Perry Anderson

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.