the fiction that gold (or fur or something as insubstantial as a color) is truly and essentially noble. The problem with the sumptuary laws, in other words, is not that they restrict freedom, but that they encourage the nobility to value an undignified freedom, the freedom of empty show.25 The second, more profound problem has its roots in fashion itself. The issue here is not that fashion is contingent—everything, on Montaigne’s view, is contingent—but rather that it flaunts its contingency. This, at a formal level, gets at a problem that has become familiar in recent anti-foundationalist accounts of culture and politics: once you have decided that everything is contingent or constructed, it is, of course, impossible to oppose anything on those grounds. The judgment is universal and thus cancels all the way through. Montaigne, then, like the anti-foundationalists, requires some criterion other than contingency in order to justify his critique, and he will decide, in what can only be a non sequitor, that a social practice is worth rejecting, not when it is contingent, but when it announces its contingency. Good laws and good customs are those that are so old that, though contingent, “no one knows their origin or that they were ever different.” (1.43 / 198) The value of antiquity is that it does not even allow the question of contingency to arise, the unnerving converse of which is that with every smashing new damask print, every smart new whalebone farthingale, the social order is parading forth the ungroundedness of its rites. And once fashion has made of contingency a public spectacle, nothing as clumsy as a law will be able to return to dominant practices the veneer of necessity. The problem with fashion, in short, is that it will rewrite the law in its own image; it will discredit in advance any law that, because articulated as part of a state program, will itself seem fully contingent—positive, imposed, as arbitrary as the faddishness it aims to prohibit. It is in that dilemma that we can see the outlines of a properly Pyrrhonist critique of the law. The problem with any law is that it always divulges the need for a law. The precondition of a law’s passage is the acknowledged possibility of its transgression. Law thus makes the mistake of articulating obligations better left unspoken. Montaigne’s opposition to the sumptuary

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laws, then, comes from his fear that they do not intervene forcefully enough to defend customary social distinctions. They are merely law, and law is always belated. In this light, it becomes possible to say that Montaigne’s skepticism— his assault on the humanist reader, his obsessive cataloging of cultural contingencies—is a summons to the French elite to better comprehend the tenuous foundations of its own authority, to stop toying around with learning and laws and other such approximations of order. There is an esotericism here that is typical of Pyrrhonist writing, a secret and withheld insight into the fragility of social practices.26 Early modern skepticism is a confidential conversation between society’s best men— the ones who can “know the origin” of social practices, who can recognize “that it was ever different” without letting anyone else catch on. Skepticism is thus a means of indenturing the subject to customary practices without having to offer up any justification for them; it looks for a way of enforcing traditional imperatives without articulating those imperatives as knowledge or law in a manner that would allow the lawyers and other such rhetoricians to equivocate them into the ether. The neopragmatists like to remind us now that our own deepest commitments are not grounded in reasoned argument or philosophical conviction. They are assembled, rather, out of “memory, imagination, early training and example, conditioned loyalties, instinctive sympathies and antipathies, and so forth.”27 A statement such as this is usually thought to sponsor some form of pluralism: no one, after all, has the same memories or the same imagination, so it can come as no surprise that a given social formation will encompass a wide range of different commitments. And yet this is a list that a Pyrrhonist would happily sign onto, as long as each of its items can be authoritatively safeguarded. Montaigne’s skepticism, in short, invites us to envision a pragmatism directed against multiplicity: Don’t waste your time hammering out sophistical arguments or passing ungainly legislation. Control memory. Condition loyalties. Police the imagination. Train the children.

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1. Let’s fasten onto the notion that emerged in the last chapter: Montaigne’s Essays work to divest humanist readers of their putative learning in order to secure customary practices against innovation. This should put us at last in a position to demarcate Montaigne’s place in the Reformation battles that form the immediate political horizon of his writing. But we should note first that, in saying this, we are moving between different timelines within the Essays. For these documents, though not obviously narrative in character, are actually telling several different stories at once. The temporality that is likely to seem most distinctively essayistic is of course the eccentric time of the aleatory self, which ticks away at a contemplative remove from political events. But this is not the Essays’ exclusive register or narrative mode. Their idiosyncratic subjectivity itself takes shape within a second, more expansive temporality, a temporality of the nation—what we normally call the French Reformation or the Wars of Religion, whose events thoroughly inform Montaigne’s writing, if only obliquely. We may begin, then, by delineating Montaigne’s narrative of the self, but it is equally important that we reconstruct, as its complement, his account of national history. If we wish to understand the Essays’ status as a symbolic act, we will have to ask: What is the big history that Montaigne recounts? And how does he mean to intercede in that history? This much can be said up front: when the moderns brought Pyrrhonism back to life, they recast it as an ideological weapon of the absolutist state, a by-product of the Reformation’s extraordinarily vicious doctrinal

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battles. With the French elites sundered by the competing claims of Catholicism and Protestantism, skepticism’s appeal lay precisely in its reluctance to adjudicate between their epistemological positions—its reluctance, that is, to join Protestant and Catholic theologians in their common search for the criterion of religious knowledge. But this stance of intellectual abstention should obviously not be mistaken for some liberal notion of neutrality. The cornerstone of the Pyrrhonist revival was a complete Latin edition of Sextus Empiricus’ works published in 1569 by the French counter-reformer Gentian Hervet, and it is documents such as this that situate Pyrrhonism in a precise ideological milieu. Pyrrhonism enabled many of France’s leading Catholic intellectuals to resolve for themselves the doctrinal and institutional issues of their day by ostentatiously ignoring them: they simply refused to grant the Protestant critics of Catholic authority the dignity of a response. Skepticism allows the churchman to say to the dissenter: I don’t know what you’re talking about. It is hard for those of us living in a modernity in which religion has the character of a private pastime or individual choice—an elective, not an election—to appreciate that theology can generate epistemological problems of any urgency. But of course it is possible, if one is so minded, to see the problems surrounding Christian worship as essentially epistemological, at least to the considerable extent that any believer would like to know who God is and what he requires of us. More to the point, decades of sixteenth-century social history may have taught us to understand the Reformation as a political contest—a contest, largely, between the new urban classes and the traditional churchly elites—but we shouldn’t allow this insight to obscure the fact that sixteenth-century men and women represented this conflict chiefly as an epistemological one, a battle over whether their words, gestures, images, and institutions could reliably communicate the will of God. At the level of doctrine, then, the central quarrel between the Protestants and the Catholics concerned the standards of religious knowledge, what the century called the “rule of faith.” The basic dichotomy here is a familiar one. Pyrrhonism is the period’s third term. Where Protestantism argued that the only criterion for truth is scripture and individual conscience, insisting that institutions be revolutionized accordingly—and where an orthodox Catholicism argued for the inherited and institutional wisdom of the church—Pyrrhonism argued that such standards of knowledge simply

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weren’t the point. From the Pyrrhonist standpoint, what was important about Protestantism and orthodox Catholicism was not that they disagreed, but that their disagreement nonetheless housed a fatally shared assumption. They both operated under the notion that governing institutions could be anchored in what one knew about the cosmos. Pyrrhonism, in effect, attempted to resolve the political antagonisms of the French civil wars by expunging from them the epistemological character of their official and contending ideologies. Consider, in this light, the following tricky little sentence of Erasmus’, on the futility of justifying Christian orthodoxy by philosophical means: “Nowadays, what ethnic or heretic could hold out an instant against the concentrated, interwoven subtleties of our theologians—unless he was so dull he didn’t understand them, so impudent that he simply hissed them down, or else so skilled in the same trick that he could fight on equal terms.”1 Erasmus is ticking off the sheer number of ways that a dissenter has to refute sound Christian doctrine—if refute, indeed, is the word— and what is especially disturbing for him is that ignorance and erudition are equally effective justifications for nonconformity. And this, of course, has the effect of discrediting not only the heretic or the “ethnic”—the word in this case means “heathen.” It also discredits any philosophical theology too delicate to stand up to the assaults of the ungodly. This already gets us intriguingly close to the Pyrrhonist position. Doctrine, Erasmus suggests, is powerless against dissent, so that to claim that your practices are justified is already to give away too much. To so much as account for your institutions in the form of an argument is to open up the possibility that your argument will be repudiated.2 Rather than attempting to establish the truth of Catholicism, then—rather than actively doubting Protestantism—the Pyrrhonist will simply change the subject, suggesting that what really demands the Catholics’ attention are custom and community, that the only worthy course of life is to live, in Sextus’ words, “without beliefs, but in accord with the ordinary regimen of life.”3 The “natural impressions” which guide skeptics bind them to the dominant conventions of society; in the absence of belief, skeptics allow habit to dictate their behavior. The dedicated Pyrrhonist, if one can speak of such a creature, is a “lover of his kind,” a loyalist and local booster. My people, says the skeptic, have always been Catholics.4 Montaigne is utterly typical of Counter-Reformation Pyrrhonism in that he offers up a Christianity that has jettisoned its own doctrines as so

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much expendable cargo. It is hard not to think of this as a radical procedure. There can be little doubt that owning up to the contingency of all belief, that admitting that the only reason you believe something is that you were born into its creeds, undermines the ordinary status of belief, because it says that you do not in fact have the sound reasons you thought you did to believe what you do. But equally—and it is on this argumentative reversal that all of Pyrrhonism depends—it says that you have no sound reasons for believing anything else. Pyrrhonism, in other words, attempts to put an alternate emphasis on the exclusive nature of that first claim: the only reason—the single, exclusive reason—you have to believe something is that you were born into it. If you accept this proposition, then you can dispense in advance with the attempt to derive conviction from any source but birth, an attempt that in the sixteenth century was nearly identical with the Protestant challenge to church authority. Pyrrhonism is Montaigne’s version of Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. It bests Luther at his own game. Pyrrhonism, in short, may be radical, but we must pause before attributing much significance to that overused word. Pyrrhonism is radical only in the way that we speak of certain medical procedures as radical. It is a kind of ideological chemotherapy: you take the risk of killing off the good cells of orthodoxy so that you may eradicate the cancer of dissent.5 The metaphor may be a queasy one, but it captures the astringent spirit of the endeavor. Perhaps even this is to overstate the case, however. For Pyrrhonism, understood now as Catholicism-withoutdoctrine, is clearly radical only if one thinks of a religion as constituted chiefly by its doctrines. We might regard Pyrrhonism as asking churchgoers to reconceptualize their own Catholicism in much the way that an anthropology of religion would: as a series of institutions and practices more expansive than any formulary of belief, to which faith is connected, finally, in roundabout and trifling ways. It is not that a Christian skepticism has absolutely nothing to do with belief, of course. On some level, Reformation Pyrrhonism does, in fact, take up a rather familiar form of fideism, amplifying the skeptical resonances of medieval antirationalist theology and charging the Protestant reformers with making reason the rule of faith. La Mothe le Vayer, another of Montaigne’s more celebrated disciples, will speak approvingly of the skeptic “enslaving his rationality under the obedience of faith.”6 And Montaigne himself is quick to sound familiar Augustinian themes when proselytizing

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for Pyrrhonism—the incomprehensibility of God, the fallacy of holding God to human standards—demonstrating with particular force just how easily skepticism can feed off of the orthodox Christian critique—or is it affirmation?—of human fallibility. But what is most distinctive about Pyrrhonism—what makes it unlike fideism—is the regularity with which it swings back round into an openly political register. This is already apparent in La Mothe le Vayer’s brief statement, which makes faith equivalent to obedience; and it is doubly apparent in the following passage from the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” which is one of the few moments in the Essays when Montaigne can properly be said to fulminate: “The means I take to beat down this frenzy [the frenzy of philosophy and Protestantism and atheism] and which seems fittest to me, is to crush and trample underfoot human arrogance and pride; to make them feel the inanity, the vanity and nothingness, of man; to wrest from their hands the puny weapons of their reason; to make them bow their heads and bite the ground beneath the authority and reverence of divine majesty.” (2.12 / 327) Montaigne is, of course, well known for opposing the inquisitorial zeal of his fellow Catholics, but in lines such as these, he reveals that Pyrrhonism is capable of an imaginative brutality of its own. The savagery that so marked the Counter-Reformation, Montaigne suggests, could have been avoided if the Catholic regimes had undertaken their campaign of terror at the cognitive level. Skepticism becomes a vision of Catholic retribution, an extended fantasy in which dissenters are to be humiliated, broken down, or tortured into blind subjection. The entire problem for Montaigne, the chief motivation behind his Pyrrhonism, is that France has been wracked by religious war. His celebration of Pyrrhonist tranquility is a frank call for peace or reconciliation; but the only terms in which he can envision peace is through the sort of skeptical militancy on display here, in which theological reason is less overcome than confiscated. When we say that Montaigne helps redefine Catholicism as something other than a system of belief, then, we are saying that he redefines Catholicism as a social and political institution, which can now be defended as such. Pyrrhonism often claims to teach its disciples faith, but when pressed, will always sidestep belief with a blunt appeal to the comforts of hegemony. This should give us a means of re-assessing the seemingly tolerant statements that regularly crop up in the Essays and

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that liberal scholarship so readily seizes upon. Montaigne often notes that he cannot demand belief of his fellow citizens, but again, the import of that sentence lies entirely on where we place the emphasis. We can say, as the liberal reading would have it, that I cannot demand belief—in which case the problem lies with the character of religious obligation, because “belief must come freely” or what have you. Alternately, we can say, as Montaigne generally has it, that I cannot demand belief—in which case the problem does not lie with religious obligation as such, but with any effort to establish that obligation as a matter of doctrine and not of policy. Montaigne, in short, insists that though he can make no doctrinal pronouncements, he can demand an institutional allegiance. And this should help distinguish Pyrrhonism from both liberalism and fideism. For when it comes right down to it, it is less important that the skeptic really be fideist—how, after all, could this be judged?— than that he appear to be so. In this special sense, the Pyrrhonist turns out to be a kind of rhetorician after all, a performer. Thus Sextus: “We still follow without doctrinal belief the common course of life. We say that there are gods, and, we reverence gods and ascribe to them foreknowledge.”7 But in rejecting belief as well as knowledge—and in giving explicit priority to the “common course of life”—Sextus makes clear that the “we say” in passages such as this is a kind of recital or incantation whose importance lies solely in signaling the speaker’s conformity to some code of behavior, and not in any felt creed or proposition about reality. Skepticism, this is all to say, can follow its own path to dogmatism— albeit a staged or strategic dogmatism—to which it is only superficially opposed. Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism is grounded in the counterintuitive proposition that agnosticism is the proper ground of obedience, every bit as much as faith. For to obey the church only because you happen to agree with the imperatives it issues is precisely not to obey. It is to cling to the independent judgment that is the antithesis of obedience. This is in fact one of Montaigne’s signature arguments, and he will return to it again and again: “Whoever obeys them”—the laws—“because they are just, does not obey them for just the reason he should.” (3.13 / 821) Or: “We must either submit completely to the authority of our ecclesiastical government, or do without it completely. It is not for us to decide what portion of obedience we owe it.” (1.28 / 134) Or again: “Obedience is not pure or tranquil in a man who reasons and argues.” (2.17 / 498)8

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It may be tempting at this point to conclude that Montaigne was a traditionalist (a conservative—a reactionary, if you prefer) and have done with him. But this is not yet to say very much, if only because that familiar political vocabulary is never particularly revealing when used to describe early modern writing. To call Montaigne a traditionalist does almost nothing to distinguish him from his contemporaries, nearly all of whom invoke tradition in some fashion or another. If we wish to ascertain the specificity of Pyrrhonism, we will have to set up a rough typology of tradition, which might look something like this: The radical reformers—the Anabaptists and the antinomians and their fellows— were the Christians most likely to discount tradition and its institutions, giving full authority to scripture as interpreted, in varied and conflicting ways, by the faithful. The magisterial reformers—the official representatives of Lutheranism and Calvinism—sought to reinstate a traditional mode of reading, employing a more or less humanist, philological rationale, but associating it now, not with the ancients, but with a primitive and historically original Christianity, bringing the church back to its roots, so to speak. Tridentine Catholicism—the orthodox but reform-minded Catholicism of the Council of Trent—sought to supplement the authority of scripture with the inherited authority of church institutions, as a kind of secondary tradition. And to these familiar positions we must now add Montaigne, who seeks to deny the authority of scripture in favor of the institutions. On the face of it, the intriguing correspondence here is actually between the first and the last of these positions, between radical reform and Pyrrhonism, which present antithetical counterimages of one another. Each means to discredit the idea that a church hierarchy can be dependably extrapolated from the gospel; each means to snap the link between scripture and the church’s institutional structure—a link that Calvinism, Lutheranism, and orthodox Catholicism all aim to reaffirm— though Montaigne and the radicals obviously hope to end up with opposite ends of that wishbone. It might help here to delve into the contrast with antinomianism, which, on the face of it, seems to share many of its tenets with Pyrrhonism. Antinomianism is a doctrine, once prevalent in radical Protestant sects, which maintains that the Christian is exempt from the laws of church or state, or even from basic moral laws as conventionally defined. The idea here is essentially epistemological, and therein lies its connection with Pyrrhonism: antinomianism holds that

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believers, for all of their belief, can have no knowledge of God. They can never claim to know God’s will, which means that the run-of-the-mill, Sunday-sermon idea that a preacher should speak the word of God is nothing short of blasphemy, the blasphemy of an orthodox faith corroded by presumption. There are shades here of Pascal and the Deus absconditus: for lack of true Christian knowledge, believers must commit themselves to a perpetual labor of interpretation, of deciphering the word of God, which will never be simply evidenced to them. And it is with this labor of interpretation that there comes a radical and exacting freedom; for in order to take up this Christian vocation, believers must make a point of discarding all preestablished wisdom. They must step outside of any religious institution that would claim to spare them this effort. If they are to know that they are obeying God—a God whose commands will never simply be issued to them—then they must be able to rule out the possibility that they are following the convenient dictates of some Christian functionary. Antinomianism requires, not necessarily that one transgress the law, but that one live in total disregard of it, as though it did not even exist. Historians have been understandably fascinated by this doctrine, because even in its mitigated forms it seems to have underwritten both some first glimmering of bourgeois autonomy and most of the period’s revolutionary social experiments: the Anabaptist communes, the catastrophe at Münster, the godly underground of the English Civil Wars. What is important for present purposes is that Pyrrhonism begins from a similar premise—that humans can have no insight into matters divine—but then re-asserts the priority of the law itself, of external behavior, of institutions and ceremony. Montaigne will never get around to asking what you really believe as long as you show up for mass and genuflect at the door and cross yourself at every cue. His entire project, in fact, is to lend this inattention to doctrine a quasi-philosophical dignity. There is no clearer way to get at the distinction between Pyrrhonism and antinomianism than to contrast their versions of the infinite regress. The antinomians, like the Pyrrhonists, employ the infinite regress as one of their pet polemical devices, but theirs typically revolves around claims of authority, and not, as with Pyrrhonism, around claims of knowledge: What, asks antinomianism, is the standard of authority? Any claim to authority has to be based on some prior authority, which in turn can only be justified by yet a third authority, and so on. Who, then, will

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authorize the authorizers? We might cite here just one typical instance of this argument, from John Milton, regarding censorship or “licensing.” Licensing, which demanded that all publications receive prior approval from the state, was founded on the notion that learned men, men capable of writing books, can nonetheless make mistakes and thus require oversight. But this notion—the notion that learned men can err—doesn’t only help justify censorship. It can just as easily militate against it. For, as Milton has it: “If learned men be the first receivers out of books and dispreaders of vice and error, how shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”9 Milton is counting, of course, on our not being able to respond to that question, if only because any answer we might think to give— the king has decreed as much, Parliament has legislated as much, the courts have ruled as much—will only provoke the question all over again. Any claim to authority, in other words, is ultimately self-authorizing or can be traced back to some earlier moment of self-authorization. The Pyrrhonists’ fear, by contrast, is almost exactly the antithesis of this: namely, that any appeal to knowledge will become, sooner or later, an antinomianism of precisely this kind, because if custom doesn’t decide what knowledge is, then persons do, in which case there can be no genuine and embodied authority, but only competing standards of authority, founded on a basic distrust of external law. It is worth underscoring, however, that Pyrrhonism does not actually disagree with antinomianism on the basic issue in question—that all sovereignty is self-authorizing. Montaigne is innovative only in that, against the threat of Protestantism, he seeks to reconcile his readers to that unsavory insight. And it is this project of reconciliation that most distinguishes Montaigne’s concept of tradition from other such notions. What is most distinctive of Calvinism and its humanist affiliates is that it invokes tradition in order to motivate a thoroughgoing critique of the present. It locates in the past some pristine historical state—the state of Greek wisdom or Christian simplicity—against which the vices of the present can be measured. The adequacy of any institution, on this view, can be judged only by how well it corresponds to its presumed original, so that a narrative of tradition will simultaneously be a narrative of corruption and a vision of some future regeneration. Montaigne, however, offers a theory of tradition in which it is no longer the presumed antiquity

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of practices that constitutes their legitimacy, but merely their present preeminence. He aims to prevent the humanists from discovering in the past any criterion by which the present can be judged. The point about the Essays, then, is not that they are “traditionalist,” but that they help mark the moment in which one distinctly modern concept of tradition comes into being, a concept that requires the wholesale re-evaluation of already existing practices—not their repudiation, and not even their modification, but simply their redescription as practices.10 What is particularly intriguing about Pyrrhonism, in this light, is that from it we can derive a general notion of ideology: What Pyrrhonism does is give up a familiar recourse to the ideology of ideas in favor of an almost materialist notion of ideology as practice, a notion that we have come to associate with Pascal, especially in his Althusserian habit.11 Pyrrhonism dispenses with the notion of internal commitment or the “truth of the heart” in favor of the obligations of ritual. This is not merely to say that Pyrrhonism has an ideology, which, though no doubt true, is hardly the point. Pyrrhonism is itself a theory of ideology, albeit one that will have ideological effects of its own. It means to harness political subjects to dominant practices in cheerful disregard of their metaphysical status. But of course this is also to say that Pyrrhonism is the very antithesis of ideology, at least as normally conceived, precisely because it is willing to name itself as such.12 It cannot be ideology because it is the very model of ideology, because it is a false consciousness that happily announces its own falseness.13

2. But perhaps this is to dispense with Montaigne’s vaunted tolerance rather too blithely. We can identify in the Essays a kind of skeptical revanchism, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that Montaigne is never as prosecutorial as all that. The Essays, after all, regularly proclaim their moderation; to call them tolerant may be too glaring an anachronism, but surely it is not much of a stretch to call them merciful. These are concepts, indeed—moderation, mercy—that the Essays actually exempt from the usual procedures of the argument on both sides of a question. They are never made to square off against their antitheses; there is no essay that offers an argument for and against cruelty, say. Cruelty never gets its day in court, which means that it takes much more polemical

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heat than the Protestants ever do. So if we wish to specify what is truly distinctive about Montaigne’s writing, then surely it is not enough to point to his professions of orthodoxy—orthodoxy is, by definition, not much of a distinguishing mark. We must give full weight, rather, to his consistent efforts to temper the righteous fury of his fellow Catholics: “We can grasp virtue in such a way that it will become vicious, if we embrace it with too sharp and violent a desire. . . . A man may both love virtue too much, and perform excessively in a just action.” (1.30 / 146) These words are directed at Huguenot militancy, to be sure, but we must imagine them as also taking in Catholic enthusiasm, which knew its full share of brutality: the Bartholomew Night slaughter, the starvation sieges of Protestant towns, the massacre of a Huguenot congregation at worship in Vassy. Lines such as these, which function as a gloss on the Essays’ many scenes of violence, take obvious pains to distinguish Montaigne from the accustomed villains of Renaissance historiography: from the Guise, the Catholic League, that Medici woman, the hapless Valois kings. Montaigne will have no part of their “savage and costly virtue.” (1.30 / 146) I would like to say up front: I think this common view of Montaigne is almost entirely misleading—not wrong, exactly, but too quick to take solace in the Essays’ putative ethics in a manner that ends up once again bracketing out their social and historical coordinates. I’d like to suggest that we take a closer look at the statements that usually make the case for Montaigne’s moderation. Consider, for instance, the following lines, from the essay on “Custom, and not easily changing an accepted law”: “It takes a lot of self-love and presumption to have such esteem for one’s own opinions that to establish them one must overthrow the public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils, and such a horrible corruption of morals, as civil wars and political changes bring with them in a matter of such weight—and introduce them into one’s own country.” (1.23 / 87) The first thing that needs to be noted about this passage is that it is still directed squarely against the Huguenots— the “overthrowers of public peace”—and is thus wholly in keeping with Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist attack on Protestantism. The notion of moderation, this is to say, still works within a narrative that assigns to the civil wars epistemological causes, and like Pyrrhonism, it hopes to resolve that conflict by softening up the doctrinal arrogance thought to underlie it. In order to understand the full force of this moderation, however, we

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need to understand something more about the Catholic campaign against the Huguenots, and in particular, we need to understand the fascinating, hybrid nature of the Huguenot revolt itself. The most important clue here lies in the unusual status of the French Catholic Church, which had a relationship with Rome unlike that of any other national church in Europe. The Gallican church was effectively a state institution, somewhat like the Church of England, though still nominally under papal control, so that by the early sixteenth century, the French crown had assumed the right to nominate bishops, to appoint officials up and down the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and to levy tithes on the clergy itself.14 The church, in fact, had become one of the primary vehicles of court patronage, dominated by political appointees, whose primary allegiance was to the Valois dynasty, and not, cosmically, to the Universal Church, nor, regionally, to any local congregation. This is worth lingering over, because the peculiarities of the Gallican church—its independence from the pope, its dependence on France’s Most Christian King—meant that when French Catholics left the church, they were not declaring their opposition first and foremost to Rome (as they were in England) or to a foreign Catholic power (as they were in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands). They were, by definition, positioning themselves against the state, against the government apparatus of which the church was so prominent a part. And this made it nearly impossible, for most of the sixteenth century, to imagine a Protestant nationalism in France. French Protestantism wasn’t just heresy. It was treason. But this doesn’t yet get at the complexity of the Huguenots’ ideological coloration. It would be easy to start assigning clear political meanings to each of the French confessions, to cast the Wars of Religion as a straightforward contest between the Catholic forces of traditionalism and the Protestant forces of innovation. Such, indeed, were the lessons of an older Marxist historiography, especially of the East German kind, which imagined the Reformation as a showdown between a patrician Catholicism and an upstart and urban Protestantism (with Marxism its successor). There may be regions for which this picture more or less holds. Perhaps England, in particular, approximates the confessional-class relations that social historians often consider standard: a half-hearted and politic state Reformation, Catholic strongholds among the feudal nobility of the distant and underdeveloped north, Puritanism among the merchants, craftsmen, and intellectuals of the already commercial south.

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But if we orient ourselves to the English model of Reformation history, the question merely reasserts itself all the more clearly: What happens in a region where the state remains affiliated with Catholicism, and not even with ultramontane, papal Catholicism, but with its own homegrown version? For France, the close correlation between Catholicism and the state meant that it was the disaffected feudal nobility who stampeded over to Calvinism, at least in the early stages of the conflict, which is to say that Protestantism was not unambiguously a force of social innovation. On the contrary, French Protestantism enabled the region’s traditional power-holders to declare their continued independence from a rapidly centralizing order of church and state, much in the same way that the German Protestant princes used the Augsburg Confession as a means of preserving the integrity of their territories against further encroachment by the Habsburg empire. As a social movement, then, if rarely in the substance of its doctrines, French Protestantism became one more symptom of the chronic tension between the king and the high nobility. It may have been an innovation all the same, but then it was an innovation of a strategic and preemptive kind, commandeered by the customary elite to stave off what it saw as the more threatening innovations undertaken, at the nobility’s expense, by an authoritarian monarchy: the rationalization of state law in the new royal courts, the standardization of state finance throughout the newly unified territory, the spread of venal office, and hence the dissipation of political power across a new professional class, and so on. Any centralizing state in Europe had as its first task the taming of its nobles. The state could pursue a number of different strategies to that end—it could absorb the nobility into the new state offices, it could kennel them at the king’s court, or it could simply strip them of land and title, if they refused otherwise to be broken; but it had to do something. No state was in a position to assign exclusive sovereignty to its monarch if it could not first compel its aristocracy to relinquish their customary privileges. French Protestantism no doubt encompassed many different movements driven by many different complaints, but seen by the lights of its aristocratic captains, it was the ideology of those noblemen who refused to adapt, who refused to relinquish their customary privileges—who chose rather to renounce the state by attacking its most powerful institution. That impulse toward secession, of course, could find other motivations among other groups. The Huguenot leaders may have come from

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the military nobility, but French Protestantism had its popular base in the towns, though even here the profile is complex and varied. In some places, Calvinism took root among the skilled and literate members of the new trades, such as printing, who were poorly represented in town governments; and in some places, it took root not so much among the poorly represented as among the just plain poor—the journeymen, the half-skilled, the hyper-exploited. These two groups, of course, did have something in common: both lacked corporate identity and the established municipal rights of the feudal trading classes. And like the feudal nobility, they saw themselves as largely shut out from the state and its new regional institutions. In sum, then, we can say that the Calvinist revolt encompassed at least two more or less contradictory political projects: that of the feudal nobility striking out against the royal state’s new open and bourgeois character; and that of Calvinism’s urban base, striking out against the royal state’s still closed and feudal character.15 Montaigne’s so-called moderation, in this light—his attack on “self-love” and “presumption”—seeks to brush aside a long list of political grievances by undoing the theology with which those grievances were publicly associated. But even here, of course, it doesn’t so much tackle that theology head-on as kick out its epistemological struts—and it does so, let us recall, on behalf of the imperiled integrity “of one’s own country.” It is a nationalist project of an early and surreptitious kind. There are moments when the political character of Montaigne’s moderation becomes especially apparent, though they tend to complicate the case even further. Of particular interest in this regard is the final paragraph of “Cruelty, Mother of Cowardice.” The passage serves as capstone to a long list of atrocities, culled not from the civil wars, but from classical sources. The prose turns grimly precise: When George Sechel, leader of those Polish peasants who, under the pretext of a crusade, did so much harm, had been defeated in battle by the voivode of Transylvania and taken, he was for three days bound naked to a wooden horse, exposed to every kind of torture that anyone could devise against him; during which time the other prisoners were given neither food nor drink. In the end, while he still lived and could see, they gave his blood to drink to his dear brother Lucat, for whose safety he kept praying, drawing upon himself all the hatred for their misdeeds. And they had twenty of his most favored captains feed on him, tearing his flesh with their teeth and swallowing the morsels. The rest of

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his body and his inner parts, when he was dead, were boiled and given to other of his followers to eat. (2.27 / 530)

There is much of interest here. The paragraph seems to encapsulate in a single nauseating tableau the Essays’ many images of brutality: of martyrs under the torturer’s knife, of mutilation, of cannibalism. But I would like to focus here on a single word, the foreign voivode, behind whose exoticism there lies a hidden but proximate critique: voivode is a Slavic term designating a regional governor or warlord; Stoker, in fact, will later write of “Voivode Dracula.”16 What is striking about this passage, then, is not simply its gore, but also its willingness to name the culprit behind the cruelty, to direct readers’ sympathies against the local grandee. This wouldn’t be surprising if we could ally the voivode with the Protestants, but if we perform even a rudimentary allegorical operation on these lines, we will see that the pressure of Montaigne’s critique has actually shifted; it has moved away from Sechel, the leader of the popular religious insurgency—I think we can confidently read “Huguenot”—and onto his self-appointed persecutors. Montaigne is here rounding against his presumptive allies, against those who “become extreme, injudicious, and unjust in the conduct of our case, and stain it with infinite reproaches of violence.” (1.54 / 227) These Catholics expect one to drink blood even when it’s not Christ’s. So here’s an instance of Montaigne’s moderation. But if we bear in mind that Montaigne’s attack on Protestantism is in large part an attack on the feudal noblesse d’épée, then we can say that these lines actually don’t mark much of a shift after all. They merely expand Montaigne’s critique of the Protestant nobility to include the Catholic nobility, as well, to the point where it becomes a generalized critique of the armigerous nobility in toto. There is much in Montaigne’s writing, in fact, that bears this out: in the essays on cruelty alone, the panorama of violence includes not only extraordinary and grisly crimes against persons, but also the ordinary, domestic militarism of the noble estate: the hunt, the duel, fencing, and so on. The idea here, of course, is that readers will come to see these several cruelties as implying one another, to the point where they will conclude that anyone capable of swatting a partridge from the air will just as soon flay a heretic alive: “Natures that are bloodthirsty toward animals give proof of a natural propensity toward cruelty.” (2.11 / 316) Montaigne’s moderation, then, is not simply an ethical matter, from

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which we might wish to draw our own lessons; it is a well-defined political challenge to “the men-at-arms” who “settle their quarrels at sword’s point”—and whose battle-tested courage the Essays enjoy redescribing as something other than noble or valorous: as cowardly, feminine, and vulgar. (2.27 / 525) Montaigne invites his readers to embrace his brand of “mercy and gentleness” so that they might distinguish themselves from the nobility of the sword and other such marauders. The uncomfortably detailed account of Sechel’s butchering seeks to elicit from its readers not so much modern liberal sympathy as a special kind of class revulsion, from which the former is finally indissociable. If this is so, then we will have to conclude that the Essays, taken as a whole, maneuver their readers into an extremely intricate, even scrambled, class position. For we have already seen that Montaigne is willing to speak as though he were a military nobleman in order to prosecute the case against the culture of humanist learning. It’s just that this doesn’t stop him from turning around to prosecute the opposite case against the warrior class itself; and this latter is a position most often associated with the learned noblesse de robe, the office-holding elite, the state’s own class—Montaigne’s class, too, if one cares about such things.17 The language of moderation is the idiom in which the new aristocracy of the state reprimands the baronial predators who would undermine the crown to serve their own parochial ends; and the language of pedantry is the idiom in which that old aristocracy seeks to defend itself against the new class of scholars and professionals. The Essays are distinctive in that they are willing to ventriloquize both positions, to launch each class’s characteristic critique of the other. Of course, this can make sense only if we note that the Catholic nobility were not themselves the most stalwart defenders of the state, Catholic state though it may have been. The unique status of the Gallican church, in fact, meant that pious Catholics—militant Catholics dedicated to the Counter-Reformation—were themselves easily positioned against the state, which could seem almost heretical because largely independent of Rome. And in that case, the Huguenots and the swordtoting Catholic nobility turn out to have had something in common: each group wanted to wrest power back from the state, to parcellize sovereignty back out to the provinces, to insist again on its regional autonomy, and to rejuvenate the Estates General and the noble councils. The Wars of Religion, then, actually involved three major players: the

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Calvinists, the militant Catholics, and the state, which drew up strategic alliances with each by turns. The key point about the wars is that they were, on both sides of the confessional divide, the last hurrah of the warrior nobility, its final attempt to re-assert itself against a state that was rapidly locking it out. By the time the wars were over, there would be a full-scale Protestant revolution against the king, centered in the south of France, and a full-scale Catholic revolution against the king, centered in Paris. So here’s Montaigne: “If the inventors”—the Protestants—“have done more harm, the imitators”—the Catholic League—“are more vicious in that they wholeheartedly follow examples whose horror and evil they have felt and punished.” (1.23, 87) I have been trying to argue that skepticism is essentially a mode of affirmation, but one that works in an unfamiliar ideological vein. Hosannas and hallelujahs are not its idiom. Pyrrhonism works rather by way of negation, by endorsing whatever “common form” happens to be left standing after one has scrapped all merely theoretical projects. So the key question when parsing a skeptical argument is always: What remains? There is no way of asking what Pyrrhonism praises, because it will never get around to praising much. One must ask rather: To what does it revert? And the Essays, I would like to suggest, always end up defaulting back to the royal state, to what Montaigne calls the “unity and contexture of this monarchy, this great structure.” (1.23 / 87) Humanist learning and feudal privilege, in this light, have something in common: they both give rise to a recalcitrant autonomy, teaching political subjects to neglect “obedience to the magistrate and maintenance of the government.” (1.23 / 88) Pyrrhonism, then, like the moderation with which it is associated, aims to uphold the state by scotching that autonomy. Moderation and absolutism go hand in hand, as the religious zealot and the feudal warlord blur into a single figure, epistemologically presumptuous, temperamentally savage, insurgent. This idea of skeptical absolutism should enable us to understand what separates Pyrrhonism from other Counter-Reformation projects, and especially from Catholic militancy. We must see Montaigne as targeting, alongside Protestantism, any attempt to promote a theologically reinvigorated Catholicism. Scholars have tended to identify two trends within early modern Catholicism or have tended to describe the same innovations with two distinctive sets of emphases. They speak, first of all, of the “Counter-Reformation,” a term which, within the ideological

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boundary lines peculiar to Reformation historiography, is considered the preoccupation of “Protestant-secular” historians and which names a straight, uncompromising Catholic dogmatism, backed up by force. Such was the Catholicism of the Inquisition or of the Habsburg reformation commission, which occupied remote Protestant villages in a campaign of official and militarized re-education. Such, too, was the Catholicism of Rome’s traditionalist curial party. But historians also speak of the “Catholic Reformation,” of a Catholic Awakening as pious as Puritanism itself, all baroque mysticism and missionary Jesuits and sacred hearts dripping with Christ’s blood. This Catholic Reformation names a movement of internal reform, which itself proceeded in a few different ways: there was a reformist Right, mostly associated with the Council of Trent, which sought to hold church and pope to the letter of Catholic doctrine— and which sought, as well, to align the church with a new form of state power, transforming the church’s once feudal hierarchy into an absolutist bureaucracy in its own right; and there was also a reformist Left, which urged that Catholic doctrine be liberalized on something like a humanist model. Early modern Catholicism obviously encompassed these many movements at once. It sponsored Counter-Reformation and Catholic Reformation both, “counter” in the sense of counter-revolution as well as “counter” in the sense of counterproposal. For present purposes, however, the important point is that Montaigne allied himself decisively with the former.18 The Catholic Reformation took as its most urgent project the introduction of a reinvigorated Catholicism to an unministered people, and Montaigne, obviously, will have none of this. Pyrrhonism disavows any attempt to deepen religious belief or foster a profound new Catholic spirituality. However concerted his defense of the church, Montaigne never means to revitalize Catholic dogma. On the contrary, Pyrrhonism is careful to stake its distance from the lay fraternities, from the Church Militant, from the Counter-Reformation as crusade, and most clearly from the French Catholic League, the church’s anti-Huguenot shock troops. In some sense, then, Montaigne’s project bears a clear resemblance to the Baroque, which José Maravall has taught us to see as a massive propaganda campaign, “with a message suggesting the desirability of integration within the confines of an estatist structure.”19 But Pyrrhonism does not, finally, depend on this kind of ideological capture. It seeks merely to regulate behavior—and to establish the futility of any project

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that sees itself as external to the state. The Catholic Baroque created a new and vivid system of signs, a hyperbolic structure of religious affect, within which the absolutist state could secure an obedience disguised as reverence. But Pyrrhonism insists, by contrast, that allegiances are best secured on the surface. Piety, it turns out, isn’t good enough for the state; it is not ideologically dependable, because it actually signals a divided allegiance, an allegiance both to God and to God’s surrogates on earth: popes, kings, bishops, priests. The danger that the Reformation announces so forcefully is that the former can always be turned against the latter; that in the hands of the faithful, church and state can always be sacrificed to the Godhead. Piety cannot in and of itself guarantee compliance. We can make the same observation with a different reference point: a medieval notion of church reform had concerned mores or public discipline. It had sought to regain control of Catholic behavior in a manner that would bring it back in accord with a canon law that was taken to be primal.20 It was only after the papal schism that this legalistic notion of reform was extended to include belief and thus the prosecution of heresy. The important point about Montaigne, along this vector of church history, is that he hangs onto this older version of reform; he sticks by the notion that parishioners need be reformed only in their conduct and not in their belief. This, in turn, should help us to specify further Pyrrhonism’s difference from fideism. Pyrrhonism is not a fideism, because it ruthlessly functionalizes religion. It is interested not at all in the beliefs of Catholicism, and in its practices only to the extent that they are the architecture of a social order. Pyrrhonism may seem like an ingenious defense of the church, but what it actually does is make religion subservient to the interests of the state. If we think back to the old idea that the success of Protestantism is among the most important ideological markers of the long, slow rise of capitalism in Europe, then we can say that Montaigne and his fellows, Catholic traditionalists though they may have been, were also concerned with refining Catholic ideology to a point where it could meet the challenge of Protestantism and the changes in the social order that Protestantism’s partial victory helped announce. Pre-Reformation Catholicism is usually thought to have been inhospitable to capital, because in a world in which every object carries its surcharge of sacred meaning, it is hard to

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treat anything as a mere economic counter or ledger-entry. This is how a Weberian sociology makes the point: In the Catholic religious vision, sacred and profane realities are not sharply separated and counterposed, but, on the contrary, widely overlapped. The Church is on the one hand a visible institutional reality operating in the here and now, on the other a depository of the ultimate spiritual resource, God’s saving redeeming grace. The distance between God and the layman is spanned by a whole range of intermediaries: angels, saints, priests, sacraments, holy practices, holy artifacts, holy places. This extensive interpenetration of the sacred and the profane discourages the faithful from treating the latter as a religiously neutral field, deprived of ritual significance, and open to his “tinkering” and rearranging. Too many things possess, as it were, double citizenship, appear not just as deployable, instrumental objects but also as vessels of holy powers. On this account the Catholic vision cannot inspire and countenance an anti-traditionalist, rational attitude toward one’s field of action.21

Montaigne, I think we can say, works to change all this—to re-assert the established forms of orthodoxy while at the same time stripping objects of their dual citizenship, redefining the physical world as a religiously neutral field. Pyrrhonism opens up Catholicism, not to anti-traditionalism, but to an instrumental traditionalism, a deployable custom. The historians of what is now called confessionalization—the transformation of the heterogeneous Christian sects into rigidly defined state churches—have suggested that the most significant historical difference that the Reformation produced was not the difference between Catholics and Protestants, but between pre-modern and modern Christianity. In both its Catholic and Protestant forms, the Reformation presided over a missionary effort, unprecedented in its thoroughness, to Christianize Europe; to introduce Christ to half-pagan backwaters; to suppress folk religion—the religion of local saints and sacred springs and animistic reliquaries—in favor of a more standardized piety; to bring everyday practices under the review of centralized institutions: the Calvinist consistory, the Catholic inquisition, the Jesuit school. The Counter-Reformation, in this sense, set out to battle not only the Protestants, but all cultish and hybrid forms of religion as well. The historians of confessionalization consider, in Robert Birely’s words, “the establishment of the confessions to be a major factor in the growth of the modern state in that the confessions fostered unity of sub-

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jects or citizens, instilled in them a sense of discipline and of loyalty to authority, and often made it possible for the ruler to make use of church resources for his purposes.”22 This means that the two Reformations, taken together, helped shift Christianity into a new ideological mode. They recast Christianity as a theodicy, a religion of affirmation, liberated now from the morbidness of the medieval Totentanz. It is possible to tell this story in a generous and optimistic spirit. Birely, for one, wants to link the Catholic Reformation to an upbeat modernity narrative. He suggests that a reformed Catholicism addressed the desires of a changing population, first, to live a worldly yet Christian life; and, second, to live in settled and peaceful states.23 But it’s not hard to tweak either of these formulations, in which case we might suspect that the Counter-Reformation, first, purged the church of its traditional modes of resistance to “worldly” capitalism and the “worldly” state; while, second, still offering itself as a mode of discipline, placing itself in the service of new forms of social regulation. This is something that Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism, in some broad sense, clearly helps make possible: it is Catholicism without magical thinking. Of course, we may want to point out that the state requires some magical thinking of its own. In Montaigne, the statist incantation sounds something like this: “We are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordians or Germans.” (2.12 / 325) The power of this wellknown slogan lies in its accomplishing two things at once: it redefines religion as a matter of culture while simultaneously positing culture as unitary, as undifferentiated in a manner that lends it the character of obligation. Once again, it seems as though Montaigne may be loosening the bonds of religion, for he is saying that Catholics are Catholics for cultural reasons alone; if they had been born on the other side of the Mediterranean, they might just as well have been Muslims. The more important point, however, is that Montaigne seeks to fix the cultural horizon as absolute, so that its contingency no longer comes with options. To say that your Catholicism is identical with your sense of yourself as a Frenchman is to say that you can dispense with your native religion about as easily as you can unlearn your native language. But what of that language? Montaigne’s limpid French, it turns out, has something interesting to contribute here. The social historians have pointed out that at the beginning of the long sixteenth century, the use of French was extremely limited within France, geographically restricted

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to the regions around Paris and socially restricted to the national elites. It was not yet a fully national language capable of supporting a unified national identity. It was, in fact, only slowly over the course of the century that “France” came into being at all, and it did so mostly as a fictional place dreamt of by French-speaking elites, whose national identity would still have to assert itself, at some later date, over various regional particularisms.24 So when Montaigne says that we are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordians or Germans, he is offering not a national identity, but a regional or tribal identity. It might have been possible for Montaigne to say: we are Christians by the same title that we are Frenchmen—but he doesn’t. And yet the matter is more complicated than that, for he writes this sentence in French, in the national vernacular of the professional elites: Nous sommes Chrestiens à mesme titre que nous sommes ou Perigordins ou Alemans. This one simple statement, then, houses a discrepancy—a contradiction between the sentence’s denotation and what, at the most general level, we may regard as its form, a vernacular style so refined that it is still echoes feuilletonistically across French prose. We can align each flank of this contradiction with a different mode of conceptualizing the nation. It is possible, for a start, to imagine the nation as tribal or pre-literate, as Perigordian or Alemannic, grounded in bonds of blood and ritual. But alternately it is possible to imagine the nation as basically textual, as French, as a community of law and interpretation. This latter is, of course, the typical Protestant strategy—to repudiate established ethnic or regional communities in favor of new collectivities founded in some freely willed commitment to the word. But it is also the strategy of Montaigne’s language—not his words but his language—in a manner that he himself cannot name. Montaigne is obviously working hard to ensure that the (Catholic) nation will be understood in tribal rather than textual terms—and yet his French vernacular participates in the process of nation-building in an entirely different way, by helping constitute a community of readers organized around a national literature. The Essays, in short, work by papering over a contradiction, attributing to the French nation—the monarchical, juridical, and mostly textual nation—the tribal status that it patently doesn’t have. Montaigne, this is all to say, uses the notion of customary religion— of religion-as-culture—in order to imagine a purified national identity, so that to speak of a “Perigordian Protestant” or a “German Jew” would

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be a kind of category error, if not some more terrible transgression, like some impossible crossbred creature in a medieval bestiary, a gryphon or chimera or other such abortion. Across Europe, the period is defined at every level by the potential conflict between confessional and national interests, a conflict embodied by the French Protestants or the English Catholics or the Spanish Moors. Montaigne’s response is to redefine religion in ethnic terms, as a cultural inheritance, so that this discrepancy cannot possibly arise. Pyrrhonism is part and parcel of the era’s obsessive purgings.25 There is an important pattern here to Pyrrhonism that it is worth spelling out. In his treatise Against the Grammarians, Sextus Empiricus surveys the immense linguistic variation across the ancient Greek dialects and concludes that there can be no standard Greek, because “there are many common usages.” This formulation would seem to spell disaster for Pyrrhonism’s default ethics, because if the common culture itself contains multiplicity, how are skeptics to know what usage to revert back to when they give up philosophy in favor of the common form? “There being many common usages, they”—the men of learning— “ask which we shall use. For it is possible to follow neither all of them, since they frequently conflict, nor any one of them, unless one be preferred on expert grounds.” As Sextus has it, however, this is actually a false problem: skeptics should simply seek out the “customary, unaffected, local usage” on the assumption that in any given place (in Athens as in Sparta) and within any given subculture (among the shepherds as among the soldiers) a single usage will prevail. “That way, even when the same thing is said in two ways, we shall attempt to fit in with the people around us and say what is not going to be laughed at.” Skeptics will tailor their speech to whatever group they are addressing. “So, deftly responding to each occasion with just the right word, we shall seem to speak faultless Greek.”26 This might sound like pluralism, such that skeptics will adapt themselves, successively, to many different local conditions. But this is to say, in fact, that skepticism pledges to eliminate multiplicity from each social site. If this is a pluralism, it is one in which differences need never coexist. Pyrrhonism, then, typically proceeds in two phases: first, it conducts an elaborate review of cultural differences and disparities. Then, having done that, it starts off on a search for unity— not philosophical unity, but rather some site of local homogeneity from which variety can be expelled. This is a skepticism of the loyalty oath and the witch-hunt, consigning all knowledge to the realm of the alien,

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of alterity and externality, some realm of being in which we do not participate: the Marranos, the Moriscos, the native Protestants. Thus Montaigne: “Attach yourself to what you are subject to, but not [to] him; he is not your colleague, or fellow citizen, or companion.” (2.12 / 389)27 We are in the position, at last, to address systematically the many questions we have been accumulating. Let’s tackle them in reverse order: • What is the status of Montaigne’s tolerance? The temptation is, of course, to find in Montaigne a flexible and humane Catholicism, a wry moderation willing to entertain any opinion from any corner. This may be true as far as it goes, but the Essays make it clear that this moderation is itself a determinate political position in the service of an incipient absolutism. To disclaim one’s own interests—and to ensure equally that others disclaim theirs—is to allow the state to get on with its work. • What is the story that Montaigne has to tell? Montaigne seems at first to be telling two distinct narratives, one involving the crisis of humanist learning and a second involving the misery of the civil wars. But upon closer inspection these turn out to be the same story—the story of proliferating argumentative positions conspiring to tear a nation apart. Montaigne’s strategy is to superimpose his Pyrrhonist narrative upon his political narrative, so that having transformed the civil wars into an epistemological epiphenomenon, he can advocate skepticism as a means of resolving that conflict. Philosophy is a catastrophe for France, skepticism a fantasy that she may yet be saved. And yet on the widest horizon, we might say that Montaigne’s skepticism actually shares its aims with the reform movements, Catholic and Protestant both. Across the board, the demand for religious reform was first and foremost a demand for the reformation of community, a project, at once utopian and disciplinary, of undoing the social divisions of a new market society. “One might suggest,” in the words of one recent historian, “that the massive adherence of the towns to Protestantism, however short-lived it may have proved, reflected a desire on the part of both the elite and the common people to restore a communal solidarity that had been smashed by economic crisis and the burdens of a centralizing State.”28 Skepticism offers itself as a shortcut to that solidarity.

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• How do we account for a critique of the subject that has nothing to do with late capitalism and its kindred institutions? There has always been a temptation to read Montaigne as an alternative to the neoclassicism of the following century—as an alternative to Malherbe and Malebranche and especially to Descartes, all of whom work in a more familiar ideological mode, one that establishes an official canon of knowledge and then predicates political subjectivity upon it. If that’s your model of ideology—and it’s not a universal model; it only operates under certain historical conditions—then Montaigne might plausibly be considered a renegade. But the challenge is to see that early modern Pyrrhonism works within an ideological configuration of its own. It sets out to destroy the innerworldly Protestant subject, which resists incorporation into the state church; and it sets out to destroy a lordly aristocratic subjectivity, which resists incorporation into the state bureaucracy. The fragmented self thus appears on the scene as an alternate and absolutist subjectivity; it places a ban on any subject position that refuses to be assimilated into governance. Montaigne’s skeptical critique of the subject works on the premise that a subjectivity that has been properly disrupted, cloven, or broken down into its component moments will be able—will be obliged, in fact—to perform its public functions even while maintaining its individual obsessions and eccentricities, which we can henceforth consider the trivial preoccupations of private men. “In the end it”—philosophy—“makes a man wild and vicious, disdainful of common religions and laws, an enemy of social intercourse, an enemy of human pleasures, incapable of any political administration and of helping either others or himself, fit to be slapped with impunity.” (1.30 / 146) The skeptic, by contrast, cannot be a heretic. Holding no opinions, he cannot hold the wrong ones.

3. We need to be wary of overestimating the coherence or success of Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism. We can identify within it a series of precise ideological gambits, but that is not yet to say that Montaigne or anybody else will be able to make good on these strategies. It should come as no

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surprise, in fact, to find that a project so wholly wedded to paradox gets itself into trouble over time—banned briefly in France, ensconced among the heretics of the Papal Index. It’s just that we needn’t treat the Essays’ temporary disrepute as a guarantee of their implicit radicalism. Not every paradox proclaims a revolution. For all its promises of tranquillity, Pyrrhonism turns out to be an unstable and punishing project. Here’s one way of thinking about its contradictions: Montaigne attacks the principle of universality in familiar ways. If something were truly universal—a concept, a custom, a moral standard—it would gain our approval spontaneously.29 There would be no need to argue for it and thus no multiplicity of cultural practices. No proposition is universally accepted; therefore, no proposition is universally binding. The problem is that this same argument can (and will) be made regarding the common form, which, if truly common, wouldn’t need to be enforced. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is the issue on which Pyrrhonism will founder, so it is worth repeating: if the church were truly a common form it would be impossible to apostatize to the new faith. If the state were truly a common form it would be impossible to take up arms against it. The very notion of the common form thus rests on a systematic confusion: it can only carry the character of an injunction— Return ye to the common form!—to the extent that it is also descriptively true, to the extent that the practices in question are in fact generally held. But to the extent that the practices in question are in fact generally held, then the injunction they are meant to actuate will be superfluous. The principal of the common form thus admits of two paraphrases, each of them nonsensical: Return ye to the common form that everyone already inhabits anyway! Or: Return ye to the common form that your apostasy has already shown to be uncommon!30 Pyrrhonism sets itself the task of securing social order in the absence of metaphysical guarantees, and this cannot help but be an apprehensive enterprise. An absence of guarantees is, after all, an absence of guarantees. Montaigne’s project is to imagine a sovereignty that is selfgrounding, without need of legitimation. But this fairly intelligible program is rooted in a paradox: the project is to lend stability to authority in all its contingency—when this is only the project in the first place because the radical contingency of authority has been fully acknowledged. The project is to think contingency as necessity, not to naturalize it in a fashion that will come to seem typical of bourgeois ideology, by scripting

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some fiction of necessity, but by trying to think the impossible stability of the contingent form in all its contingency. The Pyrrhonists insist that there is nothing that is not subject to contest, but then they hope to take recourse—and it is in this lapse that Pyrrhonism’s ideological center of gravity emerges—to whatever prevailing practices they deem selfevident and thus beyond contest. They dismiss the self-evidence of any philosophical proposition only to rediscover that self-evidence in the realm of custom or practice or convention itself. Custom bodies itself fully forth, with no interpretive burden and no internal difference. Pyrrhonism is thus wrapped up in the vain notion that prevailing practices are in some important way the only practices, that newer, competing habits—communion in both forms, say, or clerical marriage—haven’t gained the credibility or legitimacy or stability that would earn them the name practice and thus turn state-Catholicism into one practice among others. Perhaps this is the moment to tie the entire argument together. Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism accomplishes two things at once, but each of its achievements puts an insurmountable pressure on the other: it simultaneously gives us an isolated subjectivity and gives us an authoritarian custom. This might seem less contradictory if we consider the paradox of custom itself—that once it is named by the abstraction custom, it is no longer really custom at all, no longer an unreflective social practice embedded in a particular history. Montaigne gives us an autonomous subject who possesses no settled relationship to the world around it; a subjectivity thus alienated soon discovers, however, that custom can effectively guide its actions. And yet this turn to custom has the quality, not of spontaneous habit, but of voluntarism or existential choice. Custom is salutary but, strangely, it is salutary in some general way. We want to affirm that we are Catholics, not because of the specific configuration of that faith, but merely as custom—in which case, we might just as well be wailing Jews or stomping Methodists, as long as we are something.31 In Montaigne, then, the community is always given. Its features defy reinterpretation. But this means that there is a crucial ambiguity to his We-are-Catholics-by-the-same-title-that-we-are-Germans. That statement means first of all that the great majority of men and women in the great majority of cases are Catholic without reflection, simply because they have been initiated into the church’s practices via some fluke

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of child-rearing, as long as we accept that this fluke can be all-important or wholly determinative. The allegiance of these ethnic Catholics does not need to be secured because they couldn’t really be anything else; they are instinctively Roman. And yet Montaigne’s contention is also an imperative—that we should treat our religion as though it were immutable, as tribe is assumed to be, even if competing practices have already given the lie to this account. He insists that we cannot legitimately leave a practice whose claim on us seems coterminous with our being. How does this work? Consider now one of the Essays’ most important passages: “It has pleased God to give us some capacity for reason, so that we should not be, like the animals, slavishly subjected to the common laws, but should apply ourselves to them by judgment and voluntary liberty.” (2.8 / 279) There are two points that need making here. First, those wishing to read Montaigne as a proto-liberal will surely seize onto this sentence, but they will have to stop halfway through. “We should not be slavishly subjected to the common laws . . .”. The key word here is “slavishly.” We should be subjected to the laws, but our subjection should not be slavish; it should be freely willed. Second, this latter notion—free submission to the law—begins to sound an awful lot like German idealism, but the law that one freely wills is itself not an abstract law; the law is not opposed to mere custom, as it would be for Kant. The law is in fact custom itself. It is custom itself that the subject must freely will. Montaigne, in other words, is capable of referring disdainfully to a “simple and servile bondage to usage,” but it’s the “simple and servile” that bothers him and not the “bondage to usage.” (1.31 / 158) Montaigne offers a doctrine in which everything depends on our opting for custom, over and over again, with each new alternative that comes our way. What we have in Montaigne is a vision of a humanist subject constructing an abstract relationship to its own particularity. In order to sense this, we need to pay careful attention to the Essays’ narrative qualities—the unfolding of cognitive crisis—rather than their passing character of declamation or philosophical exposition. Montaigne is pursuing a rather involved rhetorical strategy here: first he initiates his readers into the idea of a self-enclosed subjectivity—a deep and finely nuanced internality, stripped of embeddedness; and then he hits them with everything that is inadequate about this abstract self. He sets the maverick, disembodied subject loose—and then has to scramble to rein

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it in: “We are never at home; we are always beyond.” Nous ne sommes jamais chez nous, nous sommes toujours au delà. (1.3 / 8) This is all laid out in the essay on “Vain Subtleties,” where Montaigne draws up a brief typology of intellects. There are three types of thinker, Montaigne writes. First, there are “simple souls,” benighted and credulous, but good Christians and good neighbors. Then there is the “middle range,” the half-wits or wise fools, whose moderate intelligence ends up muddling everything. They follow the “first plausible meaning”; they “regard our sticking to the old ways . . . as simplicity and stupidity.” Montaigne, slyly, suggests that these intellectual “half-breeds” are actually correct—they are correct, for instance, to point out that established social practices cannot be philosophically justified—but they are correct in a way that only corroborates their stupidity, because they are convinced that their insights need to be acted on. Finally, there are the great minds who are the secret allies of the simpletons. Wisdom and study will re-create something rather like an untaught piety, though in a “deeper and more abstruse light.” (1.54 / 277)32 But why, finally, this will to ignorance?33 Why is knowledge a problem for Montaigne? I think we can say that skepticism, as a practice, only makes sense against the rise of epistemology in Europe, what we might call the intrusion of epistemology into social life. Knowledge, after all, took on a new status in early modern Europe. Pre-modern philosophy was in some literal sense cloistered; it may have been totalizing in its scope, but it was monkish in its practices, without any clear claim on kings or courts or the common life of the nation—this last, indeed, can’t be said to have existed. What happened in the early modern centuries was that epistemology and its institutions became in some measure autonomous; they came, in the form of the public sphere, say, or of experimental science, to constitute their own social realm, with their own institutions and procedures that refused to bow to the traditional moral strictures put on intellectual life. They disarticulated themselves from community-bound standards, proclaiming an independence from, or even precedence over, the sphere of politics. We can make this point in Marxist terms, seeing in epistemology an analogy of the market economy, which came in this period to claim a similar precedence, in which case we may feel compelled to wonder whether there isn’t some special relationship between epistemology and market exchange; or we can make the point in generically sociological terms, casting modernity as a series

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of autonomous and potentially antagonistic social sites, with knowledge now one contending sphere among others. Either way, we have to distinguish this notion from the later, more familiar contention that knowledge is in the service of capital or the state, debased into so many technologies of profit and power. There is a sense, to be sure, in which the Pyrrhonists are aware that the new learning makes possible new forms of authority, and it is not hard to see the skeptical attack on knowledge as a displaced attack on these new institutions: new print networks helped install expanded markets, which themselves operated under the dream of perfect knowledge. New information-gathering bureaucracies fixed in place the administrative state. A new corpus of travel writing, offered in the spirit of comparative ethnology, set the stage for empire. But the more interesting point, it seems to me, is this: the Pyrrhonists’ anxiety is, typically, very nearly the antithesis of this now common position—not that knowledge proceeds in tandem with authority, but rather that authority, however defined, will prove unable to keep knowledge in check, that the authentic forms of common life have become subordinate to a newly resourceful epistemology, that a proliferating knowledge will subject authority to perpetual innovation, in which case authority will no longer be authority at all. It is this shift to epistemology, to knowledge and argument as a kind of permanent novelty, that early modern skepticism seeks to preempt. What most clearly distinguishes Pyrrhonism from anti-foundationalism as we now understand it is that Pyrrhonism turns knowledge into a sign for the entire history of social differentiation. We can finally see what it has been vital for us to understand all along: Pyrrhonism is actually the opposite of a post-structuralism and its affiliated movements. The latter finds in knowledge an index of sameness and imagines that by undoing knowledge it can also undo the history of homogenization. Pyrrhonism finds in knowledge an index of difference, and by opposing knowledge seeks to turn back a history of social differentiation. When Montaigne, for example, imagines the New World as an antediluvian paradise without knowledge, he is making knowledge stand in for the entire subsequent history of Europe: law, bureaucracy, warfare, and so on. This, then, is the Essays’ third narrative, operating within a temporality much vaster than that of subject or nation: “What they tell us of the Brazilians, that they died only of old age, which is attributed to the serenity and tranquillity of their air, I attribute rather to the tranquillity and serenity of

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their souls, unburdened with any tense or unpleasant passion or thought or occupation, as people who spent their life in admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without religion of any kind.” (2.12 / 362) Pyrrhonism, when closely examined, may seem garbled, straddling discourses in a way that is not so much nimble as desperate—it may, taken as a general imperative, seem an unconvincing or unattractive or even contemptible way to live one’s life—but it discloses something important about early modern Europe: it makes epistemology out to be a symptom of social complexity and conflict. It is this complexity that the savant’s claim to know normally effaces; the allegedly successful act of knowing tends to jettison, like spent fuel, the labor that went into knowing—the very fact that we find ourselves in a social situation diffuse enough to require that effort, where practices and institutions and communities don’t seem merely given or adequately circumscribed by traditional vocabularies, vocabularies which aren’t in this sense knowledge. Pyrrhonism, illicitly but tellingly, tries to undo that history of differentiation by undoing its philosophical trappings. It seeks to retrieve that state in which knowledge was once superfluous. We may return to the question of skepticism and alienation with which these chapters began: Pyrrhonism’s project is to de-epistemologize the epistemological subject, to point the way back to the unalienated web of custom and community. The problem would seem in this sense to be one of irony: Pyrrhonism offers a rationale by which the modern subjects who already know theoretical practices to be contingent can continue to adhere to those practices without need for further reflection. Pyrrhonism coaches the subject of knowledge in a form of ironic belief. But this, in fact, only points back to a problem with the notion of belief itself. There is a dilemma in so-called belief, an impasse within the entire vocabulary of belief, that is complementary to the paradoxes that everywhere accompany skepticism. For belief is only ever articulated against the possibility of doubt. It is the public acknowledgement, contested in advance, of a conviction that can no longer be anything but private. Hegel notes that the Greeks, in the condition of Sittlichkeit, did not possess beliefs as we understand that word. Greek consciousness did not “believe in them”—the laws—“for although belief does perceive essential being it perceives it as something alien to itself.”34 Belief, in other words, names that state in which conviction has been robbed of the authority of the tacit, which is subject, in this sense, to neither belief nor

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skepticism. One “believes” something only once one has given up the claim to “knowing” it or only once one has been given good reasons not to believe it. All belief is, in this sense, ironic and potentially selfcanceling. “He who has only faith,” say the philosophers, “for precisely that reason, no longer has it.”35 There is another sentence of Hegel’s that brings the Pyrrhonist project into sharp relief in more or less these terms: “When the power of synthesis vanishes from the lives of men and when the antitheses have lost their vital relation and their power of interaction and gain independence, it is then that philosophy becomes a felt need.”36 A statement such as this clearly assigns a rather exalted role to philosophy. Philosophy’s world-historical vocation lies in the felt need for synthesis: it comes into being, heroically, to provide the knowledge that is no longer available from ordinary social experience. But Hegel’s notion has as it corollary a less sanguine formulation: that philosophy always names a lack, that pure thought is what substitutes for the lived experience of totality, in which case we might welcome it and resent it in equal proportion. The important point is that the Pyrrhonists come down squarely on the side of resentment. Indeed, if I may risk an anachronism: we will understand something important about Pyrrhonism if we can see that it works by reversing this familiar Hegelian causality: It doesn’t see philosophy as the consequence of—the potentially salutary response to—social atomization. It holds philosophy responsible for social atomization—or at least denounces it as the latter’s most despicable symptom. And to somebody who conceives of philosophy in these terms, as a form of alienation, skepticism offers itself as an ingenious means of returning to the condition of Sittlichkeit, of thwarting the knowledge that has corroded social bonds, and of re-creating, through a labor of philosophical forbearance, the equanimity that is the apparent hallmark of the pre-modern or the naïve.37

II

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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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Introduction: The Question of Natural Philosophy

IN 1665, an Anglican priest named Joseph Glanvill published a book called Scepsis Scientifica.1 The title—Scientific Skepticism—is all wrong, so wrong that it hardly seems worth describing the actual book until its obscurities have been admitted. Let’s just take each of the words in turn. First, the adjective. Intellectual historians have been pleading with each other for at least a generation now not to use the term scientist to describe Bacon or Newton or William Harvey, not to use the term scientific to characterize their endeavors, not to use the term science to name their ideas about the natural world. The worry, broadly, is that the word science doesn’t capture what Newton and the others were up to, because it separates knowledge of the material world out from other types of knowledge or modes of knowing. Seventeenth-century thinkers had their own terms for describing what was new in their thought, and these terms were quite varied: the new philosophy, the experimental philosophy, the mechanical philosophy, sometimes just the French philosophy. Conspicuous here, however, is the recurrence of the word philosophy, which brings into view the single most important aspect of the word science as English speakers have commonly used it since the early nineteenth century: that it isn’t philosophy. You can call a body of knowledge science only once you’ve decided it shouldn’t be called philosophy; science is that peculiar form of systematic knowledge which is trying really hard not to be philosophy, and scientists, similarly, are otherwise learned people who maintain a principled silence on matters of ontology and morality and politics and God. When we see seventeenth-century thinkers still referring to themselves as philosophers we are reminded that they

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maintained no such silence—that they had all sorts of nontrivial things to say about divinity and ethics and the commonwealth—and that they saw knowledge of nature as just one important plank in a more encompassing intellectual endeavor.2 So we’re meant to call Newton a natural philosopher, for the simple reason that this is what he called himself. It is the same favor we might do a religious sect or ethnic group. On these terms, the recommendation sounds reasonable enough, and yet it still might make a person itchy: The intellectual historians, like their allies among the revisionist political historians, are always on the lurk for conceptual anachronism. The cry of anachronism has, in fact, become their chief weapon against the social historians, who are to be faulted simply for analyzing the past with concepts of their own devising. We shouldn’t talk about capitalism in the seventeenth century because the concept of capitalism didn’t exist yet. This is a little silly, as should be clear enough from the revisionists’ own writings. When not accusing others of anachronism, the revisionists can often be found expounding the doctrine of unintended consequences: History is not a matter of big plans boldly executed; it is a matter of contingencies and small reversals, a calculus of many lives pursuing personal ends, occasionally a matter of big plans attempted, but then inevitably rewoven beyond recognition by fortune and accident. And so we’re forced to conclude that almost no-one in England actually set out to overthrow the state in the 1640s; events took on a logic of their own, anti-royalists radicalized despite themselves, Charles I fell to the ax of circumstance. Or we’re forced to say that the early modern English state didn’t really set out to acquire colonies; what gets called the first British Empire was just an ad hoc set of overseas adventures undertaken by mostly private men. It was a blue-water assemblage or mishap. It’s not hard to sense how this notion of unintended consequences might dovetail with accusations of anachronism, in which case we would say that the problem with run-of-the-mill social historians is that they recast the English Revolution on the model of the Russian or French Revolutions— that’s generally what it means to even speak of an English Revolution, as opposed to a Puritan Revolution or the Civil War or Wars. Alternately, the problem with the social historians is that they inject nineteenth-century imperialist foreign policy back into seventeenth-century European expansion and end up concocting a kind of high-imperial Scramble for the Caribbean. But perhaps the revisionists aren’t as unlike the social

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historians as they take themselves to be: An aversion to anachronism is actually at odds with the doctrine of unintended consequences, which says, roughly, that the Puritans and Parliamentarians staged a revolution without their even knowing it and that the sugar planters and Atlantic privateers built an empire without exactly meaning to; and it is hard to know how we are to name those unintended consequences if we don’t make our peace with anachronism—that is, if we don’t introduce into our historical accounts terms that were not available to the original actors. Unintended consequences is the slogan under which the historians most opposed to sociology reintroduce into their writing the latter’s founding insight, which is that the social field almost never coincides with the understandings of its own members. Unintended consequences demand that we anachronize. It is possible to live in a capitalist society and not know it. But then does the same point hold for science (or for any other overt intellectual practice)? Here the intellectual historians are on more solid ground. It’s not hard to imagine finding yourself going along with a revolution that you hadn’t bargained for and can’t properly name, but can you be a scientist without knowing it? Can you systematically gather knowledge about the natural world, mostly by experiment, relying chiefly on materialist and mathematical modes of explanation, to the principled exclusion of metaphysical speculation, without knowing it? Probably not. Some of early modern Europe’s more extravagant neoPlatonists were fond of arguing that there was something special about the earliest forms of philosophy in the eastern Mediterranean: Hermes Trismegistus and Pythagoras and Plato had prepared the Gentiles for Christ’s coming; they had insinuated into pagan thinking ideas that would ready the Europeans for the eventual arrival of Christ. Platonism had kept the Greeks on ice for God, which means that its key thinkers were, after a fashion, Christians who didn’t know it. What’s curious, then, is that the historians of early modern “science”—I mean the ones who blithely use that term—commit a version of this rather bizarre error. Some of them—usually the very historians who most dislike these same neo-Platonic traditions; the historians most likely to argue that Giordano Bruno, for instance, was “really a scientist” and not “just a magus”—some of them treat science in the same way that the Hermeticists once treated Christ, as having been there latently in the world before it was there in fact.

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So let’s put one on the board for the intellectual historians. Early celestial mechanics and accounts of magnets and vacuums and pumping blood are better grasped if we call them natural philosophy. But then there’s still a problem: Once we train ourselves to speak of natural philosophy, what do we do with those seventeenth-century writers who themselves prefer the word science and its derivatives? Glanvill’s book is called Scientific Skepticism, and that first word isn’t just a fluke of the title: Science is the term Glanvill generally uses to name what he is about. He laments that “we are at a loss for a scientifical account . . . of our senses” or that, having each spent nine months in the womb, we still “can give no more scientifical account of the state of our three-quarters confinement than if we had never been extant in the greater world.” He suggests that the thinking mind requires a “scientifical method” and urges his fellows to incur “pains in quest of science.”3 Thomas Hobbes, writing some ten years earlier, goes Glanvill one better, since he already makes it clear that something called science is a saving alternative to philosophy. Science is not just a casual synonym for philosophical system; it is a polemical substitute for it. So Hobbes speaks of “infallible science” or “true science,” as against “vain and erroneous” philosophy—he’ll speak at one point of “vain philosophy and fabulous traditions”—and his use of those two terms, science and philosophy, is patterned enough that each noun will begin to absorb its adjectives into itself: Science gets defined by its infallibility, philosophy by its vanity.4 Nearly any body of knowledge (or set of arguments) that Hobbes wants to commend to the reader he will call science. Philosophy, contrariwise, is something you can only “profess”; it is a type of madness or, at best, a bookishness. Geometry, Hobbes says, is “the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind.”5 Perhaps the problem is clear. We do someone like Hobbes no favors if we simply call him a natural philosopher, congratulate ourselves on our fidelity to the lexical past, and soldier on without stopping to reckon with what is oddest in his writing, which is precisely his untimely commitment to the term science. So what do we do with an anachronism when it is not ours to delete? The trick is to recover a sense of what was once unexpected and contrary about the word science, though a word of caution is in order here. Science was not, in fact, a new word in English when Hobbes and Glanvill were writing; it had long been in common use and had already acquired a range of meanings: knowledge in general, any particular branch of knowledge, a skill that required formal

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learning, sometimes just a craft. What’s odd, then, is not its sudden appearance on the scene, but a subtle shift in its valence: In some mouths— Hobbes’s, Glanvill’s, others that aligned themselves with Descartes or the Mersenne circle in Paris—the word gets repeated so often and with such unexplained emphasis that it begins to seem like a term of art. It takes on something of the character of a loan word, as though the naturalized English term were becoming foreign all over again, as though it really were a freshly borrowed Gallicism, newly stripped of its nasal honk. What does it mean to think you’re doing science when everyone else around you—including the people we would call physicists and astronomers and such—take themselves to be doing philosophy? What reason might a person have for wanting to study the natural world systematically but unphilosophically? That’s the question looming over the adjective scientific. But then what about the skepticism that it modifies in Glanvill’s title? The conjunction of science and skepticism is even more peculiar than the word science standing alone, though Glanvill is hardly the only one in the period to align the two. In 1661—that is, four years before the appearance of Glanvill’s book; the same year, in fact, that Scientific Skepticism first appeared (albeit under a different title)—Robert Boyle published a tract called The Sceptical Chymist, widely regarded as one of the most important books in the history of chemistry.6 The problem here is simple: Skepticism is a position that denies the possibility of knowledge. The word skeptical did not, in the 1660s, mean “generally wary of popular belief” or “convincible only via rigorous demonstration.” It meant something like “hostile to the entire endeavor of learning.” A skeptical chemist is thus not an especially tough-minded chemist; he is a chemist who has given up on the possibility of chemical knowledge, of ever understanding anything about substances and how they compound in the world’s things. These titles, then, are witty conceits in the manner that the century is famous for, though we have long since lost a sense of them as paradoxes or provocative oxymorons. A skeptical chemist is like a Petrarchan lover who freezes when he burns and is free when held captive and is purified by sinning. Here, too, a word of explanation is necessary: It is important that we not mistake these titles for mere literary flourishes, philosophers bragging that they have read their Donne. They are that, too, of course, but natural philosophers had their own reasons for loving jokes and paradoxes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

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many naturalists, mostly natural historians, were especially interested in freakish plants and animals—not just one-off monsters or miscarried mutants, but entire species that defied the period’s usual categories or modes of explanation. Lambs that grew on stalks, like gourds or tomatoes—and some writers reported having seen such things—were living paradoxes, vegetable and beast at once, the whole cassoulet. Concern for such species tended to go hand in hand with a certain way of thinking about nature, one that did not emphasize nature’s order, which is what we normally expect to find in the period, but instead flaunted its improbable variety, its sheer, sporting plenitude, its ability to undo the most basic classifications we would bring to bear upon it. Some early modern writers, in sum, were obsessed with hermaphroditic snails, and if you choose to glimpse in this the possibility, at least, of a queer science, you wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. The notion here was that nature plays: It shifts, it mutates, it mimics, it grafts and hybridizes, cycling joyously through the full range of living possibility. A good student of nature, then, will need to have a knack for play, as well; and so many of the period’s books instructed readers on how to counterfeit nature—on how to produce what we would consider frauds or, at best, ingenious creations—taxidermical hoaxes, really, fabulous creatures, griffons and basilisks sewn together out of rabbits and dogs and other equally mundane members of the European barnyard; and many scientific collections were content to display these swindles. But then such fabrications weren’t generally seen as violating an epistemology of empirical accuracy; rather, they were part of an alternative epistemology of play, in which students of nature tried to align themselves with nature’s distinctive forces, tried to emulate nature, to hand themselves over to nature, precisely by devising an unreal creature, on the understanding that this is what nature itself does. Nature does not merely repeat itself, breeding standardized, ark-ready pairs of the same few species; it engineers the unexpected and hitherto imaginary. A contrived unicorn merely helps nature fill in the gaps.7 By calling himself a “skeptical chemist,” then, the seventeenth-century natural philosopher becomes a living paradox of this kind, an intellectual zoophyte; he attains the status of one of his own freaks. Men of science went by many different names in the seventeenth century: Natural philosophers, natural historians, mathematicians, physicians. The skeptical chemist is the most outlandish species in that bestiary. We will have to take his measure.

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Skepticism and Utopia

SCIENTIFIC skepticism—the paradox is easier to aggravate than it is to explain. The problem, in a nutshell, is that early modern natural philosophers generally seem, to a quite unusual degree, un-skeptical: credulous, brazen, exorbitantly promising that knowledge of the natural world will remake or even redeem that world. Giordano Bruno, for one, thought of science as a kind of paganism, a pre-Christian wisdom that would teach its practitioners to love the infinitely varied objects that populate the cosmos; and what we usually call the Scientific Revolution he envisioned as a competitor Reformation, a way of reviving long-buried, basically Egyptian modes of reverencing the God-filled world. Tycho Brahe enters our textbooks as the scientist who first documented the appearance of a new star, thereby demonstrating that the heavens were, in fact, capable of change; but it is less commonly noted that he considered this new star to be literally heaven-sent, God’s porch light, a sign that Europe was entering into a new age of Christian love. Even Isaac Newton turns out to have been an anti-social heretic and Christian alchemist who spent most of his time trying to discover, in his lab, the particular chemical by which God controls objects in the world; who saw his own science as a revival of the world’s first religion; and who spent his off hours looking for historical confirmation of biblical prophesy. Such is the face of science in a period that lacked the institutions and ideologies that scientists now rely on to sustain their efforts; science could only justify itself in terms poached from other philosophical registers, and this lent the entire endeavor the air of crackpot enthusiasm. We can be more specific: natural philosophy seems least like science in that it kept

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close company with at least three forms of magnificent humbug. First, natural philosophy often saw itself as a species of magic. What we call science is not the simple extension of everyday observation but actually works at one remove from such common sense. Modern physics could only come into being by overturning earlier convictions, some of which seem perfectly in line with our ordinary experience of the world: objects fall because they are heavy; vacuums cannot exist; rest is natural and motion is not. Science works by abstracting away from the mundane and embodied empiricism of daily life; it crafts a language for naming mostly invisible forces—the minute, the cosmically remote, the American—and is thus a kind of empiricism of the unseen or the occult—and so easily assimilated to magic. Second, natural philosophy was often millenarian. Knowledge, having once caused the Fall, would now undo it. If systematically acquired, it would allow humanity to once again command nature, in a manner last seen in Eden, and would thus mark the culmination of Christian history, the restoration of God’s favor, a benignly protracted end of days. Science itself would be the lost Adamic language, a way of “calling the creatures by their true names”—that’s Francis Bacon, in case anyone is tempted to attribute such views only to the century’s ranting fringe.1 But then, third, that ranting fringe is itself worth taking seriously, because it is with them that a Left history of science spots its chance. Anyone who took millenarian views seriously was easily pushed into the political opposition; it will come as no surprise to learn that, after the English king was executed in the 1640s, a cadre of intellectuals from across Europe congregated in London to draw up plans for an actual scientific revolution. The idea was to abolish or transform the traditional institutions of knowledge—the universities, the trade guilds, and so on— and to establish new offices to coordinate the amassing and dissemination of all knowledge throughout England and Wales, on the theory that everything must be taught to everyone. The English Revolution would become a living encyclopedia.2 Magic, the millennium, revolution—a fourth term can bridge them all: utopia is the authentic note of early modern natural philosophy, and this is the hurdle we will have to clear if we want to make sense of the skeptical chemist. The question here is in large part one of language, of how knowledge gets represented. Utopian writing was one of the great innovations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and one of the features that most unites the early utopias is the centrality they

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accord knowledge. Later utopias will spill out in every direction, uttering their several, mutually incompatible wishes, most efficiently captured as a list of withouts: life without property or life without money or without gender or technology or the state. The early utopias may not agree on much either, but they do agree that the better world will require a massive infusion of learning. To begin with the obvious: More’s Utopia (1516) and Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) are both anti-feudal, anti-commercial orders of nonstop education and self-cultivation.3 What’s most notable about the genre’s urtext, in fact, is its attempt to imagine the egalitarian extension of its author’s elite humanism; it may be the book’s communism that most readers get hung up on, but it is worth remembering that shared property, in More, is in the service of this other program. The utopians share wealth and the burdens of work so that all people will have most of the day to learn. Utopia remakes the European city into a generalized schoolhouse, or better, a liberal arts college from which no one need ever graduate. And Campanella’s great innovation over More is to literalize that notion: his city is a set of nested circles, with a series of walls encompassing the town in wider and wider loops, dividing each ring-road from the next; and each wall is printed, back and front, with all manner of useful knowledge, so that one mural teaches geometry, another teaches astronomy, and so on, in a preemptive extrapolation from Courbusier’s manhole covers. The town’s built structures will make the cosmos intelligible in the way a subway map makes its city intelligible. For its part, Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627)—an entire island, as in More, and not just a city—is organized into underground research centers, observation towers, field stations, zoos, aquaria, and experimental gardens, and this is perhaps best thought of as introducing a modification into Campanella’s scheme: town planning will aid in the production of knowledge and not just in its distribution. Architecture will make a laboratory of the very landscape. What we can see here in these multiple examples is that the early utopias have a distinctive way of framing their concern with knowledge just by virtue of being utopias. They do not ask, in the usual manner of philosophy, what kind of mind one needs to have—or what kind of cognitive procedure one needs to master—in order to obtain knowledge. They are not concerned with thinking persons in this sense. In fact, the classic utopias are barely concerned with persons at all; they are not interested in subjectivity, which is to say, in narrative terms, that they don’t really have

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characters, in a manner that reliably frustrates readers who have formed their tastes on novels. They are stories without subjects, and this seeming deficiency is actually their secret boast, because the very form of utopian writing entails a question that almost none of the period’s philosophers knows how to ask: What kind of social order—indeed, what kind of built environment—is necessary for knowledge to become available to large numbers of people at once? One of the many ways in which we are no longer able to read these early utopias is that it is almost impossible for us to recover a position from which organized knowledge is available only as a fantasy and not as a Google search. The utopias themselves conspire in this blockage, since their first order of business, before we get to their vaunted ironies and irresolutions, is to render their various fantasies concrete, plausible, and thus subjunctively familiar. Utopias are habitually described as fancies, but they irritate precisely where they are most fanciful—not exactly where they seem least familiar, but where they seem least capable of becoming familiar—and this is one of the reasons that they are so allergic to narrative or plot, because plots require events, and events, understood as singular occurrences, always have something improbable about them, in the strict sense of the word: something unrepeatable, unlikely to happen (or to happen again). But then we need to think harder about this notion of utopian familiarity, for whatever else utopia is, it is also an encounter with an Other, something from the far and uncharted side of the globe, even when they import recognizably English features into their inventions: More’s gussied-up London, Bacon’s anglicized aristocracy. Mere fancy may irritate, but genuine familiarity is no less vexing. One of the distinctive experiences of reading utopias is the sense of deflation one feels upon encountering some element that seems too recognizable, insufficiently unlike the bad world; and the telling point is that this holds equally for the distressingly familiar—Do women in Utopia really have to do all the cooking?—and for the trivially so. The simple fact that we intuitively describe More’s communal dining halls as “cafeterias” points to a real problem, which is that we occasionally eat out in utopia and don’t feel transformed by its salad bars. Utopias, then, ask us to face our political desire as we would something radically unlike ourselves. They confront us with the sheer, shocking alterity of the future, which is the member routinely left off that list of Others to whom it is asked we pay respectful heed. Such, then, is the

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interpretive problem for anyone reading the early utopias: How do we recover some sense of a knowledge society as anything but routine and everyday? But the problem isn’t just ours, as belated readers. Our challenge has as its counterpart a puzzle faced by the utopian writers themselves, probably the defining problem in matters of utopian style. For how does one even begin to describe the radically new? The worry here is that all language is dogged by familiarity, that it is a record of already existing objects and practices, that it cannot help but refer us back to already existing things, in which case any fantasy object will turn out upon closer inspection to be, as it were, modular, a composite of prefabricated parts; and utopia, in this sense, can never be anything more than an ingenious reshuffling of the deck. Genuine utopianism, then, would have to be iconoclastic, a refusal to name the future and thus bind it to the wonted, in which case utopian thought exacts as its price the entire genre of utopian writing, whose every sentence is a self-betrayal, a blot on expectancy. What we’re seeing here is that the problem of knowledge is built into utopian writing at the level of form or style. It is not just a matter of these early utopias’ optional content—of Solomon’s House, say, or the Greek classics that the sailors bring to More’s island like Spam to Polynesia. The utopian sentence, even as it sets out to describe new institutions of knowledge, is stalked by the most basic epistemological question of all: How do you gain access to something you can’t yet possibly be said to know? One wonders, then, how the classic utopias solve this problem. Where do they find the writing strategies to describe their terrae incognitae? It might help if we looked first at a text that travels the opposite route, one that actually takes the iconoclastic—or, if you like, skeptical— line. Stanislav Lem’s Solaris (1961) is by no means a utopian novel, but like much of the science fiction that takes the utopian canon as its precursor, it shares the latter’s basic problem or puzzle: Is there a language to name the radically other or alien?4 The story is dead simple. Three scientists are trying to make sense of an alien life-form, a living ocean that covers nearly all of a remote planet and which earlier researchers have slowly understood to be a single, vast and intelligent organism; they fail; that’s the entire arc of the narrative. The only piece of information that needs to be added to this basic description is that the novel is narrated by one its scientists—a psychologist newly arrived on the space

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station that hovers above the planet—which means that the scientists’ failure is necessarily the novel’s own. The novel does not equip its readers with some hidden trove of knowledge, some master key that it denies its scientist-characters, in the manner of a historical novel where readers know in advance that the Highlanders won’t win this fight. If anything, we might rather think of Solaris as punishing the scifi buffs who are its readiest readers, or at least as assiduously disappointing their genre-determined expectations. It frets about the “geocentrism” that scientists (and novelists and readers) employ to make sense of the living ocean, because “the preconceptions of Earth”—of the entire earth, and not just of the planet’s scientists—“the preconceptions of Earth offer no assistance in unraveling the mysteries of Solaris.” It speaks, too, of the “illusions produced by our compulsion”—an encompassing our—“to superimpose analogies with what we know.” Or elsewhere: “There was no escaping the impressions that grew out of man’s experience on Earth. The prospects of Contact receded.”5 That last sentence is the sound of an entire genre turning in on itself. Perhaps the easiest way of understanding Lem’s novel, then, is to call it the Tristram Shandy of science fiction, the text that sets out to liquidate a young form from within; Solaris looks back over sixty-odd years of science fiction and resolves to negate both those terms, sci and fi, understood now as the twin faces of a single epistemological breakdown, which only ramifies when brought together in this disaster of a genre, this intergalactic minstrelsy show, in which the “humanoids” we initially take to be extraterrestrials—the Martians and lizard-men of a hundred space operas—only ever turn out to be earthlings with green shoe polish on their faces. But then what does a skeptical science fiction novel actually put between its covers, if not so many iconoclastically blank pages—Shandy’s famously black page, perhaps, reinterpreted as the view from a spaceship’s porthole? Solaris can’t get on with the usual business of science fiction in its space-explorer mode—that route is blocked by the novel’s skepticism—and so it ends up borrowing instead from three other genres, which come in, as it were, to replace those flagging SF conventions. First, large sections of the novel read like a scientific literature review. The narrative device here is reasonably straightforward: the newly arrived psychologist regularly feels compelled to bone up on the planet he’s been sent to study, and whenever he opens a volume from the

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space station’s Solaris library, the novel incorporates what he reads. It’s just that where most novels would use this as an opportunity to sneak in some dependable backstory, Lem has instead worked up a series of bravura setpieces, counterfeiting an entire scholarly apparatus, complete with contending theoretical schools, paradigm shifts, seasons of selfinterrogating metadiscourse, and so on. It is a marvelous writing exercise, one that earns Solaris a place alongside the Dunciad or Pale Fire and the other great works of mock scholarship. And though Lem’s performance is utterly deadpan, it is no less satirical than these others, in which case we have to revise a formulation just offered. For it’s not so much that Lem has borrowed from scholarly discourses as that he has borrowed from Menippean satire on scholarly discourses. His is a straight-faced parody of the scientific literature review, meant to induce even in lay readers a version of despair ordinarily reserved for graduate students, that combination of curiosity and helplessness one feels upon reading the first chapter of a scholarly book—that introductory chapter whose chorus of dissenting voices preemptively drowns out the succeeding monograph.6 But Lem is up to something here. Even as the scientific literature struggles to account for Solaris, it provides extended descriptions of what we’re not supposed to call the planet’s geological formations: the vast, temporary mountains that the living ocean casts up into the sky and then tears down again, like self-summoning volcanoes that exist only as long as it takes to erupt; or the crags that form in imitation of some nearby object, a passing cloud or dropped glove, and which would seem to indicate the alien organism’s capacity for something like art. The novel thus yields a second generic strand, a mode of sheer visual attention which is at once ekphrasis and a kind of topographical prosepoetry, and this it asks us to evaluate in at least two different ways. Those geological passages are unmistakably sublime; it’s as though the novel were trying here to recover the lost sublimity of topographic verse at a moment when its anthologized and earthbound forms have all taken on a banal, this-car-climbed-Mount-Washington quality; and Lem’s prose succeeds in this mostly by withholding the analogies or mere names that my summary has glibly supplied: mountains, volcanoes, crags. Lem writes around and past the word mountain so that he can describe with due awe a kind of elevation that none of us has ever seen.

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But then withholding the name of an object can also have a different effect. Right from the opening paragraphs, the novel exploits the limitations of its first-person narration by cinching its narrative frame tight, recording only what its psychologist-narrator sees, without context or explanation. The narrator is immobilized in a space capsule, hurtling through the dark, and the novel invites us to see him, under these circumstances, as pretty much the perfect Cartesian, almost a brain in a vat, disembodied, suspended in an abstract space of pure geometry to which he in no conceivable sense belongs, having to register sensations that seem utterly external and that he has to actively decode. This is not a comfortable position. The prose itself immediately emphasizes difficulties and omissions in the tide of perception; it withholds the phenomenological fullness—the great surge of itemized detail—that we expect from perceptual writing, as though to make us feel the poverty of perception thus torn from situation or circumstance: “I was plunged in darkness”; “I could not recognize a single constellation”; “I had missed the precious moment when the planet first came into view.”7 And even though some sensations do, if you like, take, these crowd in so close to the reader’s sensory field—are so insistently sensuous—that they can barely even be called perception at all; that is, they are allowed to register as raw, without subsumption by a concept, which alone would make them cognition. Lem’s strategy here is hard to overlook: “As my head began to spin, I caught sight of a tiny pattern of green and white dots; it was the station’s positioning marker. Something detached itself with a snap from the cone of the capsule; with a fierce jerk, the long parachute collar released its hoops, and the noise which followed reminded me irresistibly of Earth: for the first time after so many months, the moaning of the wind.”8 The repeated pattern—expanded now beyond the domain of sight—makes this passage conspicuous: onetwo-three, three times in a row, we have a sensory description so concrete as to be unintelligible—mere sense—promptly followed by a naming, which brings clarity, but only retrospectively, and is dissolved at once by the next unexplained attack of sensation. A “pattern” is followed by a “something” is followed by a “noise”; and these three terms offer especially clear evidence of how much more abstract sense description is than ordinary speech, which relies on such description almost not at all. It is possible to conclude that these sentences merely model a certain empiricist theory of cognition—the stages by which the mind

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putatively absorbs objects in the world—but then in doing so, they also make clear how disorienting and alienating it would be if our brains actually functioned the way a canonical empiricism says they do. The fantasy of all ekphrasis—that language can be rendered visual, that if pressed sufficiently hard it will finally, at last, mutate and thus seize hold of its object—only manages to tear open an obvious hole in the fabric of Lem’s prose. This, then, is ekphrasis in a skeptical mood, in its own way as grimly parodic and self-negating as the literature reviews in which it features. The problem is not just the faraway planet: objects are always aliens.9 But then Solaris has yet another category of alien objects, and it is these last that feature most prominently in the novel: the planet has the ability to conjure up flesh-and-blood bodies out of the memories of its human observers, which means that the narrator spends most of the book wandering the space station with the avatar of his dead wife. At this point, a third generic strand is unspooled, for Lem’s novel is above all a ghost story, and it takes no trouble to hide this: it calls those incarnated memories “phantoms,” “visitors,” and “apparitions”; sends its characters “fleeing from some invisible watcher,” and so on.10 If readers are tempted to further gloss this ghost story as a psychoanalytic parable—as an allegory of melancholy (whose sufferers refuse to surrender the lost objects of their desire) or of transference love (that love “composed entirely of repetitions and pale imitations of earlier reactions”)—then this is only because Freud has made it easy for them by scripting psychoanalysis as an Edwardian ghost story in the first place, charged with the “task of re-creating the repressed” by “summoning up a spirit from the underworld.”11 The characters in the novel are forced to make room in their lives for the issue of their own traumatic desires—there are shades here, obviously, of the diabolically granted wish—and this introduces an additional complexity into the scheme I’ve been elaborating, because it would be easy enough to range these ghosts among the novel’s expanding set of unknowable and unexplicable others, but this isn’t quite right, since, as memories, the ghosts can’t be understood as genuine others at all. Whatever alterity they can claim is merely that vexing, object-like otherness that Freud installs at the core of the psychoanalytic subject itself. The ghosts, then, ask to be read as terrible, truncated compensations for the absence of actual others; and one of the novel’s more interesting achievements is to give these stunted non-persons—these

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transference-wraiths—a kind of novelistic subjectivity of their own; the novel wants to imagine what it might feel like to exist as the abbreviated product of somebody else’s fantasy, and if anything diminishes Lem’s accomplishment here, it is the simple fact that anybody who has been loved already knows what this feels like. But the novel’s Gothic language also brings with it a second conceptual field or set of historical associations. At one point, the book will speak of its space station as a “ghost ship,” and with that one phrase and its suggestion of the eerie, inscrutable oceans, a certain imperial strain in Lem’s writing lights up.12 Here’s the novel: We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. . . . And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what do to with other worlds.13

If classic science fiction typically reads like a recapitulation of colonial history—just so many moon-Kiplings and Venutian Haggards—then we can be reasonably sure that Lem is the genre’s Conrad, charting the ideological exhaustion of the imperial project, systematically retelling its founding myths as horror stories, filling his pages with European explorers who come unhinged at the furthest reaches of their travels. At this point, the trick is to get the novel’s many registers to all line up: its critique of science, its psychoanalytic ghosts, its echoes of European empire. All of them get bundled together under the novel’s habitual skepticism, as various facets of the unknowable and ghastly—on the understanding that unknowability points to what is radically other. Much of this is the ordinary stuff of critical theory; the language comes perhaps a little too easily: a person’s ordinary forms of desire—the ones you take to be the emblems of your humanity—are actually imperialist, a kind of sick Hegelianism. You go out into the world desiring others: travelers want to know other peoples; lovers want to cohabit with people other than themselves; science wants to make sense of nature, which is the non-human

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and thus fundamentally other. And in each case, you merely end up replicating yourself—conquering other peoples; effacing the otherness of your lovers; dominating nature. What is so compelling about Lem, then, is that he recasts this cheaply moralizing version of critical theory as a penny dreadful, so that when you come face-to-face with the thing you claim to have wanted all along—something genuinely unlike you—it turns out to be chilling, some nearby thing that is nonetheless beyond the limits of our understanding: alien life-forms, alien landscapes, the alien objects of your own desire. Lem makes a Gothic thriller out of the basic drama of modern epistemology—the subject–object split—weaving together its two separate and complementary horror stories of solipsism (in its Freudian variant) and the enigmatic other: the cogito in its dungeon, the noumenon with clanking chains. For our purposes, the interest of Solaris is that it threatens to cancel the promise of utopian writing before we’ve even gotten around to specifying what that promise is. If we’re to understand the utopias, then, we will need to know what kind of narrative resources are even available to fill the holes that Lem leaves conspicuously unplugged. Happily, there exists a rather intriguing response novel to Solaris, and that’s John Brunner’s Total Eclipse. It should be noted straightaway that Total Eclipse actually asks that we read it as a reworking of Lem: it was published in 1974, four years after Solaris first appeared in English; the hero travels to his faraway planet to study his alien life-form in a space shuttle called the Stellaris; his mentor on the planet is a wise old Pole; and so the quasi-footnotes accumulate. The easiest way to describe Total Eclipse is to say simply that it retells Lem’s story in something other than a skeptical mode. We ordinarily think of satires as coming only after the texts they satirize, but Total Eclipse offers itself as a reversal of this basic literaryhistorical law; it is as though Solaris, once published, had summoned into being a second novel to serve as target and solemn counterpart, as though Total Eclipse had sprung into existence just in time to throw itself in front of Lem’s satirical bullet.14 Here, then, is the novel’s setup: on a remote planet, space explorers have found, not an alien species, but the remnants of an extinct alien species—a super-intelligent race of crab creatures—and the novel will track a team of thirty scientists as they fan out over the planet to investigate its various archaeological sites. Whatever else it is doing, then, Total Eclipse is playing a game of competitive alterity with Solaris. Like other

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science fiction novels—like the utopias themselves—you can imagine this book as pushing hard on the fundamental question of all anthropology: Is it possible to know an Other? The anthropological conception of culture already radicalizes that question beyond its ordinary range of philosophical meanings, as keyed to everyday life, the proximate others with whom we share streets and bedrooms. Lem then radicalizes it further by making those others non-human. And now Brunner ups the ante further still by making his non-humans dead—on the understanding that really existing archaeology is itself an epistemologically highstakes form of anthropology, one that asks what you can know about absent others using almost no evidence at all. But then there is no canon of archaeology novels with readily available conventions for Brunner to draw on, so one might wonder what in Total Eclipse actually takes the place of Lem’s horror-story skepticism. Brunner’s strategy is to take over Lem’s scenario more or less intact, but then to route it through a very different ensemble of genres. Three of these stand out: 1. The book is above all a mystery novel. In its opening pages, the novel has its archaeologist-hero ask: “How can I make myself comprehend the utter nonhumanity” of the alien species?—and then it promptly has him vow not to leave “the mystery unsolved.”15 It is in that modulation from Heidegger to Hercule Poirot that the novel first plays its hand. What’s most distinctive about Total Eclipse is how it brings in the roughand-ready language of detective fiction in order to address the central issue in all of radical ethics. It would seem that radical ethicists don’t need to stage a primal encounter with Being, don’t need to undo the entire history of European philosophy, don’t need to recover some sense of themselves as openings for the non-human world. They need trenchcoats and foxy stenographers. There is a rather precise act of generic substitution at work here. Where Lem has the Gothic or the ghost story, Brunner has—if not exactly a whodunit—then at least a who-were-they; and this is perhaps the most important shift at play in these books, because those two genres model for their readers utterly different attitudes toward knowledge. There is, of course, a subgenre of ghost stories that are themselves basically variants on the detective story: the ghost shows up; its presence calls attention to a mystery, a crime, a murder; some living person solves the murder; the bones are buried; knowledge becomes a kind of exorcism, a way not of preserving the past, but of obliterating it.

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It should already be clear that Lem’s is not that kind of ghost story. Solaris strikes a note of occult terror by the end of its second chapter and never much allows the reader to harbor the hope that this will all get cleared up. But Total Eclipse reads more and more like a mystery novel as it goes on, with its archaeologist-hero functioning increasingly as chief inspector, sifting through evidence, tallying hunches and hypotheses, setting out to confirm and disconfirm them. Like most forms of the Gothic, mystery novels are organized around a gap—the unexplained—but it is the implicit promise of any detective story that the unexplained is actually the not-yet-explained; and it is with this simple observation that we can see how Brunner is able to use the form of the mystery novel as an antidote to Lem’s skepticism and hence as an ingenious defense of science. Or perhaps “defense” isn’t quite the right word, since the novel doesn’t exactly mount an argued case on behalf of science; rather, it calls upon the established strategies of crime fiction in order to make us feel science as compelling. It will teach us via its Agatha Christie conventions to have patience with that Gothic-skeptical gap, simply by modeling for us, in the face of some mystery, the entirely un-mysterious labor of assembling knowledge piece by piece. What remains remarkable about Brunner’s novel, however, is that it thinks it can redirect this absolutely rudimentary story about knowledge—the basic story at once of science and the police—toward the fundamental problem of alterity as such. With its team of many experts, Total Eclipse often reads like a police procedural, and what sets the police procedural apart from other forms of crime fiction is its fascination with the institutional production of knowledge, in which case one is tempted to say that Brunner is pushing us to imagine a bureaucratic solution to the problem of the radically other, on the theory that Levinas could have spared himself a lot of trouble if he’d merely compiled a large enough database. 2. But we need to pull back from this description, because even as the novel sends out its squad of scientists to crack the case of the vanishing crab creatures, it keeps its archaeologist-hero in place in his role as master knower. And then the question becomes: What, in the novel’s terms, allows him to play that role? But then that’s always the question in mystery fiction, the question attending any character who fills the detective function: What are the sources of such a person’s epistemological superpowers? It is that question, in fact, that makes mystery stories such intriguing, impromptu exercises in the sociology of knowledge. And here

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the novel does something unexpected: Brunner’s archaeologist has become eminent in his field mostly because he is unusually good at projecting himself into long-dead lifeworlds; he parses cuneiform by climbing into the collective heads of its prehistoric etchers; and in the novel’s faraway galaxy, he will try to extend into utterly new terrain the techniques of this sympathetic archaeology, literally building himself a mechanical crab-suit so that he can skitter across the alien planet in the form of one of its dead inhabitants. This conceit startles not because it is outlandish, but precisely because it is disarmingly commonplace. The archaeologist is simply an empath, and empaths are familiar not only because they have gone on to become stock science fiction characters in their own right, but because they are perhaps the stock characters in the entire history of literary realism—or perhaps something more encompassing than stock characters, something more like the master types that comprise most realist narrators and most realist readers and any number of realism’s central characters. The realist novel is an ongoing discourse among empaths about empaths, flitting in and out of characters’ heads and hearts, turning us all into psychics and mind readers, which means that realism was always a kind of science fiction to begin with. The empathetic archaeologist asks to be read, then, as the perfected form of this utterly basic novelistic type, and one could easily read Total Eclipse as the improbable resurgence of literary sentimentalism within the science fiction form. With the allegorical license of science fiction, the novel tries to imagine the consummate sentimentalist, the cosmic man of feeling, who is so very empathetic that, having honed his techniques on widows and orphans, he can now feel his way into the position of a crayfish, directing all the resources of the future’s expanded technology to re-create a mode of knowing that is almost totemic or tribal and not in any ordinary sense scientific; more like Adorno’s mimesis than like the enlightenment that putatively replaced it. If there is something worth sticking up for in Brunner’s little-read book, it is this lunatic extension of novelistic sympathy, this reckless bid to press the entire history of the sentimental novel to some delirious and hypothetical extreme, in a manner that cracks open the constrictive humanism of the original sentimental project—that wants to turn its humanist techniques to anti- or at least trans-humanist ends, to the point where it models a few impossibly ordinary techniques for becoming animal, like the subject of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man—Treadwell whispering benevolently to the bears.

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3. Finally, it’s hard not to see the novel as a colonial adventure story, as well. I’ve been describing the novel’s hero as an archaeologist, but he is more precisely described as a paleolinguist; he has been sent to the planet to decipher the extinct creatures’ electromagnetic writing system, and this William Jones of crab-Sanskrit habitually refers to the creatures as “the natives,” as in: “We’re trying to peel away all the veils of history from the native race.”16 This is curious. The novel actually solicits the readers’ possible anxieties on this front, or at least assigns them to a character of their own. When the novel begins, Third Worldist types at the UN are threatening to shut the research station down and have shot a paranoid, strutting Bolivian general into space in order to vet the scientists’ work. The novel thus registers the anti-imperialist critique of knowledge, but only as an obstacle to be cleared: the general is gone from the book by page sixty, having recanted, apologized for his anti-imperialism, and given the scientists the Third World’s blessing to “reveal the mystery of the natives.”17 What’s most interesting is that this hastily executed sub- or really pre-plot has clear effects on the novel’s form: as long as the general is on hand, the novel pretty much withholds any descriptions of the alien planet; it is as though the very presence of a Third World nationalist disables the usual mechanisms of novelistic description; and it is only as the general is preparing to quit the novel for good that description comes, as it were, back on line. Readers then get their first delayed panorama of the planet, the scene from a hovercraft’s window: flying creatures; trees—“Trees? Not exactly”; a “herd of animals related to the vanished native,” with skin “almost as thick and tough as that of a rhinoceros.”18 It is clear in passages such as these that the novel’s approach to style is almost entirely like that of early imperial travel writing. It faces the same dilemma as faced by English explorers poised over their journals and logbooks: How do you record having seen plants and animals for which the European languages provide no terms? And in the teeth of this problem, Brunner resorts to the solutions offered by early imperial writing: its itemized empiricism, its idiom of careful and qualified approximation. It is just that a science fiction novel will have to stage that entire writing project at a higher level of abstraction. Where the European explorers had to adjust their descriptions of, say, American birds to approximate Old World sparrows and rooks, this novel has to perform that operation on the entire zoological class, on birds as such, because outer space empties out much larger patches of semantic terrain: not I saw something like a woodpecker, only larger,

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but I saw something like a bird, only not a bird. The novel’s mood in such scenes is markedly un-sublime—whatever isn’t quite yet wonder, something like simple curiosity; and here we need to ask again what kind of work science fiction, as a mode, is doing in Total Eclipse. If the novel displaces the epistemological eagerness of exploration onto a fictional planet, then this is surely out of a felt sense that earthly continents can no longer afford their accustomed thrill, because all the semantic gaps have been filled in. There is no longer the entertaining possibility that a European traveler will mail home sketches of grotesquely misrendered elephants. Here be no monsters. In those conditions, at the far end of colonial history, it falls to science fiction to re-create the pleasure of the colonial unknown, the teasing puzzle of the other, understood now as a safari, albeit without the rifles. And to that extent Brunner’s concern is precisely not Lem’s—not that knowledge has ominous, uncrossable limitations, but that it now has no limitations left; that the world has been rendered entirely too perspicuous. Lurking behind Total Eclipse, at the level of history itself, is the closing of an intellectual frontier, so that in the immediate aftermath of the European empires, this novel will restage those empires’ earliest history, in order to recover some sense of properly epistemological adventure, the memory of a terrain not yet captured by memory. So Solaris and Total Eclipse try to foster in their respective readers markedly different attitudes to the problem of knowing the other, and each achieves its effects by borrowing liberally from genres other than science fiction. Total Eclipse bushwhacks a path to its others via conventions adapted from travel writing, detective fiction, and the sentimental novel; and Solaris, meanwhile, closes the door on its others by adapting horror fiction, ekphrasis, and a satirical version of science writing. If we wish now to work out how the early modern utopias manage to describe social orders radically unlike their authors’ own—how they summon the Novum—then our procedure should be clear: we need merely catalog the genres the utopias draw upon. There are two here that demand special consideration. First, the earliest utopias were written as philosophical dialogues; this is most emphatically the case with More himself, whose founding work features multiple speakers, a narrated prologue, a carefully particularized setting, a temporally specified occasion, and so on. Second, the utopias borrow heavily from New World travel writing: More’s utopian traveler, Hythloday, is introduced as the world’s foremost expert on “unknown peoples and unexplored lands”;

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Campanella again takes the fast track by making his traveler one of Columbus’s sailors; and the fourth word of Bacon’s New Atlantis is “Peru.”19 But to simply name these genres is not yet to say much. We’ll also need to know how the philosophical dialogue and travel writing stand in relation to one another, and here the matter gets tricky. One wonders, for a start, what kind of work travel conventions are performing in the utopian text. The question can be asked more clearly: we have already seen with Solaris and Total Eclipse that science fiction is not so much a genre in its own right as it is a way of radicalizing other genres, of amplifying the concerns of established literary forms by exaggerating their conventions to the point where the writer is given fresh problems to solve. Science fiction is a kind of narrative steroid whose purpose it is to restore the flagging energies of a depleted genre; and so a sci-fi romance will revitalize the routines of the love story by having its earthly Casanova fall headlong for an ant woman, just as a sci-fi war story will conjure up unimaginable enemies to replace the quaintly Napoleonic soldiers of historical fiction. One suspects, then, that the point will hold for the utopias, as well, but if so, we’re faced with a bit of a puzzle. Anyone asking how More and Campanella and Bacon radicalize the procedures of early colonial travel writing has got to pause over the word early. Why would a speculative fiction feel compelled to radicalize a recent genre whose basic combinations haven’t yet been played out? One begins to worry that utopia’s dating is all wrong—not that the literary historians have got it wrong, but that the utopias themselves have made a mistake, that the genre itself is precipitate and untimely. It is hard to imagine that in 1516, when More’s Utopia first appeared—not a quarter century after Columbus’s first letter from the Caribbean and barely a decade after Vespucci’s literary voyages—New World travel writing already seemed sufficiently tapped out to require fictional renovation. We are used to thinking of utopia as a way of writing the future—or even as that-which-is-alwaysdeferred, that-for-which-one-permanently-waits—but we must at least consider the possibility that, from another perspective, utopia showed up too early or bumrushed the historical show. When More seizes hold of the still warm conventions of New World travel writing, what exactly is it that he is radicalizing? I mean to say that the apparently intuitive link between travel writing and utopia can actually seem a little odd, and this problem is only compounded by the content of the utopias themselves, by the substance

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of the various utopian constitutions, none of which actually seems to like travel very much. More’s island has notoriously strict travel regulations: any Utopians wanting to leave their hometowns have to get passes from the local authorities. Bacon’s Bensalem bans foreign travel outright, and when the European sailors show up off their coast, the Bensalemites initially refuse to let them disembark—again, no encouragement to travelers—and even once the sailors talk their way to shore, they are confined to the capital city, forbidden to tour the city’s hinterlands, as though Utopia were hiding a nuclear weapons program or race of experimental leopard-men. A paradox flares up: one of the policy recommendations that travelers to Utopia seem to bring home with them is that travel be severely restricted. The genre’s ideological proposals seem hopelessly at odds with its literary affiliations. But then at other moments, the early utopias do, in fact, recommend travel or something like it, and it is important that we think of this twofold stance as a specification and not an ambivalence. More’s Utopians say that whenever they encounter a foreign practice that is preferable to their own—more in keeping with human happiness—they cheerfully adopt it as a model. And then Campanella’s Solarians and Bacon’s Bensalemites actually send intelligencers fanning out over the globe to collect such practices. Here’s Campanella: “They explained to me that they understood the languages of all the nations and that they dispatched ambassadors throughout the world to learn what was both good and bad in each of them.” Or elsewhere in the same book: “The City of the Sun sends out spies to all nations to learn their customs and is continually improving its own.”20 It is perhaps easiest for us to think of these passages as the moment of genre theory within the utopias themselves, the point where the utopias pause to teach us the utopian function of all travelers’ tales: that they can at any point unleash a geopolitical Copernicanism, dislodging your homeland from its place of presumed centrality, reclassifying it, like earth among the planets, as just one member of a perhaps infinite set, and thus disrupting your sense of the finality of ordinary life, your sense that the institutions you inhabit have a fixed and necessary form. Before they come to us with any specific proposals— before they prompt us to debate the wisdom of abolishing private property or inspecting the naked bodies of possible spouses—utopias, just by virtue of the form they borrow from travel writing, exist as the bearers of abstract possibility.

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Passages such as these, at any rate, should put paid to the idea, regularly rehearsed in the scholarship, that utopian constitutions are themselves settled, fatally beyond change or history, hence authoritarian or edenically bored, and so on. Travel is the spur against the genre’s otherwise inert constitutionalism, the preserver of surplus utopian energies, the moment of utopian non-identity that persists even in utopian writing. And so Bacon on Bensalem’s spies: “Thus we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels; nor for silks; nor for spices; nor any other commodity of matter; but only for God’s first creature, which was Light: to have Light (I say) of the growth of all parts of the world.”21 The undercover anthropology recommended here is itself trying to solve a pressing political problem, one that has never gone away: Is it possible to opt out of global trade and not end up with a culture that is parochial or constrictively inward-looking? One is reminded of Ngugi in 1986, urging that Third World nationalists take as their first task the translation of the world’s great writers into regional languages (and not the closing of literary borders or, alternately, the export of regional writing to American libraries); a decolonized culture would be one in which Tolstoy and Neruda could be made to speak Quechua.22 The trick, Bacon’s Bensalemite priest says outright, is to “preserve the good which cometh by communicating with strangers, and avoiding the hurt.”23 The utopian spies of light are thus versions of Ngugi’s Third World translators: Bacon and Campanella dispatch voyagers on a sixteenth-century European model, but theirs are voyagers without imperial or commercial designs, unarmed conquistadors and ethnographers sprung loose from the colonial project. This, too, can be traced back to More: the first thing we learn about Utopia’s Portuguese traveler is that he is an expert on exploration, but then the second thing we learn about him is that he is a Hellenophile, an adherent of the Renaissance’s radicalized second stage, preferring the Greeks to the Romans. This means that More already conducts his first thoughtexperiment upon his European (and so doesn’t wait until the island to start introducing his utopian innovations). What if Columbus had been a Neoplatonist, a philosopher-sailor? And what if he had then discovered a Cuba full of Neoplatonists (whom he would have been more interested in learning from than, say, enslaving)? This point should, in turn, help us clear up the mystery of utopia’s chronology, the sense, that is, that utopian writing appeared before it should have. For it turns out that utopian writing does remarkably little

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to augment the conventions of travel writing. It is, rather, the historical project of European humanism that utopia’s speculative frame sets out to radicalize—or rather it is humanism that gets radicalized via the ordinary conventions of travel writing. Utopian writing latches onto a feature of European humanism that is easily overlooked—that it was always a mode of engagement with Christendom’s others. Even in its most orthodox, Greco-Roman form it demanded a commitment to pagan learning. In northern Europe, this temporal shift—reaching back behind Christian history—was compounded by a geographical dislocation: Italian humanists could pretend they were simply reviving the glory of Rome, but English and Dutch humanists had to pledge, rather, to trade in local customs for their Mediterranean counterparts. And in its woollier, Hermetic versions, humanism set out to revive an expressly non-European—Egyptian or Babylonian—wisdom. It is in utopian writing, then, that humanism, late in its history, takes its final step, beyond Egypt and Babylon, dislodging itself altogether from this or that particular site, no longer posing as a patrimony to be reclaimed in some kind of philosophical probate court, and offering itself instead as a replicable procedure, a method that can be brought to bear even on hypothetical lands on the far side of America. The fictional status of the genre’s territories vouches for the generalizability of the utopian operation, simply by modeling it in some pure form upon non-existent places, thereby making humanism visible as an intellectual project undertaken by the thinking mind and not as the special, transfixing property inherent to some Mediterranean object. This is what it means to say that More’s Hythloday is a utopian figure even before he arrives on the philosophical island, because he exists from the start as the bearer of this planetary humanism, embarked on precisely the kind of voyage that the Utopians themselves recommend; and the travel-narrative-as-philosophical-dialogue is precisely the form one might expect from such a Socrates-a-gogo. But if we now introduce the dialogue into our considerations, things will get knotty all over again. For Utopia’s modern readers have generally seen its two organizing genres as at odds with one another: the idea here is that the book’s dialogic frame places the entire utopian thought experiment between parentheses, marking it out as only a single voice within a spectrum of possible voices, and allowing other, competing and anti-utopian positions to register their objections, which will then nag away at readers,

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even as those readers first absorb the new challenges of the utopian imagination. It is obviously hard to assign the authorial voice to Hythloday in a book by Thomas More that also features a speaker called “Thomas More.” If we follow this reading, then utopian writing has, from the very start, been a way of staging one’s doubts and ambivalences about the possibility of utopia, and an inflated version of that same argument will hold that the philosophical dialogue is a way of fully neutralizing the traveler’s report; dialogue prompts us to reflect on the traveler’s naïve, basically touristic enthusiasms, threading sardonic commentary beneath Hythloday’s tedious slideshow of his island vacation.24 We might then conclude that an alternate (and preferable) utopia is conveyed by the text’s dialogic form, now at the expense of its only putatively utopian content—a liberal utopia of discussion and unregulated discourse, in marked contrast to the imagined island, where such discourse is expressly forbidden: anyone in Utopia who discusses politics outside of the island’s assembly is put to death. Much of the twentiethcentury commentary on More is a game of irony-spotting, and as ironies go, this one is a doozy: Hythloday would, in Utopia, face the gallows for initiating a conversation in defense of utopia. But then there is also reason to wonder whether philosophical dialogues are ever as straightforwardly pluralist as all that. Liberal defenders of the dialogue form generally read it against a prior history of the scholastic philosophical treatise, whose demonstrations and deductions, once forced to compete with the dialogue’s eclectic, Ciceronian backand-forth, begin to sound like droning soliloquies, as monotonously ill-judged as any eight-minute drum solo. The dialogue, like the essay, would seem to be an inherently skeptical form, one which elevates the argument on both sides of a question to the level of organizing principle.25 But if one reads even the Ciceronian dialogue, which flourished above all in the sixteenth century, not against its scholastic, Catholicuniversity past, but rather against its commercial and literary present— if we see it as in competition not just with Aquinas and Scotus, but equally with the rampant and burgeoning offerings of the new print marketplace—then what stands out is not the dialogue’s multiplication of possible voices, but precisely its restriction of them. The Ciceronian dialogue is generally staffed by aristocratic speakers, often real people, living figures called by name, and the form is generally careful to describe the rarefied spaces—villa gardens, mostly; a “green bank” in

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More—that shelter such elite conversation. The pluralism that liberal readers champion at the level of argument has thus been hollowed out in advance, at which point the form asks to be read as struggling to preserve in print the decorum and authority of a patrician intellectual culture that belongs to an age before print, at a moment when moveable type threatens to render argument anonymous and thereby open its platform to unseen and unqualified speakers.26 Speakers in dialogues, in other words, flaunt their credentials. This point alone should be enough to get a reader to start paying attention to all the techniques that dialogues have for administering their discourse—for stabilizing and weighting their apparent play of voices. Dialogues habitually shore up the authority of some speakers at the expense of others, and this is especially clear in More’s Utopia: the work famously falls into two halves. In the first volume, Hythloday rails against the current condition of England; in the second, he spells out the utopian alternative to English corruption. The important point, for present purposes, is that each volume conspicuously interrupts the argument on both sides of a question. One might expect Hythloday’s indictment of England to get a full rebuttal, but just as a second speaker steps up to defend the nation, the cardinal who is presiding over the conversation stops him—“Oh do shut up!”27—and thus lets Hythloday’s charges stand largely unchallenged. More important, in the work’s final pages, the book-More—who only once, during an exchange on the political duties of a wise man, has engaged Hythloday in anything like a real debate— says, roughly, that though he finds Hythloday absurd, he can’t be bothered to refute the traveler’s claims.28 And with that the book just ends. In both cases, Utopia calls our attention to the obligations of the dialogic form—that there should be a considered response to the main speaker’s ideas—only to defy those obligations and thus to leave the opposite case unstated. If we consider the development of utopian writing over time, the point will only become sharper. The dialogue form quickly loses its grip on utopia. By the time we get to Campanella—and his is only the second recognizable instance of the genre—the philosophical dialogue has already shriveled to a vestigial organ, a barebones A-B-A-B in which the B-speaker functions only as a proxy for the reader’s eager curiosity: Oh really?! Do go on! The historians of the dialogue form tell us that this tracks a broader shift over the course of the sixteenth century

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toward such closed dialogues, disputations reverting back to the condition of monologue.29 And then when we pick up The New Atlantis, we will find that Bacon has ditched the dialogue form altogether, so that only the traveler’s tale remains to organize the text’s otherwise varied materials. If we read the early utopias in sequence, then, we can witness an unusual process of generic de-splicing, in which the travel narrative expands to the point where it colonizes the entire utopian form, pushing the dialogue from the scene, at which point we might as well concede that the travel-narrative-as-dialogue was a rigged game anyway, since its main speakers had an authority that their rivals, the philosophical landlubbers, could never match—the authority of having encountered, firsthand, ways of living that no one back home could flat-out deny. The genre’s sailor-intellectuals come not to discourse, but to uncrate strange knowledge like it’s bullion. It was Plato who had once tried to shift the balance of philosophical power away from the traveler; in Plato’s city, anyone who had voyaged abroad was summoned to appear before the Committee of the Republic. If the traveler had discovered practices worth emulating, the Committee would consider decreeing their adoption. But if he had acquired foreign vices—if he had become foppish or Frenchified or developed a taste for ketjap—he would be put to death.30 What’s striking, then, is that the modern liberals who insist on the dialogical reading of Utopia—the reading in which English and Dutch gentlemen are there to deflate anything Hythloday has to say, to insulate the reader from the wayfarer’s enthusiasms—are basically sticking up for a meeker version of Plato’s Euro-nationalist debriefing commission, and they are strikingly out of step with the genre’s unfolding possibilities. More’s Utopia might be a chamber of echoing ironies, but as a genre, utopian writing begins to flourish at the expense of the dialogue and the varieties of skepticism such dialogues typically generate.

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1. At this point, it becomes possible to restate an earlier remark with renewed emphasis: the phrase “scientific skepticism” requires an explanation because its two terms are so defiantly incompatible—an unknowing knowledge or learned ignorance—and this at a historical moment in which the new philosophy was commonly regarded as enchanted, prophetic, and utopian. What will eventually get called science did not edge its way into European thought with self-effacing modesty, and to this now we must add the point that there is a second body of seventeenthcentury English literature that is, in fact, at cross-purposes with philosophy or learning; but very little of this writing is scientific in form, however that word is understood. The period’s anti-philosophy did not typically erupt from within its new philosophical modes. The matter of genre is once again instructive, and it is perhaps best approached via a general observation: nearly any literary genre will have a distinctive way of framing the problem of knowledge, a mode of attack that easily suggests itself, an easy path, if you like, away from philosophy. Utopian writing is the exception here. The forms of writing that conventionally get called “poetic” do not see themselves, in the first instance, as conveying knowledge; each has made its peace with its fictionality or artfulness, and so each will have its own more or less pugnacious ways of marking its distance from philosophy and science. To be sure, literary genres are not inherently skeptical. In the seventeenth century, English natural philosophers were generally stuck for ways of making their innovative observations seem credible, and their common strategy was to borrow

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the rhetorical authority of existing genres, to adapt those modes such that new things about the natural world could be easily said, which means that one of the more interesting trends in the period is that competing forms of natural-philosophical writing proliferated across it: the mathematical (or math-like) proof; the philosophical narrative (“First I boiled the gold, then I sealed it in a jug with the lees of Canary wine . . .”); again, the philosophical dialogue; again, imperial travel writing. George Starkey, the Bermuda-born and Harvard-educated philosopher, claimed in the 1650s to have learned all his chemistry from a Native American adept in the woods of New England; that should give a pretty clear sense of how unsettled the rhetoric of early science was.1 So literary genres can’t be said to railroad their writers into skeptical positions. They mostly have distinctive ways of delivering up their objects for our contemplation. But equally, they have distinctive ways of withholding those objects. The writing conventions that make a literary genre recognizable as something other than learning can be heightened to render that genre visibly hostile to learning. We might usefully look at the case of lyric poetry, and in particular at the great English sonnet sequences, which came to the fore around 1600, roughly alongside Bacon, and so near the beginning of the moststudied innovations in natural philosophy. What often strikes readers of sonnets is that the poems offer up unruly sentiments—love, loneliness, adoration, devotion, heartbreak—from within an unusually decorous, even businesslike form. There is no integral agreement of form and content here; sonnets positively flaunt the disparity between their patterned strictness and the excessive emotions such strictness is made to utter, as though someone had tried to enter an orgasm into a spreadsheet: “I, I, O I may say, that she is mine.”2 The usual line about sonnets is that this disparity is actually their achievement; that sonnets are a massive, poetic apparatus for capturing desire, for redirecting or lightly sublimating it, for reorganizing it into this or that settled version of love: courtly love or married love or the Neoplatonic love of virtue and God’s beauty. And so the successfully Petrarchan sonnet will cut loose with a cry of passion in its first eight lines only to spend its final six reeling that passion back in, correcting it, subjecting it to moral scrutiny and revision. A sonnet’s rhymes are the buckles and catches of surplus repression. It will come as no surprise, then, that some sonneteers flip this orthodox structure on its head, designing poems in which the octet (and

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sometimes much of the sestet) announces the lover’s prim, Neoplatonic resolve—“thy beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good”—and the final lines then baffle this resolve by greeting the return of the lyrically repressed: “ ‘But ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’ ”3 The rather interesting problem here is that sonnets are full of features that have been laid down in advance, features that poets do not control—their length, their meter, their octet/sestet division, their assertive rhyme schemes—and these conventions, understood now as what constrain a poet’s choices, can function equally well as the signposts of self-observation or moral reflection and as markers of an intrusive desire, which is itself both unbidden and entirely predictable. It turns out, in fact, that the key English sonnet sequences—Sidney’s, above all, but also the several written in Sidney’s shadow—are more interested in this disappointed or inverted Petrarchanism than in the achieved or orthodox kind. It may be misleading to call such sequences “skeptical,” but only because they are so palpably deranged, perhaps the most unhinged writings in the canon not to include the word opium in their titles, verse after verse after verse in which sleepless stalker-poets talk to the furniture and threaten to strangle their girlfriends’ pets. Most of us encounter sonnets singly, muted in anthologies or read aloud at weddings, in which form, free-standing, they can seem merely plangent. But the affect of the sonnet sequences, properly read in succession and at a clip—the affect, that is, of their endlessly duplicated exorbitance and thus of plangency ordered in bulk—is one of erotic compulsion, to the point where the form’s crisp regularities begin to convey, not the continuity of inherited literary craft, but repetition in some nearly psychoanalytic sense, full of workhorse rhymes and inescapable turns that mark out the mechanical coercions of desire, and which generate, in their readers, that mixture of involvement and boredom one typically associates with pornography. It could easily seem misplaced to identify an argumentative program in such a poetry, as though one were praising a sociopath for his delicate understanding of Freud. But a certain philosophical interest creeps in all the same—and not only because the poems so often defeat one’s expectation that a sonnet will model for us the ordering of passion by thought. The most famous English sonnets define themselves via a series of negations: “I do not envy Aristotle’s wit, / Nor do aspire to Caesar’s bleeding fame.”4 It’s

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those not’s that matter: not Caesar, not Aristotle. We can see lyric poetry rising here from the ashes of politics and philosophy—“that Plato I read for nought”5—on the understanding that as long as Latin remained the lingua franca of European statesmen and intellectuals, vernacular poetry was mostly going to avoid displays of erudition anyway. The very medium of English verse seemed insulated from the domain of official speech and so carried, for much of its early history, latent anti-philosophical energies. It required considerable effort to remake English as a public and political language, but rather less effort, one imagines, to cast it, as these sonnets do, as a language of private intensities. That privacy comes at considerable epistemological cost, however. One way of making this point is to say that if sonnets are pornography, they are pornography of a curious kind, in which the sex objects, here women, are almost entirely absent; themselves negated or nearly so; the official concern of most every poem, but missing, all the same; almost never specified in character or body; abbreviated to a few routine tags— golden hair, eyes black as night, and so on; screened off behind vacantly classicizing names or else not named at all; ensnared in puns, conceits, and all manner of linguistic switchbacks, paradoxes, and antitheses of almost Hegelian dexterity. Women appear in this poetry as such abstractions that they can hardly be said to appear at all, and this shadow existence both points to what the poems want us to take as their real-world situation—that a given sequence’s woman is unapproachable, withdrawn from the one who loves her—and heralds a peculiar writing practice: it is not just that sonnet-women are in some literal sense impenetrable. It is that they seem hardened to language, as well, and this, too, in multiple senses: deaf to their lovers’ pleas, but also immune to description. Discourse seems to bounce off them. The poems’ speakers say, over and over again, that they do not have the language to persuade women—or to paint them—and that they are also incapable of interpreting those women’s words, looks, or curtsies. Such is the porno-iconoclasm of the sonnet sequence: “O absent presence Stella is not here.”6 Women exist only as the gap into which poets write. In the sonnet sequences, then, language and thought, like the desire they are meant to convey, never even make a show of attaching to their objects; they all get conspicuously re-routed; they split and turn pirouettes. In some of the sonnets, you can actually trace the process by which the poet adapts a conventional theological language, meant to evoke the

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remoteness of God, so that it can begin to apply even to proximate persons and objects, which may sound like a garden-variety way of exalting whatever one holds dear—Stella is a god!—but is also one good way of losing us the world. Sidney calls his lovers Stella and Astrophil—“star” and “star-lover”—and the effect, in part, of this low-level allegory is to generalize the sonnets’ philosophical dilemma out beyond the particular problem of accessing and knowing women: in the drama of a failed lover denied the woman he dotes on, we glimpse, in outline, that other drama of a failed astronomer who can say nothing useful about the stars. It is no accident, in this sense, that one of Sidney’s sonnets equates the lover with the philosopher who is so fixated on the skies that he fell into a ditch, which is, in the period, an utterly commonplace dig at learned men, abstracted from their surroundings but no closer to their elevated objects for that. Sonnets initiate their readers into something more than an erotic impasse; they rehearse a straining after objects, a kind of frustration that is at once sexual and epistemological. In lyric poetry, all objects tend to the condition of the unapproachable woman. One begins to suspect that the success of the lyric announces, no less than the rise of epistemology itself, some fundamental historical disordering of humanity’s relationship to the object world. And yet perhaps it doesn’t take all that much to make a poem skeptical. A few linguistic modifications will do the trick: a principled fuzziness of language, and nothing is easier than that, since language is so undifferentiated to begin with; a certain heightening of the poem’s conventionality—a willingness to call itself poem—such that its rules and devices start drawing attention to themselves, at the expense of what they were supposed to describe, like a camera lens speckled with dust or a microphone screeching feedback. In this context, lyric poetry’s two most widely shared characteristics—the characteristics so basic to the mode that one rarely bothers to even name them—begin to vibrate with world-canceling possibilities: lyric poems are really good at interior states; and they are given to fancy language; and these two achievements will tend precisely to fasten our attention on the problems of thought and language and thus to stymie our approach to the world. The tough point here is that whatever version of skepticism lurks within a genre is not some accidental feature of that genre, some side effect easily circumvented. Literary skepticism has everything to do with a genre’s distinguishing features; it is nothing but those features, differently

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named, since once a genre’s conventions become visible as conventions, they will typically screen from view the very objects they were meant to transmit. All you have to do to identify the skepticism that a literary genre can breed is to name the genre as a genre, at which point the skepticism will probably follow obediently on.

2. We can transfer this point to the theater, which would require us to say, as a hunch, that plays can easily generate a skepticism about playing, about performance or theatricality, which sounds plausible enough, though we’ll have to look around now to see what it actually means. Some of the issues carry over from lyric poetry, not only for the plain reason that most early English plays were written in verse, but also because most of those plays are downright talky, at least by the standards of film or of a later, fourth-wall theater committed to lovingly reconstructing the living rooms of the middle class. What early plays lack in convincing visual illusion they generally make up for in long speeches describing off-stage events. People in English plays seem to spend a lot of time standing on the edges of battlefields. But then unstaged combat is actually just the start of it. Early plays allow all sorts of different events to get absorbed by discourse: assassinations, assignations, and so on. Discourse actually extends to the stage itself, since in a theater with minimal props and sets, playwrights often rely on dialogue to evoke objects and places that are supposed to be right there, materially present, visible. The effect of the early theater, then, is powerfully de-corporealizing: absent presences all over again. One might think, in other words, that the stage has all sorts of easy ways of solving the epistemological problems that dog lyric poetry, since it can, in some halfway literal sense, actually plunk the object world down in front of us, like the philosophical reformers in Swift’s Laputa, who think they can circumvent language by carrying around on their backs enormous bags of everyday objects, to which they, in place of conversation, need merely point. The great surprise, then, is how rarely English dramatists avail themselves of this puppet-show materialism. Early plays tend, rather, toward the condition of closet drama or the dramatic reading. The audience in a London theater was often stuck meditating on competing descriptions of an unseen world.

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But then an audience needn’t experience this as a problem or a challenge. The early theater’s discursive qualities will only register as skeptical if they can be shown to disrupt our accustomed confidence in language. So the question becomes: What kinds of language do early English plays adopt? And what attitude to those languages do they cultivate in their audiences? The plays themselves have some conventional ways of distinguishing between different idioms; the distinction between verse and prose is only the most strongly marked of these and is generally meant to convey divisions in caste or rank, codifying and stylizing a real-world divide between those who had access to a humanist rhetorical education and those who did not. Here too, then, the relationship between Latin and English is revealing, but a short, historical detour is needed to draw a box around the question. In the 1830s, Thomas Macaulay delivered his “Minute on Indian Education,” in which he argued that the various traditions of Asian learning and letters were all for naught; that they needed to be quietly retired, scrubbed from the curriculum of Britain’s imperial Indian schools, reclassified as superstition or myth, and packed off to the children’s corner of the library. A European education, in English, would obviously take their place. Scholars have long recognized that Macaulay’s argument was, on its own terms, impeccably liberal: his notion was that Indians needed to be more open to the accomplishments of other cultures. It is less often noted, however, that this militant cosmopolitanism also informs his account of English culture, which isn’t nearly as boastful as it sometimes sounds. Macaulay is not, in fact, sticking up for English culture, because the point, he says, on which the Indians would do best to emulate the English is the latters’ willingness to be colonized. Such, then, is Macaulay’s notion of the Renaissance, that it was the event in which England saved itself by liquidating its own indigenous culture. Modern England, it turns out, is only great because it isn’t really English at all, because it has already allowed itself to be comprehensively Latinized and Greekified. It may not be especially surprising to hear a British politician foretell that the Raj will bring the Renaissance to India, but even so, the idea has as its corollary the unexpected concession that the Renaissance was itself a kind of conquest, an imperialism without an empire, an invasion of Mediterranean ghosts.7 Among the British imperial intelligentsia more broadly, one of the more striking variants of Macaulay’s doctrine was the idea that India

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would actually push the English language to new levels of refinement, because thousands of colonials would end up speaking a literary English never really spoken in England. The colony would preserve English in some artificially high form. In India, in other words, you could engineer an English spared the indignity of having native speakers.8 Among a nation of Addisons, English would at last attain the status of Latin, splendidly dead. Something of this argument is still communicated to us when we read a modern edition of a seventeenth-century play and realize that we generally need more footnotes to understand the prose dialogue of plebian speakers than the high humanist verse of the stage gentry: “Look, look, look now, buss it, buss it, and friends, did’ums, did’ums, beat its nown silly baby”—that’s one of the London burghers in Aphra Behn’s Lucky Chance (1686), and your guess is as good as mine.9 A sentence such as this obviously contravenes our own no longer classical expectation that prose will be perspicuous and verse cryptic, and we need to think of this as one of the early theater’s more ingenious contrivances, that many of its plays manage to render ordinary speech unintelligible, to make it seem unfit for simple purposes of communication. Macaulay’s observations only have their own insidious plausibility because they are actually in keeping with one of the signature projects of early modern letters. Verse drama is the utopia of genteel speech, full of princes and dukes who speak the impossible English of the later empire, unreal Englishmen with Italian names who speak a perfected and placeless version of their own language, a language now shielded from its own canting poor. Ods bods isn’t really native English; it is the accent Latin adopts when issuing its judgment upon mere English. It is English heard only as sound. Lines such as Behn’s, then, which turn common English into its own pidgin, would seem to grant a monopoly on sense to the genteel speakers whose language has been refashioned on the model of Cicero and Seneca. This is certainly true, broadly speaking, but it is not reliably true. There is, on the seventeenth-century stage, no simple epistemological divide between patrician speakers who discourse knowingly on the world and plebian speakers who jibber. Elevated speech will produce opacities of its own, since the theater inherits from humanist pedagogy not only an elevated lexicon, taken to be more precise than ordinary English and less apt to change across time; and not only a more deliberative syntax, capable of draping a single, multistage thought across

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the semicolons of an extended sentence; but also the argument on both sides of the question. This last appears in the plays as a penchant both for staged debate between speakers (see, for instance, the zinging exercise in praise-and-blame at the beginning of Act 2 in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer) and for the uncertain deliberations of a single speaker (as when Faust wonders, repeatedly, whether he should stay loyal to the devil). Modern audiences almost always experience such deliberations as vividly psychological, but they actually have the character of a schoolboy’s rhetorical exercise. The period’s most famous plays are shot through with all manner of puzzlement—it is what a liberal-minded criticism has always liked best about them—but it is important to see that such puzzlement is generated, almost mechanically, by a certain way of inhabiting elite language, a certain forensic training. “To be or not to be” may be the most celebrated six words in the English language, but they are also something of a set topic, a grammar school’s essay prompt. So early plays share with poetry the condition of writing, tending to let words stand in for objects and events; and they share with the rhetorical education a knack for disputation—it wouldn’t be quite right to see early plays as humanist dialogues staffed with living actors, but it wouldn’t be entirely wrong either. These observations bring into view some of the theater’s skeptical tendencies, but they are only a start, because if we want to work out what form of skepticism is peculiar to the theater (as opposed to the skepticism it shares with other modes), it’s those living actors that matter, and not just the dialogue they speak, because the actors, by their very presence, raise a rather different set of epistemological problems for us to consider. Theater depends on the existence of people who can convincingly pretend to be what they are not, who can mime emotions they are not feeling, and who can speak sentences they do not mean. It is possible, accordingly, to think of theater as intrinsically skeptical in its effects; theater is a box for taking any persona or sentiment and reducing it to mere appearance, a handful of apeable and outward signs: a duke is not a bloodline; he is a pinched accent and a few yards of cambric. Love is not an ungovernable passion; it is a way of modulating one’s voice. Any advance in realism, such as an oldfashioned literary history likes to attribute to the Renaissance theater, with its historically particularized settings, its absolutist courts and London streets, is actually, in these terms, something of an own-goal, since

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the more realistic a performance becomes, the more you are forced to wonder whether real life isn’t itself a kind of performance, a staged contrivance. The more vividly you respond to an actor’s virtuoso turn, the more perplexed you might be to discover that your responses to the world are so thoroughly pre-programmed, able to be elicited even in the absence of any real occasion or object. The theater catches us rejoicing in unreal marriages and weeping for unreal deaths. The single most important thing one can know about early modern theater is that it really did produce skeptical drama of this kind; that with remarkable regularity, it activated the skeptical tendencies latent in theater as a mode.10 The point is perhaps most efficiently made via a list of the early theater’s stock characters: rogues, petty cheats, conmen, adulterers, schemers, spies, and Machiavels—and also, yes, dukes, princes, kings, merchants, wives, but these are usually just the same people differently named. It is a rare seventeenth-century play that does not feature characters who are themselves acting, systematically lying, wearing disguises, assuming the identities of others.11 This is tricky: such a theater actually has its own mode of disclosure—its own way of making objects and persons known—and this, too, is a matter of stage convention. The London theater may have chosen contemporary settings for its plays, but it also inherited all sorts of devices from its late medieval precursor, continuities of acting style or stage arrangement. Seventeenth-century tragedies and comedies were still, in many respects, like the Christian plays that had once been performed in churchyards and aristocratic halls. In the larger, more popular theaters, the audience did not sit in the dark; plays were performed during the day, in sunlight, which means that the stage was never much brighter than the house. Actors and audience visibly shared the same space, as they would have for a long time already on the impromptu stages set up by wandering players, and this effect was heightened by the layout of most stages, which extended, like gangplanks, into the audience.12 And since everyone was, as it were, at the same party, actors and audience in one room together, the characters would often speak directly to the spectators, in quick asides or full-bore soliloquies or in scene-capping minimonologues—a quick, nefarious couplet here, a scheming quatrain there. This rapport with the audience is what students of the plays inevitably notice first about them, and it is the feature that modernizing productions have the hardest time accommodating. A director can supply

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a Renaissance play with its missing sets, but it is still hard for a new staging not to give the impression that an earlier generation of Europeans had mastered the art of free association, the famously difficult trick of speaking aloud, without deliberation or censorship, every last thought that comes into one’s head. Such is the odd quality of a seventeenthcentury play: the people it depicts are systematically duplicitous but incapable of shutting up about it. Characters in these plays are always feigning, but the audience nearly always knows that they are feigning, because the characters themselves have confessed as much, plainly stating who they are, disclosing their despicable plans, twiddling their rhetorical moustaches. These multiple addresses to the audience are a truth-telling: when rogues and cheats are revealed near the end of a play, the other characters are usually learning something that the audience has known from the start, which is why modern viewers weaned on spy movies and mystery novels generally find soliloquies irritating and the plays static, as though Middleton and Webster didn’t know the first thing about suspense techniques, about how to keep an audience on the hook and guessing. But then the conventions of the un-modern stage obviously generate effects of their own, and it’s these we need to hone in on. We might best think of the early theater as a laboratory in which a thought experiment is being conducted: What would it be like if other people were, in fact, entirely legible? What would it be like if there were no hidden motives or silent reflections, if we each walked the streets with our thoughts posted above our heads, as though in bubbles? The theater does tend to produce a variant of skepticism; this point is accurate enough as far as it goes. But we need to see now that theater generates this skepticism by first offering itself as an enchanted epistemological space, a cognitive wonderland in which all persons can be seen for what they really are, but only so that once we leave the theater, we can undergo the loss of that perfect knowledge and thus face the dismal opacity of our ordinary lives. The theater does not so much educate its audiences as taunt them with a knowledge they cannot take with them. Its plays are to that extent not entirely unlike those science fiction movies in which characters wake to the realization that their entire lived experience has been manufactured by computers or cable TV stations. They trade in low-tech versions of those movies’ dangerous insights, that everyday life is pervasively stage-managed, that its phenomenological consistency could dissolve

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away terribly at any moment. The stage conventions that modern spectators generally find quaint are, in fact, psychotic. Still, it’s misleading to think of the early theater only as actorly, late medieval, not yet realist. We usually think of a later realist theater as one that works hard to mute its own theatrical qualities, out of the sense, perhaps, that ruined weavers weren’t much given to juggling. But it is best to think of seventeenth-century plays as offering a modified realism in their own right, a realism that surveys the social terrain outside of the theater and finds it already saturated with theatricality, in which case the distinction between realism and meta-theater disappears, and the stage will do most to render social relations intelligible when it most insistently flaunts its particular artifice.13 The period’s plays contain an inexhaustible store of demystifying maxims: “Honesty is but an art to seem so”—that’s from Marston’s Malcontent of 1604. Or: “Love in this age is as well counterfeited as complexion. . . . We know not what to make of one another”—that’s from Shadwell’s True Widow, more than seventy years later. Shadwell’s play also contains the following line, spoken of a woman seen looking over financial documents in her lodgings: “This lady must be a cheat, by doing her business so publicly.”14 That the speaker here is allowed to be right—the lady is a cheat; her name, in fact, is Lady Cheatly—goes a long way toward explaining what the early theater is up to: it defines the entire arena of public life as a scam—cheating because public—and then extends its notion of public life to include a person’s own chamber, so that the field of the fraudulently public and the field of the visible pretty much coincide. Anything that can be seen is public, and anything public is false. But then visibility and publicity are also the theater’s most basic modes; the stage necessarily turns interior states into public pronouncements and transforms intimacies into occasions for collective witnessing. It’s just that the seventeenth-century theater, having first translated all of human existence into the realm of appearance, typically instructs its viewers to then discount appearances. One sometimes gets the feeling that the only people who hated the theater more than the Puritans were the playwrights themselves; that the early playhouses existed mostly as a kind of anti-theater, called into being only to pass judgment upon a rampantly theatricalized society.15 As such, the theater participated in a certain paradox. One wishes to make a familiar sociological argument about Renaissance drama: permanent and commercial playhouses were first built in London in the

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1570s, and it is tempting to see in these dedicated theaters the creation of an autonomous artistic sphere, an independent arena for what could only now, upon possessing its own institutions, be called “culture,” henceforth freed from the immediate supervision of the court or the noble estate or their attenuated patronage networks. It seems suggestive, at least, that the first playhouses went up within a decade or so of the Royal Exchange, which similarly helped bring into being the market economy, as a sphere with its own institutions and rules; or that the playhouses belonged, more broadly, to the era of the centralizing state, again to be understood as a newly autonomous sphere. The theater would seem, then, to partake of a generalized compartmentalization of social life, the separation of previously integrated functions out into so many self-directed subsystems, which is perhaps the defining feature of early modern European history, the feature that many scholars, indeed, have in mind when they call that history “early modern.” But then this line of thinking is belied by the content of the plays themselves, which recognize no such distinctions; the early theater looks beyond its walls and discovers itself everywhere. The new playhouses may have given theater companies a permanent place to perform other than the court, but the revenge tragedies they staged, with their feigning madmen, clandestine lovers, and plays-within-plays, continued to depict the court as a kind of playhouse. We can glimpse here the theater trying to register two distinct political transformations, themselves contradictory: first, the rise of court manners, and hence the theatricalization of nearly all aristocratic discourse, with its scripts and protocols and increasingly inflexible sense of what-one-says-when; and second, the emergence from out of the period’s civil wars of pure politics or the notion of statecraft, the art of governing in dire circumstances, of saving a commonwealth by ignoring its constitution, which produces the modern court as a new kind of institution from which religion and custom and law have been evicted, and which produces, too, the modern courtier as political entrepreneur, loosed from outmoded obligations, free to improvise and plot and dissemble.16 Similarly, the stage’s city comedies, or at least its satirical ones, generally depict commercial London as one big vaudeville: merchants are hucksters or charlatans; consumers remake themselves at will by buying what were once fixed status markers and are now the commoditygarnishes of elective identities; there are more plays-within-plays. And

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again, these conventions aren’t just meta-theatrical conceits; there are actually a few different ways of making plausible the notion the comedies project of a histrionic marketplace. One can point to London’s population explosion, on the understanding that demographic booms always generate some rather interesting epistemological problems, since in a massively expanded city, made up mostly of migrants, you will encounter, daily, a parade of strangers, disembedded others about whom you possess no knowledge, no sense of reputation or prior history; and whom you must therefore learn how to read, whose bodies and garments and idioms you must actively decode. Strangers have opportunities to perform that neighbors do not. Alternately, one can point to the spectacular qualities of consumer capitalism itself, which encourages its members to adorn themselves in ever-changing ways and thus discloses, without apology, the otherwise secret role that appearance plays in all social life. Long story short: the rise of the state and rise of the market economy can seem to include the theater within themselves, at least on certain accounts, not least of all the theater’s own.

3. Of course, the plays are in other senses quite varied, and nowhere more so than in the solutions that they model to the overarching crisis they collectively announce. Seventeenth-century drama churns out all manner of political fantasies about how a person—usually a gentleman, but not always—might best survive in a theatrical society, how he might turn a culture of generalized illusion to his benefit and perhaps even roll back some of its most threatening features. Such, then, is how we might understand the figure of the gallant or the spark, as the wish-dream of an aristocracy that feels itself endangered. We must pause to appreciate the labor that went into cementing this figure as one of the early theater’s central types, already present on the pre-Revolutionary stage and absolutely dominant on its Restoration counterpart. The gallant, in his most conspicuous variant, is the gentleman who schemes, often under masks or aliases or borrowed finery, so that he can liberate pretty women from their tyrannical uncles or estates from their base and undeserving proprietors. He is a high-born rascal, and as such, he only comes into being when an aristocratic culture is willing to tell trickster tales about itself. But then it is a global peasant-folk culture that provides the fund

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of such tales, and so what we witness on the seventeenth-century stage is a notable historical inversion, primitive accumulation extended into the domain of culture, a process in which the nobility confiscates peasant culture and begins refashioning it to its own purposes—or, if you prefer, begins refashioning itself on the model of its own cunning rustics, thereby undoing a caste divide that had run right through feudal culture. Such, then, is one of the most basic fantasies of the late-seventeenth-century stage—that it can adjust the aristocracy to the demands of a theatrical society, erecting a new peerage of Lord Coyotes and Sir Coney-Catchers, gentlemen capable of mastering the realm of appearance. The peasants, for their part, will appear on the seventeenth-century stage in unaccustomed guises, not as tricksters, at least not always, but sometimes as compulsive truth-tellers, as well, and in doing so they will become the bearers of a rather different project. The honest bumpkin is a less familiar figure, however, and will require more ample description. In 1662, London theatergoers saw Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee, one of the first Restoration comedies and very much the archetype for dozens that came after. The play is actually set during the Revolution—not many will be—and features two dashing young Royalists who are scrambling to get their family lands back from the grasping Puritans who have seized them. Already in the first act, the play introduces a servant character, a sweet and sentimental drudge, weepingly loyal to the king and to his dead Royalist master. The servant is clearly meant as a model of plebian obedience, here imagined as warm affection for one’s betters, and it is utterly notable that the play has made him an Irishman—his name is Teague, though versions of the character will appear in other plays under various O’s and Mac’s. A Royalist playwright—and it is worth pointing out that the early Restoration stage was under strict political controls—cannot help but prefer the poor Irish to the poor English; what we witness in the stage Irishman is a remarkable moment of counter-Revolutionary anti-nationalism, very much in keeping with Brecht’s later observation that East Germany’s government would do well to dissolve the people and elect another. The problem with the fractious, commercialized, and Protestant English is that they do not enough resemble the Catholic peasantry, whom the Royalist gentry will now nominate as its subalterns of choice. A detail: in Act 3, the two young Cavaliers, having taken the Irishman on as their servant, send him to convey a message to a powerful

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Puritan woman, and out of this utterly banal piece of stage business, the routine plot device of a hundred different early plays, The Committee extracts two polemical points. The Puritan woman used to be a serving-girl herself; it is the Revolution that has enabled her to amass a fortune at Royalist expense. The Irishman, accordingly, cannot bring himself to be polite to someone the play describes as a “translated kitchen-maid.”17 He lets slip something insulting. She says: “Do you know who you speak to, sirrah?” He replies: “Well, what are you then? Upon my soul, in my own country, they can tell who I am.”18 That’s one polemical point right there, in the exchange’s final phrases, and what’s remarkable about them is the geographical distinction they suggest. Ireland is a place where an entire social epistemology remains intact, a place where people can still be known, where you can still tell who people are. England springs into view, by contrast, as a nation in which the epistemology of everyday life has deliquesced, a commonwealth of the inscrutable or strange nation. But it turns out that the Irish servant’s rudeness, his inability to show deference to a fellow commoner, itself houses the second polemical point, because the servant’s new masters have already tried to teach him how to fake politic submission around the Puritans, and he simply cannot do it: “Upon my soul, I shall laugh upon her face, for all I would not have a mind to do it.”19 A line such as this is a little bit of genre theory in its own right; it directs the audience at a comedy to understand their own laughter as an act of uncovering, the audible sign of recognition or knowledge, and not, as in farce, of confusion or misunderstanding—and this should go a long way to explaining the Restoration stage’s brief infatuation with the obnoxiously frank, all those plain dealers and characters named Tell-troth and Blunt. The Committee is a comedy that means to turn all the genre’s established, Roman conventions on their head—a comedy of nonerrors, if you like, a comedy of accuracies, in which the Irishman emerges as the un-wily servant, so openhearted that he simply doesn’t know how to flatter, even when given lessons. The Committee, in fact, is full of such failed Pygmalion scenes: a young gentlewoman has some fun at the expense of a dopey, déclassé burgher boy by trying to teach him how to conduct himself like a gentleman, when he’s obviously unfit for the role. The translated kitchen-maid tries to act the lady, but inevitably finds herself nattering on about sex and vomit and other of the body’s less patrician fluids. It’s worth trying to imagine the performances in question, these special roles that require players to act badly. They,

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too, are a kind of meta-theater, in which performance is meant to be visible as performance, but such performances now ask to be understood as self-canceling, because so easily seen through; and this unusual variant of meta-theater will actually smuggle into its reflexivity a new realism of character, one in which a person’s given status, assigned by birth and rank, can never be hidden and so will always be seen poking out from behind its temporary disguises. So here’s the seventeenthcentury stage’s second political fantasy, housed in paradox: a good actor is one who can convince you, via a terrible performance, that people are incapable of acting. The gallant, meanwhile, has as his closest cousin the revenger, himself typically a gentleman who is shown learning how to scheme. It’s just that where the gallants are shown squaring off against rich aldermen and bankers, the revengers have as their class competitors the new princes of the absolutist state; and where the gallants are trying to regain control over the nation’s estates and women—farms and wombs, anything that grows, the sum of English fertility—the revengers’ task is rather less tangible: their historical mission is to summon back into existence the forms of justice that sovereignty necessarily suspends. They have their work cut out for them. If you posit such a thing as a theatrical society, then you’ll probably hold that the law, as an institution, is especially vulnerable to its corrosions. It is hard to imagine the process by which medicine, say, or blacksmithing could be reduced entirely to show, without any reference to the world’s woof or tooth, but it isn’t at all hard to think of lawyers as mere performers, players by another name. Acting and the law are the two professions that will pay you to lie. The point is so commonplace that it would barely be worth making, except that it brings into view what is so remarkable about the revenge tragedies, which is that they grant the thought—lawyers are like actors—only so that they might upend it; they don’t contest the idea so much as they transpose its meanings, reversing the usual process by which the law court gets denounced as a satellite-theater by instead imagining the theater as a functioning agency of the law. If the problem with lawyers is that they are too much like actors, then perhaps the problem can be solved by transforming actors themselves into lawyers (or constables or judges). No work is more jaw-droppingly literal about this possibility than Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1590), and the easiest way to explain the observation is simply to describe the play.

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First the plot: the crown prince of Portugal has killed a young Spanish nobleman, in battle but dishonorably, in an unfair fight; he, in turn, is captured and transported back to the Spanish court, where he befriends his Spanish counterpart and falls in love with the latter’s sister. She, however, is already in love with a young gentleman at court—not himself an aristocrat—and so the two princes band together to murder this lover and force her to marry young Portugal instead. The murdered man’s father seeks justice from the king for his dead son and then goes crazy, or seems to, when he discovers that the princes are protected by their high position—they will not be held accountable. He and the princess eventually turn vigilante, assassinating the two princes in front of their royal fathers, the kings of Spain and Portugal. That’s about it. What stands out here is that the play has, as its historical prompt, the making of nationstates in early modern Europe; it begins by describing the war in which the Spanish court subjugated its Portuguese fringe and seems to be heading, as one of its possible endings, for the kind of political marriage that early modern courts often arranged to celebrate the cessation of hostilities and union of territories—a marriage “for strengthening of our lateconfirmed league” is the play’s rendering.20 That the play withholds this ending, that it instead shows the princess offing her unwished-for fiancé, is enough to capture the story’s incendiary gist: revenge tragedies—and The Spanish Tragedy is the genre’s first modern instance—come into being to monkey-wrench the narrative of state-formation, to make sure the centralized state does not get its comic resolution. But then, what is the play’s sense of centralized states such that they must be scuttled? The Spanish Tragedy depicts the absolutist state as a polity from which law has vanished, or at least fingers the state’s royal court as a dismal legal void within an otherwise law-bound polity. This isn’t the only way to tell a story about early modern legal history. It’s just as plausible to think of state-formation as involving the gradual extension of an increasingly uniform law into various reiving frontiers and saloon towns, which means that we have to think of The Spanish Tragedy as occupying a rather distinctive ideological niche, one more concerned with the punctual collapse of early modern law than with its thickening mesh. The point of view from which the play asks us to judge the sovereign’s lawlessness is, however, rather complicated, because it involves two very different figures at once. The first young Spaniard to be cut down—the warrior on the battlefield—is described in quasi-Homeric

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terms plainly borrowed from romance or heroic verse, those aristocratic refashionings of Mediterranean epic conventions: he is, for instance, a “worthy chevalier,” fighting on the “fields / Where lovers live and bloody martialists.”21 What I haven’t yet noted is that this dead cavalier watches the entire play, alongside the audience, as a ghost, commenting on the action, demanding feudal blood-vengeance, complaining when it is slow in coming. This contrivance cannot help but align the audience with the dead man, who is proxy figure and chorus. The audience, in other words, is itself rendered spectral, asked to look upon the present from the perspective of a recently canceled past, which had its own modes of Gothic justice, now missing. Tragedy, in these terms, is a species of antiromance, a genre which summons a stock romance character to sit in judgment on political formations that mostly postdate the romance. It is romance’s verdict upon the present. But the play’s action is centered on a different figure, who accordingly absorbs most of the audience’s concern, and that’s the revenging father. The important thing to know about the father is that he is himself a court officer, and not just any court officer, but the Knight Marshal, which is a term that Kyd has imported into his Spanish play from English law. The historical Knight Marshal was one of the two chief officers in a special law court that regulated disputes between royal servants and that also claimed jurisdiction over any disputes or minor crimes that occurred within a twelve-mile radius of the king, wherever the king happened to be, as though he radiated a legal force field that accompanied the royal nomad on his annual circuit.22 The Knight Marshal was not this law court’s judge, but rather the one who enforced its judgments, though The Spanish Tragedy will show its revenger-Marshal actually hearing a few cases: one commoner wants to collect a debt, another wants to evict a tenant, and so on. Either way, as enforcer or as judge, the Knight Marshal encapsulated in his person the very possibility of the rule of law; his office provided an institutional guarantee that some version of the law would extend into the royal household itself. What The Spanish Tragedy puts on display, then, is the breakdown of that guarantee. The play asks us to be alarmed not only because a father cannot obtain justice for his son, but also and more pressingly because the state’s own judiciary cannot function around a sovereign whose very presence blots out the law rather than securing it. It matters here that the revenging father is himself a commoner by birth, because this status seals

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in place one’s sense that the play is bringing to bear two very different standards of justice—a feudal notion of aristocratic and decentralized justice, in which vengeance still counts as redress and is therefore not properly describable as law, but also a non-aristocratic and at least protobureaucratic notion of institutionalized law, which is what the Knight Marshal stands in for. The play’s achievement is to hold these two incompatible conceptions of justice together and find the royal court wanting by either standard. Or perhaps the play is more dynamic than that, because what The Spanish Tragedy depicts, of course, is the process by which the father turns revenger, which is to say the process by which a legal administrator becomes a defender or crusader, reverting back to some feudal code of blood-honor and thereby making good on his otherwise vestigial title. The Knight Marshal will for once act like a knight. But to say this makes the play sound more backwards-looking than it actually is, because emphasizing the bloodshed alone overlooks the revenger’s methods, how he actually brings his adversaries low. He does not, as it were, go medieval on them, does not borrow a jouster’s suit of armor or storm the king’s castle. Instead, he chooses a device that, in the 1590s, would have struck an audience as entirely up-to-date. He stages a play—and what we have to understand, then, is a how a mere play can imagine itself as a vehicle of medieval blood-justice or samurai atavism. Here’s what happens: the revenging father is asked to organize an interlude for the wedding that is meant to seal the union of Portugal and Spain, and so he writes a revenge tragedy, casts his son’s murderers as the victims, and, in effect, substitutes real daggers for the fake ones. Just to be clear: the English theater’s first revenge tragedy already contains within it a revenge tragedy, and this allows us to identify the genre’s motivating fantasy with remarkable precision, since it means that the play itself actually recounts the effects it would like such plays to have. And Kyd’s impossible ambition is, of course, to script a play that not only depicts revenge, but actually achieves it; a play that has unmistakable realworld effects. The disaffected jurist may mutate into a marauding knight, but he also turns into a playwright—and the defining feature of this marauder-playwright will be a murderous hostility to the absolutist state: in the play’s final moments, as the defiant revenger is being dragged off to be tortured, we see him first rip out his own tongue—no language at the king’s command!—and then slit the throat of the king’s

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brother with a penknife, which is, of course, the weapon of choice for someone who would like to imagine that blank verse could actually draw blood. The satirical comedies, for their part, will have their own way of imagining the stage as law court. Again, they are sometimes absolutely literal about this. In the dedication that Ben Jonson added to the print edition of Volpone, he suggests that it is “the office of a comic poet to imitate justice and instruct to life,” and this dedication is addressed to Oxford and Cambridge, collectively, although Jonson was not university educated—his family were come-down gentry, and he had apprenticed as a bricklayer. What we see Jonson doing, then, is trying to elevate comic theater, to make it something other than tumbling or low mummery, to align it with the universities rather than accept it as something that even bricklayers can do, and hence to turn the stage into a kind of state office and the playwright into an office-holder—this is what it means to so much as speak of “the office of a comic poet.” And so Volpone will end accordingly with an actual courtroom scene, with the play’s many cheats all found out, named for what they are, denounced, and assigned their various punishments by the city’s “honored fathers”: whippings, life sentences, property seizures, and so on.23 Every Man Out of His Humor goes Volpone one further and actually follows one of its malefactors—a fop, not a cheat—into prison, so that the audience can revel as he is shorn of his taffeta and gingerbread. Here, too, Jonson has told his viewers what’s coming. Every Man Out begins with the character of a playwright, who takes the stage to explain the play’s aims: . . . My soul Was never ground into such oily colors To flatter vice and daub iniquity. But with an armèd and resolvèd hand, I’ll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked as at their birth.24

The period’s comedies are, indeed, full of such naked-stripping exposure scenes, even the ones that don’t come with jails and tribunals and explanatory clues in their prefaces. The comic stage may be crowded with conmen, but those conmen are often unmasked, and we have to see the plays in which they feature as trying to imagine an end to feigning. Such is perhaps the early modern stage’s most pervasive fantasy: that

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the theater will offer commercialized versions of old public shaming rituals, summoning an audience of strangers to chortle as some villain gets ducked. These fifth-act skimmingtons are trying to recode the stage’s addiction to visibility, not as a fatal appetite for illusion or depthless Erscheinung, but as its opposite, a commitment to disclosure or revelation. The stage, like the law, will become a device for making things seen, for flushing them into public view. The theater should convince you, above all, that other people are watching. Jonson, in Every Man Out, appoints two characters to sit onstage so they can keep an eye on the audience.

4. The theater, then, can be understood as the arena in which the law and the lie contend for mastery over the realm of appearance. And this means that when philosophical writers refer to the world as a theater, as they habitually do in the seventeenth century, they can mean a few different things by it. They can mean that the world is a nebula of generalized illusion or, oddly, they can mean nearly the opposite, that the world is the building in which God makes himself manifest, takes to the boards, puts his law-like glory on display for our delight and edification. Jean Bodin, writing in the 1590s, called his scientific treatise The Theater of Nature, and he did not mean by this that frogs wear putty noses and are out to steal our women. This is Bodin: “We have come into this theater of the world for no other reason than to understand insofar as we can, by contemplating the appearance of the universe and all the actions and individual works of the greatest Creator of all things.”25 There is something momentous happening in this sentence, but we will have to work to see what it is. Early modern Christians seemed to expend a lot of energy trying to figure out what kind of job God actually held: Bodin’s language obviously turns God into a playmaker, at once poet, actor, and choreographer. But then God had more career options than that: many other Christians spoke of the “book of nature”—and not its “theater”—and this obviously makes God a writer or scribe of some more generic kind. A later natural philosophy, more or less recognizable as science, will prefer a mechanic-God, a watchmaker or some other such small-scale manufacturer. At some level of philosophical generality, the choice of God’s vocation doesn’t much matter; any trade at all will, by asking us to see the world as God’s product, communicate the argument

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from design, which is all any of these formulations mean to do. Playwright, scribe, and watchmaker are just substitutable ways of making vivid the claims that go into calling God “the Creator.” But it’s not that simple. The particular work one imagines God as doing will have conceptual consequences and ideological valences that spill out beyond a mere creationism. Left historians of science have tended, unsurprisingly, to prefer the watchmaker-God, out of a sense that a remarkable historical shift must have been underway if Europeans, accustomed for centuries to address their God as “Lord”—as duke or suzerain—were now willing to imagine him instead as grease monkey. But the more Hegelian reaches of Marxist philosophy have wanted nothing to do with the watchmaker-God, for the simple reason that He makes of the world a watch, a finished artifact that humanity can only receive as gift; a world, in other words, in which humanity does not fully participate. The surprise of Bodin’s sentence, in these terms, is that the playmaker-God already commits us to some of the lethal intellectual turns that the Hegelians normally associate only with the later watchmaker-God, which means in turn that it was aesthetics and not mechanics that set in motion the history of positivism: Bodin explicitly turns humanity into an audience, spectators who look upon the world but do not participate in its making. “We have come into the theater to contemplate the Creator’s works” and must regard ourselves therefore as ticket-holders cordoned off from the action. Even the mass gives Christians a speaking part. The language of the theater, at any rate, could be used to authorize new knowledge claims, and not just to undermine them, especially when those claims were strongly visual in orientation. A dissection hall was called an “anatomical theater,” much as teaching hospitals still have their “surgical theaters,” and something of this meaning was easily transferred over from rooms to book titles. A seventeenth-century writer wanting to offer a compendium of botanical knowledge, say—what a modern author might call a “survey” or perhaps a “conspectus,” an attentive-looking—could call that book a Theater of Plants, a volume that actually appeared in 1640. In 1657, Samuel Purchas published a tract on bees called A Theater of Politicall Flying-Insects, which may be the best title in a century with no shortage of good titles. Natural philosophy, in these terms, is a kind of theater because the world is God’s pageant; and a philosophical book is therefore something like the first print edition of a

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play, the folio form of a spectacle one would ideally leave the house to see staged. But then, as the example of the dissection hall suggests, the idea that theaters could produce knowledge was not just a matter of terminology. Some natural philosophy actually incorporated the theater’s techniques. An anatomical theater was, in fact, built like a playhouse, with a central, raised platform and stadium seating, so that its cadavers could be put on display to onlookers, and this arrangement wasn’t just a fluke of early modern architecture, part of some fleeting theatrical vogue. Philosophy-as-theater was meant to solve a particular set of epistemological problems. The Royal Society offers a case in point. As late as the 1660s, many in the Royal Society were still trying to figure out what even counted as knowledge. At least on some prominent accounts, what distinguished knowledge from belief was shared certainty—and hence publicity—which meant that a claim could not be considered knowledge until it had been disseminated, first broadcast and then ratified by a community of observers who recognized each others’ judgments as authoritative. But then how do you broadcast new facts? You can write them down and mail them out, but written accounts will obviously present special problems—How do you convince a distant reader that you really saw what you say you saw or that you undertook the experiment in just the manner you’ve laid out?—and before science writing could gain widespread authority, these representational problems would have to be solved separately, usually via a commitment to novelistically thick description, a welter of circumstantial detail that aimed to transform isolated correspondents into a congregation of virtual witnesses. Alternately, you could find a way around writing by just performing your experiment publicly, in front of flesh-and-blood witnesses, and this is what the Royal Society did, or at least what it generally thought of itself as doing. Gentleman-philosophers would send in reports from their various workshops, but their observations would not be considered facts until they had been re-enacted before a meeting of London virtuosi.26 Theatricality, on this understanding, far from destroying knowledge, would guarantee it. But here is where we stumble onto another intriguing problem, for these philosophical performances, in dissection halls or scientific academies, were all shadowed by merely theatrical versions of themselves, public performances with no clear epistemological purchase. We

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can, in other words, list all the ways in which the idea of the theater was harnessed to the seventeenth century’s new epistemologies, but even here new variants of skepticism will coalesce. Every fresh epistemological solution yields a fresh epistemological pitfall. It’s well known that early modern mental hospitals would allow paying visitors to tour their buildings and gooseneck at the mad, and here already we catch a glimpse of a learned institution taking on a secondary function as a place of entertainment. It’s less well known, however, that the point holds for other philosophical sites, as well—for dissection halls, say, which were often decorated with curiosities and opened their doors to the general public once or twice a year; or for the Royal Society itself, which regularly gave tours to visiting gentlemen and which apparently liked to dazzle guests and members alike with phosphorescent lightshows: glow-in-the-dark rocks, radiant fish, small explosions.27 Jesuit philosophers, meanwhile, had a sideline in optical illusions: magic lanterns, distorting mirrors, a magnetic Jesus that walked on water.28 Cultural historians are now adept at showing how the category of “literature” only came into being when a certain body of writing got cordoned off from popular culture, the clowning and folk tales and pulp fiction that literary writers nonetheless continue to plunder for new narrative materials: Ben Jonson will indulge his audience with a little freak-show slapstick, but then post an aristocrat on stage to demystify it; Joseph Conrad, further on down the line, will write spooky navy stories—for grown men. “Science,” we can see now, had to travel a stretch of that same path, had to learn, like literature itself, how not to be pop culture, which now joins religion and magic as one of science’s historical doubles and antagonists. Bacon says simply that the new learning exists “both for pleasure and use,” and what we have to see is that this seemingly innocuous phrase actually names a certain fear, the anxiety that cracks the scientific utopias open from within.29 Bacon’s New Atlantis is, among the early utopias, the only recognizable techno-fantasy, which accounts for its special status among modern readers who prefer their science fiction to come with warp drives and space elevators. Bensalem is a magical island already transformed by applied science, a dreamworld of polyester and chemical dyes, of airplanes and submarines and centralized heating. What readers often overlook, however, is that this society of the machine already includes industrialized entertainment—that’s the “pleasure” in

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Bacon’s formulation: movie theaters, high-end audio systems, a kind of smell-o-vision—or rather what he calls “perspective houses,” “sound houses” and “perfume houses.” And it is here that Bacon’s utopian informant pauses to register what first sounds like another boast, but is actually a worry: “We have . . . houses of deceits of the senses; where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions; and their fallacies. And surely you will easily believe that we that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses, if we would disguise those things and labor to make them seem more miraculous. But we do hate all impostures and lies; insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not shew any natural work or thing, adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and without all affection of strangeness.”30 Historians of science have made the point that the Scientific Revolution didn’t just require philosophical paradigm shifts—away from Aristotle, say, and toward a Neoplatonic mathematization of the cosmos; it also required new instruments or devices, knowledge-producing machines—telescopes, thermoscopes, wind-guns, and the like—which means that natural philosophy retained an artisanal character even as it generated a new type of masterintellectual. The new learning didn’t just help produce, at a century’s remove, the Industrial Revolution; it was itself the product of mechanical innovations. This is an impeccably Baconian line of argument: Bensalem is a utopia of manufacturing whose chief product or line of widgets is knowledge itself. But then Bacon also realizes, as the historians who have followed him generally do not, that no machine is reliable in its philosophical effects—that any device that produces knowledge can just as easily produce lies; that fact-generating machines will also churn out illusion like some kind of emission or epistemological greenhouse gas. Even in utopia—especially in utopia, because the technology there is that much more advanced—it is alarmingly hard to tell the difference between a research lab and a “house of deceit,” between a university lecture hall and a movie theater. Technology cannot, in fact, spontaneously guarantee knowledge—and so the distinction between knowledge and illusion, which seems intrinsic to the machine world, but which the machine world in fact dissolves—will have to be established separately, through moral coaching—“We do hate lies”—and the law: “We have forbidden them.”

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But even this is not the end of the matter, since some philosophers are able to imagine other solutions to this problem, solutions that don’t involve the state. What many natural philosophers thought would safeguard the truth was simply their own gentility. Let’s put the artisans and their gizmos to one side: it is possible to argue that early modern science had a rather different class character than these indicate, that its institutions were built not by craftsmen but by the lesser aristocracy, and that the credibility of the new learning was borrowed in large measure from the credibility of its genteel proponents.31 The Royal Society was— need it be said?—not a working man’s club, and what we learn upon examining its membership rolls is that gentility was something more than a social rank; it was an epistemological status, as well. Gentlemen were thought more likely to tell the truth about the world—the meaning of the word honest used to hover between “candid” and “honorable”—and there are at least two distinct ideologies informing this perception. First, there was the still medieval notion that in a polity without standardized law or a state apparatus capable of enforcing contracts, a gentleman’s word was his bond. A traditional honor culture grants special authority to genteel utterances, and we can think of an early scientific epistemology, presided over by virtuosi, as capturing for new purposes these otherwise outmoded feudal energies. Science is not the overcoming of medieval ideology but merely its redeployment. But the ideology of honor was, in the seventeenth century, itself getting updated along civic humanist lines; a real gentleman was no longer a warrior figure, but merely someone who had retained a threatened autonomy, someone who remained outside of commerce and other networks of dependence and corruption. A gentleman could be trusted not to lie because, made economically independent by his landholdings, which he alone controlled, he could have no compelling reason not to tell the truth. The official English science of the late seventeenth century, sent to London as correspondence from sundry farm labs or rural outposts, was anchored in a kind of Country epistemology. Knowing this should help us see, once and for all, where the early theater draws its skeptical line in the sand. Seventeenth-century plays, with some regularity, actually feature natural philosophers or other seemingly learned people as characters in their own right. Jonson’s Volpone poses briefly as a Paracelsian, hawking medicines on the town square. His Dr. Subtle offers to sell the philosopher’s stone to apocalyptic Anabaptists.

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Shadwell’s Sir Nicholas Gimcrack reads the Bible by the light of a rotting ham. Faust meets that encyclopedia salesman. But what we never encounter on the period’s stage is one of those gentleman-philosophers with an inbred knack for honesty and accuracy. A clarification: most of the stage-philosophers are not, in fact, genteel, and the few who are seem driven by their appetites, not their arguments. Jonson’s Lady Would-be is a lusty she-pedant, who seems to treat erudition as an aphrodisiac or seduction technique. Shadwell’s Sir Nicholas imports bottled air from all over England, and then uncorks the breezes of Wiltshire so he can sip them like liqueur.32 The chymist, on this account, is not a man of knowledge, but only a connoisseur, and this latter concept will establish the relationship between knowledge and gentility in a new way: rather than representing aristocrats as the best natural philosophers, because socially programmed to tell the truth, the plays tend to see them only as Europe’s first consuming class, careful to avoid seeming useful, able to take any item of knowledge and make it serve their passions or their pleasure or their culture of self-display. “ ‘Tis below a virtuoso to trouble himself with men and manners. I study insects, and I have observed the tarantula does infinitely delight in music, which is the reason of its poison being drawn out of it.”33 This is a goof on the idea of “pure science,” or at least a clear indication that this term could not, in Restoration England, mean what it would later come to mean: entomology is pure only because it is so trivial, and hence a badge of leisure. It has the purity of a diversion or a frivol, and in this way, too, comes to resemble popular culture. Shadwell’s play will, in these terms, ask us to think of the theater as the better form of knowledge; theater here offers itself as more useful than science—that’s hardly the usual judgment on the issue—providing the functional knowledge of men and manners that the natural philosophers scorn. But then most of the plays won’t much follow Shadwell on this point and are content instead letting knowledge collapse back into display, thereby undoing the distinction, strenuously defended by Bacon and the others, between houses of knowledge and houses of deceit. You should not go to a theater of plants expecting to find anything but fake geraniums. Volpone flogs his “oglio del Scoto” and advertises his “excellency in matter of rare and unknown secrets.” Subtle tells his servant to “take away the recipient / And rectify your menstrue from the phlegma.” A young fop says that “Aristotle in his Daemonologia, approves Scaliger for the best navigator in his time; and, in his Hypercritics, he reports him to be

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Heautontimorumenos. You understand the Greek, sir?”34 In each of these instances, spectators are being asked to chart the drift of philosophical language away from its putative epistemological moorings. Philosophy, simply by virtue of appearing as stage-dialogue, is reduced to a set of speech habits, turns of phrase that anyone can mimic or learn by rote. Again: the early theater tends to depict all other institutions as theatrical; its performances tend to transform everything into performance; its productions often play like backstage musicals without the music, lifting the curtain on the scaffolding of everyday life. We can now extend this point to philosophy itself: when philosophy appears as a set speech, we are, as it were, invited to go backstage on it, asked to see philosophical utterances as orchestrated, directed toward ends not themselves philosophical. Even the century’s few occult plays—the plays about learned magic, where knowledge is allowed to have real effects—end up generating a skeptical point, since all the magus’s secrets ever amount to is some fairly ordinary spectacle: a few men shouting to indicate a storm; three or four faeries dancing. The pinnacle of Prospero’s learning yields commonplace stagecraft, and the odd experience of watching Marlowe’s Faustus is how unsublime the demon-play actually is, how satirically belittling. Modern audiences expect to find a piece about a crazy genius who learns everything there is to know about the world and is then swallowed whole by hell’s mouth, and instead they get a play whose Satanic interludes are commedia dell’arte or fairground knockabout. And the anti-climax we feel upon realizing this is not entirely anachronistic; it is, in fact, a version of Faustus’s own disappointment. He signs away his soul so he can command the world by magic, and all he gets in return is some fireworks and a few devils doing cartwheels. Such, then, is how the seventeenthcentury stage generally asks us to see philosophy, as a Mephistophelean swindle. The point is crude, and it’s tempting to dress it up some, translate the argument into some finer philosophical language, maybe adduce the relevant passages in Montaigne, whom the playwrights are almost certain to have read. But such a procedure would, by restoring philosophy to its vanished dignity, miss the point. Players and buffoons were the organic intellectuals of early modern skepticism. Left historians of science are fond of arguing that working people were central to the Scientific Revolution. Not only did artisans fashion its instruments, but farmers and miners and such also had to know an awful lot about nature, just by virtue of their work, and something like science only became possible once these

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classes forwarded their knowledge of the world on to the university men. But then Faustus and the others allow us to extend this familiar observation into new territory. For Pyrrhonism, too, had its history from below, and doubt, no less than philosophy, had its craftsmen or plebian makers: acrobats, clowns, anyone else who could dupe onlookers and then catch them out in the duping.

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1. There are two things you can count on a Hobbsean not to like: they are European civilization and space aliens; and we will have understood something important about Hobbes’s political thought if we can figure out what the one has to do with the other. Hobbes himself hated whatever counted as European civilization in the seventeenth century; you’ll have to wait for a certain kind of transvaluating German before you find another philosopher so determined to rip out all the major intellectual traditions of the West. And as for the space aliens—it may be easier to start with them and work our way earthwards. The aliens come with a story attached: it is the 1680s, and there is a natural philosopher, a Rosicrucian astronomer, who is looking after two young women, his daughter and his niece. He keeps them under lock and key, because he is worried they will marry below his expectations. Their two boyfriends, meanwhile, want to liberate the women from the philosopher’s control, to which end they come to him disguised as moon-men, first as emissaries from the lunar king, and then later as the king himself and as his cousin, the prince of Thunderland. The philosopher, honored that the moon is for a change paying attention to him, agrees to deliver his women over to the extraterrestrials, who celebrate the event by transforming the front corridor of his townhouse into a cosmic palace, with an oversized, living zodiac, Galileo and Kepler in flying chariots, and an African dance troupe singing songs to the stars. This done, the boyfriends reveal themselves, explaining to the philosopher that the entire affair has been a hoax and that it is philosophy that has made him thus gullible,

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at which point the astronomer resolves to burn his books in shame: “let my study blaze; / Burn all to ashes, and be sure the wind / Scatter the vile contagious monstrous lies.”1 This is the plot of Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, which was one of the great stage hits of the 1680s, regularly revived until 1750 or so. Much of the play is Restoration comedy by-the-numbers, and we need to take its conventionality seriously. Behn has grafted the figure of the philosopher onto the figure of the obstructing uncle, who is one of the early theater’s stock types. There are scores upon scores of plays like Behn’s, plays in which plucky young men steal women away from oldtimers, though the women are sometimes wives rather than wards, which means that the uncle and the cuckold are to some extent variants of the same character. But then one wonders: Why all this generational strife and gerontophobia? The short answer is that the humbling of old men, as represented on the stage, is an ongoing summons to class struggle and counter-revolution. The old men in question are almost always rich commoners, or perhaps new-model knights with mail-order titles and comically typifying names like “Sir Cautious Fulbank.” The young gallants have typifying names, as well, though these latter are meant to signal their elevated status and have generally been borrowed from aristocratic romances. “Bellamour” shows up a lot; in Emperor of the Moon, they are “Don Cinthio” and “Don Charmante.” Collectively, then, the plays mean to announce a crisis, which is that the burghers seem to have gotten the upper hand, or at least that London’s bourgeoisie is hogging the nation’s women, and this sentiment opens up onto the vaguely Nietzschean fear that England has submitted to the dominion of the weak, rule by dull and impotent old men. The figure of the uncle, in these terms, can carry some rather precise historical meanings. This has something to do with the place of the younger brother in early modern writing, about which scholars have already had a lot to say.2 The English commitment to strict primogeniture— to the bequeathing of estates, undivided, to firstborn sons—meant that younger brothers in genteel families were largely unprovided for in the seventeenth century. Each generation would produce thousands of gentlemen that the aristocracy could not absorb, like the lost boys of Mormon polygamy. Younger brothers can thus seem like the figures of a dialectical history, in which the established agrarian order produced its own negation or gravediggers, gentlemen who were forced into trade and the

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learned professions, disembedded moderns rising up at the very heart of the late feudal economy. The stage-uncle is in his essentials a version of these younger brothers; uncles, like brothers, are near relations who nonetheless stand just outside the direct patrimonial line. Uncles are younger brothers all grown up, as made evident well before the Revolution in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1622). The demon-uncle in that play, Sir Giles Overreach, is a younger brother who has gone into moneylending and outlived the family’s titled firstborn, and who now ruins country gentlemen for sport. The word uncle, in sum, is sometimes shorthand for “mutating aristocrat”—a gentleman who no longer feels bound by codes of gentility; the word can thus serve as a marker of a new class configuration, of a gentlemanly capitalism that still registers as crossbred and disruptive, and to this historical meaning the Restoration comedies will add a distinctive ideological coloration: Howard’s Committee has the usual plot—gallants liberate women from their protectors—except that its obstructing parents are grasping Puritans, and this association will also persist over time, because even as the regicide retreats into historical memory, its one-time supporters will age into the comic roles that Terence has kept waiting for them, so that by the 1670s and 1680s, the very phrase “old men” will, in theatrical contexts, mean something like “London citizens of the revolutionary generation,” in which case to do battle with the greybeards is actually to do battle with the bearers of a certain radical legacy. When Behn takes the stock character of the uncle and turns him into an astronomer, she is therefore locking natural philosophy into a set of ready-made associations. She doesn’t have to spell it out; the character-type comes outfitted with its own meanings. Moon-gazing is the sort of thing that burghers and Puritans do, and it would be better for everyone if they could be talked out of it. But then why? What’s so bad about philosophy, beyond its being practiced by disreputable people? Behn’s play levels two accusations: first, philosophy leads to sexual deviance. Early in the play, the doctor, egged on by one of the fake aliens, immediately signs onto some extravagantly heretical beliefs. “Man,” he says, “was not made for woman.”3 Women, in the world’s original dispensation, were meant to couple with gnomes and salamanders; and men were supposed to mate with air- and water-spirits; and if the first humans had gone along with this cabbalistic breeding program, the planet would have been populated with demigods

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and not with the frail creatures we actually are, which means that ordinary, straight sex between Adam and Eve was already a kind of Fall. The play obviously means us to find these views ridiculous, but then it also begins with the doctor’s daughter singing a tune in defense of sexual freedom for women—women were “born free as man to love and range”4—and it is this conjunction of libertinism and sexual disgust that will characterize Behn’s narrative and commit it to a certain doublevoicedness. The play cultivates its audience to snicker at the doctor’s philosophical perversions while also endorsing the erotic self-assertion of women (on the understanding that any woman left free to pursue her real desires would spontaneously lust for an aristocrat). The matter, then, is tricky: the doctor’s philosophy is indeed a form of repression; the alien has demanded “absolute abstinence from carnal thought,” and this is not just Behn’s comic invention; it was commonly thought that magic or alchemy could only be practiced by virtuous men.5 But then the play equally invites us to see natural philosophy as sublimation on something like a Platonic model: philosophers are people who can have sex with the immortal. The daughters and their boyfriends will then function as the antithesis of this ambiguity (in a manner that is equally ambiguous). To the extent that the doctor is an agent of sexual discipline—a patriarch who wants to turn his girls into philosophical nuns, marrying Jesus or the Koran or space lizards—then the boyfriends are the commandos of liberated desire. But to the extent that the father is himself a philosophical queer, the young lovers are actually the forces of constraint, of a mundane, this-worldly sex that the women are expected to adopt as free and natural. The play’s first charge against philosophy, then, is that it redirects a person’s desire toward inappropriate objects. We can now see that its second charge is simply a political version of the same: that astronomy deflects a person’s allegiances toward rulers they have no business serving. The easiest way at this accusation is by way of its completely ingenious staging. Behn’s play owed much of its success to its visual extravagance and especially to its long final scene, the masque for the emperor of the moon, which gathered together in one place all the technological innovations of the Restoration theater, complete with platforms and flying machines and intricate, peel-away sets, in a manner that only the first operas could rival. I’ve pointed out that natural philosophy, despite deep misgivings, couldn’t stop itself from borrowing the theater’s techniques,

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and if anyone feels like repaying the insult, now would be the time: Behn’s play is anti-scientific but nonetheless entirely mechanized, transfixed by the technology it officially disdains—at one point, the doctor’s servant lumbers onto the stage with a priapic, twenty-foot telescope—in much the same way that the sci-fi movies that most want us to fear the computerized world are the very ones that rely most extensively on computer-generated effects. The more pressing point, however, is that Behn’s space pageant was part of the Restoration theater’s ongoing commercialization of a royalist aesthetic. Early in the century, the royal masque had possessed a near monopoly on stage inventions. The public playhouses had almost nothing by way of sets; but the royal masques offered almost nothing but sets—lavish, cutting-edge designs to compensate for the stammering amateurism of court theatrics; and the Restoration theater would eventually thrive by finding a way to commodify this once courtly spectacle, to throw open to any ticket-holder sights formerly reserved for the king and his intimates. Behn’s play makes clearer than most what is at stake in this pop Baroque, because it actually names its spectacle as masque and thereby spells out the relevant cultural continuities. But even this clarity generates a confusion of its own, because the play is actually staging a masque for the wrong king, a foreign and, as it were, invading monarch—at one point, the moonemperor will demand allegiance from the earth’s many nations: “French, English, Spaniards, Danes, Turks, Russians, Indians, and the nearer climes of Christendom.”6 The play, if you like, narrates one thread of its own theatrical pre-history, recounting the process by which masques move from the court into a private house, where they get staged for the benefit of people who are not England’s king, and this means that any pleasure that common playgoers might take in gaining access to a masque would have to be shadowed by a realization that their very presence makes the masque illicit, that a commercialized masque dangerously abstracts the form from its only legitimate subject and spectator, which is the sovereign. It is this disloyalty that the play wants to fasten on the natural philosopher. The doctor spends most of the final scene on one knee—“Thus low I bow. . . .”; “Thus low I kneel. . . .”; “Thus low I fall to thank their royal goodness.”7 What we see here is a comic allegory of what the seventeenth century usually calls “conscience” or “private judgment,” the process by which the philosopher, simply by practicing philosophy, calls

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into the world an authority other than the crown or state; and the play’s cunning is to make visible the anti-philosophical case that no philosophy is beyond politics, that all philosophy secretes some notion of sovereignty inside itself, in which case the natural philosopher—the man who wants to serve “truth” or “wisdom” or “nature” more than he wants to serve the king—is by definition a traitor. At best, an English philosopher will be like a Catholic, never to be trusted, torn by a divided allegiance, with the man in the moon his pope. Behn’s final masque shrewdly reframes the period’s most revered astronomers as entirely political figures; it reduces them back to the status of courtiers, ambassadors from a foreign prince, the arbiters and missionaries of an other-worldly power, lunar Jesuits: “We from the upper world thus low salute you. Kepler and Galileus we are called, sent as interpreters to . . . the emperor of the moon, who is descending.”8 The matter is even more dire than this, in fact, because the play has already made clear that the philosopher’s allegiance to this competitor-sovereign is itself disordered; when the astronomer gazes on the moon, he is trying to “steal the secrets of [its] king,” like a spy or “wise politician” who means to “survey all,” leaving no mysteries of state. This the play is content to call “treason.”9

2. Philosophy is inherently a form of sedition—and so we run up against Hobbes’s argument, splendidly literalized, though I realize that Hobbes is not typically regarded as a skeptic and that the point may therefore come as a small surprise. Hobbes often wrote as though he wanted to be the Euclid of political philosophy, a political geometer who could begin with first principles and from them derive necessary rules for public affairs. The actual substance of his doctrines, which begin by establishing a law of self-preservation and end by recommending strongman-rulers presiding over a permanent state of emergency, is not, in the first instance, germane. What matters for now is the clinching certainty of his argumentative style, as with the opening sentence of De Cive: “The faculties of human nature may be reduced to four kinds.”10 If it seems odd to call Hobbes a skeptic, this is because we don’t usually expect to see skeptics counting off reductionist schemes on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, it is formulations such as this that have often convinced the positivists to consecrate Hobbes as their philosophical precursor of choice, as the

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founder of something we can call “political science.” And it is this same demonstrative presentation that has always spooked Hobbes’s liberal and republican readers, who find in his pseudo-mathematical assurance a foretaste of the coercions they can expect from the sovereign power he would erect. These last points aren’t exactly wrong, but against them I would like to pitch two of my own. First, the word science—which is, after all, the term we’re trying to account for here—is defined by its notbeing-philosophy and so includes a certain negation within itself, which means, in turn, that anything we wish to call “political science” will have to be scrutinized for the skepticism that it harbors, its snubbing of “political philosophy.” In Hobbes’s writing, we will not have far to look. Second, anything that radical thought finds severe or unyielding in Hobbes’s system is as much a matter of this skepticism as it is of the Euclidian axioms with which that skepticism impossibly coexists. If you want to get a sense of the reversals that you’re in for when you start reading Hobbes, you just need to take a glance at his late Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England.11 The marvelous perversity of this dialogue lies in a simple transposition: it is the law student who sticks up for philosophy—who keeps trying to find philosophical coordinates for English law—and the philosopher who, speaking with all the authority of that job description, has to break it to the student that philosophy isn’t good for much: “See, you lawyers, how much you are beholding to a philosopher.”12 That sentence, taken on its own, could be read as collecting on a debt, as in: You lawyers should reverence Aristotle because you owe him so much. That it means nothing of the sort—that it is, rather, a kind of taunt—is made clear in a dozen other passages, as when the philosopher says that the seventeenth century’s most famous jurist, “whether he had more or less use of reason, was not thereby a judge, but because the king made him so.” Or again: “Statutes are not philosophy . . . but are commands or prohibitions which ought to be obeyed.”13 The not-philosophy sentence is one of the hallmarks of Hobbes’s prose; most skeptics develop elaborate rhetorical strategies for writing their way out of philosophy, but Hobbes often seems to think he can just show philosophy the door. So later in the Dialogue we read that the apostles fanned out around the eastern Mediterranean after Christ’s death to set up churches—“and not by the authority of Plato or Aristotle or any other philosopher.” Or there’s this, from early in De Cive: ancient princes “did not defend their power by

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arguments but by punishing the wicked and defending the good.” Or this, from The Elements of Law: “Upon the occasion of some strange and deformed birth, it shall not be decided by Aristotle, or the philosophers, whether the same be a man or no, but by the laws.”14 The pattern is clear: not philosophy, philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, or arguments; but rather, commands, prohibitions, punishments, laws. Hobbes’s philosopher says in the opening pages of the dialogue that he has read the statutes of English law, but he has precisely not read them as a philosopher would; the philosopher steps forward to teach the law student how to read unphilosophically: “I read them not to dispute, but to obey them.” And then on the next page, the negation continues: “It is not wisdom, but authority that makes a law.”15 When Carl Schmitt later borrows this slogan from Hobbes, he prefers its Latin version: Auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem. But Hobbes’s English has “wisdom” where the Latin has “truth,” and the choice of term is at least of some small consequence, since rejecting “wisdom” keeps the heat squarely on the philosopher, its devotee, and less on what Leviathan calls “men learned in humane sciences.”16 The Dialogue on the Common Law is out to cancel –sophy, as though the philosopher were mutating before our eyes into a law-loving creature we might call the philonomer. Perhaps, however, this formulation is misleading, because the law, for Hobbes, is not in fact primal or self-generating, as it will be for the legal positivists who regularly invoke him, and the purpose of the Dialogue is, in fact, to destroy the autonomy of the legal system as a separate branch of government. What Hobbes shares with the legal positivists is the decoupling of law from ethics or religion. The idea here is that it is a simple category error to describe any particular law as good or right, let alone godly. It probably doesn’t even make much sense to describe a law as just, unless you have a high tolerance for tautology, since law is the originator of justice and not its expression or tool—though even this may be granting too much. Better to say, then, that the law does not produce justice. The value of law is that it brings an end to philosophically irresolvable battles over justice. Here’s Hobbes: In the state of nature, where every man is his own judge, and differeth from other concerning the names and appellations of things, and from those differences arise quarrels, and breach of peace; it was necessary that there should be a common measure of all things that might fall in controversy. . . . This common measure, some say, is right reason: with

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“Seeing reason is not existent . . .”. All of Hobbes’s thinking begins here. What kind of politics follows conclusively on from the non-existence of reason? Expositors often note that Hobbes’s state of nature arises from the physiological near-equality of human adults; pretty much any person could, with a little ingenuity, kill any other person, which means, in defiance of certain aristocratic myths, that there has never been a natural hierarchy of human types, no organic warrior class born with broadswords for hands. The state comes into being to manufacture a simulated superiority where no natural one exists. What is less commonly noted is that Hobbes, in this passage and many others like it, adapts Pyrrhonism into an intellectual version of this same famous argument: adults have, alongside their shared physiques, a rough philosophical parity, as well, which means that people will inevitably make up their own minds: “Every man is his own judge.” The state of nature is, among other things, an epistemological condition, and political societies are formed when people join together to solve this epistemological crisis by non-epistemological means—that’s one good definition of skepticism right there. Any thinking person in conditions of political breakdown—in the American wilds or at a time of civil war—would have to be a skeptic, stuck between the philosophical positions that attach to warring parties; and any solution to such epistemological savagery will be artificial—gloriously, savingly artificial—the arbitrary investiture of some particular doctrine. It might be confusing to so much as call the upshot of this process “law.” Consider the following, spectacularly fudged formulation of Hobbes’s: “The king’s reason, be it more or less, is that anima legis, that summa lex whereof Sir Edward Coke speaketh, and not the reason, learning, or wisdom of the judges.”18 The sentence’s official task is to reassign authority over the law from legal professionals to the state’s executive, which is obviously where Hobbes parts ways with the legal positivists who like to claim him as their own. But the real action in the sentence lies somewhere else, in the phrase “be it more or less.” Only

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“the king’s reason” gives life to law. But it does so whatever his portion of reason, whether or not the king is actually rational. The king’s reason could, in fact, by some competing standard, be utter foolishness, could be un-reason, at which point the sentence undoes itself and what is here named reason morphs into will. This is one of the most remarkable statements in all of Hobbes, where you can see him writing one word and meaning its antithesis: the king’s command is the spirit of the laws of which Coke speaks. And the most pervasive consequence of this hidden shift is that the king’s reason, because not reason, can be given no particular content. This can’t be repeated often enough: Hobbes’s theories have next to nothing to say about what the sovereign is supposed to command, about the substance of a well-made commonwealth’s governing doctrines. The king’s will marks out the hollow space or iconoclastic taboo in the philosophical system, and we can see here that Hobbes is out to liquidate an entire genre of political writing: the mirror-forprinces and other such works of humanist political counsel. Hobbes may be, alongside Bodin, the great theorist of sovereignty, but sovereignty exists in his writing almost only as a principled silence at its center, the philosopher’s refusal to tell the king his business. We don’t typically think of Hobbes as a skeptic, and we don’t usually think of him as a philosophical storyteller, in the manner of Hegel or Nietzsche, but we can see here that he suspends skepticism in his supposedly geometric system—he hebs it auf—by spinning it into a narrative. It is important that we get this right, because the story Hobbes is telling here—the story of sovereignty following sequentially on from doubt, as its solution—is the cell-form of a narrative that he can condense and expand as he likes; and that he will retell on several different occasions and with superficially different historical reference points. Such, for a start, is his account of the English Revolution and its aftermath, and we should pause to note how distinctive the telling is. There is hardly a historical development in early modern Britain that hasn’t been proposed by some scholar or another as a possible cause of the revolution: the long-term decline of the high, feudal nobility; the rise of agrarian capitalism and hence of an independent, landowning elite; the growth of the Atlantic economy and with it of new, colonial merchants bypassing crown control; the centralized English state; the un-centralized English state; the Reformation, its ambiguous Elizabethan settlement, the rise of the Puritans as fifth column; the ideology of the ancient constitution

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and a growing sense of Parliament’s centrality to the nation’s affairs; the ineptitude of those two particular kings, a mumbling, drunken sodomite and his stubborn, despotic son; the special challenges of “Britain,” that is, of governing three kingdoms as though they were a single nation, and hence of trying to integrate their competing customs, institutions, and Christianities into a single state apparatus. Conrad Russell thinks the civil wars were an act of Scottish imperial aggression.19 We don’t have to decide for ourselves who is right in order to see that Hobbes is doing something unusual when he places the blame not on changing state forms, and not on underlying socioeconomic tendencies, and not even on a few bungling politicians, but on Solon and Cato, or rather on the “universities” who, by promulgating the ancient wisdom of such men, “have been to this nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.”20 What Hobbes means is that the teaching of Greek and Latin has encouraged Englishmen to think of themselves as Grecified and Romanized and so to demand Greek or Roman forms of government. In his Behemoth, then, Hobbes will recount the revolution as Quixotetale, a story of over-read men stupidly playing out scenarios from their favorite books, which means that his history of the conflict is, by modern standards, an emphatically literary history, or at least something like The Intellectual Origins of the English Civil War. The “babbling philosophy of Aristotle and other Greeks . . . serves only to breed disaffectation, dissension, and finally sedition and civil war.”21 The universities were a Trojan horse—that Hobbes reaches for an obligatory classical allusion even here, in the process of denouncing the teaching of Greek and Latin, can be taken as evidence for his point and not as that point’s refutation. Humanism caused the revolution, as did scholasticism more distantly before that, since Hobbes gives us no clear grounds on which to divvy intellectual history up into its textbook periods. Tyrannicide was in the air as soon as medieval Europeans learned to conjugate occidere. For a modern reader, one of the things that will stand out about Hobbes’s account of medieval Europe is how fully it flies in the face of eighteenthand nineteenth-century myths about the superstitious and Gothic centuries that preceded the revival of learning. For Hobbes, medieval Europe’s most distinctive institution was not, say, the church, and certainly not the manor, but rather the university, that great post-classical innovation, and the problem with this university age was that it was entirely

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too philosophical, cranking out what Hobbes calls “an abundance of scholars.”22 He generally describes the medieval universities the way an antiimperialist might now regard the string of U.S. military bases that stretches across the globe, as the fortresses of a foreign power on various native soils and hence as a standing insult to the very principle of sovereignty. The pope, he writes, set up universities around Europe so he could consolidate his power “by disputation,” and nearly everything that Hobbes wrote can be read as studying the solvent effects of disputation upon national life.23 Even in Protestant England, learned men are not properly absorbed into the nation-state, because their heads are filled with the thoughts of other commonwealths and other historical periods, which leaves them acting like spectral diplomats on a mission from dead polities. There is barely a modern student of Hobbes who doesn’t stop at some point to praise the man’s lapidary prose, but one wonders if these readers know exactly what they are applauding, because Greek and Latin speakers are, for Hobbes, just a version of the astronomer in Behn’s Emperor of the Moon—the servants of an alien world, Athenian spies, and their classicized speech (“Latin and Greek words wryed a little at the point towards the native language of the several countries where they are used”) is nothing but the audible mark of their treachery. To praise Hobbes for his vernacular briskness, then, is to greenlight a project, not unlike Heidegger’s, to scrub the language clean of its foreign philosophical accretions, and this, in turn, is but a side-project of a larger, state-run endeavor—that cultural revolution, also outlined by Hobbes, to “punish . . . most of those that have had their breeding in the universities.”24 But then even Hobbes’s nationalism will get routed through a myth about non-English others. It is no doubt already evident that the story Hobbes is telling takes in more than the seventeenth century. The English Revolution is, for him, just the latest instance of world history’s single recurring catastrophe, which is the destruction of political order by philosophy. In Hobbes’s theory of history, 1648 is always underway. His thick, detailed recounting of the English conflict can thus be stretched thin into a story about Europe as a whole or about Mediterranean civilization. And yet when Hobbes is telling a story about the millennia, and not just about a decade or a half century, the arguments he makes have to change in one conspicuous way: as a political memoirist or commentator on contemporary events, Hobbes is emphatically an anti-classicist,

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but at this other level, as philosophical historian of the world, he is content to propose a counter-antiquity. If Greek and Roman thought are the problem to be overcome, the infectious agent spreading through the history of European philosophy, then perhaps one might simply look back before the Greeks, or somewhere off to the east of the Peloponnesus, to show one’s fellows that many people have gotten by just fine without Aristotle. Hobbes, the bearer of philosophical modernity, sounds least modern when he is trying to imagine a “golden age” of “peace,” though what he means in this case is an age “before [political] questions . . . began to be debated.”25 Even this effort, though, doesn’t play out quite as one might expect. Carl Schmitt, one of Hobbes’s most ardent readers, has a legend of his own to tell, which is that you can’t understand Hobbes if you don’t understand why Jews hate dragons. Hobbes wants us to love the leviathan—a mythical beast, something more than a whale, a sea serpent or great, swimming monster, the kraken of the state. Some nations have known enough to revere dragons in more or less Hobbes’s fashion—the Chinese, for instance, or the Anglo-Saxons, marching into battle with flying lizards on their standards—but the Semitic peoples have set themselves apart by understanding the serpent and his oversized cousins only as diabolical. No surprise, then, that Jews hate the state, as well; that they treat the leviathan like a fiend to be fought, this diasporic people who are content to live in stateless abjection and who refuse be properly assimilated into anyone else’s nation either. The Jews, as ethnic irritant and leftover, prevent the charmed circle of the state from ever closing. And Hobbes—such is Schmitt’s conclusion—will be their antidote, the great anti-liberal, hence anti-Semitic, philosopher, who must be strictly distinguished from the Spinoza that intellectual historians insist on treating as his Judeo-republican twin.26 It can’t come as much of a surprise that Schmitt is completely wrong about all of this. Hobbes was a semitophile, which is just one more way in which he resembles the radical Protestants he wanted to put out of business, those Judaizing Puritans who named their sons Isaac or Josiah and their Connecticut towns Bozrah or Goshen or Canaan. Even if we swallow the anachronism and call Hobbes an anti-liberal, we have to see that Hobbes fleshes out his anti-liberalism with a completely different national myth. It is Judaic antiquity that Hobbes wants to revive, as an alternative to the Greek and Roman ones. What Hobbes admires about the Jews is, in fact, a kind of nationalism; the earliest Jews, in the

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process of constituting themselves as Jews, understood something about the state that few subsequent nations have, so if we’re going to start tossing around anachronisms, one might do better to call Hobbes a Zionist. Here’s the sense in which the Jews were the original people of the lizard: they treated their prophets and priests as kings or princes, and so did not allow religion to take shape as an independent sphere, separate from political life. The Jews cemented their status as a nation by covenanting with one another to treat Moses as though he were God’s chosen, as though he were the only one in their midst capable of speaking God’s commands. (Hobbes says it helps that Moses really was God’s chosen, but he also says the other Jews, because not chosen, couldn’t have known this.) There is a lot of talk in the scholarship about Hobbes’s Erastianism, his determination to subordinate the church to the needs of the state. But the point is somewhat misleading, since Hobbes does not, in fact, give us good grounds on which to distinguish between Erastianism and theocracy, which is its antithesis and double. A prince, for Hobbes, can take on religious functions. This is what he is normally read as advocating, as in: King Charles should take firm control of the Church of England; he alone, and not bishops, priests, or elders, should set the parameters of Christian belief and practice. But then ancient Israel presents Hobbes with the opposite case, which, for his purposes, is just as good: a prophet can take on political functions, can start functioning as legislator and commander. What matters is that these functions remain fused in a single authority; that this authority be publicly and unmistakably designated; that it retain interpretative authority over both secular and spiritual affairs; and that it never allow a church to gain independent jurisdiction over belief and moral conduct. What is best about the Jews is that they didn’t have “a church” in this sense, so that when they went to worship at temple, understood now as a building and not an institution, it was their own ethno-political compact they were actually adoring. It is in this context that philosophy needs to be understood as an event: The Jews, like Paul and Augustine and Ficino after them, eventually had their own fatal encounter with Greek thought, which is little more than a lightly disguised polytheism, with its ontology of warring elements and infinitely varied substances. Greek philosophy was an idiocy spread by the Athenian empire, nothing more than codified superstition, a savage thinking that sees the world crowded with animated things, a cosmos of enchanted, Aristotelian objects, carrying their own

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purposes and motive forces inside them like tree spirits. Jesus missed his chance to purge the church of its pagan admixture. Hobbes will not make the same mistake.27 At this point, it becomes tempting to perform Hobbes’s own operation upon him and slot him into a philosophical narrative of our choosing, but that’s probably not such a good idea. There are two stories that critical theory likes to tell about the seventeenth century. They’re the same two stories that critical theory tells about every century, unsurprisingly. It’s just that the seventeenth century can seem especially ripe for theoretical inspection, the right moment in which to begin a philosophical modernity narrative. The Dialectic of Enlightenment opens, after all, on its very first page, with Francis Bacon, and not with d’Alembert or David Hume.28 The first story one might want to tell recounts the triumph of identity thought, of categories, classification schemes, and philosophical systems, at the expense of non-identity, the singular, the anomalous, the odd or ill-fitting; if that’s the story you’re after, you might direct your attention, in the century’s archive, to the later Ramists, the pansophists, eventually to Cartesian mechanism and then to Newtonian. The second story seeks the origins of our modernity in the running together of knowledge and political power, and instances of this, too, undoubtedly abound. You can even choose your constitutional register or elevation. If you are looking for an epistemological monarchy, you will find in the seventeenth century still humanist fantasies about learned princes and Neoplatonic philosopher-kings. You might even find the real thing: Scotland’s James VI publishing his own closely argued theories of kingship; the Medicis patronizing Galileo and so having the moons of Jupiter named after them; Prague’s Rudolph turning his imperial castle into one great Wunderkammer, with astrolabes for ornaments and pelicans wandering the hallways. If, however it’s epistemological aristocracy you’re after, you’ll find that early-seventeenth-century education rates, in England as in Europe more generally, were high—twentieth-century high—as the nobility, gentry, and even some of the talented poor crowded into the expanding universities in order to make themselves seem useful to the state.29 If, finally, you’re looking for epistemological democracy, you might even find glimpses of that: the expanding print marketplace, which produced many volumes of popular knowledge (and not just sermons or romances); hot Protestants gadding to lectures on learned topics (and not just to preachers

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ranting apocalypse); the revolutionary determination of some to “turn plowmen into philosophers.”30 The ideological judgment you issue on these varieties of knowledgepower is, of course, up for grabs: if you follow Foucault, then knowledge is power in almost dematerialized form, a swamp gas that will seep through every window screen and cracked door, the bearer of norms and commands into the furthest recesses of no longer private life. If, on the other hand, you follow Niklas Luhmann, who is critical theory’s neoliberal look-alike, then the reorganization of institutions around knowledge is what makes possible the characteristic plurality of modern societies and so to be cherished or jealously guarded. Social spheres— law, religion, the economy, and so on—achieve their independence by bootstrapping themselves into so many information-processing systems, networks for gathering, sorting, and communicating knowledge about their environments, in which case an early modern philosopher-king is not the soft totalitarian of Foucauldian lore, but merely the state’s techie, trying to bring the commonwealth online. Here’s the problem. In most versions of critical theory, these two stories go together. If you weave together an account of identity thought and an account of governmentality, you’ll probably get the Enlightenment of post-structuralist cliché, which is the administered society masquerading as Spirit. But Hobbes is a spoiler in this scenario, because he works with one of these stories and doesn’t work with the other, and so forces us to consider them separately. Hobbes’s entire project is to preempt the discursive plurality that systems theory both describes and ratifies, the existence of law, the state, religion, and so on, each as a separate arena of social life with its own language, institutions, standards of judgment—what Weber calls the polytheism of modern societies or simply the war of the gods. Hobbes’s philosophy is, in these terms, resolutely mononuclear, and this in two senses: he wants to limit the disagreement that is possible within any one of the spheres, and he wants to destroy the autonomy of the spheres and so limit the possibility of disagreement between them. Denounced as an atheist in his lifetime, he remains intrigued by ancient Israel because its monotheism, even more than trinitarian Christianity, can serve as the model for the absolute monarch, who retains a monopoly over interpretation and the making of decisions. His fantasy is that he will be able to restore some near-original

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political unity, and his materialist ontology will rehearse this operation on philosophy in advance; it will abolish the indirect powers, vanquish the independent spirits and substances that gallop around medieval Aristotelianism like so many errant knights, and in their place it will install a sovereign monism of the body. Just follow the mono’s—monarch, monotheism, monopoly, monism: Hobbes is as clear a case of identity thought as an Adornian could ask for. And yet his practical project is something else again: he means to roll back the intrusion of learning, philosophy, or investigation into political life, and not to hasten their amalgamation. So if you’re keeping tabs, Hobbes says yes to identity thought, but no to governmentality—yes to sameness but no to knowledge-power—and it’s at this point that anyone well read in critical theory will have to stop and squint. The easiest thing one can say is that Hobbes wants to terminate the humanist and post-humanist projects—the advancement of learning—to which critical theory’s sense of the period is usually keyed. He wants to throw that history into reverse. This point is clarifying, but perhaps a little meek, since once we encounter Hobbes, we have to wonder whether critical theory was even telling the right story to begin with. Hobbes is a spoiler, because he forces us to return to the most overquoted sentence in seventeenth-century philosophy so that we can understand why somebody interested in shoring up the state would not want to say that knowledge is power. For someone of Hobbes’s cast of mind, that dictum actually spells trouble—it’s a problem, not a program. For if knowledge is power, then this simply means there is another class of people, after the feudal nobility, whom the sovereign is going to have to strip of their power, except this is now going to mean stripping them of their knowledge, and it won’t be clear how this is to be accomplished, since it is easier to impound a halberd than a truth-claim. Hobbes, in short, holds out the possibility that not all modern states have been “epistemological regimes,” at which point you either decide that one of the source-figures of modern political thought utterly misdescribed his historical conjuncture and had no effect on the political orders that came after him. Or you discern, in the light cast by Hobbes, another modernity about which Foucault and Luhmann have almost nothing to say. Still, there is a version of the Adornian or Foucauldian question that we might want to put to Hobbes. Is it possible to separate knowledge from power? It’s just that this question is the stick with which crit-

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ical theorists usually beat liberals and positivists, by showing, under the guise of Ideologiekritik or science studies or the sociology of knowledge, that no, power can never simply be escorted from the epistemological field. But do we even know how to ask the question with the opposite valence—not: Can knowledge exist without power?—but: Can power exist without knowledge? This latter is Hobbes’s question, and a dialectical account of sovereignty would have to show that knowledge, once repressed, returns to disrupt the non-epistemological exercise of power, as surely as power persists within apolitical science as its demon and unconscious. It is not, after all, as though Hobbes’s writing didn’t come with puzzles of its own. Critical theory is, among other things, a way of thinking about administered systems and, reflectively, about the status of thought within such systems. Adorno’s indispensable point was that in conditions of generalized administration, it becomes ever harder to so much as name whatever it is that escapes administration, lest one administer it in the naming. But what we will find in Hobbes is that it is equally hard for the proponents of administration to fix, in thought, the administered society itself, and that the attempt to do so will generate its own distinctive set of impasses. The problem is perhaps best approached from its theological side. We know that Hobbes’s science of politics is trying to theorize sovereignty, and it has to be stressed that this concept was not original to him or to his immediate predecessor Bodin. Both thinkers inherited the concept from Christian theologians, which should remind us again, should reminders still be necessary, that there was no showdown between religion and science in the seventeenth century. It is hard to find a natural philosopher in these decades whose writing is not demonstrably pious.31 This isn’t to say that the new learning didn’t sometimes make the orthodox nervous, but then that last term already frames the issue in the right way: there were competing philosophical systems; each was at once theological and scientific; and each could be judged, loosely, for its orthodoxy. Instead of a fight between science and religion, one discovers a fight between orthodox science (accounts of nature that most respectable observers found compatible with the central tenets of Christianity) and dissenting science (accounts of nature that seemed to promote religious innovation or perhaps even heresy). In most cases, the orthodox philosophers wanted to be able to say two things at once: first, they wanted to say that the universe is governed

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by laws or that its objects behave according to observable patterns; such would be the minimum requirement of a natural philosophy, that careful examination of the world yield some kind of intelligible system. Second, they wanted to say that God is in control of that system, that he commands it; such would be the minimum requirement of Christianity, especially for anyone who wanted to retain the Old Testament God of might, who is the sovereign’s prototype. A free and powerful God is woven into the everyday language of Christianity—thy kingdom come; thy will be done—and cannot be discreetly ditched. But then it is never really clear how both of these claims are going to be sayable at once, and the orthodox were always, to some degree, up against it. Perhaps their dilemma is already evident: Even my unforced paraphrase has already registered two competing jurisdictional claims—The universe is governed by laws, and God commands the system—so that one might well wonder who is really calling the shots, God or the laws. You could say that these laws are “God’s laws,” but this won’t make the problem go away; it will only postpone the salient question, which is whether or not God is subject to those laws. The standoff between religion and science that one fails to find in the period surfaces instead as an uncertainty within natural philosophy itself, as an instability internal to the arguments of a Christian science, much of whose history can be told as the story of this problem’s successive patches or fixes. One way of glossing the issue would be to ask whether the sovereign God is inside or outside the system of scientific laws. This, too, is a hard question to answer for anyone wanting to leave sovereignty intact. The period’s famous clockwork language positions God outside of his own system—the clockmaker does not crawl about in his own timepieces—and this both preserves a clear hierarchy between the Creator and his Creation and grants the cosmos an object-like independence that leaves God with precious little to do. The Deleuzians and the Negri circle have to that extent got it wrong: the notion of sovereignty is neither opposed to doctrines of immanence nor attached to conceptions of a power-wielding outside. A polity’s outside, strictly conceived, is ostracism or Solonian self-exile, the negation of sovereignty, and not its perch. So the theorist of sovereignty, no less than the theorist of multitude, has to find a way to get God to live in his own house. But this, too, is tricky. You have to be careful about how you invite God back into the system. You can try to rejig the allegory of the clockwork so that the

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sovereign does, in fact, remain in the machine, in which case you might simply hone in on those parts of the clock that one can plausibly describe as its command center, as when one writer says, in 1649, that the sovereign “should be not only a hand but also the escapement that tells all other wheels the time to move.”32 This is no advance at all, however, because to command a mechanism is to possess an oddly mechanical form of command. A clock obviously cannot change its mind, cannot decide one morning that it would rather be a musket. The sovereign escapement, moreover, is just one part of a clock’s mechanism and can itself only carry out a single action, repeatedly, without alteration or freedom to maneuver. One does not glorify God by calling him a rather important cog. But then if you look instead to the period’s least mechanical ways of describing the cosmos—if you look, that is, to vitalist notions of a living universe—sovereignty’s prospects seem even dimmer. For what does it mean to say that all the objects in the universe have the characteristics of life? Nothing less than that they are self-organizing, self-moving, and self-directing; that they do not even require imposed laws, at which point it becomes easy to conclude that divinity is simply the world spirit of those universally shared capacities or that God is a lobster. It is, in short, really hard to conceptualize sovereignty, because you have to be able view it as simultaneously inside and outside of the system, something that presides over a system but is not properly of it. The danger is that in trying to explain God, you will slip and locate him entirely outside of nature or entirely within it; and these two separate misfilings will actually have the same effect, which is to dissolve the very thing they were meant to establish. If God is removed from the cosmos— or if he is immanent to it—then, either way, matter can take care of itself; bodies in the world can move under their own steam. You give up on sovereignty the instant you concede that objects can take care of themselves without governance. The kindest thing one can say about sovereignty, then, is that the concept is delicate and dialectical, fusing in one the opposed notions of inside and outside, immanence and transcendence, law and will. But then this will mean that sovereignty comes in two distinct versions, depending on which aspect of the dialectic it emphasizes and which it keeps in reserve. First, sovereignty comes in a relatively constitutionalist version, in which God is thought to have created the universe in an outpouring of unfettered will, free and incomprehensible, only then to seal

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a covenant with humanity stipulating that the cosmos’s day-to-day operations would be calculable and rule-bound.33 But then sovereignty also comes in a relatively absolutist version, which sets out from the idea that a world of mere undirected matter would be one of randomness, degeneration, and a certain molecular disorder, so that it can then argue that God’s will, far from exceeding the cosmos’s visible order, actually sustains that order in the form of occasional providential windings and adjustments. This second version of sovereignty might be dialectical, but it is also a bit of a mess, muddling through by transforming God from the watch’s maker to its repairman, which hardly sounds like a promotion for God, not least because it suggests that he didn’t make much of a watch to begin with. Over the last few sentences, my own language has become forthrightly political: natural philosophy produces both a constitutionalist version of God and an absolutist version of God. It is nearly impossible, indeed, to describe this particular episode in intellectual history without political terms intruding into the discussion, if only because the relevant philosophers themselves reach for political analogies at every turn. Here’s a late but typical example, from 1715: “As those men, who pretend that in an earthly government things may go on perfectly well without the king himself ordering or disposing of any thing, may reasonably be suspected that they would like very well to set the king aside: so whosoever contends, that the course of the world can go on without the continual direction of God, the Supreme Governor; his doctrine does in effect tend to exclude God out of the world.”34 We could say that voluntarist theology served as a model for some seventeenth-century theories of kingship, but this formulation overlooks the way in which such a theology, by meditating at length on power and law, had been carrying a certain political content all along. But then this inheritance, if we want to call it that, turns out to be something of a curse or a congenital disease, since once Hobbes and others start describing kings in terms formerly reserved for God, the conceptual impasses of that theology will recur in overtly political form. To describe the king as godlike may seem like royalism’s trump card, but the strategy comes with its own inevitable risks, since it tends to block clear perceptions of the king and to turn him instead into the unfathomable engine of metaphysical paradox. These paradoxes will emerge if we go back now and redo the last two or three pages of the argument, substituting “king” for “God” and

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“commonwealth” for “cosmos.” All the other formulations will hold—is the king inside of the commonwealth or outside of it?—though we need to note straight away that the term commonwealth itself covers over a distinction that most later political theorists would want to make between “state” and “society” and so houses yet another version of the same puzzle. What, after all, is the relationship between these last two? Is the state inside of society or outside of it? Do we think of the state as a centralized super-institution with a London address; as a machine, that is, for pooling wealth and coordinating the use of force; as a brimming treasury and a professional military, which did not exist in 1640 but by 1710 had some 300,000 men in its ranks? Or do we think of the state as imminent to the social field, as a network, not a center, staffed by provincial elites and administering daily life in a thousand localities at once, relieving the destitute, punishing the vagrant, forcing the idle to work, harassing the odd witch?35 Those questions are hard enough, and they will only get harder, because the sovereign, in turn, is not the state—there is no point more crucial to an understanding of Hobbes than this—but rather a kind of finality within or alongside of the state, which means we will have to ask all over again: Is the sovereign inside of the state or outside of it? If we think of the polity as a machine—and this formulation was also utterly commonplace; Hobbes himself recommends that the political philosopher disassemble the commonwealth like “an automatic clock or other fairly complex device”36—so if we think of the polity as a machine, then what place do we allot the sovereign? Clockwork may be an effective way of imagining a new and expanding state bureaucracy, producing halfway-predictable decisions according to publicized rules, but it doesn’t much help one imagine a sovereignty beyond rule; it tends, rather, to bust the monarch down to the rank of chief bureaucrat, the escapement of state. The easiest way to keep the sovereign outside of the state-machine, meanwhile, will be to posit him as clockmaker or Creator, but this preserves his autonomy only by confining it, temporally, to some original moment of state-formation. The king gives way to the founding legislator, a Moses or Lycurgus, whose sovereignty is primal and unrepeatable, a sovereignty in perpetuity whose effects are therefore anti-royalist. Such, then, is Hobbes’s embarrassment. He is routinely described as a mechanical materialist, whose peculiar rigor it is to describe the entire universe as though it were a turbine—but his stated project is to summon

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into being something, sovereignty, that is beyond mechanism. Our task as readers of Hobbes, then, is to trace the ways in which his materialism gets hedged or clipped, even to follow the path by which this materialism reverses into its opposite term. This process is clearest when it registers as mere confusion, as it does around Hobbes’s most famous literary flourish, the image of the leviathan, which is a notorious shambles. What exactly does Hobbes wish to indicate about the state by calling it a leviathan? The word itself suggests a giant animal, something rare but nonetheless organic, an occasional feature of the natural order, as though states were something we might now and then spot breeding freely in the wilds. That this is precisely what Hobbes does not mean to say—his argument will be that states are a contrivance that humans devise to escape what is worst in nature—should already indicate something haphazard in the metaphor. The very first thing that Hobbes needs to tell us, then, right in the book’s opening paragraph, is that the leviathan is an “artificial animal” or “automaton,” not a crocodile, but a robot crocodile.37 More perplexity: if any terms clearly signal Hobbes’s mechanical materialism, it would presumably be these; they initiate an account of the state as machine, though we need to note again that, far from glorifying the state, such an account would almost certainly scale back on what a state can do, simply by describing it as a purpose-built device. But Hobbes does not wish to restrict the state in this way, which means that when he describes the machinery of state as an artificial animal, he is not, in fact, reducing a living thing back to matter-in-motion, which is what textbook intellectual history would tell us he is doing. Quite the contrary: he is trying to retain, in his mechanism, some organic quality of animation or free capacity, in a way that no seventeenth-century windup toy would even have approximated. The “artificial animal,” we immediately learn, is actually an “artificial man,” which is to say a machine with “life and motion,” “reason and will.”38 Hobbes surrenders his materialism in the very act of introducing it. These last qualities—will and reason—will then get amplified, much later in the book, when Hobbes glosses the leviathan as a “mortal God,” at which point the clockwork whale sloughs off its involuntary, mechanical qualities altogether and steps forth as a figure of almost unbounded power.39 There is a danger, however, that in reconstructing the shifting meanings of the leviathan-trope, we will attribute to it more coherence than it actually has—a pleasing narrative progression or set of

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developmental stages. The metaphor is more of a hash than that; the state is at once man, beast, machine, and god. Hobbes is not telling a philosophical fable about an entity that starts as a sea monster and evolves over time into divinity. He is talking about a cyborg Jesus with fins. But then this isn’t just sloppy writing either. The unsettled metaphor is a compressed version of a rift that runs straight through Hobbes’s system. When he first introduces the term leviathan, Hobbes says that it is “a commonwealth,” and that “sovereignty” is just one of this commonwealth’s many parts, the part that quickens the nation’s body.40 Alongside sovereignty, then, the political body is equipped with economy and law, as limbs and kidneys in their own right. But later, when he declares the leviathan to be a god, he says that the commonwealth is that “one person . . . called sovereign,” who can frighten everyone else into behaving peacefully.41 The sovereign has ceased to be a mere organ of state and has become instead another name for it. It is to this extent never really clear which has priority in Hobbes’s thinking, sovereignty or the system. Or if we think we know that sovereignty must have priority, because he so often tells us that it does, we will be surprised that this other conception of the state nonetheless persists in his writing, as residue or alternative. Hobbes is trying to theorize, at one and the same time, the institutionalized state and the sovereign who cannot be confined by institutions, and this, too, is not simply an error, but rather the mark, in thought, of a seventeenth-century state that really did exist in at least two modalities at once, as both immanence and externality. When we read Hobbes, however, the state’s twofold status is available to us, not as a carefully drawn distinction, but only as a persistent hesitation. He will, as it were, assign a different argumentative register to each of these modalities—to the state and to sovereignty—which will then intertwine in his writing; and the distinctive experience of reading the work is of having to shuttle, unaided, between these opposed intellectual habits or philosophical traditions, the author stepping forward on one page as government geometer and thinker of the machine-state and on the next as political theologian and theorist of a godlike freedom; first with the idea that all thought is a kind of computation and that all political obligation can be reckoned sum-like from the principle of self-preservation, which he still calls natural law, but which a modern reader would more likely call biological instinct; then arguing that all belief must be traced back to the sovereign’s inexplicable will, which exists beyond any chain

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of calculation. The dualism that Hobbes’s materialist ontology officially sets out to destroy—as in: It is nonsense to speak of “spirit” and the Cartesians are idiots for even trying—thus returns unharmed in his politics. The sovereign is King Ghost in the state-machine; “an artificial soul,” Hobbes calls him.42 Hobbes’s inadvertent dualism turns out to be the answer to a question we may have forgotten we ever asked. Let’s reach back to the beginning. The issue all along has been: How do we make sense of those paradoxical books that call themselves “skeptical” and “scientific” at the same time, like Glanvill’s Scientific Skepticism or Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist? Why would an intellectual system advertise that it is at once philosophical and anti-philosophical? Hobbes, whatever his obvious disagreements with Glanvill and Boyle, gives us a sense why. Science comes into being to name anything whose existence is structured by law or pattern; skepticism keeps alive the possibility that there exist entities beyond law or pattern; and any thinker who is both scientific and a skeptic is simply trying to think both categories at once, though some readers will no doubt find it surprising that the latter category, the set of things beyond law, includes not only pirates and political dissidents, and not only antiseptic philosophical concepts like contingency, but also kings and classical dictators and other such antinomians of the Right. Sovereignty, in other words, is erected on doubt. One of the many ways in which Hobbes is not really a materialist is that he is obsessed with the role of thought in social life. Institutions are never simply material and never automatic in their operations. They all involve discourse—propositions or arguments: “Jesus is the Christ” or “All men are created equal.” From this one observation emerges an entire series of problems, the classic puzzles of political epistemology: it is clear enough that the founding propositions of a given institution cannot themselves be justified by further argument; they all have the character of axioms or stipulations, which makes them the most vulnerable terms in an institution’s operative ideology, even as they must function as that ideology’s cornerstone. They are always offered in a hypothetical mood and so confess in advance that other founding propositions could have served just as well: we agree to act as though all men were created equal. What’s more, those same propositions, even if safeguarded, are not selfinterpreting and so will tend to generate multiple versions of themselves, at which point we have to conclude that a given institution is

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not, in fact, defined by its founding propositions, but by inconclusive debates over those propositions: All men are created equal—now what do we mean by “men”? The daily functioning of an institution, meanwhile, consists of a thousand small utterances, the processes by which a court or a church or a laboratory scans its environment for the objects under its purview and then comes to determinations about them. These processes are in every case rule-bound, but the problem here is that rules are always generalized or abstract and therefore not selfapplying; the applicability of a rule to a given case will always be up for grabs—or, better, will require a judgment that cannot itself be circumscribed by rules. A government can outlaw torture, but someone will still have to decide whether this particular police beating deserves to be called torture. Any attempt to further specify the rules, by, for instance, drawing up a torture checklist, will merely displace the judgment onto a more minute set of criteria: a government can spell out that waterboarding counts as torture, but someone will still have to decide that the suspect was made to believe he was drowning and not just given a stern dunk or a swirlie. Any institution, then, will involve propositions, but those propositions will themselves be shot through with unclosable gaps. The idea of the gap has a distinguished history in critical theory and brings with it a dualism of its own. The Left Hegelians have drawn attention to the gap between the concept and the object and asked us to keep faith with the concept, as the thing’s perfected form, which human endeavor may yet help the object achieve. The Adornians have simply reversed this procedure—without, however, losing sight of that other, utopian operation—again beginning with the gap between concept and object, but asking us instead to declare our solidarity with the object, understood as whatever eludes the concept’s tyranny. What we can see now is that Hobbes and his followers have their own distinctive account of the gap, which is that it must be closed at all costs—jimmied shut. What arises in the gap between abstactum and concretum is not dialectics, negative or otherwise, but only the decision. The sovereign is the one who, in the face of interminable disagreements—the inevitable multiplicity of intellectual life—up and chooses a political order’s founding propositions, freely and on no particular grounds. And then he also chooses how those propositions are to be construed. And he chooses to which people and events they are to apply. One point merits repeating: the

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theory of sovereignty has absolutely nothing to say about what the sovereign decrees. State power is contentless, philosophically ungrounded, impeccably anti-foundationalist. Skepticism brings into view the void spaces in the political system and then outlines the non-philosophical procedure by which the sovereign will plug that vacuum. Hobbes, then, is a materialist or mechanist—a plenist, properly—only when not talking about the sovereign. Mechanism is what exists on either side of the gap. It is the language one uses to describe the system’s ordinary operations, until it reaches an interpretive impasse and the gap makes itself felt. It is also the language with which one utters a certain project or wish, the desire to make sure that the absence of certainty does not cause the state to falter: the sovereign’s monopoly on interpretation should ensure the machine-like but not really mechanical functioning of the system. Hobbsean institutions can be described, with equal plausibility, as machines that need the enlivening spirit of the sovereign to make them work, or as a din of voices and ideas—prattling spirits—that need a sovereign to make them mechanical. There is, it should be recalled, a skepticism latent, as potentiality, in all mechanical materialism, which is, after all, an attack on spirit or mind and hence on the autonomy of thought, and it this autonomy that Hobbes both concedes and means to undo. The mechanism that Hobbes cannot sustain as an ontology survives only as aspiration. Hobbes, in short, is trying to purge knowledge or argument from politics and so trying to summon into being politics as an autonomous practice, and if he holds any interest for radical thought, it is surely here, in this bulwark against technocracy. Politics can be said to begin only where knowledge ends. It is tempting to bring systems theory to bear upon such an argument, in order to explain what Hobbes is up to, and also to judge his achievement with some sense of proportion, by assigning this outsized figure a duly minor role in Luhmann’s story about the last half millennium or so.43 We could, from that distance, see Leviathan as just one more blip in the history of differentiation, one more branching of the social tree, after which science and the state will exist as independent and mutually indifferent subsystems. But the language of systems does not much help us understand Hobbes—I’m not even sure that it much helps us understand Luhmann—and explaining why should help us bring this argumentative sequence to its end. We can try to account for the seventeenth century by reaching for Luhmann’s language,

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but it is every bit as plausible to account for Luhmann by referring him back to the seventeenth century. The most familiar historical accounts of the Scientific Revolution tend to cast science in the role of lieutenant, a sinister but secondary player in what are basically nonscientific scenarios. Perhaps the most widespread of these historical schemes posits a correlation between science and the rise of capitalism, though here, too, there are a number of different ways of establishing the relationship. The most direct route travels by way of technology or industry. It looks at the seventeenth century’s mechanical metaphors, its redescription of the world as horologe or gin, and sees in their wake a world of actual machines, as though the scientists had decided to make good on what had once been mere linguistic figures by populating the world with automata. First the natural philosophers imagined the world as a machine, and then the manufacturers set about mechanizing the world. Fast-forward to Luhmann, whom commentators often honor by noting how well-read he is in cybernetics or information theory. What this amounts to, in practice, is a compulsion, scrupulous and daft, to describe the entire social order as a giant computer, a set of loosely integrated networks, each of which has “programs” for translating its environment into a “binary code” so that the material world can be processed as information, and this, of course, makes him, no less than Hobbes and his fellows, a mechanist, the techno-materialist of some later capitalism, not the anatomist of a particular socioeconomic history so much as its product and partisan. Systems theory testifies to the sheer excitement of the computer, newly available as a trope for describing every other, as yet un-computerized thing in the world, and is thus fully a product of the 1970s, the equivalent, in thought, of those movies about malign supercomputers who kidnap humans so they can sire android anti-Christs on the bodies of women. But even as it remains sunk in that decade, systems theory inherits a seventeenth-century discourse of the social machine, whose appurtenances Luhmann need merely retrofit or technologically modernize. Luhmann’s is, in fact, a full-bore modernity narrative, and whether or not you will profit from reading him will depend in large part on what kind of stomach you have for such things. Differentiation is the historical tendency of pretty much any social order and exists as both telos and norm. Autonomous subsystems are the grain of history, but their autonomy must for that very reason be strenuously guarded, since all

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attempts to undo differentiation—social-democratic endeavors, perhaps, to introduce political goals into the economy—are affronts against time itself and will only flood a given subsystem with so much noise, information it has lost the ability to accommodate.44 But amidst this generalized defense of the social spheres, there is one completely ordinary instance of differentiation that Luhmann’s scheme cannot accommodate, a subsystem that his theory excludes in advance—and that is science. Knowledge is the one term exempt in Luhmann from history’s most basic patterns; it cannot constitute a sphere of its own, because it is wired into every subsystem; it is the substance or medium of subsystems, the common element that not-so-secretly unites all of these nominally incompatible arenas. The fundamental terms of Luhmann’s argument are obviously what make that argument possible, but they are also its constraint. A theory of universal differentiation nonetheless requires an undifferentiated term. Something similar is going on with Hobbes. Hobbes can seem to be making a few different proposals at once. He wants to purge knowledge from the state, but then he wants to purge it from all of the other spheres, as well, from law, religion, and so on. This is tricky: he sees each sphere as constituted by a set of fundamental debates; law is the clamor of argument, religion an incipient civil war. The temptation felt by the members of a given sphere once they have run aground upon these debates is to look outside the sphere to anchor its operations in something other than itself. Legal thinkers might come to believe that the law will have to be derived from principles that are not themselves law, from reason or nature or ethics or what have you, though this, of course, far from terminating the debate, will only escalate it. This escalation, then, is precisely what Hobbes won’t let happen; it is the move that he steps in to block. Or rather: sovereignty—and not Hobbes—tries to terminate disputes by installing itself within each sphere as its absent foundation. The nation’s laws, its cast of Christian belief, its scientific research methods— all must find their origin in the sovereign’s command. But this leaves us with a paradox: sovereignty ensures the autonomy of every subsystem only by trespassing upon each of them. And the paradox will redound back upon sovereignty itself, which is both a distinct agency, generally imagined as a king or committee above the social order, and that order’s undifferentiated term, not so much above the other subsystems as burrowed into their several fractures and clefts, endlessly delegated and

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dispersed, necessarily shared with so many judges and prefects and section chiefs, the common stuff of the commonwealth. The purging, from politics, of knowledge and argument does not result in the advent of politics as an autonomous sphere or practice, but rather in its expansion across the social field. But then, what is the status of Hobbes’s own arguments after this purging? Can we even go on calling the theory of sovereignty “political philosophy”? Political philosophy is precisely the intermediate term that the wholesale separation of philosophy from politics should exclude. Whatever the predictable ideological content of this or that school, there has always been a utopian charge to the practice of political philosophy, which begins with the historical fact of political multiplicity, demands a consideration of constitutional forms that are not the nation’s own, sends this Polybian parade of –ocracies and –archies marching across the mind, and invites one at last to settle on a language for judging authority. Any theorist who devises a philosophically compelling set of political ideas risks superceding the sovereign as antiphilosopher. This point is easy to misunderstand: I am not saying that political philosophers inevitably put hard questions to the state—not at all. Political philosophy has mostly been the thinking of the state. The point is, rather, that even the language that gets used to justify the state or sovereign—even the language that gets used to describe them—will persist, as a loose atom, un-subsumed into sovereignty, capable, at some later date, of controverting what it now certifies. Hobbes knows as much: orthodox royalist doctrines of the most Christian king are actually a half-baked monarchism, since anyone giving Christian reasons to support the king is implicitly conceding that there might also be Christian reasons to oppose the king, simply by positing God’s law as the standard by which government might be assessed. That’s a loophole Hobbes means to close. But Hobbes’s own philosophy, inevitably, has a starting point of its own, which is the principle of self-preservation: everything wants to live. People form political societies—they contract with one another to obey the sovereign unconditionally—simply because it is their best hope for staying alive. The problem, of course, is that while this argument may provide some compelling reasons to mind the king, it will on occasion provide equally compelling reasons to defy him, even in Hobbes; self-preservation allows you to withdraw from a state—to transfer your allegiance to a new sovereign—if you conclude that the

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old state has become too weak to protect you; and it invites you to positively fight the state if its agents knock down your front door. Selfpreservation is the principle that motors the philosophical system and so cannot be relinquished even in extremis. There is, accordingly, a liberal reading of Hobbes that finds in his argument a minimalist program of government, in which the state has the authority to regulate only those areas of social life in which the public safety is at stake.45 Any practices or beliefs that can plausibly be described as private pass out from under government review. This is a little maddening and historically wide of the mark, since Hobbes, read alongside his peers, is unmistakably calling for a massive expansion of state powers. But it is not exactly wrong. The liberals have simply found their opening, recognizing that any criterion used to justify the sovereign will serve equally well as a constraint upon him. Hobbes can try to abolish the philosophers so that sovereignty can operate unimpeded, but the very act of abolition will leave behind, as residue, a standard or criterion, and the absolute monarch will have to share sovereignty, this unsharable thing, with the very argument that anchors his absolutism.

3. Hobbes means to purge philosophy from politics and in some moments to negate philosophy altogether. One way to think about “science,” then, is as philosophy in political exile, still bearing the marks of the attempt on its life. But phrases like “scientific skepticism” and “skeptical chemistry” are more complicated than this, because the word “skepticism” emphasizes the continuing work of negation, even as it becomes unclear just what skepticism is now negating. It can’t be negating knowledge, since that term, or one of its specifications, is preserved right there in the oxymoron. So what exactly is a skeptical science trying to shut down? The answer is that science involves at least three separate negations—all of them, I think, surprising: 1) Materialism produces, as its own fantasy and science fiction scenario, a world in which literally everything is visible. The Cartesian plenum is a cosmos completely filled with matter, with no perforations or void spaces, just body pressed up against body. Everything in this world is protoplasm; an aroma, seemingly incorporeal, is actually a ma-

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terial communication, a minute parcel of molecules carried to the nose, and so is there to be seen, hypothetically, by anyone with eyes sharp enough to see it. The materialist, then, dreams of being the man with those X-ray eyes—the first human, perhaps, the perfect Edenic knower or empiricist Superman, with a telescopic right eye and a microscopic left, a synesthete who can see sounds, like Duke Ellington. “Adam,” says Glanvill, “needed no Spectacles.”46 Against this, skepticism is capable of tendering a certain rough materialism of its own. A poem in honor of Glanvill contains these verses: Reason’s a draught [a team of horses] that does display, And cast its aspects every way. It does acknowledge no back parts, ‘Tis faced like Janus, and regards Opposite sides.47

Empiricism’s fantasy—that every other sense organ could be transformed into an eyeball—is recast here as skepticism’s familiar nightmare, the argument on both sides of the question all over again, but imagined now as a proliferation of eyes, the mutant sprouting of so many ocular stalks around a person’s skull, flooding the mind with multiple views at once and so allowing nothing in particular to be said about the world. More interesting than this optic surfeit, though, is how these lines register a certain deficit. The reasoning person risks becoming all eye—but also all head (Janus, a draft team)—and anyone suffering from this encephalitis will “acknowledge no back parts”; a few lines later, the poem will speak of “unsure bottoms.”48 Rationality is the condition of asslessness, and the greatest service that skepticism can render, in these circumstances, is to recall us to our creaturely bodies. Skepticism will give us our asses back. The choice of trope strikes me as consequential, because it helps us see that when Glanvill moves in to establish, alongside skepticism, the claims of something called science, he, too, will do so at the expense of the ass. Reason is the condition of asslessness, but so is skepticism. Here’s how that works. Scepsis Scientifica is still a skeptical tract, the kind of book that emphasizes how little we know or can know, and like many such books, it has a lot to say about the unreliability of the senses. This already means that Glanvill is fostering in his readers a certain antagonism toward their own bodies,

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since it is premised on the idea that the body just isn’t very good at what it does; it cannot report reliably on the world. But then the halfway counterintuitive point that Glanvill makes is that the body is weak not because it has trouble taking in information, but because it takes in entirely too much information about the world or takes in information too readily. The problem, in other words, isn’t only one of lack. It’s not just that we no longer have Adam’s infrared super-eyes. It’s that our bodies are snowed under with information that we don’t know how to sort, sensations of uncertain origin, weird, itching sympathies and queer fevers. Worse: all information is conveyed to the mind by sensation, but any sensation, in addition to communicating knowledge, can provide pleasure, as well, which means that every epistemological item carries with it some alluring, non-epistemological surcharge. The body’s membrane—the ticklish film that it exposes to the world—is the field of both knowledge and appetite, and it will never be clear in advance what in a given sensation is data and what desire. Such is Glanvill’s argument, broadly and neutrally stated, and with that established, we can now start factoring in his linguistic choices. He writes that one of the reasons we collectively know so little about the world is that “the woman in us” has the upper hand; we are governed by “the fond feminine.”49 I hurry to add: when Glanvill says that the human species is too womanish, he is not saying, generically, that people are all scatterbrained. The problem is more specific than that: The trouble with post-lapsarian bodies is that they have “easily seducible understandings” and “receive all things . . . in promiscuous admission.”50 The trouble specific to women is that they are literally, anatomically, too open to the world. The notion should be familiar to anyone who watches a lot of horror movies. In Don’t Look Now (1973), when a woman sits down for her first séance—trying to summon the ghosts of the dead, trying to make herself sensitive to the traces they have left in the world—she is told at the outset to make sure her knees are pointing outwards: “Are your legs crossed, dear?”— because the spirits won’t come if they are. In Videodrome (1983), the hero’s vulnerability to the culture industry and corporate manipulation is figured as a maw that grows across his belly and is at once video slot and vagina.51 Ordinary enough images, I suppose, but what one doesn’t automatically expect to find in the seventeenth century is Glanvill’s hunch that humans are universally women, that every sense organ— every socket and nostril—is also a receiving sex organ, that human bodies

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are—all of them—covered in vaginas. The trouble with women is, finally, not specific to women at all. So when Glanvill contemplates the putatively male body, the degenerate surrogate to Adam’s perfect body, he will have to worry about everything that “enters in at the postern”— the word once meant “the back door” and had that phrase’s same range of uses.52 Our condition in the world is one of perpetual sodomy, and it will be the task of a scientific skepticism to correct this. The term “antifoundationalism” takes on some new, hitherto unsuspected meanings. Skepticism, far from performing a doubt-ridden helplessness, is a way of re-establishing control over one’s gaping organism, of sealing off some of its too trafficked corridors or at least of reversing that traffic’s flow. The body, responding too readily to the world, easily forms misconceptions, and these misconceptions are “fleshed in us”—and if this formulation suggests both a pregnancy and a tumor, that’s as it should be.53 Errors of judgment are malignant, anal pregnancies. Glanvill, accordingly, has two more or less interchangeable ways of imagining a cure: we can read his treatise, which should function as a “fortuitous, undesigned abortive”; or we can contemplate pure mind and knowledge, which notions we will have to “defaecate from materiality”—it’s materiality that is getting expelled here, just in case there’s any confusion.54 Science, for its part, will come in to reconstruct the body thus purified, although it will reconstruct that body really only by canceling it all over again. Science’s fantasy is that the flawless male body can be restored through a series of mechanical prostheses and extensions, like the telescope, which Glanville calls “a Galileo’s tube.”55 Once augmented, the feeble, ever-female body will be nothing more than a relay or mediating term, a mere valve between the scientific instrument and the thinking mind. Glanvill’s writing is spilling over with the ordinary language of sex and gender, but this language can actually be hard to parse, since he is not in any of the usual senses trying to consolidate the position of men over women or what have you; he is, rather, trying to strip the human species of masculinity altogether so that he can reassign it instead to the laboratory and its gym bag of strap-on organs. We can call science a patriarchy—feminist historians of science have often said as much— but Glanvill’s science will be a patriarchy with a difference, a bionic order utterly lacking in organic men. And yet the feminist point remains: science, generally regarded as matter’s anti-metaphysical champion, comes into the world instead as its husband and overseer.

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2) Around 1940, Edgar Zilsel, an Austrian Marxist and sometime associate of the Frankfurt School, made an argument of a most unAdornian cast.56 Zilsel maintained that the Scientific Revolution had marked a turning point in the history of class relations. There is a sense in which early experimental philosophy had its roots in the artisan’s workshop and was to that extent a plebian exercise, the more or less spontaneous outgrowth of the tinkering and tool-making of craftsmen. Any artisan’s trade depended in some still utilitarian way on close observation and causal investigation, especially whenever it sought to refine its techniques, rather than just transmit itself from generation to generation. It was this accumulated knowledge that would become what is now called science, but only once it was taken over by educated elites, whose role it would be to bring intellectual system and financial patronage to the endeavor. This is not to say, however, that there was a direct route from the masons’ guild to the lecture hall. Something important had to happen first: before gentlefolk could bring themselves to roll up their sleeves and start lugging barometers up mountains or charting the arcs of cannonballs, they had to overcome aristocratic society’s customary prohibition against manual labor. Perhaps it is already clear that Zilsel’s account of the rise of science had some unusual features. Scholars who are interested in the division between intellectual and manual labor usually train their attention on a much later period, the decades on either side of 1900, hence on Taylorism or Fordism or whichever term you choose to name the de-skilling of work and bureaucracy’s ascendancy over the labor process. The separation of mental from manual labor would seem to be one of the most basic features of industrial societies, capitalist or otherwise, and Zilsel’s surprising move, in these terms, was to backdate that separation to the medieval centuries and then offer science as the utopian term in which the divide was overcome. His was an argument of good cheer, and it is painful now to have to restate the Adornian case, which has been known to make plants die. It’s not that the seventeenth century doesn’t afford the evidence to bolster Zilsel’s claims. It does. In 1651, a physician named Nathaniel Highmore wrote these words to Robert Boyle: “You stand both a pattern and wonder to our nobility and gentry. . . . You have not thought your blood and descent debased, because married to the arts.”57 Boyle himself said that he did not shrink from picking up cinders with his own hands, and that image is easy enough to square with what we

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think we know about Boyle, which is that he was the man who rescued chemistry for modern science, the man who first hammered out the language by which something called chemistry, or chymistry, could be distinguished from alchemy. When Boyle adopts the pose of chymistas-artisan, then, we might think of this as one of his strategies for leaping clear of alchemy, refusing the stance of alchemist-as-priest-or-adept, refusing, too, the arcana of its doctrines and the incantations of its allegorical prose. What else is the phrase “skeptical chemist” likely to mean? It is all the more surprising, then, to find out just who it is that Boyle’s skeptic names as his enemies. The Sceptical Chymist is not, in fact, written against the “alchemists”—the word just doesn’t show up—but rather against “the vulgar chymists,” mere “laborants,” “sooty empirics,” “apothecaries,” “artists,” and the odd “mine-digger.”58 That first, indeed, is one of the most common phrases in the entire book. It turns up again and again: The “vulgar chymists” are named as the problem; the “sceptical chymist” steps forward as their nemesis and solution, to the point where “vulgar” and “skeptical” begin to function as antitheses, and “skeptical” becomes a functional synonym for “genteel.” Here’s the perfect Boylean sentence: the book’s skeptic says that he had the “good fortune to learn the operations [of chymistry] from illiterate persons, upon whose credit I was not tempted to take up any opinion about them”—about those operations, that is, about chymistry.59 The sentence is drawing a careful distinction that a quick reading could easily overlook. The skeptic seems to have apprenticed himself to artisans—I learned from the illiterate—and one might think that this bears out Zilsel’s argument. But what the chymist is saying, in fact, is that he carefully studied what the craftsmen did and ignored what they thought: I was not tempted to credit them. The sentence, in other words, is careful to note what he refused to learn. The skeptic is the man who knows better than to believe the poor, and it is this withholding of belief that will turn the accumulated wisdom of the various craft traditions into so many neutral and transferable proficiencies—“operations” is the word Boyle uses, mere action without thought. Before workers could be de-skilled they had to be outfitted with something that one could call “skills,” and this, too, is part of the process by which manual was separated from mental labor. Boyle is regularly regarded, alongside Newton and Locke, as one of the master thinkers of an early (and English) Enlightenment, but it is hard to know whether he is, in fact, especially interested in light. The

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Sceptical Chymist is written as a philosophical dialogue—it is “a book,” Boyle assures the reader, “wherein only gentlemen are introduced as speakers”—and the scene of the dialogue is, in the usual manner of such things, at least lightly particularized: as the book begins, the skeptic has retired to his garden, to an arbor, so that he can “enjoy under its cool shades a delightful protection from the yet troublesome heat of the sun.”60 Philosophy, it turns out, does not thrive on sunlight, which is what tans a farmhand’s skin, but requires shade instead, which is the mark of leisure. Not just any shade will do, however. The book sounds most like a proto-enlightenment tract when it polemicizes against “smoak”—and this it does often. Earlier chymical writings, it says in accusation, “afford as well smoak as light.” The philosopher’s task is therefore to “draw the chymists’ doctrine out of their dark and smoky laboratories.”61 The importance of these formulations is that they give the usual enlightenment language such obvious sociological specificity: genuine knowledge can only be acquired apart from the workshop. A furnace, it’s true, will also cast a certain light, but even its illumination is wrong: we must strive, Boyle writes, not to be “philosophers by the fire”—a phrase that works in at least two different modes at once, summarizing a line of reasoning in which Boyle suggests, on argued grounds, that chemists might learn more about substances in the world if their first response to any new object wasn’t to set it on fire, and communicating his less reasoned hunch that alchemists, far from resembling Druids or gurus, are rather too much like blacksmiths or smelters of ore.62 Science is thought at a cooling distance from the foundry. It does not bring about the reunion of intellectual and manual labor. It is the process by which masters, having dispossessed laborers of their traditional learning, achieve epistemological independence from the servants who would otherwise know more than they do. 3) Let’s stick with that last phrase—“philosophers by the fire.” Here’s the sentence in which it occurs: the problem with some chymists, writes Boyle, is that they “cry up their own sect for the invention of a new philosophy, some of them, as Helmont, etc. styling themselves philosophers by the fire; and the most part not only ascribing, but as far as in them lies, engrossing to those of their sect the title of PHILOSOPHERS.” The word that leaps out here is “sect,” if only because Boyle nervously repeats it. It is not, perhaps, a word one sees coming. The

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word “fire” easily calls to mind the forge, kiln, or oven—and hence the set of class associations I was just describing—but this word “sect” draws from the flames a second, less intuitive set of meanings, and we will have to wonder now why a skeptical chemistry might want to negate them. What is it that might align early chemists with the sectarians, that is, with the period’s religious and political radicals? The current thinking on Boyle, among the intellectual historians, shores up our sense that he was not writing against the alchemists in general. There was, in the seventeenth century, no clear supersession of something called alchemy by something called chemistry. That latter term didn’t even exist yet. There was only a branch of philosophy one might call chymistry, and though this may have had competing schools, those schools couldn’t help but recognize one another as fellows. It is not as though some chymists already knew themselves to be antiquated and so began slinking from the field. In fact, if you go back and re-read this sentence of Boyle’s, it should be obvious that he thinks of himself, at least here, as vetoing a troublesome innovation—a “new philosophy”—and not as rooting out an ageold superstition (about gold or the philosopher’s stone or what have you).63 That innovation Boyle attaches to the name “Helmont,” and this should fill in all the historical content we’ll need, since Jan Baptist van Helmont was a Flemish philosopher and the period’s most respected Paracelsian. When Boyle denounces the philosophers of the fire, he is, we can now say, denouncing the Paracelsians, and the question becomes, more precisely: Why might one call the Paracelsians a “sect”? And what did the Paracelsians think they were doing with all that fire? The easiest way to answer these questions is to put two passages side by side, one from Paracelsus and then another from Boyle. First Paracelsus: When a metal becomes glass or stone, when wood becomes a stone . . . when wood becomes charcoal . . . when cloth becomes paper . . . all of that is the transmutation of things. . . . For nature . . . brings nothing to light which is completed in itself, rather, human beings have to complete it. This completing is called alchemy. For the alchemist is like the baker who bakes bread, like the vitner who makes wine, the weaver who makes cloth. He who brings what grows in nature for the use of man to that which is ordained by nature, he is an alchemist.64

Boyle was right about one thing: Paracelsus really does make chymistry sound like the spontaneous ideology of artisans. Alchemy is not just a

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mode of thought; it is a way of working with the world; and anyone looking to master that art will have to model themselves more on bakers and weavers than on university men. One might pause before even calling such a thing “philosophy,” except that Paracelsus is clearly making some rather grand philosophical claims on behalf of work, any gloss on which is going to end up making him sound like a Left Hegelian: the world that is given to us must be transformed by human endeavor, existing first as mere nature and made complete only by the free creativity of all people. Work is the human transformation of natural things, the business of which is to bring the world to its perfection, to actualize or make real—to bring into the world as fact—the potentialities that lie trapped and stunted within objects. Hence the fire: the Paracelsians thought that alchemy could redeem objects by burning them, one by one, reducing them back to their component parts, draining away their dross and slag, and re-assembling them with their powers concentrated and at the ready. Phrased in these terms, the project can sound cryptic or inanely esoteric, but many of the Paracelsians were physicians or medical chemists, and if you know that, then you can begin to see what they were after: growing in a garden, foxglove isn’t much more than a cluster of flowers, slender and bell-like, literally a glove for foxes; but decocted, it will slow your pulse and speed your kidneys. Turning water into wine may have been an out-and-out miracle, but turning grapes into wine is still pretty amazing. The idea, then, was that alchemy would simply pursue systematically what laboring people already achieved in their partial and ongoing fashion, which was nothing less than the regeneration of the world. It is not surprising, then, that the high-water mark of English Paracelsianism came in the 1640s and 1650s, the decades of revolution.65 Alchemy taught that everything could be remade. Revisionist historians like to point out that the word “revolution” wasn’t available to political actors in the 1640s, at least not with any of its now familiar meanings, and this is yet another way of suggesting that whatever happened in the 1640s couldn’t possibly have been a revolution. But one might plausibly wonder if revolutionaries can get by without the word “revolution” if they’ve got “transmutation” in its stead. Such, at any rate, is the “new philosophy” that Boyle means to eradicate; this is why the word “sect” suggests itself to him when he’s describing the alchemists; and here, finally, is how he elaborates on the point:

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Even eminent chymists have suffered themselves to be reprehended by me for their over great diligence in purifying some of the things they obtain by fire from mixed bodies. For though such completely purified ingredients of bodies might perhaps be more satisfactory to our understanding; yet others are often more useful to our lives. . . . They that go about to extract the virtues of . . . bodies by exposing them to the violence of the fire, do exceedingly mistake and take the way to destroy what they would obtain.66

A skeptical chemistry is, in short, a strike against the Paracelsian bid to renew the world, for which it substitutes the doctrine of the world’s sufficiency, hence a policy of non-intervention or chymical Gelassenheit. This last may do more than any other term to account for the emergence of the word science as one possible alternative to the word philosophy, though the Heideggerians will scratch their heads to hear it. Philosophers only turn to the word science, as Horkheimer and Althusser will to theory or Heidegger himself to Denken, when the word philosophy no longer seems usable. In the idiom of the 1650s and 1660s, the word science often had as its companions the word philosophy, which it meant to replace, and the word skepticism, with which it traveled. The function of science, as a term, was to engineer an improbable synthesis of these other, antithetical concepts, the impossible union of knowledge and its opposite, of the new learning and the attack on learning. Science was philosophy that had absorbed into itself the historical project of skepticism, with the latter working as a swab to draw off natural philosophy’s utopian program so that it could then produce what would have been, in the few generations before Hobbes and Boyle, almost unthinkable: a non-utopian knowledge, a learning that pledged to leave the world unchanged and so would accumulate to no particular end. This is not an observation from which we will walk away unscathed. What should we make of Boyle’s anti-utopianism? It’s not that we can’t come up with some good reasons to reject the utopian conception of knowledge—we can. But we can also come up with some bad ones. There is a suspicion, often bruited, that Thomas More is one of the prophets of factory discipline, that his utopia exists to transform free people into model workers by press-ganging them into labor squads.67 The idea is simply baffling, since the critique of work is at the very cen-

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ter of utopian ideology. Indispensable tasks get shared so that no person will have to work a minute more than necessary: “All citizens should have as much of their time as possible released from productive labor so that they can devote themselves to the free development of their minds.”68 One calls to mind a sentence of Spinoza’s that the Deleuzians are fond of quoting: “We don’t yet know what a human body is capable of.” The claim’s meaning is plain enough, that we must not reconcile ourselves politically to bounds on our humanity that have been settled in advance. But it is the signal weakness of the Deleuzians’ position that they cannot hear how this apparent celebration of capacities can also sound like a threat, or at least a Gatorade ad. We have, after all, no reason to doubt that people have some limits; we can never say with certainty where those limits lie, but we know, as well as we know anything, that they are catastrophic if breached, that a body sufficiently beleaguered will break or that a mind persistently harried will eventually come unstuck. The Left usually thinks of itself as wanting to share all the good things—wealth, rights, pleasure—but utopia, one suspects, is mostly a matter of sharing the bad things and letting the good things take care of themselves, out of the simple sense that the bad things—work and grief—will annihilate any person upon whom they are fixed. Hence the place of labor on More’s island: everyone works so that no one need be a worker. About Bacon, meanwhile, we often hear that he was an imperialist, even in The New Atlantis, though almost nothing in the writing actually bears this out.69 Bensalem—in Bacon’s utopian creation story—arose from the collapse of the original American empire; it survives only because it is de-linked from the current world system; it carefully vets visitors because it worries that any passing traveler might become a tie back to that system; and it spends a lot of time trying to figure out how the benefits of cosmopolitan learning might be secured for the utopian island without its entering into global trade or networks of political obligation. Far from blowing the imperialist trumpet, Bacon can sometimes sound like Nehru or Nasser, the seventeenth century’s only Third World nationalist. None of this is to say that the utopias don’t deserve scrutiny; only that we should tailor that scrutiny rather than buy it off the rack. The question, in other words, is not whether the utopias are generically imperialist or generically disciplinary, but whether there are forms of hierarchy that persist even once we’ve given due weight to Bacon’s

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anti-imperialism or More’s critique of work. Any reader of utopia is in the position of a Western Marxist contemplating the unfolding history of the Soviet Union, wondering how it is that coercion and oppression and something, indeed, very much like class could survive even once capital and most forms of private property have been abolished. And the key to this last question has, more often than not, been knowledge—that knowledge was the term around which new hierarchies could form even in the absence of capital, or perhaps even that knowledge should be understood as one of capital’s less tangible forms, and so would preserve exploitation, in the form of managerial elites or “the bureaucracy” or “the new class,” if not subjected to its own revolutionary upheaval. It is the new class that we find staring back at us, as though in impossible premonition, from the early utopias, each and every one of them. On More’s Utopia, the best students are admitted to a scholarly elite and excused from manual labor, the sharing of which is otherwise the island’s organizing principle, and it is from this humanist aristocracy that Utopia’s governors are chosen. Bacon goes More one further and imagines a philosophical peerage, a high nobility of science with open budgets and names like superheroes or street gangs: the Depredators, the Mysterymen, the Pioneers. Campanella is more literal-minded and has his utopians elect an administrator for each branch of learning, the Minister of Astronomy, the Minister of Alchemy, and so on, and appoints as head of state a kind of Prince Metaphysics—Campanella just calls him Metafisico—which can’t help but remind one of Tycho Brahe, who built Europe’s best astronomical observatory by introducing serfdom, in the age of Western feudalism’s historical disappearance, to a free Danish island, pressing his peasants so hard that they scattered to the mainland like shooting stars.70 But these bare literary facts, always and evermore true of the great utopian texts, have nonetheless not always seemed to matter. A leeriness toward utopian knowledge inhabits its proper historical moment, the period of a certain struggle, to which we might affix the name Trotskyism, as long as we also allow that there is a line, more or less direct, between Trotsky and Derrida or Foucault. It is more common, I realize, to trace these last back to Heidegger, or to Nietzsche before that, or to chalk critical theory up to the sheer force of Nietzsche’s arguments, washing like a wave over Marxist thought, massively amplifying the anti-philosophical strains in Marx’s own thinking, which we will accordingly have to imagine as the port in which Nietzschean argu-

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ments could dock. But none of this will make any sense if we don’t add in the global Left’s encounter with Stalin. A Left Nietzscheanism or a Left Heideggerianism is, in effect, a philosophically amplified version of the original Trotskyist heresy, which held that a new Left would have to dismantle regimes of knowledge and not just of wealth, at which point the major trends in radical thought can, at least through the 1970s, be understood as a broad Trotskyist front, from the Frankfurt School to early post-structuralism to the French Maoists to Bourdieu. But then careful attention to the word “science” and its history should make any of these positions just a little harder to take up. There seems to have been a brief period, twenty or twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, where the relationship between the term skepticism and the term science was visibly up for grabs, productively unsettled, and one of the things that eventually shook out of this moment was a newly instrumentalized account of knowledge. What this means is that there is not some simple “rise of epistemology” that radical thought can undo by turning to a philosophical skepticism, since what is most bothersome about the new epistemology already included that skepticism inside itself. You can keep talking in terms of “epistemological regimes” and then try to adopt an anti-epistemological position, out of a sense that this will help you negate whatever is regime-like about this or that system of knowledge. But you’ll still be in a bind, because the term “epistemological regime” posits knowledge only as a positivity and then invites you to play the heroic role of negating it, when, indeed, the term “science,” which is philosophy and anti-philosophy at once, itself contains that negation and so will preempt any skepticism you wish to bring to bear against it. The language of skepticism is there on both sides of the fight. Post-structuralism wants, among other things, to pull the plug on the utopian wish-dream of a perfect knowledge, and in this it does not reverse the historical emergence of “science,” but merely replicates it. That the same point can be made about so-called enlightenment should have been clear to the attentive reader of Adorno all along.71 For enlightenment was never just a myth, never just the Whig interpretation of history or the Protestant-secular dream of a rationalized lifeworld. Enlightenment was always both myth and the undoing of myth, the process by which any philosophical argument could be inspected, pitilessly, and then written off as mere belief; and it was always Adorno’s prediction that enlightenment, having picked off every competitor in

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the room, would inevitably reach a moment when it could only turn the gun back on itself—the moment, that is, when the enlightenment hostility to myth would do away with the myth of enlightenment. Poststructuralism, which is convinced that it holds a monopoly on the negative and that this makes it the radical alternative to a played-out enlightenment, is, in fact, that enlightenment’s final and fatal act.

III

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THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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1. I would like to begin in fabular fashion by recounting two stories we tell about ourselves and our modernity and the books we read. My first story is so familiar that it nearly tells itself. It goes something like this: Europe was once full of imbeciles; then came the printing press, and there were imbeciles no more; for with print came mass literacy, and with literacy came learning, and with learning—and it is here that the story gets hazy—came democratic self-fulfillment in some guise or another. This is a story, then, of lettered nations and lettered subjects, and it is a story, as well, of what Jürgen Habermas has lastingly termed the “public sphere”—the sphere, characteristic of modernity, “in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed.”1 The guarantor-institutions in the public sphere have, of course, traditionally been print institutions. And so it is in this sphere that we discover the significance of print. It is in the public sphere that literate subjects come together, via print, to reflect on the business of nations. Print is public debate; it is the promise of critical reason. This story, I need hardly point out, is out of favor, although even those readers who have long since parted with any belief in the essential value of great literature are likely to harbor some residual attachment to the value of the printed word. Michael Warner has dubbed this narrative the “Whig-McLuhanite” model of print history, and his phrase neatly encapsulates the charges against it, which are that it indulges in a crudely progressive technological determinism.2 And yet the critique as it has evolved is, in fact, more shrewd than this: few scholars have suggested

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that it is simply wrong to claim that print has been liberating in roughly the manner outlined here. Many have insisted, however, that print is not necessarily or inherently liberating. Print, these scholars contend, is not inherently anything. It may have played something like a democratizing role in Europe and America, but it has done so only insofar as it was enmeshed in other phenomena, such as the expansion of capitalism or the rise of the bureaucratic state, and the limits of its democratizing project have been the limits of those other institutions. Capital and the state may have been significantly changed by print, but they themselves helped transform print and cannot, therefore, simply be explained by it. As much as print has set the terms for our modernity, so too has print been shaped by our modern social and political institutions. The technology does not exist apart from the politics that assigns it its meanings or functions; print is not prior to culture. Recent projects in what is usually called the history of the book have thus had a story of their own to tell: they have spun a political history of print. They have insisted that we cannot understand the effects of print without understanding print’s place in the social-symbolic order. Warner’s The Letters of the Republic is a model effort of this kind. “The West,” Warner begins, “treasures few moments in its history the way it treasures the story of the democratization of print. In the century preceding the American and French revolution, men of letters commonly linked the spread of letters to the growth of knowledge.”3 Warner’s purpose is to call this story into question; indeed, his topic is early American republicanism, and he goes on to make the strong case that our tendency to naturalize a certain logic of print has worked to obscure the limitations of the republican politics that print is said to underwrite. I have few quarrels with this as far as it goes; I would, however, like to append to Warner’s project the following simple observation: the narrative that Warner identifies here—the story of the democratization of print—has become self-evident in Europe and America only because it has won out over other, competing narratives of print. Warner tells the story of his Poor Richard republicans, and he tells it well. But there is another, equally political story here, the story of those writers who, in the early eighteenth century, already denied the benefits of print and repudiated the knowledge and the democracy that were said to attend it. It is this second story I would like to tell here, the story of what we might call print skepticism. This chapter, then, concerns the contending meanings

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of print in the early modern period, although unlike Warner, I take England as my site of investigation. It is about the self-proclaimed opponents of print and the public sphere.

2. [From Bedlam] Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast Of Curll’s chaste press, and Lintot’s rubric post: Hence hymning Tyburn’s elegaic lines, Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, MAGAZINES: Sepulchral Lies, our holy walls to grace, And New Years Odes, and all the Grubstreet race. —Alexander Pope, The Dunciad

In his seminal Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas points out that one of the key moments in the development of the English public sphere in the eighteenth century is the formation of something like a print opposition or fourth estate. The public sphere, he notes, can only really take hold once the interrogation of state power becomes one of the expected features of print discourse, as it does for the first time in the Tory journalism of the 1720s. In Bolingbroke’s Craftsman, Habermas argues, “the press was for the first time established as a genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate.”4 The year 1726 is of particular importance in this regard, because its summer saw the publication, in rapid succession, of three great Tory satires: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gay’s Fables, and Pope’s Dunciad. For Habermas this is a watershed moment. He sees in these polemics the opening volleys of the opposition’s literary flank, in which the critical exercise of public reason is given the polished respectability of belles lettres. Collectively, he argues, Swift, Pope, and Gay worked to establish the very idea that a ruling body could be criticized publicly, in print, as part of a sustained debate about the legitimacy of authority. There is a sense, no doubt, in which Habermas is dead-on. There are few who would contest that, taken together, the Tory satires of the early eighteenth century make for an unprecedented display of public truculence. Swift, Pope, and Gay, in fact, are only the most enduring members of a vociferous gang of Tory controversialists engaged in an unremitting campaign against the venality of Walpole’s Whig oligarchy. If we follow Habermas’s account—and, again, I think there is good reason to—it would

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seem as if the Tory satirists must play a prominent role in any narrative of print and the rise of a democratic culture. Habermas himself is atypically blunt on this score: the Tory satirists, he declares, are forerunners of Europe’s finest journalistic traditions. They are “exemplary of the critical press.”5 It is on this point that Habermas is in accord with a scholar as otherwise far removed from him as J. G. A Pocock, for whom these same writers are “the first intellectuals of the Left.”6 Keen as this point is, however, I think it may be keen in ways that Habermas does not fully understand, for if there is one feature of modernity that Tory skepticism consistently targets, it is the very idea of a public sphere and a critical press. The cast of characters in Tory satire is a catalogue of Habermas’s public-sphere participants—politicians, scholars, stockjobbers—and for the Tories these are unmistakably a typology of fools. What’s more, if there is one feature that unites Swift, Pope, and Gay, at least in their Scriblerian mode, it is their loathing of discourse— not any particular discourse, but discourse as such, the mere procedure of public argument. This observation alone should do much to complicate Habermas’s suggestive but perhaps too blithe notions of a Tory fourth estate.7 For the consistent effect of Tory satire is, in fact, to expose England’s early modern political culture as a dictatorship of the public, a catastrophic attempt to predicate power on public opinion rather than on virtue. Modernity, in this vision, is a fall from grace, a deplorable break from a past marked by manly earnestness and into a feminized present of hypocrisy and superficial luxury. My point here is simple: if we are looking for the opponents of print and the public sphere, these are the writers—the same writers, it turns out, who are in some sense most representative of that public sphere. I would like to suggest, therefore, that if we wish to understand the canonical Tory satires, we must read them against the rise of the public sphere and with an eye toward this compelling contradiction. The questions are first of all historical. What were the contradictions inherent in print at the advent of Britain’s commercial revolution? What concessions did the bourgeois public sphere exact from its participants? But these questions speak, perhaps more pressingly, to lingering cultural-political concerns: What is the place of oppositional discourse within the print market and the conventions of public reason? What do we think we gain when we declare ourselves skeptical of print and public

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reason? And how, finally, do we account for the continued appeal of the literary? We might think of this last as the chapter’s secret query. The issues are threefold: (1) The Tory satirists, as a rule, proceed with more force than finesse. Even in its most literary manifestations, their polemic is easily available in their writing, so that no great exegetical effort is required to round up its tropes and trace its strategies. The Tories are forever drawing battle lines. It is commonly noted, for instance, that the public sphere came into being on the wings of three (closely related) historical developments: the rise of Parliament and party; the expansion of capital during the Financial Revolution; and the creation of the free press with the end of censorship in 1695.8 These, it just so happens, are a fairly accurate short-list of Tory bugaboos; they are a quickly sketched profile of a pathological modernity. Party, for the satirists, is never anything more than “Faction,” the lamentable symptom of an ailing and divided nation. Capital is a sham, replacing a yeoman’s economy of landed value with the new institutions of a phantom credit. And as for the rise of the free press—the Tory disdain for the modern print trade is complete. Swift and his fellow satirists greet the glut of print with something akin to hysteria; in a way that almost wholly anticipates some of the early handwringing over the Internet, the Tory satirists imagine that the proliferation of textuality in the wake of a new information technology can only have dire consequences for the polity. The rise of print culture heralds an age in which signification will run amok, flooding the polity with an undifferentiated mass of contradictory opinions and arguments and thus corroding traditional forms of citizenship or civic virtue. It is important, of course, not to separate out the strands of the Tory polemic artificially. The avenues of critique enumerated here are ultimately part of a single vision, that of a disunited society governed by Grub Street and infected by a market morality.9 This vision, moreover, is underwritten in each of its manifestations by a severe repudiation of the critical reason that is supposed to be the hallmark of modernity or the public sphere.10 Tory satire reserves special scorn for the “Critick”—a figure characterized chiefly by his punishing pettiness of mind and made ugly by a pretense to knowledge that is, in fact, a poorly concealed bid for power. Critics of this caliber bode ill for civic discourse. In Habermas’s compellingly idealized account, the early modern public sphere “developed to

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the extent to which the public concern regarding the private sphere of civil society was no longer confined to the authorities but was considered by the subjects as one that was properly theirs.”11 But for the Tory satirists, enveloped in the gloom of their pessimistic anthropology, the public arrogation of authority can only be ominous. For the proponents of the public sphere, rational-critical debate offers a blessed alternative to domination. But for the satirists, the public sphere is merely a new kind of domination, the tyranny of corrupt commercial interests. Stated in these terms, the Tory critique has a familiar ring to it—it’s much the same critique Habermas makes, in fact. But there is a philosophical frame to the Tory argument that we must be careful not to overlook. According to Habermas, the public sphere’s key function is to “compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.”12 The public, in other words, is said to possess, or perhaps to produce, some knowledge (as to its interests or the constitution of good government), and the exercise of authority is supposed to be predicated on that knowledge. It is this attempted link between knowledge and authority that commands our attention here, for the Tory satirists’ complaint against the public sphere is finally an epistemological one. Swift and Co. never tire of railing against the modern “commonwealth of learning”— or as Pope has it in the Essay on Criticism: “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,/ With loads of learned lumber in his head.”13 The Tory satirists are, to this extent, skeptics: underlying the Tory reproach of modernity is an anti-philosophical insistence, a stalwart insistence in Swift, an oft-qualified one in Pope, that the epistemophilia so characteristic of modernity is fundamentally misguided; it leads not to a definitive corpus of common knowledge but to an insane proliferation of argumentative standpoints, and the idea that authority should be called upon to validate itself in such ambitiously epistemological terms is nothing short of disaster. If there is no transparent epistemological standard by which authority could justify itself, then to demand public legitimation for authority is to subject power to an inadjudicable infinity of competing standards and thus to throw the status of authority permanently, chaotically into question. There is no single statement in Swift and Pope that can be adduced to drive this point home, though there are menippean moments enough: we might think here of the mock footnotes that engulf Pope’s Dunciad; or of the frenetic display of cod learning in Swift’s Tale of a Tub; or of the

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brutal and muddle-headed philosopher-kings of Laputa. If we are to see just how pervasive these anti-epistemological concerns are, however, we will have to find them in passages that are not themselves obviously epistemological, such as the opening pages of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, which describe a pampered teenage girl at her toilette, decking herself out in the assembled goods of British colonialism: Indian jewels, Arabian perfumes, “the various offerings of the world.”14 The first thing we need to understand about Pope’s portrait of this gaudy miss is that it comes with some implicit assurances. It aligns together three distinct critiques: a political critique of global trade, an ethical critique of the vain and degraded consumer, and an epistemological critique of fashion’s duplicity. And the tacit promise of the scene is that if we spurn fashion’s wisdom of the surface, we will find alternatives to each of these depravities. We will, in reverse order, discover a knowledge of essences, or at least of solid, substantive objects; we will kindle in ourselves an appetite for honesty; and we will do our bit toward building a social order, founded on something other than consumption, in which such virtues can thrive.15 It is important to keep in mind that within the frame of the poem, this entire project has its origins in the epistemological unease that Pope is at such pains to provoke, the sense that the girl’s ointments and unguents are a ruse and therefore worth looking beyond. A smudge of rouge is all it takes to get the epistemological ball rolling. There are plenty of eighteenth-century texts willing to make good on Pope’s anti-cosmetic promise: so we have Defoe’s Roxana, proving the authenticity of her face by making her lover scrub her tear-strewn cheeks (though even here one suspects a joke, since Roxana’s un-powdered nose is pretty much the only thing about her that is bona fide). Even Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is little more than an erotic riff on this Tory theme, as though to say: we spend our days adorned with trickery, swaddled in fraud, but when you strip away the sham of fashion, when you tear off the petticoats and the shifts and the waistcoats, then at last you have something tangible, something that cannot lie.16 The problem is that Tory satire, unlike Cleland or Defoe, makes this promise, but never keeps it. Swift and his allies conspicuously refuse the orgasmic empiricism of Fanny Hill. Keep reading around in Tory satire and sooner or later you will find Swift’s great scatological works, which are all nighttime poems and thus form a tidy counterpoint to the morning rituals described by Pope. Swift is not the poet of “puffs, powders, patches”—that is the other poet’s turf,

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the flimflam that begins the day.17 Swift is the bard of cold cream and cotton balls, of loosening girdles, of the body exposed, of shitting Celia and Chloe’s golden shower; of whorish Corinna, come midnight, disassembling her public body like a mechanic stripping a car for parts.18 The important point for our purposes is that the disgust that is the typical product of Swift’s sullen nocturnes is not merely aesthetic, and it is not merely the misogynistic redescription of woman as monster, though it is certainly these things, too. Swift’s nausea contains a properly epistemological challenge, marking the moment when the reader finally earns that private encounter promised by Pope. Swift offers us access to the body when the makeup comes off; and the perpetual shock of Swiftian dishabille is that knowledge, when it finally arrives, comes at too great a cost. It cannot be borne. The naked girls of Swift are just way stations to the dissected cadaver of A Tale of the Tub; they are all “women flayed,” the victims of “Reason’s mangling and piercing,” counterfeit beauties at various stages of their peeling. There is a Hegelian motto that deserves to be rewritten for Swift and his friends: appearance has its falsehood, but essence has its falsehood, too. (2) This is, as should already be clear, no mere philosophical impasse. The Tory predicament is capable of a political description. Swift and Pope are, to begin with, civic humanists of a special kind. There is a peculiarly English brand of Machiavellianism that has an afterlife in the figures that oppose the various post-republican compromises of the Restoration and beyond.19 I’m thinking here not only of Swift and Pope, but also of sundry other partisans of what is usually termed the “Country ideology,” which in its broadest contours is an unlikely fusing of a (more or less egalitarian) political understanding of virtue with traditionalist, hierarchical forms of deference. The Tory polemics of the early eighteenth century are a virtual combinatory of seventeenth-century discourses, drawing on Hobbes and Harrington in equal proportion, weaving together humanist notions of virtue with an absolutist insistence that sovereignty be unified and incontestable. More precisely, the Country ideology is a combination of Florentine republicanism and the mythic agrarianism of the physiocrat—a crossbreed for which the iconic figure of the yeoman may be taken as emblematic: the robust farmerpatriot whose landholdings, however small, allow him to participate independently in the nation’s affairs, without depending for his livelihood on the corrosive largesse of some governing class.

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The important thing to understand about this eighteenth-century Machiavellianism is that it has, albeit with reluctance and rage, reconciled itself to its own reduction to the status of a critical ethics. It is a republicanism without a republic—or better, a civic humanism without a humanist civitas—and in this sense, its “virtue” no longer names a lived practice; it names only a vantage point from which existing social practices may be denounced.20 The fury so characteristic of writers like Swift is fueled by a sense of its own futility in the face of civic entropy. The millenarian viciousness of the Country ideology derives from a sense that while the governing classes of early modern England—the Whigocracy or the Robinocrats or the monied interest—can be railed against, they cannot be coherently opposed, because the only true opposition to the mercenary powers of the Whig regime would be a complete reawakening of virtue throughout the English polity—if, indeed, in its dismal and degraded state, it still merits that name. Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King is the representative text here; and yet the important point to make regarding it is this: it is only the gateway to the gloomy outskirts of the post-republican imagination, where despairing civic humanists await the return of true politics in the form of the patriot king, a vengeful humanist messiah capable of stemming the tide of corruption in a single, superhuman display of honesty.21 The most familiar face of eighteenth-century Machiavellianism is thus that of God’s Englishmen—Tory citizen-prophets playing a vanguard role in a drama at once national and chiliastic, united in fierce opposition to the dominant institutions of the early century: the public sphere, public credit, the newly professional military, the parliamentary state and its bureaucracy. Swift and his fellows have a fairly clear historical narrative to tell—the story of backwoods Anglo-Saxon virtue put to the test by urban corruption—but they tell this story mournfully after the fact, the way a certain type of American might even today mourn the passing of the cowboy. The Tory version sounds something like this: the old agricultural economy once supported the stout yeoman, whose virtue was crucial to the health of the nation, not so much because it gave the English polity a broad political base, but because it formed the bedrock of a special, uniquely English class. This class—a class of small landholders, a not-quite-gentry—was distinctive in that it combined the hardiness of the Nordic peasantry with the political backbone of the Continental aristocracy, while dodging both the barnyard oafishness of

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the former and the perfumed effeminacy of the latter. And so we reach the decidedly un-Habermasian bottom line: the Tories transform the republican vision of an egalitarian and open-ended politics into a disaffected myth of English patriotism and class prerogative, in which civic humanism takes the guise of a strident, splenetic anti-modernity. And to the extent, then, that they retain any notion of the public, theirs is a public of heroic men casting aside particular interest to forge a common will and foster the common good, not a public of essentially private persons piecing together some craven consensus to novel commercial ends. We can make the point in more general terms. In addition to the satires’ surface polemic, there is usually a historical narrative implicit in their contempt; and it is in those narratives that the contending readings of the public sphere become particularly clear. The bourgeois public sphere is born of the turmoil of the seventeenth century. Insurrection and regicide are its enabling acts, and yet to sustain its claims to reason, that sphere must efface its own history.22 The Tory skeptics, by contrast, are bent on re-articulating that originary conflict; their political polemics and satirical stories work to construct continuities between a mad present, marked by financial corruption, seemingly endless military endeavors, and the spiraling demands of the administrative state, and the past hundred years of, in Swift’s words, “Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments; the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, and Ambition could produce.”23 Where the proponents of the public sphere see its operations as informed “discourse,” Swift and Co. see only the permanence of dissent, an ominous pretense to evenhandedness which still bears the marks of revolutionary violence. Swift’s The Battle of the Books, in this sense, is more than just an occasional satire: with its horde of modern radicals wielding “pen, ink, and paper . . . pamphlets and other offensive weapons,” the book-as-marauder or poet-asmercenary is the central conceit of all Tory writing.24 It works by literalizing one of the Tories’ central contentions, that, in Newcastle’s words, “controversy is a Civil War with the Pen which pulls out the sword soon afterwards.”25 (3) There is furthermore the question of form. Most current, historically minded accounts of early modern satire hardly take on the question of form at all. They content themselves instead with simply reading the thematics of the text, distilling its argument into a series of discrete

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propositions that can then be brought into dialogue with other political “standpoints.” Most formal accounts of satire, by contrast, have little more to offer than the ritually incanted insight that the satirical text “perpetually undermines itself,” dissolving without end into a wash of delicious indeterminacies. But to fetishize the “destabilized text” in this fashion, to play this game of infinitely receding ironies, is to ignore the fact that the formal unreliability of satire already has a kind of ideological valence. The point is: in the context of a public sphere that assigns new and grandiose roles to print, to act out this kind of textual instability in satirical form is already to engage in a polemic of sorts. It is to tutor the reader in the insincerity of print. Let us consider Swift. Swift’s satire, more so even than the work of his confederates, is marked by his ability to mimic the voices he mocks. The belabored neoclassicism of Pope’s style already signals a cultural project: it is a bid for vanished dignity. But Swift shows no such confidence in the ability of antique models to regenerate the virtue that modern social practices otherwise lack, and so he delivers his prose hostage to the degraded rhetorical forms of the metropolitan market. Swift’s strategy is to adopt the premises or habits of thought characteristic of his opponents in an effort to drive their arguments toward an illogical, inhuman extremity. His “Modest Proposal” as exemplary in this regard: Since we think the market should regulate human affairs; and since we consider the Irish less than human; and since, further, the Irish are suffering from famine—why don’t we just butcher the Irish babies and put the meat up for sale? Beyond any specific intervention into the debates of the day, satire such as this, especially when writ large, as in A Tale of a Tub, constitutes a generalized attack on the conventions of public discourse and debate. The public sphere, this is to say, is founded on its ability to test truth claims, but Swift’s aggressive skepticism seeks to rob these truth claims of the standards by which their soundness might be tried. By demonstrating how easily the rhetoric of ratiocination is manipulated, Swift’s skeptical satires work to empty public knowledge of its suasiveness—and thus to deny the tools of persuasion to those whose business it is to persuade. Satire, in this special sense, never sets out to persuade anybody of anything. Its aim, rather, is to shout discourse down, to stifle debate or just generally gum up the works. To make satire just another aspect of the public sphere, therefore—to treat it, as so many scholars do today, as though it were merely part of the debate—is

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to miss the point. Tory satire, in all its archaic severity and quicksilver crudeness, is marked precisely by an unwillingness to argue according to the standards of public rationality.26

3. The Tory satirists inherit from Pyrrhonism an enemies list: humanists, militant Protestants, natural philosophers—and to these it adds an organizing hostility to the public sphere. We can pause now to ask how the satirists update those other, earlier antagonisms, not least of all because it might otherwise seem perverse to so much as describe the Tories as anti-humanists. Pope, after all, enters our anthologies as neoclassicism’s poetic standard-bearer. Swift may not himself write like the classicists, but we know that he drank with them, and his Battle of the Books features a memorably vicious moment in which Aristotle sends an arrow streaking through Descartes’ skull. A bloodthirsty Aristotelian is not a skeptic, and so the trick will be to work out how this seeming classicism actually houses a closet skepticism; for this we will have to turn to the cataclysmic anti-theodicy that is Pope’s Dunciad. This demands some patience. The Dunciad is so entangled in the quarrels of early-eighteenthcentury London as to be nearly impenetrable, accessible only to scholars and hobbyists, though its plot is easily retold: late one Lord Mayor’s Day, in an unfashionable neighborhood in London’s east end, the kingdom’s poet laureate prays to Dulness, the goddess of stupidity. He builds a pyramid of books—oversized folios at its base, pocket-sized octavos at its peak—and then sets the pile on fire, an offering to the goddess. Lured by this book burning, Dulness appears to the poet and adopts him as son, her chosen mortal or minion. The laureate will now be stupidity’s agent on earth, Dulness’s own hero, the conqueror fated to found an empire of the senseless. London, presented with its new poet-leader, unites in a barking, croaking chorus of praise, and the goddess holds heroic games for the city’s publishers, critics, and hack-writers—the foot-soldiers of stupidity: two publishers engage in a pissing contest— first prize is Eliza Haywood, second prize a chamber pot. The periodical writers hold a diving match into the city’s central sewer to gauge who can dive deepest into its filth and who fling the most muck. The final event is an endurance test: The nation’s critics vie to see who can stay awake the longest during a public reading of bad poetry, but the contest

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ends in a kind of mass draw when the entire assembly is lulled to sleep, poets and all. The goddess now sends the sleeping laureate on a journey through the underworld, where he meets the inept writers of England’s past, one of whom recounts for him the world history of stupidity and prophesies the laureate’s immanent victory over wit, Dulness’s reign without end. Back on earth, the goddess brings this prophesy to pass, assuming her throne while her courtiers pass in review: editors, schoolmasters, university dons, private tutors, gentlemen collectors, deists, and natural philosophers. Her court assembled, the goddess sends darkness out over the city. In an act of anti-creation, Dulness yawns, and London’s very fabric begins to unravel. The image here is of a national narcolepsy: the poem ends with a sweeping list of groups, institutions, and city sites, each falling suddenly comatose, as though gassed. The Dunciad’s basic claim on our critical attention should be clear even from this rough outline. It is perhaps the English canon’s most extended exercise in the mock-epic or mock-heroic: the poem tells the story of an empire’s founding, the poet laureate plays Aeneas to Dulness’s Aphrodite; London is the very Athens of inanity. To understand what Pope is up to, then, one needs to understand a few things about the ancient Mediterranean epic. Many readers think of epics as closely related to myths. Epics are either overblown folklore or compendia of traditional stories, arranging all the old myths into overarching narrative sequences. Either way, epics are the great organic poems of tribal peoples, of societies that are not yet alienated or internally differentiated. This is all dead wrong, and that in a few different ways. To clear away this mistake, we needn’t look any further than The Iliad—and Mediterranean epics don’t get any earlier than The Iliad—which takes as its subject a fundamental tear in the fabric of tribal society, the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, and sets in motion a fantasy about how that society can be reinstated. The error is even clearer in The Odyssey and The Aeneid, whose heroes succeed precisely by leaving the mythological, tribal world behind—blinding the Cyclops, escaping from various magical islands—and entering instead a largely disenchanted world of sovereign power and colonial settlement. The canonical epics depict tribal society as under attack or, more emphatically, as already archaic, an obstacle to be overcome. This is nowhere more apparent than in Virgil’s famous description of Aeneas’ shield, which is decorated with a prophetic tableau of Actium,

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the sea-battle off Greece’s west coast still widely considered the decisive encounter in the founding of the Roman Empire—the battle, that is, in which Marc Antony was defeated by Octavian. The passage describes the clashing of two navies: first, a true-blue Roman fleet, led in unison by Apollo, Augustus, and the city’s senators, staffed by stalwart Italians, sailing in strict formation; and second, arrayed against the Romans, an unruly Oriental fleet, led less by Antony than by Cleopatra, his Egyptian mistress, and staffed by a mongrel crew of eastern peoples, presided over by those people’s bestial and crossbred gods, unleashing the forces of Discord, Strife, and Fury. The oppositions here are too clear to require much elaboration: The Aeneid pits the forces of a manly, ordered, ethnically pure, and rational West against a womanly, motley, harebrained, and still mythological East. Antony, in Virgil’s version of Roman history, deserved defeat because he had, in effect, gone native or relinquished his Romanness. He had allowed himself to be emasculated and Orientalized.27 This brings us then to Alexander Pope: imagine, in Virgil’s terms, some hypothetical epic in which it was Augustus, not Antony, who sank at Actium—an epic, in other words, of Cleopatra’s victory. Imagine an effeminate and Oriental epic, one which failed ultimately to distinguish itself from myth. Such, in effect, is the Dunciad, from whose pages the pantheon’s central male gods have vanished, to be replaced by Dulness, “the Mighty Mother,” a figure modeled on the many mother goddesses of Mediterranean mythology: Aphrodite, who marks the triumph of the passions over the Apollonian principles of reason; Cybele, the Asian mistress of the animals; and Hera, famously hostile to Rome, protectoress of African Carthage, ever determined to thwart Zeus. Pope’s epic is underwritten by a single, troubled question: What if the Weltgeist were a woman? What if the cosmos were feminine to its very core? What if Hera really were calling the shots and history were thus out of the hands of Europe’s men? The Dunciad, in short, is rooted in a profound gender switch, a kind of metaphysical transvestitism. It is the epic in drag. It is in these terms that Pope will tell a modernity narrative of his own. There are, broadly speaking, two different modes in which eighteenth-century writers tend to narrate a specifically English modernity. First, there is a classicist mode, in which England appears as the proper inheritor of Athenian and Roman culture, the successor to Greece and Italy, which have unexpectedly been cut out of antiquity’s will. This

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self-understanding comes at a considerable price, however, since it is premised on a sense of profound historical discontinuity. The distinctive quality of humanist history-writing is that it conceives of the present as a repetition or emulation of some remote past; it makes the Renaissance into antiquity’s afterimage. This is a familiar point, to be sure, but its immediate upshot is curious all the same: intense engagement with the remote past is a means of breaking with the proximate (medieval or feudal) past, in which case classicism is properly understood as a modernizing project. It is in classicism that early modern writers most vigorously fight over the disposition their modernity will take. It is impossible to understand classicism if we don’t understand it first and foremost as a set of political fantasies about the future. It is in the ancient world that early modern writers discover the republic or the marketplace or the empire yet to come. In southern Europe, then, these fantasies point in two directions at once: they are a way of imagining a rejuvenated future, but they depend on certain perceived continuities with the historical past. Italy, to be blunt, is still easily imagined as Roman, which means that Italian classicism was basically a theory of alienation, rooted in the notion that Italy was estranged from its own best traditions. An Italian modernity, then, would be a matter of becoming again what one has latently been all along, of recovering a lost potentiality. The situation in England, as throughout northern Europe, is much more complicated than in Italy, since its classicism is necessarily imported, an externality. England will have to become Mediterranean, will have to show itself to be the better Italy. It is in the north, then, that classicism’s transformative vocation steps to the fore. English humanism is a program of avowed social and cultural reform. And this means, in turn, that it is always in danger of being experienced as alien, not only imported but imposed, premised on a rejection of the native past, which can now be defended only once reconceptualized along classicist lines, as something called the “Gothic.” Such, then, is the eighteenth century’s second dominant modernity narrative: the Gothic is a kind of “medieval classicism”— a cultural movement that means to develop something like a humanist account of the national and medieval past, which will henceforth be subject to revivals in its own right. A Gothic modernity is a humanism of the north, based on the recovery, indeed the amplification, of indigenous, English history, which must now be cleansed of any Greek or Roman admixture.

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Pope’s achievement, in these terms, is to script yet a third modernity narrative, one that falls outside the usual historical schemes. Pope is, after a fashion, a champion of Mediterranean classicism, but his is a classicism that never appeared, an antiquity gone astray. In Pope’s telling, the single most important fact about the English Renaissance is that it never happened. And the Dunciad, in these terms, is best understood as the poem of this aborted Renaissance, in which modernity has reverted, not back to some classical archetype, and not back to some age of Anglo-Saxon spotlessness, but back to primal discord—“native Anarchy” the poem calls it.28 The poem is, in its spoofy way, a manifesto for this bizarro classicism, in which modernity, eager to resurrect the ancient world, accidentally overshoots Athens and Rome, reaching back beyond the learning, urbanity, and imperial order of those cities, straight to the animalistic world of myth that the epic typically works to supplant—straight back, that is, to “the most grave and ancient of things, Chaos, Night, and Dulness.”29 Stupidity, it turns out, has an antiquity of its own, and it is the Dunciad’s business to script a Renaissance for those old and brainless days—to issue a sarcastic philological summons back to the primordial sources of foolishness. If origins are what you are after, the poem suggests, then nothing will seem more primal than the void that preceded human existence itself. The poem’s basic gender switch—from an ordered cosmos governed by a god to a disordered cosmos governed by a goddess—is thus matched by a fundamental switch of genre: the Dunciad modulates unmistakably from epic to apocalypse, reversing, with startling literal-mindedness, the Renaissance’s familiar tropes of revival or reawakening: England’s new age is a slumbering. It is a kaliyuga, an epoch of disorder and decay. There is a curious conceptual operation that underpins this story. The Dunciad operates by a crude associative logic, consigning to the scrapheap of stupidity any cultural trend that does not correspond to the canons of neoclassical taste, and the poem is notable chiefly for the manic energy with which it constructs its many equivalences. A partial list of these conflations should make the point clear: Pope’s primary target, as usual in Tory satire, is the new commercial culture, the rise of England’s print marketplace: the Dunciad’s hero, recall, is England’s poet laureate, and the poet in question is one Colley Cibber, a historical figure who was indeed laureate under Walpole, but who was known chiefly as a comic actor and popular playwright. He thus functions as a

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symptom of commercial culture’s inflated status, like rock stars who get knighthoods or Elvis at the White House. The matter is not so simple, however, for the Dunciad will put other constructions on Cibber, as well; it is around the figure of the pop laureate that the poem will conduct its several conflations. Cibber, for a start, is the poet of the “Smithfield Muses”—Smithfield was the center of London’s meat trade and the site of Bartholomew Fair—and this single reference to the city’s traditional fairgrounds aligns the book trade in which Cibber was such a prominent player with the urban folk culture of which it is merely the catastrophic extension.30 Commerce is the medium by which the culture of the poor radiates disastrously into society’s every rank, establishing itself as the national idiom at the expense of courtly forms. Pope’s rewriting of the Homeric games transforms them, accordingly, from a heroic display of epic masculinity into a carnivalistic spectacle of tomfoolery and selfabasement. But equally, the poet laureate possesses a “Gothic library! of Greece and Rome / Well purged,” which is to say that commercial culture is also a perpetuation of medieval obscurantism and the frivolity of romance or legend.31 What’s more, the poet laureate pledges himself to Dulness’s “good old cause,” a phrase that unmistakably aligns commercial culture with dissenting Protestantism and religious war. And so the legions that throng to Dulness in the course of the poem will contain their share of non-conformist preachers, snarling theatrically to their congregations, turning the pulpit into pantomime. Such is one familiar Tory constellation: commercial writing, folk culture, medieval superstition, and Puritanism. This last term is especially revealing. In one of the poem’s many prefaces, Pope will go so far as to compare Cibber with John of Leiden, the sixteenth-century Anabaptist prophet who briefly transformed Münster into a communist theocracy. The same passage, however, sees in Cibber another caliph “Omar”—that is, ‘Umar Ibn Al-khattab, the founder of the Islamic empire—and a second Attila, to boot. The poet, this is to say, is associated with the radical reformers at their woolliest, and these, in turn, are correlated with Arabian potentates and the invading Huns. The poem’s associative logic hopscotches from hack-writing to Dissent to the Orient, and the effect of this last, emphasized in the poem’s many allusions to Asian marauders, is to give a precise historical valence to the poem’s geography: the dunces move across London from east to west, from the unfashionable and commercial City to the fashionable

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and aristocratic town, under Dulness’s command, as “her old empire to restore she tries.”32 The Dunciad, then, is premised on a kind of Cockney Orientalism, the triumph of London’s East over London’s West; the hackwriters are England’s own Asians, and mocking the nation’s adventures in the Indies, they will pursue English literature’s first program of reverse colonization. Commercial culture will accomplish what the Huns and the infidels never managed; it will subject England to the yoke of barbarism. The rise of the print commodity is, in effect, the crusades in reverse, a second Moorish invasion, Attila completing at last his march to the Atlantic. I have described the Dunciad as a special kind of modernity narrative, but perhaps that term is misplaced, for we can see at this point that the effect of the poem’s several conflations is finally rather odd. The Dunciad is perhaps better understood as a series of unfolding historical analogies, and these work together to suppress the poem’s narrative impulses, to transform this putative epic into a succession of static tableaus, a set of lists and interchangeable episodes, each of which culminates in a dozing: the doping of the critics, the nation’s final catalepsy. But this formal characteristic, which might sound like a failing—Pope botches the story!—is in fact wholly in keeping with the poem’s project. The collapse of narrative is the condition of a world without history, buckling under the weight of its compounded stupidity. In the place of narrative, the poem sets up a structure of analogic substitution: a commercial culture—in which art is subject to the principles of exchange—can itself be exchanged for any number of other degraded things. None of this is especially surprising. The concept of classicism will inevitably generate as its antithesis an indiscriminate notion of the non-classical: commercial culture, folk culture, the Middle Ages, religious enthusiasm, the globe’s non-European preponderance. But if we press on with the Dunciad, we will find that there is still a surprise in store for us. It becomes necessary at this point to turn our attention to one of the most conspicuous features of Pope’s text, which my description of it has so far withheld. The Dunciad is casually described as a “poem,” but this is, in fact, a misnomer. There is a poem at its center, to be sure, but that poem—the poem I’ve been discussing here—is surrounded by two (!) fake footnote apparatuses, ascribed to fictional editors who serve the poem as satirical emblems or targets. Already in its original editions, the poem was buried beneath a thick glaze of bogus commentary, which

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means that the Dunciad is actually an odd hybrid of poetry and prose. The Dunciad is less a mock epic than a mock edition of a mock epic, and this changes everything. Most unnervingly, it means that we must add learning to the poem’s roster of stupidity. The fake footnotes are an unmistakable lampoon against the learned. Knowledge, which might have seemed the great classicist alternative to Pope’s burgeoning catalog of cloddishness, turns out to be its apotheosis. Knowledge is duncery’s hallmark, not its antidote. Or rather: Pope’s dunderheaded modernity is not the negation of the Renaissance; it is the Renaissance, differently described. The underlying conceit of the Dunciad’s final edition, published in 1743, is that the poem has had two equally incompetent modern editors, Martinus Scriblerus and Aristarchus, and the joke is that the one systematically challenges and revises the other’s commentary. At stake here are competing editorial principles: Aristarchus is an empiricist, a contextual philologist, a technician of language, keeping a careful tally of first usages and variant editions, and emending the text at will. Martinus Scriblerus, by contrast, is a humanist pedant, an avatar of the manuscript whose initials he shares, a dogmatic Aristotelian, enslaved to the authority of the classics, emending nothing, willing to reproduce any error as long as it is an ancient error. It is especially important, then, that Pope takes the unusual step of including multiple fake apparatuses: the Dunciad’s footnotes conduct a running argument on both sides of the question, forcing the period’s competing philologies to square off against one another, to the fatal detriment of each. The problem with scholars, the poem notes in a now familiar turn of phrase, is that they believe the world was “given to man for a subject of disputation.”33 This is not yet to specify the full shock of the Dunciad, however. For the satire on Martinus Scriblerus carries a special weight in the poem, even beyond its status as Pyrrhonist counterweight to his rival’s blinkered empiricism. The poem casts Scriblerus as a doctrinaire humanist—a classicist, an antiquarian—which means that Pope’s putative neoclassicism is willing to prosecute the case against antiquity, however selectively, and is thus actually a modernism in disguise. Scriblerus functions as an emblem for the diminishing returns of European classicism, committed, in its late stages, to publishing the very dregs of the ancient world, determined to gloss every last Thessalonian hiccup, characterized by a “high respect for Antiquity and a Great Family, how dull or dark soever.”34 We can be more

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precise: in the figure of Scriblerus, Pope prosecutes the case against humanist and classicist scholarship. Here, then, is how an avowed classicism can disguise a covert skepticism. Pope is typically regarded as one of the period’s most dedicated partisans of the ancients, but he nonetheless launches a comprehensive attack on ancient learning. One of the chief accomplishments of the Dunciad is to install an uncompromising distinction between classicist knowledge and classicist taste and to sacrifice the former up to the latter. The poem aims to thoroughly reconfigure the early eighteenth century’s characteristic Kulturkampf, the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns,” for which it substitutes a querelle des poètes et des savants. The poem’s chief distinction is not, as one might expect, between the decadent moderns and the superior ancients, but between the epistemophiles and the aesthetes, regardless of their historical allegiances. The Dunciad marks a moment, late in classicism’s history, when humanism has turned against itself, and this rift correlates, in the poem’s own terms, with a new class division: Pope pits an aristocratic humanism—a highbred humanism of taste—against the professionalized humanism of the scholar, in which the critic figures as bourgeois or artisan, a tradesman of the spirit. This is clearest in the poem’s fourth book, whose cast of fools is almost entirely academic: schoolmasters, tutors, dons, editors, and other such intellectual laborers. And what’s more, the poem tellingly slips into an occult register in these final pages, transforming the scholars who most pride themselves on their intellectual sobriety into figures of folkloric monstrosity: the business of editors is to summon classic authors from their graves, to re-animate ancient writing so that it may walk again, zombie-like, neither living nor dead; the eighteenth-century schoolmaster, likewise, is a terrible “Spectre,” a flogging fiend who leaves no schoolboy’s skin untanned; the impresarios who promote commercial culture are wizards concocting potions to transform gentlemen into servile fops and dilettantes. An epistemological modernity, in sum, undoes any distinction between classical learning and Gothic magic—the very distinction on which Pope’s humanism might initially have seemed to depend. It is the disastrous triumph of institutionalized knowledge over the genteel standards of taste. So much for humanism. But then how do the Tory satirists update the attack on natural philosophy? And how do they update the attack on militant Protestantism? These questions will turn out to have the same answer, though this probably won’t be immediately apparent. The first thing

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one notes about Swift’s great anti-scientific satires is that they seem strikingly familiar. Their very familiarity would seem to constitute Swift’s continued claim upon us as readers: that he breaks with the mordant triumphalism of Restoration satire—the Puritan-baiting burlesque of Butler’s Hudibras or Dryden’s absolutist two-step—and offers instead a critique of the seventeenth century’s new ways of knowing. Swift’s satire warns against the epistemological future. So we might think once again of the woman flayed, whose desacralized husk we can see as initiating a long history of Gothic imagery, of tropes that work to summon forth a revulsion against science: grave-robbers, body-snatchers, Igors hunchbacked and lisping, death-camp laboratories, and so on.35 Alternately, we might think of Gulliver’s third voyage—the voyage to Laputa, the society of number— where an entire history of standardization seems to play itself out in advance, where the tailor sews Gulliver a badly fitting suit by measuring his thumb and calculating the rest;36 where dinner arrives die-cut into unappetizing rhomboids; and where, using magnets, philosophers have built an island that can fly, which cruises over territories to survey the populations below and literally crushes insurrections simply by landing on them. This last, in fact, may be one of Swift’s least appreciated contributions to our store of representational strategies. The flying island is a real innovation, a new way of depicting knowledge’s affiliation with authority; and it is a figure that will persist, that remains vital in any science fiction image that allows a single, super-sophisticated machine to stand in for the entire scientific and political order: so we have the technocratic space-stations of Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), pirouetting through their airless, corporate cosmos, in which every last phone call back to earth gets tallied by some interplanetary Ma Bell; or the predatory and neoimperialist galleon in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), dispatched by “the Company,” an enterprise so encompassing as to require no further designation; or, again, the recycled and ramshackle space-barge of The Matrix (1999), which forms a tangible, late-industrial counterweight to the film’s computergenerated G-men, themselves technological tokens of some other, cybernetic kind. Reading back from these images, we can see in Swift’s Laputa the first of these techno-political spaceships, a philosophically abstracted island, powered by giant magnets, the ship’s compass made monstrous, with the new and ominous ability to transport itself about the globe. There is a danger here, however, an intellectual temptation that accompanies the growing familiarity of these images. Most science fiction

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represents a world in which science is more or less fully integrated into capital and the state. The genre’s conditions of possibility are industrial capital, corporate R&D, and the government foundation; and, at least in its dystopian forms, science fiction tends to conjure up images of an appropriately solemn kind: mechanized atrocities, Zyklon gas, atom bombs, Tuskagee experiments, lives abbreviated on the factory floor. But Swift’s satire still isn’t about science in this way. The philosophers at the Academy of Lagado conduct experiments to distill sunlight from cucumbers and to teach the blind to smell colors. What strikes one about these efforts is hardly their ruthless efficacy; it is rather their utopian foolishness. At the center of Swift’s travesty on natural philosophy, in other words, there stands, not the “mad scientist,” who is essentially a product of Mary Shelley and her interpreters, but what the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries call the “projector,” the schemer or enterpriser. It is here that the attack on militant Protestantism edges back into the conversation. Swift would seem to be allied with Boyle and his fellows in their efforts to crack down on the utopianism of Puritan learning. The point to bear in mind is that, in the counter-revolutionary 1660s and 1670s, the perceived correlation between religious enthusiasm and natural philosophy posed a real problem for the Royal Society. Natural philosophy bore the taint of disloyalty. The Society’s first task, therefore, was to disavow any connections with the Commonwealth. The ideological campaign of its early years, visible both in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society—an officially commissioned puff-piece—and in Abraham Cowley’s poetic encomia on the new association, sought to serve a number of functions at once: to establish the Society’s political and religious orthodoxy; to propose the theisms that would prevent mechanical philosophy from being perceived as an atheistical and materialist doctrine; and to establish, retrospectively, a new correlation, not between natural philosophy and Puritanism, but between magic, superstition, and Puritanism, to which responsible science could now present itself as the antidote. The ideologues of the Royal Society sought in particular to fend off the accusation that the New Learning was a species of antinomianism, through which a philosopher could make any claim, however heterodox, by appealing to the argumentative criteria of his choosing. Boyle and his colleagues sought to demonstrate that far from fostering dissent, natural philosophy was a means of managing or con-

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taining disagreement so that it wouldn’t spill into the political realm. The new Royal Society would fill its rolls with “virtuosi,” carefully vetted gentlemen-philosophers whose political orthodoxy would be beyond suspicion; it would emphasize consensus over disputation; and it would set in place the empiricist methodologies by which local and carefully delineated disputes could be resolved without rancor or sectarianism. The natural philosophers of the Restoration aimed to wean learning of its recent insurgency and in the process to provide an altogether new model for philosophy, in which authority would flow from the free and civil exchange of educated argument. The Royal Society, in short, was a scientific public sphere, though of some tightly managed kind.37 We can find one disastrous alternative to this scientific public sphere in Swift’s Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, a short satire that, on the face of it, reads like a straightforward spoof of Puritan worship.38 What do the English look like, around 1700, when they are still in the grips of fanaticism? This is worth examining in some detail: the satire presents itself as a natural-philosophical account of a Dissenting service, written by one scientific virtuoso for another. Imagine, if you like, a physicist or physiologist describing a Pentecostal revival meeting—that’s what Swift is after here. At the heart of the piece we find a precise, itemizing account of the Puritan enthusiasts as they whip themselves up into a spiritual froth: “They violently strain their eyeballs inward, half closing the lids; then as they sit, they are in a perpetual motion of see-saw, making long hums at proper periods and continuing the sound at equal height, choosing their time in those intermissions while the preacher is at ebb.”39 The immediate implications of this are clear: by adopting the rhetoric of mechanical philosophy, Swift is able to suggest that what the Puritans take to be divine inspiration, the inner light of Christ shining in their breasts, is in fact nothing of the kind. The critique here is basically what we have come to know as the Weberian one: Swift is targeting the routinization and rationalization of religious experience. The shaking, the quaking, the shouted hallelujahs—these are nothing more than bodily operations, performed by rote and thus infinitely replicable, producing rote physiological and psychological effects, no different from hypnosis or a good endorphin rush; by the end of the piece, Swift will have decided that Puritan rapture is little more than orgasm and that Quaker women are a tribe of nymphomaniacs. Religion of this kind

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clearly has no special claim to piety. On the contrary, it is a mere “trade . . . wholly an effect of art.” It is based on “methods of managing the senses” so as to produce “artificial ecstasies.”40 Swift’s satire, to this extent, would seem to fall into line with the ideologues of the Royal Society; its account of religious ecstasy—that it is a form of self-deception—is indistinguishable from theirs. We might think of the Mechanical Operation, then, as just one more entry in England’s long counter-revolutionary campaign against radical Puritan enthusiasm. But here’s the hitch: Swift uses a hyperbolically mechanical language in order to transform the Puritans into mechanics—“our British workmen,” he calls them.41 And this is a remarkably complicated operation, for mechanism is not merely a code into which Puritan worship can be innocently translated. It is an accusation. Mechanism is a predicament; the problem with the Dissenters is that their religion is, in the end, merely mechanical; and to say as much is to realize that Swift’s satire has been working in two directions all along: even as it has been burlesquing the island’s religious enthusiasts, it has been parodying the scientific language that would seem to be enthusiasm’s clearest ideological alternative. By mimicking with such precision the forms of naturalphilosophical writing, and by extending them into spheres where they would seem to have no place, the satire makes the procedures of the New Learning seem fully as conventional and rote as Puritan worship itself. And so we might usefully set The Mechanical Operation alongside other passages in Swift’s satire in which he ventriloquizes the New Learning, such as the moment in the voyage to Brobdingnag when the natural philosophers argue inanely over what kind of creature Gulliver is;42 or the report delivered by the Lilliputians on the items that Gulliver has about his body. This last, in fact, is of particular epistemological interest. The Lilliputians, faced with Gulliver’s giant snuff-box, say, resort to an excessively elaborate and circumstantial vocabulary to describe even this ordinary object. The elephantine comb they find on Gulliver is “a sort of Engine, from the Back of which were extended twenty long Poles, resembling the Pallisadoes”—or pointed wooden stakes—“before your Majesty’s Court.”43 The effect of these descriptions is to make scientific language seem pathological in its minuteness, like some neurological disorder, an aphasia in which objects cannot be named but must instead be exhaustively evoked. Empiricism, in this scheme, is a form of alienation: it places its speakers in the position of outsiders, engaged in

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a perpetual labor of circumscription, as though they did not belong to their own culture, as though they lacked their own language’s most ordinary terms. One is reminded here of Stanley Cavell’s accusation that philosophers usually treat the problem of language as though they themselves came from “foreign tribes”; or of Heidegger’s charge that philosophers treat objects as though we didn’t have some relationship to them that preceded our thinking about them, as though objects weren’t, in our ordinary lives, already accessible.44 It is usually noted that the voyages to Lilliput and Laputa depend for their effects on a thinly veiled satirical allegory: if the Travels pack any kind of polemical punch, it is because they proceed at a near resemblance to English personages and English events. This is surely true in one sense, but it is worth underscoring in this connection that the philosophers of Laputa, like the empiricists of Lilliput, are made to appear alien even as they are made to appear English. Swift deploys the full arsenal of exoticizing effects in order to place natural philosophers beyond recognition, outside of the community: they are the Englishmen who are not properly English, some new and terrible clan, like the Puritans, “whose race is now spread over three kingdoms.”45 Perhaps, though, this is all to make the matter seem more subtle than it really is. Swift doesn’t exactly leave the reader guessing at the connection between Puritanism and the New Learning. Enthusiasm, we read in The Mechanical Operation, is not merely a property of religion: “It has possessed as great a power in the kingdom of knowledge, where it is hard to assign one art or science which has not annexed to it some fanatic branch: such are the Philosopher’s Stone, The Grand Elixir, The Planetary Worlds, The Squaring of the Circle, The Summum Bonum, Utopian Commonwealths, with some others of less or subordinate note; which all serve for nothing else but to employ or amuse this grain of enthusiasm, dealt into every composition.”46 It is in the lines just quoted, then, that the figure of the projector discloses its clearest meanings. To call the natural philosophers “projectors” is to strip them of their latitudinarian sobriety and to find in them instead a barely suppressed millenarianism. It is to discover in the Royal Society’s even-handed exchange of argument the continuing force of the zealots’ revolution. Swift’s strategy here is to accept as given the scientific critique of enthusiasm and then to radicalize that account until its two terms, science and enthusiasm, collapse into one another—until religious enthusiasm can

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be seen as just another form of mechanism and science appears as enthusiasm by another name. So perhaps Swift’s satire is targeting science, after all, but still in some specifically seventeenth-century sense—science as a form of learning that thinks it can wash away philosophy’s utopian taint. Swift is intent on denying this science its newfound respectability, and to do this, he trades in unwelcome reminders: if the Royal Society seeks to suppress its revolutionary origins, then it is upon those origins that Swift will fix our attention, re-asserting the earlier correlation between sectarianism and the new learning, re-tarnishing natural philosophy with the old stain of Hudibrastic inanity. Swift means to keep alive the notion that philosophical disagreement of the kind that the experimental method encourages necessarily leads to social and political disorder. For the purposes of clarity, then, we may wish to divide Swift’s writing into its distinct satirical vectors: the satire against non-Anglican religion, the satire against the new philosophy, the satire against hack writing. But we mustn’t let such interpretive clarity obscure the more important point, for Swift’s achievement is always to superimpose these seemingly discrete targets upon one another. Tory satire discovers at every turn what it takes to be a single problem: disputative philosophy, first bred by the Puritan rebellion, codified now in the New Learning, and amplified beyond repair by the public sphere. The new philosophy cannot survive its original disgrace.

4. Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipped me in ink, my parents’, or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. (...) But why then publish? —Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

Such, then, are the contours of the Tory opposition to print and print culture. But it is important that we turn our attention now to a formal matter of a more intricate kind. The Tory satirists are caught throughout in a performative contradiction. The final fury of their polemics is always reserved for the institutions of the public sphere—coffee houses, periodicals, “the

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Critick”—and yet the Tories are, of course, wholly implicated in these institutions. The Tories are a mainstay of the coffee-house crowd. Their periodicals are the flagship publications of the day. Their uncompromising assault on the Whig government, we might recall, is “exemplary of the critical press.” The Tories, in short, must enter the public sphere in order to so much as articulate their opposition to it. Their anti-modernity, in this light, is merely a special kind of modernity; and one wonders, first and foremost, how the Tory satirists endure this paradox. This is, to begin with, a rhetorical issue. Catherine Gallagher has argued that women writers in the eighteenth century devised a complex variety of rhetorical strategies to give legitimacy to their own status as authors in the face of the marketplace and their masculinized profession.47 Following Gallagher’s lead, we might well ask in regard to the Tory satirists: How do satirical texts figure their own textuality? How do the satirists figure their own status as authors? How do they position themselves in relation to the marketplace? How, to be precise, do they envision a textuality that is both modern and outside of the print marketplace? How, analogously, do they envision a textuality that is engaged—though that word would not be theirs—and outside of the public sphere? Nuanced answers to these questions may be available, but on the face of it, a crude answer will do; for in its broad strokes, the Tory impulse is clear enough—and much less cunning than the authorizing strategies that Gallagher discovers in Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley. The Tory strategy is to deny everything. Deny your textuality, deny your place in the market, deny your participation in the public sphere. “If I ridicule the Follies and Corruption of a Court, a Ministry, or a Senate,” Swift writes, “are they not amply paid by Pensions, Titles, and Power, while I expect, and desire no other Reward, than that of laughing with a few Friends in a Corner?”48 The satirical text is portrayed here as essentially private; its ridicule may be, in some ineffectual way, public— it may have, at least, public targets—but its important effects are wholly intimate. Satire gains significance only at a remove from the mechanisms of publicity and politics. Indeed, satirical writing isn’t even properly writing here. It is virtually a spoken act, a conversation or chuckle between pals, and is thus exempt from Swift’s generalized critique of print or public argument.49 Let me underscore that the issue, at this level, is a rhetorical one, because it should be obvious that Swift’s avowal of privacy is a wishful

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misrepresentation of his publishing practice.50 But what of that practice? The Tory satirists, in effect, pose a tantalizing question for anyone interested in the history of textual forms: Can publishing be anything other than public? The answer to this question would seem, upon first reflection, to be a clear no. The Tory satirists may long for this incongruity, but it’s hard to see how this desire alone could liberate them from the print marketplace: they are public, like it or not. There are two determining features of the publishing landscape of the early eighteenth century that are instructive in this regard. In this period, we find, first of all, what I’ve already referred to as the rise of the free press. The expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695 amounted to what we would now call the deregulation of the publishing industry. The first decades of the eighteenth century saw the rapid proliferation of printers and presses across England, all engaged in a sudden competition for an expanding and eager, though still limited, readership. The free press was thus first and foremost the newly commodified press: and perhaps the most imposing task facing any early-eighteenth-century writer was learning to navigate this uncharted market.51 In ways that have already been indicated, however, this period witnessed not only the commodification of print, but also its wholesale politicization, giving rise to what Gallagher has called “the new public textuality of political controversy.”52 To be a writer of any stature at all in Swift’s day was by definition to be a political writer; and similarly, to read nearly any printed document was to read it through a partisan lens, in much the way that European periodicals today are still read as “center-left,” say, or as “right-wing.” It is important to note that these two developments, the rapid expansion of the literary marketplace and the politicization of print, are entangled with one another in complicated ways. One notes among the writers of the early eighteenth century, Whig and Tory alike, a general distrust of the marketplace; and so there developed among this first generation of market-writers a series of publishing strategies designed to mediate their position in the new literary economy, to hedge against the market or resist commodification. This all sounds rather grand, but it amounted, in effect, to the search for new forms of patronage. The increasingly common practice of literary subscription, for instance, enabled authors to receive, in Leslie Stephen’s words, “a kind of commission from the upper class.” Subscription constituted a “kind of joint-stock body of collective patronage”—a hybrid

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form of market-patronage that promised to spare the writer the indignity of the bookstall.53 It is important to note, however, that subscription of this kind was reserved for poetry’s most prominent figures, most famously Pope himself; and so by and large it was political patronage that replaced aristocratic patronage as an author’s primary means of support. The problem for the Tory satirists, in this light, was this: to the extent that they shunned the market, they had little choice, by and large, but to become political figures in a manner that called their critique of politics into question. But to the extent to which they severed their ties to the political institutions they saw as corrupt, they were cast back upon the market they abhorred. This, ultimately, is the ground of the performative contradiction within which they labored; and it is important for us, therefore, not to conceive of this contradiction as a moral point. I do not mean to suggest that the Tory satirists were in some simple way hypocrites. My contention is rather that the Tory satirists were fueled by a special kind of irony: the irony of immanent critique—the ideological bind that comes from having to launch a critique of prevailing institutions and discourses from within those institutions and discourses themselves. This, finally, is a question of what Richard Brodhead has called “literary access”; it is a question of the terms under which authorship is even possible, at specific moments in our history, under concrete political, economic, and cultural conditions.54 I don’t want to overstate this case, however. Recognizing the publishing frameworks within which the Tory satirists operated can go a long way toward helping us formulate the performative contradiction they faced; and yet, ultimately, it cannot account for the full complexity of that bind. The notion of immanent critique, this is to say, may do something to illuminate the Tory quandary; but in the end, Tory satire cannot be conflated ahead into that later notion for the simple reason that the Tory satirists are out to undermine the very notion of critique as such. Theirs is a critique of critique, and the dilemma here is simple but stark: if what you are criticizing is the glut of print or the institution of criticism itself, then your every critical utterance—your every written word—compromises the authority of your stance.55 An early example of this anti-critical genre was published in 1700, by Sir Richard Blackmore; it is entitled the Satyr against Wit, and the futility of his effort is palpable in the very title.56 The moderns, Swift writes in a similar vein, are like

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spiders, self-generating spitters of venom and spleen. The ancients, by contrast, are bees, pollinating men’s minds, offering “Sweetness and Light.”57 These images are clear enough, to be sure, but in the very act of generating these pointed entomological metaphors, Swift signals his allegiance to the one and defines himself as the other; he is an arachnoid turncoat, the spider fighting for the bee. And Swift, it should be noted, draws out the ramifications of this schizoid self-loathing unflinchingly: “It would be very expedient for the Publick Good of Learning, that Every True Critick, as soon as he had finished his Task assigned, should immediately deliver himself up to Ratsbane, or Hemp, or from some convenient Altitude, and that no Man’s Pretensions to so illustrious a Character, should by any means be received, before That Operation were performed.”58 Criticism, it turns out, is only justifiable when it is bent on its own destruction; and so perhaps Swift is a bee, after all—not the honey-bee of his own description, but the bumble-bee, delivering up its defensive sting at the price of its own life. Just to bring all the strands together: if Tory satire verges on the suicidal then this is, in large part, because the public sphere and the market establish mechanisms of opinion and discourse so firmly that to argue against them is already to accept their terms and procedures; to rage to one’s peers against the validity of the public sphere is already to adopt its discourses. This is a variation on a distinctively Pyrrhonist dilemma. For Sextus Empiricus, as for the classical Pyrrhonists more generally, there is always “some more general, agreed [upon] practice” to dictate the skeptics’ behavior once they have freed themselves from philosophy’s thrall.59 There is some place where the programmatic dispute that is otherwise characteristic of skepticism comes to a halt in the face of a culture’s established and ordinary practices. Pyrrhonism, in short, depends on the idea that there is somebody else calling the shots, some single, customary standard of conduct to which the skeptic can take recourse. Tory satire marks the point where this strategy, based on a fiction to begin with, breaks down, where the Pyrrhonist withdrawal to custom comes to seem, under the force of social differentiation, ever less viable. What distinguishes the English skeptics of the eighteenth century from their predecessors, then, is that they find the route to custom blocked by the capitalist marketplace and the administrative state. Pyrrhonism, in other words, advocates custom as a kind of default ethics, but when custom itself is at odds with dominant forms of social practice, as it is in the mer-

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cantile public sphere, skeptics find themselves in a very different kind of bind. This quandary emerges with special clarity in Swift’s increasingly confused use of the term “common form.” This phrase is one of Tory satire’s real keywords. The Tories’ express purpose is to stick up for the “common forms” of pre-commercial England, by which they generally mean the Anglican church and landed wealth. In A Tale of a Tub, that phrase still functions in proper Pyrrhonist fashion: it names the meliorative force of custom. When a person has given up on any attempt to “form parties by his particular notions,” when his brain is “in its natural position and state of serenity,” then he will “pass his life in the common forms.”60 And yet in Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa, the term takes on an altogether different valence. The phrase now names fashion, foppery, gossip, the idle entertainments of a depraved public space: “common forms were not design’d / Directors to a noble mind.”61 The “common form” thus comes to name both the shared inheritance of an elite national culture and the vulgarity of commercial society. This doubleness will prove fatal. Where Pyrrhonist skeptics could see themselves as retreating to the common forms of custom, the Scriblerian skeptics must withdraw from the common forum of the market and the public sphere. We’ve already seen this problem with Montaigne: that the “common forms” begin to articulate themselves as such only when under attack, but once they have been reduced to a self-conscious intellectual stance, one position among many in an institutionalized debate, they are precisely no longer common and to argue their authority is to abandon oneself to paradox. This is the Tory contradiction at its least forgiving. There is a sense, however, in which satire as a form can be read as an attempt to reckon with this contradiction—which, I hope I’ve made clear, operates at several different levels. Beyond any specific intellectual intervention, the calculated obnoxiousness of Tory satire signals a simple refusal to enter the public sphere, to subject itself to a cloyingly convivial, clubhouse reason. Satire, this is to say, is an attempt to avoid the discursive demands of sustained argument while still engaging in the debates from which such arguments emerge. The Tory skeptic must stand on the fringes of the public sphere—at the coffee-house door, so to speak—proclaiming in full voice his refusal to enter. Unwilling to participate in the game of persuasion, satire—whether in the form of Swiftian mimicry or Popish mock-heroics—becomes an attempt to evoke, through a series of negative gestures, an ideal which can no longer be

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positively articulated; under the weight of a commercial modernity, satire becomes the inverted image of customary, authoritarian ideals that no longer seem rationally defensible and whose hegemony is waning. And it is in these several senses that satire is, in fact, a kind of “publishing that is not public.” Satire is the Tories’ defiant gambit to make good on that oxymoron. This last point is worth dwelling on. There is an old argument which claims that Tory satire is an exercise in negativity, though negativity itself gets called by different names. Where the New Critics once spoke of Swift’s “savage irony,” the Derrideans are now likely to discover “self-deconstruction” and “aporia.”62 My own argument, in this light, has been twofold: to the extent that Tory satire is a matter of negativity, then we must give a historical account of that negativity itself, which is as ideologically specific as the positive positions it seeks to annul. Within any such historical account, moreover, negativity is only going to be half the story. If we place too strenuous an emphasis on the Tories’ refusals and repudiations, we are likely to neglect their ingenious (though ill-fated) attempts to produce new textual forms—to solve at the level of genre ideological problems that can no longer be addressed at the level of argument. It is with that observation that we come to the crux of the matter. We may extend the argument’s ambition, however, by following its line out beyond satire into the rise of the novel, the Romantic lyric, and the philosophical discourse of the aesthetic: because while satire may fill this role for a time, what, ultimately, is a “publishing that is not public” if not the “literary”? When, in other words, is a public artifact not public?—When it is “aesthetic”? The upshot of my argument is this: that Tory satire works to define the ideological dilemmas to which the categories of the “aesthetic” and the “literary” are a response. We have heard repeatedly in recent years that the constitution of “literature” in the eighteenth century is really just an attempt to “keep the mob at bay” or some such, but it has been difficult, in many accounts, to know exactly what this could mean beyond a vague, unrevealing elitism. The public-sphere questions sketched out here might help fill in these gaps, because they help us see, as the Tories themselves would have seen, the value of “literature” as a form of textuality that is not “merely political.” To spell out the Tory opposition to the public sphere is to make clear their desire for a form of textuality that operates at a safe remove from this degraded public space.63

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There is a further paradox in this, to be sure. The early eighteenth century is generally considered, in Anglophone cultural history, to be one of the great moments of political literature. Indeed, one of Habermas’s most intriguing insights is that, in the formation of the public sphere, the realm of culture or taste serves as a model for political discourse itself. His argument runs something like this: once art has lost its ceremonial or ritual functions, it achieves a kind of autonomy. This newly commodified art may be subject to contradictions of its own, but at least it is no longer subservient to aristocratic patronage, enabling it, for the first time, to take on functions other than those of representing the authority of court or church or aristocracy. Habermas’s point here is that the autonomy that art claimed for itself when it entered the marketplace provided the early public sphere with a sense of what an autonomous critical reason might look like. When—to caricature the case a little—the seventeenth-century men of taste sat over their claret debating the merits of a poem, they were, had they but known it, rehearsing the exchange of ideas and opinion that would later define the public sphere. They were tutoring themselves in the very possibilities of critical scrutiny or self-assertion. “The process,” Habermas concludes, “in which the state-governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making use of their reason was one of functionally converting the public sphere in the world of letters already equipped with institutions of the public and with forums for discussion.”64 Once again, I don’t think Habermas is mistaken, and yet, once again, it seems important to complicate his argument by identifying a contradictory tendency. The autonomy of art may in some sense presage the autonomy of public reason; but in another sense, the category of the “literary” as a self-governing sphere of cultural production comes into being precisely when a certain kind of writing begins to assert its independence against the public sphere. There is a sense, to be blunt, in which the marriage of art and politics in the public sphere is a distinctly unhappy one, and it is in their seeming divorce that “literature” is born. The Tory satire that Habermas sees as so typical of the public sphere may be political, but its politics, after all, is one of disaffection. Consider, in this light, Philip Stanhope’s diatribe in the anti-government periodical Common Sense: I challenge the Ministerial Advocates to produce one Line of Sense, or English, written on their Side of the Question for these last Seven Years. . . . Has there been an Essay, in Verse or Prose, has there been even a Distich,

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Stanhope’s bluster is curious. In some sense, a screed such as this does much to support Habermas’s notion of the “literary opposition.” But one might say that it supports that notion rather too well, exceeding it to the point where the “literary” has in fact become identical with the “oppositional.” Stanhope comes perilously close to suggesting that the realm of aesthetic production has become wholly inimical to the realm of state politics; and it is but a short step from here to arguing the complete disassociation of literature from politics. It is, in other words, a short step from saying that “neoclassical literature” is opposed to “Whig politics” to saying that literature as such is opposed to—or, in fact, the opposite of—any politics. If Tory satire is, in effect, a hyper-politicized literature against politics, then it should come as no surprise that this contradiction is, in the long run, untenable. What an eighteenthcentury writer of a certain cast of mind requires, therefore, is a cultural category that can partake of the politicized mechanisms of print while distancing itself from the “political,” securing for the author a critical perch on commercial society while staking a more direct claim on our ethical and sentimental faculties. And this, of course, is the category of literature. But a crucial change has to take place first before “literature” can emerge—and it is this change that we see the Tory satirists ( just barely) initiating: in their attempt to resist commodification, the first generation of writers for the market indulge in a widespread nostalgia for the patronage and manuscript culture of the courtly poets. “Literature,” however, will make no sense as a concept until writers can forego this longing for an idealized form of textual circulation and wager instead on a new form of textual production. They must convince themselves that they can produce a new kind of writerly object, one that can survive commodification intact, one that can make it through the marketplace without being mugged of its excellence. Swift and Pope, by effectively corralling the

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humanist elite out of the public sphere, help establish the preconditions for literature. And so it is with the satirists that culture will begin its long and stuttery history of secessionism, trying again and again to claim autonomy from the degraded spheres of politics and economics. Careful attention to the impasse of Tory publicity should help us understand how it is that critics of modernity ever got going on this perpetual bid for an ever-receding independence. This, in the long run, is the story of Raymond William’s cultured Victorians, bucking against the constricted instrumentality of industrial society. It is the story, too, of Bourdieu’s rather woolier Second-Empire bohemians, for whom anti-bourgeois contempt constituted a kind of independence, the self-determination of the déclassé. In the name of romanticism, aestheticism, or modernism, literature will discover, as though always afresh, that its political projects succeed best when they abjure all reference to the political. And it is here, I think, that we must stop short—upon discovering that this bold and bitter Adornian point is Tory through and through.

5. I have tried to shed some light on a few of our perpetual and common concerns: concerns such as the place of print in the political realm, the place of the author in the marketplace, the place of oppositional thought within dominant institutions, and the place of the “literary” in the hierarchy of textual forms. First and foremost, however, I am eager to stoke the dwindling debate over the promise and limitations of the public sphere. Most of the important work on the public sphere subsequent to Habermas has, in its own way, focused on the issue of access, and it is easy to see why. There is a contradiction that has plagued the public sphere since its inception, and this has been the source of much recent suspicion toward its institutions, to the extent that they can even be said to survive under late capital: as Habermas himself already notes, the public sphere defines itself as infinitely open and accommodating—as an arena of suasion and not force, free from the coercion and hierarchy that mark social relations in both the private sphere and in the administered public space of the state. In practice, however, the public sphere is of course bounded in some familiar and troubling ways. It defines its participants as universal subjects, but this merely ensures that the only subjects who are able to participate in its exercise of critical reason are

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those who can, so to speak, make themselves universal. This—again as Habermas already notes—entails “the identification of ‘property owner’ with ‘human being as such.’ ”66 And I’m sure there are few now who will be surprised to find that both “property owner” and “human being as such” come, in the eighteenth century, with phalluses firmly attached.67 Habermas, of course, is interested in the public sphere as a promise that is never fulfilled. Subsequent scholars, however, have not had Habermas’s dialectical patience. Terry Eagleton, for instance, pointedly dismisses the public sphere as the idealized self-image of the eighteenth-century merchant class, projecting a pretense of reason which merely masks the chummy accommodation of aristocratic and capitalist interests characteristic of the age.68 This antagonism is even more pronounced in Michael Warner’s work, where the classical public sphere is rarely anything other than a cruel abstraction, the vacuous power play of disembodied subjects.69 These uncompromising hostilities do help train our minds on the problem of the public sphere, but what I have yet to see in any account is an acknowledgement that there was massive and articulate opposition to the institutions of the public sphere from its very onset, and not just from the counterpublics of women and workers, but from the dominant sphere’s own elite and disaffected participants.70 The terms of this opposition—its own allegiances, the alternatives it poses (or the lack of them)—have yet to be investigated in any sustained way. Such a project is doubly necessary because, given the dissenting tenor of recent accounts, an inquiry into the quandaries faced by the public sphere’s opponents should provide us with some small insight into our own muddles and misgivings. That said, it is hard to know in what way the Tory satirists force us to revise our estimate of Habermas. Habermas’s method is bracingly dialectical, employing several interpretive strategies in quick succession: he begins by rigorously delineating the concept that the public sphere generates of itself—the dream of a perfect and collaborative rationality. He then measures the print institutions of the eighteenth century against their own norms and finds them perpetually wanting. Habermas is under no illusions here: it turns out that the public sphere never matched its own concept, but was always exclusive, particularist, and prejudicial. And then, having measured the institutions against their concept, he reverses tack: he measures the theories of publicity, notably Kant’s, against the institutions, and shows that they,

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too, are inadequate, because they cannot, as theory, solve the real contradictions of the material structures they seek to describe. Finally—and here’s where it gets tricky—Habermas launches into a historical narrative, a story that he calls the “degeneration” of the public sphere under monopoly capital. The word “degeneration” doesn’t quite capture the tenor of Habermas’s account, however, which attempts to show not so much that the public sphere fell apart over the nineteenth century, but that the conditions of making good on the public sphere became increasingly less available until they were eclipsed entirely by the administered publicity, the pretended and passive consensus, of public relations and mass culture. One often has the feeling, then—and this is the strange quality of the book—that Habermas is giving the history of an institution that never existed in the first place and then came, over time, to exist even less. It is uncertain where we should locate the Tories in such a troubled scheme. They demonstrate that a critical-oppositional discourse has felt compelled from the start to establish itself against the public sphere; that if one is inclined to be hostile toward a commodified public space, there is no reason to wait until the days of monopoly capital to get hot and bothered; that the public sphere takes on its blandly ideological character as soon as it becomes the guardian of commercial society (in a mercantile London, not a monopolized one) and the bureaucratic state (under Walpole, not the welfare regime). Does this sink Habermas’s account? That depends on whether one thinks that his normative claims require a pristine public sphere, operating in actual fact, to serve as historical anchor or original source. What seems clear to me, however, is that the Tory satirists, in all their histrionic brilliance and political impotence, are a standing rebuke to any of us who would like to pursue a politics beyond the public sphere. They are a mocking reminder of our continued and quixotic attempt to write our way out of institutions we cannot, at present, change.

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1. Does the novel have an epistemology? We can consider this question by way of a puzzle. In the opening pages of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), we encounter the following peculiar passage, in which Williams names his boyhood obsessions: The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterised the whole train of my life, was curiosity. It was this that gave me my mechanical turn; I was desirous of tracing the variety of effects which might be produced from given causes. It was this that made me a sort of natural philosopher; I could not rest till I had acquainted myself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the universe. In fine, this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance.1

Now you might ask why I have singled out these sentences as strange. It is not as though they read oddly. The language is unruffled, inconspicuous. Just try, however, to paraphrase the train of association here, and the oddness of the thing should become apparent. Here is my version: Caleb Williams states that because of his inbred curiosity he had: (1) a bent for tinkering; (2) a scientist’s mind; and (3) a love of novels. It is, I would suggest, hardly intuitive that the third term should follow so trippingly upon the previous two. But notice the breezy and summary manner with which Caleb makes his case: In fine, I loved novels, I loved narrative. In that very terseness lies a riddle for the literary historian: How, in the final years of the eighteenth century, is it possible for a

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writer to claim that a knack for mechanics makes one a novel reader? It would be convenient to pigeonhole Caleb Williams as one of the 1790s’ new Romantic novels or as the highwater mark of the political Gothic, but then how do we account for these remarks, which make the early novel sound as though it were some kind of eighteenth-century Erector Set? We could try to resolve the matter by turning to some familiar eighteenth-century debates on the novel, but this is likely only to make Godwin’s formulation seem all the more eccentric. After all, Godwin’s description ascribes to narrative, to romance even, a kind of rigor or boyish solemnity. But that, too, seems all wrong. Doesn’t the eighteenthcentury novel conventionally offer itself as a form of sentimental education, a fastidious program in fine judgment and sociability? And isn’t the century’s stock polemic against the novel that it renders its readers slack and effeminate, that it is an exercise in mawkishness and wanton fancy, a universal solvent on the nation’s mental faculties and moral fiber? This is, in fact, the path that we might have expected “curiosity” to take in the passage at hand. It is easy enough to think of curiosity as incubating a love of novels, if by “curiosity” we mean prurience and by “novels” we mean strange and extravagant literary entertainments. But Godwin’s is obviously not this wanton curiosity; his is something like a researcher’s inquisitiveness. Curiosity here nourishes an interest in causality, not caprice. It is as though Godwin had in mind some hypothetical genre we would have to dub “the Newtonian novel”—dreary affair that this would be, billiard-ball characters careening through the narrative in precise and linear vectors, resolutions falling at story’s end like apples, heavy, on our heads. If we work under the charitable assumption that this is not how eighteenth-century novels read, then we are stuck with the problem: curiosity, causality, the novel. Our task now is to account for that strange concatenation. So how do we get from a “mechanical turn” to “an invincible attachment to books?” The answer, I would claim, is Machiavelli—to which one might reasonably respond: What was the question again? My suggestion is that if, taking our cue from Godwin, we want to understand the eighteenth-century novel as in some important way taking up issues of causality, then we are going to need not a Newtonian language, or not simply a Newtonian language, but a Machiavellian language, as well. For there is a Machiavellian vocabulary that persists in

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eighteenth-century narrative as one of its most conspicuous features, but which will have largely vanished by the time the Victorian novel hits the scene: I’m thinking of the terms “fortune,” “virtue,” “prudence,” and the like.2 It’s that first word that interests me most, and I’ll cite just one example, chosen more or less at random from the century’s writing. In The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Fanny Hill’s first love, Mr. Charles, disappears early in the narrative, consigning her to a life of continued prostitution. She discovers that he has been sent away from England because: it was indispensably necessary to secure a considerable inheritance, that devolv’d to him by the death of a rich merchant (his own brother) at one of the factories in the South-Seas, of which he had lately receiv’d advice together with a copy of the Will.3

This, Fanny says, is what “fortune” had in store for her. (58) What is striking about this passage, then, is that the turn of fortune’s wheel has come here to name not merely circumstance or the chance conjuncture of events, but something rather more precise: “Fortune” names the commercial imperatives of colonial trade. Fanny uses the term “fortune” to describe the mechanism by which a nascent global economy comes, disastrously, to disrupt her life. The word “fortune” announces the outer limits of the individual’s ability to conceptualize the seemingly infinite social space that surrounds her; it marks the point where the subject’s ability to make sense of the social sphere breaks down, where she is unable to penetrate further into the distant institutions that govern her. It thus resembles what the late century will come to call the sublime, but does so in a nearly sociopolitical (rather than an aesthetic) register. When eighteenth-century characters cannot name causes—or when they mean to emphasize the implacable complexity of those causes— they invoke fortune. Fortune substitutes for causality. But how is it that the Machiavellian word “fortune” should seem suited to this purpose? Perhaps it is not too much to say that the Machiavellian prince is the prototypical modern, scrambling to maintain his autonomy in willful disregard of custom’s strictures.4 If this seems to hover on the verge of anachronism, I would happily reverse the formulation. The moderns, the middle class, the bourgeoisie—call them what you will—they are, collectively, the children of fortune, the successors of Machiavelli’s prince and the inheritors of his most pressing questions:

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How do we act, how do we understand actions, when we cannot count on our actions appearing legitimate to others? Action becomes unsettled and unpredictable in modernity first of all because modern practices, by which I mean first and foremost market practices, lack the authority of custom or collective social sanction. So if The Prince is about the new legislator undertaking actions not endorsed by tradition, then this is a formulation that lends itself to eighteenth-century renovation in something like the following form: How, in a period of putative calm, after a century of revolution and economic upheaval, does one make sense of the new practices of the market and managerial politics, which likewise lack the legitimacy of usage, as though the experiences of the new prince had been generalized throughout the social arena? The Machiavellian word “fortune,” in this sense, comes late in its history to name, not merely the “intangibles” in a situation of action with no obvious precedent, as Machiavelli would have it, but the unmasterable complexities of the social sphere. “Fortune” names the lack of transparency in the city and the colonial world market. In modernity, every man is a prince, every woman perhaps a princess, but the paradox of this seductive slogan is that it registers simultaneously the modern subject’s claim to autonomy and everything that under the name of fortune lashes out to compromise that independence.

2. Eighteenth-century English fictions, I am suggesting, are formally innovative, and I think we need to work harder to account for these formal experiments in terms of the transformation of the British economy, its new centrality to a (haphazard but powerful) mercantile world system. Or, to make the same argument in reverse, we need to look for finance, credit, and other forms of capitalist innovation not just in the early novel’s themes or representations, but in its narrative strategies, in the storytelling’s governing concepts and characteristic turns. We will have to proceed carefully here. By 1700, the English social order had already been utterly transformed by capitalism: commercial agriculture controlled the English countryside and had done so since at least 1600; rural class relations had already polarized as smallholders lost their land in an increasingly liquid property market; landowners and merchants had already found new ways to press the rural poor and loot the globe; the

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joint-stock companies were already at sea, the Atlantic economy already flush. Of course, the eighteenth-century elites introduced commercial innovations of their own: the endless tussle over colonies east and west, a permanent wartime economy funded by new forms of public credit, a new national bank, a new stock market, a new consumer culture of colonial goods, a newly visible class of “monied men,” wildfire urbanization, monetary innovations, the slow smothering of the pre-capitalist economy (the moral economy of customary rights or the provincial barter economy), the building of a unified national market. But where the official culture of the seventeenth century still tended to represent itself as agrarian and deferential, in however brittle and declamatory a fashion, eighteenth-century English prose embarks on a project of cultural renovation: if you steep yourself in the courtly, aristocratic, and religious genres that dominate early Stuart writing, eighteenth-century letters will read like one long meditation on “commerce”—though this word, let it be said, is a compact term, a bit of shorthand that condenses together Britain’s many different economic transformations—so that even a piece of eighteenth-century pastoral like Pope’s Windsor Forest turns out, in its final lines, to be a poem not of the land but of the water, of global trade and colonial conquest, of rivers and seas and the oaks that cheerily fell themselves to be shaved into England’s ships (“Thy Trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their Woods, / And half thy Forests rush into my Floods”). Eighteenth-century English writing will learn, in other words, to tell new kinds of stories, stories about new events and practices and things. And yet the more important point, I think, is that the period will also tell its stories differently, representing action as unsettled and openended in a manner that is particularly striking when set against the highly conventionalized, providential narratives of the seventeenth century. For an illustration of this, we need look no further than the most typical of eighteenth-century plots: an individual, usually a woman, comes from the country to the city and is initiated into the treacherous intricacies of market society. (This works, at least as a first description, for Fanny Hill, Defoe’s Roxana, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Burney’s Evelina, Lennox’s Female Quixote—we could extend the list at will.) Perhaps the following might stand as a working hypothesis: If action becomes unstuck in the early novel, if action no longer seems to carry fixed providential meanings, this is because the modern agent must undertake

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action not within a traditionally oriented community, and not within a humanist commonwealth of shared political ends, but precisely within “society,” a complex articulation of contending groups and practices, organized around the new phenomena of finance, trade, the state, the public sphere, the advanced division of labor. The question facing early modern social actors, therefore—the question, too, facing early modern narrative—is: How does one conceive of action within such diffuse practices and institutions, and how does one gauge its effects? Some may be disturbed by what they see as too easy a reliance here on the hackneyed distinction between urban society and traditional communities, the old Gesellschaft-und-Gemeinschaft shtick. But I hope, in fact, that turning to Machiavelli will serve to jimmy open that dichotomy. I am not claiming that pre-modern communities were undifferentiated, and I am certainly not claiming that pre-modern politics were not complex. I am claiming, however, that pre-modern politics were complex for the political classes. If pre-modern social formations were differentiated, then one prominent differentiation lay between those fairly narrow urban and courtly classes who experienced complexity and the preponderance of the population whose routines were too strictly regimented to merit that word. To set complexity as the standard of historical experience is to generalize this class perspective anachronistically. My key argument regarding the early novel, just to repeat it with this elaboration in mind, is that the early novel helps mark the advance of social differentiation, the de facto generalization of this formerly elite experience of complexity, as new groups come into the city and the market. In one sense, all I’m doing here is rehearsing one of Fredric Jameson’s lines. For it is Jameson who has argued most forcefully that narratives of fortune are to be expected in periods of systemic transition: This is the stage Marx describes as exchange on the frontiers between two modes of production, which have not yet been subsumed under a single standard of value; so great fortunes can be made and lost overnight, ships sink or against all expectation appear in the harbor, heroic travelers reappear with cheap goods whose scarcity in the home society lends them extraordinary worth. This is therefore an experience of money which marks the form rather than the content of narratives; these last may include rudimentary commodities and coins incidentally, but nascent Value organizes them around a conception of the Event

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The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment which is formed by categories of Fortune and Providence, the wheel that turns, bringing great good luck and then dashing it, the sense of what is not yet an invisible hand guiding human destinies and endowing them with what is not yet “success” or “failure,” but rather the irreversibility of an unprecedented fate, which makes its bearer into the protagonist of a unique and “memorable” story.5

But if my theme is Jamesonian, I wish to improvise a few variations upon it. For Jameson doesn’t even realize that he is talking about the early novel. The “stage” Jameson has in mind here is late feudalism—or more precisely, the first flourishing of medieval merchant capital in European cities, which is something of an anomaly within feudalism, but which isn’t yet modern capitalism either; and the stories he’s thinking of are pre-modern art tales, such as Boccaccio’s, which he sees as a byproduct of this urban trade: feudal tales of fortune are inconceivable outside of that system’s towns, its islands of commerce. This observation is surely right as far as it goes, but it stops well short of the mark, for the pattern that Jameson identifies is only sharpened in the early novel, as the cities swell and markets spill beyond their borders, as commodity relations lay claim to the entire social order and fortune flourishes in their wake.6 The novel, in this sense, is the medieval art tale writ large. What’s more, Jameson compresses together fortune and providence, but these are, in fact, radically distinct categories; we miss something crucial about eighteenth-century narrative if we let them just bleed into one another. I tend to think here of the odd and inconclusive anti-romances by earlier women writers—Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood—as so many attempts to shut down providential forms of storytelling, to rehearse narrative patterns in which events merely happen and nothing ever concludes: stories just stop dead. For something has to happen first before fortune can step to the fore as a narrative mode: providence has to leave the scene. In order for an event to take on the full character of an event, it must be able to appear within narrative as something other than an index of divine will, and it is one of the signature projects of eighteenth-century narrative to purge itself of its inherited providential conventions. This is nowhere more apparent than in Behn’s “Unfortunate Happy Lady,” in which the narrator chalks up a certain stroke of misfortune—the type of misfortune endemic in eighteenth-century narrative (in this case it is a batch of letters that have gone astray)—to “providence, or accident if you please.”7 What

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emerges with special clarity in this phrase is the coexistence of two fundamentally different modes of storytelling. Behn is representative here of much eighteenth-century writing to come, but her formulation is remarkable for the offhand air with which it reduces providence to the status of an option—a mode of reading, in effect, rather than a mode of narration itself, a supplementary code to be invoked at the reader’s discretion. Walter Benjamin’s great “Storyteller” essay discovers in the Erzählung or customary yarn a simple refusal to explain, a reliance on sheer mysterious sequence, entirely without the novel’s expository and clarifying impulses, its contextual surfeit. In the work of Behn and her fellows, we see early modern narrative reverting temporarily back to the condition of the tale, emptied of explanation. The anti-romance, it is worth pointing out, is fully a political project. This is already clear in Machiavelli, who must, in this light, be regarded as a great prose innovator, as having helped found a new genre or mode of writing. For Machiavelli’s fundamental innovation is to reject what we might call political romance, the ideological finery of classical political manuals, in favor of brisk, analytical narratives of political action: Because I want to write what will be useful to anyone who understands, it seems to me better to concentrate on what really happens rather than on theories or speculations. For many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist. . . . I shall set aside fantasies about rulers, then, and consider what happens in fact.8

There is some general sense, then, in which Machiavelli’s political materialism stands in the same relation to humanist political theory that the novel eventually will to the romance: it is the acid bath of realism, coolly pointing to a permanent gap between the political order and the concepts or images of itself that this order generates. Machiavelli means to narrate political action in strict disregard of its ideals or ideologies. Of course the point is better put the other way round, not that Machiavelli is novelistic or anti-romantic, but that early-eighteenthcentury fiction remains profoundly, corrosively Machiavellian. The stories of a Behn or a Barker work by taking Machiavelli’s vocabulary and preoccupations and translating them out of what the period defines as the public and political sphere of men and into the intimate and erotic sphere of women. These, then, are anti-romances in some more narrow sense, full of rape, aborted amours, marriages that end in murder. They

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are love stories that never get off the ground, as though to say that many have imagined gallants or ladyloves that have never been seen or known to exist. . . . We shall set aside fantasies about women, then, and talk about what happens in fact. They are the death-rattle of an aristocratic culture of courtly love. The anti-romance, in this last sense, helps mark a specific moment in the history of English class relations; it opens up onto a culture that one might hesitate to call bourgeois or capitalist, but which is emphatically, polemically post-aristocratic. The anti-romance is a hinge form, an aesthetic purgative, the genre in which a newly commercial culture flushes away its inherited aristocratic conventions. Such then is the achievement of Defoe’s great Roxana—that it presses the conventions of anti-romance (the sham marriages, the scheming sex, the dry-eyed judgments on “this Thing call’d a Husband”) into a systematic exploration of the commercial lifeworld.9 The first point that needs to be made about Roxana is that its narrator is a particularly striking example of what the Lukacsians call the problematic individual. She is a figure, in other words, in which the distinctive quandaries of modernity become legible, precisely because she is not fully integrated into the social order. We might think of the matter this way: Defoe’s first bit of narrative business in Roxana is to establish the ways in which his narrator is out of joint. She is, to begin with, a diaspora Huguenot living in England. This gives her a passing familiarity with two national communities, but no secure claim or deep history in either. To compound matters, she has no recourse to a family that might stand as bulwark against the foreign territory around her; her intimates are all dead, in prison, or denounced as unreliable mere pages after the novel begins. Nor does Roxana possess the inherited wealth that would help her buck her orphaned state; this, too, is lost in a matter of paragraphs, the casualty of some speculative bubble. Here again one notes fortune’s primary guise in the early novel: if the early novel displays a preoccupation with chance, contingency, and reversal, then this in large part is narrative’s attempt to register the shockwaves of capital throughout a society unaccustomed to its tremors. In the opening pages of Roxana (and in a manner that is typical of the early novel), we are invited to trace within the dilemma of a single subject the faltering of distant and poorly grasped markets. At no other point in the history of English narrative are Fortune and fortune so close.

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The effect of Roxana’s multiple divestitures (no nation, no family, no inheritance) is clear: they produce a creature who dwells entirely within the market, a kind of pure commercial subject, without any residual attachments to anything or anyone outside of the commodity sphere. This point needs to be emphasized, because formally, if seen from sufficient distance, Roxana might seem like one of the first great rags-to-riches stories in English—the heroine, if that’s the word for Roxana, does proceed from indigence to affluence. And yet a moment’s inspection will reveal that the novel delivers none of Horatio Alger’s satisfactions. The Alger tales, it goes without saying, are precisely capitalist romances, but Defoe simply isn’t interested in window-dressing of this kind: Roxana amasses her fortune by abandoning her children, whoring her away across three countries, and rigging up a series of assumed identities, like a con man. The titillation for which Defoe’s novels are so famous, then, actually works to articulate a specific historical problem. In the later sections of Capital, Volume 1, Marx makes an anti-romantic argument of his own: How, he asks, did capitalism even get started if there wasn’t always capitalism? How, in other words, did some people accumulate capital within a social order that was not itself capitalist? The conventional view—a “legend” that owes more to “the promised land of modern romantic novels” than to “actual history”—is that some people simply worked harder and spent less.10 And Marx’s reply to this myth is predictably tart: it was not diligence and discipline that gave rise to capitalism, but rather theft and corruption, a coordinated assault on the globe’s various customary economies, the expropriation of Europe’s peasants and the colonies’ recently subjugated peoples. Roxana, in this sense, is a case study in primitive accumulation, which Marx identifies as the peculiarly capitalist form of anti-romance—it’s just that Defoe narrates at the level of the lifeworld what Marx identifies only at the level of historical structure, the wholesale abandonment of a customary Christian or aristocratic ethics in the service of new economic practices. Roxana, then, is one of those rare novels that is content never to let its action leave the market; indeed, it is remarkable for the fearlessness with which it expunges from its narrative nearly everything that is not already within the cash nexus. It depicts a social order that has handed itself over entirely to the commodity, in which every object—every candlestick, every roast beef—announces its price, compulsively, so that guineas and pistoles appear in the text with the regularity of commas.

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Defoe’s Europe is already the world imagined by Adorno (and New Yorker cartoons), in which there is no relationship outside of the market, in which a new husband is the occasion for a business contract, a dead husband merely a chance to balance the books. Roxana is notable, then, because it provides, within its own pages, a social and historical account of the anti-romance conventions that Behn and Haywood deploy without such explanation: anti-romance thrives because romance asphyxiates in the commodity world. Consider, in this light, the place of providence in Roxana. Defoe’s narrative strategies are, in fact, a single-minded onslaught on providence. This may not be immediately apparent, because the language of providence is, in fact, all over the novel. And yet a careful reading will show that the status of providence has entirely changed. The following passage is typical: In a word, it never Lightn’d or Thunder’d, but I expected the next Flash wou’d penetrate my Vitals, and melt the Sword in the Scabbord of Flesh; it never blew a Storm of Wind, but I expected the Fall of some Stack of Chimneys, or some Part of the House wou’d bury me in its Ruins; and so of other things. (260)

The point is clear: older, providential forms of narration do linger on in Roxana. It’s just that they do so in severely truncated form. Roxana announces here that, whatever the flat, causal train of her narrative, she has actually been reading the events of her life providentially all along— or rather that she has been prepared to read them providentially—or that she has worried that they might offer themselves up to a providential reading. She is anxious, in other words, that her life will take on a providential cast, that the next summer storm or thud of falling bricks will herald God’s judgment upon her wickedness. She is waiting for what we might more prosaically call her comeuppance. The crucial point here, however, is that the novel never follows through on such a reading— that such a reading, in fact, would be impossible as the narrative is configured, since providence itself never puts in an appearance. The events in her life never become legible in that way: they never allow themselves to be plumbed for some significance greater than the immediate gain to be derived from them. Roxana, in short, never gets what’s coming to her, and it is crucial that we understand this as something more than a vagary of the plot. For if Defoe’s readers cannot discern in his story some

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pattern of, variously, justice or order or form unfolding in events, then this means that when the narrative invokes providence, it does so only to signal providence’s absence. When Roxana mentions that she was tempted to read her own life providentially, she does so only to demonstrate that these traditional narrative forms do not bear themselves out in her life. Sometimes, it turns out, a thunderclap is just a thunderclap; and if we are to measure the achievement of the early novel, then we must acknowledge how difficult such a seemingly banal sentence would be to utter to an audience for whom providential interpretation has become reflexive; an audience, in other words, for whom a thunderclap is rarely just a thunderclap. Roxana gives us a clear idea of the work that early, novelistic narrative had to do in order to forestall its readers’ easy recourse to allegory. The matter is more complicated than this, however, because Roxana is also an anti-romance in a second, nearly antithetical sense. A fuller description of the novel’s structure will make the point clear: the narrative falls into three distinct stages. Its first long section details the process of primitive accumulation, Roxana’s accrual of capital by what are not technically capitalist means (sex and fraud, in other words). The novel’s brief second section shows Roxana making the transition from this sheer accumulative passion to a kind of capitalist rationality: she resolves to learn “how to secure my Wealth” (106) or “how to be a Miser” (168)—how, in short, to manage her estate. This is the moment of narrative money-laundering, when Roxana transforms the wealth she has amassed outside of the legitimate economy—wealth that is clearly associated with fortuna, with risk, adventure, a kind of erotic piracy—into the roughly predictable forms of investment. No sooner is this transition effected then the novel’s third stage begins: [R]eally I began to be sick of the Vice; and as I had good Leisure now to divert and enjoy myself in the World, as much as it was possible for any Woman to do, that ever liv’d in it; so I found that my Judgment began to prevail upon me to fix my Delight upon nobler Objects than I had formerly done; . . . it came so very strong upon my Mind one Morning, when I had been lying awake some time in my Bed, as if somebody had ask’d me the Question, What was I a Whore for now? (200–201)

This is one of the novel’s crucial passages. It is, for a start, an especially clear instance of the book’s ongoing conversion of providence into

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psychology; ethics is an intrusive voice rather than a cosmic judgment. But then the passage is all the more interesting because it is so obviously hankering after a sphere, removed from the market, in which ethical life can obtain as it were objectively, as something other than a bad mood. Roxana is trying to imagine both a period that will call the stage of capital accumulation to a close (“What was I a whore for now?”) and a realm of consumption (of “leisure” and “delight”) in which moral concerns can still be plausibly broached. She is, in sum, trying to climb back out of capital’s story and into some other narrative, one perhaps in which providence is still calling the shots. The crucial point is that this effort fails. We can describe this failure first in ideological terms. The novel shifts from one driving question—Can customary forms of virtue survive the transition to capitalism? (to which the answer is clearly no)—to a second driving question—Can the market’s new woman escape her own corruption? And to this latter question the novel attempts three narrative solutions: First, it has Roxana disguise herself as a Quaker—behind plain gray cloth and a twittering of thee’s and thou’s—so that the primitive accumulator might redeem herself by association with distinctively middle-class forms of piety. Then it holds out the possibility of her marrying a prince, which would make for moneylaundering on a higher order, a new class alliance between finance and the pre-capitalist elite. And finally, it has her marry a Dutch financier, who simply buys her a noble title or two, which means that customary forms of status have themselves come onto the market, themselves been commodified, so that the monied interest, rather than allying itself with the aristocracy, can now simply usurp their place. In its final pages, Roxana achieves its distinctive ideological character by systematically allowing each of these strategies to disappoint: Roxana corrupts the Quakers, rather than being made pious by them; the prince spurns her in a fit of Christian righteousness; and even her newly acquired nobility cannot prevent her from being discovered by the daughter she has abandoned, who threatens to tie her back to her whoredom and thus deprive her of her purchased respectability. These narrative turns clearly present the reader with a well-defined ideological predicament: the novel increasingly represents primitive accumulation as trauma. It cannot, in other words, imagine a situation in which the sordid history of primitive accumulation could be successfully repressed, which means that the novel solicits the commercial classes’ fantasies of respectability only to deflate

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them. This is what it means, then, to say that Roxana actually consists of anti-romance in two distinct forms: the narrative of primitive accumulation requires the evacuation of aristocratic and Christian providence, which makes of it a capitalist anti-romance; but then the novel will not permit itself to script a new capitalist romance in providence’s stead. Defoe (in this book, at least) is resolutely hostile to such ideological jerryrigging, hostile, in other words, to the century’s more familiar forms of commercial apologetics. Roxana cannot pull off (or preemptively undoes) the novel’s characteristic ideological projects, its roster of mixed marriages and tableaus of virtue triumphant, which won’t come to the fore until the 1740s, when the novel, precisely in the process of becoming “the novel,” programmatically begins re-admitting romance to its pages. This is not yet to say enough, however, because the novel’s ideological failure points to a narrative failure of a different order. For even Roxana’s disappointments do not allow themselves to be figured as providentially ordained. One could at least imagine a novel in which Roxana’s very failures took on a providential cast, but Defoe’s efforts in this direction are conspicuously half-hearted. The novel, having gone to such lengths to eliminate providence from its pages, has trouble reinstating it. This is clear in two ways: the novel’s sketchy final paragraph proclaims that providence has exacted its tax on Roxana, that she is spending her old age poor and repentant. But it does so lackadaisically, with an utter lack of narrative detail.11 Providence here can only be announced. It cannot be recounted. What’s more, the near-absence of providence has a way of dividing Defoe’s narration into two levels or formal orders. First, the narrative works in simple causal terms. Consider the following crucial paragraph, in which Roxana reflects upon her good fortune in having escaped capture with her servant during one of their schemes: And now Amy and I were at Leisure to look upon the Mischiefs that we had escap’d; and had I had any Religion, or any Sence of a Supreme Power managing, directing, and governing on both Causes and Events in this World, such a Case as this wou’d have given any-body room to have been very thankful to the Power who had not only put such a Treasure into my Hand, but given me such an Escape from the Ruin that threaten’d me; but I had none of those things about me; I had indeed, a grateful Sence upon my Mind of the generous Friendship of my Deliverer, the Dutch Merchant; by whom I was so faithfully serv’d, and by whom, as far as relates to second Causes, I was preserv’d from Destruction. (160)

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The narrative issues that govern Defoe’s texts emerge with special clarity in this passage. It shows us, namely, that for the purposes of narration, second causes have become primary. The providential account of Roxana’s rescue—“a Supreme Power managing, directing, and governing”— is spelled out only to be discounted, and not even argued against, but merely brushed aside. Defoe, one is tempted to conclude, is teaching his readership how to read a story in merely causal ways. Instead of a conventionally patterned story of divinely ordered purposes, he gives us a story of worldly events unfolding in their temporal sequence. And yet, second, the novel remains awash in ethical language— Roxana’s periodic self-denunciations of her own wantonness. The problem is that providence’s absence leaves the novel’s ethical register abstract, without any compelling relationship to the events narrated, a retrospective intrusion or psychological tic, rather than a principle of the narrative itself. It is not so much that the novel exposes or mocks these ethical considerations, as Machiavelli does, but that its renders such considerations incompatible with its own narrative, so that Roxana typically urges her women readers not to be “ruined” by “great men” and then starts recounting how some doting lover or another, far from destroying her, merely contributed to her swelling kitty. Such, then, is the peculiar experience of reading Defoe, in which we watch helplessly as practices wholly disassociate themselves from the normative language that is meant to describe them. Ethics is the gum left behind when providence seeps away. It is providence reformulated as private anxiety—as psychology or smarting conscience—rather than as narrative code. An important qualification becomes necessary at this point: Roxana may be the bitch-mother of all anti-romances, but this line of argument should also give us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the novel and the romance as traditionally conceived. If we think just of the stalest distinctions between the romance and the novel, one of the first indices that comes to mind is the romance’s emphasis on extraordinary or fantastical events, which stands in such stark contrast to the novel’s obsession with the quotidian. But why is this? Why does eighteenth-century narrative discover the everyday or the ordinary? I think we can say that in trying to describe the newly complex space of the modern, the novel is able to describe the everyday as though it were extraordinary. It is able to generate the suspense or the unfamiliarity of “romance” narrative out of proximate materials, testifying to an estrangement of the

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plain or the commonplace. Thus we begin with a cliché about the novel and the romance, but in the end we can further blur the boundary between the two, because if novels such as Roxana turn to “ordinary life,” then this is because ordinary life has come to approximate the condition of romance itself, at least in one of its key features, the treacherous territory of the mundane.12 If we follow this Machiavellian line—if we think of early novels as, in effect, Machiavellian romances of the marketplace—then we can also account in new ways for what has often been referred to as the novel’s empiricism: its descriptive bent; its fine, itemizing texture; its emphasis on detail within the environs of the everyday. The rather abstract and archaic Machiavellian terminology that lives on in the early novel is, I would like to say, actually of a piece with its circumstantial precision. In the hopes of returning some agency to the decontextualized or nakedly autonomous modern subject, the novel’s minutiae serve as notice to readers that the early modern sphere of action demands a degree of attention that the seemingly chthonic routines of the pre-modern never did—and that the bureaucratized routines of the fully modern may never again—that they must therefore watch over their deeds in some new way, with an eye toward their contingency or their proximate detail and in a pose of perpetual vigilance. Such, then, is what it might mean to speak of the novel’s epistemology: it trains the reader to treat no-longer-ordinary life as an object of knowledge. But there is a second way we might account for the novel’s empiricism, and this will take us back to the question of causality with which we started. We might say, first, that the novel’s empiricism works to attune its readers to the problem of fortune, which I’ve been suggesting is really the problem of social complexity in the metropolis and the new world system; but we might equally say that the novel’s empiricism is an attempt to win narrative back from the realm of fortune, to refuse the narrative crutch of fortune, to find concrete, social and causal explanations for the vicissitudes that have traditionally (and lamely) been chalked up to fortune. The term “fortune” designates a distinctive mode of storytelling, one that forsakes any attempt to spell out the deep causality of the episodes that it records. But the novel’s descriptive precision may also serve to establish new and elaborate chains of causality. The beginning of Fielding’s Amelia is representative in this regard. Fielding begins with a question: Will fortune govern his narrative

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or will his story unfold in the more methodical register of causality? The events to be recounted were so “extraordinary,” in Fielding’s words, “that they seemed to require . . . the utmost Invention which Superstition hath ever attributed to Fortune: Tho’ whether any such Being interfered in the case, or, indeed, whether there be any such Being in the Universe, is a Matter which I by no Means presume to determine in the Affirmative.”13 For the time being, Fielding is content to leave this question open, but the answer arrives in the form of the novel itself: Amelia is an extravagant story of suffering, and it is remarkable in its largely unprecedented attempts to name, with as much specificity as possible, the social mechanisms, the multiple causes, of such suffering. The novel, then, is in fact an attack on the concept of “fortune,” which emerges here as a breach of narrative and ethical responsibility. The storyteller and the moral agent have the common obligation to track causality down.14 And with this observation, Godwin’s notion of the causal or mechanical novel begins to make a kind of sense. The causal novel is an instrument for charting the new intricacies of modern social space.15

3. Here, then, are the first, rough outlines of some shared project. We can say that there are at least three modes of storytelling that vie for priority in the eighteenth century, often within the same pages: providence, fortune, and causality. We can speak, at the broadest level, of a historical shift, undertaken in this period, from providential narrative to causal narrative, from stories that promise knowledge of God’s design to narratives that promise knowledge of the material and social world existing in time. But how do we evaluate this shift? We have some choices to make. We could treat it as an autonomous cultural revolution, which we would presumably call “secularization” and which would require no explanation in terms other than its own.16 Alternately, we can work to correlate this shift with contemporary social and economic transformations, in which case the renovation of narrative will appear as a political project of a special kind. It is possible, I think, to specify with some precision the character of that political project, but in order to do so we need to start thinking hard about credit, which is perhaps the eighteenth century’s decisive capitalist innovation. The first, familiar point to be made about credit is that it is fortune’s double or sister. Eighteenth-century

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writing speaks often of credit and does so in terms clearly borrowed from older figurations of fortune: fortune metamorphoses from a metaphysical quandary into a social and historical problem, Lady Credit, who stands in distant and capricious command over human affairs. Credit, it is important to keep in mind, does not just refer to money lent or payment deferred; it refers to paper instruments of all kinds, nearly all of them new or newly central to the eighteenth-century economy: bank notes, bills of exchange, stock, government debt, and eventually paper currency itself, which, like all credit, is not itself a valuable thing, but only the promise of a valuable thing. Credit, then, works to lure the economy out of the realm of the concrete, away from land and tangible, tradable goods—spices to sniff, cloth you can rub between thumb and forefinger—and into a realm of fluid and disembodied value. It bestows effective and transformative force on beliefs and ideas and expectations and hunches. The word “credit,” then, names no single thing; it designates, rather, that series of practices and institutions that give authority to paper. For an eighteenth-century writer to cast credit in fortune’s guise is, therefore, to articulate an anxiety, the fear that Britain has been handed over to a phantasm, an apparition, a thing that is not a thing, an incorporeal force able to upend the course of secular events with all the unpredictability, the fickle contingency of a speculative bubble or market crash.17 What’s more, fortune and credit are joined here by a third term—the figure of rhetoric. The same conventions that surround the fear of fortune and credit also pervade an older fear of public speech. Richard Fanshawe writes in the 1640s that “words are wind . . . the world’s firmest glory,” and Defoe will write half a century later against the “Air-Money” that is credit. Credit, then, is money transmuted into breath or argument; and behind both these atmospheric figures there murmurs the insistence that the social order should not lie at the ether’s whim; that opinion, image, and dispute should not raise the meanest born to the highest place, should not corrupt with mere words or show a political culture of virtue, military service, and plowable, paceable acres. There emerges in early modern writing, then, a conceptual constellation: fortune, credit, rhetoric. These are the string-pullers, the lifeworld’s deep movers, the causes that can barely be named, rendering the social system progressively more immaterial, abstract, inscrutable. There is a temptation here that needs to be warded off. This constellation—fortune, credit, rhetoric—only holds for a specific moment

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in the history of the English-speaking world, the period that sees both the Financial Revolution and the rise of the public sphere or print marketplace, that distinctive phase, in other words, in which both credit and rhetoric find the institutions proper to them and from which they will attempt to generalize themselves throughout the social order. Most of the writing currently available on credit and writing in the eighteenth century, however, looks over this situation—an increasingly complex social order governed by the hyper-reality of the media and high finance—and discovers in it what we might call the “long postmodern.” As a genre, it has been argued, the novel took shape in a society increasingly governed by fictions. The novel is that type of fiction characteristic of a society that is itself constituted by fiction, that is, by credit and print. The novel, in short, has always been postmodern.18 There is one sense in which this argument is absolutely crucial. It is—tacitly, unpolemically—a rebuff to the prevailing clichés of the English eighteenth century as an age of lab-coated Enlightenment, imposing its unyielding and claustrophobic epistemologies, deploying scientists and philosophers on every street corner. The new economic criticism has demonstrated that the eighteenth century is characterized equally and antithetically by an epistemological unmooring, that finance and fiction, far from bolstering customary claims to know the world, powerfully undo such claims. In this argument, we can catch a pleasing glimmer of historical process or the long durée, a history of the present, of the market’s expanding dominion and the intensifying abstraction of social life, that is, its atomization into isolated but exchangeable subsystems, each of them ultimately ungrounded and experienced therefore as fictional. But it is only a glimmer that we catch, because a sense of historical process is what most of this criticism actually works to forestall. Most economic criticism of the early novel relies on new-historicist homologies. The simile is its chief argumentative figure: “Finance is like fiction. . . . Like the buying of stock, the reading of novels was. . . . Human faces are like imprinted coins are like typeface on a page.”19 The problem is this: once you say that fiction is “like” credit, once you simply set them in a relation of equivalence, you absolve yourself of having to determine what these two distinct social spheres, culture and the economy, have to do with one another. Such arguments-by-analogy rely on intuitive correspondences, as though puns were the motor of history; they never seriously consider the social order’s multiple sites, the history of their divergence or their

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continued and mutual determination.20 And if fiction and finance are not linked by historical process but by some permanent analogical axle, then the long postmodern is in danger of becoming the perpetual postmodern, in which case the new economic criticism isn’t so much giving a history of the present as merely rediscovering the present in some Augustan mirror, casting the eighteenth century in its own image. So there is a second choice that needs making. Either we can resign ourselves to an eternitas postmoderna, to an endless horizon of spectacle and speculation; or we can learn to distinguish eighteenth-century credit from postmodern credit. We can learn, in other words, to distinguish between: 1. finance capital as an emergent structure, which was in contest with residual forms—the peasant economy of traditional rights and privileges, the half-feudal physiocracy of the landed classes, a burgher mercantilism that still believed in solid things; which was in the service of primitive accumulation; which was in league with agrarian capitalism’s ideology of “improvement” and a modest global trade in artisanal luxuries; and which made possible a state of permanent war, settler colonialism, capitalist slavery, and economic nationalism; 2. and finance capitalism as a dominant structure, late capitalism’s lynchpin, coordinating a vast, worldwide industrial apparatus, itself premised on the complete penetration of the pre-capitalist world, now mechanized and commodified through and through, generating a ubiquitous global trade in necessaries and a media that means to colonize the unconscious or dictate desire. These two forms of finance capital surely belong to the same history. They partake, no doubt, of similar logics. They can usefully be superimposed on top of one another. But they are not, for all that, the same thing. And if we do not learn to make this distinction, then bandying about terms like “credit” and “finance capital” will rather sap than strengthen our sense of capital’s historicity.21 At the very least, then, we can say that what is distinctive about eighteenth-century Britain is how it takes itself to have solved its postmodern problems. How, in eighteenth-century terms, does one conquer the fear of credit and its fictions? Economic histories of the eighteenth

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century place great stress on the following observation: you cannot have sophisticated mechanisms of credit unless you have institutions that more or less guarantee credit’s repayment. We can phrase this point in a few different ways: Max Weber notes, first of all, that capitalism demands what he calls guarantees of calculability: “Capitalism must be able to count on the continuity, trustworthiness and objectivity of the legal order, and on the rational predictable function of legal and administrative agencies.”22 Jürgen Habermas suggests in a similar vein that early “state interventions without empowerment by law were blameworthy primarily not because they violated principles of justice laid down by natural right but simply because they were unpredictable and thus would preclude exactly the kind and measure of rationality that was in the interest of private persons functioning in a capitalist fashion.” Classical political economy, he writes, was the discourse that set the standard for such predictive rationality: “It conceived of a system whose immanent laws afforded the individual a sure foundation for calculating his economic activity rationally according to the standard for profit maximization.”23 Bruce Carruthers, finally, notes that what the stock market requires is “accessible information and routine procedures.”24 He suggests that when we speak of the Financial Revolution, we are speaking, in effect, of the introduction of such regular operations in the form of professional brokers, the financial press, a centralized exchange, standardized contracts, and so on. The solution to the problem of Lady Credit, then, was to tame her, to remove credit from the realm of risk, to sunder credit from fortune as one might separate conjoined twins. Credit’s taming required new institutions, new forms of rationalization: government statistics, new techniques for administering commerce, actuarial tables and new discourses of probability; more sophisticated forms of commercial empiricism, such as double-entry bookkeeping, the new field of political economy, designed to discover regularities in what had once been fortune’s marketplace. “[G]oods had to be reified,” notes J. G. A Pocock in one of his most commanding observations, “and the laws of the market discovered or invented, in order to restore reality and rationality to an otherwise purely speculative universe.”25 Taken together, these observations should allow me, at last, to drive my point home: the early novel is an extension of these projects. If credit removes economic actors from a world of real and tangible things and inserts them instead into networks of speculation and belief, then the

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novel thrives because of its ability to narrate such social complexity, its knack for depicting individuals in circuits or social webs. The early novel is cognitive mapping for the new commercial classes. The first financial institutions of Britain’s commercial revolution forced a degree of predictability onto a social sphere that would otherwise have been governed by fortune. “There is a real sense,” continues Pocock, “in which the sense of a secular future is the child of capitalist investment.” A society founded on credit survives “by men’s expectations of one another’s capacity for future action and performance.”26 The institutions of credit, like the predictive rationality that they require, are in large part, then, an issue of narrative. You cannot have credit unless you can narrate causally and prudentially, in a way that seems to set up strong links in a sequence of abstract and linear temporality—past-present-future—and this is precisely what novels like Roxana teach their readers to do. Such novels teach their readers to tell a biographical narrative in causal terms, one that can make sense of the past and project itself cautiously into the future, within the framework of credit and the money economy and outside of the frameworks of providence and fortune. In one sense, we can say that the new institutions of finance made such narratives possible: the eighteenth-century state and eighteenth-century capital set about to construct a planar, homogeneous space in which a narrative empiricism of this kind could function, in which its procedures would have efficacy—in which fortune wouldn’t always barge in or muck up the game. But perhaps the more compelling insight is the converse of this one, an argument which, admittedly, bursts the confines of the present chapter: that the new forms of novelistic narrative themselves made the new institutions of finance possible. Finance capital actually required these new narrative models. So here is one way at least of solving the puzzle with which we began: curiosity, causality, the novel. There can be no credit without subjects who can narrate their lives in novelistic terms. Causal narrative is the guarantee of calculability. It is the minimum condition of a good investment.

4. If we can identify a novelistic epistemology, the question becomes whether we can speak, equally, of a novelistic skepticism. What would it mean to call a novel skeptical? Is there a skepticism proper to the

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novel? The principle underlying narrative tends to shift over the eighteenth century from providence to causality; and fortune, in this scheme, is the skeptical term. It suggests that the forms of knowledge generally thought proper to narrative are not, in fact, obtainable. We might describe as skeptical, therefore, those novels in which fortune reasserts itself, in which providence leaves the scene without being replaced by causality, in which contingency and accident transform the narrative from an instrument of knowledge to a mere succession of chance events. This moment of narrative failure is, in fact, never far away in eighteenth-century fictions. Fortune, it turns out, is always just around the corner. There is a literary history yet to be written, a history of narrative miscarriage, from Cervantes’s Quixote to Graham Swift’s Waterland, a history that would collate the many points at which narrators pack up shop, having decided that the storytelling strategies available to them are not adequate to the incidents they are meant to represent. Godwin’s Caleb Williams is, once again, instructive in this regard. The action of the novel is easily summarized: a precocious peasant boy is taken into service by a warm-hearted and cultivated gentleman. This gentleman, however, harbors a dreadful secret: he once murdered one of his neighbors, a boorish and tyrannical squire despised by the entire county. The servant soon learns of this crime, and his master spends the rest of the novel punishing him for the discovery, framing him for theft, throwing him in jail, hounding him across England and Wales, ruining his reputation wherever he attempts to settle. Such a precis, of course, does scant justice to the book, which derives much of its force from its paranoid rewriting of other popular eighteenthcentury tales. Perhaps this is to phrase the point too blandly, however, for Caleb Williams, in fact, lures its readers into a tough-minded bait-andswitch. It plays a somber game with its readers’ established expectations. The novel’s opening chapters are, in effect, a retelling of Tom Jones. Godwin is careful to set his novel in Fielding’s symbolic space, the pastoral England that Georgian culture places at the center of the national imaginary; and he is careful, too, to populate his novels with Fielding’s wellestablished English types, the high-minded country gentleman, the clodhopping country squire. But even the book’s early chapters suggest a Fielding novel drained of all good humor. The congenial tone of Tom Jones has faded and has become, instead, something by turns fearful and angry.

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Godwin’s Tory squire is unequivocally a brute, a reckless man whose machismo is something much worse than rustic idiosyncrasy; it is arbitrary power, savagely exercised. And the Whig gentleman, more to the point, is himself nothing more than a brute with a bigger vocabulary. Eighteenthcentury letters offers as one of its most deeply ingrained ideological distinctions a contrast between the new aristocracy and the old—between, on the one hand, a reformed ruling class, possessed of refinement or homespun country virtue (or both), and thus worthy of its status; and, on the other, an unreconstructed ruling class, anachronistic in its rudeness, feral and feudal in equal proportion, given to abusing its inherited privileges. But Caleb Williams begins by drawing this distinction only so that it may have the pleasure of undoing it. Imagine, if you can, a novel in which Squire Allworthy beats Squire Western to death and then unleashes a terror campaign against young Tom. Against the eighteenth century’s gallery of class types, to expose the gentleman for a criminal is to engage in a polemic of a precise kind: it is to suggest that the man of refinement and the Jacobite boob are, finally, one and the same figure, united in the corrupt exercise of an unmerited authority. After Caleb Williams, there can be no distinguishing between Mr. Darcy and the dastardly Lovelace. There can be no essential difference between Mr. B before his marriage and Mr. B after it. Caleb Williams, in short, is one of the great novels of demystification, structured around a single, heart-stopping narrative inversion, the conspicuous and argumentative substitution of one account of the English social order for another. As such, it bears an affinity to the left-wing mystery novel of later centuries, in which misery and violence are revealed to be, not, as in the classic drawing-room whodunit, a disruption of the social order, but rather that order’s most predictable effect. And yet Caleb Williams remains nonetheless rather conventional in its form. It continues to follow what, by the 1790s, had become the novel’s established procedures. Not content to chalk up the anguish of the poor to the “mutability of human affairs,” as though that were in itself a sufficient causal explanation, it seeks to redescribe vicissitude in fully social terms, to account for Caleb’s plight by tracing out elaborate causal chains, all of which point back to his master’s cruelty. Godwin’s radicalism, then, is founded on the simple and profoundly novelistic notion that misery is capable of historical and political explanation, and that the oppressed, therefore, need not learn to love their fate, as though their station were

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determined by providence, as though it were unchanging, inscrutable, merely vexing.27 The important point about Caleb Williams, in this light, is that it is not, finally, able to make good on this promise. It is unable to carry its explanatory project through to completion. On the contrary, one of the fascinations of Godwin’s writing is that it is perpetually near the end of its narrative tether, always skirting that point where it can no longer provide a causal account of the events that it depicts. This is nowhere more apparent than in the following passage, from early in the novel: the uncouth squire, Caleb writes, the one who will soon be murdered, “was the rival that Fortune, in her caprice, had reserved for the accomplished Falkland”—the refined gentleman Caleb serves—“and because they regarded each other with a deadly hatred, I have become an object of misery and abhorrence.”28 This one deceptively simple sentence neatly encapsulates the narrative snag that will trouble Caleb Williams throughout. The sentence vacillates between two different modes of storytelling: Caleb’s suffering gets a deep causality; the syntax alone guarantees as much—causality is built into the word “because”: I suffer because of their hatred. But the beginning of the sentence, by invoking fortune, has already posted a boundary beyond which causal narrative cannot cross. It has precluded in advance much of the sentence’s epistemological force. Caleb’s suffering is due to his master’s hatred, but his master’s hatred is due to nothing tangible at all, to fortune or caprice. Caleb Williams, in short, does not purge fortune from its pages, as the genre demands it must, but merely defers fortune onto the character of the ruling class. Contingency takes up residence in the master’s personality, in the obscurity of his motives, and Godwin’s recourse to psychology is as innovative as it is hapless. We can identify that the master is persecuting Caleb, but we can never say why he is persecuting Caleb or what puts him in a position of power over Caleb in the first place. A deficiency of this kind, it’s true, need not be a disappointment. It would not be difficult, after all, to imagine a novel in which the notion of contingency yielded a politically invigorating insight. Let’s just state the obvious: to say that the aristocracy holds its authority contingently is to say that it does not hold it by necessity. It raises the possibility, at least, of a freer social order from which the nobles have been expelled. But what is most distinctive about Caleb Williams, what separates it from the forms of radical writing that will succeed it, is that contingency here is

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rarely anything less than debilitating. To call contingency “fortune,” in fact, rather than mere “accident,” is nearly always to understand it as political defeat, as the elimination of political agency. Fortune certainly names a version of skepticism, but it also names a heteronomy. To chalk an event up to fortune is to admit that you are not calling the shots. Caleb, then, is able to stand up to his depraved master, but he cannot, finally, buck the fortune that governs their common circumstance. This is not to say that Caleb Williams is itself a skeptical novel, but merely that in its radicalized hopelessness we can see what it would mean for an eighteenth-century novel to back away from its own characteristic procedures. Caleb Williams, like nearly any novel, eventually reaches a point where it must cede its epistemological claims—the only exception here would be an extraordinary project like Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, which is based on the simple promise of infinity, a pledge that there will always be another novel, that narration is never-ending, as incessant as totality itself. A skeptical novel, by extension, would be one which drew the line of narrative failure radically near, that made an obtrusive point of expelling causal narrative from its pages. The obvious candidate for this title is, of course, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Here are some observations that are commonly made about Shandy: at the level of genre, it resembles a provincial or domestic or country-house novel; it follows over several years the history of a single gentry family, holed up in their Yorkshire estate—the entire book, some seven hundred pages in most modern editions, plays itself out in a radius of four miles. It does have a story to tell, but its narrative impulses are strangely muted, episodic at best, as befits a family melodrama. There is no plot to be summarized: sons are born, brothers die, uncles go a-courting. But this, as any reader knows, is rather to underestimate Shandy’s retreat from plain narrative, because instead of story, the novel presides over a seemingly endless store of narrative games: it transposes chapters, delays its preface for some two hundred pages, impedes action through anecdotes, interpolated documents, long stretches of unclassifiable whimsy; it allows the narrative to trail off into blank pages or a small galaxy of asterisks or random, squiggling pen-strokes. Shandy does everything, in short, not to tell what little story it has; it makes a conspicuous display, in fact, of that refusal. It is a novel patched together out of digressions, an epic throatclearing. Shandy is particularly compelling, then, because it is so often held up as a model of what skeptical storytelling might look like. It is the

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anti-novel par excellence, modernist before its time and postmodernist, too, the old canon’s great writerly text, the eighteenth-century’s bulwark against realism, the only thing standing between us and Richardson. Unlike Caleb Williams, Tristram Shandy is less a failed narrative than an investigation into the conditions under which narratives fail, and its teasing show of defeat is thus its secret triumph. If Sterne’s book remains appealing, then, or even in some sense actual, this is because it wears its skepticism on its sleeve, what with its cock-and-bull humor, its broadsides against the philosopher-critics, its haywire play with narrative time—that Shandean vaudeville of fabula and sjuzet—its coyly ponderous deployment of novelistic conventions. It is a virtual handbook of literary sports, the Hoyle’s of metafiction.29 This, then, is what a skeptical novel would look like. Consider, in this regard, Sterne’s many lists. Tristram Shandy, like much satiric fiction, has a penchant for lists: lists of body parts, of noble titles, of ancient garments, of Parisian streets, of the branches of knowledge.30 Swift, too, has his lists, but these tend to strike the reader as panicked, shouting out the mounting challenges of an unchecked materiality. Flaubert, again, will have his lists, and these will take on something of an anthropological cast, reconstructing the warp and woof of the bourgeois lifeworld: this is the list as thick description, though in Zola’s hands, such lists will forfeit their ability to disclose the lifeworld’s secrets and will read instead like so many warehouse inventories, inert commodities piled in heaps. And from Zola we might move on to the nominalist lists of Joyce and Nabokov, and then on to the giddy, scat-singing lists of William Gass and Thomas Pynchon. Even Milton has his lists, though these are of a different order entirely: Milton is best known for his long poems, but he sometimes wrote short, tightly articulated lyrics whose business it is to banish all contingency from their confines. A poem such as “At a Solemn Music,” for instance, is a dense exercise in apposition, arranging the objects of heaven and earth in an unbroken chain of substitution, a sequence in which any term can stand in for any other: “Blest pair of sirens, pledges of heaven’s joy, Sphere-borne harmonious sisters, Voice, and Verse . . . the undisturbed song of pure consent . . . the saintly shout and solemn jubilee,” and on and on.31 Each of Milton’s phrases refers inevitably back to the same substance, which is simply divinity itself, of which any particular item is merely the extension, and thus not, in fact, particular at all. The Miltonic list, in other words, is really nothing of the kind. It is,

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paradoxically, the exhaustive inventory of a single item, just so many synonyms for the Godhead. Against this backdrop, the compulsive listing characteristic of Sterne appears as a means of courting contingency, not banishing it. The skeptical list is a roll-call of disarticulated objects, organized by sequence alone, without origin or end. The Shandean list is thus the antithesis of Milton’s all-encompassing divinity, and it is the antithesis of the concept, as well, for a functioning concept must be able, like God, to subsume into itself its multiple referents, which consequently need not be enumerated. An item on a list, by contrast, always retains some residue of singularity. The perfect list would therefore not be a list of anything at all. It would be an index of the unique, a catalog of objects incapable of carrying any meaning beyond themselves—the smell of jasmine; a backgammon counter; Davenport, Iowa—though one is tempted to point out that such lists are then lists of the “singular,” which thereby becomes an abstract category in its own right. Lists, at any rate, are skeptical ground zero in Tristram Shandy. They are the seam by which contingency is reintroduced into causal storytelling, the device by which objects up and detach themselves from the narrative. Narrative in Tristram Shandy is forever in danger of regressing back to the status of the list, random sequence without form or natural succession. And it is via the list and the contingency that it announces that we can begin to account for the book’s shaggy-dog quality: Tristram’s manic digressions are an elaborate parody of causal narrative. Why, Tristram begins by asking, has my life been so unhappy? And the central joke of the novel, the gag embedded in its very structure, is that once you ask this question, you will find so many answers that none of them will carry conviction. Why are you unhappy? Because of your nose, your name, your father’s obstinacy, your mother’s vagary, the maid’s carelessness, a window sash, the clock in the hall. Tristram Shandy sets itself up as an investigation into the extended and multiple chains of causality that govern a life—“My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell”32—but the book’s basic lesson is that causes, when compounded, are indistinguishable from fortune itself. A single cause might still give the appearance of necessity, but a constellation of causes smacks, improbably, of the stars aligning.33 Name too many causes and you might as well have named none at all.

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Tristram Shandy is thus not, as is often suggested, an anomaly, the odd-man-out in the eighteenth-century canon. On the contrary, it confronts the reader with two different modes of storytelling, fortune and causality, in a manner that is wholly typical of the early novel. It is unusual only in its willingness to reduce the latter uncompromisingly back to the former, to surrender itself up to fortune, when most eighteenthcentury narratives show a new determination to keep fortune at bay. It is in this fairly precise respect that we can read Sterne’s book as a dissent from “plain narrative,” a defection from what Tristram calls the “vast empire of biographical free-booters.”34 But to say as much is only to raise a question of a more demanding kind. We might describe Tristram Shandy as the great novel of contingency and overdetermination, but it is hard to gauge the significance of that observation for an eighteenthcentury text. We might be able to intuit the force of Sterne’s causal games if Shandy were a postmodern novel, though even here the matter would be tricky. The notion of contingency now underwrites a contradictory range of political allegiances: Althusser’s anti-historicist Marxism, like the Left post-structuralism that it on many counts anticipates, conceives of contingency as an emancipatory alternative to a social order whose features would otherwise seem natural or necessary.35 But in the history departments of the English-speaking world, “contingency” has become the weapon of choice among right-wing scholars determined to vanquish altogether the project of a critical social history.36 The notion that nothing in history is necessary, that historical events do not so much as yield meaningful trends or patterns, has licensed a wholesale return to political history, in which everything depends on the ultimately inexplicable actions of singular individuals—this revival has taken its most curious form in the current Tory vogue for counterfactuals and “alternate histories,” which are equal parts science fiction and anti-socialist stridency37: What if the U.S. South had won the Civil War? In what shadow universe did Napoleon march all the way to Moscow? What course might history have taken if Lenin had missed the train? Contingency brings with it the blessing of an open future and the disaster of an inscrutable past. Shandy, in these terms, presents us with a puzzle of its own: the eighteenth-century novel typically helps its readers imagine the new social space of the market metropolis, and it uses new forms of causal narrative to do so. But this is a project from which Sterne conspicuously

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bows out. And so the question has got to be: Why? Under what conditions, or with what ends in mind, does one derive more benefit from not telling a story than from telling one?

5. So let us ask again: Is there such a thing as a skeptical novel? There are many, I suspect, who will find this question mal posée or just plain blinkered. For it is entirely possible to see the novel as quintessentially skeptical, to see skepticism as the novel’s distinguishing generic mark. This argument, or some version of it, is most often associated with Bakhtin, and its most appealing feature is its discovery of skepticism in the deepest recesses of the novel’s form. To say that novels are inherently skeptical is to say nothing about their thematics. Few novels, after all, have much to offer on the subjects of philosophy and knowledge as such. But what is most characteristic of novels, at least on this view, is that they do not endorse—that they are, in fact, structurally incapable of endorsing— a single account of the world. It is in their ideological elasticity that novels come, spontaneously, to distinguish themselves from philosophical system. Novels are unlike other forms of writing in that they proceed by staging multiple voices, more or less fully individualized, autonomous, and in constant and unresolvable competition with whatever voice is ostensibly pegged as authoritative—and this will be as true of Smollet’s Humphrey Clinker as it is of Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy. The novel is the genre in which writers relinquish control over their writing, the genre that gives voice to human variety, as characters barge in upon the scene speaking their jargon and their argot and their dialect, their criminal cant and their gude broad Scots. Far from having an epistemology, then, the novel serves to inoculate its readers against epistemology, against the idea that a book could give a definitive account of the world. There is no denying the force of this argument. It works marvelously well as an account of Tristram Shandy, for a start.38 This should be apparent even to Sterne’s most casual readers: the book takes as its central preoccupation the specialized languages of its characters—Walter Shandy’s philosophical patois, his brother’s military lingo—and these are not merely demonstrated in passing, as some subtle and implicit feature of the social world; they are insistently paraded forth, elaborated and commented upon. And these two are only the most conspicuous of the

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novel’s many and varied voices. Sterne’s is a relentlessly heteroglossic text, awash with interpolated sermons (2.16–17), contracts (pp. 67–68), natural-philosophical treatises, long stretches of Latin and French (4.1), interruptions from hypothetical readers. If, from amidst its tiresome neoclassical monologues and the unwitting dialogism of its first social-realist novels, the eighteenth century can boast of a programatically Bakhtinian book, one in which the play of voices has the character of an agenda, then surely it is Sterne’s. Shandy might then appear as one of the great populist novels, a book with no overweening linguistic center, a book that knocks polite language from its pedestal; a book in which the languages of scholars and soldiers and priests are stripped of their authenticity and appear instead as so many assumed voices, in which every monologue, no matter how sententiously delivered, turns out to be a comic aria in some epistemological opera buffo. But there’s a problem. The theorists of heteroglossia offer what is essentially an ethical account of literature. They begin with the rather compelling idea that the history of literature has been a history of generic conflict, of struggle between literary forms. But at their crudest, they then erect a sterile dichotomy between the novel and all other, non-novelistic forms. It is the epic that generally gets stuck playing the heavy in this scenario. There is one genre, Bakhtin writes, a sinister genre; it is called the epic; it is closed, preemptory, and dogmatic; and it flourishes in societies that are similarly totalitarian—that is, in feudal, slaveholding, absolutist, and Stalinist societies. But there is a second genre, a saving genre; it is called the novel; and it is open-ended, plural, ironic, tolerant. The rise of the novel is thus a historical event of the highest order; it announces the triumph of liberal society and is thus an index of the West’s greatest achievements. In the hands of even the most distinguished Bakhtinians working in English, this scheme generally ends up as insipid and Whiggish as it sounds. Novels, we have been told, offer a “continuous critique of all repressive, authoritarian, one-eyed ideologies.” They “militate against . . . the concept of a pristine, closed-off, static identity and truth wherever it may be found.”39 Comments of this kind make Bakhtin’s long essays seem like so many belated bourgeois manifestos for the novel. The novel has something like the public sphere written into its very form. So what’s the problem? The problem is that Bakhtin’s language is vague, abstract. So novels trace the procedure by which the play of many voices militates against static identities. But one can’t help but wonder:

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Which voices? Which static identities? Does polyglossia itself have a history? Have there been, across time, multiple polyglossiae, or at least multiple responses to polyglossia, as well as multiple ways of representing it? Or are its effects uniquely constant? Such, then, is the challenge of Tristram Shandy: it forces its readers to reckon with polyglossia as something other than an ethical imperative. Polyglossia in Sterne is not an open line to the Other; it is a historical predicament. Tristram Shandy may be packed with dialogue and debate, but conversation in Sterne is a harsh parody of human communication. A Bakhtinian reading makes the novel sounds congenial and coffee-house-ish, but a hard look at some of the novel’s most distinctive passages should demonstrate just how little they have to do with dialogism. Mock symposia between such Rabelaisian figures as “Copulator,” “Big-Belly,” and Kysarcius dot the narrative, but they are non-discourses full of chop logic (“the argument of the shepherd’s pipe,” “the argument of the third leg”). And Walter Shandy, Sterne’s philosophical standard bearer, perpetually finds himself defeated by opponents who simply refuse to engage his arguments discursively: his brother Toby whistles in the face of his claims; his wife passively agrees or stops her ears. Toby and the missus are by their very nature threats to discourse, and the text delights at the ease with which they frustrate even the tautest arguments of their philosopher kin.40 The limits of communication, in short, are always close at hand in Tristram Shandy. They are the engine of humor in this funniest of English fictions. Sterne’s Yorkshire is thus a kind of nightmare world in which dialogue is impossible because each character is sealed, hermetically, in his own private parlance, and Shandy is to that extent precisely an anti-Bakhtinian novel. It is less a novel of dialogue than it is a novel of serial idiolects. It seems to me, then, that dialogic readings of Sterne will always miss the point, if only because classical skepticism— which Sterne, with his many avowed debts to Montaigne and Swift, clearly invokes—provides eighteenth-century readers with an entirely different model for construing many-voicedness. Polyglossia does not carry its own meanings inside it. It must be interpreted, and Pyrrhonism provides a gloss on the notion of multiplicity that is utterly unlike Bakhtin’s cozy liberalism. The Shandys’ country estate is not a Bakhtinian hall of echoes, and its polyglossia is not a hallelujah chorus, not a praise-song scored for many voices. It is an obstacle to be overcome, a Babel for our bewailing.

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So what does it mean to think of polyglossia as a historical problem? It is in response to this question that we need to consider the matter of Shandy’s genre. I have until now been referring to Tristram Shandy as a novel, but this is, in fact, a controversial claim, or at least it would have been at one point, for genre is at the center of one of the landmark debates in the annals of Sterne criticism: Is Tristram Shandy a novel, or is it a satire? It is hard not to feel that this is another false question, a sterile dispute over abstract and malleable categories. But behind these two possible designations there lie sharply divergent views of Tristram Shandy’s aims and effects, different ways of inserting the book into cultural history. To call Tristram Shandy a novel is, at least within the English tradition, to ascribe to it a certain realism. It is to discover in the book a spontaneous sociology, an account of more or less isolated subjects groping their way around a new capitalist modernity. To call Tristram Shandy a satire, by contrast, is to place it in the service of a pre-capitalist social order imagined in terms of clear, Christian-humanist norms (or it would be if we made the least effort to imagine actual eighteenth-century men and women reading the book). These alternatives may present no less false a problem, but this is, at any rate, a false problem of a more interesting kind, one for which Northrop Frye provides a key reference point: “The novelist,” Frye writes, “sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect.”41 Tristram Shandy presents a world bereft of communication, one in which the possibilities for human solidarity have been grievously foreshortened. The question of genre forces us to wonder how, on Sterne’s account, this sorry state has come about. Is the problem, at its root, intellectual or social, a problem for satire or the novel? When Tristram Shandy makes us snicker, what exactly are we laughing at? Let’s first examine Sterne’s satirical credentials, his Swiftian inheritance. On one level, Tristram Shandy does little more than relocate Swift’s attack on public rationality to a domestic setting, the country estate, miles away from the nearest coffee house, in which every stalled conversation reads like a savage parody of public speech. Sterne asks us to imagine what our most intimate relationships would look like if the lifeworld were truly revolutionized according to the dictates of public rationality, and the result is predictably appalling. Sterne’s characters employ the conventions of public rationality—or rather, his aristocratic and professional men do—but these very conventions leave them

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permanently walled in behind their conflicting discourses. The speculative flights of Walter Shandy, homestead statesman and former merchant, and the military expertise of Uncle Toby, man of sentiment and gentleman soldier—these become equally suspect when it is revealed that they can impart nothing to one another. The portrait that emerges is one of a ruling order that can know nothing but its own tightly caulked concepts, and as a consequence must, as in Swift, play dupe to the material world at every turn. The Georgian age of improvement, for Sterne, is the misguided era of encyclopedias and educational tracts, in which fathers compile endless instructions for their sons’ upbringing while the children themselves go unwatched and imperiled. The troubling, if risible, result of this failure is a social practice dangerously disassociated from the “sensible” life it is meant to administer. Thus Sterne: “Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom that the wisest of us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forgo our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.”42 Sterne, then, will follow Swift in documenting the lasting victory of the body over philosophy, so that every dirty joke in Tristram Shandy—every term that slips uncontrollably into the sexual, every nose, buttonhole, whisker, and clock-key—calls into question the efficacy of a public sphere that seeks to regulate the polity through reasoned and collective deliberation. One of Bakhtin’s most basic points is that novels are in some important way no longer rhetorical documents; they are not a species of oratory. Novels do not set out to persuade their readers into some single point of view, the way a sermon might. But if we latch onto the book’s many satirical cues, then we are forced to conclude that Tristram Shandy remains fundamentally hortatory, structured around a series of simple inversions—beware the way of the Shandys!—pressing its readers to recoil against this one family’s constitutional fatuity. The languages employed by Sterne’s characters do not, as Bakhtin would have it, demand serious engagement, because they have all been discredited in advance as so much gibberish, the bluster of the learned crank, the bravado of the military blowhard. Sterne’s basic procedure is to take the tradition of anti-romance—the tradition of Cervantes or of Congreve’s Incognita, in which the naïf gets suckered in by a fairy-tale idealism—and to adapt it to that only superficially modern moment in which the self-proclaimed sophisticate gets suckered by science or learning. Tristram Shandy, in

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other words, suggests that science and romance are not the antithetical terms that we normally take them to be, but are actually part of a common history of nonsense.43 Science does not replace romance; it merely gives the Quixote new opportunities to disgrace himself. And the final effect of this point is to admonish the reader, to tease him out of this silliness, to refer him back to everything that is lacking in Shandy Hall, to Christian humility, say, or the community of the church, the utopian features of which are faintly recapitulated in the book’s regular demonstrations of charity, benevolence, and fellow-feeling. On the satirical view, all that stands in between us and the Christian community is the arrogance of knowledge; and all that Tristram Shandy need do in order to re-create that community is convince its readers, one by one, to abandon their philosophical pretenses.44 Skepticism will reinvigorate the polity.45 What, though, if we were to read Tristram Shandy not as a satire but as a realist novel, albeit of a special kind?46 In that case, we would have to direct our attention to the historical and social features of the discourses that Sterne satirizes. But where are those historical and social features? This is the important question. Does the book in any sense provide a social rather than an intellectual account of human folly? I think it does, though in a rather circuitous manner. The key point here is that Sterne’s satire has several different objects of attack. Walter Shandy, the pedant, is an utterly conventional satirical butt, but he is not the sole recipient of the novel’s scorn. Rather, he is surrounded by a number of new and equally weighted satirical targets. Or rather: Walter’s philosophical pomposity is counterbalanced by the analogous obsessions of the novel’s other characters—what Sterne calls their “hobbyhorses”—as though pedantry had generalized itself throughout the social sphere. The novel’s skepticism, then, is not directed merely against one character’s (uniquely philosophical) pretensions, but at the multiple fixations that balkanize the Shandys’ lifeworld. Its satire is not aimed solely at book-learning, but is directed at polyglossia itself, and even on Bakhtin’s account, this latter is not a strictly philosophical phenomenon. Polyglossia is part of the history of social differentiation, the history by which Europe’s national vernaculars were transformed, multiplying the varieties of spoken English or French or Russian far beyond the customary variation of regional dialects, divvying up the nation into so many linguistic subcultures. Polyglossia thus names, for instance, the

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separation of elite from popular culture (each with its separate idiom); or the quickened pace of European migration, colonialism, globalization (with their proliferating creoles); or simply the development of specialized vocabularies within each of the new bourgeois professions.47 Polyglossia is social complexity made audible. To read Shandy as a novel, then, means to discover in it a distinctly historical, rather than simply moralizing, form of satire, which by lampooning a domestic world that has disintegrated into competing languages, offers up a generalized attack on the history of social differentiation itself. Consider, in this light, Sterne’s most famous trope, the hobbyhorse, which describes the obsessive avocations by which the novel’s central characters are defined: Walter Shandy spends all his free time doing philosophy, Toby spends every spare moment playing war. The hobbyhorse is itself a parody of specialized knowledges, and as such it means to discredit not just philosophy and the institutions proper to it—the university, the printing press, the learned academy or society—but also the several professions and their innovative claims to expertise. Tristram Shandy encapsulates the history by which each sphere of ordinary life reconstitutes itself in philosophy’s image, in which everyday practices become thoroughly epistemologized, so that the life of a merchant or statesman or soldier now seems to require as much learning as that of a scholar. This is what it means to say that the hobbyhorse is not simply the epistemological figure that it is normally taken to be, not simply a skeptical jeer at some wayward idée fixe. The hobbyhorse evokes, in its compact way, an entire social history, one in which specialization, by overemphasizing technique, turns all men into buffs or aficionados, amassing erudition to no discernible end: the soldier becomes a war-gamer, the philosopher a dilettante, mere enthusiasts in an armchair society. At this point, then, another familiar concept comes into view, beyond the notion of “polyglossia.” Skepticism reinvents itself here as an attack on the division of labor, an attack, that is, on the place of knowledge in a commercial society, in which philosophy dissipates into professionalized discourses “physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, aenigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending, as these do, in ical).”48 This observation, in turn, provides one way of making sense of Sterne’s domesticity, the novel’s resolute self-confinement to

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a single country house: the domestic novel, it hardly needs saying, occupies a unique place in eighteenth-century letters, though it seems to me that the stakes here may be higher than is usually acknowledged. Let’s take the broad view: it has been suggested that under conditions of global capitalism, the social sphere becomes so complex that knowledge of its structures does not coincide with any person’s everyday experience of it. In a capitalist modernity, knowledge of the social order is not given in our habits or routines; we only come to understand the vast institutions that govern us through abstraction and study. And this is not simply a postmodern innovation. The capitalist world system has never been anything less than intricate and dispersed, which means that cognitive mapping is one of the great modern projects. It has been argued further that, with regard to this cognitive mapping, the novel participates in a crucial division of discursive labor: in the eighteenth century a special, new type of storytelling, eventually called the novel, will report on the domestic and the everyday; and a special new type of storytelling called political economy will report on the social structure in all its public complexity. The domestic novel will in large part cede any claim to representing totality, choosing instead the pleasures of the miniature and the mundane.49 This, indeed, would be one way of distinguishing the domestic novel from the full-bore social realism that grows up alongside it: nineteenth-century social realism resurrects, in oblique ways, the claim to represent totality.50 And yet this is not an indictment of the domestic novel pure and simple. We are used to thinking of the domestic novel as a vicious fantasy of middle-class atomism and constraining femininity. That case is too powerful to need rehearsing again here, so I will simply offer a reminder of its urgency: the rise of the domestic woman marks, at least in one sphere, the declining importance of class (or status) and the rise of gender as the crucial axis of power in modernity. The servant girl can marry her lord, as in Pamela, or the gentlewoman can marry a common captain, as in Persuasion, and in either configuration, one of the characteristic pleasures of domestic and courtship novels is watching the traditional boundaries of rank dissolve in marriage. But there’s a catch: once the home is defined as classless, as free from the strife of public life, where rank is still in force, a gendered notion of virtue (and a gendered division of labor) will henceforth hold sway over social subjectivities. And yet it remains true all the same that, in the early novel, domesticity takes on an unexpected utopian cast. Nancy Armstrong—whose

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argument I have been following here—describes domesticity as a “reformist ideology,” but I think we can sharpen her formulation.51 Domesticity is an attempt to imagine a site in which human dignity can be preserved once such dignity has been expelled from the public realms of the marketplace and the state. Its ideological and utopian functions in large part coincide. In other words, the domestic is supposed to compensate for the failings of the public. For Sterne, then, domesticity is, at least potentially, a means of solving some characteristic Pyrrhonist problems: the traditional Pyrrhonist wants us to withdraw from speculation and argument precisely in order to reconcile us to ordinary ways. Swift urges us to disengage from partisan disputes, to return to the “common forms” of English life, only to discover that this phrase names so many different things as to name nothing. We are meant to turn from dispute to the common form, but when the human aggregate recognizes itself as a society, as an articulated multiplicity rather than a naturally given whole—when, in short, it has become content to organize itself around dispute—then we find that we have no common form left to turn to. The Pyrrhonists discover that their disengagement, without their quite knowing it, has become—not a move from sectarianism to the common forms—but from what will now be called the “public” to what we have no choice but to call the “private.” This is, in one sense, the signature of Sterne’s skepticism: it attempts to rediscover the common forms of Pyrrhonism in domesticity, posited now as a non-philosophical, organic form of life capable of preserving spontaneous human affections. The country estate is thus the final resting place of humanist disaffection, nourishing an eccentric and homespun virtue, which will serve as a model for redeeming the polity even as it testifies, in its isolation, to the public world’s intractable corruption. But this is not a simple point, for there is a clear sense in which the domestic novel is unable to maintain the separate spheres that it seeks to institute, and this is true in more ways than one. There are several senses in which the realms of public and private become permeable or can be seen to require their opposite number. Indeed, the domestic novel can only play its role of utopian compensation if it represses the way in which the household remains economic and in that sense public, organizing the production and distribution of goods through marriage, inheritance, and women’s work. The novel narrates all these things, of course—but it rewrites them, per Shandy, as stories of sympathy, so that

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their economic function appears merely incidental. The household is clearly a unit in the national economy. It is the key site of consumption and in some cases continues to produce goods for sale. In this sense, too, the private sphere remains at least partially public. So the question becomes: What enables the domestic person to participate in the public rituals of consumption and production but still consider herself essentially private? The answer turns on one of the eighteenth century’s central notions, that of sentimentality. Domesticity and the interiority thought appropriate to it have as their precondition a new and special type of consumption—the domestic, sentimental consumption elaborated by Deirdre Lynch. The idea is this: if, in the depths of your refined and ardent subjectivity, you can imbue the commodity with enough affect, then you will be able to ennoble it to the point where the commodity is no longer merely a commodity. More important, if you sentimentalize your objects, then you are no longer merely a consumer, whose identity is constituted only in the circuit of exchangeable objects.52 Sentimentality becomes the means of rescuing the object from circulation—and of rescuing your own profound subjectivity along with it. The market is nominalist in matters of value, as eighteenth-century political economy well knows. The political economists will work their way to the realization that no object—no commodity, least of all money—has an intrinsic value. In the market, objects are assigned a relative and thus mutable value. And in the face of this, the novel will tell us that the home is the one place in a corrosive commodity culture where everything stays the same; stays true to itself, retains its intrinsic value, where objects and individuals both can be appreciated for what they truly are. The most serious problem facing domestic fiction, however, is this: the domestic comes into being in contradistinction to a degraded public space; it is supposed to preserve the virtue and wholeness that has become impossible in the practices that the public sphere superintends; and domestic novels help us reconceive of these values in appropriate ways. But at the same time, in order for the domestic space to yield an interesting narrative, it has to be shown as a site of conflict. Domestic novels inevitably show the home as vulnerable to the very same struggles that plague the public. The novel has to introduce all of the conflicts and suffering from which domesticity is supposed to provide refuge. One of the century’s favorite narrative strategies is to discover some

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kind of public struggle replicated at the level of the family, as when Fielding, early in Tom Jones, records “one of the most bloody battles, or rather duels, that were ever recorded in domestic history.”53 “Domestic tyrant” is something of a set phrase in the century’s fictions; Richardson’s Mr B is surely the first figure to come to mind, though we might think once again of William Godwin, who opens Caleb Williams with an indictment of “domestic and unrecorded despotism.”54 Of course, the purpose of these narratives is to purge the family space of these conflicts in a way that the public space can no longer be purged. But in doing so these narratives demonstrate that the private is actually modeled on the public—“if a kingdom be . . . a great family,” notes Johnson, “a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.”55 Domestic fictions always smack of effort; they are marked everywhere by the labor required to reimagine home as refuge. We might say, then, that there is something of the mock-epic throughout the early novel. The novel sets forth in a double movement: it reduces, it undertakes a narrowing of scope, from the business of nations to domestic affairs. But then it also aggrandizes: it uses a grand, even martial, language to describe everyday conflict. This might be one way to make sense of Mary Wollstonecraft’s brilliant rhetorical innovations in A Vindication of the Rights of Women: she brings a republican language to bear on gender and domesticity, making good on a conflation that has been lurking in the domestic novel all along, railing at last against “the divine right of husbands” and the like.56 Sterne’s version of this predicament is rather desperate: Shandy seems to envision something like a domestic Pyrrhonism grounded in sentiment and sympathy, but in the end, it can do nothing more than rediscover in domestic space these same public-sphere conflicts, which return to disrupt the lifeworld at the most basic level. Domestic ideology, in short, comes to look pretty ramshackle in Tristram Shandy, so much so, in fact, that we may be tempted to conclude that the book really isn’t a domestic novel at all, that there is a sense, at least, in which the book’s manor-house setting is actually a generic feint or bluff. For Shandy, finally, is less concerned with the family than it is with a civil society that can be depicted only in its corrosive or centrifugal effects. It is less a novel of domesticity than a novel of generalized and perfidious publicity, of a private sphere that has already been reconfigured in the public

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sphere’s image. We can better understand the force of Tristram Shandy if we set it alongside some proximate reference points: genius, notes Adam Ferguson in An Essay on Civil Society, which belongs to the same decade as Shandy—has nothing to do with the knowledge of the specialist. Genius is not mere expertise. It is, rather, “a kind of ability, which the separate application of men to particular callings, only tends to suppress or weaken. Where shall we find the talents which are fit to act with men in a collective body, if we break that body into parts, and confine the observation of each to a separate track?”57 One might describe Tristram Shandy, then, as the story of a world without genius, the British Enlightenment’s own dystopia. There is a basic affinity, in fact, between satire and dystopian science fiction (or between satire and the horror movie, for that matter). Each of these genres owes its most characteristic effects to the same rudimentary literary figure, which is hyperbole, the exaggeration of some readily identifiable feature of the social world to the point where it comes to seem grisly or grotesque. It is thus always tempting to describe each of these genres in terms of the other, to see satire as a dystopia of the present and science fiction as a satire on the future. Dystopias are the extrapolation into history of satire’s bleakness. Tristram Shandy, in these somewhat fanciful terms, emerges in the 1760s as a vision of some near-future England for which Ferguson’s warning has come too late, a commercial nation turned hobbyhorsical tip to toe, in which the commonwealth has been put asunder, because men, “beyond their own particular trade, are ignorant of human affairs.”58 This description of Shandy as dystopia may not be as far-fetched as it first sounds, since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—to name another proximate text—is easily understood as little more than a Gothic Shandy. They are, at some level, nearly the same novel, each rooted in the conflict between sentiment and philosophy, between what Shelley calls “domestic affections” and a knowledge run rampant. Sterne and Shelley both confront their readers with the sorry spectacle of a family withering under the leadership of a mad and overweening philosopher. Victor Frankenstein, in brief, is a second Walter Shandy, though Shelley’s novel draws on a later set of historical reference points: Frankenstein, unlike Walter, is a natural philosopher, and the idea of the natural philosopher combines a few different notions of knowledge’s place within the social order. First, he is a utopian radical, who finds in science a

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break with all customary ways of life; who is bent, in fact, on building a new man, a kind of revolutionary subject. But the creature he gives life to is described as little more than an alienated bourgeois, disembedded, possessed of a monstrous autonomy, a parody of freedom, outside “all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds”—“I was dependent on none,” mourns the monster, “and related to none.”59 Second, Frankenstein is something of a technologist, an industrial pioneer, engendering a working class, not exactly a neckbolted cyborg—the language of the machine is almost entirely absent from the novel—but a manufactured object all the same; this condition is visible in the Monster’s sheer cretinous brawn, or in the sympathetic “wretch’s” spontaneous solidarity with the rural poor. The Monster, in short, combines the worst aspects of working- and middle-class plights. He is a figure whose alienations are ingeniously multiple. That said, the crucial difference between Shandy and Frankenstein is that the latter is arguably the more hopeful book. Shelley’s narrative works along clear ideological vectors: the reckless scientist is forced to repent; he urges others to renounce knowledge and return to their families; they comply. Shandy, by contrast, is oddly intransigent, unable to imagine a family that has not itself been nearly liquidated by knowledge. It is a case study in a lifeworld that has been pathologically rationalized, where custom no longer provides for consensus in advance, but where the eighteenth century’s alternate modes of consensus—the discursive consensus of the public sphere, the affective consensus of sympathy—can find almost no purchase. Whatever else it does, Tristram Shandy also asks us to view this process as a class crisis of a specific kind. The novel offers itself as a portrait of deracination or class obsolescence. Sterne makes the Shandys the emblem of a provincial gentry completely decoupled from social use and sexually barren to boot, its older generation emasculated or erotically disinterested—unable, the novel says, “to tell the right end of a woman from the wrong”—its firstborn sons dead, its younger sons castrated, mutilated, barely fit for breeches.60 There is thus an elegiac strain to whatever affection the reader is able to work up for a superannuated figure such as Uncle Toby, in whom we can see the dimmest shadow of the aristocratic man-at-arms, the armigerous gentleman, his military vocation long since obsolete, transformed now into something like a middleclass hobby. The Scottish Enlighteners, for their part, will propose a

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number of different correctives to what they take to be the feebleness of commercial society; Ferguson will endorse a military humanism, a kind of ethical rearmament program or campaign of remasculinization, in which the British polity stands to be redeemed if only all its men can be conscripted back into the militia, where virtue gets issued to all incoming soldiers, like muskets. But Shandy is conspicuous for its refusal to play that Scottish game, for its inability to imagine a new social order in which the polity’s most pressing problems have been solved. With this point in mind, we can head back to the hobbyhorse for a fresh look. The idea of the hobbyhorse announces a series of failures or quandaries, epistemological problems, to be sure, but also historical and political ones. At the most intimate level, the hobbyhorse clearly has everything to do with the hobby, and thus with the problem of boredom— empty time, the consuming classes’ surfeit of repose, their obligation, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “to fill up the vacancies of attention and lessen the tediousness of time.”61 The hobbyhorse, this is to say, is a figure not only of the division of labor, but also of divertissement. Walter and Toby can only indulge their obsessions, to put it plainly, for lack of anything better to do. A passage from Pascal expresses something of this intuition: The only good thing for men . . . is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short by what is called diversion.62

Pascal’s writings invite us to register the strangeness of the English word “occupation”: the word names a person’s craft or chosen work, the central fact of adult life, one’s claim to competence, one’s long working day. And yet the term names, for all that, an oddly unsettled state, wholly unlike a “calling,” just something to keep you occupied. The strange quality of “occupation” is that it inhabits the same range of meanings as “pastime,” which is only seemingly its antithesis. This needn’t be a problem. Utopian thought regularly calls for the reunification of work and play, for the free unfolding of human capacities in some category of activity that is neither labor nor leisure.63 It is the business of divertissement, however, to make a travesty of that wish, so that the terms “occupation” and “pastime” do in fact come together to name a condition common to each—a unification

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of work and play in which employment, like idleness, whiles on without purpose or profit; and repose, like labor, is petrified in a state of administered tedium. To judge by Pascal and the eighteenth-century novel, at any rate, boredom makes its first appearance outside of the workplace, in leisure, in the oppressively free time of the feckless and antiquated aristocracy; only later will it find its complement on the factory floor. It is the calamity of genteel leisure, a torpor barely distinguishable from the century’s amusements—the nine-card ombre of The Rape of the Lock, the interchangeable shop-fronts of Burney’s Evelina, the pleasure gardens in iteration, the tedium of the social round in Austen. The hobbyhorse takes on a terrible quality in this light, for the single-minded preoccupation of Sterne’s characters merely repeats in a more organized way the monotony it was intended to vanquish. Like all divertissement, it offers up little more than repetition disguised as achievement. What makes the hobbyhorse potentially dreadful is that it simultaneously has too much purpose—that is, too constrained a purpose—and no purpose at all. It is thus an apt figure for the dilemma that might be said to bedevil the eighteenth-century gentry: to the extent that eighteenth-century gentlemen transformed themselves into a modern professional elite, they took on specialized social functions, thereby losing their traditional claim to represent the nation as a whole. A professionalized gentry is no longer a gentry at all. But to the extent that they sought to remain a gentry, to the extent, that is, that they continued, in a society governed by the division of labor, to insist on their universality, they risked being left altogether without a function, with nothing left to their name but a few droll and archaic political rituals. To see the hobbyhorse as divertissement should, in turn, help us account for the place of the gag in Tristram Shandy, for the status of its jokes. We can attribute to Shandean laughter a rather precise ideological valence, and in order to do this, we must not simply conflate Sterne’s comic gusto with the satire of the early century, with the smirking malevolence of Swift, or even with the carnivals and coprolalia of Rabelais. We gain little by describing Sterne as a latter-day Augustan—and we must equally hold at bay the vulgar-Bakhtinian all-the-world’s-a-fairground approach to parody, irony, and mirth. This is not to say, however, that Sterne’s jokes are entirely lacking in the imaginative qualities we have come to associate with carnival. Far from it: just as the hobbyhorse holds

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out the promise of play—a purposiveness without purpose, a freedom without boredom, a utopian gleaning snatched from divertissement—so too does Tristram Shandy offer something like utopian laughter, which we might best understand in Richard Dyer’s sense, as when he suggests that mass entertainment offers a glimmer of what utopia might feel like, rather than how it would be organized: a pang of intensity, plentitude’s flush.64 True Shandeism, Sterne notes, “makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round,” and it is this mirth that ameliorates the novel’s potential direness, that prevents Shandy from reading like some premonition of Chekhov, sour aristocrats dithering in the twilight.65 But, equally, laughter in Sterne is always in danger of lapsing back into the condition of divertissement, fully as habitual and routinized as the realist novel’s endless rubbers of whist. The key here, I think, is a single, scary sentence in Horkheimer and Adorno, one which comes, perhaps, from an unlikely source. In “The Culture Industry,” Horkheimer and Adorno write of moviegoers at madcap comedies: “The iron law is that they not satisfy their desires at any price—they must laugh, and be content with laughter.”66 The genius of this single line—one might think of Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels—is that it helps us see the possibility of an anti-utopian laughter, a laughter that comes at the expense of happiness, and not as its realization, a laughter proper to a culture that has forsaken the attempt to think ends. Divertissement is an unhappy happiness, and the form of laughter proper to it is one that no longer refers to the possibility of a better life, but is content rather merely to fling itself in the face of melancholy. This gets, I think, at something crucial about Tristram Shandy, in which games and high spirits take the place of Pascal’s hunting and gambling, as a form of consolation or compensation or simple busy-ness. Shandeism is Pascalian laughter, the gag as hobby, hilarity as diversion, the elbow repeatedly in your ribs. But this is not yet to exhaust the idea of hobbyhorse, for at the most general level, Shandean obsession balloons into a problem of an entirely different order. Whatever its veneer of cheeriness, the political puzzle posed by the novel’s epistemological muddle is striking. Tristram Shandy presents a ruling order secluded in its craziness and incapable of authority, a social order perpetually in danger of dissolving back into its component groups while the business of the day goes undone. England, at the end of the day, is “this unsettled island,” given to extremes, ruled by men of the “most whimsical and capricious” nature.67 Who, the novel

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seems to ask, will take responsibility for practical matters if all the educated men are off refining Newtonian physics or polishing their heroic couplets? And if the novel’s play of voices is unable to provide a framework in which communication or consensus is possible—if, as the novel has it, the uneducated, the women, and the lesser classes are consigned to some space outside of dialogue—then how are the liberal men of culture to maintain their position of dominance without recourse to compulsion or outright force? Is this, in Frye’s terms, a novelistic account of a social transformation? Or is it a satirical account of an intellectual failing? It is, of course, impossible to say. It has become common to describe the process of social differentiation in terms of reification: a rationalized lifeworld is one in which social practices have crystallized out into so many seeming things—science, culture, politics, the economy. But Sterne’s notion of the hobbyhorse has a rather different point to make. Indeed, to diagnose an English modernity in terms of its various hobbyhorses is in some sense the opposite of describing it in terms of reification. The notion of the hobbyhorse mistakes the various spheres of social life not for simple things, fixed and public realms, but for private whims or fancies, detached from all social utility. All the same, the hobbyhorse identifies a condition that is at once epistemological and social. What is so impressive about Tristram Shandy, then, is that the novel and satire come to coexist in its pages, visibly and uneasily. I have been suggesting throughout these chapters that skepticism is effectively double, that it always works along two vectors. Its most prominent face remains philosophical or epistemological, offering a more or less reasoned critique of concepts, knowledge claims, the forms of perception, and so on. But it is always also a social theory or historical narrative, at least in some displaced way, aiming to indict the forms of life in which philosophy and knowledge take root. It is Sterne’s great achievement to make this hesitation felt at the level of genre. Read as a novel, Tristram Shandy offers a roundabout account of the status of knowledge in a commercial and professionalized modernity. It depicts a lifeworld transfigured by the division of labor and the rise of expert knowledge. Read as a satire, Shandy offers an uncomplicated attack on such knowledge, as though knowledge were an attitude one could simply relinquish. Sterne’s satirical novel is an attempt to evoke a lifeworld, no longer representable, in which social differentiation has been undone, in which men are constituted by something other

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than their professional and private knowledges. It places itself in the service of a skeptical Christian humanism that survives now only as desideratum. With that, we are finally in a position to understand Sterne’s unrelenting parody of novelistic narrative. The early novel, I hope I have made clear, offers something like an epistemology. We can put the point in Bakhtin’s terms—not in terms of heteroglossia, which is, for our purposes, a red herring—but through his luminous notion of the chronotope.68 Bakhtin suggests that each form of narrative—the adventure story, the romance, the novel—asks us to imagine the relations between time and space in a distinct way, and I have tried to show that using these terms we can describe early English novels as adventure stories of the marketplace. Novelistic narrative of this kind takes shape in a massively differentiated social terrain existing in open time, a time governed by fortune or complex causality, terms which these novels often render indistinguishable. Alternately, we can put the point in Lukacsian terms, seeing the early novel as a spontaneous lesson in dialectical thought, an impromptu exercise in cognitive mapping, though the early novel, unlike the nineteenth-century realism that Lukács heralds, tends to accentuate everything that is arduous about this process, everything that prevents newly isolated individuals from finding their bearings in the market metropolis. Sterne’s achievement is to magnify these narrative difficulties to the point of collapse, to nag away at the early novel’s characteristic chronotope, to strand his readers in an insurmountable state of disorientation. His most basic move is to renounce the project of cognitive mapping on which the early novel has already embarked, to revert back, in the name of a social order that can be felt now only in its absence, to the satirist’s position of negation and intransigence. Complexity, rather than be represented, must be refused. And polyglossia, rather than be applauded, must come to seem fearsome; its complexity must be repudiated as unmanageable. We don’t need to share Sterne’s backwards gaze in order to feel that Bakhtin—or rather any Anglo-Saxon Bakhtinian who imports the former’s anti-Stalinist discourse to the West without modification—is the model of a radical criticism that assumes that power enters capitalist modernity unchanged; that all power is centralized, totalitarian, uniform, and humorless; and that gestures toward decentralization are thus indiscriminately to be seconded.69 Criticism of this kind

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almost always works by conflating capital with the state, or by ignoring capital altogether and taking the state to be the exclusive residence of power. What is distinctive about capitalist forms of authority, however, has always been their dispersion, their multiplicity, their ability to organize the several forms of authority into a global structure of administration. And it is that power, the power of administered difference, that Sterne’s skepticism pitches itself, helplessly, against.

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Epilogue: The Antinomy of Antinomies

I want to conclude by calling to mind a certain, special type of theoretical project—the type of project of which I think Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society is still the finest example.1 There are a number of different claims one would want to make on behalf of this text, a number of different ways to account for its continued consequence. One might want to say, for a start, that Williams’s most evident accomplishment in Culture and Society was to identify a distinctively British discourse on culture, one that stood in principled opposition to the humiliations of a new industrial society. This is true, no doubt, but perhaps only incidentally so, because more important to Williams than the unified national character of this discourse was its motley political character, the ease with which the concept of culture seemed to pass, throughout its history, from Right to Left and back again. Perhaps one can say then that the purpose of Culture and Society was to interrupt that history by shoring up the Left’s title to the concept of culture. Isn’t that exactly what you need to do before something that will be called “cultural materialism” can get off the ground? You have to take the concept of culture back from Eliot and the Leavises. But perhaps this isn’t quite right, either. Williams, it’s true, wrote his book at a moment when the British Left was returning, systematically, to the concept of culture—Williams’s argument is both symptom and cause of that shift. It seems to me, however, that Culture and Society’s singular insight is that a transition such as this onto new political and intellectual terrain—a transition, in this case, beyond the old Marxist preoccupations with the economy or the state—brings with it a special

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kind of conceptual burden: it demands that you survey the complicated topography of your new concept, which will turn out, upon review, not to be so very new after all. Before the Left could put the notion of culture to use, Williams suggested, it would have to spell out the contradictory and contending valences of its new favorite concept—and it would have to do this without suggesting that culture was, once clarified, plainly Left—that the Left had some kind of exclusive claim to the concept, as though the word “culture” carried its politics along with it like a membership card.2 Culture and Society, I would suggest, remains a crucial piece of scholarship because it shows us one way of giving the history of a concept, to think of a concept not merely as a concept—not as some inert analytical tool or untethered generalization—but as a historical problem of a special kind, something that helps organize our experience of new institutions and new social relations. For such a project, clearly, it is no longer simply a matter of keeping your concept safe from the Right. On the contrary, Culture and Society is in large part an acknowledgement that the Right pretty much held the mortgage on “culture” to begin with, and that anybody wanting to use that concept on behalf of the collectivity would have to expropriate it in complex and cunning ways. We might also think here—lest we conclude that Williams is really sui generis on this score—of Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic, which is basically just Culture and Society with a German accent.3 Williams and Eagleton both set out to examine traditions of inquiry that provide the protocols for the Left’s critical thought, traditions that have fed the Left’s political imagination, but which in crucial ways seem to muddy their own promise. Their works have offered reminders that our own concepts come with prior social histories over which we cannot exercise retrospective control. And they have sought, in the wake of this realization, to temper and make precise the Left’s enthusiasm for its own vocabularies by teasing out a chronicle of the paradoxical and peripatetic concepts at hand. My question here is, in this light, a simple one: Would it be possible to carry this kind of project out for the anti-foundationalism that is currently at the heart of Left cultural theory, in both its post-structuralist and neopragmatist guises? Anti-foundationalism typically insists on its novelty, but can we, in the face of this exaggerated claim, give a critical pre-history of its concepts, as Williams did for his? One wants, of course, to answer the question with an emphatic yes. This immediately gets

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tricky, however, because what is so distinctive about anti-foundationalism is not so much the new concepts that it generates—though it has these, too—as the rather extraordinary place it assigns to conceptuality itself. There is no subject, in fact, on which anti-foundationalism is more melodramatically eloquent than on “the violence of conceptuality.” It is the vocation of concepts to universalize, and anti-foundationalism has made the urgent case that such universalism is more of a crime than a calling. The concept is an epistemological blunder and an ethical breach, teaching us as it does to look away from the unique qualities of singular objects. Better than to do without concepts wherever possible, or if one must have concepts, let them be self-defeating concepts, concepts that resist the very abstraction to which they are otherwise addicted: “contingencies” and “ruptures” and “difference” in all its plentitude. What anti-foundationalism has instead of concepts, then, are suspicions, critical procedures, and argumentative forms—the techniques, in other words, by which it takes mere concepts to the mat. If we want to do for post-structuralism what Williams did for cultural materialism—to provide it with a critical pre-history—then it may be more rewarding to give the history of its argumentative forms than to give the history of the concepts or keywords about which it is so skittish. So the question becomes: Can we understand the form of post-structuralist skepticism as a historical problem or project of a special kind? This may strike some as a strange formulation. What could it mean, after all, to study a set of theories for their form? Is it possible to say anything meaningful about a given philosophical system if you look away from its tissue of argumentation? Don’t we want to insist rather that a philosophy is the propositions it makes or it is nothing? More to the point, even if we can identify a philosophical form, would we be able to say that such a form inhabits history?4 We might, at this point, want to turn our attention away from Williams and take our cue instead from the Frankfurt School and its affiliates, who teach us that classical epistemology—the subject-object epistemology of German Idealism—is the commodity in cognitive form. Now what does this mean? The most orthodox Marxism will tell us that there are two ways of looking at the commodity-object: you can view the object from the perspective of use, in which case it is resplendent with particularity, a particular object in the service of particular uses, about which no philosophical generalizations can be offered. Or you can view the object from the perspective of

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exchange, in which case you will need to repudiate its particularity, turn it into sheer quantity, a bearer of abstract value, an arbitrary mass with a price tag attached. What is intriguing is that even within the utterly familiar distinction between use-value and exchange-value, we can begin to see an account of epistemology beginning to emerge—an account, more to the point, of conceptuality, which is clearly of a piece with the exchange relationship: conceptuality, like exchange-value, renders objects abstract and thus fungible. The concept, in other words, gathers together the sundry objects it is said to subsume and forces them into a relation of equivalence. But such conceptual abstraction, then, is not simply a cognitive process, the spontaneous procedure of any thinking mind; it is of a piece with commodity exchange and thus grounded in social practices. Abstraction itself has something like material form. Classical epistemology invites us to the divide up the world in much the way that capital does: into an isolated and atomized subject of knowledge, completely sundered from the realm of the social, and a world of alien and exchangeable objects. The important point for present purposes is that this is throughout a question of form. To say that classical epistemology replicates the commodity form is not to say anything about its content, the force of its propositions. Classical epistemology, in fact, has predictably little to say about commodities. The claim is rather that the commodityform helps constitute epistemology in its very structure. Something interesting is happening at this point in the argument, which seems to be on the verge of a syllogism, or something very much like one: First, we know that anti-foundationalism teaches us to critique concepts. And second, we can say, at least if we follow the Frankfurt School, that concepts have their ground in the commodity-form. It is surely tempting now to barrel straight on to some third proposition, to the effect that an anti-foundationalist critique of the concept is therefore always also a critique of the commodity or of capitalism more generally. This is the type of claim, in fact, that a Left anti-foundationalism likes to make on its own behalf—that its critique of knowledge is simultaneously a critique of the state or of markets or of the cultural norms that would discipline us. But this is precisely the question that, in Raymond Williams’s spirit, we must keep open: If the philosophical tradition—the heavyweight Greco-German philosophical tradition—is inextricably entangled with the commodity form, does it follow that when we critique this tradition we are necessarily critiquing the commodity, as well? Let’s hold

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questions of discipline and the state to one side for now and ask in some detail: Does anti-foundationalism help us think against the commoditysphere? Or is it just another way of handing thought over to the commodity? It is at this point that we need to understand something about the form of anti-foundationalist argument, and for this we need to reach back to the book’s starting point—to Pyrrhonism, which serves as a kind of ur-text for the many anti-foundationalisms that will follow. A few reminders: taking its cue from the classical rhetorical education, the characteristic feature of ancient skepticism was the argument on both sides of the question. This is the classic debating club exercise, in which a student is called upon to defeat the proposition he had just stood up to defend. Unlike the rhetoricians, however, who eventually tire of this game, the ancient skeptics insisted that we must practice such antinomic argument systematically, against others and habitually against ourselves. A central skeptical text such as Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism is, in this sense, basically just a rhetorical handbook of a special kind. It is not so much a reasoned, philosophical critique of epistemology as an anthology of counterarguments, an engine for generating contradiction. Ancient skepticism did not ask its followers to believe anything; it attempted only to instill in them an easy way with counterarguments. Thus Pyrrhonism, strictly speaking, did not even claim that knowledge is impossible. It thought it could demonstrate, rather, that there were equally good reasons for thinking knowledge possible and impossible, such that we must suspend judgment on these (as on all) matters. The question of philosophical form emerges with special clarity here, because it is the cardinal aim of classical skepticism to dispense with propositions altogether, in which case we might say that skepticism simply is a form—the form of antinomy or argument/counterargument. Skepticism aims to be nothing but that form, without any philosophical insides. Understanding the form of Pyrrhonian arguments should allow us, in turn, to draw an important distinction. If we survey early modern philosophy, we see that there occurs something like a divergence between the form of skeptical arguments and what comes to be their content. Thus we might point to Hobbes’s Leviathan, which, in its opening epistemological chapters, imports many propositions that are more or less skeptical—human reason is impoverished, knowledge is impossible,

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and so on. But Hobbes introduces these propositions in changed form, merely by offering them as propositions and not as part of an argument on both sides of the question. Hobbes, in other words, offers up a reified Pyrrhonism that has abandoned skepticism’s characteristic structure or rhetorical figure—antinomy—in favor of a program of assertion. And once we encounter Hobbes, we are forced to distinguish between those thinkers who preserve the fixed content of skepticism—Burke also comes to mind—and those who preserve its techniques: its conspicuous rhetorical agility, its strict avoidance of proposition, its penchant for contradiction. If we mean to give a critical pre-history of contemporary anti-foundationalism, then, we would do well, I think, to look to those forms of thought that cultivate antinomies, that actually proceed by such contraries, that push all thought toward contradiction or aporia: skepticism, the dialectic, deconstruction and its cousins. This, in turn, should allow us to reformulate our questions with renewed precision: What is the relationship between the commodity-sphere and antinomy? It may be useful here to sketch out a brief and speculative scheme, a selective genealogy of antinomic argumentation: Mandeville, Smith, Marx, Adorno, Lyotard. Such is the roll call I propose. Mandeville is hard to describe. He is one of the eighteenth century’s most distinctive theorists of market society, but he owes this distinction to his not following any of the century’s established paradigms for describing commerce and its effects. Typically, discussions of commerce in the eighteenth century follow one of two strategies: There is the Country or Commonwealth critique of commerce, which sees a market society as a deplorable lapse into superficial luxury and political corruption. And countering this, there is the humanist defense of commerce as an enrichment of human capacities. Mandeville is a defender of market practice, to be sure, but he is not an ideologue in this fashion, scripting a new legitimacy of the market in an attempt to deny all that is corrosive about it. When it comes to the market, Mandeville is as antagonistic to the Whig window-dressers as he is to the Tory spoilers—as indifferent to ethical apologies for the market as he is to ethical attacks upon it—and his lesson in this sense is a stark one: the managers of the new regime should stop trying to meet the critics on their own terms by cobbling together some (patently ludicrous) theory of market virtue, because the new practices have no justification beyond their own continued existence. To insist otherwise, to try to provide some kind of external

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ethical framework for the market, is to hand over to the market’s opponents a criterion of virtue against which commerce will inevitably be found wanting. Now Mandeville is not obviously a skeptic in the way that the early modern Pyrrhonists such as Montaigne are skeptics. But he does in fact make use of the argument on both sides of a question in ways that are simultaneously systematic and indirect. This has something to do with the sense of relationality that pervades The Fable of the Bees—the sense, in other words, that a market society can only be understood as dispersed, diffuse, or differential, and that such dispersal creates unsolvable problems for an inherited, pre-capitalist ethical vocabulary. One of Mandeville’s great insights is that under market conditions, ethical judgments themselves enter a kind of economy; essentialist notions of virtue, like absolute notions of value, are made untenable as they refract across the complex sequence of institutions and actions that make up the commodity sphere. Thus Mandeville: “It is in Morality as it is in Nature; there is nothing so perfectly Good in Creatures that it cannot be hurtful to any one of the Society, nor anything so entirely Evil, but it may prove beneficial to some part or other of the Creation.”5 To phrase it more baldly: whatever harms one economic actor will necessarily benefit some second actor; the miller’s loss is the brewer’s gain, my bankruptcy is my competitor’s windfall.6 The market, in this sense, is constituted by an endless series of small contradictions or indeterminacies—so that it is impossible to say whether any single action benefits or harms the market as a totality. The market inspires, as though naturally, what the classical skeptic must achieve through sustained rhetorical maneuvering—a wellturned equipollence of argument—and is in this sense a kind of running exercise in antinomy.7 Mandeville, then, allows us to draw a startling first conclusion: no less than German idealism, skepticism is—at least partially and potentially—an epistemology of the market, in which antinomy names the disintegrating logic of objects and actions as they are scattered across the capital-circuit. American neopragmatism finds its Mandeville in Barbara Herrnstein Smith, whose arguments are utterly fascinating, in an appalling kind of way. These arguments typically kick off with a well-rehearsed attack on positivism: beliefs are not caused by things in the world. Objects do not carry meanings already attached to them such that they can determine the beliefs of those that perceive them. Any given belief can be

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backed up by all manner of contingent reasons, so that the only criterion a belief can have is that it be “cognitively congenial and otherwise serviceable.”8 In Contingencies of Value, Smith accordingly lays out a thoroughgoing nominalism; she puts a complete ban on thinking universality. If all beliefs or judgments can be held for multiple and contingent reasons, then there is no general conclusion to be drawn about any of them. But then in a sly and disingenuous footnote, she takes it all back. This dedicated anti-foundationalist thinker sneaks in a single foundation: there is, in fact, one language that holds universally, and that is the language of the market: “even if there are no marketplaces in BongoBongo, a marketplace analogy could still illuminate how people communicate there.”9 Never mind the name Bongo-Bongo and the insult of its cartoon anthropology—the argument surrounding it is troubling enough: even where capitalism is not historically in place, markets are implicit in human thought and human action, which can only mean that peasant and tribal societies have been just biding their time, ever at the wait for the markets that alone give full expression to the natural structure of human reasoning. The market alone is universal. It is the permanent location of thought. Such is the universalism that makes Smith’s anti-universalist pragmatism tick. This is a strategy she repeats elsewhere. In “Belief and Resistance,” she begins by emphasizing how innovative her pragmatist nominalism is. “[M]ore or less novel conceptions of what me might mean by ‘beliefs’ have been emerging,” she writes, and the aim of her essay, we gather, is to pursue that novelty around another fresh corner.10 The “traditionalist epistemologies,” by contrast, are “rationalist, realist, and so on.”11 It’s worth noting how significant a rhetorical move this already is: to be an anti-foundationalist, we are forced to conclude, is to be something other than a traditionalist. But then she wants to say that her “more or less novel,” non-traditionalist insight is that all thought is traditionalist. All thought begs the question—begs some question, begs its question—in that it cannot help but fall back on an ensemble of active and enabling assumptions. We are possessed, she writes, by a “cognitive conservatism,” and what is notable about her formulation is less her compounding an epistemological register with a political one than her taking recourse once again to the very type of universal that her nominalism had seemed to prohibit: taking our cues from “recent studies in the field of economic psychology and decision science,” we can conclude that “cognitive

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conservatism” is “endemic, that is, species-wide. . . . We are, it seems, congenitally both docile and stubborn.”12 We are all, each of us, whether we own up to it or not, docile, stubborn, conservative thinkers in the eternal market. I’m tempted to say, then, that Barbara Herrnstein Smith provides the key to, announces the secret meaning of, contemporary pragmatism. It is market-thought, in which all cognition is revealed to be a meditation on the serviceable, a species of cost-benefit analysis. What seems to me so crucial about Mandeville and Smith is that in their writing, antinomy is no longer just a (rather ill-tempered) philosophical form. It is a sociological observation, a feature of our institutions themselves. Mandeville in particular spells out a number of ways in which historical conditions—in this case, the expansion of the market economy—might make conventional forms of philosophical judgment seem impossible or undesirable. It is this understanding—this use of antinomy to diagnose a condition that is at once epistemological and social—that Mandeville shares with a second Smith. Adam Smith is even less of a skeptic than Mandeville—The Wealth of Nations has almost nothing to say about knowledge as such—but it is clear all the same that Smith continues and extends Mandeville’s assault on philosophical notions of value. At one level, at least, his economic writings are a single, sustained polemic against mercantilist essentialism—that is, against the empiricism or crude materialism of earlier economic theories. If we examine John Locke’s realist account of money, for instance, we will discover that it is empiricist to the point of tautology: silver is silver, Locke argues (if one can call that an argument); it can be nothing else—its value is intrinsic to it. The Wealth of Nations, in this light, is an attempt to establish decisively that silver is never just silver, and that wealth, more to the point, is not just wealth, just treasure. Wealth, rather, is the entire circuit of a nation’s trade and manufacture. Money, in this light, designates what Smith calls the object’s “nominal price.” It is merely a name or a sign, announcing the contingent value of objects circulating within networks. Smith demonstrates that in order to understand a market economy—in order to understand something as ordinary as its currency—one needs to be able to conceive of value as relative and mutable. The Wealth of Nations is a manifesto for market anti-foundationalists.13 And so Lukács’s gloss on Marx’s Capital, it comes as a small shock to realize, works perfectly well as a rough-and-ready description of the Wealth of Nations itself: Smith, like Marx, attempts what Lukács calls “the

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retranslation of economic objects from things back into processes, into the changing relations between men.”14 Perhaps it would be better to put the point the other way round: it would be inane to claim that Smith is a Marxist before the fact, but it is somewhat more plausible to claim that Marx is not merely a LeftHegelian—he is a Left-Smithian, as well. This need come as no surprise, of course, since Hegel famously claims to have adopted the dialectic from Smith in the first place. The central error of vulgar political economy, according to Marx, is that it reifies capital much as mercantilism once reified wealth; it treats capital as a naturally given thing. A dialectical account of capital, by contrast, would resist reification: it would provide an understanding of capital as a complex and changing historical structure governed at various levels by conflict and contradiction, fully a part of the history of human relationships. This, to be sure, provides a way of thinking against capital, but only in the sense that it allows Marxists to get a better bead on capital than a merely descriptive economics would provide. Marx isn’t so much trying to rebut Adam Smith on this score. He’s trying to go Smith one better. So does the Marxist dialectic help us think capital or think against capital? For Marx, these are basically the same thing: antinomic thought is simultaneously an epistemology of the market and an epistemology of resistance. The question regarding Marx is essentially the one posed by the capital-logicians: Is the dialectic as Marx wields it a properly philosophical epistemology, that is, an ahistorical methodology that reports on the intricate and contradictory ways the world has always been and always will be? Or is the dialectic itself a historically bound form of thought, one that is specific to capital? The latter position—that the dialectic is specific to capital—itself comes in a hard line and a soft: (1) The soft line maintains, à la Lukács, that the dialectic only comes into its own under capital, only becomes thinkable under capital, but is bound to persist to account for the new intricacies of some as yet unimaginable communist condition; (2) The hard line insists that the dialectic is adequate only to capitalism and will wither with capitalism itself. Communism, presumably, will have no need of such philosophical extravagance. At this point, the question of epistemology gets referred into the political future. Now there is yet a third position possible here—a voice from the utopian beyond—that would shift us onto rather different ground. This position would seek to disassociate dialectical thinking from capitalism

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nearly altogether and thus reverse the course we’ve been charting thus far. Rather than viewing antinomy as a species of capital-logic, it would discover in the filigree of dialectical thought a glimpse of the socialist condition yet to come, a condition in which the dialectical unity of Identity and Difference could not only be thought but also, in some as yet unimaginable fashion, actually lived. This is a position suggested by Fredric Jameson when he writes that “Dialectical reason, which corresponds to a social organization that does not yet exist, has not yet come into being in any hegemonic form.”15 Jameson for his part has adapted this notion from Theodor Adorno who, perhaps more than anyone, teaches us to think of skepticism and its antinomies as an intransigently political project. If Adorno is able to pull this off, however—if he is able to wrench the dialectic back from capital—this is in large part because he theorizes the changing place of knowledge under capitalism itself. For surely it is not enough to say, as Mandeville would have it, that the market is the great anti-foundationalist. Even as capitalism is liquidating customary forms of knowledge and judgment, it is also assembling new epistemological apparatuses to place in the service of accumulation and its regimes. It’s not as though the usual foundationalist epistemologies simply fell outside of the marketplace. Idealism, we have already noted, is an epistemology of the commodity and the lifeworld that it helps standardize, governed now by abstract time and abstract space and abstract subjectivity. Empiricism, similarly, is an epistemology of domination, in which concrete objects are made to yield knowledge of themselves the better to command them (though this last, empiricism, is equally an epistemology of servility, in which thought shows itself to be unthinking, content as it is to collapse back into a social system whose features it merely enumerates). And taken together, idealism and empiricism find their cutting edge in instrumental reason, a scientistic and bureaucratic rationality that can master information but has abandoned any attempt to think ends. This is a familiar notion, to be sure, but we need to think again about its consequences. If we make instrumental reason the hallmark of capital’s epistemology, then antinomic argument clearly becomes a way of blasting open its simplicities. Consider, in this light, the form of Adorno’s Minima Moralia: these short, chiseled essays, each a thesis just waiting to be cancelled by one of its fellows, their sentences a fun-house ride of whiplash reversals, if we could imagine a fun-house ride that was dense

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and deliberate and sad. Minima Moralia is an elaborate, startling exercise in aphoristic antinomy. Thus we read in #10, “Divided-United,” that bourgeois marriage is just another form of economic contract—it is domination at its most intimate, hegemony by candlelight. And we read not half a page later, in #11, “With All My Worldly Goods,” that marriage is the last best hope of non-instrumental relationships in a world otherwise given over to instrumentality.16 Nothing mediates this antithesis—no third essay follows to resolve the contraries. Antinomic argument in Minima Moralia is a way of announcing the pervasive and agonizing contradictions around which capital organizes everyday life. It is a way of fixing the reader’s gaze, without the sugar pill of consolation, on the suffering that attends such diremption. Minima Moralia attempts, by letting its every proposition collapse into paradox, to clear the ground for something that, from the perspective of instrumental reason, is bound to seem like ignorance: a splendid and immoderate Kantianism, in which one is not even to treat objects as objects. Now surely Adorno’s project has only received added clarity in the thirty years since his death. Anti-foundationalism—even an antifoundationalism rather more precipitate than Adorno’s—makes brute and intuitive sense at a time when knowledge has become in some new way determinative of capitalism itself. It is easy, in this light, to think of the critique of “enlightenment” or of “disciplinary knowledge” or even of “epistemology” more generally as a just barely displaced attack on everything that’s compressed into the term information economy: the capitalist organization of knowledge in the cybernetic revolution of the last half century, the corporate subsumption of science in the guise of research-and-development, the transformation of the First World’s consumer sphere around new forms of commodified knowledge, the construction of a worldwide communications industry, which provides the structure for global production and generates new imperial projects in its wake. This list—to which we might add, as a secondary or subsidiary phenomenon, the passing of the humanist university—points us now toward one of Lyotard’s crucial points in The Postmodern Condition: that knowledge under late capitalism loses its traditional ideological functions. In an information economy, knowledge no longer serves to justify authority. On Lyotard’s view, the forms of thinking that have come to fore in the globalized economy are little more than refined forms of

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positivism, a technocratic knowledge that places itself directly in the service of capital and the state, which is to say that knowledge no longer takes the form of some ornate philosophical system whose business it is to provide capital or the state with conceptual legitimacy. But if one says this clearly, then I think one can also say that Lyotard’s more famous argument—the argument concerning the death of metanarratives—has generally been misunderstood, or that the consequences of the argument have been poorly reckoned. The first sentence of The Postmodern Condition is already revealing: “Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”17 We need to pay careful attention to the phrasing here: Lyotard will be discussing the “status of knowledge,” its position relative to the economy and the culture. Note, too, the subtitle: The Postmodern Condition is a “report on knowledge”—which is to say that it is not a critique of knowledge. Lyotard does not demand that we launch an assault on epistemology. He seeks to consider the changing condition of knowledge under new social arrangements. And if we follow Lyotard’s account—if we accept the idea that the metanarratives have broken down—then it turns out that under late capitalism, philosophical knowledge is always already problematized—it has already ceded way to the administered regime of science—in which case the anti-foundationalists and the Adornians don’t have much to do. This yields a difficult point. Anti-foundationalism is typically thought to possess a coherent political profile. The Frankfurt School and its successors have tried to put the critique of knowledge in the service of an anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic politics. Post-structuralism aligns its version of that critique with what used to be called the new social movements. And even neopragmatism tends to call for a Left-liberal political praxis on Deweyite lines. These are, no doubt, distinct projects, with different aims and different histories—each of them, indeed, further encompasses several distinct projects within it, and in a different context, everything would hinge on specifying those differences. But to so much as speak of “theory,” and not even to endorse it, but merely to take it seriously as a social fact, is to posit a realm in which critical Marxism, post-structuralism, and pragmatism form a common stock of arguments. And within the generalizing perspective of this “theory,” within

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that politically resolute canon of counterphilosophy, these various projects are all premised on the notion that we must continue to uproot foundationalisms at every turn (because an unjust society speciously relies on them). But Lyotard’s argument is a humorless rejoinder to the epistemological determinism to which these projects, in their most distinctive formulations, tend. One writer, for instance, has gone so far as to recommend, in the pages of boundary 2, that one treat antifoundationalism as an “entry requirement,” which means that anyone not properly schooled, anyone not sporting the post-structuralist beret, should be shunned as inauthentically or inadequately Left.18 Yet if we follow Lyotard, anti-foundationalist critique is simply redundant, because knowledge no longer plays the legitimizing role that antifoundationalists axiomatically take it to have. Capital and technology have already done the uprooting for us, so to critique epistemology is only to carry out the program that the market has laid down for us in advance—the program, that is, of obliterating the established canons of social, historical, and ethical knowledge. And with that we seemed to have traced a circle. My argument seems to be foundering on a basic discrepancy or pulling away in two different directions at once. We began by asking whether anti-foundationalism resists the commodity-sphere or accommodates it, and what we’re finding is that, in some queasy way, it does both. Here’s the problem: we can follow Adorno (or deconstruction or the Rethinking Marxism gang) and hold to our antinomies—our nominalisms, our skepticisms, our antifoundationalisms—insisting that they are our best shot at eluding reification and the constricted demands of instrumental reason. Or we can follow Baudrillard and Lyotard or Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and conclude that capital has beaten us to the punch, that the market will always outmatch our hostility to grand narratives and universal values and essential qualities. In one sense, this is merely to say that if anti-foundationalism is going to have any force, it will need to introduce a new degree of historical specificity to its claims. There may be some intrinsic interest in sticking it to logocentrism or foundational knowledge or science, but in order for such work to approach the political force that one typically hopes from it, it is necessary to enumerate with much greater precision than critics generally muster just which institutions we think are actually troubled by a

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critique of epistemology. What is it about the status of knowledge or science within our common lives that makes anti-foundationalist critique compelling? I take that to be a question of unrelieved urgency. But once we pose that question, it becomes hard all over again to know how to proceed. For if we are stuck between these skeptical options—between anti-foundationalism as a species of market-thought and anti-foundationalism as a mode of critical ethics or political resistance—then this has something to do with the contradictory place occupied in advanced capitalism by knowledge itself. On the one hand, knowledge seems to be forever discredited in advance; the experience of complexity under global capital seems to humiliate any conceptual scheme around which we might try to organize it and through which we might try to justify action against it. But at the same time, knowledge now seems to play a new and defining role in economic relations: global capitalism seems to give an unprecedented centrality to knowledge, or at least to information, around which it creates new technologies, new classes of workers, new institutions to produce, store, and distribute data. This, it seems to me, is the ground of our politico-epistemological hesitation. This helps explain why the antinomic argument that seems our surest means of withstanding the instrumentalization of thought is simultaneously the most supple of market logics. Arguments that appeal to contradiction embed us within global capitalism in a manner that is itself contradictory. That, I would like to suggest, is the antinomy of antinomies.

NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

q Notes

Introduction 1. Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (1676), 2.2.78–86. 2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 167–168. 3. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 162–218. 4. See “On the Young Marx,” in For Marx, pp. 49–86, especially p. 77: “To a very great extent, Marx’s return to the theoretical products of the English and French eighteenth century was a real return to the pre-Hegelian, to the objects themselves in their reality.” 5. See “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx, pp. 87–128, quotation p. 103. 6. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 188–243. 7. The authors I consider are the usual suspects in matters skeptical, which means their choices shouldn’t demand much special explanation. I should cop to one omission. I feel a little sheepish about not giving Hume a chapter of his own. He would seem a riper candidate than Hobbes, at any rate. To this I can only respond that Hume holds almost no surprises for someone already steeped in classical skepticism, to the point where treating him separately would have paid diminishing returns. A sop, then, to his fans: What action there is in Hume turns on his notion of custom, which is a key concept for the Pyrrhonists. It is to custom that classical skeptics turn in order to spring themselves free from various epistemological impasses. The question is: If there are no good argumentative grounds for choosing one form of life over another, then on what basis do we choose any form of life at all? And to this the skeptics answer: custom. We just do

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what everyone else around us is already doing. Hume, then, will introduce two innovations: He will tend to substitute sociability for custom; and then having done this, he will reassign the word “custom” to the sphere of cognition, so that it comes to mean something like an accreted intellectual habit. 8. “Marxism in Humanism,” in For Marx, pp. 219–247, quotation p. 234. 9. I’m not especially concerned to argue the point of this paragraph, which should be evident to anyone who has read the standard intellectual histories on the subject—I’m thinking especially of Richard Popkin’s History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Richard Tuck’s Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I owe a debt to these historians, but should probably make clear that what I’m up to in this book is not intellectual history. It’s not history, for a start, though the chapters’ roughly chronological order could raise expectations on that front that I cannot fulfill. I’d like to take refuge behind my literary training: I am less interested in telling a story about skepticism than in figuring out what stories skeptics tell. Nor is this a book about ideas in the usual sense, not only because I’ve made no effort to filter out social and political history, but also because I find it most useful to think about skepticism as a rather unusual form of writing. I’m starting from the notion—to which you can affix the names Wittgenstein and Heidegger, if you like—that skepticism is actually rather hard to get going. It is actually rather hard to talk somebody out of knowing things about the world. And I’m wondering what kind of rhetorical resources are available to people who take this strange task upon themselves; I’m wondering, too, what kind of impasses they talk themselves into. It might help to think of the book as what you get when you read Popkin with a head full of Adorno. 10. The following statement from Virtue, Commerce, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 70, is representative: “The main historical weakness in the antiliberal position is that all its practitioners, right and left, are so anxious to find, that they antedate and exaggerate, some moment at which economy became emancipated from polity and market man, productive man, or distributive man declared that he no longer needed the paideia of politics to make him a self-satisfactory being.” 11. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 92. These first three they also refer to as “the somber writers of the early bourgeois period”—p. 71. 12. See Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), p. 49.

1. Skepticism and Rhetoric 1. The first example is the famous first speech attributed to Lysias in Plato’s Phaedrus. The second two appear among many other examples in Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. For a full translation with commentary, see Benson

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Mates’s The Skeptic Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 87–217. All subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically by section number. On the matter of addition and subtraction, see also Against the Arithmeticians, which is book IV of Against the Professors (M 4.23–34). 2. . . . and sure enough, the opening scene of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632) contains just that speech, a bravura defense of sister-love. 3. Lanham uses the term throughout the introduction to The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 4. Ibid., p. 5. 5. See especially Stanley Fish’s chapter on “Rhetoric,” in Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 471–502. 6. The former claim—that the mother is not kin to her child—is argued by Kysarcius in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 324–325. 7. See Lanham, p. 6. Quintillian’s textbook definition of the orator as a “good man speaking well” is only the most famous instance of this phenomenon. 8. Ibid. 9. Sextus also includes among his targets the rival skeptics of the late Academy. But his contention here is that the Academics are, finally, not skeptical enough. For Sextus, the doubter’s creed of “I know nothing” is simply a form of skeptical absolutism, which turns the Academic into a special kind of Dogmatist. 10. This mistake is legion. It is, in fact, the governing assumption in nearly all analytical work on the subject. Let me cite just a few examples from otherwise useful books: See Richard Popkin’s History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which chides Sextus Empiricus—and sundry other skeptics—for not producing “original works of philosophy.” Luciano Floridi, similarly, feels compelled to point out that Sextus’ writings are “not philosophical masterpieces.” See his Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. vii. See also Martha Nussbaum—The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 15—who claims that the skeptics would have happily signed onto the Epicurean notion that “philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing life by arguments and reasonings.” 11. See Lanham, p. 3. 12. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948), p. 392. 13. Mates discusses Sextus’ treatment of the second-order dilemma at length in his introduction to the Outlines, and especially on p. 9. The secondorder dilemma deserves a history of its own. Richard Rorty—Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 371—gives the dilemma one of its clearest modern formulations when he writes that the antifoundationalist’s task is to “decry the notion of having a view while avoiding

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having a view about having views.” Barbara Herrnstein Smith, for her part, contemptuously refuses to consider “the self-refutationist argument”—Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 150. 14. See also Mates, p. 65. 15. This is a paraphrase of one of Sextus’ more playful attacks. See the Outlines, 1:14. 16. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 111. 17. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, trans. Richard Bett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 35–36. 18. These refer to the third through fifth, the eighth, and tenth modes, respectively. See the Outlines, 1:14. 19. On the etymology of “skeptic” see David Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Miles Burnyeat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 9–31. 20. Montaigne, p. 454. 21. See, for example, the Outlines, 1:15; 2:13; 3:5. 22. For a particularly egregious reading of skepticism as a form of protoliberalism, see John Christian Laursen, The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). And also: Arne Naess, Skepticism (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), p. 74. “One might reasonably predict important social implications of widespread skepticism, even of the fragmentary, unphilosophical kind. It should effectively undermine closed societies with their demands for explicit adherence to certain doctrines and the systematic rejection of counterargument. And in more or less open societies skepticism should help both in the reshuffling of political priorities and in the elimination of rigid ideological reasoning that lacks any basis in spontaneous thought and feeling.” 23. Quoted in Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 115. 24. Quoted in Burnyeat, p. 120; for Mates’s translation, which simply retains more of the Greek, see 1:4. 25. See Husserl in the Crisis of European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 75–76: “It is unavoidable that . . . anyone who seriously seeks to be a philosopher begin with a sort of radical skeptical epoché.” We might well dub this instrumental doubt, skepticism in the service of certainty, or doubt as an epistemological methodology. The important point is that skepticism proper takes epoché as its telos (with tranquillity as a kind of second telos or unexpected bonus)—whereas for Husserl and Descartes it forms the point of departure. Philosophical doubt is thus a radical inversion of classical skeptical methodology, which Husserl—p. 77—will then denounce as “the hell of an unsurpassable, quasi-skeptical epoché.” 26. Gorgias, 462d–e.

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27. On the place of medical tropes in Greek philosophy, see “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 61–171; and Nussbaum. On the philosophical tenor of ancient medicine, see Michael Frede, “Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity,” in Frede’s Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 225–242. 28. “As, then, the doctor who in doing away with pleurisy creates pneumonia, or in curing brain fever creates lethargic fever, does not remove the danger, but changes it around, so the philosopher, if he brings in another disturbance in place of the former one, does not come to the aid of the person who is disturbed.” (M 11.137; quoted in Nussbaum, p. 297) 29. Or rather, at least two of the three major medical schools of the day had pronounced skeptical tendencies. No one is sure whether there was a Pyrrhonist school as such. See D. K. House, “The Life of Sextus Empiricus,” Classical Quarterly 30 (1980), pp. 227–238. 30. Against the Rhetoricians, in Sextus Empiricus in Four Volumes, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), vol. IV, pp. 188–243. 31. See Adversos mathematikos, which is alternately translated as Against the Professors and Against the Learned (and which includes Against the Rhetoricians). 32. The locus classicus of this rhetorical plain-talking is Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar. 33. Montaigne, 2.12, p. 430. 34. Against the Rhetoricians, p. 213. 35. Cf. Montaigne, 3.13, p. 817: “We should have wiped out the traces of this innumerable diversity of opinions, instead of wearing them as decoration and cramming the heads of posterity with them.” 36. Skeptics, Bacon notes, are like “moody lovers who rail at their sweethearts but never leave them”—quoted in David Hiley, Philosophy in Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 24. 37. Montaigne, p. 436. 38. Sextus, Against the Rhetoricians, p. 205: Rhetoric “is not useful to cities. . . . For the laws are what bind cities together, and as the soul perishes when the body has perished, so the cities are destroyed when the laws are abolished.” 39. Ibid., p. 207. 40. Ibid., p. 209. Sextus continues: “For just as juggler deceives the eyes of the beholders by their sleight of hand, so the orators by their low cunning blind the minds of the judges to the law and so steal away the votes.” 41. As Benson Mates has remarked—p. 30—the true Pyrrhonist never really “doubts” anything, because the notion of “doubt” would suggest too active a critical stance. The true skeptic, in this light, is merely gripped by uncertainty without ever having to question anything, exactly. 42. For an overview of the literature on Sextus’ life, see Floridi, pp. 3–7.

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Notes to Pages 43–50

43. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 83–222. 44. See Herbert Marcuse, Negations (Boston: Beacon, 1968), p. xx. 45. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). It’s not that Anglo-American philosophers don’t make this same point. The problem is that they seem incapable of taking the point to heart, so that analytical articles on Hellenistic philosophy tend to read something like this: “It is important to realize that Epicureanism was a way of life, not a doctrine. I will now summarize for you Epicurean doctrine.” 46. See Hadot, “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990), pp. 483–505, quotation pp. 491–492. 47. Hadot, Philosophy, p. 57; also p. 158. 48. See The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 49. See Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992). 50. For a general account of Stoicism, see A. A. Long and David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On the philosophical opposition, see Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); P. A. Brunt, “Stoicism and the Principate,” Papers of the British School at Rome 43 (1975), pp. 7–35; Martin Goodman, The Roman World 44 BC–AD 180 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 161–162. 51. See Barbara Levick, Vespasian (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 89–90; and Brian Jones, The Emperor Domitian (London: Routledge, 1992). 52. Starobinski makes this point with regard to Montaigne: “For him it is enough simply to feign respect, since it is only the outward form that matters”— Montaigne in Motion (1982), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 252. This is an important observation. In analytical circles, the renewed interest in ancient skepticism has been accompanied by a lively debate over the scope of skepticism. Some maintain that Sextus requires us to abandon all beliefs, including ordinary beliefs, which could not help but leave the skeptic radically at odds with the community that surrounds him. (See Miles Burnyeat’s “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism?” in Burnyeat, 1983, pp. 111–141.) Others maintain that Sextus requires only that we dispense with philosophical belief—belief, that is, about the essential nature of phenomena, in which case we are free to indulge in ordinary beliefs of any description. (See Michael Frede, “The Skeptic’s Beliefs,” in Frede, pp. 179–200.) This exchange gets at something important, but is misguided in its terms, because both notions are clearly correct: Pyrrhonism suspends judgment on all matters of belief, but then promptly readmits ordinary beliefs on something other than philosophical

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grounds, indeed, as something other than belief. In fact, Pyrrhonism actually demands that we adhere to ordinary beliefs, but only once they have been redescribed as habits or performances.

2. Skepticism and the Subject 1. See Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 134. 2. Thus Marx, in the Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Press, 1955), p. 128: “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.” 3. See, for instance, Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism, Postmodernism,” New Left Review 152 (1985), pp. 60–73. 4. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne (1580; 1588; 1595), trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948), 2.1, p. 244. See also 3.9: “Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two.” All subsequent references to this work will be given, parenthetically, by essay and page number. 5. Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text (1986), trans. Pat Fedkiew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 99. 6. Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation (1969), trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 3. 7. See “Rereading Montaigne,” in Claude Levi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx (1991), trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 25: “I find in Montaigne a sophisticated version of the mobile, tolerant wonder that characterized Mandeville’s Travels.” 8. Levi-Strauss, p. 217. 9. Ibid., p. 219. 10. Montaigne, writes Starobinski, is doubly attractive because his “thought does not suffer as Nietzsche’s does from the possibility of totalitarian interpretation.” To this one can only respond: not so fast. See Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion (1982), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 305. 11. See also “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Ball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–63. Derrida suggests here—p. 47—that Montaigne is not a philosophical villain on the order of Descartes because he doesn’t exclude from thought the possibility of madness. Descartes exiles unreason from reason in a manner that Foucault has taught us to fear, but “this decree would have been impossible for a Montaigne, who was, as we know, haunted by the possibility of being mad, or of becoming completely mad in the very action of thought itself.” 12. See, in particular, the late-humanist Montaigne of Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California

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Press, 1991); and the odder, Straussian Montaigne of David Lewis Schaefer, The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 13. See, for example, Montaigne, 1.26, pp. 108–109. “These are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it.” 14. See ibid., 1.23, p. 84: “Once, having to justify one of our observances, which was received with steadfast authority far and wide around us, and preferring to establish it, not as is usually done, merely by force of laws and examples, but by tracking it to its origin, I there found its foundation so weak that I nearly became disgusted with it, I who was supposed to confirm it in others.” 15. Peter (Pierre) Charron, Of Wisdome (1600), trans. Samson Lennard (Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1971). Translation originally published London, n.d. (before 1612). 16. For Montaigne’s attack on high humanist rhetoric, see 1.26, especially pp. 125ff. 17. See ibid., 1.21, p. 76. “Some urge me to write the events of my time, believing that I see them with a view less distorted by passion than another man’s. . . . There is nothing so contrary to my style as an extended narration.” See also Craig Brush, From the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-Portrait (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), pp. 27ff. 18. See Humanism in Crisis, ed. Philippe Desan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), especially George Huppert, “Ruined Schools: The End of the Renaissance System of Education in France,” pp. 55–67. 19. Cf. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 178: “There is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some Philosophers have not maintained for Truth.” Or Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin, 1967), 3:34, p. 228: “What a shuttlecock of a fellow would the greatest philosopher that ever existed, be whisked into at once, did he read such books, and observe such facts, and think such thoughts, as would eternally be making him change sides!” 20. See James J. Supple, “The Failure of Humanist Education: David de Fleurance-Rivault, Anthoine Mathé de Laval, and Nicolas Faret,” in Desan, pp. 35–53. 21. Consider the comment by Antoine de Laval, quoted in Supple in Desan, p. 44: “There is not much point in talking about Aristotle to a man with a sword at his side.” 22. See especially Montaigne, 1.5, “Whether a governor of a besieged place should go out to parley”; 1.45, “Of the battle of Dreux”; 2.9, “Of the arms of the Parthians”; 2.34, “Observations on Julius Caesar’s methods of making war.”

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23. Sterne, typically, ups the ante on this gag. See Tristram Shandy, 5.1, p. 339: “Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk—so little to the stock? Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?” Sterne’s sally against unoriginality actually manages to plagiarize two sources at once: it steals its language from Richard Burton—these lines are straight from the Anatomy of Melancholy—and its joke from Montaigne. For a fuller account of Sterne’s borrowings, see Jonathan Lamb, “Sterne’s System of Imitation,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), pp. 19–38. 24. See Pope’s Dunciad, 4:251. See also Montaigne’s final judgment on humanism: “Let us leave aside that infinite confusion that is seen among the philosophers themselves, and that perpetual and universal debate over the knowledge of things. For this is a very true presupposition: that men are in agreement about nothing.” 2.12, p. 423. 25. See Montaigne, 1.43, p. 197. “From the examples of many nations we may learn enough better ways of distinguishing ourselves and our rank externally (which I truly believe to be very necessary in a state), without for this purpose fostering such manifest corruption and harm.” 26. See especially 1.23, “Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law.” 27. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 161.

3. Skepticism and the State 1. See Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511), trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 60. 2. Erasmus’ point calls to mind a confused and desperate sentence from Burke’s Reflections, ed. Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 25: “A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter, so capable of supporting itself, by the then unnecessary support of any argument.” 3. See Sextus, Outlines, 1:11. 4. Ibid., 3:3. 5. Thus Montaigne, 1.56, p. 231: “It is a desperate stroke in which you must abandon your weapons to make your adversary lose his, and a secret trick that must be used rarely and reservedly. It is great rashness to ruin yourself in order to ruin another.” 6. Quoted in Richard Popkin, History of Scepticism from Savanarola to Bayle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 138. 7. Sextus, 3:3. 8. Slavoj Žižek makes a similar point with regard to Pascal in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 37. 9. John Milton, Areopagitica, in Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), pp. 196–248, quotation p. 216.

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10. Cf. Wittgenstein at his most Pyrrhonist—in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), p. 74: “The danger here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure when there is no such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do it.” 11. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), pp. 127–186, quotation p. 168: “We are indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ for the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian (for woe to him who brings scandal into the world!)—scandal itself.” Althusser’s formulation is brilliant, but it completely overestimates the scandal of this position. See also the opening sections of . Z ižek’s Sublime Object. 12. Pace, Althusser—p. 175: “Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’ ” 13. Perhaps this is the point for me to cite what I take to be the strangest sentence in the recent history of Montaigne criticism. In a discussion of Paul de Man’s essay on Montaigne, Dudley Marchi takes the opportunity to mount a Pyrrhonist defense of de Man’s wartime writings—Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the Essais (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1994), p. 175: “In a mode of Montaignean subservient innovation, de Man made the necessary homage to the inevitable powers of his time.” I have no intention of taking a fresh swipe at de Man, but I invite the reader to dwell a moment on the complete fraudulence of this sentence, in which the ideological patterns of Pyrrhonism leap into bold and contemporary relief: the “inevitability” of fascism, the “necessity” of fellowtraveling. 14. See, for example, Mack P. Holt, French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 10. 15. On the latter, see Henry Heller’s Iron and Blood: Civil Wars in SixteenthCentury France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), p. 12. 16. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 309. 17. “Montaigne’s experience and background were not quite what he pretended. His great-grandfather had bought the Montaigne estates in 1477 with the profits from his trade in wine and fish at Bordeaux. His father, who had fought in the Italian wars and lived nobly on his estates, had seen to the completion of Montaigne’s legal education at Toulouse. Montaigne had bought office in the cour des aides at Périgueux in 1554 and subsequently obtained a place in the parlement of Bordeaux when the Périgordine cour des aides was incorpo-

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rated within that court. His two uncles had also acquired venal office before the religious wars. The Montaigne family assumed the status of ancient nobility when in fact its recent origins were in commerce, law, and office.” J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1976), pp. 96–97. 18. On the distinction between the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, see Hubert Jedin, “Catholic-Reformation or Counter-Reformation,” in Counter-Reformation: The Essential Readings, ed. David Luebke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 21–45; and John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 19. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), quotation from “Introduction” by Godzich and Spadacinni, p. xix. 20. See O’Malley, pp. 17–18. 21. See Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), p. 57. 22. Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), p. 7. 23. Ibid., p. 176: “One of the foremost achievements of the Catholic Reform, as well as the Reformation, was the assertion of the validity of the worldly or lay vocation as a Christian way of life.” 24. Janine Garrisson, A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483–1598: Renaissance, Reformation and Rebellion, trans. Richard Rex (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). 25. See J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–1598, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 58. 26. All quotations are from Sextus’ Against the Grammarians, trans. D. L. Blanks (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 46–47. 27. See also 1.9, p. 24: “An ancient Church Father [St. Augustine] says that we are better off in the company of a dog we know than in that of a man whose language we do not know. So that to a man a foreigner is not like a man [Pliny].” 28. Garrisson, p. 62. 29. See also Against the Grammarians, p. 31: “What moves us by nature”— and not by convention—“moves all in the same way and not some in one way and others in the opposite way.” 30. There is a sentence in Swift’s “Apology” for A Tale of a Tub—ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3—that demonstrates this contradiction rather neatly. The problem with some Christians, Swift suggests, is that they “endeavour pulling up those very foundations wherein all Christians have agreed” (emphasis mine). 31. Thus Dryden, in The Medal:

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Notes to Pages 113–120 The common cry is e’en religion’s test: The Turk’s is at Constantinople best, Idols in India; popery at Rome; And our own worship only true at home. (103–106)

32. Montaigne continues: “It may be said with some plausibility that there is an abecedarian ignorance that comes before knowledge, and another, doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge: an ignorance that knowledge creates and engenders, just as much as it undoes and destroys the first.” And he concludes: “For my part I draw back as much as I can into the first and natural stage, which for naught I attempted to leave.” 33. See Nietzsche in the Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 328: “It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance.” Montaigne brags that he “ignorantly and negligently” lets himself “be guided by the general law of the world.” (3.13 / p. 821) 34. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), No. 436. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 164: “In the extreme case, that is to say, when there is a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization (as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appears as selfevident. This experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs.” 35. Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 20—p. 14 in the Jephcott translation, which isn’t as good in this instance. 36. Quoted in Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1920), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 139. 37. I’m arguing, then, against a conventional view that sees skepticism as a form of alienation. See M. F. Burnyeat, “The Skeptic in his Time and Place,” in Skepticism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Popkin and Charles Schmitt (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1987), pp. 13–44. Or Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Pyrrhonism is an attempt to undo alienation. It may, to that extent, testify to alienation, but it does not itself comprise that alienation.

Part 2. The Seventeenth Century 1. The full title is Scepsis Scientifica: or, Confessed Ignorance, the way to Science; In an Essay of The Vanity of Dogmatizing, and Confident Opinion (London: 1665). 2. The point is so widely held that it could be misleading to cite any one scholar as source, but one good place to review the argument is Roger French

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and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1996). 3. Glanvill, p. 27; “Preface”; p. 31; p. 15. 4. Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 37; p. 28; p. 418. The subject of chapter 46 is the “darkness from vain philosophy and fabulous traditions.” 5. ibid., p. 34; p. 28. 6. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (1661) (London: J.M. Dent, 1910). 7. Paula Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” in Renaissance Quarterly (1990) 43, pp. 292–331.

4. Skepticism and Utopia 1. Francis Bacon, “Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature” (c. 1602), Works (London: Longman, 1876–1883) III, quotation p. 222. 2. On magic, millennium, and revolution, see Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), and two volumes by Charles Webster: The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626– 1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976); and From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 3. Thomas More, Utopia (1516), ed. and trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999); Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun (1602), trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 4. Stanislave Lem, Solaris (1961), trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1987). 5. Ibid., p. 111; p. 123; p. 114; p. 123. 6. A sample: “I . . . thought to myself that our scholarship, all the information accumulated in the libraries, amounted to a useless jumble of words, a sludge of statements and suppositions, and that we had not progressed an inch in the 78 years since researches had begun. The situation seemed much worse now than in the time of the pioneers, since the assiduous efforts of so many years had not resulted in a single indisputable conclusion.” (22–23) The novel says outright that the planet has become a case study in “the limitations of human knowledge.” (23) 7. Ibid., p. 1; p. 2; p. 3. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. On ekphrasis, see especially W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992), pp. 695–719. 10. That last formulation comes early, on p. 12. The others are repeated throughout the novel. 11. These formulations all come from the Alan Bance’s new translation of Freud’s 1915 letter on transference love, available, among other places, in The

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Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 341–353, quotations p. 349, p. 341, p. 345. 12. Lem, p. 125. 13. Ibid., p. 72. 14. John Brunner, Total Eclipse (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974). On the pairing of Lem and Brunner, and much else besides, see Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). 15. Brunner, p. 4. 16. Ibid., p. 80. 17. Ibid., p. 126. 18. Ibid., p. 55. 19. More, p. 57; Bacon, p. 457. 20. Campanella, p. 37; p. 67. 21. Bacon, p. 472. 22. Ngugi wa Thiang’o, Decolonizing the Mind (London: James Currey, 1986), especially p. 8. 23. Bacon, pp. 470–471. 24. See, among many other examples, B. Bradshaw’s “More on Utopia,” The Historical Journal 24 (1981), pp. 1–27. 25. Anyone wanting to follow out this Bakhtinian commonplace could consult David Marsh’s The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 26. Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 27. More, p. 769. 28. Ibid., p. 159-160. 29. Jon Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 30. Plato, Laws 951d–952d.

5. Skepticism and the Theater 1. William Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 2. That’s Sidney, from Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 69, line 11. 3. Ibid., 71.12–14. 4. Ibid., 64.9–10. 5. Ibid., 21.5. 6. Ibid., 106.1. 7. Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) in Archives of Empire: Volume 1: From the East India Company to the Suez

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Canal, edited by Mia Carter with Barbara Harlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 227-238. 8. On this point, see Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 117. 9. Aphra Behn, Lucky Chance, or An Alderman’s Bargain, 1.3.26–27. 10. By now, some readers may be wondering where Stanley Cavell’s arguments fit in with mine. I don’t want to talk anybody out of finding Cavell useful, but I’d just as soon find the quickest path past him. His account of skepticism strikes me as so muddled, conceptually and terminologically, as to be a nonstarter, unable to distinguish in the most basic terms between (1) skepticism as anti-philosophy, that which teaches you how not to philosophize; (2) epistemology as that particular form of philosophy that tries to establish secure criteria of knowledge; (3) the problem of other minds, which is the much more local preoccupation of some twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers. Anyone who bundles these three distinct philosophical modes together can have nothing illuminating to say about those writers who actually took themselves to be skeptics. Beyond that, Cavell’s arguments invariably turn on a certain story, which he retells so often that it takes on mythic qualities—a story about how the search for knowledge exiles us from the intimate and ordinary knowledge of others, which he sometimes calls “the domestic”—and this is the ever-recurring tragedy of modern life, the destruction of domesticity by epistemology, or of intimacy by the demand for knowledge. That this sounds unmistakably like the Genesis story is very much to the point: The couple was happy, but then someone went looking for the kinds of knowledge that humans can’t have. I reckon you can decide for yourself whether you find the parable’s Christian homeliness compelling. Other accounts of skepticism and the early theater are worse. Over the course of nearly 150 introductory pages, William Hamlin’s baffling Tragedy and Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) literally cites no evidence—not a single passage—to support its central contention that early European skepticism involved a commitment to “free expression and open-minded enquiry, and a powerful distaste for dogmatic authority, intolerance, and persecution”— that’s p. 71. 11. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 12. For recent studies that emphasize the continuity between medieval drama and early modern theater, see the work of Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 13. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 14. Malcontent, 5.3.12; True Widow, 3.5.149–150, 152; 2.1.203–204.

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15. Jean Howard, Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994); Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 16. On court manners, see Norbert Elias’s Court Society (1969), trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983); and on the new politics, see Richard Tuck’s Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 17. Howard, The Committee, 3.1.40. 18. Ibid., 3.2.101–103. 19. Ibid., 3.1.63–64. 20. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 2.3.11. 21. Ibid., 1.4.10; 1.1.60–61. 22. Douglas Greene, “The Court of the Marshalsea in Late Tudor and Stuart England,” The American Journal of Legal History 20 (1976), pp. 267–281. 23. Volpone, 5.10.3. 24. Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, “Induction,” lines 11–16. 25. Quoted in Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 154. 26. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 55–65. 27. Jan Golinksi, “Phosphorus and the Public Cultures of Science in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 80 (1989), pp. 11–39. Cf. Marie Boas Hall, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 185: “Boyle’s air-pump together with Hooke’s microscope constituted the show pieces of the Society; when distinguished visitors were to be entertained, the chief exhibits were always experiments with the pump.” 28. Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacles in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” Roma Moderna e Contemporanea 3 (1995). 29. Bacon, p. 486. 30. Ibid. 31. This is the argument of Steven Shapin’s Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 32. Compare Joseph Priestley’s comment from a full century later, when he isolated oxygen for the first time—quoted in Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 78: “Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury.” 33. Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 3.3.88–92. 34. Volpone, 2.2.125–126, 132–133; Alchemist, 2.5.1–2; Every Man Out, 3.1.175–179.

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6. Skepticism and Science 1. Aphra Behn, The Emperor of the Moon (1687), 3.3.222–223. 2. See, for instance, Michael McKeon’s two chapters on what he calls parables of the younger son in Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 3. Behn, 1.2.47. 4. Ibid., 1.1.3. 5. Ibid., 1.2.62. 6. Ibid., 3.3.134–136. 7. Iibid., 3.3. 24–25; 170; 29. 8. Ibid., 3.3.21–23. 9. Ibid., 1.2.11–14. 10. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen (De Cive) (1641; 1647), ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 21. 11. Hobbes, A Dialogue Between A Philosopher and A Student of the Common Laws of England (1681), ed. Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 12. Ibid., p. 58. 13. Ibid., p. 62; p. 69. 14. Ibid., p. 125; De Cive, p. 9; Elements of Law (1640), ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (1889), 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), p. 189. 15. Dialogue, p. 54; p. 55. 16. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 473. 17. Elements, p. 188. Cf. Montaigne, 3.13, p. 821: “Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other.” 18. Dialogue, p. 62. 19. Lawrence Stone, Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (1972) (London: Routledge, 1986); Conrad Russell, Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); and Ann Hughes, Causes of the English Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). For Russell on Scottish imperialism, see p. 31; p. 60. 20. Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament (1668; 1681), ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 40. See also p. 3: “There were an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so educated, as that in their youth having read the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity and great actions; in which books the popular government was extolled by the glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny; they became thereby in love with their forms of government.” 21. Ibid., p. 95. 22. Ibid., p. 17.

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23. Ibid., p. 16; see also 40. 24. Ibid., p. 56. 25. De Cive, p. 9. 26. Carl Schmitt, Leviathan in The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (1938), trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). 27. See, in particular, Chapter 40 of Leviathan, “Of the rights of the Kingdom of God, in Abraham, Moses, the High Priests; and the Kings of Judah.” 28. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1. 29. Lawrence Stone, “The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640,” Past and Present 28 (1964), pp. 41–80. 30. That’s Gabriel Plattes, who, in the early 1640s, wrote a literary utopia and then submitted it to the English Parliament in the hopes they would adopt it as their revolutionary program. The phrase is quoted on p. 326 of William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 31. The classic work on the subject remains Richard Westfall’s Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). 32. That’s Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, quoted in Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 33. Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, & Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 34. That’s Samuel Clarke, quoted in Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clark Disputes,” Isis 72 (1981), pp. 187–215, quotation p. 201. 35. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 36. Hobbes, De Cive, p. 10. 37. Leviathan, p. 9. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., p. 120. 40. Ibid., p. 9. 41. Ibid., p. 120. 42. Ibid., p. 9. 43. The unavoidable Luhmann is Social Systems (1984), trans. John Bednarz and Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 44. Systems theory gets growly in Luhmann’s Political Theory in the Welfare State (1981), trans. John Bednarz (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1990). 45. See, for instance, Michael Oakeshott’s Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).

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46. All quotations are from the 1661 edition of Glanvill, here p. 5. 47. This is the volume’s third prefatory poem, credited to “P.H.,” lines 11–15. 48. Ibid., line 38. 49. Glanvill, p. 118. 50. Ibid., p. 117; p. 70. 51. Carol Clover, “Opening Up,” in Men, Women, and Chainsaws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 52. Ibid., p. 118. 53. Ibid., p. 71. 54. Ibid., unnumbered letter of dedication; p. 22. 55. Ibid., p. 5. 56. See the essays by Zilsel collected in The Social Origins of Modern Science, ed. Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). 57. Quoted in Steven Shapin, Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 190. 58. Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (1661) (London: J. M. Dent, 1910). p. 9; p. 8; p. 22; p. 179; p. 117 (twice). 59. Ibid., p. 9. 60. Ibid., p. 7; p. 9. 61. Ibid., p. 166; p. 6. 62. Ibid., p. 162. 63. Lawrence M. Principe, Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 64. Quoted in Bruce Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 70–71. 65. See, in particular, Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); also Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: S. Karger, 1958); and Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (New York: F. Watt, 1966). 66. Boyle, p. 181. 67. See, for instance, Amy Boesky, Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), especially p. 40. 68. More’s Utopia (1516), ed. and trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), p. 102. 69. For instance, Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 70. Victor Thoren, Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 71. Here’s the key sentence, from the first chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 7: “Mythology itself set in motion the endless process of enlightenment by which, with ineluctable necessity, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief, until even the concepts of

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mind, truth, and, indeed, enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic.”

7. Skepticism and the Public Sphere 1. Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. xi. 2. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 5. 3. Ibid., p. ix. 4. Habermas, p. 60. 5. Ibid., p. 61. 6. J. G. A. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 477. Eighteenth-century studies is, in fact, crowded with attempts to conscript Swift and (to a lesser extent) Pope for the Left—any left. To cite just two further examples: Pope and Swift are the surprise heroes of E. P. Thompson’s epic of pre-capitalist use-rights, Whigs and Hunters (New York: Pantheon, 1975)— see especially pp. 216–218. Thompson finds in Tory disaffection an approximation of his own populist Marxism. Its “traditionalist and radical” humanism functions as a kind of placeholder: it is at least the possibility of something outside of capital, a position that has not yet resigned itself to the seeming inevitability of commerce and corruption. For Edward Said, Swift is the model of the organic intellectual, and his satire is the model of “activist” writing, at once politically intransigent and reflective. It is our business, then, to rescue Swift from his own accidental Toryism and to make of him instead “the exemplary author for vanguard contemporary criticism.” See The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 72–73. The post-structuralist Swift, in turn, remains a familiar figure, an excremental theorist of textuality and the body, anti-colonialist, mischievous, materialist. See Terry Eagleton’s Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981). 7. Pope’s account of himself in one of the Dunciad’s many prefaces is paradigmatic in this regard: “He lived in those days when (after Providence had permitted the invention of printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned) paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors covered the land: whereby . . . the peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily molested.” (lines 420–421) 8. Habermas, p. 58. For all its Cold War swagger and fetishizing of financial expertise, Peter Dickson, The Financial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1967) remains the standard citation on the development of public credit. John Carswell’s narrative history of The South Sea Bubble (2nd ed., Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1993) sketches out a more wide-ranging “Commercial Revolution” and talks down to non-specialist readers in all the right ways. John Brewer’s Sinews of

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Power (New York: Knopf, 1989) introduces a shift of emphasis by tracing the rise of the “fiscal-military” state. 9. Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1973). 10. It may help, as a point of reference, to recall Addison’s oft-quoted manifesto from The Spectator 10: “I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses.” This is precisely what Swift and Pope wish to prevent. 11. Habermas, p. 23. In describing Habermas’s account as “compelling idealized,” I realize I am signaling a patience for his procedures that many of his readers do not share. For a sympathetic but never apologetic overview of the charges against Habermas, see Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 289–339); and Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism, trans. Marc Silverman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). 12. Habermas, p. 25. 13. Lines 612–613 14. Pope, Rape of the Lock, Canto I, lines 121–148. 15. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford, 1994), 465b: “Ornamentation is the counterpart of exercise”—as rhetoric is to justice or fancy cooking to nutrition—“in the sense that it is fraudulent deceitful, petty, and servile. It misleadingly alters a person’s shape and complexion; it makes his skin all smooth and dresses him up. And so it enables people to take on a beauty which is not their own and to disregard their own innate attractions, which can be developed through exercise.” 16. Again, in the Gorgias, Zeus laments that fine people are sneaking into heaven because of their fancy dress: “they’d better be judged naked, stripped of all this clothing.” (523e) 17. Pope, Rape of the Lock, line 138. 18. The following lines, from “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” should make the point clear: oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels, When he beheld and smelled the towels, Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed. No object Strephon’s eye escapes, Here petticoats in frowzy heaps; Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot All varnished o’er with snuff and snot. 19. See Pocock.

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20. Bolingbroke, Political Writings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 249: “The utmost that private men can do, who remain untainted by the general contagion, is to keep the spirit of liberty alive in a few breasts; to protest against what they cannot hinder, and to claim on every occasion what they cannot by their own strength recover.” 21. Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (1738), in Political Writings, pp. 217–294. 22. Habermas largely ignores the revolutionary public sphere of the seventeenth century, despite its more obviously critical character. See David Zaret, “Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Calhoun, pp. 212–235. Zaret notes that the bourgeois public sphere only emerges after Whig and latitudinarian elites begin to clamp down on the woolier public sphere of the radical Puritans. 23. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 120. 24. Swift, Tale, p. 18. 25. Newcastle, quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 290. 26. Cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 91: “It has been the misfortune (not as these gentlemen think it the glory) of this age, that every thing is to be discussed, as if the constitution of our country were to be always a subject rather of altercation than enjoyment.” 27. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3–8. 28. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. by Valerie Rumbold (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 1.16. 29. Ibid., p. 69 (in the preface attributed to Martin Scriblerus). 30. The poem’s original notes explain—see pp. 97–98: “Smithfield is the place where Bartholomew Fair was kept, whose shews, machines, and dramatical entertainments, formerly agreeable only to the taste of the Rabble, were, by the Hero of this poem and others of equal genius, brought to the Theatres of Coventgarden, Lincolns-inn-fields, and the Hay-market, to be the reigning pleasures of the Court and Town. This happened in the Reigns of King George I, and II.” 31. Ibid., 1.145–146. 32. Ibid., 1.17. 33. Ibid., original footnote to 2.286, p. 193. 34. Ibid., original footnote to 4.1, p. 270. 35. This list is almost infinitely extendable: from customary, pre-Veselian prohibitions against human dissection to animal rights activism; from Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” (“Sweet is the lore which nature brings;/ Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things;—We murder to dissect.”) to Hegel’s Phenomenology. (In natural science, the “excellent . . . cannot escape the

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fate of being . . . deprived of life and Spirit, of being flayed and then seeing its skin wrapped around a lifeless knowledge and its conceit.”) See The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 31. 36. The Laputans also speak in a recondite mathematical language—see Gulliver’s Travels, p. 153: “Their Ideas are perpetually conversant in Lines and Figures. If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other Geometrical Terms.” 37. See Shapin and Schaffer. This last point is also made by Zaret. 38. See Swift, Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in A Tale, pp. 126–141. 39. Ibid., p. 131. 40. Ibid., p. 129; p. 130; p. 131. 41. Ibid., p. 129. 42. Idem., Gulliver’s Travels, pp. 91–92. 43. Ibid., p. 20. 44. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 90. 45. Swift, Mechanical Operation, p. 130. 46. Ibid., pp. 128–129. 47. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 48. Quote in F. P. Lock, “Swift and the Revolution,” in Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), pp. 262–272, quotation p. 265. Pope, for his part, will issue a series of widely read poems, late in his career, announcing that he has relinquished his public vocation as a poet and will retreat henceforth into the carefully staged privacy of Twickenham. See the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, which contains the lines: “Go, lofty poet! and in such a crowd,/ Sing thy sonorous verse—but not aloud.” Lines 108–109. 49. Cf. the “Dedication” to Montaigne’s Essays, or these lines from II.18: “My purpose is to . . . amuse someone who has a personal interest in knowing me, a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image.” 50. Mark Rose—Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 59—nabs Pope in precisely the same sleight-of-hand: “Despite [his] representation of himself as a natural poet writing to amuse himself and his friends, Pope was passionately concerned with all aspects of the book trade, including his copyrights.” See also Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1750: “Hackney for Bread” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 51. Terry Belanger, “Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), pp. 5–27. If we follow Habermas, then we are not to take

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this point polemically. To say that the early-eighteenth-century press was newly commodified is not a straightforward gibe. Habermas is not simply bemoaning the commodification of the press, as some caricature of Frankfurt School Marxism would have him do. On the contrary, Habermas wants us to linger over the benefits of commodification, temporary and partial though these benefits may be. Of all his predecessors, it may be Walter Benjamin with whom the none-too-cabbalistic Habermas shares least. And yet there is a Benjaminian quality to Habermas’s argument here that has not been sufficiently appreciated—an intransigent optimism, an eagerness to discover new forms of praxis within the banalities of the capitalist everyday. Indeed, Habermas takes his language directly from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” although one is tempted to say that he recasts Benjamin as a Protestant: The spectacles of feudal power, as well as the art of court and church, had an aura; they were harnessed to the protocols of pomp and ritual typical of pre-modern culture. But this aura was dispelled when the feudal hierarchy gave way to the prosaic mechanisms of state bureaucracy—and when art and the press were shunted together into the marketplace. It is, therefore, precisely in commodity culture, a culture in which art and information sit unceremoniously on the shelves, that critical reflection becomes momentarily possible—until, that is, capital develops new forms of spectacle grounded in the commodity itself. 52. Gallagher, p. 95. 53. Stephens, quoted in Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 10. See also David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); and A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson: Being a Study of the Relation between Author, Patron, Publisher and Public, 1728–1780 (London: R. Holden, 1927). 54. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 107ff. 55. The crucial point here is that Tory writing invites us to see this as a fairly dire contradiction, but I don’t mean to suggest it is necessary to experience selfcritique in these terms. It is possible, of course, to say that critique is naturally reflexive, in which case the contradiction outlined here loses its sting: if the public sphere insists on the value of critique, then it will surely turn critique on itself as much as anything else. This is no contradiction—or to the extent that it is, it is a contradiction easily weathered, for it is just the logic of critique unfolding. If we can grasp the difference between these two ways of experiencing critique’s reflexivity, then we can grasp the difference between the Tory satirists and Addison and Steele, with whom they otherwise seem to share so much. Addison and Steele’s Spectator is a critique of critique in this other, less harried sense, in which the public sphere comes, with genial good humor, to subject itself to self-review. See especially Spectator No. 124. 56. Richard Blackmore, Satyr Against Wit (London, 1700). 57. Swift, Tale, p. 113.

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58. Ibid., p. 45. 59. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Grammarians, trans. D. L. Blank (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 37. 60. Swift, Tale, p. 82. 61. Cadenus and Vanessa, lines 626–627. The poem then promptly glosses the “common forms” as “the vulgar forms,” line 630. 62. For Swift the ironist, see F. R. Leavis, “The Irony of Swift,” in The Common Pursuit (New York: New York University Press, 1964), pp. 73–87; and A. E. Dyson, The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony (London: Macmillan, 1965). For a deconstructionist Swift, see James Gill, “Pharmakon, Pharmakos, and Aporetic Structure in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to . . . the Houyhnhnms,” in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 181–205; and the essays collected in Jonathan Swift, ed. Nigel Wood (London: Longman, 1999). 63. This is already fairly clear in Pope’s (non-satirical) attempt to redeem modernity by building a Great Tradition; to initiate at long last the Renaissance that inexplicably passed England by. See especially the Essay on Criticism, lines 693–744. 64. Habermas, p. 51. 65. Quoted in Bertrand Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), p. 9. 66. Habermas, p. 88. 67. Feminist critiques of Habermas proceed, roughly, along two lines: there are the (fairly sympathetic) theoretical accounts of Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. See Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Calhoun, pp. 73–98; and Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Calhoun, pp. 109–142. And there are also the (rather less sympathetic) historical accounts, of which the most prominent remains Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 68. See Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984). 69. See especially Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Calhoun, pp. 377–401. 70. On the notion of the “counterpublic,” see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); also Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.”

8. Skepticism and the Novel 1. William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 6.

352

Notes to Pages 264–278

2. John Pocock’s work on English Machiavellianism is so good that it almost makes intellectual history seem respectable. See The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Virtue, Commerce, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 3. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 55. 4. Franco Moretti makes a similar argument with regard to the figure of the absolute monarch in English tragedy. See his Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983), p. 43. 5. Fredric Jameson, “Ideology of the Text,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986: Volume 1, Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 17–71, quotation p. 52. 6. But see also the alternate chronology that Jameson provides in “Metacommentary”—also in The Ideologies of Theory, pp. 3–16—where he distinguishes not between the art tale and the novel, but between the early novel of action or the event and the psychological novel of the nineteenth century. 7. Aphra Behn, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” in An Anthology of C17 Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 546. See also Jane Barker’s Love’s Intrigues—in Popular Fiction by Women, ed. Paula Backscheider and John Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 91–111—in which the heroine greets an unhappy event with the following sentence: “Now whether this Affliction was laid on me by the immediate Hand of Providence, or that Fate, or my Constellations produced it by secondary Causes, I knew not.” (98) 8. Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 9. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 8. 10. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 873; p. 890; p. 874. 11. Defoe, pp. 329–330: “[A]fter some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy Circumstances, I feel into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy also; the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime.” 12. See Aphra Behn, at the beginning of Oroonoko—ed. Lore Metzger (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 1—where she laments having to tell stories “in a World where he [the reader] finds Diversions for every Minute, new and strange.” 13. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 17.

Notes to Pages 278–279

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14. The early novel has its collaborators: See, for instance, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 130 : “what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a secret and conceal’d cause.” 15. From fortune to causality—one wonders, perhaps, what a Nietzschean account of this transition would look like. To judge by Thomas Kavanagh’s Enlightenment & the Shadows of Chance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), it would look gripping and lunatic at once. I say gripping, because Kavanagh assembles his narrative with real sweep; he possesses a keen and dramatic sense of historical transformation. Early modern history, he argues, proceeded in three stages. First, there was a pre-capitalist culture of aristocratic individuality and risk, full of venturesome nobles who embraced the battlefield and the bet and the duel, without submitting their every action to niggling bourgeois calculation. Then there came the first great experiments in capitalist finance, such as the South Sea Company or Law’s System, and these seemed poised to generalize the aristocratic culture of chance, perhaps even to democratize it, to yank the entire social order into the realm of risk. Such a capitalism—this capitalism that never happened, modernity’s missed opportunity—would have fostered the noble ethos of hazard, not stifled it. But those experiments failed, and capitalism was left instead with a cringing Enlightenment bourgeoisie bent on “domesticating” or “emasculating” chance, feminizing it with the estrogen of “probability” and “normalcy” and “averages.” The eighteenth century, then, presents us with a choice—a choice between those texts that expunge chance and set a drab world of causality and social averages in its place, and those texts that keep faith with the aristocratic experience of chance. The early novel, in this scenario, is the villain, enemy of chance, agent of constriction. I say lunatic, because Kavanagh’s account is, of course, only possible if you daydream your way into a certain class delusion. A novelistic culture, Kavanagh writes, demands a “real renunciation of our individuality and our freedom.” (251) But he himself has already made it clear that in a pre-capitalist social order, the nobility are the only ones who even count as individuals. So this particular “our”—“our individuality and our freedom”—only works if we imagine ourselves, inexplicably, as ancien régime aristocrats. 16. This is the line followed by Leo Damrosch in his God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 17. See Pocock in the Machiavellian Moment, pp. 453–454: “Credit typifies the instability of secular things, brought about by the interactions of particular human wills, appetites and passions.” It is “not simply the wheel of fortune running eccentrically about its unmoving axis . . . it is part of a huge new force in human affairs, creating new modes of war and prosperity, a new balance of power in Europe, a new conquest of the planet.”

354

Notes to Pages 280–288

18. Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 19. The first citation is from Sherman’s abstract page; the second from Ingrassia (6); the third is no citation, but a paraphrase of one of Diedre Lynch’s central arguments in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 20. For a crucial exception, see James Thompson’s excellent Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 21. This need is particularly felt in the face of Ingrassia’s work, with its outright celebration of finance and commercial culture, which its portrays as a middleclass carnival of subversion, emancipating elite women and the bourgeoisie from a civic humanism that is “highly nostalgic” and thus doesn’t merit serious consideration. (20) See also Sherman, who writes off any opposition to credit as a “Puritan distaste” (17) and applauds the market for unsettling discourse. 22. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 2, p. 1095. 23. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 86. 24. Bruce G. Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 170. 25. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, History, p. 69. 26. Ibid., p. 69. 27. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 214–215. 28. Godwin, p. 21. 29. Anachronistic readings of Sterne tend, unsurprisingly, to focus on these formal properties: the classic essay in this regard is Viktor Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, pp. 25–60. Shklovsky aligns Sterne with Cubism and the Futurists. See also J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative Middles: A Preliminary Outline,” Genre 11 (1978), pp. 375–387; Ralph Flores, The Rhetoric of Doubtful Authority: Deconstructive Readings of Self-Questioning Narratives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and the essays collected in Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism, ed. David Pierce and Peter de Voogd (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). Claims for Sterne’s modernity do sometimes extend onto the ethical and political front. See, in particular, Jens Martin Gurr, Tristram Shandy and the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999); and Donald Wehrs, “Levinas and Sterne: From the Ethics of the Face to the Aesthetics of

Notes to Pages 288–296

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Unrepresentability,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), pp. 311–329. 30. See, in order, I.2, p. 36; I.9, p. 45; VII.18, p. 478; I.21, p. 88. 31. See Milton’s “At a Solemn Music,” in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968), pp. 167–170. 32. Sterne, I.21, p. 89. 33. See Sterne, I.5, p. 40. “I have been the continual sport of what the world calls fortune; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal evil;—yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, that in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small HERO sustained.” 34. Ibid., II.4, p. 111; III.23, p. 215. 35. See, for instance, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 137–138: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency; part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender.” 36. This turn has been especially pronounced among scholars of what contingency prohibits us from calling the English Revolution. See, among others, Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Mark Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (London: Penguin, 1996). 37. See Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 38. See, for instance, Simon Dentith’s comments on Shandy in Parody (London: Routledge, 2000). 39. See, respectively, David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 22; and Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 90. There are other Bakhtins, to be sure, of which none is more compelling than Ken Hirschkop’s. See his Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 40. Walter Shandy’s lament—from II.19, p. 161—is representative in this regard: “cursed luck . . . for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature,—and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.” For Toby’s whistling, see III.6. 41. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 309. 42. Sterne, V.16, p. 369. 43. This is what Michael McKeon refers to as the “double negation” of early modern skepticism. See The Origins of the English Novel, p. 119.

356

Notes to Pages 296–298

44. Read in this light, Tristram’s apostrophe to his dead Uncle Toby becomes the novel’s representative passage. See II.3, pp. 110–111: “Stop! my dear uncle Toby,—stop!—go not one foot further into this thorny and bewildered track,— intricate are the steps! intricate are the masses of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom, KNOWLEDGE, will bring upon thee.—O my uncle!—fly—fly—fly from it as from a serpent.—Is it fit, good-natured man! thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings?—Alas! ’twill exasperate thy symptoms,—check thy perspirations,—evaporate thy spirits,—waste thy animal strength,—dry up thy radical moisture,—bring thee into a costive habit of body, impair thy health,—and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age.—O my uncle! my uncle Toby!” Fit readers, of course, are meant to absorb Tristram’s plea in its full urgency. They are meant to heed the warning that Toby could not: knowledge will kill you. 45. The case for the satirical Sterne has been made most forcefully by Melvyn New. See especially his Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of Tristram Shandy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1969). That early book makes scant mention of Pyrrhonism, but New has since set himself up as the custodian of a growing literature on Sterne and skepticism. See New, “Sterne and the Narrative of Determinateness”; J. T. Parnell, “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition”; and Peter M. Briggs, “Locke’s Essay and the Tentativeness of Tristram Shandy”—all of them in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. New (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998). Also: Donald Wehrs, “Sterne, Cervantes, Montaigne: Fideistic Skepticism and the Rhetoric of Desire,” in New Casebooks: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), pp. 133–155. 46. There has been no programmatic reading of Shandy as novel, in the sense that New’s book is a programmatic reading of Shandy as satire. But it was the guiding generic assumption of most accounts before New and of many accounts since. For an uncontroversial example, see Max Byrd, Tristram Shandy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). 47. See, for instance, Dialectical Imagination, p. 11; also pp. 262–263: “the internal stratification of a unified national language into social dialects, group manners, professional jargons, generic languages, the languages of generations and age groups, the languages of tendencies, the languages of authorities, the languages of intellectual circles and passing fashions, the languages of sociopolitical days and even hours.” 48. Sterne, p. 88. 49. On this point see James Thompson. 50. See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, p. 173: “The uncoupling of system and lifeworld is experienced in modern society as a particular kind of objectification: the social system definitively bursts out of the horizon of the lifeworld, escapes from the intuitive knowledge of everyday communicative

Notes to Pages 299–306

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practice, and is henceforth accessible only to the counterintuitive knowledge of the social sciences developing since the eighteenth century.” 51. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford, 1987). 52. See Lynch’s Economy of Character. 53. This is the chapter heading to Book 2, Chapter 4. 54. See Godwin, p. 3. 55. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia, ed. Robert W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), Chapter 26. 56. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 41. 57. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 32. 58. Ibid., p. 173 59. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 121 and 128. 60. The novel, for what it’s worth, is absolutely explicit about the decline of the Shandy family. See VIII.3, p. 517: “This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that in all our numerous family, for these four generations, we count no more than one archbishop, a Welch judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank—In the sixteenth century, we boast of no less than a dozen alchymists.” It is no less clear about the decline of the nobility more generally. See I.11, p. 53. The Shandys are living in an England where “one half of the best surnames . . . in the course of years, have generally undergone as many chops and changes as their owners.” 61. Johnson, Chapter 1. 62. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), No. 136, p. 38. 63. Thus Proudhon, in Justice in the Revolution in the Church, excerpted in Selected Writings, ed. Stewart Edwards and trans. Elizabeth Fraser (New York: Anchor, 1969), p. 82, translation modified: “If labor were developed and organized according to the principles of industrial growth and if it fulfilled all the required conditions of variety, health, intelligence, art, dignity, passion and legitimate gain (all of which it contains in essence), why should it not, even as far as pleasure is concerned, become preferable to games and dancing, fencing, gymnastics, entertainments and all the other distractions which man in his poverty has invented as a means of recovering, by gentle means of mind and body, from the mental and physical fatigue caused by being a slave to labor?” 64. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment in Utopia,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 371–381. 65. Sterne, IV.32, p. 333. 66. See Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming—here preferable to Jephcott—(New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 141.

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Notes to Pages 306–317

67. Sterne, I.11, p. 54. 68. See Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258. 69. See, for instance, Graham Pechey, “On the Borders of Bakhtin: Dialogization, Decolonization,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987), pp. 59–84, quotation pp. 62–63: “Any sociopolitical project of centralization or hegemony has always and everywhere to posit itself against the ubiquitously decentralizing (centrifugal) forces within ideology. ‘Carnival’ is the name Bakhtin gives to these forces in so far as they find expression in consciously parodic representations across a range of signifying practices; ‘the novel’ is the name he gives to their entry into the forms of writing at any time in history but most influentially in the case of Rabelais and the line of comic fiction descending from him.”

Epilogue 1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). 2. Thus Williams, in Keywords (rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 24: “I do not share the optimism, or the theories which underlie it, of that popular kind of inter-war and surviving semantics which supposed that clarification of difficult words would help in the resolution of disputes conducted in their terms and often evidently confused by them.” 3. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 4. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 27: “It is an innate peculiarity of philosophical writing to confront anew, with every radical turn in thought, the question of Darstellung.” 5. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), p. 369. 6. Anybody wishing to provide Mandeville with a concrete Pyrrhonist lineage need look no further than Montaigne, whose essay I.22 is entitled “One man’s profit is another man’s harm.” 7. This is clearest in Remark G, which is structured entirely like an argument on both sides of the question: Drunkenness is a vice, corrosive of human virtue and the common weal. Equally, drunkenness is an economic good—it is merely a special kind of consumption and thus at the very heart of the miller’s, the brewer’s, the inn-keeper’s trade. (See The Fable, pp. 89ff.) 8. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Discipline, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 139–153, quotation p. 148.

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9. See Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 206, n. 35. 10. See “Belief and Resistance,” p. 139. 11. Ibid., p. 140. 12. Ibid., p. 152 13. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937). The really crucial sections, for my purposes, come in Book IV, “Of Systems of Political Oeconomy,” and especially in Chapter One, “Of the Principle of the Commercial or Mercantile System” (pp. 398–419). 14. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 83–222; p. 183. 15. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), p. 47. 16. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974). See #10: “Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties.” And #11: “[M]arriage offers one of the last possibilities of forming human cells within universal inhumanity.” (p. 31) See also #2: “Grassy Seat.” 17. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 3. 18. Chris Connery, “Actually Existing Left Conservatism,” boundary 2 26 (1999), pp. 3–11, quotation p. 11.

q

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q Index

Adorno, Theodor, 15–16, 57, 116, 138, 192–195, 203, 220–221, 272, 306, 320–321 Althusser, Louis, 5–7, 12, 16, 290 Armstrong, Nancy, 299 atheism, 52–53 Austen, Jane, 305 Bacon, Francis, 126–129, 141–143, 147, 172–173, 192, 194, 218–219 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 59, 291–293, 295, 308 Balzac, Honoré de, 287 Barker, Jane, 268 Barthes, Roland, 14, 81 Behn, Aphra, Emperor of the Moon, 178–183; Lucky Chance, 155; “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” 268–269 Benjamin, Walter, 269 Birely, Robert, 104–105 Blackmore, Richard, 253 Blanchot, Maurice, 59–60 Bodin, Jean, 169–170 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 233 Boyle, Robert, 123–124, 212–213, 246–247 Brahe, Tycho, 125, 219 Brodhead, Richard, 253 Brunner, John, 135–140 Bruno, Giordano, 121, 125 Burke, Edmund, 315 Burney, Fanny, 266, 305 Campanella, Tommaso, 127, 141–143, 146, 219

Cavell, Stanley, 341n10 Charron, Pierre, 64 Cicero, 32 Cleland, John, 231, 264, 266 credit, 278–282 Cynicism, 47 Defoe, Daniel, 231, 266, 270–276, 279 detective fiction, 136–137, 140 Derrida, Jacques, 28 dialogues, 140, 144–147, 149, 156, 214 Diogenes, 46 domestic novels, 298–302 Dyer, Richard, 306 Eagleton, Terry, 260, 311 ekphrasis, 131–133 empire and imperial writing, 120–121, 134, 139, 154–155, 241–242 English Civil Wars and Revolution, 120, 126, 180, 187–189, 216, 234, 241, 250 Enlightenment, 3–4, 10–11, 15–16 epics, 237–238, 292 Epicureanism, 47 Erasmus, 87 essays, theory of, 58–59 Fanshawe, Richard, 279 Ferguson, Adam, 302, 304 fideism 50, 88–90, 103 Fielding, Henry, 266, 277–278, 301 Foucault, Michel, 16, 192–194 Frankfurt School, 5, 10–12, 192, 313, 322

376

Index

Freud, Sigmund, 133 Frye, Northrop, 294 Gallagher, Catherine, 251–252 Gay, John, 227 Glanvill, Joseph, 119–124, 208–211 Godwin, William, 262–263, 284–287, 301 Habermas, Jürgen, 225–230, 257–261, 282 Hadot, Pierre, 45–46 Haywood, Eliza, 268 Hegel, G. W. F., 115–116, 203 Hellenistic philosophy, 45–49 Hervet, Gentian, 86 Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 122–123, 178–208; Behemoth, 188; Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, 184; and Judaism, 190–193; Leviathan, 200, 314–315; and materialism, 199–204; and prose style, 183–184, 189; state of nature, 185–186; and theology, 195–199 Horkheimer, Max, 7–8 horror and the Gothic, 133–134, 136–137, 140, 210, 239, 244–245 Howard, Robert, 162–164, 180 humanism, 67–79, 144, 154–155, 188–190, 194, 238–240, 243–244 Hume, David, 64, 327n7 Jameson, Fredric, 28, 267–268, 320 Johnson, Samuel, 304 Jonson, Ben, 172; Every Man Out of His Humour, 168–169; Volpone and The Alchemist, 174–176 Kyd, Thomas, 164–168 Lanham, Richard, 22–24, 36, 59 La Mothe le Vayer, 88 Lem, Stanislav, 129–137, 140–141 Lennox, Charlotte, 266 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 14, 60 literature, category of, 256–259 Locke, John, 318 Luhmann, Niklas, 193–194, 204–206 Lukács, Georg, 43–44, 308, 318–319 Lynch, Deirdre, 280, 300 Lyotard, Jean-François, 321–322 lyric poetry, 149–152

Macaulay, Thomas, 154 Machiavelli, Niccolò 16, 232–233, 263–265, 269 magic, 126, 176, 180–181, 246 Mandeville, Bernard, 16, 315–316, 318 Marcuse, Herbert, 45 Marlowe, Christopher, 2–4, 156, 175–176 Maravall, José, 102 Marston, John, 159 Marx, Karl, 6–7, 16, 43, 53–54, 96, 271, 312–313, 318–319 masques, 181–182 Massinger, Philip, 180 millenarianism, 126, 249 Milton, John, 93, 288 Montaigne, Michel de, 26, 31, 36, 39, 57–116, 255, 293; “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 68–69, 78, 89; “Cruelty, Mother of Cowardice,” 98–99; and obedience, 90, 101–103; “On the Custom of Wearing Clothes”; “On Pedantry,” 70–77; “On Vain Subtleties,” 113; and prose style, 64–65, 105–106; and tradition, 91–94 More, Thomas, 127–129, 140–147, 217–219 neo-Platonism, 121, 143, 149–150 Newton, Isaac, 125 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 61, 219 Paracelsianism, 215–217 Pascal, Blaise, 304 Plato, 28–29, 34, 37, 41, 46, 147 Pocock, J. G. A., 15, 228, 232–233, 282–283 Pope, Alexander, 227–244; Dunciad, 227, 230, 236–244; Essay on Criticism, 230; Rape of the Lock, 231, 305; Windsor Forest, 266 Popkin, Richard, 328n9, 329n10 post-structuralism, 5, 10–15, 55–56, 114, 193–194, 219–221 pragmatism, 5, 10–11, 13, 45, 84 Pyrrhonism, 11–12, 21–51, 254, 299; and the argument on both sides of a question, 21–22, 35, 59, 77, 145, 156, 209, 243, 314; and ideology, 12, 94; and infinite regress, 30–31, 92–93; and the suspension of judgment, 32–35, 38, 64; and tranquility, 34, 39, 42, 89, 116

Index Reformation, 65–66, 86–109 revisionist history, 120–121, 188, 216, 290 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 64 Royal Society, 171, 174, 246 satire, 131, 140, 227–236, 255–256, 294–296 science fiction, 130, 141, 245–246, 302 science, philosophy of, 7–8, 119–124, 171–174, 184, 202, 208–221, 250 Scientific Revolution, 3–4, 119–221, 244–249 Schmitt, Carl, 185, 190 de Sade, 16 sentimentalism, 137–138, 140 Sextus Empiricus, 21–51, 87, 90, 254; Against the Grammarians, 107; Against the Rhetoricians, 35–43; Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 24–35, 50 Shadwell, Thomas, 1–4, 159, 175 Shelley, Mary, 302–303 Sidney, Philip, see lyric poetry Smith, Adam, 318–319 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 84, 316–318 solipsism, 52–53 sonnets, see lyric poetry Spinoza, Baruch, 218 Stanhope, Philip, 257–258 Starkey, George, 149

377

Starobinski, Jean, 61 Stephen, Leslie, 252 Sterne, Laurence, 130, 287–309 Stoicism, 47–49 Swift, Jonathan, 227–236, 244–250, 288, 293–295, 299; Battle of the Books, 234, 236, 254; Cadenus and Vanessa, 255; Gulliver’s Travels, 2–4, 153, 227, 231, 245, 248; Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 247–248; “Modest Proposal,” 235; poems, 231–232; Tale of a Tub, 230, 232, 235, 245, 255 theater, 153–177, 178–183 tolerance and toleration, 31, 89–90, 94–101, 108 travel writing, 139–144, 147, 149 Trostskyism, 219–220 Tuck, Richard, 328n9 utopias, 125–147, 148, 305–306, 217–219 Warner, Michael, 225–227, 260 Weber, Max, 282 Williams, Raymond, 310–311 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 301 Wycherley, William, 156 Zilsel, Edgar, 212–213