Perry 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.