Revolutionary Tradition

In contemporary academies more time is spent applying for grants that would allow us to write than doing the writing itself. The imposition of grants leads to all sorts of corruptions; marketisations of “research areas”, subordination to mandated research frameworks, outsourcing of teaching for the so-called reclamation of research labour-time, consolidation of accepted or conventionalised networks of citation (like the five- to ten-year rule for “outdated” sources), and degradations in spirit and style in favour of slipshod output. Research has entered the world of speculative capital; the alleged market value of a “project” decided in advance of its completion. Collateral damage is, as Gayatri Spivak has noted, the death of discipline itself, an enforced interdisciplinarity that, so the argument goes, destroys the integrity of the integrated disciplines, and artificial – rather than entrenched – cross-disciplinary relations.1 Discipline as such is now a threat to research.

Walter Benjamin famously proclaimed that in every era “the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it”.2 Benjamin takes his civilisational cues from Karl Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, who uses the phrase “revolutionäre Überlieferung” in reference to how the Revolution of 1848 parodied that of the period 1793–1795.3 We have only to recognise that in our time we are losing view of this idea; that revolutions come through traditions, and that tradition, or at least certain traditions, must oppose conformism. For Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, tradition is one of the four key elements of hermeneutics. Tradition is encapsulated in Überlieferung, a word that means something similar to the handing-down from the past.4 It leads not to the passive attitude but rather the question or self-questioning from an historical position, necessary for hermeneutics to take place. One can see how all this has come to pass in the present, how we have lost our Überlieferung, but we must specify too the particular disciplines or traditions of which we speak: criticism. Criticism is the result of revolutions in reading, in the inheritance and alteration of tradition, as difficult as it may be to claim this today. But has it suffered a counter-revolutionary blow? Is that which replaces criticism also (counter)-revolutionary? We may have advocated reform or renovation at least, but alas no longer can this suffice. There are those who claim criticism has been replaced either by theory (“Theory’s Empire”)5 or a certain vulgar type or brand of literary historicism (I’m thinking here of Jane Gallop’s 2007 essay on the historicisation of literary studies).6 Either may be true; we can at least say criticism has not been enriched by them. There may have been a time when we could have advocated not overhaul but enrichment. There was a window of opportunity once where history and theory may have worked to the betterment of criticism, not to its destruction. This window is now closed shut; we are left with criticism’s destruction in the wake of the neoliberal revolution.

The question of a critical tradition is tied up with the history of criticism within or alongside institutions. Is it a coincidence that the destruction of criticism occurred concomitantly with the destruction of the university? Capitalist modes of production, sometimes advanced, but never profitable on the plane of social relations, ultimately destroyed the contemporary university (to leave problems with the pre-neoliberal university aside), or more exactly, contemporary universities primarily in the capitalist West fell to the neoliberal phase of the capitalist mode of development in a process which arguably began in Chile after the fall of Salvador Allende in 1973 (thus outside the West). There, as Raewyn Connell puts it in The Good University, the neoliberal turn was made “at the point of a bayonet”.7 Neoliberalism, at least in the Chilean example, came first as a United States imperialist military exercise. In Chile the phenomenon of “Taxi Professors” – casualised teachers who “rush from university to university to teach different classes” – came as a result of the brutal and bloody military violence that ushered in this new “market regime” imposed by the United States of America.8 I would go so far as to suggest that the neoliberal phase of capitalist development also led to, or is leading to, the downfall of the critical tradition. For neoliberalism is revolutionary too: it cannot handle traditions of this kind. We may harness critical traditions against it, but its power is immense, and its determination to recognise only one form of value, an arbitrary market value, cannot be underestimated. Tradition in itself may not be much, but contained within it is a peculiar element of the solution for a greater disciplinary independence, since it has now found itself more able to stand “apart from” or “above” the neoliberal behemoth and is, by virtue of its inherent long-term ability to resist conformity, less susceptible to integration into neoliberal forms of value.

I suggest this not to advocate a pure regression of action, as if there is some prior moment to return to that can fix everything. By no means should we hearken after the past and dwell upon what was lost; we need only recognise the revolutionary potential that lies dormant in the critical tradition itself. Not all is lost because a weapon we have is our reading and readings. We cannot stop reading, and readings carry us on into the future. In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye wrote:

It might seem well-nigh mad today (a time in which there are so many “crises” that it is hard to tell which crisis it is of which one speaks) to run around proclaiming that criticism is prophetic; but one must experiment with it. We know from all Frye’s writings that he meant the critical tradition was linked to the judgemental tradition of social prophecy, of the kind Michael Walzer speaks of in Interpretation and Social Criticism.10 Where the liberation of “human creative energy” is concerned, we are speaking here of something far greater than a superficial “creative-critical” rapprochement we hear a lot about today. On the one hand the critic must be prophetic because of the prophets and prophetic literature, or must become so in order to muster the courage to face the prophetic literature, which I will go into further below in light of Bruce Gardiner’s prophetic reading of Walt Whitman. Yet on another register criticism simply passes itself on to the next generation of readers because it offers new or visionary readings and methods of readings for it. Imagine claiming to a grant supplier today the necessity of passing a new visionary reading on to a new generation of readers! Yet this is precisely what Bruce Gardiner, who I argue is both a revolutionist and traditionalist, has done for us. Bruce’s teaching is necessarily and truly interdisciplinary in that it can connect traditions while recognising that the dialectics of tradition respects to a certain degree disciplinary integrity and depth, and that disciplinary integrity and depth is a crucial precursor to any interdisciplinary contact. Bruce’s teaching was and is “useful” as much as “valuable”. It can be truly put to use. As such, it is hard to speak of such teaching in terms of “value” under the terms ascribed to it today. Value, particularly social value, must also be rigorously discussed and not readily assumed. Criticism presupposes no value. Criticism unsurprisingly seeks to critique all value, which makes it peculiarly susceptible to condemnation in our time.

If all this is so, if criticism has been overrun by a revolution (or counter-revolution), what has come forth to replace it? Very little has replaced it, to our advantage. The degradation of the situation is such that it is clear; it is of the broadest benefit to bring back the basic tools of criticism, to return to the thrill of enigmas, emendation, divinations of meanings and revelation of countermeanings, to bring forth again the thrill of “English” in more than one language, to borrow from Colin MacCabe’s 1984 defence of the trivium.11 It makes sense in the global arena, far even from the imperial metropoles; in the English departments of the Second12 and Third Worlds, where such tools are largely still taught due to a belated acquisition of method and a relative insulation from the dynamics of neoliberal austerity in developed metropoles. The deeper value of criticism is surely the broadness of its applicability. It is of benefit to students, readers, teachers, enthusiasts, and possibly even to the livelihood of writing and writers themselves, who may resist criticism yet rely on it more than they are consciously aware. Perhaps we can revive a term used by those who have concentrated some effort on uncovering the divinatory in hermeneutics, from Schleiermacher to Frank Kermode and Tilottama Rajan: divinatory criticism, or visionary reading.13 Such modes of criticism are arguably the very vein of accessibility and access. In the stupor and confusion of our time, visionary reading holds true because it passes what Kermode identifies as the “gift” of reading from one reader to the next. In the teachings of Bruce Gardiner we find the truest expression of revolution within the tradition, a passing-down of the gift.

In Gardiner’s final lectures in his posting at the University of Sydney he gave a two-part series on Walt Whitman’s prophetic poetics.14 The question of a prophetic voice that is an American voice is a most difficult one, for an American who speaks from that centre, from the country out of which, and under which, a once new, now false “sign of democracy” pullulates, will surely not find those voices alien enough to constitute a prophetic voice. The key here is not America’s outsideness as colony, but rather Whitman’s outsideness: “No one believed him,” Gardiner says. Not even the Americans, at least not at first; what once was anti-literary did not become literary overnight. Being sad and alienated in one’s country is of course a necessity for any prophet, but Gardiner reminds us it is both prophecy and scripture. Whitman’s prophetic “aspect” is precisely that which is written in the plain or common speech of prophecy, the common speech we primarily identify as prophetic since the literary words of Amos, who spoke against poverty and priesthood in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and whose very outsideness from the “school of prophets” made him the truest of prophets. Amos set in motion the notion of prophecy as writing, as scripture.

The nature of Whitman’s prophetism is thus partial, but still crucial. Extravagant eulogy is also useless. We speak not of any explicit or implicit critique of America that we might find in Whitman, but we can speak of war, or of Whitman’s prophetic voice as partly that of a prophet of destruction and war, not just the Civil War but all wars to come. Geoffrey Hartman, in Minor Prophecies, could find in the voice of “cultural prophecy” all the worst horrors of national and racial destiny.15 In an account of Whitman’s prophetic voice, Yosefa Raz cites Alicia Ostriker’s disavowal (in 1991, the first weeks of the Gulf War) of Whitmanian warmongering in “Drum-Taps”; the grand prophetic voice is culpable, nay condemnable on the level of US geostrategic and geopolitical hegemony.16 Ultimately, what makes Whitman prophetic must eventually be separated from what makes Whitman American. Whitman’s American tradition is not necessarily that of the poetic-prophetic tradition: it could spurn and seed various lines of influence, from Charles Reznikoff’s citational realism to Allen Ginsberg’s mid-century American Personalism, neither of which are essentially prophetic, though they are American. Nor should it trouble us too much that poet-prophets, from Blake to Yeats to Whitman, did not prepare for us the foundation of a new religion. For Whitman it was human poetry that was religion enough. Gardiner’s interest here is rather on the peculiar nature of prophetic voice, which on the one hand is a singular and stand-out voice, rising above carnage to speak loud and clear, yet on the other hand a collocation of many voices. Irreducible to national democracy, characteristically then it is epic poetry and scripture (“script of a preacher’s speech”). It is an uncommon summoning of the common voice of the many. Through theophany it reaches us, or the poet, that is: through manifestation. Whitman is ceaselessly in dialogue with what André D. Neher called prophetic silence,17 most clearly in the 24th section of Song of Myself, which emulates the Hebrew prophetic books of the Nevi’im. “Long dumb voices” come through to Whitman, who speaks them into existence.18

But it is in discussing the sixth section of Leaves of Grass that Gardiner comes closest to the prophetic voice, which arrives through theophany. This does not mean that the poet sits back and receives the divine message without doing anything or putting in any effort. A prophetic poetry is a poetry of guesses just as the critical reading is a criticism of guesses, hints and divinations. It nudges itself into the right position to receive the manifestation, or as Gardiner puts it, “Epiphanies only happen to those primed for them.” In section 6 Whitman is guessing at grass and guessing at the child’s speech; the guessing of a graminologist – expert in grasses – who investigates as any graminologist should, but in the end

The securing of the truth of scripture by no means implies a rigid or priestly following of the order. It is precisely the revolutionary out-speaking of the poetic mode of prophecy that secures the transmission. The triplet of epiphany, theophany and prophecy folds voice through voice through voice – the speaking-through jumping portal to portal, from tongue to tongue to tongue. Prophecy comes as a voice from Outside, as Maurice Blanchot well knew.19 What makes Whitman’s guessing at grasses prophetic is not that it predicts anything, but rather that it joins a larger prophetic tradition outside America. Gardiner emphasises that Whitman was urging his prophetic voice forth, speaking precisely to the revolutionary traditions of Spiritualism, from Swedenborg to the Shakers to Blake. As to “what kind of scripture” we speak of, then, it happens to be a broad array of historical influences constituting what Gardiner calls a “great spiritual revival”:

From Swedenborg, Yeats too derives a prophetic poetics, but the revival to which Whitman was speaking in Blake is the most striking. Surely there is no Whitmanian America without Blake’s America. Blake’s America connects to other regions in global hemispheric space – Europe, Africa, Asia – and is prophetic (social-prophetic) precisely because it praises and critiques revolution, carrying within itself a theory and poetic mythos of all revolution inseparable from its prophetism. Yet the transmission of the poet-prophetic tradition, let us not forget, requires recognition, critical recognition in the first place: Gardiner’s critical recognition of such a tradition is the first leap towards it. To prophetic literature Gardiner can prophetically speak. This is entirely divorced from canon-making, which cannot conceive of it. We have reason to believe the prophetic tradition as such is not limited to any particular historical age at all, nor any one medium. Gardiner draws Hooper and Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1982) into the prophetic tradition.20 Likewise I consider Rochelle Owens a contemporary living example of a poet-prophet who, in poems like “W.C. Fields in French Light” (1986)21 but also in more recent works of hers, gives full voice to this great revival. We have a tradition to wrest from conformism, not one to conserve.

The prophetic tradition, a revolutionary one and a critical one, is poorly understood in our time, most probably because we don’t live in a prophetic age (though we may ever be on the edge of one). It is a tradition which requires revolution to restore its truthful transmission. I wish that all those who have been exposed to the teachings of Bruce Gardiner will carry on the revolutionary traditions they have come into contact with, and that prophet-critics and prophet-poets will advance liberally, without bad encumbrance and yet with good moderation, when times call for them to do so. Carried on the tide of these traditions, we have a sure way to the production of new, visionary readings. It will happen between recognition and judgement, between reflection and direct contact. As Frye said in The Secular Scripture, and please allow me to repeat it one more time, if the critic is to recognise the prophetic, the critic “needs to be prophetic too”. Whether our model is John the Baptist, Amos, Swedenborg, Whitman, Blake, Frye, or indeed Bruce Gardiner, our challenge now is to turn judgement back into recognition, tradition into revolution.

Bibliography