The Brooklyn Rail

Perhaps because I began the study of literature and visual art with the illuminated books of William Blake, I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of anachronism. Was Blake a throwback, a medieval monk creating hand-made illustrated poems in the age of the printing press? Or a belated survivor of the seventeenth century English Revolution, with its Levellers, Enthusiasts, Ranters, and Adamites, reading Milton naked in his garden with his wife? Or was he the prophet addressing “Children of a future age, / Reading this indignant page, / Know that in a former time / Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.” Wasn’t Blake a throwback to an even earlier role of the Biblical prophet, dreaming of dinner parties with Isaiah and Ezekiel and railing against the undeserved authority of the Greek and Roman classics, which, when united with crusading Christian imperialism, had plagued the world with endless war and colonial oppression for centuries? Why did Blake have to wait 150 years to enjoy his moment of timeliness in the Age of Aquarius, when the Sixties transformed him into both a mass and elite culture hero, cleansing the “doors of perception” in rock and roll, prompting vortexes on the walls of Jackson Pollock’s Long Island studio, and inspiring new accounts of madness in the work of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault.

I therefore read Fredric Jameson’s mandate to “always historicize” as itself an anachronistic gesture, a call to push back against the dominant intellectual fashions of Postmodernism in the 1980s, with their flaccid assertions of pluralism, relativism, and neoliberal pronouncements of the end of history and the final triumph of capitalism. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe wants to resist Fredric Jameson’s “always historicize” in the name of the noncommittal adverbs “often” or “sometimes,” because he believes “the slogan has led to all sorts of worthless art being protected or even recommended by using historical goodness to suppress aesthetics of any kind.” Well, maybe. Are we thinking of Socialist Realism then? Gilbert-Rolfe’s rear-guard defense of old-fashioned forms of aesthetic judgment based in “charm and complexity” betrays its own anachronistic nostalgia for the old days of formalism.

I read Jameson’s mandate to historicize, however, within a much larger philosophical mandate, namely the insistence on thinking dialectically as a method, and as an acknowledgment of the fundamentally social character of human thought in unending dialogue, conversation, debate, and contradiction. This ancient philosophical tradition, tracing its pedigree from Plato to Hegel to Adorno, also enjoyed its Blakean moment in the dogmatic assertion that “Without Contraries Is no Progression: Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are Necessary to Human Existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” It is easy to forget that this dogma cannot simply be attributed to Blake, but is the “Voice of the Devil” in a dramatic text called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which in the year 1793 cannot be published without mortal danger to its author.

Historicizing and anachronizing, then, are in my view “necessary to Human existence,” mutually interdependent contraries that cannot even be thought of without reference to one another. But this is not the dialectic that Gilbert- Rolfe is invoking. The antagonism that he wants to oppose to historicism is aesthetics, formalism, and perhaps even a kind of phenomenological presentism that insists on the sensuous presence of a work of art as the thing that demands our attention. It is highly ironic, then, that he chooses as his antagonist Fredric Jameson, the American Marxist critic who did the most to deliver the news of Western Marxism in Europe to an oblivious American audience in the 1960s. The title of Jameson’s pioneering book, Marxism and Form (1971) signals his timely rescue of the Marxist tradition from the era of historicist and ideological reductivism that Gilbert- Rolfe is attacking as “historical goodness.” Jameson simultaneously challenged vulgar Marxism and vulgar American liberalism, conducting intellectual warfare on two fronts. That is why he is such an essential figure in the evolution of modern critical theory, not to mention art history, aesthetics, media and cultural studies, and literary criticism.

So yes, I want to “always historicize,” but I want to do so while “always aestheticizing” the object or event or image under consideration, paying attention to its immediate, sensuous presence, including its charm and complexity. When it comes to history, my dogmatic question is, “History as opposed to what?” And that takes us immediately to history as opposed to itself in its ambiguity as the name of “what happened in the past” to the story of what happened in the past—or is happening in the present. And this only strikes the first chord of the larger symphony of history in its engagement with nature, ideas, technology, everyday life, and the much larger sphere of time beyond the human. We formalists, presentists, and anarchist anachronists will have plenty to work with in the multifarious forms of history, not to mention the history of forms. Meanwhile, we might want to contemplate Jameson’s other memorable observation that becomes more timely every day: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”