Perry Anderson

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