Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue

Jan Miernowski

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319322759
• eBook ISBN: 9783319322766
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book employs perspectives from continental philosophy, intellectual history, and literary and cultural studies to breach the divide between early modernist and modernist thinkers. It turns to early modern humanism in order to challenge late 20th-century thought and present-day posthumanism. This book addresses contemporary concerns such as the moral responsibility of the artist, the place of religious beliefs in our secular societies, legal rights extended to nonhuman species, the sense of 'normality' applied to the human body, the politics of migration, individual political freedom and international terrorism. It demonstrates how early modern humanism can bring new perspectives to postmodern antihumanism and even invite us to envision a humanism of the future.

© The Author(s) 2016

Jan Miernowski (ed.)Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue10.1007/978-3-319-32276-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Is the Author Responsible? Artistic Agency in Humanist and Antihumanist Perspectives

James Helgeson¹

(1)

University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

End Abstract

Attacks on the “intentional fallacy ” have often neglected developments in philosophy since the Second World War that suggest other locations for “meaning” besides the inner sanctum of the mind present to itself. Indeed, what many critics of literary intention take for granted is that naïve readers will gravitate naturally to a theory of “self-expression .” Such a theory is internalist and representationalist; it has its origins in Aristotl e’s assertions in the Peri Hermeneias about writing as an image of the sentiments (pathemata) of the soul (16a5-9),¹ although the language of “self-expression” arises in Renaissance humanism . In short, attackers presuppose a private , mental, and representational picture of meaning and not a public, intersubjective , and active one. Alternative, more public ways of conceiving of action and meaning in writing, ways also available to Renaissance humanists (and which often foreground rhetorical and ethical questions), merit more examination. Or so I will argue.

I start from the assumption that the “death of the author ” is primarily a concern for the intellectual historian. This “death” is a historically situated one: its site is that of Parisian philosophy of the late 1960s and the (slightly older) Anglo-American New Criticism .² The comments that follow concern postwar “antihumanism ,” coupling the theme of the “death of man” to once current theories about the “death of the author .”³ The discussion of authorial agency rests primarily here on comments about two works: Erasmus ’ Praise of Folly (1509) and Renzo Martens ’ film Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty (2008). There are many possible examples: these two happen to be separated by almost exactly half a millennium. The analysis I provide links concerns about interpretation , omnipresent in the early modern period, with ethical concerns regarding care, deployed by Martens in his film. I argue that in many cases authorship is inextricably imbricated with “humanist ” concerns, and, in particular with the provocation of the reader’s or spectator’s ethical reflections.

Death and Transfiguration

Roland Barthes ’ essay “La Mort de l’auteur ” will soon be a half-century old, and its influence on a generation of critics cannot be overestimated. The essay can now be put into historical perspective, that is, understood in the contingent context of its production: France in the late 1960s, and in particular the long heritage of Stéphane Mallarmé ’s announcement of the “elocutionary disappearance of the poet.” Barthes explicitly privileges the Mallarméan heritage, writing that “in France, Mallarmé , no doubt the first, saw and foresaw the necessity to substitute language itself for the subject hitherto supposed to be its owner.”⁴ That the story of the writer’s disappearance is of a strikingly Gallic cast (passing from Mallarmé to Valéry to Proust to Surrealism ) is hardly surprising, since similar universalizing tendencies are pervasive in criticism in other languages, and all the more so in English.

Yet, partly because of the peculiarly local nature of Barthes’ references, the theoretical assertions that open his essay warrant more scrutiny. Barthes begins by quoting from Balzac ’s novella Sarrasine, noting the ambiguity of the relationship of the narrative voice to the author:

Who speaks in this way? … We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

No doubt it has always been so: once a fact is recounted—for intransitive purposes, i.e. exclusive of any function except the exercise of the symbol itself—this gap appears, the voice loses its own origin, the author enters into his own death , writing begins. … The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages , influenced by English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the individual , or, as we say more nobly, of the “human person.” Hence it is logical that…⁵

The rhetorical strategies of this passage are worth examining in some detail. Barthes (or perhaps, given the positions here advanced, some indeterminate voice behind this essay) asks, “who speaks in this way?” going on to claim that the answer to that question is necessarily indeterminate “for the good reason that writing is…” Notice the force of the copula of identity. “Writing is…” There is no argument offered for the following theoretical definition: “the effacement of all origin.” Rather, there ensues a rapid historical narrative, in which we pass directly from the end of the Middle Ages (extending apparently into the seventeenth century) to English empiricism .

The chronology is strangely retrograde. Should a writer such as Francis Bacon be taken here to be an English empiricist , or does this philosophical movement start later in the seventeenth century with Hobbes or even Locke ? Do we then move backwards, or forwards, from the English empiricists to the French rationalists ? And why is the last element in Barthes ’ list, “the personal faith of the individual ,” also chronologically the earliest (i.e. the Reformation )? Moreover, Barthes assumption of intransitivity—that writing is separated not only from origin but also from any sense of worldly action (“exclusive of any function except the exercise of the symbol itself”)—is a tendentious description, one that generalizes for all time (“no doubt [sans doute] it has always been thus”) a view of literature rooted in post-Romantic assumptions, and resting on a conception, taken as self-evident, of linguistic production based on “symbols.” Such a view of literature sits awkwardly with the historical evidence of early modern texts and particularly the rhetorical assumptions of early modern humanism . What is more, such a view of the linguistic “symbol” suggests, I will argue, a parochial view of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy, as is evinced by Barthes’ rather rapid reading, probably via Benveniste , of “Oxford philosophy .” In short, Barthes ’ essay ultimately rests largely on ex cathedra argument by prestigious assertion. In particular, the “hence it is logical that…,” which introduces a move in the argument linking authorship to capitalist ideology, is logically inert. What Barthes puts in the place of the theory of authorial agency is a performative model based on a (partial) reading of J.L. Austin . Other models of writing, externalist and intersubjective ones: both rhetorical (in which the addressee is necessarily central) and post-Wittgensteinian (in which language is essentially nonprivate), are absent from his discussion.

By contrast to Barthes, Michel Foucault begins his 1969 article on the “author-function,” “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” by suggesting that indifference to the identity of the speaker was central to contemporary concerns—indeed, by evoking the context of contemporary intellectual production in which the broadly Mallarméan and Barthesian post-Romantic concern for the elocutionary disappearance of the author was primarily an ethical concern. Why an “ethical” concern? Primarily because the institutions of literary knowledge, of university culture, were, it seemed, in the thrall of an authoritarian idea, attached, for example, to the name of Lanson , whereby the author was the ultimate guarantor of understanding (a tradition Barthes explicitly calls “tyrannical”). The “death of the author ” is a declaration of independence from this tradition.

The context in which the liberatory “death of the author ” (and thus then liberation from individualized voluntas) became popular is that of the 1960s structuralism , and what structuralism had to say about individual “agency” as an epiphenomenon of intersubjective structural machinery. Here the voluntas/scriptum distinction of rhetorical hermeneutics is subsumed by a “system” or “structure” that takes priority over the individual case even when there are considerable differences in the ways this recourse to “structure” happens.

Michel Foucault was highly resistant to the structuralist label, and was also less apt to rely on “structuralist ” negation of individual phenomena than many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, the discussion following his presentation to the Société française de philosophie on February 22, 1969, entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?,” took place, explicitly, under the sign of the negation of “man” and of the “subject” in the wake of historical processes. Jean d’Ormesson opened the questions by referring to “the end of man” (“la fin de l’homme”) and in a lengthy intervention, Lucien Goldmann went on to suggest that:

Among the key theorists of a school occupying an important place in contemporary thought – characterized by the denial of man in general and hence the negation of the subject in all its aspects and also the suppression of the author – Michel Foucault, who has not explicitly formulated this negation but suggested it all throughout his presentation, ending on the prospect of the abolition of the author , is certainly one of the most interesting and one of the figures most difficult to combat and criticize. …

The negation of the subject is now the central idea of a group of thinkers, or rather an entire philosophical current. If, within this current, Foucault has a particularly original, and brilliant position, one must nevertheless integrate him with what might be called the French school of non-genetic structuralism, which includes the names of Lévi-Strauss , Roland Barthes , Althusser , Derrida , and so on …

When we raise the question of “who is speaking?”, there are now in the humanities at least two answers, which, although strictly opposed to each other, each refuse the traditionally accepted notion of the individual subject. In the first, which I call non-genetic structuralism , the subject is negated, replaced by structures (linguistic, mental, social, etc.), leaving to men and their behavior only the place of a role or a function within these structures, which constitute the point, the finality of research or explanation.⁶

Goldmann ’s comments respond to remarks that Foucault made at the end of his paper:

The author – or what I have tried to describe as the author-function – is perhaps only one of the possible specifications of the subject-function. A possible specification, or a necessary one? Given the historical changes that have taken place, it does not seem necessary – far from it – that the author-function should remain constant in its form, its complexity, even its existence. One can imagine a culture where discourses circulate and are received without the author-function ever appearing.⁷

Foucault and Goldmann share much common ground, although there is a significant terminological difference between them. Neither denies the existence of a subject or an author . Both rather suggest that the question of the “author-function” is a subset of the question of the “subject-function”: the critique of the “author” is part of a more general strategy for displacing the individual subject , one intimately linked to critiques of the categories of individual will and action. That is, both explicitly link the question of the “author ” to that of the “subject .” Goldmann is more apt than Foucault to refer to subject and author as phenomena that can be analyzed in relation to (generally Marxist ) “structures” (Foucault , for his part, had not used the word “structure ” in his exposé), postulating the existence of what he calls a “transindividual subject” or a “collective subject.” Goldmann concedes (although not Lacan , who was also present) nonetheless, that

Structures do not go down into the street [i.e. to protest]: which is to say, it is never structures that make history, but people, although the action of these people always has a structured and signifying character. ⁸

Thus, the late 1960s discussions of the “death of the author” and the negation of the subject are closely connected with late-1960s “antihumanism .” Foucault asks, following Beckett and Barthes, whether it is important to know “who is speaking?” (“qui parle?”). Goldmann adds to this question another: “what is he saying?” (“qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”). I would like to inflect this latter question somewhat, and ask not “what is he saying?,” but rather “what is s/he doing?” It is this question of ethical responsibility for linguistic actions—for language usage conceived of as action—that will concern us for the rest of this chapter.

Actors and Actions

In the second act of Alban Berg ’s Lulu, as in the Franz Wedekind play on which the scene is based, Dr. Schön, horrified by his wife Lulu ’s machinations—they have already led to a suicide—forces her to her knees and, unwisely, offers her a gun to shoot herself. She, wisely, shoots him instead.

Let us suppose that Renée Fleming , the soprano singing Lulu in a Metropolitan Oper a production, substitutes a loaded revolver and in fact shoots the baritone, playing Dr. Schön, dead, during a public performance.⁹ The reasons don’t matter: we can imagine any number of spurs for Renée Fleming to kill the baritone, and it is, let us say, a flair for the dramatic that makes her do it on stage. In such a situation, we might assume that Renée Fleming —if she does not manage to disappear through the stage door unnoticed—would be arrested at the close of the abbreviated performance for the murder of the baritone.

In the theater, audiences generally, if not always, seem to be able to distinguish between character s and the people who play them. It is very rare for audience members to intervene in action on stage, preventing simulated crimes, and audiences generally would not applaud a dramatic murder assumed to be “real” (or at least one hopes that this is the case). Likewise, in a court of law, it would not be a defense for Renée Fleming to claim that she had committed her crime in character. Being a character on stage does not provide the same kinds of mitigating protections from punishment for crimes that, say, being insane would normally provide. More specifically, the standard assumption is that there is a character and a person playing that character: the first is an imaginative creation, the second a person, certainly in a judicial sense, considered responsible for actions, and no doubt a person in any number of more thorny ontological ways of considering the question of personhood .¹⁰

However, the limits between what is allowed and what is not allowed are blurry and the ambiguous cases are the most interesting ones. For example, under a brutal regime, the actor who gives an apparently subversive speech on stage will be held accountable for the subversive content of the speech. He or she is unlikely to be able to claim the privileges of character. Moreover, the actor is speaking words often written by another person, and so the political offense is one of being apparently in league with the playwright, sharing, intersubjective ly, a subversive political stance with him or her. Of course, the playwright and the actor need not agree with what their characters say. When, in Act V of Beaumarchais ’ Le Mariage de Figaro, Figaro gives his rant against the aristocracy, this certainly does not mean ipso facto that Beaumarchais shared Figaro’s position, or, all the more so, that the actor shared tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Is the Author Responsible? Artistic Agency in Humanist and Antihumanist Perspectives
• 2. An Ethics for Antihumanism? Belief and Practice
• 3. Should We Practice Justice Toward Nonhuman Animals? Radical Animal Interests, Humanism, and Classical Justice
• 4. What Came Before, What Comes After Normal? Some Humanist and Postmodern Antihumanist Thoughts on the Concept of Normalcy
• 5. What Is a Colony Before Colonialism? Humanist and Antihumanist Concepts of Governmentality from Foucault to Montaigne
• 6. Humanists, Antihumanists, and Nouveaux Philosophes on What Makes Us Free
• 7. Can a Human Bomb Be Human? Humanist and Antihumanist Perspectives on War and Terrorism
• Backmatter