Perry Anderson

Are there any appropriate dimensions to literary biography as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/perry-anderson/different-speeds-same-furies

"Marriage extended rather than altered this, Powell acquiring many an in-law from an Anglo-Irish background to which he was allergic"

To endorse, largely, what has been said: it seems plain that PA likes AP partly because he can identify with the relevant milieu. It is frustrating, in a way, that someone as brilliant as PA lacks perspective on this.

Arrival at the age of 13 at Eton, a year after the Great War had come an end, brought him in Spurling’s view

the underlying stability and continuity that came from a sense he had never known before of belonging to a community that accepted him, the nearest thing to a place where he felt at home. The school became from now on a kind of virtual extended family whose members – however rebarbative, reluctant or remote – stood in all his life for the actual relatives he hadn’t got.

Fortunate in finding himself in a house ‘with a poor reputation and no standards to keep up’, presided over by an easy-going master, he flourished as a member of the school’s Arts Society, did well academically, and emerged more polished and confident socially.

etc.

John Bayley (Letters, 10 January) wonders where I found a Russian tricolour of black, gold and white. The answer is: from the Imperial decree of 1858 which made it the correct flag of the Empire, in concord with the Romanov arms – and from the processions in Moscow today, in which rival banners express attachment to different aspects of the old order. There are those for whom it is more handsome a symbol of the past than the Batavian colours of which Bayley is fond.

Perry Anderson
Los Angeles

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n04/letters#letter5

Mark S's favourite:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n04/letters#letter1

Like Proust he needs an editor

Seriously need to finish Lineages of the Absolutist State one of these days.
So long.
So dense.
Maybe tomorrow.

I read the second half of PA's Powell epic today.

He spends most of the last pages describing AP as a very conservative or right-wing person. To what end? The only logical end really seems to be what has been a very standard PA manner for 30+ years: to play his own kind of Olympian contrarianism by writing with intimate sympathy about people on the political Right and showing no interest in criticizing their political views.

He also manages, in a predictable way, to insult people who are sceptical about Brexit. He doesn't live in the UK and doesn't face the various problems that Brexit has brought and will bring.

(The one thing he has in common with Morrissey, I suppose. Irish blood, Californian heart.)

Unusually, PA picked up in a Guardian literary comment piece. The one striking thing here is that she quotes something he wrote 34 years ago - if that wasn't 'Modernity & Revolution' then I may not have read it:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/06/proust-truly-long-read-stories

This is the post where I ask for help in parsing one of Perry Anderson's sentences (or in this case fragment of a sentence):
"Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older than when she figures for him as Swann’s wife"

(this is an example of one of proust's "lapses of control": who is older than what here?)

Yes, I puzzled over that also. It didn't help that I haven't read Proust for nearly 15 years.

Odette - when Swann's wife - is a certain age

The narrator is now older than this

Now Odette visits Uncle Adolphe

...

is that what it is saying?

Again, much too far from Proust now to know - don't even remember an Uncle Adolphe.

This could conceivably be a failure of prose or of copy-editing.

LRB editing has worsened in the last couple of years.

yours is one possibilty (though it's not made clear why this causes a problem)
viz "Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older thanshe was when she figures for him as Swann’s wife"

another is this:
"Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older thanhe is when she figures for him as Swann’s wife"
(which is presumably impossible since the events come in the opposite order?)

i guess a reckless copy editor might have deleted some such phrase? (why? hardly to save space) -- it's a copy editor's failing in any case, since a good one (me or you) wd have flagged up and problem and insisted something be done about it. i agree abt the worsening in general

oddly enough an adolphe who's an uncle has already been mentioned: not a character in the book but proust's own maternal grandmother's uncle -- so i didn't blink at this till i went back just now confidently to inform you who the adolphe in the book was, and can't (the only extended proust i have read is the extracts in this essay)

in mine the bolded he is the narrator not the uncle lol, basically a copy editor shd have thrown the whole fragment back at PA and insist he restructure it more clearly and quick now, obnubilate indeed

I used to marvel at the absence of basic errors (spelling, grammar) in the LRB - say, 10 to 15 years ago.

They have come in since then, sometimes say 2 or 3 per issue. I suspect also that there were errors way back, say 35 years ago, and the period I am talking about was a high plateau of quality in between.

I think it's that the narrator is older than he (the narrator) is when Odette figures for him as Swann's wife. The narrator, as a child, visits his uncle Adolphe and meets a lady in pink at his house. This lady in pink turns out to be Odette, who lived as a courtesan before she married Swann. But by the basic timeline of the story, Swann and Odette should already be married well before the narrator has reached the age of this episode. So it's unclear whether: (a) the narrator has met Odette Swann, who is implausibly reverting to her relationship with Adolphe, or (b) he's met the unmarried Odette de Crecy, and Proust has confused his timeline.

aha, thank you jmm :)

i guess that is more obvious to someone readily familiar with the text -- so that it unravels itself via information not actually available on the lrb's page -- but even so it is not terrific writing

Which is not something I would often say about Perry Anderson

rereading this essay i'm enjoying it a *lot* but i do think that writing abt fiction rather than reactionary thinkers or "politics from 30,000 feet" sometimes brings out something a bit discordantly antic in PA's prose -- actually not far from the kind of stuff that made me grind my teeth when christopher hitchens was being a bit too clever in his sentence-making (with similar pretext: i.e. when writing abt fiction rather than politics): "making an English equivalent of the Latin ablative absolute one of the trademarks of his style, with sovereign indifference to schoolroom objections to the pendant participle"

that final phrase is somehow just too cute (esp.after the clumsily repeated "to" before it): give a good example perry and stop showing off

or trying to show off

Yes.

There are, iirc, several instances in Proust with timeline issues. I think he died before all seven vols were published but there were probably issues around any editors dealing w/Proust in the first place. Yeah, lol.

Powell is a reactionary thinker writing fiction - making the last section the strongest. Biggest laugh was Anderson sorta going along with Powell's hatred of Auden/British lefties just because Lyndon Johnson quoted the last line of September 1, 1939 in a speech.

That was poor. That poem is one of the greatest modern poems in English that I can think of. PA, for all his brilliance, wouldn't have it in him to write something like it. He's unwise to mock it for the way it has been appropriated. He doesn't even bother to mention (though it's relevant) the best-known fact about the poem - that Auden kept changing the words because he was anxious and uncertain about the meaning.

Is the second part of the Anderson essay still only available to subscribers?

Yes.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n15/perry-anderson/time-unfolded

I still don't really understand PA's attraction to reactionary thinkers, let alone the way that here he makes no criticism of Powell or doesn't seek to articulate a dialectical relation between ideas that PA supposedly disagrees with and fiction that he thinks perceptive.

I think it comes down to contrarianism, in line with Mark's observation about (C) Hitchens.

admittedly i was reading it in bed late but i found part 2 quite hard going: at the start he is wrestling with the mysteries of differential popularity, which ends up being smug and dull -- popular culture is apparently wildly foreign territory to him and he's using adorno and debord as his baedecker, which lol (has he actually ever been to the cinema? he doesn't write as if he knows what films are actually like) (also is it true that there are no blockbusters than run on understatement?)

then he gets into the weeds of translateability (of idiom, of humour) -- which if course bears on global popularity -- but the survey is too sketchy to do the work he wants it to and too sketchy also for you to get into what interesting about it that isn't pretext-driven. d'you think he's actually read dream of the red chamber?

i didn't really follow the point he was making about bayley (who i anyway have zero interest in): that powell went over bayley's head? who cares?

the section on powell's knowledge of and interest in world lit -- as manifested in his essays and the quotations in the book -- is good, but a bit buried (i'd have liked more honestly, but i think perry is quite out of his wheelhouse here and couldn't risk more)

and then the actual real politics section: which becomes increasingly dispiriting, partly bcz powell's judgments are so cookiecutter tribal and his insights so meagre, and partly bcz it honestly isn't re-integrated back into any of the rest of the piece

xp

contrarianism plus staunch anti-liberalism

Yes, re: anti-liberalism.

I think he quotes Powell saying Labour is part of liberalism?

I suspect that he has, indeed, read the massive Chinese novel. Am sure he wouldn't bluff that. It's all the kind of thing that Moretti would have told him was important.

I think I agree with you, Mark, re: the final section, the banality of AP's views, and how non-integrated it is!

That (from Mark S) is a pretty good critical summary of Part II.

d'you think this is a colossal extract from a longer soon-to-be-pubished book? the "reactionary thinkers" essays in the LRB ended up as a book

(tho they were more easily freestanding: i wonder if some of the sketchier sections will actually exist at some point at deeper length)

This is a good and intriguing thought.

re earlier book, do you mean:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/574-a-zone-of-engagement

?

I don't agree with Anderson at all btw (and from a google of it I saw that Auden was ambivalent about the ending, but it stuck so..), just noting the bizarre contortion at that moment.

Xps

I think I should get a load of the older PA books. I know some of the material but tons I have still not read. Like that book and also:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/228-spectrum
https://www.versobooks.com/books/575-english-questions

PA is pretty good on Global South lit so I reckon he's read Dream of Red Chamber. There is an essay of his in the LRB discussing historical fic that pulls in a wide range of novels (Cities of Salt, Buru Quartet)

spectrum begins with a long chapter on reactionary thinkers -- hayek and oakeshott and etc -- which began life as essays in the LRB (i guess they wd have felt odd in the NLR)

His essays on India (which unusually I am not sure I read!!) became a book.

And so did US FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS after ALREADY occupying an ENTIRE issue of NEW LEFT REVIEW a few months previously.

we shd post him a print-out of this thread so he can rewrite where necessary (e.g. concerning uncle adolphe and also omitting any discussion of john bayley's opinions on anything)

I read all his essays on EU states (incl his essay on Cyprus!) back in the day, and I think that became a book too.

Yes that became a big book.

I didn't read the Cyprus material because it was so vast and I couldn't find any personal interest in Cyprus. There are these rare cases where I can't get excited about PA's work.

The Germany essay in the book appeared in the NLR under the heading 'Land of Ideas?'.

I'd second the recommendations for The New Old World (that big book w/ the EU essays and Cyprus) and Spectrum. I didn't have much personal interest in Cyprus before but found it a v gripping and fascinating read. Perhaps because I knew least about Cyprus and Turkey, those two chapters were the best parts of the book, though his essays on France and Italy are among his best (imo).

I interned at Verso five years ago and asked about what his next colossal one would be - I was told it was likely going to be a collection of the essays on Russia, Brazil, China and a longer theoretical intro/conclusion synthesizing views on the BRICs, although who knows, I could easily see him having switched gears and put out an 600 page book on the 20th century novel.

I haven't gotten to the second part of the essay yet (picked up the print copy of the LRB yesterday) so will withhold judgment on it as a whole for now. Had been a pretty big PA stan before (while not always agreeing with particular points) so am always pleased to find others (and to notice this thread!).

Federico, that is most interesting. Are you a long-time ILB poster? We have a FAP tomorrow.

xp Anderson has written at length about those three countries in the LRB, IIRC

"at length" sort of goes without saying with PAnderson of course

i was disappointed by Spectrum, felt i was lacking background on some of the thinkers (esp on the right) that was assumed

Been on a long holiday, read through the last nine of A Dance to the Music of Time for the first time.
I liked it well enough, but Anderson seems to overestimate it/Powell massively in the two articles. Keeps taking midweight literary basics as some kind of mastery - allusion is catnip to him.
Still on holiday, but will try to get round to saying more about Powell and/or this chunk of Anderson when I get back.

Hey pinefox, I'm a (fairly?) long-time lurker and (very) occasional poster. I'm trying to get in the habit of posting more regularly, though my schedule's been a bit crazy the last while. Unfortunately, I'm not in London, otherwise I'd happily join.

I read elsewhere (on another thread?) that the overestimation is part of PA's "bid" to elevate Powell to a more respectable, if not canonical, status, and using (abusing?) Proust in the process. It seems somewhat plausible, whether it's something he deliberately set out to do or not. Still haven't read pt 2 yet, but look forward to getting to it tmw or this weekend.

That seems about right - the Tariq Ali article on Powell makes it clear that PA has been reading and rereading and laughing aloud at Dance for an age, so I suspect the article is the eruption of a forty year internal monologue where he’s arguing with himself that this is better than Proust. Writes it as a late-life treat.

(I think mark s suggests something like canonising AP for a bet in one of the other threads which I also like)

He’s an unpersuasive critic though imo.

I don't remember Ali on Powell - I don't like Ali but I like it when he drops in anecdotes about PA.

Yesterday I read a Fredric Jameson book which referred to something like 'PA's definitive study of the historical novel', which meant a 2 or 3 page LRB article.

Here, p.259:

https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fredric-Jameson-The-Antinomies-of-Realism-2015.pdf

- actually it was 'landmark survey', not quite the same thing.

Pinefox:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/fiction4
PA turns up halfway through.

i don't really have a problem with taking proust down a peg or three -- and i certainly don't have a problem with firing what woof calls "midweight literary basics" into the revered sludge of its rep to do this: if they are a thing powell does well which by comparison does badly or not at all, this is a useful dimension to explore

i feel -- long as it is -- that he really only half-explores the thing he's uncovered though: on the lethem thread PF and i had a mild disagreement abt the rightness of the usage of e.g. description-at--first-meet which too much "raises the stakes" (by manipulating seemingly small realist items overtly to foreshadow larger future events). Unlike MP, AP -- with PA's stated approval -- is not among these stylists: PF catalogues him with the "dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction", and PA devotes a half column (pt 1, 19.7.18, p.,17, col.1) to the comparison. OK: MP comes off badly in this comparison by this measure: his descriptions seem to aim to lodge the characters as exemplars of his (tiresome?) overarching apothegms: no one gets anyone else, pain is all -- except for art, which is all-er (PA's caricature via my memory: it's mostly on p.14 same issue but i can't be arsed to redigest it for this point). But late in part 2 (2.8.18, p.32. col.3), AP writes thus

"Powell’s imagination was deeply historical, as Proust’s was not. He was also much more deeply conservative. That could easily have led to a threnody of time past, not individual as in A la recherche, but political and cultural. What checked any such move was the other side of his conservatism, conviction of the constancy of human nature, which he shared with Proust. In the tension spanning those two sides lay the difference between them, which cascades down the last page of A Dance."

This is some of what I mean (on the lethem thread) by the politics of this "raising the stakes" -- powell's refusal tightly imbricated into his beliefs in unchanging human nature across changing history (vs proust who thinks history is -- acc.AP -- just stuck). the figure of "dance" that overlays the entire 12-volume massif actually does the work that any given stakes-raising encounter-description might, in lethem or pynchon or proust or whoever: it points a bony finger to the structural prison of the belief system, which in powell the narrator and characters can have no inkling of… other authors (viz these three) would disagree, tho the character-inkling might be religious, or moulded dream- or fantasy-work, or the underpinning of their political engagement in the story or etc). foreshadowing and prophecy come in many forms in ordinary (=as per realism's nostra) life also. anyway this is an element i'd like much more on, tho i think you have to bring in other authors and styles of authoring to do it justice maybe

lastly, while the bet is a likeable version of PA's project, what i fear he's actually done is decided something along the following line:
1: powell is my fave and i wub him
2: all artistic material that i like must be important and world historical not like those yukky post modernists seem to think
2a: pop is by definition bad and its fans -- the "people" apparently -- shd feel bad)
3: er anyway in what way is AP important and world historical, compared for example to proust who everyone (not the "people", the other better everyone) agrees is important and world historical
4: so if i compare them and prove AP > MP qed, then i win and my taste R0X0R snubs to you

(^^^new breakthroughs in the rendering of interior monologue here IMO)

lol what i'm writing myself towards is 80,00 words by me on why pynchon is better not worse than powell OR proust: "a gallumph to the kazoo of space" if you will

jeezus fvck i have actual serious work to do today

hah great post, thanks mark!

I think I agree about the 4-5 stage process of PA's submerged thought / motives here.

Clarification: 'PF catalogues him with the "dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction"' -- only in that I was grouping PA's version of AP, as far as I remembered it, with this, after you had reminded me of it (so it was your classification in fact, which I was just citing!). I have never read a word of AP outside what PA quotes, so don't truly know whether he is dogged, quiet and realistic or not.

Also: the specific criticism I made of Lethem in that post applied to one of Lethem's later novels, but does not at all apply across his whole career - which has transformed quite a bit. So the problem, as I see it, is possibly characteristic of late Lethem, but not early Lethem, at all. Whereas to my eyes (and Lethem's, in fact, as per review of BLEEDING EDGE) early Pynchon and late Pynchon do not look very qualitatively different from each other.

Was Powell a popular author in his day, amongst "the people"? The alleged soapiness of A Dance had lead me to think so, while Proust is pretty much shorthand for stuff only effete intellectuals read.

There is a consistent supernatural element to Dance that breaks the confines of dogged realism - haunted houses, spiritualism, a character based on Crowley. See also Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence, which again dabbles in the uncanny while presenting a largely realistic portrait of English society.

yes sorry i'm doing a lot of cutting to the chase on my side of the argument (always easier when you've read nearly none of the authors under discussion): i think all i'm doing actually is trying to throw a wrinkle of complexity and reservation into this specific judgment of yours (re lethem's first description of miriam):

It seems to me that in reality, we don't draw this kind of symbolic conclusion from an item of clothing someone wears. And the fact that we wouldn't do it in life makes it risky for the novelist to do it - it's his imposition on the action - without getting anything valuable in return.

So it may well be risky for this novelist at this moment in this book: in the sense of "getting nothing valuable in return" and in the sense of annoying well disposed reader mr p fox late of this fandom. (And no one on that thread has stepped in to defend the description at issue…) But there are other kinds of novels where there is a useful return -- my claim is that this return functions at the level of overarching belief systems, mostly, either the author's or those of the world being sketched (or both), rather than locally and empirically. There will sometimes be good reason to raise the stakes, even if there isn't here -- it's not just a matter or good or bad taste.

the (to me) rather laboured section at the start of pt 2 is PA talking through the relative popularity of the two authors less in units sold than in reception theory terms i guess (books about and industry surrounding; translations of etc). his argument that proust is proto-pop bcz proto-pomo is both snide and flimsy

everyone (not the "people", the other better everyone) agrees genuinely is the move that underpins it, and any extended discussion threatens to bog down in a quasi-political argument abt who "the people" actually ever are

re previous post about JL:

I don't think I can judge these claims, for my part, without seeing another example, ie: of an instance where you think an author does this successfully.

Again for me a relatively extreme example of the aesthetic would be Rushdie, which for me would ring alarm bells about it as a tendency.

I think that 'belief systems' are sometimes relevant but also that authors (like JL in that case) can fall into an 'aesthetic' that doesn't really have much belief attached to it - maybe an 'attitude' or 'stance' in the external, posing sense, more than a belief.

PA seems to be suspicious about Proust being popularized because popularizable. (PoMo, I think, would just be a spin-off of that -- he doesn't actually think Proust is aesthetically PoMo himself, surely.)

I quite like the way that, as this discussion reminds me, PA's discussion is so entertainingly rangy and manifold in theme and approach.

nice tart letter* also in the current lrb on anderson being wrong abt balzac: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n16/letters

(one of the things going on here, i suspect, is that PA has read and reread powell quite a lot bcz he enjoys doing so -- but has read the various other Vast Oeuvres** bcz as a High-Level Savant he felt he Ought To Have: it's not that he has nothing valuable to say as a consequence, he is a learned and an intelligent reader, but that there's just a trace of duty-based ressentiment to the critique?)

*(from a prof specialising in balzac*** and proust)
**(some of them, half-finished red chamber klaxon is that you i feel beating soundless but imperative on my mind's ear?)
***(i have actually read some balzac! old goriot aka pere goriot)

Christopher Prendergast is also the editor of the newer translation of Proust (and the one I read).

btw i am reading all these posts as if everyone itt rhymes proust with frowst, the only correct way to say it

Was Powell a popular author in his day, amongst "the people"? The alleged soapiness of A Dance had lead me to think so, while Proust is pretty much shorthand for stuff only effete intellectuals read.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 23 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I see there was an adaptation of Dance.. for TV in 1997 (four parts). Anyone here watch it?

yes, I've seen it. Simon Russell Beale is excellent as Widmerpool from youth to bloviating Lord and there are lots of other familiar faces, but it doesn't get anywhere near capturing the scope of the novels, and it's all a bit Downton Abbey

Also two different radio adaptations (neither of which I've heard)

yes i watched some of the TV version, i wasn't very taken by it: four parts is the opposite of soap, it totally needs to be tackled reina del sur-style IMO: can i really be the only person watching LA REINA DEL SUR?

as does recherche, with a very boyish kate del castillo as albertine

every time i think of engaging with powell i can feel an #istandwithwidmerpool position rising, a bubble of challops frozen into the glaciated mammoth like a dormant pliocene megavirus

albertine:
https://68.media.tumblr.com/a92ef861f1c2056ae6a16aa7e8adc7ec/tumblr_inline_mlxzsjMhxw1qz4rgp.gif

Anderson must be commissioned to do LA REINA DEL SUR next.

as you say he is good on the global south, what can possibly go wrong

The judge in Dublin who ran the trial in which Samuel Beckett was a witness in the 1930s called Proust 'Mr Prowst'. This is supposed to be one of the things that made SB despair of Ireland and never want to return.

What was the trial about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Was_Going_Down_Sackville_Street#Libel_lawsuit

Mentioned this on the pub last night and was just scrolling thru now - two left-wingers and their love for a reactionary (in this case Naipaul):

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-painful-sum-of-things/

Thanks for sharing, I'd like to give that a read as well this weekend.

I've been thinking more of the "painful admiration" one of them cites and the ambivalence of that relation between a left-wing/progressive reader/critic and a reactionary author (Tariq Ali also wrote an obit of Naipaul - it appears they were friendly?).

It struck me as curious that - with some notable exceptions - this appears to be much more common in English literature than in other countries/regions/traditions? There's Naipaul and Powell, but also the love of Waugh, Larkin, Amis, Kipling, etc. I had assumed it was perhaps in large part due to "high Tory" culture and its reproduction in the cultural institutions/universities in the UK?

I finished the Anderson essay last night and was disappointed he hadn't gone a bit further in exploring this peculiarity of English culture but this afternoon happened to remember he dedicated a typically lengthy essay on more or less this question 50 years ago (!).

It's paywalled on their site, but I believe can be found elsewhere online (or in his book English Questions) https://newleftreview.org/I/50/perry-anderson-components-of-the-national-culture

I was also left unsatisfied by the second part of the essay, I feel like quite a bit was left unresolved. That said, it does make me want to read Powell (as well as The Dream of the Red Chamber and Malcolm Bowie on Proust), so there is that.

Good to be reminded of n+1. I should read more of it. Like this excellent reply from Wood:

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-3/essays/a-reply-to-the-editors/

Wouldn't we need to know more about how other countries, et al, handle it before we could say England was distinctive?

Or: Flaubert is in some ways reactionary. He's revered in France (by liberals and leftists, by Barthes, et al). So such traditions perhaps have their own versions of this?

In Germany, one or two of the big modern names have been on the left - Brecht, Grass, Wolf? - which does present a different scenario.

Yes, that's true but I always was under the impression in these other countries/literary traditions that they were more of an exceptional character?

I'll admit, I haven't fully thought this through at length, but I have had trouble coming up with other analogous examples where capital R reactionary authors are still held in the same esteem from other countries (there's Flaubert, Celine in France; Heidegger in the Continental Philosophy tradition). I definitely acknowledge more familiarity with Anglo-American literature than others, but still...! That said, I may be totally missing some obvious examples.

I would have thought that in France for instance, it could be shown that half the canon was conservative or reactionary in some way. It's an old canard that Marx loved Balzac 'despite' his royalism.

The difference you're pointing to, I think, is not about the historic canon but a more recent field - say, post-WWII. That would be a clearer, because more limited point of comparison.

Then there's also a difference between 'fascist modernism' and 'conservative English', ie / eg: between Pound and Larkin - very different sets of reactions and audiences involved.

I had assumed it was perhaps in large part due to "high Tory" culture and its reproduction in the cultural institutions/universities in the UK?

I would say that that hasn't been reproduced much in universities (and to an extent elsewhere in the UK) since, say, the 1980s -- English Studies is very much a post-New-Left formation in which the default is liberal or left. In fact in a way, people like Larkin and Powell are *not* that respected in universities, and PA may be writing against that to a degree.

Whether other nations have remained more conservative, or been similar, etc, I don't know - but there have been very conservative (critical) traditions in France / Germany. My understanding is that Barthes and Derrida for instance were writing against much more rigid formations than existed in the UK, which partly explains why they didn't entirely fit our frameworks.

Yes, those are totally fair points and I prob should have made a distinction b/w fascist and conservative reactionaries which, together with their audiences, are very different from one another.

Also, yes it doesn't seem to be something that has continued among younger generations - at least, I think most younger(ish) conservative/reactionary writers in the English speaking world seem to be, to use an Andersonism, "of little moment." Perhaps in the UK itself, this is in part due to or reflects the waning influence of high Tory culture over the course of the second half of the 20th century? I'll admit to being a bit out of my depth here - not being English and observing from abroad - so should probably stop making these somewhat sweeping generalizing speculations :)

Where are you now Federico?

I agree about the waning of high Con culture. In a way this connects to the cultural change often described by old-time ilx poster Robin Carmody.

Australia's most respected poet, Les Murray, is a tedious reactionary in his politics. (My contribution from a tiny country nobody cares about)

I'm in Toronto where - curious if this is also the case in Australia - we've inherited some legacy of high Con culture too (though not nearly as strong).

To go back to PA's essay, I'm surprised they didn't inspire a larger response in the Letters pages. The journalist/critic Jeet Heer managed to have a successful Twitter poll on it, though.

Anthony Powell is:

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 17, 2018

I know the poll is presumably a light-hearted jape, but its two options are not really alternatives.

Is Anthony Powell:

a) inferior to Samuel Beckett,
or
b) superior to Doris Lessing?

Think carefully before you answer.

do i have to read any of their books tho

re letters: Yes, just one response so far in the LRB? Which made an OK point about retrospective insight into a body of work but was itself ultimately unconvincing. I mean this is literally laughable:

"Without the relation to Balzac, Proust’s project is both unintelligible and, to some extent, pointless."

We might as well all write in, one per issue, saying things like:

"We have forgotten Flaubert. He remains, of course, the master - and Proust's"

"Well and good. But the true wellspring of the Proustian ethos is, of course, Stendhal"

"That Proust is fundamentally unreadable without an expert knowledge of the Goncourts used to be well understood. No longer, to judge from the recent pages of the London Review"

this entire exercise is perry dodging the 91 balzac novels he knows he ought to have read (bcz marx) but hasn't

My game plan: read a million words of Powell, a million words of Proust, then some biographies & criticism. Eventually compose 8 or 9 tweets refuting Perry Anderson's views of both. Never say I don't work for you people.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 15, 2018

jeet go on ilx

ugh jeet he did a series on tweets on how Powell/that generation of writers had a 'thing' for Thatcher.

I revive with this New Yorker write-up on Spurling's biog, which made me think that oh of course Anderson doesn't even make an attempt at reviewing it.

The teratology of the contemporary political imagination – plentiful enough: Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán, Kaczyński, ogres galore – has acquired a new monster.

Guess who's back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratology

actually didn't know about the meaning of this word at all.

Thanks for pulling that out PF. I can see how he comes off as pompous with his wider vocabulary, but in this instance it does the job.

Finished this tonight. It's not my idea of a very good PA essay.

The Lula material is partly reheated, simply in that he's written at length on Lula before (but not about his trial, successors, etc). He comes out as quite partisan for Lula's PT / workers' party - that's one of the things that most interests me about the essay. PA still has an ability to be very impressed by certain people, like the analyst he compares to Marx, and Lula himself.

But then the treatment of Bolsonaro: we get the standard PA problem that he hates 'bien pensants' more than anyone else, and is more keen to take swipes at them than to make any serious criticism of the political Right - in this case, by the sound of it, far Right. This particular strain of contrarianism is tired. The things that Bolsonaro has said and done, as I understand it so far, are worrying and dangerous towards several groups of people. PA makes light of most of this.

Perry will be unimpressed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/15/american-museum-of-natural-history-will-not-host-bolsonaro-gala-event

smh at everyone not knowing what teratology means, do you not read stephen jay gould ppl, everyone familiar* with the paling corpses of birth-dead monsters in 19th century pickle jars knows this word

*i mean like from books shut up

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II125/articles/perry-anderson-ukania-perpetua

so far the feeblest response in the Discourse™ has been someone saying they always confuse him the grayson perry 😴 and the best someone saying they always confuse him with GERRY ANDERSON, which is correct bcz that's who he is

it's going on a bit this, on which page is the murderer revealed ?? ho ho ho

Is ukania named after kakania?

Sorry lol just saw the relevant footnote

The murderer was William Longshanks and the murder's been going on for 954 years amirite

it's a tom nairn gag but i'm sure there's some fancypants referent behind it, these lads go for miitteleuropa like incels on anime

This is a terrible pun, if Perry (or Nairn) took Cool Britannia as some sort of parallel campaign it would be worse.

(Also name drops Lampedusa's saying. Think I'm getting old)

ukania is from ruritania. it's a tom nairn joint

ukania was my least favourite peter andre single

xp. and it's from the 60s iirc !

ts: robert musil vs anthony hope, who do they want us to think they actually enjoy reading

tbf i wd totally binge on a massive lrb two-part perry polemic exploring why rupert of hentzau is better than remembrance of things past

(the woman anthony hope married had exactly the same name as my grandmother apparently)

nairn definitely uses it in the 1988 edn of the enchanted glass

"tbf i wd totally binge on a massive lrb two-part perry polemic exploring why rupert of hentzau is better than remembrance of things past"

*Todd Flanders voice* contrarianism makes baby Jesus cry.

I learnt a new word, "indurate", thanks Perry Thomas Anderson!

Sorry Perry, but to use one of your own favourite phrases, this is "total bollocks":

Passively mutinous under Thatcher, collusively supine under Blair and Brown, the liberal academy sprang to life not over the ref or Iraq but over Europe, once the Referendum on it was lost. At the oldest universities Remainer passions ran so high that the occasional Leaver misfit could become a social leper; at Cambridge, the Vice-Chancellor’s office censored unwelcome opinion with stone-walling worthy of the Writers’ Union under Brezhnev.

And this is almost too on the nose:

As for the culture of the country in any wider sense, a symptomatic celebration of it came in 2015 from Dominic Sandbrook, whose Great British Dream Factory, hailing the matchless global success of its television series, detective stories, fantasy literature, pop music, children’s books, action films, science fiction etc. across five hundred pages, proudly announced: ‘I have stuck to the middle ground—the “middlebrow” some might say—and have deliberately not picked things that appeal only to self-styled intellectuals.

I had insomnia last night and thought maybe this would bore me to sleep but I ended up a third of the way into it and enjoying it tbf.. And lol kept having to pause to learn new words that I have already forgotten.

oh it's great in its Perry Anderson way, but for someone who namedrops both Gramsci and Stuart Hall he really isn't interested in culture, middle-brow or otherwise, it seems to me

except for anthonies powell and hope

maybe there is a case to be made that Ukania/UK/England/Britain/whatever is a fundamentally unserious place with little or no "high" culture (whatever that is "nowadays"), but if that is the case then Perry is either unable or uninterested in demonstrating it to be so. It's hardly like his wordcount is the problem!

meanwhile twitter user tom gann suggested this poulantzas essay as a counter to some of anderson's non-cultural arguments:

I find it quite striking just doing a search of the new Anderson that there's no mention of the Poulantzas critique, which I think undoes a lot of the theoretical foundations of the Nairn-Anderson theses. https://t.co/KceX0rLBh9

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) October 13, 2020

i haven't read it as i don't have time today and also a sub is required and i don't have that either currently

"maybe there is a case to be made that Ukania/UK/England/Britain/whatever is a fundamentally unserious place with little or no "high" culture (whatever that is "nowadays")"

Was in a convo with someone on twitter last week (that I am almost certain is younger than me) who was arguing this and using the lack of Brit film auteurs* and citing its poor literary culture. When I said how unique TV seemed to be in the kinds of programmes made in this country (up until recently anyway) he gave me the bullshit about TV not being any kind of art, and I think wrt Perry that's what you're dealing with.**

* Also cited how auteurs aren't the only way to judge.
** of course this discounts all sorts of music too.

auteur theory invented at cahiers so they can bang on abt how grebt westerns are plus sam fuller (the baning on is correct but unqualified auteurism is the very definition of a reacionary-midbrow route to it! = how the endpoint of kubrick is nolan sorry if this offends)

i mean i was mainly joking abt musil vs hope and who perry wants you to think he reads but These Guys™ have a colossal cultural cringe thing going on re "european literary superiority" which isn't actually that different from the FBPE kneejerk: deference to the continental w/o actually having thought abt it

(tbf i guess the anderson-nairn thesis IS thinking abt it, but the enchanted glass is as terrible on culture as the new left review almost always is)

xp

I've noticed some of these popular lefty twitter commentariat ppl who are possibly late 20's-late 30's (just guessing here) who are good at dunking on rotten pols, rotten hacks etc and do it all day long ... but when they switch their gaze to culture/movies/music they are pretty rubbish and full of shit - literally putting the shit in shitposting. But I should add some of them are brilliant as well. I mean Juliet@zinovievletter wouldn't brook any of that TV snobbery bullshit and is always posting brilliant links from the golden age of UK tv.

Wld like to read a long mark s LRB essay about vulgar auteurism (but fear that the job wld go to Michael Wood)

Juliet Jacques has been good on TV yeah.

I think with some of these left twitter accounts it comes from reading a lot of Frankfurt School. Tbf I exhibited a lot of these traits in the past but I think growing up watching TV in South America and coming here and seeing what else you could put on (to say the least lol, + getting to know more) has meant this deference to Euro culture hasn't stayed with me xp

i am currently in the mind to chuck pitches at the LRB -- i seem to have a line of communication currently, and assuming lanch-biz doesn't feck it up -- so i will bear that in mind WF!

currently currently, this is how my pitches read

I should state, for the record, that dunking on Dominic Sandbrook is good and should be encouraged

dunk him for his bad verses

I've developed this condition now where now I can't be arsed downloading highly esteemed longreads onto my device (unless they are BIG and IMPORTANT and have MASSIVE WORDS that i've never heard of before) after my new hero Perry Anderson raised the bar a load. I know Mark says he's one of these academia pricks that is quite myopically reductive about the ills of Trumpism and he has beers with that troglodyte Lydon. But that was a marvellous piece of writing that helped me stabilize lots of spinning parts that were twirling around my tired brain. He probably is a knobhead tbf, but it was an unexpected pleasure all the same.

It's good to read that Calzino enjoyed the essay. I bet I will too, eventually!

I have never heard of Anthony Hope.

It is, indeed, pathetic that PA is still obessively referring to 'Ukania', an idea that wasn't very droll or illuminating 30+ years ago.

I agree with Neil S about academics and Brexit. PA doesn't work in the UK academy and his views on it don't have much empirical basis.

pinefox have you not read the prisoner of zenda? i am crestfallen

I'm afraid not. Has Perry Anderson? I suppose he has read most things.

its his favourite book imo

calzino yr endorsement has made me curious

god knows what I was prattling on about upthread! but in short it made me think, specifically about the limitations of an opposition party in the UK, how the Labour party (even the vaunted Atlee led one) was never going to to take us to a better place than this current hellscape and how Corbynism was always completely doomed, even without December election bloodbath. And also Blairism and its adherents/apologists were a set of intellectual and moral midgets, hardly news but it's nice to hear things retold sometimes!

I'm still working my way through it. a massive read would be to go back through all the articles which he mentions or whose argument he summarizes in the piece.

in the mentions is a Rory Scothorne piece. I didn't realise he was a "somebody" who has wrote for the lrb, just thought he was a solid lefty-scottish twitter poster who talks a lot of sense about how fucked Scottish Labour are. PA tracks the path of the SNP going from an obscure bourgie centrist party with no ambition of independence to the where they are now.

I wish there was more scothorne in the lrb, seems to have a piece once or twice a year.

Remember when this thing was released?

i read this and there's not much to it. there's bits where its so obvious he was only vaguely paying attention

like: 'during the eu negs it became obvious the eu were punishing the uk to make an example' uh this is not obvious at all, it would seem quite the converse. a major part of his argument hinges on this diagnosis as well. there was something similar about scotland i forget.

just basic semi-paying attention stuff but secondary to 'my grand thesis'

never got round to the ukania one, but have just read the first of the three-parter on Europe, 'The European Coup.' And having approached it with a great deal of scepticism, I've come out the other end thinking it's a masterly display of intellect and structure.

The overall arc is a review of the work of a Dutch thinker and European political player Luuk van Middelaar. Anderson dubs van Middelaar, as, 'in Gramsci's vocabulary, the first organic intellectual of the EU.' Anderson pays tribute to the achievement of his work, though is sceptical about the uniformity of the plaudits, and by extension the lack of close examination. And of course Anderson is about to give him a thorough working over. In doing so he does a number of things simultaneously, and I think quite brilliantly, in an interwoven, discursive, but never off-topic essay. It's even a little difficult to separate these out.

One strand, reviews the key points of van Middelaar's major work The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union. In doing so Anderson via van Middelaar provides a useful, and helpfully quite simple framework for thinking about the EU, or rather the overall European project. However, some of this framework rests on a quite difficult set of intellectual jumps, which I'll come back to in a sec.

Another strand, via the rather innocuous statement 'Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a lack of curiosity about the author himself', is to build up a network of thinkers and thought going back to Machiavelli and interconnecting with each other, who provide a genealogy of the historical and intellectual context of the European project.

Of course with this is the other strand, which is the content and interrelation of those ideas.

And the other strand is the historical context for those ideas, particularly the Congress of Vienna/Restoration of Europe/Congress system, but also the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. This process of thought takes its cue from the view of van Middelaar's teacher, Ankersmit:

Good political thought, for Ankersmit, was never of the sort personified by Rawls: an abstract system of principles detached from concrete reality. It was always a response to urgent historical problems..

Or in another line contrasting the approach taken by these thinkers contra Rawls...'Ignored in a Rawlsian matrix concerned only with rights rather than interests...' In other words the process Anderson is describing, these core thinkers as they are understood in the retrospective context of the EU and its thinkers, is driven by contingency rather than idealism.

Lot of caveats there you'll note, and Anderson manages some of this complexity tonally, which is understandable, but on occasion can get a bit confusing, especially during the first third, where in order to review van Middelaar's ideas, he will ventriloquise them, sometimes to rather sharply sarcastic effect, and occasionally it's easy to forget he's ventriloquising.

Later in the essay, Anderson will drop the conventional mask of the reviewer somewhat, and use a later work of van Middelaar to take issue with some of the claims that van Middelaar makes for the successes of the EU over the last decade or so.

Anderson admires the earlier work as a realistic external assessment, with the later work being the view of an interested participant, or as Anderson has it: Alarums and Excursions belongs to a subclass of literature ... (which) might be called spin-doctorates of the equerry.

yes, they might well be, Perry, but only by *you* you hilarious word-guzzler.

The chief value he sees in the early work is that it lays bare, in the same way Machiavelli did, the operations and political machinations of the European project without any concern that it might be undemocratic or morally dubious - these after all are the demands that contingency places on politics, and anything is to be justified to further the European project as a thing above and beyond its constituent parts.

Anyway, i've rambled enough. What are the constituent parts:

• where is the demos for the European Union (or are they representatives without a demos), and how can they be engaged?
• what is the nature of European Union politics as van Middelaar and his intellectual heritage sees it. This produces that series of intellectual jumps which are quite hard to think through, or were for me anyway:
• 1) Politics as aesthetic: it is not representative by *resembling* what is being represented, but a substitute for it, therefore it is a creative act and subject to aesthetics.
• 2) Creating or engaging the demos is either, in three categories: German: aesthetics: an act of propaganda (flags and ode to joy); Roman: creating material benefits (eg unimpeded travel, free phone calls, and of course trade benefits), Greek: demos as participant and spectator in the democratic process (Anderson suggests that the EU and indeed van Middelaar are weak on this and weak on its solutions - in an interesting point right at the end of the essay, Anderson says the thinker to whom van Middelaar took most exception was Baudrillard).
• 3) It being a branch of aesthetics it is subject to the sublime - that transformative mixture in Romantic philosophy of terror and beauty. This bit's pretty obscure though I felt i was on the right track when i said to myself 'well in these terms isn't the general financial crash 'sublime'' and indeed in the next paragraph the activities of the bourse were considered to participate in this conception of the sublime. The crucial aspect here is that it's suggested that the sublime is the route to getting people invested in the 'Greek' way - that is as spectators and participants. They have to be interested in how the EU will affect their lives, and basically that can mean... getting them frightened basically.
• The 'three sphere' way of thinking about the dynamics: 1) The outer sphere, all countries that might be considered to come into the ambit of European Union politics, Europe as a continent, not just members, 2) the inner sphere: Commission, Court of Justice and EU Parliament and 3) an intermediate sphere, the operation of the member states, and at its apex the European Council.
• The mechanic of the coup, as understood by 17thC thinker Naudé: a coup d'erat denoting not just the sudden overthrow of a regime, but any comparably unexpected action undertaken to found, preserve, alter or aggrandise a state, the processes of which take place in secret. There's a great quote from Naudé on the imperative of secrecy being a constituent element of his version of the coup d'etat:

in coups d'erat one sees the thunderbolt before one hears it growling in the clouds, it strikes before it flames forth, matins are said before the bells are rung, the execution precedes the sentence, everything is done à la judaique - he receives the stroke who thought to give it, dies who thought himself quite safe, suffers who never dreamed of pain; all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness

• Anderson cites several examples of this version of the coup from van Middelaar's work, the two most significant: a 1963 ECJ ruling that national legislation had to complete with Community regulations under the rubric that it was in 'the spirit of the Treaty of Rome (even though nothing in the Treaty of Rome authorised this. The 1985 Act designed to add services to the common market, which was opposed by Britain, Denmark and Greece, who never got a chance to exercise their veto due to a piece of very dubious administrative sleight of hand by Craxi.

I'm certainly very dependent on trusting Anderson's bona fides, at least his scholarly probity, though I know generally what angle he has on the European Union. For example if you'd asked me who the major thinkers relating to the EU were I'd've said, idk? Habermaas? Streeck? Who don't make any appearance at all. The entire conception of the European project as being a way of keeping Europe unified through economic self-interest, while promoting progressively liberal policies for its community of citizens is entirely reframed here, completely reconfigured, which is what makes it so fascinating.

very interested to read the next two, which is *not* something you'd've heard me saying before i read this.

oh a couple of infelicities:

"the oubliette of his retrospect" ew no

and the final fucking line!

Van Rompuy has voiced the truths of Brussels more bluntly. In Greece, 'the performance of the troika may have taken place a little too much in the media spotlight': better in a blackout. What of the continent at large? "I believe the Union is over-democratised': in so many words.

Wait, what? 'In so many words'? Do you mean you've paraphrased Van Rompuy to say something quite revealing, but which he didn't say? Or is this your essay 'in so many words'? (Which would be a reasonable summary). Painful ambiguity to end on there.

It'd be good to see a review of this from someone who knows what they're talking about - Adam Tooze is a critical and engaged watcher of the EU for example. In fact, I'd like to revisit his thorough treatment of the troika, and EU statecraft in the aftermath of the GFC in Crashed, and replay it with Anderson's essay in mind to see what fits and what doesn't.

Every now and then you can feel Anderson straining van Middelaas to say more than he is actually saying in order to support Anderson's tacit argument of an undemocratic EU. Phrases like 'you can just feel his enthusiasm'. Ok ok, show don't tell, Perry.

Creating or engaging the demos is either, in three categories As a self-centric American, I can't get away from the first and third, would like more of the Roman, also a t-shirt w Naudé quote; thanks for the post.

Wonder what Anderson would make of this kind of talk? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/29/brexit-trade-deal-workers-rights-risk-unions

Or this---room for the sublime? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/24/at-long-last-we-have-a-brexit-deal-and-its-as-bad-as-you-thought

As far as I know, PA is pro-Brexit. (Maybe this article confirms it.)

I may possibly have remarked before that what rather grates about this is that, as far as I know, he does not live in the UK.

Like many people, I think Brexit is bad for those of us living here, and it's annoying to see it defended by someone who's unaffected by it. (You could even add Morrissey to this theme, though I don't think he would make it through a PA article.)

But my premises might be flawed; PA might actually spend much more time in the UK than I realise. And he would still argue, I'm sure, that he has the right to opinions on any foreign land, as he does on Italy, Russia, Turkey, etc.

the article isn’t about brexit (i think it mentions it once in what as you say is a v long article - as an example where van middelaar’s v whiggish support of european successes is perhaps misplaced). suspect an analysis of “the outer sphere” comes in this next instalment “An Ever Greater Union?”.

i don’t know whether anderson would be a brexit supporter as such, but he’s wary of the methodology of the european project and sees many of its layers as undemocratic, which is a charge of leavers i guess? i mean i suspect that anderson like many international thinkers eg Tooze thinks Brexit is, globally, and in the long term, of supreme unimportance, another milestone of blip on the UK’s confused and belligerent transition from an imperial power to a nation state. obviously we’ve been driven insane in the country by four years of relentless coverage of nothing happening apart from internal torments. it’s been very badly handled and is a bad idea, as many people will likely see a reduction in wealth (cultural, STEM and material) and global influence (if that matters), but in Anderson’s grand frameworks that probably doesn’t figure than as an example of something else rather than an important thing in itself.

this essay is more the history of ideas around it. i must admit i find it hard to say why the overall essay appealed to me so much. if you’d outlined it’s matter to me idve said god no life’s too short. but there’s something almost like gormenghast in the world building, the exposition of an intellectual framework and web, of people i’d never heard of and the interconnectedness of frames of thought, and i was genuinely impressed how perry managed it.

I think PA is pro-Brexit - even if he doesn't say so here.

But I agree that for him this would be in a disdainful context of dismissal of the importance of deluded "Ukania" - a very tiresome meme that he was been trading in uncritically for 30-odd years.

A feature of PA is that he hates centrists, liberals, Blairites, social democrats, etc, more than he does the political Right.

So one can be confident that in a PA analysis of Brexit there would be contempt for Remainiac types, Blair's interventions, perhaps CHUK, but not much for Farage, Gove, the PM.

I must admit that this feels suspect. If you're going to say one is bad (true), you need to say the other is at least equally bad.

You don't need to address everything, at least when it's a given. I'm not convinced you're right about Perry's animosities but I'm with it anyway, the centrist and faux-left temporizers have done far more harm to the left than any amount of plain sight reactionaries

If you never address a thing, it may not appear to be a given.

A feature of PA is that he hates centrists, liberals, Blairites, social democrats, etc, more than he does the political Right.

That doesn't sounds right to me at all. I think PA deals more critically with some of the people in these groupings, who might at other times have been on the left.

Having read "The European Coup" I was kind of startled by his mention of Brexit, which is something he hasn't dealt with in much of the writing I've read by him (a lot of the LRB archive has a focus on mainland Europe, Brazil, India). It could be that he just can't be fucked anymore -- but also reckon that in any treatment would also uncover weaknesses in his writing. UKANIA in the NLR is a block for me, only a quarter of the way through.

Now, by the fact he did mention Brexit -- if only as another data point that shows the weaknesses of the EU -- as in why did its leaders not give Cameron more concessions, was an interesting point of sorts...and I quite like to see where he will go with it. But the thing is he hasn't explored this question, so I don't know whether he is a Lexiteer. But a straight political opinion isn't something you get from PA.

are all three parts out now and what is the combined wordlength?

i will never calculate this for myself

the total number of words is called a "Perrygrination"

holdingnose_emoji

I didn't mean to scold him or preach to the choir w my posts re brexit, just wondering how/if the concerns cited/points made might fit into his "world-building," which is the most appealing term used here re his possible appeal.

It's about 30k, expect nothing less

strong dubdobdee blogpost energy

I've read the 3rd part of this Euro piece in one sitting. Mostly on Brexit, and you could mostly read without the other parts.

Perry's spinning plates technique is kinda incredible, and his way with detail -- what he can prioritise, what he does not -- gives rise to rich moments.

I'd add that to reduce his position on the EU to "Lexit" isn't correct. Throughout he is sober about what the EU is, what UK democracy is, in all of its shortcomings.

Perry has some sharp words for Remain support coming out of universities but it's not a class warrior position, more of an observation of the EU's relationship to UK higher ed.

I read, at last, Part II of PA in Europe, without reading Part I, which I don't have to hand.

Mostly a critique of the EU's infamous democratic deficit. Factually informative, but not surprising in outlook.

the meat of the essay is to show the context and geneaology of political philosophy that drives the character of its political model tho, right? the point of it being that he’s showing the intellectual mechanics that inform it. the use of that above the purely descriptive is to place it in the context of ideas which will be forming and formed by the future the world, no?

Fizzles: unlike you, I haven't yet read Part One. What you say may be what Part One is about, but so far it's not what Part Two is about. It's about 'mechanics' as in institutional operations, but not really about ideas.

i am postponing the 30,000 words of undiluted thrillpower until i have three clear days to go in hard

(adding that i suspect now more than ever that PA's 60s/70s project to detect and outline the ideology that actually underlay the UK's non-conformance to the standard evolution of polities -- the nairn-anderson thesis -- was, despite its probable good intentions at the outset, increasingly significantly distorts his reading of present-day UK politics. N&A were battling to refuse the "acquired an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness" argument of course, and refusing to embed british exceptionalism in a negative characteristic = the absence of and casual freedom from any one affirmed ideology) (i mean it;s is thesis and fair play he wants to stick with it BUT the seemingly trivial fact of the badness of the "ukania" gag continues to tell against the whole) (also nairn omits discussion of the sex pistols from "the enchanted glass", his book on the monarchy, and not for good reasons IMO)

(so i will be reading it with all this very much in mind) (when i have a fkn second) (five clear days)

this post^^^ took me nearly three clear days and it's still full of typos

Btw, no mention of "ukania" in the first and third parts of that piece. Anderson skillfully used the ongoing relationship of UK politics to EU politics in the latter to draw out a set of insights from either. Mostly insights into Europe, but I got a lot out of it from a UK perspective.

I doubt that PA is seeking to surprise anyone with his outlook. Does he ever? Is anyone going to be surprised about any of his views on Brazil or India or UK? If you want to reduce his stance on to a one-liner -- which he resists by the vast quantity of reading and links he can make from it -- it's one of the i.e. all of this fucking sucks variety, but it's the facts and links that he draws that open up avenues for others. And in this, PA is getting to a map of this bloc of centre-right-to-centre-left coalitions that are highly robust, one that can survive all types and manner of crisis (created by itself or otherwise) that would topple national governments, one that can shrug at a member state's entire withdrawal from it.

BUT the seemingly trivial fact of the badness of the "ukania" gag continues to tell against the whole

I love this.

PA ends Part II saying that the EU's claims are almost all hollow but it has two benefits: free movement and a range of consumer goods. He recognises that those are popular - but then, in a way, dealing with them only in the last paragraph of a 10,000-word article suggests that he's slighting the practical benefits of the EU. As I have said before, I am unsure that he lives in the EU (or perhaps he does, half the year or something), which may be a reason he is cavalier about the everyday gains of being in it.

I think that a reader not knowing much about the subject, reading Part II and taking it at face value, would say: the EU is pretty bad and it would be good for a country to leave it and restore its democratic independence.

This isn't a very new sensation or surprising outcome - I felt the same after reading Susan Watkins on the EU in the LRB c.7 years ago, and she was, in effect, one of PA's successors as editor of NLR.

Reading Part III. A simple response consistently emerges: one that many of us have felt about many other things and fields.*

It's basically: "I believed you, indeed was profoundly impressed, when you were talking about those other places and things that weren't very familiar, but now you're talking about where I live and things I went through, and you keep saying things - even if only small things - that I know are wrong."

Not to say it's all wrong, or useless. But it's surprising how cavalier he is with factual narrative when talking about things that most of his readers will already know as well as he does.

[*A parallel: it's been said that everyone likes most things about Declan Kiberd's INVENTING IRELAND, except that Wildeans don't like the chapter on Wilde, Joyceans don't like the chapter on Joyce, Shavians don't like the chapter on Shaw ...]

im going to be using the expression ukania on ilx long after perry mason has shuffled off this mortal coil

"Not to say it's all wrong, or useless. But it's surprising how cavalier he is with factual narrative when talking about things that most of his readers will already know as well as he does."

Is it not very surprising or just wrong? I've certainly not seen this command of the overall narrative from anybody on the mainstream press though I've read good reporting on aspects of it.

Part of the reason people have been as divided on Brexit -- and not just along Leave or Remain either, with both camps having its own cliques -- is that there is very little agreement on the nature of the EU and its benefits and who are the main beneficiaries?

This was certainly part of the weakness of the Remain argument during the referendum and is a lot of the bathos of the angrier end of the FBPE crew

God knows when/if I'll get to read this PA piece but the subject of how the EU sells itself to its citizens would be worth a lot of analysis in itself

PA's argument is that it doesn't bother because it doesn't need to, and that the vitally important decisions made by (in partiuclar) the European Council and the ECJ are made in camera without the bother of tirseome politics or democracy.

I've read the first part and he essentially makes it sound like a confidence trick.

After the first part I'm mostly 'man, fuck a dutch tory'

As Perry Anderson's greatest admirer on ILX (with the caveat that Mark S was into amphibologies before I was) -- I found Part III of this overall remarkably poor.

The first half is a standard account of UK political history since the 1960s which you could assemble from Wikipedia or even from most UK adults' general knowledge -- but, as I noted, strangely specked with errors, casually misleading and false claims, which go with the 'breezy journalism' genre. Still, he does add *some* new analysis to this story, though its accuracy too remains questionable.

Then he gets on to Mount, Oborne, Wheatcroft - which feels much too easily self-selecting, PA as so often just going back to the same people he's been reading for years (especially Mount). It's at least interesting to see how much Mount has changed his tunes. But PA says these are all less impressive than Noel Malcolm and Richard Tuck, Hobbes scholars. Hm ... So what do they have to say?

Mainly that the EU is undemocratic and unaccountable - which is PA's general case, which could have been made in a page, not 30,000 words. But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits), surely *because those nations are neoliberal in their national politics anyway* ... That's all OK up to a point, but PA also TWICE cites the fact that Tuck argues that *Brexit makes the break-up of the UK less likely*.

Well, this could be true; it could be too early to say; but it flies in the face of everything that any political analyst has said for the last 6 years, and PA does *nothing* to explain why they're wrong and Tuck's right about it. And yet Tuck is one of his great sages!

And finally we get a last couple of pages just repeating the general charges of undemocratic structure and personal corruption, and along the way saying that the EU is politically worse than the UK.

Some of this article is true, some of it is insightful, but the balance of new insight to retreads is unusually unfavourable here by PA's standards. It's even noticeable that his prose is less sparkling than usual.

Part II was informative but unexciting. Part I, which Fizzles greatly admired, I still haven't properly read. But overall the balance of value here seems to be towards a let-down.

In part 1, there was a startlingly... tendentious (ie bad and wrong) paragraph about the founding of the United States.

"But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits)"

No large EU state is testing this claim precisely because it is against the rules they are bound to observe by being in the EU.

Good point on Tuck, it did seem one of two points -- the other on Momentum and languages -- that were obscure and needed more, though I think in the latter there was a larger point on Labour's infighting on the issue that would've detracted from the piece.

very busy at the moment and still only halfway thru the second essay

two things i wanted to note in passing before i forget:
i: "They are set not in stone, but in granite" wtf u think granite is anderson
ii: "documents of such ‘epic length’ that the Ireland’s EU commissioner declared of the last that ‘no sane and sensible person’ could read it" where am i going with this

Perry Anderson is no Mason

wtf u think granite is anderson

incredible. reminds me of some otherwise completely forgotten tv doc years ago where the presenter knelt down by a railway in france and said something about 'this rail of non ferrous metal', i thought 'whaddya think sncf stands for ya mook'.

copy-editors sleepwalking as ever in the great man's contributions: i mean if it were me i would be DELIGHTED to catch him out, less obnubilation more reading back what you just wrote SIR

Those are excellent amusing comments by Mark S.

Latest LRB features, not 3pp of letters followed by a long response from PA, but ... one letter, from someone who was involved in European defence policy 20 years ago.

"But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits)"

Actually this was also wrong? PA went through the episode where Italy tried to nationalise a utility in the early 60s, which was blocked by the ECJ.

I've still not read the second one, but 'not set in stone, in granite' strikes me as a forgivable rhetorical messing around with a maxim. Bit clumsy like but not it's not a mistake as such.

some non-clumsy messing around: "if x is set in stone, that stone is granite"

also (since i'm apparently in maximum subbing-nerd pedant-mode today): "the effect of 'constitutionalising' (the apostrophes are needed, because… )" -- perry ffs they're not "apostrophes ", they're quotatation marks

thats right "quotatation marks"

Indicating quotatating

I did find 'apostrophes' odd there.

The LRB's editor should quit after allowing these errors through.

Oh.

when i read it i legit sat there for a minute trying to remember the phrase "inverted commas" and then thinking did i invent that? has it just been apostrophes this whole time? no it hasn't.

A parody of Perry Anderson from 1966:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1966/xx/pseudlr.htm

still padding* thru the second installment and lolled at this: "Foucault’s overblown identification of knowledge with power here finds literal embodimen"

translation: "i sourly grant on OTM to a figure it's very important you grasp I deprecate" <-- dude this^^^ is bad rockwriting, terminology and also trope

*my work at the moment is a large book-length edit at deadline so i can only really read and think abt other stuff in the brief breaks i am barely taking (= i had no weekend to speak of) -- if only the great man knew of our dedication to his flawed genius eh

Kevin and Perry Go Large but it's Perry Anderson and idk some famous Kevin I haven't done the work here tbrr

Things I was shockingly old when I learner: Perry is a shortening of Peregrine

s/b PIPPIN imo

According to his wiki page, he started out as a rock critic, writing under the pseudonym Richard Merton. I wonder if any of his rock writings have ever surfaced

they're in the LRB archive* and they're NOT THAT GREAT!

one of my (way too many) highly delayed projects from last year is writing them up as an overlap of incompatible worlds!

*(tbf there may be more elsewhere also: e.g in alex cockburn's underground weekly 7 Days which isn't currently arechived on-line (or wasn't when i last looked) (pre-pandemic)

I will check out the LRB archive!

you have to pay per article :(

(which fair enough i guess -- they have a business model and writers shd be paid for their craft)

BUT

Surely not the LRB archive?

The NLR archive?

I'm unsure if it was Mark S who gave me PA on the Stones, or vice versa - I think the latter - in any case we discussed it quite a bit at some point. Possibly not on ILX. Possibly even in an actual pub.

PA's argument on the Stones is actually relatively good and distinct (ie: good because it is an argument at all, not just waffle). It's something like: the Stones are more interesting than others from a progressive POV, because they proceed by taking reactionary things (like sexism) to an extreme.

This argument is structurally very similar to Adam Mars-Jones' VENUS ENVY (c.1990?) in its praise of Alasdair Gray in contrast to Amis & McEwan.

I tend to agree with Mark S re PA on Foucault - that line didn't work very well. For PA's overall take on MF one might want to go back to the very entertaining IN THE TRACKS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM (1983?).

oops yes apologies zelda, i meant the NLR achive not the LRB archive

i shouldn't actually be posting at all this morning i am RGHT UP AGAINST IT deadline-wise

[posts some more]

Coming back from a long ILX hibernation and have to post in reply to the parody article upthread, I genuinely LOL'd - thanks for sharing that! It looks like there are some old blog posts about him floating online as Richard Merton w/ excerpts (https://chaosofmemories.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/perry-anderson-meets-the-rolling-stones)

A t/s question on British Marxist historians writing music criticism under a pseudonym: Richard Merton (Perry) vs Francis Newton (Eric Hobsbawm)?

I still have to read the new LRB essays when I have the time...

PA on music would always interest me much more than EJH - simply because EJH, like Philip Larkin I suppose, only wrote about jazz. The very idea of PA on the Stones is, by contrast, utterly compelling to me.

That's a good blog post.

hobbo took a pseud bcz the CPGB line on jazz at the time he started was that jazz was footling and degraded bourgeois trash (the proletariat shd be levelling up to and inheriting the classical greats, not shifting dodgily sideways towards modernism or anything american and commerical) -- and then kept it after this line softened bcz that was the name his critical work was attached to and the reveal would never not be awkward

PA i think bcz the NLR's foray into rock writing was very much a kind of intellectual speculation when a curious artistic opening seemed to flash up in a moment of political turmoil: he was (correectly) very uncertain of how the times (and the arts of the times) would work out, PLUS he didn't want to risk his recently acquired high-octane intellectual shtick and is nothing if not a massive cowardly pussy in this regard

in conclusion: i disapprove

also what a boring pseud ffs

he shd have called himself PIPPIN SHAGRAT

anyway reading that blogpost has reminded why it is so very U&K that i complete my patreon post on the same material but also that i have a ton of actual real work i'm actually being paid for that i need to get on with right now >:(

perry shd totally subsidise me for my attention to his oeuvre, out of his pots and pots of inherited landed-gentry money, the only way for the intellectual thread to extend to a new generation imo

While we're talking NLR pseudonyms, we can recall that Peter Wollen called himself Lucien Rey and Lee Russell. One reason in his case was that he had deserted the Army and was afraid of being recaptured and court-martialled.

One of my arguments about PA on the EU was that he overstated the extent to which the neo-liberal EU would automatically forbid any kind of social democracy. My sense is that it is more contingent than that, and more a matter of Realpolitik, rather than rigid rules.

Thus, an extreme instance: if Germany were to 'go socialist', could the EU stop it? Effectively unthinkable, as Germany is an EU hegemon. But of course the whole issue is more complex anyway.

I raise this because a letter to the LRB has made these points:

Perry Anderson claims that ‘Bernie Sanders’s three basic demands – reject or modify Nafta and the TPP; raise taxes on Wall Street; free university tuition – would be out of reach’ if the US were subject to EU rules. The EU member states and the EU Parliament rejected TTIP. The Commission has no direct influence on corporation tax but has objected to the tax breaks sanctioned by several member states, including Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. It is true that the Stability and Growth pact attempts to exert fiscal discipline, but this is routinely flouted, especially at present during the Covid crisis. Taxation remains an area of state competence, beyond the reach of the Commission. As for tuition fees, many EU member states charge virtually nothing for university tuition and whether they do or not has nothing to do with the EU.

Simon Sweeney
York

I think 'routinely flouted' is the most useful reminder here. One thing that we often learn about the EU (from PA as well as others) is that it makes up, bends and breaks rules as it goes along.

The point about tuition fees (again, look at Germany) is rather a zinger - but perhaps PA has a comeback to this that I have not yet read.

yes the tuition fees thing is so obviously wrong with many eu member states currently having, or having previously had free tuition fees (scotland for example, which, perry cuomo being someone who is somewhat knowledgable on the uk and, you know, from there, should know) and bernie sanders tuition thing being limited to public colleges,HBCUs and trade schools.

I recently finished PA's 'The European Coup', so admired by Fizzles.

Superb levels of knowledge and detail - often into absurdly arcane things like sub-post-Machiavellian thinkers. Yet there is also a certain absurdity in PA writing at such length about this one writer, Luuk can Middelaar (I'd quite forgotten his first name till now), at such length. He seems to be mainly an ideologue, a self-justifying hack, though quite well-versed in the history of political thought.

I suppose you have to say that this is a conceit, a way of writing about the EU. But PA writes about the EU anyway, in parts 2 & 3!

Or is van Middelaar, whom many of us had probably never heard of, actually a bigger deal - not just in the halls of the EU itself but among, say, British pro-European types? Is he actually admired by the same people who like to retweet pictures of Donald Tusk saying he regrets Britain's departure? Had half the people on the anti-Brexit marches heard of him? Has he influenced their thought even if they haven't?

Many of us have had some degree of investment in the EU and a wish for the UK to stay in it. But it is hard for that view to endure PA's critique. He is one of the few people I have ever read who can make Brexit seem quite a logical and principled idea (though still, I think, a bad policy in real-world practice). I recall JC's grant of a score of 7/10 to the EU. People have scorned that for years. But wasn't JC, as usual, correct? PA, though, would surely not give the EU higher than 2/10.

i need to write up my commentary on this 3-part piece but not right now as i am extremely tired after being extremely busy for weeks on end

This thread must now be one of the best multi-authored discussions on PA ever to exist. It's longer than you might think.

we shd post him a print-out of this thread so he can rewrite where necessary (e.g. concerning uncle adolphe and also omitting any discussion of john bayley's opinions on anything)

― mark s, Wednesday, August 22, 2018

one day important ppl will be collecting my ilx comments into benjamin-style convolutes and writing as to how we wont see his (my) like again

Remarkably, I don't think that Mark S, or anyone, has yet commented on PA's epistolary exchange with Luuk von Middelaar himself, which becomes like a tribute act to the vintage exchange with T G Ash.

It's extraordinary stuff overall, with LVM writing a letter 2/3 of a page long in which he accuses PA of ad hominem biographical attacks, and drags in facts about PA's family history.

PA then responds to all his critics - too briskly and briefly to be satisfactory, in truth - and *in each case* inserts biographical facts about their careers as though these undermine what they've said! Rather playing into the image of him that LVM has just constructed.

Then PA responds to LVM, making too light of his own factual errors. He responds to LVM's excusing of his youthful Neo-Con writings (they were only in 2001! When we were writing on ILX! But LVM treats them as impossibly distant and thus forgivable), asking if LVM showed any sign of opposition to the Iraq War. This is odd because in early 2003 PA wrote an LRB article scorning protesters against the Iraq War. (I probably complained about it on ILX at the time!)

Finally PA winds up talking about 'tease for tease' between them and hopes to meet LVM over a glass of wine. Amphibologies revisited!

the tone of the exchange of letters annoyed me a lot actually, on both sides -- substantive content aside i really really disliked that mode of SCR clubbability, though i'm not sure if it's merely a rhetorical device (i think to be fair to LVM it was) or an actual reflection, of these great well-heeled comfortable thinkers laughing as they quaff port before a roaring fire, on a plane far above the rest of us

which is worse, rhetorical or actual? can't decide

Like to imagine that one day soon may we all quaff port before a roaring fire - ideally in a boozer in Borough - far above the plane of ILx.

This desirable plan would be more plausible if the Royal Oak had not had its deleterious makeover. Maybe another boozer can be found.

Mark: I can't disagree, but isn't this exactly the same thing as the long-ago TGA exchange that you were the only person to know about (and tell us about), and which you didn't seem to mind?

On reflection: isn't the clubbability a compensation for the bitterness of the exchange, with all its ad hominem insinuations?

I actually think that PA's greatest weakness here is NOT engaging on substantive content. LVM insinuates that PA is a timid Brexiter. Rather than coming out and admitting to a Lexit position, or whatever (which is what all his articles imply), PA just plays with words a bit and raises a glass. But the absence of substantive engagement goes beyond that accusation. PA's responses to the other critics are desultory, when most of them appeared to have raised substantive points.

a missive in the latest issue pointed out that LVM proposed dinner, with PA rejoindering with an offer of a glass of wine. WHICH IS IT????

This is clearly something to look forward to, once I have read the remaining ... 17 articles in my current issue.

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1378770031044030465/photo/1

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJf8MUVEAIJKYw?format=png&name=small

Edgerton on Pezza:
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2021/10/why-the-left-must-abandon-the-myth-of-british-decline

That was really good guide on Britisher intellectual history.

Is CP Snow taken seriously though? Not sure if he overstates that one.

the totality of snow's cultural presence today is the phrase "the two cultures" for science vs arts, with (if yr lucky) snow's line tacked on, that the arts shd know more abt the sciences, to be 👍🏽 or 👎🏽. i don't believe most present-day citations recall that leavis was snow's antagonist (leavis having also fallen a very long way out of intellectual favour)

which is not being "taken seriously" -- edgerton brings up a phrase ppl recognise to introduce a debate they know only by vaguest repute, as a rhetorical move to call for its replacementment (with perry vs EP) and as a low-key burn lol ("btw perry = snow in my analogy")

adding: leavis IS more worthwhile than snow i think, but VERY VERY flawed (i read his book on lawrence and it's just amazingly rambly and terrible and intellectually thin)

Just saw this take on the piece.

I have lots of thoughts about this from @DEHEdgerton about Perry Anderson and declinism - mainly that it's great to see a such sharp and appreciative essay on PA. I still think that DE bends the analytic stick too far though, missing lots on the processhttps://t.co/O9TtGmGVR3

— John Merrick (@johnpmerrick) October 5, 2021

merrick's unfleshed suggestion is i think on point, that PA's version of gramsci and hegemony pays too much mind to elites (and the formation of shaping cultural ideologies), with the key money-stuff morphing away hugely under the cultural radar.

tbf of course the NLR has published lots on the role of finance so the overall anderson project *does* address it, it's just that, having allowed space for all this important scholarship, anderson himself seems to pay it mind only rarely in his work

tl;dr: PA is an idealist gramscian not a materialist gramscian lol

I've always viewed gulf between NYT, & Times of London, as evidence of the Nairn-Anderson thesis (that our bourgeois revolution is incomplete and is fused with plenty of feudal aspects).

While the NYT published Krugman, the Times *genuinely believed* Ed Miliband was a Marxist > https://t.co/Irm6MNjtM1

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) September 12, 2022

today in claims i'm afraid i don't actually believe:

If you want to know “how to be like that” Mike Davis read 500 pages a day and apparently Perry Anderson reads a book every afternoon

— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) November 2, 2022

Is the book by Perry Anderson?

https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/0*71MbysBs606ZN8Nr

Mike relaxing with a book after he'd finished feeding his collection of exotic pets

Nobody ever got smart by reading a book in two weeks and taking time to think about it.

everything fredric jameson writes is terrible

― mark s, Wednesday, September 28, 2022

That one book with the Andy Warhol ballet slippers on the front sure had a nice cover design though.

Perry Anderson reading a Goosebumps a day.

mofo finishes the quick crossword in matrix bullet time

not me spending 20 minutes hunting the internet for news on the longest word perry has ever used (and whether you could contruct a crossword round it)

Not read it for years, but I *think* I'd stan for *The Logic of Late Capitalism*.

The essay?

long solid thread on PA's "in the tracks of historical marxism" -- useful at least a marker on specific conflicts and how accurately PA summarises them, in particular the debate pro and con althusser (kind of homework list in a moment when further homework may be a distraction and a luxury?) (anyway and however… )

I started Perry Anderson's In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. Early on he provides a hand summary of his Considerations on Western Marxism, which I generally think is good and right, but Tracks has raised a new doubt or two for me that I want to think about. He talks about

— Nate Holdren (@n_hold) January 14, 2023

IN THE TRACKS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

I find it a bit odd to make a statement like this author has done through a series of tweets, not a piece of connected prose (eg: linked from a tweet).

I fully realise that Twitter is attractive and consumable and that Twitter threads have their appeal.

But in this instance the format isn't the best way to follow an argument.

"in the tracks": could mean like sherlock holmes! could also mean PA has been left lying bruised in its foosteps after it passed on its way

The thread is odd in not mentioning a large part of IN THE TRACKS, which is a critique of post-structuralism. A critique that Terry Eagleton opportunistically attacked at the time, before going on to say very similar things himself.

I agree it's a funny title, with those connotations. My sense has always been that it means something like "French theory today is merely following in the tracks of Marxism", but I would have to return to the book to corroborate this.

"I wouldn't trust Anderson on any empirical matters" lol

"did you pick up the milk Perry?"
"as to whether Anderson purchased the aforementioned dairy product, the record must remain forever in a state of occluded obscurity"

The P-Dawg on Mike Davis and Tom Nairn, good stuff, he even manages to admit that not all was plain sailing for Davis at the NLR
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii139/articles/perry-anderson-two-great-losses

"from lower depths of redneck aliteracy"

🧐

yes, that certainly caused a caesura in my reading, if you will

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/podcasts-video/podcasts/perry-anderson-and-john-lanchester-powell-v.-proust

This is now announced, but, not being into the podcast world, I don't know how to listen to it.

i think just click on the sound bar (the triangle-arrow) below the faintly coy photo of perry and make sure yr volume is up

You're right !

Poster Map on another thread mentioned Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. I wish to reply so I bring it to this slightly more appropriate thread:

...

Davis was a major figure, and certainly commands respect. So my personal irritation with one phrase isn't at all meant to belittle him in general, as if I could.

I was aware that he had written a reply to FJ on PoMo - it's collected, as I recall, in an old volume called JAMESON/POSTMODERNISM/CRITIQUE (1990?) - where I think, possibly, FJ acknowledges him more generously in a reply to critics (though may be fabricating this notion). I am fairly sure that FJ here and there in his work cites CITY OF QUARTZ, if not other works, favourably.

Davis's critique of FJ is surely valid - I have no criticism of it as such.

Davis might well have been justified in some kind of frustration with the English NLR crowd, and specifically the Old Etonians among them (unsure how many that is, maybe just 3, or more). My one substantial, small comment was that this could not logically include FJ, who never had anything to do with English public schools. FJ probably met Anderson et al in the 1970s (just a guess) - say, after MARXISM & FORM and THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE. Terry Eagleton (also no kind of Etonian, though he became an Oxonian) went and taught with FJ for a term in California in the late 1970s. But FJ - to my surprise - seems never to have published a word in the NLR till 1984, when the most famous essay of his whole career appeared there. He was already 50. He has contributed frequently since, but I don't suppose he has been on the editorial board; don't think he has ever resided at length in the UK.

So in sum:
1: yes, Davis in general was good
2: Davis's critique of some affluent leftists could possibly be valid
3: but Davis couldn't literally have been referring to FJ in the specific comment that was cited.

I like Mike Davis and read Victorian Holocausts back in the summer, loved it apart from sections of the book where he goes way too deep into the science of the El Nino phenomenon, which was a bit too much for my brane. And I started City of Quartz last week, it's good stuff - never knew about Llano del Rio the socialist city, which at the time the book was written - the ruins of it still existed.

I meant colony obv.. "city" is a bit of a stretch!

That's a good reminder Calzino - had read about that place and TBH forgotten that Davis discussed it. Apparently a library in CA has a big archive of documentation about it. And I seem to recall that it eventually relocated to another state!?

up to where I'd read he was visiting the ruins and bumped into 2 refugees from El Salvador seemingly living rough there, who he describes as like "hobo heroes from a Jack London novel". When he told them about its socialist history one of them asked did the rich people come and bomb them with planes? No he replies, their credit failed!

thanks for the clarifying information the pinefox, i stand corrected.

Thanks Map - I appreciate your civility here. I have a couple of follow-ups.

1: to support your and Calzino's appreciation of Davis, I remembered that what I admired about Davis was that after every US election - including midterms! - he would write a long, detailed analysis of the results for NLR, in terms of individual states, psephology, demographics. It was extraordinary work; I marvelled at the expertise and data. Marxists are not always thought to be interested in 'bourgeois democracy' - here was a contradiction of that view.

2: I don't have POSTMODERNISM / JAMESON / CRITIQUE here and couldn't find references to Davis in the other FJ I have to end. Finally I looked in POSTMODERNISM itself and found the endnote that the critic you cited had cited. And I'm afraid that here FJ, indeed, doesn't come out so well. What he praises in Davis, he immediately takes away, in a very uncomradely way. His tone is not well judged. He could engage much more with the substance of Davis's critique, and at least in this particular case, he doesn't.

As noted before, this can't have anything to do with a UK background (which frustrated Davis in the UK); it may have something to do with a US academic turf war which is opaque at this distance.

I still have the feeling that in later work, FJ acknowledged Davis more generously, but I may be imagining that. I have 10 of FJ's books to hand but don't think any of them provide such evidence.

Perry Anderson in THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY (1998) cites Davis (p.78) as 'Jameson's earliest critic [re PoMo] on the Left', and implies that he had made a valid point about FJ's periodisation.

as much as i can appreciate the need to deflate arrogant, vacant intellectualism, i do find that davis's shtick can sometimes lapse into into fetishization, especially when he starts calling people "effete". philosophy and theory were a refuge for me, and helped me to name the false consciousness that had made my own midwestern, blue collar milieu so hostile to creativity and intellect. these qualities are important too, and, to keep things short, i guess i think it's okay that some of our leftists are more about wit or playfulness than they are about centering labor. we need a bit of the former aspect, too.

of course, ideally you'd have somebody like e.p. thompson, who seems to embody the best aspects of both worlds.

Well said.

He only reads the intro to them

At the party last night talked to someone who used to check out books for Perry Anderson as an undergrad. Terrifying. Said he'd bring a trundle and load it up with 40 books every 3-4 days.

— jq di zuppa🥫 (@outsidadgitator) December 30, 2023