The Other Ulrich

My view of, or task I would set for, literature: partial solution, contribution to the solution, investigation, or the like. I feel exempted from having to give an unequivocal response. I have, after all, also postulated the morality of individual cases, etc.

A justified objection: That was from the period before the war. There was no way of shaking up the totality. It went further too: everyone had this feeling. Whether one wanted it that way or not, there was a firm system of coordinates. A floating ball, which one pushed and turned every which way. One's interest exhausted itself in the variations. The tacit assumption was probably not the solidity of the environment but one's lack of concern for it, without one's being aware of it ...

The situation has now changed. The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for yes and no. In this sense, a person with as little substance as Brecht is exemplary through the form of his behavior. He moves people because he demonstrates their own experience to them. One has to understand this completely.

Therefore the didactic element in the book must be strengthened. A practical formula must be advanced.

Not further thought out: apparently this gives the practical-theoretical opposition, the original spy concept, new meaning.

- from Robert Musil's notes on the unfinished preface to The Man Without Qualities

All the way through reading The Man Without Qualities I was conscious of my memory of Proust, or what remains of it, at any rate. To compare the two is difficult, especially since the value one puts on the latter is often inextricably bound up with pride at having slogged through seven volumes. But it is clear that Proust does not come out ahead. In Search of Lost Time is in its way a tremendously self-satisfied book; Marcel never doubts the legitimacy of his character-analyses. He suffers and doubts, but always on the way to a conclusion that justifies him. That is why he is so astute when he brings out the ridiculous in his surroundings; he is so conscious of possessing an ultimate yardstick that the satirical mode comes naturally to him. Enveloped in Proust's megalomania, the reader often has difficulty telling the rapturous passages from the banal ones.

The Man Without Qualities is different. In another section of the preface notes, Musil describes the protagonist Ulrich as "not simply a failure," but someone who is constantly aware of "a further possibility." (A perfect description--imagine a Prufrock that can imagine a possibility beyond being Prufrock, and a possibility beyond that.) That means the novel is constitutionally incapable of constructing a self-justifying discourse like Proust's, since none of its infinite multiplicity of answers can ever be final. It also means that it is an immensely frustrating novel to read: it, quite consciously, never gets anywhere. The incomplete second volume is dominated by the specter of a Millennium, a passive and private utopia held forth as the resolution of Ulrich's disengagement from the world. But even this radical and fundamental retreat ends up being a failure that never makes good on its promise. It is, of course, tragic that Musil did not have the chance to finish his novel--and yet it seems impossible that he could ever have finished it.

Still, we are left with the notes, which are attached to the Wilkins/Pike translation. They are not like, say, Flaubert's drafts for the end of Bouvard and Pécuchet, which mesh so neatly with the narrative that one understands right away what the author had intended to write. These notes contain contradictory possibilities, the ghosts of events once supposed to transpire earlier in the novel, sketches for unknown characters, authorial remarks and marginalia scattered haphazardly through long passages of exposition, sentences that branch out suddenly into three possible turns of phrase: in short, a Borgesian garden sprouting untended in the vacant space. What are we to make of them? Are they worth reading? As Pike observes, these fragments contain some of Musil's most beautiful writing and clearest thought, but they are also totally unlike the orderly world presented in the finished wing.

The notes, I think, are best read as another novel, the possibility that haunts its built-up twin. The Musil of the notes loves hybrids, men-women and women-goats and goat-eagles: two creatures within one body, or two bodies under one soul. With its notes, The Man Without Qualities is such a hybrid, two literary beasts in one binding, one running headlong away from the other. Notes-Musil writes at one point, with desperation, that the prewar world he had spent decades trying to compass had disappeared --that the novel was now inevitably a historical one. In fact, with its grand debates, its inactive action, its strategic maps of intellectual oppositions, the complete part was already doomed to irrelevance as a masterpiece of self-conscious high modernism. Its counterpart, though, is perhaps the purest expression of what was to become the postmodern idiom; the fact that it is unintentionally so makes it all the more living. In the original novel, one sees not so much equally possible alternatives as options that are already foreclosed by other possibilities; in the counterpart, we are presented with a series of open Kierkegaardian Either/Ors, like a choose-your-own-adventure book without an ending.

One novel a failure, the other, in its way, a success. Could Musil have seen it this way? Could he have imagined a possibility beyond the book he knew as The Man Without Qualities? What could he have meant by this passage from the unfinished preface?

...It is not a satire, but a positive construal.
It is not a confession, but a satire.
It is not the book of a psychologist.
It is not the book of a thinker (since it places the ideational elements in an order that--)
It is not the book of a singer who ...
It is not the book of a successful
                                     unsuccessful author.

Yes, sic, sic, all of it--it does not make sense. The book is a satire and is not a satire. It is not the book of a successful author. It is not the book of an unsuccessful author. But perhaps it is still the book of a thinker.

On Having Been Modern

To be sure, by affirming that the Constitution, if it is to be effective, has to be unaware of what it allows, I am practicing an unveiling, but one that no longer bears upon the same objects as the modern critique and is no longer triggered by the same mainsprings. So long as we adhered willingly to the Constitution, it allowed us to settle all disputes and served as a basis for the critical spirit, providing individuals with justification for their attacks and their operations of unveiling. But if the Constitution as a whole now appears as only one half that no longer allows us to understand its own other half, then it is the very foundation of the modern critique that turns out to be ill-assured. I am thus trying the tricky move to unveil the modern Constitution without resorting to the modern type of debunking. To do so I am accounting for this vague and uneasy feeling that we have recently become as unable to denounce as to modernize. The upper ground for taking a critical stance seems to have escaped us.

Yet by appealing sometimes to Nature, sometimes to Society, sometimes to God, and by constantly opposing the transcendence of each one of these three terms to its immanence, the moderns had found the mainspring of their indignations well wound up. What kind of a modern could no longer fall back on the transcendence of nature to criticize the obscurantism of power? On the immanence of Nature to criticize human inertia? On the immanence of Society to criticize the submission of humans and the dangers of naturalism? On the transcendence of society to criticize the human illusion of individual liberty? On the transcendence of God to appeal to the judgment of humans and the obstinacy of things? On the immanence of God to criticize established churches, naturalist beliefs, and socialist dreams? It would be a pretty pathetic kind of modern, or else a postmodern: still inhabited by the violent desire to denounce, they would no longer have the strength to believe in the legitimacy of any of these six courts of appeal. To strip moderns of their indignation is to deprive them, it seems, of all self-respect. To strip critical intellectuals of the six bases for their denunciations is apparently to rob them of all reason to live. In losing our wholehearted adherence to the Constitution, do we not have the impression that we are losing the best of ourselves? Was it not the origin of our energy, our moral strength, our ethics?
- Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

The Constitution Latour's talking about is not, of course, the US Constitution. It is the complex of binaries by which we separate our ideas of nature, society, and God into pure poles of transcendence (corresponding to the object) and immanence (corresponding to the subject). This fundamental cleavage, and the armory it makes available for critique, is for Latour the definitive characteristic of modernity; he even traces it, with admirable specificity, to Boyle and Hobbes. His method is to show that we have never carried out in practice what we imagine in the form of the Constitution; instead, the very purifying function of modernity enables the constant creation of hybrids that exist somewhere between the two poles.

I'm glad to have finally read this book, if only on account of this illuminating insight. But Latour is less successful with the rest of his argument. His objective, as far as I can tell, involves ridding us of our own bad faith with respect to the process of hybridization; we are to recognize that the poles do not exist, only the hybrids, and then bricole together chunks of pre-, post-, and just plain modern thought to enable ourselves to understand them better. (The particular chunks involved seem to have been chosen like pizza toppings.) The space in between is filled out with a predictable discussion of networks and the objects that love them.

At the very least, this is much more of a tactical than a strategic advance in thinking about thinking. Latour makes the point that particular hybrids and distributions of transcendence and immanence are created by collectives. But he seems to believe that the hybridity outweighs the stakes involved in its components. The contemporary understanding of personality, for instance, is what I take to be a classic Latourian hybrid: everyone agrees that both nature and nurture are involved. That doesn't mean debates about how much nature or nurture get any less acrimonious, or indeed partake of less fundamental metaphysical divides. We might start talking about it as a hybrid or a network, sure--but the search for purity (in whatever form) that defines the "modern" style of thinking doesn't go away.

In fact, the whole business looks suspiciously like an intervention on the side of immanence dressed up in mediationist clothing. Save for a few vocabulary changes, all of this collective futzing about with distributions is not so very different from Foucauldian discursive practices. As a good postmodern, I don't object to immanence at all. Immanence doesn't mind when transcendence wants to make a hybrid; it merely smiles into its moustache, knowing that the inner economy of the hybrid is always an immanent matter. Transcendence, on the other hand, requires purity if it is to mean anything. There must always be a part of Nature that is not "up to us." So Latour's claim to overcoming the demand for purity is unambiguously one-sided.

There are other objections I could make. (On what level does the network operate here? Are the concepts "immanence" and "transcendence" constituted by a network? If so, how can networks be somehow allied with hybrids?). Yet what I think about most of all is the other book I'm reading now: The Man Without Qualities (of which more next week). It is there that dueling denunciations and demands for purity emerge at their most vivid and most impotent. All six of Latour's stances can be found. But Musil is more correct--is still more correct: there's no escaping the cycle. Modernity is a nightmare from which we cannot awake.

Something Happened

Émigrés from the Soviet Union have been reporting for at least the last generation now that virtually nobody in that country truly believed in Marxism-Leninism any longer, and that this was nowhere more true than in the Soviet elite, which continued to mouth Marxist slogans out of sheer cynicism. The corruption and decadence of the late Brezhnev-era Soviet state seemed to matter little, however, for as long as the state itself refused to throw into question any of the fundamental principles underlying Soviet society, the system was capable of functioning adequately out of sheer inertia and could even muster some dynamism in the realm of foreign and defense policy. Marxism-Leninism was like a magical incantation which, however absurd and devoid of meaning, was the only common basis on which the elite could agree to rule Soviet society ...

The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely that perestroika will succeed such that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future. But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. And in this respect I believe that something very important has happened in the Soviet Union in the past few years: the criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been so thorough and devastating that there is very little chance of going back to either Stalinism or Brezhnevism in any simple way. Gorbachev has finally permitted people to say what they had privately understood for many years, namely, that the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect but was in fact a monumental failure. The conservative opposition in the USSR, consisting both of simple workers afraid of unemployment and inflation and of party officials fearful of losing their jobs and privileges, is outspoken and may be strong enough to force Gorbachev's ouster in the next few years. But what both groups desire is tradition, order, and authority; they manifest no deep commitment to Marxism-Leninism, except insofar as they have invested much of their own lives in it. For authority to be restored in the Soviet Union after Gorbachev's demolition work, it must be on the basis of some new and vigorous ideology which has not yet appeared on the horizon.
- Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?"

Fukuyama was hardly the only intellectual in the '89-'91 period to make a point about the ideological disappearance of Marxism-Leninism. In fact, everyone from Latour to Badiou to Eagleton identifies those years with that event. This should not be surprising; after all, the Cold War, which had provided reliable political coordinates for almost half a century, had just ended. The intellectuals were just jumping on the bandwagon. And surely something important was happening: the people on the television were chanting, standing on tanks, pulling down statues. It must have been some kind of watershed.

On the other hand, as Fukuyama points out, nothing really happened. If the Soviet Union's ideological purpose was to "represent an alternative" to liberal democracy--as many writers put it--the link between representation and represented had become attenuated indeed. The claim of the USSR to alone speak for Marx had already begun to collapse when news of Stalinist repression had started splintering the mainstream European Communist Parties. After 1968 the Situationist critique of the Cold War powers as variations on a spectacular capitalist theme became mainstream. The Soviet Union in the minds of the radicals was not even meaningfully socialist, still less a communist utopia.

By all accounts, 1989 should have produced as little agitation among the intellectuals as the death of the last Stuart claimant to the English throne did among subversives in nineteenth-century Britain. Bolshevism was already as obsolete as Jacobitism had been. And yet we were told, and still are, that something important had happened. Perhaps "New World Order" was an exaggeration, but Marxism as a fetish began sliding precipitously into disrepute. Now even Badiou and Jameson are coy about their sympathies. Just as notably, the greatest economic crisis since the Depression did nothing for Marxism's fortunes--as good a test as any for the relevance of a system of thought.

So what was 1989 really? It was an excuse. In taking Marxism's grotesquely misshapen Dutch uncle for the real thing, the intellectuals killed it off themselves, as they had been secretly meaning to do for a while. The announcements were a sort of speech act, a collective promise to bury the subject once and for all. The attacks levied against Fukuyama only prove the point: his mistake was in being from the Right and thus apparently gloating, not in actually being wrong. The Soviet Union, in the end, was a lamb sacrificed on the altar to expiate much more threatening sins.

But the illusion that the collapse of Marxism had been brought about by a real-world event continues to be necessary. After all, if the Marxist star had gone out quietly of its own accord, it would have been impossible not to look for a reason for its disappearance. And if no such reason could have been found, the remaining explanation would have had to confront the reality that Marxism and everything else was just a fad, no more inherently capable of satisfying the Eleventh Thesis than any other--and how could the intellos take themselves seriously after that?

Credo Quia Absurdum

Furthermore if you look back on your own experience, is it not in that victory by which your faith overcomes the world, in "your exit from the horrible pit and out of the slough of the marsh," that you yourselves sing a new song to the Lord for all the marvels he has performed? Again, when he purposed to "settle your feet on a rock and to direct your steps," then too, I feel certain, a new song was sounding on your lips, a song to our God for his gracious renewal of your life. When you repented he not only forgave your sins but even promised rewards, so that rejoicing in the hope of benefits to come, you sing of the Lord's ways: how great is the glory of the Lord! And when, as happens, texts of Scripture hitherto dark and impenetrable at last become bright with meaning for you, then, in gratitude for this nurturing bread of heaven you must charm the ears of God with a voice of exultation and praise, a festal song. In the daily trials and combats arising from the flesh, the world and the devil, that are never wanting to those who live devout lives in Christ, you learn by what you experience that man's life on earth is a ceaseless warfare, and are impelled to repeat your songs day after day for every victory won. As often as temptation is overcome, an immoral habit brought under control, an impending danger shunned, the trap of the seducer detected, when a passion long indulged is finally and perfectly allayed, or a virtue persistently desired and repeatedly sought is ultimately obtained by God's gift; so often, in the words of the prophet, let thanksgiving and joy resound. For every benefit conferred, God is to be praised in his gifts. Otherwise when the time of judgment comes, that man will be punished as an ingrate who cannot say to God: "Your statutes were my song in the land of exile.”
- Bernard of Clairvaux, sermon on the Song of Songs (1)

I recently reread Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and, while I am not quite its target audience, it left me with a distinct impression of failure. Kierkegaard's objective is to polemically disprove the traditional bourgeois interpretation of the story of Isaac. This interpretation relies essentially on an economic view of Abraham's dilemma: the business with Isaac was so traumatic because Isaac was very precious for him. In other words, if the circumstances were different Isaac could have been replaced by a well-worn Led Zeppelin T-shirt. For Kierkegaard (as you no doubt already know) the problem is that Abraham is in effect committing murder based on nothing but his individual act of faith--which is nevertheless a justified act. (What's really at stake here is Kantian morality, which, in Kierkegaard's view, can acknowledge no situation in which the individual would have the power to suspend the universal moral law.)

Here's why I think he fails. In order to properly position the leap of faith in relation to both everyday behavior and the maxim-driven conduct of a Kantian, Kierkegaard needs to evacuate all notions of calculation, weighing of possibilities, and other essentially economic considerations from the faith-act itself. The whole point is that the leap of faith transcends calculation, and as long as it is subject to being calculated, it appears entirely irrational. But on the other hand, in order for the book to have a purpose, there must be an element of volition: Abraham could have chosen not to obey God. These two demands are fundamentally in conflict. If I must make a choice about my leap of faith, I must make it using the familiar evaluative strategies that are available to me--otherwise there is no choice at all. Kierkegaard, in short, begs the question; his approach to agency requires its occlusion in other, irrelevant, pseudoproblems.

Skimming inattentively through a few of Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs, I noticed a recurring echo of this problem of agency. Here Bernard notes how we praise God when we have overcome temptation (but note the passive voice!). What, precisely, are we giving thanks for? In another sermon, he says that baptized infants can enter heaven because of a gift of grace, not, like adults, a "reward of merit." What's the difference? Where in the chain of causality is there an agency not always-already guided by grace--and whence, then, this notion of reward?

Of course, for many believers this is not a problem at all. They can point out that God "gives one the strength" to resist temptation but does not erase one's agency. But this only defers the question: if, hypothetically, I am given the strength to resist temptation, is it possible for me not to resist it? If yes, I have not been given anything; if no, then I have made no choice and therefore deserve no reward. Suppose another answer is given--that God gives one the strength but one must still make a choice to use it. Again, the question is deferred: if God does not give me the strength to use the strength He gives, he has given me nothing. And so on. If we believe Nietzsche, this underlying cover-up is at the very center of Judeo-Christian religion.

Bernard, though, is a bit more complex than that. His sermons outdo the most hardened postmodernist in their dissection of isolated lines from the Song of Songs. (Half a dozen are dedicated to a single line.) What emerges from the discussion is something beyond the typical elision of the poem's sexuality. Almost like a Sufi mystic, Bernard embraces the "drunkenness" or irrationality underlying the beloved's demand for the lover's kiss (i.e. God's grace). Such a view provides the opening for a way out of the dilemma of agency. In drunkenness, both calculation and reward disappear--a consequence Bernard wisely does not dwell on.

Omelettes and Hunchbacks

In vain do the liberal gentlemen try to save the Tsar's collapsing throne! In vain they stretch their hands out to assist him! They're trying to wheedle some alms out of him and get him to look favorably on their "constitutional project," so that, the way paved with petty reforms, they might turn the Tsar into their weapon, replacing his autocracy with the autocracy of the bourgeoisie, and then systematically smother the proletariat and the peasantry. But in vain! It is too late, you liberal gentlemen! Look around at what the Tsar's government has given you, look through his "ukaze from on high": a tiny "liberty" of "zemstvo and city institutions," a tiny "guarantee" against "infringements on the rights of private individuals," a tiny "liberty" of the "printed word," and a big injunction about the "preservation at all costs of the unshakeability of the fundamental laws of the empire," about "the taking of active measures, the preservation of the full force of the law, the throne's most vital support in an autocratic state"! And what then? There was not even time to digest the laughable "order" of the laughable Tsar before "warnings" to newspapers began raining down like hail, gendarme and police raids began, even peaceful banquets were forbidden. The Tsar's government itself tried to prove that in its puny promises it would not go beyond pitiful words.

On the other hand, the angry masses of the people are preparing for revolution, not for peace with the Tsar. They hold firmly to the proverb "The hunchback can only be cured by the grave." Yes, gentlemen, your efforts are fruitless! The Russian revolution is inevitable. It is as inevitable as the rising of the sun. Can you stop the rising sun? The greatest force of this revolution is the urban and rural proletariat, and its standard-bearer is the Social-Democratic Labor Party, not you, liberal gentlemen! Why do you forget this obvious "trivial detail"?
- Stalin, "Workers of the Caucasus, now is the time to take revenge!" (1905)

First, a little bit of sloppy and inconclusive historical detective work. The proverb "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" is frequently associated with Lenin and cited as evidence of his callousness--his willingness to sacrifice innocent lives for revolutionary ends. Of course, Lenin never said this, because Russian does not have such a proverb and never did. What Lenin would most likely have said was "Лес рубят, щепки летят," i.e., "When you chop down a tree, the wood-chips go flying." But Russians typically attribute the use of the phrase in this context to Stalin. (Khruschev writes, "In those days we thought like lumberjacks--when you chop down a tree, the wood-chips go flying.")

But that phrase occurs nowhere in Stalin's collected works, or, for that matter, in Lenin's; in one dictionary of quotations it is described as "supposedly said by Stalin." The book I translated last year attributes the phrase, in an uncited epigraph, to the Latvian Bolshevik Martin Latsis--a version I am inclined to believe, since Latsis was more genuinely bloodthirsty, if you can believe it, than either Lenin or Stalin, and masterminded the Red Terror during the Civil War. The origins of the connection, then, are vague. It is clear that sometime in the early Soviet period the saying came to be associated with revolutionary violence, but not much beyond that is known; Dal's list of Russian proverbs includes only "где дрова рубят, тут и щепа валится (там не без щепок)" ("where there's woodchopping, there are wood chips," a phrase of uncertain meaning) and "у вас (или в лесу) дрова рубят, а к нам (в город) щепки летят" ("you chop wood over there (or in the forest) and the chips go flying over here (or into town)," which seems to mean something else entirely).

In the end, I think the phrase is fundamentally a red herring. There are few people, Stalinist apologists or no, who would not acknowledge the legitimacy of "breaking eggs" in one form or other--criminals and minorities being the equivalent in liberal-capitalist society. The only insight the phrase gives us is the emotional one, the sheer disgust at how disposable human life was under conditions of Communist terror. It is invoked lazily to suggest the inevitable human cost of doomed utopian projects, but it does not force us to confront the equally costly failures of our own favorite kind of omelette. It's comforting, but unhelpful.

A much better equivalent--which I have, thanks to Google, found in one of Stalin's earliest published works--is the saying "горбатого могила исправит," or "the hunchback can only be cured by the grave." The proverb has its roots in the Bible, which would have suited Stalin's seminary education (though one wonders if Kant's line about the crooked timber is related too). Unlike the other one, where people are referred to only euphemistically, here the meaning is direct and only indirectly implies an unpolishable turd: flawed human beings must be killed. This represents a very specific view of human characteristics and the relationship between the vanguard and the rest of the people; in fact, as Igal Halfin's recent book shows, it is precisely the ideological transition to a view of counterrevolutionary sympathies as immutable and ineradicable that marked the apex of the Terror.

As punctual accumulations of conventional wisdom, proverbs are powerful indices of popular views. What makes them so is not their homely, day-to-day utility, but in fact the very meaninglessness of the collected body of proverbs. Zizek, I'm told, points out somewhere that proverbs are pointless because for every proverb there is an equal and opposite proverb. What matters, then, is which of the options one takes. Is the hunchback incurable, or did labor make a man out of the ape (also a popular line)? How a generation answers that question can tell us much about what it thought it was doing.

From Tidings to Intelligence

Sir Politic: I did so. Sir,
I knew him one of the most dangerous heads
Living within the state, and so I held him.
Peregrine: Indeed, sir?
Sir Politic: While he lived, in action.
He has received weekly intelligence,
Upon my knowledge, out of the Low Countries,
For all parts of the world, in cabbages;
And those dispensed again to ambassadors,
In oranges, musk-melons, apricocks,
Lemons, pome-citrons, and such-like: sometimes
In Colchester oysters, and your Selsey cockles.
Peregrine: You make me wonder.
Sir Politic: Sir, upon my knowledge.
Nay, I've observed him, at your public ordinary,
Take his advertisement from a traveller
A conceal'd statesman, in a trencher of meat;
And instantly, before the meal was done,
Convey an answer in a tooth-pick.
Peregrine: Strange!
How could this be, sir?
Sir Politic: Why, the meat was cut
So like his character, and so laid, as he
Must easily read the cipher.

[...]

Sir Politic: No. This is my diary,
Wherein I note my actions of the day.
Peregrine: Pray you let's see, sir. What is here?
[READS.]
"Notandum,
A rat had gnawn my spur-leathers; notwithstanding,
I put on new, and did go forth: but first
I threw three beans over the threshold. Item,
I went and bought two tooth-picks, whereof one
I burst immediatly, in a discourse
With a Dutch merchant, 'bout ragion del stato.
From him I went and paid a moccinigo,
For piecing my silk stockings; by the way
I cheapen'd sprats; and at St. Mark's I urined."
'Faith, these are politic notes!
Sir Politic: Sir, I do slip
No action of my life, but thus I quote it.
- from Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox (1606)

Jonson's play, on the face of it, is just another comedy about conspiracies raveling and unraveling. It's a good one, certainly: the plot is wound tightly, and the various static allegorical characters all get their fitting comeuppance. The various intertextual winks and allusions to classical tropes are nice too. All in all, though, it's a little thin. I don't imagine that an audience that had the option of seeing Shakespeare "live" instead would have willingly cast its groats in Jonson's direction--his characters have witty lines, but no depth to speak of. Hence, most likely, the rather apologetic prologue and (highly abbreviated) epilogue.

There is one thing I find interesting. Nowhere in the Bard, the invention of the human notwithstanding, have I found much of an echo of the emerging social technologies of his time. To be sure, the fact that his plays are set in other times and places generally excuses him from depicting limited-liability corporations or the pamphlet trade--yet there seems to be something in his constitution that makes him resistant to such novelties. Habermas's great epic The Birth of the Public Sphere, Out of the Spirit of Commerce doesn't find cause to mention him except in the negative ("public opinion" or the like never appears in his work!).

In Volpone, though, there is a strange subplot--the dialogue between Sir Politic Wouldbe and Peregrine, commercial Englishmen living in Venice and scheming about getting rich quick. It links to the main plot only tangentially: Wouldbe's wife is busy trying to cuckold him with Volpone for the sake of cash, while Peregrine and Politic run into a costumed Volpone at one point. It's almost like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. As the play goes on, Peregrine plays a neat trick on Politic and the two exeunt never to be seen again. That much is only marginally of interest.

Sir Politic, though, was probably among the first staged representations of the transcontinental mercantile society that was to produce the public sphere. He obsessively schemes and plans, gathering information and passing it around; his most priceless possessions are his notes. In fact, the resolution of his subplot hinges on their destruction--and also on the odd circumstance that a "statesman" uses the word "intelligence" where a lay person would use the word "tidings." (Or so my copy helpfully notes; it is this "intelligence" that would soon fill the various Gazettes and Mercuries of seventeeth-century London.) Like everyone in this comedy (except Peregrine), Sir Politic comes off as frankly ridiculous. He will believe anything and try anything for commercial advancement, and the fact that he records everything in his diary is ludicrous enough to serve as a joke in itself. We still have another half-century before Pepys.

Could Jonson have anticipated the historical role of these hoarders of information? Would he have believed that taking part in the world that they created would soon become a non-negotiable condition for being a man of letters? Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but it's strange to think that he had no clue. Our contemporary obsession with latching on to the next informational big thing--one year it's Second Life, the next it's Twitter--may end up being just as vain. The Mesoamerican civilizations did know about the wheel, but they only used it for their children's toys.

The Modern World

The Modern Lovers and the MC5 are typically grouped together, with a number of other bands, under the general heading of "proto-punk." It is rare for someone today to encounter them as anything else; they are primarily of historical interest, a milestone on the way to the Clash. Proto-punk is a queer genre that way: none of its "members" could ever have thought of themselves as representing it--unlike just about any other style, from cool jazz to grunge. This is not to say that proto-punk is unpopular; certainly the Modern Lovers are a staple of any rock music collection, and almost everyone at least knows who the MC5 were. But it is a measure of the success of punk as a meta-genre that it has managed to enfold the era immediately preceding it as well as, to some extent, every period afterwards.

This is, I think, problematic on at least one level. The one and only Modern Lovers album (released 1976, recorded 1972) and the MC5's second album (1970) share a feature that remains unexplained by their designation: they are fundamentally backward-looking, not forward-looking. Kraftwerk and their Krautrock cousins can be accurately described as ancestors of modern electronica, since their music represented a conscious and deliberate break with tradition. The same cannot be said of either proto-punk band. It is not simply that they were more evolutionary than revolutionary; it is that the decade that lives most vividly in these albums is the 1950s, not the 1980s.

The Modern Lovers belies its name: it is not so much about being modern as the fear of being modern. Greil Marcus noticed that the 1-2-3-4-5-6 count-off at the beginning of "Roadrunner" was a sign of hesitation, and hesitation defines the album. Jonathan Richman still loves the 50s, still loves the old world; his crush in "Hospital" lives in modern apartments, he even got scared once or twice. His values belong to the '50s: he is repulsed by both Hippie Johnny and the "cocaine-sniffing triumphs" he's expected to desire. Even "Modern World" feels as if he's closing his eyes, holding his breath, and jumping uncertainly into the strange and new.

Back in the USA is violently opposed to the sentimentalized '50s that are so dear to Richman. The MC5 do not reject the '50s so much as expose them for what they really were. Bracketed by raw and energetic covers of '50s hits ("Tutti Frutti" and "Back in the USA"), the album's original songs draw out the suppressed sexuality, anger, and revolt behind the coy façade. Though Richman sees the decade as a stable, unchanging source of reassurance, for the MC5 it harbors unresolved conflicts and critical potential that is only waiting to be exposed.

These two varieties of retrospection could be mapped onto our political styles of reading history--the conservative one of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival and the radical one of Howard Zinn. But they are more fundamental than that. Nietzsche would have called Back in the USA a prime example of the spirit of revenge--never quite willing to leave past wrongs behind--and he would probably have been no easier on Richman. In the end, despite their fixation on the past, these glancing engagements with the meaning of the '50s shaped rock music's approach to the modern. Punk, in some sense, was just proto-punk without the history.