Lectures

Writing And Ethical Responsibility – Sean Burke (Continued)

By the time of Socrates and Plato, writing had freed Greek culture from expending its energies in this colossal task of holding culture in the head. Thus unencumbered, the mind had become free to analyse, assess, question the information stored in the artificial and external sign. The external sign created knowledge as object and made mind the subject in relation to that object. In the oral tradition, on the other hand, subject and object were not differentiated: performers and audience alike simply immersed themselves within the tale and its telling - a species of identification quite the reverse of literary criticism which involves standing back from the work, assessing it as an object of study rather than of direct experience. Only with the cultural assimilation of writing does the notion of subjective autonomy come into being and, correlatively, that of authorial responsibility. Thus when Plato recalls his master in the Apology, it is as that radical who asked the so-called men of wisdom what they understood by wisdom. It is also as that primordial literary theorist who asked the poets what they meant by their poems, who called for a rational agent to step out from the shadowy, cave-like world of poetic identification. Socrates was disappointed in his assumption that the authors of these works might provide a rational account of their work: 

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors … I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean ... (Apology 22b-c)

Poets and dramatists had sheltered behind ritual, collective authorship and the doctrine of inspiration which, whilst it dignifies the work with divine status, also relieves the author or poet of any responsibility or initiative in its production. Hence Socrates places the following questions at the centre of subsequent thought: “who is speaking?”, “what do you mean by what you say?”, “how can you justify what you say?”, “what are its potential consequences?”. A culture in which poetry served to unify knowledge now fragments, becomes compartmentalised: philosophy, history, politics, literature and ethics become separate realms of enquiry. The Socratic practice of asking the poets what they meant thus amounts to enjoining the poet not only to be a reader, a literary critic, of his or her own work, but also to take ethical responsibility for that work. It constitutes a clear demand that poets sign their texts in the full sense of signing for the future, for misreading, for unintended meaning. Only by separating out the personality of the poet from the content of the poem, by enforcing a critically reflective distance between person and poem, could Platonism ensure that the artificer takes as much responsibility for the artifice as a parent for its child. In this moment of interrogation, literature is demystified, finds itself accountable to philosophical ethics and the modern conception of the author as a rational agent comes into being.

VI

Ironically, though, Plato has called himself before his own tribunal. Homer has not had a more dangerous effect effect upon society than Plato; indeed, no work of literature has affected the political organisation of nations in anything like the manner of the Republic. Plato’s text did not distinguish between its suitable and unsuitable readers. Moreover, it influenced the development of speculative philosophy which - at least from Rousseau to Marx - has proved the dangerous discourse par excellence. We might here hold Plato both “responsible” and “irresponsible”. That his Republic should have provided a blueprint for every subsequent projection of an ideal order onto the plane of history is doubtless an accident that he could never have foreseen. In his view of writing as blind consignment, however, he self-condemns by letting loose his words in the knowledge of their uncertain destination, in the knowledge that no text could ever defend itself against unsuitable readers.

   Should, then, Plato have left his dream of the ideal commonwealth unrecorded and unwritten? Should Nietzsche have remained a classical scholar and not written inspirationally of the ends of man from the heights of Sils Maria? Would the world have been a worse place without The Communist Manifesto or The Social Contract? We are here descending into the ethically unfathomable. After all, the climate of  imaginative freedom which gave us The Prelude, The Rights of  Man, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Prometheus Unbound, Les Fleurs de Mal, Tristan und Isolde and Joyce’s Ulysses also gave us Mein Kamph, Mussolini’s The Garden of Fascism, Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Gulags. How to weigh in the balance? How cautious do we want to be? How much writerly recklessness can we withstand? 

   “All great things are precarious,” says Socrates (Republic, 497d) and those who feel they are on the verge of a momentous discovery or an unprescedented cultural achievement cannot but proceed with a sense of freedom and danger, a mixture of  obsession, awe and recklessness. Marx wrote from a passionate conviction that the interests of social justice and human wants would forever be served by his work; Freud felt that culture needed the concept of the unconscious to heal the wounds of the civilised psyche. William Blake knew that the world would be incomplete without his elaborate mythologies and John Milton that Genesis had to be rewritten in the form of classical epic. Darwin’s devout Christianity could not deter him from the great adventure of evolutionary biology; Socrates drank hemlock rather than recant his relentless interrogation of cultural and intellectual presuppositions. What applies here to artists and intellectuals naturally applies also to great scientists. If something radically new is to come into the world, it is essential that a leap of the imagination be made, one which generally makes profound connections between orders of knowledge where none had previously been perceived. Without risk, knowledge and creativity ossify as they did under the long and vigilant authority of the Church prior to the Renaissance. There must be in every great poet, philosopher or scientist something of the spirit of the William Blake who declared “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”. 17.

   How to find a balance, a middle path between creativity and containment, imagination and ethics? ¹⁸ Naturally, content is the major determining factor in a discourse’s propensity for negative overspill. The dangerous discourse will talk of improved social orders, the origins and ends of man, lay down revolutionary maps or blueprints for a more-or-less idealised state. But were the ethical issue purely dependent upon content, Thomas More’s Utopia would belong beside the works of  Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche as a text which lent itself to violent (mis)appropriation. But More wrote the political section of Utopia and then added the fictional and fictionalising opening. By thus refracting the the political content through an imaginary scenario, he establishes a contract with his readerships - then, now and to come - that the text is to be taken as a “philosophy of a if”, a potential world with no necessary purchase upon and connection with the world as it does or should stand. The strategy thereby complicates any literal reading, any attempt to reduce the text to a manifesto. It forces the reader into a consideration of the issues of representation and verisimilitude. Such self-consciousness allows the expression of visionary ideas while protecting those ideas from abusive or incompetent readers. The literary, or the aesthetic in general, thus allows expression whilst assuaging its hazards, allows an author to say and not to say, a reader to rend the veil of familiar thought without taking the text as a licence to irresponsible or ill-judged action. ¹⁹

   Such a precedent might well have been followed by the authors of the grand narratives of modernity. Marx, for instance, could have presented his critique of capital as political philosophy and have abandoned the mythical notion of historical inevitability altogether, or presented it as a vision, or fanciful hypothesis; Hegel could have catalogued his analysis of the master-slave relationship with other philosophical passages in his work and redrafted his Phenomenology as a curious novel centred around a mysterious and imaginary concept called the world spirit (Geist) or as an epic poem charting the soul’s return to itself on the model, say, of Wordsworth’s Prelude. As it was, Hegel proferred his mythological narrative of human history as absolute truth; Marx claimed scientific status for his story of class conflict and its utopian resolution at the end of history. The twentieth century - which is still, in its way, only now becoming our century - gives us to wonder what would have been the effect of The Communist Manifesto had Marx and Engels written a novel around its convictions, had it all been articulated by, say, a Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or had Nietzsche distilled all his wondrous and stormy insights through the medium of verse.

VII

In his supremely subtle story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius”, Jorge Luis Borges tells of how a utopia in which material objects do not exist becomes a dystopia when it connects with the real world. In Tlön, “every philosophy is a dialectical game” and its “metaphysicians do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding” and even  “judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.” ²⁰ The shape of the story makes it clear that speculative philosophy is a harmless and even charming activity whilst it remains utterly removed from politics, history, the destinies of nations; whilst, that is, it remains an object of aesthetic contemplation, rather than an impetus to social change. The story was written during the Second World War and for a long time was seen as an escapist fantasy. However, towards its close - when Tlön is engulfing the real world - the narrator writes: “[R]eality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was sufficient to entrance the minds of  men”. ²¹ Thus does idealist thought write itself on the plane of history; the failure of mankind is to take its own imaginings for reality, to take fiction for truth. “Tlön”, the narrator says, “is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, designed to be deciphered by men.” ²² Idealist thought belongs with art, literature, and music; when the Idea begins to direct the real, catastrophe ensues. Thus must humanity constantly remind itself that a compelling text is not a discourse of truth simply because it has been classified under a non-fictional category. Respect of the role and rule of genre is hence a matter of grave ethical responsibility, particularly in the writing and reading of works whose construction of history has incendiary potential.

   Here Plato’s subordination of literature to philosophical analysis undergoes a curious reversal in that philosophy of a speculative cast can learn rules of prudence from poets, novelists and dramatists. The movement toward self-consciousness in literature can be read as retreat of the work from its world. However, such an inward turn also defends literature against misreading as dogma or constructive myth. A literary work will insist on a hypothetical frame, on the fact that it is articulated "as if.". Yet the work inhabits conditionality perpetually rather than provisionally: unlike the scientific hypothesis, it never aspires to shuffle off the hypothetical frame. An hypothesis wishes to become a demonstrable truth; a poem dreams only of being a poem. Self-conscious uses of aesthetic strategies, the reminder to the reader that what is being read exists within the realm of the imagined, the capacity of literature to be in dialogue with itself - all these metafictional cues do the serious work of reminding us that literary events are not to be construed as imperatives in the broader ethical realm. This insistence on literature finding its own realm is not an evasion of responsibility: it resists the solidification of the work into dogma or myth, prevents it from invading the political order. On this stage, the aesthetic contains all mutinies within itself. The poetry of Keats, for example, is altogether enriched by the treacheries of his language: these treacheries feed back into the enclosed labyrinth of the work. Nor again is this to deny the power of literature to allow us to reflect critically on ethical issues: dramas and novels provide splendid fora for the consideration of social, moral and ethical dilemmas, but do so within the splendidly elaborate yet consequence-free setting of hypothetical situations. A Balzac or a Dickens invites us to pass judgement on a significant moment in history but in novels which seek to understand rather than to drive history. These containments seem essential if we are not to allow fictions to masquerade as truth, to become myths which people refuse to recognise as myths. As Kierkegaard said of Hegel, he would have been the greatest thinker in history had he prefaced his work with the caveat “this is all a thought-experiment”. ²³

VIII

Our emphasis has been exclusively upon the responsibilities of the writer and one may – with good reason - counter that the problem ultimately resides with readers. Only through readers does writing move from the silence of the page to the clamour of war or revolution. It took Lenin and others to convert Marxism into Bolshevism, the Nazi propagandists to wrest Nietzsche into some appearance of conformity with the project of Aryan supremacy, Soviet planners to adapt Plato’s Republic to State Communism. Writing will inevitably fall into the hands of malign or incompetent readers and the imposition of a severe ethic of discursive responsibility would stifle creative thought. Yet, a greater willingness on the part of authors to identify those areas of their work which rely on narrative or poetic rather than argumentative force can go some way toward assuaging the dangers posed by the grand narratives of history, the human spirit and its destiny. Also some acknowledgement of the subjective wellsprings of such systems would forewarn readers that ideas such as the noble savage, the (bermensch, the journey of Geist to meet itself at the end of time, the end of history in universal peace originate from a particular, situated and indeed human-all-too-human authorial perspective. Evolutionary biology had an altogether greater claim to objectivity than did dialetical materialism or psychoanalysis despite the incessant efforts of Marx and Freud to persuade their audiences that they had set out upon the secure path of a science. Similarly, Nietzsche’s The Antichrist does violence to a responsible notion of what constitutes philosophy in a way that John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding does not. Real dangers arise when essentially narrative acts - the redemptive systems of Hegel and Marx, for example - claim cognitive status, when a series of brilliant but turbulently poetic insights presents itself as “the Nietzschean philosophy” or “the philosophy of will-to-power”.

   Separating out what is philosophical in a “philosophy” from what is poetic, what is narrative in a social “science” from what is scientific should have been the responsibility of authors in the first place but can now only fall to us in our attempts to be good readers. And to be good readers is to be vigilantly mindful of Frank Kermode’s warning: “If we forget that fictions are fictive we regress to myth … ’making human sense’ is something that literature achieves only so long as we remember the status of fictions." ²⁴ W.H.Auden famously wrote “poetry makes nothing happen”, a phrase which can be taken to indicate either poetry’s ineffectuality or its power of giving life to the void. “No more poetry after Auschwitz”, writes Theodor Adorno, seemingly saying quite the opposite. ²⁵ Yet, if we take Adorno against the grain of his own thought to mean that never again should discourses mix up truth claims with aesthetic effects, we do fullest justice to his concerns by reversing the manifest sense of the statement. “More poetry after Auschwitz”, he is best taken as saying. “More poetry” would then mean not the proliferation of new discourses but the reclamation by literature from philosophy of all that properly belongs within its sphere, its domain. On this account alone, literature is in our time an ethical realm, and realm of the ethical.
 

FOOTNOTES

1. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author”, trans. Josue V. Harari in Josue V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp.141-60: p.160.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p.52.

3. Extending the issue of responsibility to science, the pioneers quantum mechanics - Bohr, Heisenberg, and Oppenheimer, and others - found themselves pondering their responsibility for unintended and disastrous outcomes of their work. One could also, of course, adduce lower-case instances of the (ir)responsibility of the writer. Certain texts have driven not only the author into exile, vilification or persecution but the author’s family also: such a conflict of responsibilities is particularly acute for dissident authors who face an uneviable choice between quietism and gambling with the fates of those close to them

 4. Ayatollah Khomeni, quoted in Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, The Rushdie File (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), p.84. See also Maire ni Fhlathuin’s astute “Postcolonialism and the Author: the Case of Salman Rushdie” in Sean Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), pp.277-284.

5. Patricia Waugh, The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960-1990 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.51.

6. Feroza Jussawalla, “Resurrecting the Prophet: the Case of Salman, the Otherwise”, Public Culture, 2.1, p.107.

7. “The Koran is copied in a book, is pronounced with the tongue, is remembered in the heart and, even so, continues to persist in the center of God and is not altered by its passage through written pages and human understanding” (Koran, Chapter XIII).

8. Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam (London: The Hogarth Press, 1991), p.138.

9. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.198.

10. Martin Jay, Fin de Si(cle Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1988), p.33.

11. Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p.6.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche as cited in Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p.259. Elsewhere, Nietzsche declares: “Nothing that happened at all can be reprehensible in itself for one should not want to eliminate it: for everything is so bound up with everything else that to want to exclude something means to exclude everything: a reprehensible action means: a reprehended world” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Water Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House: Vintage, 1967), &293.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House: Vintage Books, 1969), pp.326-27. Reading this passage one feels an appalled exultation, a sense of  being in the presence of  a dark sublimity, so prescient are these words of a movement “conjured up against everything that had been demanded, hallowed so far” and so accurate in venturing that his name will be associated with the catacysm and its memory - for just as none of Nietzsche’s defenders will deny the association, nor will his attackers profess a directly causal relation. The passage also accepts responsibility for the ensuing carnage.

14. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell, edited by Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schoken, 1986), p.30.

15. Wie leicht nimmt man die Last einer Entschuldig[ung] auf sich, so lange man nichts zu verantworten hat. ABER ICH BIN VERANTWORTLICH)”. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter of June/July 1883, cited in Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e, op. cit, p.395.

16. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963), p.176.

17. William Blake, Jerusalem, plate 10, line 20.

18.In oral cultures wisdom and knowledge were passed down from master to pupil with the latter benefitting from the former’s instruction. Also, with the advent of literacy in ancient Greece, institutions were established to protect discourse against abusive or incompetent readings: Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum and the apostolic succession of Jesus Christ being the most famous examples. However, latter-day equivalents have proved ineffectual: neither the First and Second Internationals nor the Institute of Psychoanalysis proved capable of protecting the legacies of Marx and Freud. In modernity, a discourse cannot rely on such institutions and the authors of potentially dangerous discourses need to programme responsibility into the construction and frames of the work itself.

19. Metafictional or aesthetic defences proved inadequate in the anomalous affair of The Satanic Verses since the text addressed itself to an Islamic tradition in which the aesthetic, cognitive and ethical do not necessarily comprise distinct categories. Moreover, for the majority of Rusdhie’s Muslim audience, concepts such as mediation and representation – as adduced in defence of the novel – appeared as little more than disingenuous attempts to draw a cordon sanitaire around an act of blasphemous appropriation. See, also, n.7 above.

20. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). p.34.

21. Ibid, p.42

22. Ibid.

23. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p.558.

24. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p.41.

25. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

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