Philosopher of the imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis

I admit it, I have a secret, almost librarian-like inclination toward obscure and overlooked cultural figures. Especially essayists (Charles Lamb, Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. K. Chesterton), Biedermeier painters (Georg Friedrich Kersting and Carl Spitzweg), eighteenth-century "proto-Romantics" (J. M. R. Lenz, J. G. Hamann, Senancour, Edward Young), fin-de-siecle pianists (Frederic Lamond, Mark Hambourg, Moritz Rosenthal), and just about anyone from Bengal or the Weimar era (Tagore's female relatives, Nirad Chaudhuri, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay; Max Scheler, Paul Bekker, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Max Beckmann...) But with the subject of this post I may well be going too far. I asked an acquaintance with a postdoctoral position in a French department and a passion for theory what she knew of Cornelius Castoriadis - the answer: rien de tout! Why should she have done, I hear you ask - he doesn't sound very French...

And of course he wasn't French. Castoriadis was born in Istanbul, to Greek parents, in 1922, and grew up in Athens. He describes his early life and influences in the first part of a Greek TV documentary here (the only segment of the programme with English subtitles, unfortunately: click on the 'CC' button on the toolbar at the bottom to bring them up). His earliest ambition was to be a composer - a significant fact, to which we will return. But it was in Paris, where he moved in 1945 in order to escape political persecution (by both Fascists and Communists) and write a doctoral thesis in philosophy, that he established his reputation. Keeping track of all the different fields and languages which he covered - whilst remaining until 1970 an immigrant potentially subject to deportation by the French authorities at 24 hours' notice - is quite a task. With a student background in Weberian sociology, economics and law, he became a professional economist for the OECD, a trained psychoanalyst, a socialist theorist, activist and member of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (which also included Jean-Francois Lyotard and Guy Debord), and most importantly, a philosopher, one who knew the key texts of both the ancient Greek and modern German traditions in the original and used his understanding of them to preserve a rigorous intellectual independence, whilst simultaneously living through one of the most creative and competitive periods in the history of French thought. Here's a photo of the man:


Even more than Michel Foucault, to whom in his bespectacled baldness he bore some resemblance, Castoriadis does not look like the kind of character you want to mess with. And in his case, this was true on the intellectual level as well. The other Parisian penseurs were rarely bad-tempered: it is a rarity when Foucault's foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things refers to the "tiny minds" of certain "half-witted 'commentators'" who persisted in categorizing him as a structuralist, and more typical when he continues, with mandarin modesty, "I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved". Castoriadis, however, took no prisoners whatever. Foucault's own work he describes as "Nietzsche warmed over with a Parisian sauce"; postmodernism's "displays of self-contentment are as arrogant as they are stupid"; structuralism is a "pseudo-scientific ideology" and Lacanism a "smoky mystification"; and of one of the holiest of theoretical Grails, Marx's Das Kapital, Castoriadis wrote simply, "It is no accident that the man spent forty years of his life working on his economic treatise without finishing it".

Having lived with two Greeks who once nearly fell out with each other over a point of mathematics, I'm not surprised by Castoriadis's Mediterranean robustness in argument. The humour in the last example is just as typical though; and while we're at it, why not cite some more examples. The first Gulf War was supported by two-thirds of the French public "because of their fascination for the big American airlifted electronic penis". Castoriadis's comment on Chantal Mouffe's appeal to "fight the bureaucratic character of the State apparatus": that would be like trying to "fight the vegetal character of plants". You only need as much French as will get you round the Paris metro system to understand the following anti-historicist pun: "Sartre accused Camus of not seeing that history a un sens [has a meaning/is going somewhere] - it goes to...Bagnolet, Porte-des-Lilas, I forget which subway station...I think some people realized quite a while ago that these expressions are absurd. History has no more sens and no more meaning than 'the gravitational field weighs fourteen kilos'. It is within the gravitational field that something can weigh fourteen kilos. Likewise, history is the field in and through which meaning emerges, created by human beings."

But to go on to the more productiveside of Castoriadis's criticisms, it is probably with his opposition to Marx that we should start in attempting to understand Castoriadis’s own theory of society. Up until the mid-1960s at the latest, Castoriadis was still a Marxist. It is however worth noting that the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie distinguished itself among similar organs of the French left by its detailed critique of Soviet socialism, which Castoriadis in his articles of the 1950s referred to not as socialism but as “bureaucratic capitalism”, or later, as “stratocracy” – a rigidified and fundamentally anti-democratic institutional regime. In 1959, Castoriadis published a “Note on the Marxist philosophy and theory of history” in the journal, a text which would be developed into the extensive reflections of the articles series “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” in 1964-5, and integrated in this form in 1974 into his most famous book, The Imaginary Institution of Society. Here Castoriadis’s engagement with the philosophical roots and assumptions of Marxism brought him to the point where he no longer honestly wished to uphold one “true” version of Marxism against its rivals, or defend Marx himself against his devotees. It was Marx who was the problem. As he put it early on in the above-mentioned text, “Starting from revolutionary Marxism, we have arrived at the point where we have to choose between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionaries” (IIS, 14). Castoriadis chose the latter route, and when his articles did not produce the response from their readership that he hoped for, he initiated the dissolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1966. His intellectual career entered another phase.

What was Castoriadis’s problem with Marx? One could say it was Marx’s theory of historical knowledge, his project in Das Kapital (which Castoriadis, unlike Erich Fromm and others, did not believe could be circumvented by a return to the “early” Marx) – a project of understanding the development of history according to the lawful application of economic categories of thought. Castoriadis no longer believed that the history of human society could be understood through a framework of economic determinism. In the opening pages of The Imaginary Institution of Society he points out the totalizing error in the Marxist assumption that the social life of man is always determined fundamentally by the structures of labour and production, structures that only change, according to a “progressive” and teleological model of history, as a result of technological development (IIS, 29). The error consists in the projection of categories that have grown dominant within Western society over the past 200 years onto the variety of all other human societies – categories which are “capitalist”, in the sense that modern capitalism is the principal object, though not the goal or ideal, of Marxist analysis: 

“When, as in the cultivation of maize by certain Indian tribes in Mexico, or in the cultivation of rice in Indonesian villages, agricultural labour is lived not only as a means of providing food  but at the same time as the cult of a god, as a festival, and as a dance, and when a [Marxist] theoretician appears on the scene and interprets everything in those gestures that is not specifically productive as no more than mystification, illusion, and the cunning of reason, it must be forcefully asserted that this theoretician is a much more complete incarnation of capitalism than any boss... Nothing allows us to assert that the framework of gestures comprising productive labour in the narrow sense is ‘truer’ or more ‘real’ than the ensemble of meanings into which these gestures have been woven by those who perform them. Nothing, if not that the postulate that the true nature of man is to be a productive-economic animal...a postulate which implies, if it were true, that socialism is forever impossible.” (IIS, 28)

Revolutionary socialism in Castoriadis’s view could not fall back on the historical materialist demand that we see past the obscuring veils of culture and ideology to what is “really going on”, since “what is really going on” must include an account of culture, ideology and much else which would appear insubstantial or irrelevant from the strict standpoint of economic production. This sphere of human activity Castoriadis summed up under the heading of the “imaginary”. And as the title of his book communicates, it was the “imaginary” which Castoriadis saw as the founding stratum and origin of society (he was incidentally the first theorist to transfer the term from the psychoanalytic field, within which it was used by Lacan, into the field of sociological analysis, where it is now an accepted term in a number of different theoretical traditions). Only in terms of the imaginary, to return to his above anthropological example, could one explain why societies at the same technological stage and with the same relations of production could differ from each other so radically on the plane of culture, social and ritual organization, and identity. Each society was subject to different “social imaginary significations”, organizing nodes of social meaning, which do not have a fixed denotative sense themselves but serve to orientate or frame that society’s beliefs and values. The institution and particular elaboration of these social imaginary significations is original with each society, not deduced from some natural, rational or historical model: it is an imaginative act of purely human and collective creativity, of whose status as such the society may or may not be aware (a distinction Castoriadis regards as crucial, as we will see). And though the scope and nature of these organizing significations may be rather different in the different social contexts of, say, a remote Amazonian tribe or the modern French state, they are not necessarily any less symbolically powerful, or more rational, in the latter case than in the former. As Castoriadis explains it: 

“I hold that human history...is in its essence defined by imaginary creation. In this context, ‘imaginary’ obviously does not signify the ‘fictive’, the ‘illusory’, the ‘specular’, but rather the positing of new forms... Each society creates its own forms. These forms in turn bring into being a world... At their core are to be found, in each case, social imaginary significations, which also are created by each society and which are embodied in its institutions. God is one such social imaginary signification, but so is modern rationality, and so forth. The ultimate objective of social and historical research is the restitution and the analysis, as far as possible, of these significations for each society under study.” (World in Fragments, p. 84)

Though such an approach is clearly no longer (vulgarly) materialist, it might be hard at first to see what separates these significations and accompanying “forms” from the equivalent analytical categories of contemporary structuralist and post-structuralist theory (which however, as I mentioned, Castoriadis despised): Levi-Strauss’s myths (and their application to modern bourgeois culture by Barthes), Foucault’s epistemes, Derrida’s transcendental signifieds, and so forth. The difference is that Castoriadis's analysis is anti-determinist. Castoriadis believed that the real challenge of analyzing society and history was not one of tackling a complex but logical, determinate, and finally inescapable structure of causes and distinctions, as a thinker like Foucault believed, but of remaining faithful to the imaginary, creative, and self-instituted – in a sense, arbitrary, indeterminate – essence of society’s fundamental ideals. It was, for him, essential to see that everything around one could be otherwise, if people would only collectively imagine it so. This was the central insight of his radical philosophy, and combined Castoriadis’s commitments to revolution and (as a Greek) to democracy.

The stress on collective imaginary creation really distinguished Castoriadis from his more famous contemporaries. It was this that made him, alongside the Situationists and surrealists, the guiding theoretical influence on the student uprising of May 1968 (though he kept his writings pseudonymous in order to safeguard himself from the authorities). Castoriadis was a friend of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most famous agitator during the student revolt, and in a manifesto Cohn-Bendit paid tribute to the ideas of a certain Pierre Chalieu – one of Castoriadis’s pseudonyms. Castoriadis’s reminiscences of those months in the text “The Movement of the Sixties” show how much he identified with the essential creative spirit, the reimagining of society that was going on at the time – “those weeks of fraternity and active solidarity, when one spoke to anybody and everybody in the street without fear of being taken for a fool... the sit-ins and teach-ins of all sorts, in which professors and students, schoolteachers and pupils, and doctors...engineers, foremen...administrative staff spent whole days and nights discussing their work, their mutual relations, the possibility of transform[ation]” (WIF, “The Movement of the Sixties”, 48). And in turn the importance of Castoriadis’s central theoretical category, the imagination, showed itself in the famous graffiti and slogans of the movement, such as "L'imagination au pouvoir", or "Manquer d'imagination, c'est ne pas imaginer le manque". As Castoriadis himself later commented, "one wonders how that could relate to Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, or Lacan!". What the most famous philosophical names of that era really theorized was not the motivating spirit but the failure of ’68: to dissolve the subject or imprison it theoretically within all-controlling networks of language and power was for Castoriadis “a retrospective legitimation of [political] withdrawal, renunciation, noncommitment” (WIF, 53). The other Parisian thinkers were, in a memorable phrase, “ideologues of man’s impotence before his own creations” (WIF, 54).

One might still feel scepticism that Castoriadis’s approach has genuine theoretical power, that it explains or identifies important social-historical issues or currents (rather than contributing to them). Yet the points at which Castoriadis productively exceeded Marxist analysis have proved to be some of the most fertile areas for theoretical research in recent decades. For instance, by developing an idea of Max Weber, he identified the dominant “social imaginary signification” in modern capitalist society as the ideal of “rational mastery” – pursued to the point of irrationality. This irrationality showed itself both in the ultimately self-destructive approach of Western man to the environment – like Cohn-Bendit, Castoriadis was a committed Green theorist and activist – and in the increasingly erratic deregulated organization of the global economy, of which Castoriadis wrote in 1996, more than a decade before the financial crisis, “the absolute freedom to transfer capital is ruining whole sectors of production almost everywhere in the world, and the global economy is being turned into a planetary casino”( “The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism”, in Figures of the Thinkable, 47). The significant really-existent alternatives to the capitalist imaginary in modern society which Castoriadis mentioned were not, after 1968, those of socialism, but of nationalism and religion – the two forces whose global persistence left-wing theory has had the most difficulty in accounting for (it is notable that the most ambitious and successful contemporary attempt to theorize nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s 1983 Imagined Communities, relies on a framework of ideas remarkably similar to Castoriadis’s, though as far as I am aware, not directly influenced by him). 

I cannot conclude this brief exposition of Castoriadis’s political thought without mentioning his idea of “autonomy”, which for him is the distinguishing mark of those societies which are aware of the self-instituted, created character of their “social imaginary significations”. The existence of such societies is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, though in Castoriadis’s (rather narrow) definition, it is exclusive to the West: the two moments at which (some measure of) true political autonomy has arisen have been in ancient Athenian democracy and its revival in modern Europe (which Castoriadis interestingly dates to the “first Renaissance” of the twelfth century – for reasons that there isn't space to explore here). Autonomy in Castoriadis’s sense means not so much freedom from external power or determination in a literal fashion, though the absence of tyranny or imperialism is certainly one precondition for autonomy in his sense. He means rather the refusal to legitimate or naturalize one’s social ideals permanently by referring them to a stable and non-social level of being, whether that be God in the Judaeo-Christian model, or Reason, or the ineluctable progress of history in Hegel and Marx, or the idea of biological perfectibility and the survival of the fittest in social Darwinism or Nazi racial theory, to take a few examples. By acknowledging that one’s ideas of justice, the Good and so forth are negotiable, rephrasable, reimaginable, because humanly created in the first place, one frees a space for a genuine democracy, as opposed to a struggle between rival intellectual Absolutes.

Some poems from Gitanjali

Ever since Tagore himself translated his poems into prose to form the English Gitanjali, it has been generally assumed that fully rendering the poetic form of his lyrics into English, making a consistent attempt to repeat their rhymes, metre and music, is a Himalayan task. Even translators who are themselves published poets, such as William Radice, have abandoned rhyme in a fairly large proportion of their English versions, adducing supplementary arguments such as that the original rhymes and rhythms of a song's text will not be heard when the song is sung. With the greatest respect for their pioneering efforts on behalf of Tagore, I am not quite convinced. The effect of Tagore's songs does rely partly on the concordance of their phrases, both in the music and in the poetry, and when the two reinforce each other the effect is palpable. There is no getting away from it: the majority of Tagore's poetry uses rhyme and metre, and is written in a heightened, musical diction. It may not help his popularity to say so, but what I have read of Gitanjali in the original reminds me more of Tennyson's In Memoriam, say, than any work of a twentieth-century poet. If few of us read Tennyson today, maybe that is our loss! Among middle-class Bengalis his popularity, like that of Matthew Arnold and other nineteenth-century poets, still rides high. Together with Tagore himself, who read and wrote criticism on them, they form the basis of a community of taste with an ear and values different from our own - something worth respect rather than dismissal.

Another factor militating against poetic translations is the present desire for semantic exactitude, already commented on in this blog. The original meaning must be preserved: a vina remains a vina, even if Tagore himself translated it (out of cultural consideration) as a harp or a lute. If one considers the emotional tone and the poetic rhythm to be more important, however, such anxieties recede into the background. The following translations follow these priorities more than those of the present. They are free with the original imagery, keeping to what I consider poetically important but changing or introducing details elsewhere. (In no. 26, to me it is important that the speaker is a woman - hotobhagini - but the question in the final line, for instance, is entirely my composition: it rhymes and is I hope in keeping with the mood of the poem.) Even if they cannot capture Tagore's mastery, I hope they convey some of his music. Read them less as the work of a poet or scholar and more as you would (if you are a musician) the anonymous, rhymed translations in old Victorian editions of German Lieder:

No. 26 ("She je pashe eshe bosechhilo")

He came beside my bed and sat
But I was sleeping late.
Woman! What tiredness was that
Which seized you, oh unfortunate!

He entered at the still of night,
Lute in hand; and when touched right,
Its soft, deep-sounding melody
My dreaming mind would sate.

I wake, and see the south wind blow
Past the doorway madly rushing,
And still his scent floats in the air,
My senses in the darkness brushing.

Thus does night upon night pass by -
His body ever passing near - oh why
Can I never feel his garland's touch?
Must this be my fate?

No. 72 ("Ke go antarataro she")

O, this inwardness is his -
With what hidden touch he frees
The pain and knowledge of what is.

Into my eyes he puts his spells,
With his music my heart swells,
And his pulsing rhythm tells
Of happiness, sorrow, ecstasies.

In gold and silver, blues and greens
Life's cloth is woven with his sheens;
Some day that veil will part which screens
Him from my heart's entreaties.

The days and years are onward rolled,
Yet secretly my mind's consoled:
In new shapes and guises old
He sends his eternal rain of bliss.

No. 74 ("Aar nai re bela, namlo chhaya")

Evening falls; across the earth its shade
Is cast -
And pitcher in hand to the stream I hurry
At the last.

To watery music the clouds move
In uneasy courses up above
And onto strange paths I must rove
Following echoes past.

Along the lonely road at this late hour
No travellers go;
Restless is the river of desire
When new winds blow.

I cannot say, shall I return or not?
Whom to meet it may still be my lot -
From the farther bank I know not what
Melody drifts low.

No. 84 ("Heri aharaho tomari biroho")

Always your longing I see - its pain unceasingly
Reaches across the spaces it can find;
From hills to flowering wood, from sky to ocean's flood
In every form and place to be outlined.

In star upon star, waiting through the night,
Gazing down unblinking, distant, bright,
In branches bowing before the monsoon's might
Through all your melody of longing wind.

In home after home tonight the unending pain
Of this deep longing new strength will attain
And in new loves and wishes, alas, remain,
Through ecstasy and suffering, still blind.

All my own life's trouble spurning
In new melodies flowing, turning
This longing of yours rises, burning
Through the centre of my mind.

- and the opening poem of the Bengali Gitanjali, "Amar matha noto kore dao":

Bring me, Lord, in the dust to kneel
At thy feet,
Sink all my pride, and make me feel
With tears' relief replete.

For me to pay my pride's expense
Is to myself mere insolence;
If round my soul I'll set a fence,
Then thee I'll never meet.

Let me not seek my name to publish
Through works of my own;
Rather fulfil, oh Lord, thy wish
In my life alone -

I yearn only for thy peace
In my heart; thy greatest grace
Shall stay with me, shadowing my face
And lead me before thy seat.

Democracy and the humanities

With that title, a certain grandiloquence cannot easily be avoided. And there has been plenty of it in the press lately; but I say - "Friends, Cantabrigians, Faculty-Men, lend me your ears; I come to bury the humanities, not to praise them..." Even that would be unnecessary: they will anyway be buried inexhumably under a forthcoming landslide of bureaucratic antipathy and enormous tuition fees. All I want to ask is: are they being buried alive? Or are they actually dead already?

For though we hear much, including from leading professorial lights such as Martha Nussbaum, about the role of the humanities in public life, in fostering democratic values and a sense of meaning beyond the utilitarian, not much progress has been made in establishing whether they do that as well as they might in their current form. And my intention here is to argue that they fall well short. In fact, they are not even living up to their name, for there is little that is humanist, or even humane, about the unhealthy combination of louse-combing textual and artefactual obsessiveness on the one hand with Grand, but increasingly bizarre Theory on the other that currently predominates in humanities faculties. I would not want to make sweeping denunciations without offering examples of how things could be done better. So such examples will be offered: in each case showing how things were done better, approximately 100 years ago. (Often they were done even better than that 200 years ago; but a single century is quite enough time to cover in a blog post.)

The problems that could be identified with the bulk of present-day academic writing on the arts and humanities are many, but I want to pick out two interrelated points that bear on the question of democracy or the public sphere - one of style, the other of intellectual content. The first is that the favoured writing style in the academy is not one that courts a wider audience than the academy itself. With some exceptions, of course; but not enough. I used to buy the TLS quite often, thinking it represented a desirable intellectual generalism, until I realised I could get a more interesting and personalized selection of the same sort of academic book review by spending an hour in the library Periodicals room. Part of the problem here is the metaphors in currency, which are often quite dazzlingly abstract and depersonalized: structuralist, in other words, even where the author claims to be poststructuralist, New Historicist, postcolonialist or whatever it might be. And this merges (in a way that will become clearer when we look at some quotes) into my second point of intellectual content - the presently professed lack of faith in individual personality and autonomy, the dissolution of subjectivity or the "death of the author". Both esoteric style and fatalist philosophical content are, it is hardly difficult to see, quite precisely unsuited to fostering democratic ideals or practical discussions in the public sphere.

I mentioned a sort of covert structuralism. Here is an example, presented in the context of an academically celebrated postcolonial critique of culture by the Indian theorist Homi K. Bhabha -

"The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. The pronominal I of the proposition cannot be made to address - in its own words - the subject of enunciation, for this is not personable, but remains a spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse. The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other" (The Location of Culture, p. 36)

This can I think fairly be taken to represent Bhabha's theory of literary interpretation and communication, and it is "spatial" rather than "personable", to use Bhabha's own terms. The talk is of "places" (in place of I and You), "mobilizing", "positionality", "passages": these are metaphors, let us remind ourselves, but grandly strategic ones. They enforce a sense of personal powerlessness that goes far beyond what might be understood (it isn't easy!) as the substantial point of Bhabha's argument - that even literary statements depend on their audiences and contexts in ways that are hard to calculate. If that is what he means, then here is Tagore making the same point, in a much easier and more personable fashion, in the 1907 address "Literary Creation":

"Man's thoughts are gratified if they get these three opportunities: to blossom, to fruit, and to drop onto fertile soil. Thoughts, like living things, constantly urge us towards this fulfilment; hence the unabated exchange of embraces and whispers among human beings. A mind looks for another mind to relieve it of the burden of its thoughts, to have its own ideas contemplated by another. That is why women gather at the waterside steps, friend runs to friend, letters go to and fro...
"Thus throughout human society, the thoughts of one mind strive to find fulfilment in another, thereby so shaping our ideas that they are no longer exclusive to the original thinker. This often goes unnoticed. A little reflection would make us agree that when we say something to a friend, the statement moulds itself to some extent in accordance with our friend's mind. We cannot write to one friend exactly as we write to another. My idea adjusts itself somewhat to the particular mind of the particular friend in whom it secretly seeks fulfilment. In fact, what we say is shaped by the conjunction of speaker and listener.
"In literature, for the same reason, the author tries to fit the work, even if unwittingly, to the nature of the person to whom it is offered. The folk epic of Dashurathi is not Dashurathi's sole possession; it is written in collaboration with the society that listens to it. It does not contain the thoughts of Dashurathi alone; the love, hate, piety, belief, and taste of a given circle at a give time find spontaneous expression within it... Therefore, that which survives does not speak only of itself; it speaks of the world around it, because it survives more by the force of its surroundings than by its own strength."

Comment on the difference in prose quality is superfluous: even though this is a modern translation, it always comes through with Tagore, who also wrote exquisitely in English. Bhabha has won a Bad Writing Competition for another sentence in the same book I have quoted. My point however is more substantial. You cannot accuse Tagore here of any Romantic hero-worship of the figure of the author. His point is indeed that "negotiations" are taking place, to use a current term, in literary creation, and some of them are even "unwitting" (- which could equally be translated "unconscious"). But they are also rhetorical, emotional, and founded in human relationships, where Bhabha's are "strategic", institutional, and decidedly inhuman. Tagore prefers to phrase them in that way; and who can blame him. Bhabha, on the other hand, tries to present what is in truth a metaphorical (and rhetorical) effect of his text as the inescapable reality of communication. He does not succeed in explaning how this inhumanly "spatial" reality serves human needs; Tagore's clustering thought-fruits and his women at the waterside steps do that far better.

Is this comparison unfair? Bhabha is an academic theorist; Tagore was a poet. But he was also a critic, literary professional and a man of the university (albeit his own, rather eccentric university, Visva-Bharati). And on his side, when questioned in a newspaper interview Bhabha will say things such as the following, which in intention at least sounds almost Tagorean: "In a world that is increasingly instrumentalist and consumerist, I think it is very important to set up against such a world the great aspirations of literature and poetry, of painting and music, because art and aesthetic experience adds ardour and passion to our principles and our beliefs. It should be seen as an essential part of our freedom and not an optional part of our lives." If he really believes this, then why does his own criticism add so little "ardour and passion"? Why does it celebrate not "freedom" and "great aspirations", but obscure and uncanny spatial strategies?

Let us move on to another example. Here is a modern critic who makes much capital out of resisting Bhabha's sort of language: Harold Bloom, celebrating timeless literary and humanistic values in his book How to Read and Why. This is how he begins to instruct the reader on how to read poetry:

"A first principle for how to read poems: closely, because a true criterion for any good poem is that it will sustain a very close reading indeed. Here is William Blake, giving us a lyric that again seems simple and direct, 'The Sick Rose'... The ironies of 'The Sick Rose' are fierce, perhaps cruel in their relentlessness. What Blake depicts is altogether natural, and yet the poem's perspective renders the natural itself into a social ritual in which phallic menace is set against female self-gratification (the rose's bed is one of 'crimson joy' before the worm finds it out)" (pp.71-2)

Since I. A. Richards and William Empson between the wars, the technique of "close reading" has become a literary-academic sine qua non: unless you can appreciate and produce interpretations such as the above, you are not invited to the party. What did literary criticism look like before close reading, then? Like this: George Saintsbury on Thomas Browne -

"The finale of Hydriotaphia has rung in the ears of some eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of English Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo of his word-music. 'Time, which antiquates antiquities' will have some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been heard in English before, 'ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus'...
"Christian Morals is entirely of a piece with the other books - the same gorgeously Latinised terminology, which somehow never becomes stiff or awkward; the same sententious weight, which is never heavy or dull; the same cunning construction of sentences and paragraphs; and above all, the same extraordinary power of transforming a commonplace into the eternal idea corresponding to it by some far-reaching image, some illustration quaintly erudite, or even by sheer and mere beauty of phrase and expression.
"For this is the great merit of Browne, that, quaint or gorgeous, or even, as he sometimes may seem to be, merely tricksy - bringing out of the treasures of his wisdom and his wit and his learning things new and old, for the mere pleasure of showing them - thought and expression are always at one in him, just as they are in the great poets. The one is never below the other, and both are always worthy of the placid, partly sad, wholly conscious and intelligent, sense of the riddles of life which serves them as background" (George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1913), pp. 451-2)

Again, there is simply no competition when it comes to the writing. Nor is there on the question of erudition: Bloom may be considered the best-read man alive by modern standards, but his acquaintance with literature is paltry compared to Saintsbury's, who could jump from Shakespeare to Corneille to Crabbe to Martial in a few lines and never needed to read anything in translation. Yet the real question is not of expertise, but of approach: were Bloom to continue expounding on Blakean sexual politics it would not increase your desire to read more of the poetry, whereas if you do not know Browne, you will most certainly want to now. (I hope you might want to read more Saintsbury too: he has been unjustly forgotten, and most English majors have simply never heard of him.)

When referred to at all, Saintsbury is usually categorized as an "aesthetic" critic, and it might be hard to see at first how aestheticism has anything to do with democracy or the public sphere. But it does, because what a critic such as Saintsbury gives you is a sense of the humane and "personable" value of a given author, something with a far more natural and widespread appeal than an analysis of fierce ironic mechanisms, or the necessity of understanding a rosebud as a vulva. Yes, his metaphors sometimes become uncomfortably culinary, "as if he were proposing a picnic" to quote John Gross; but his philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: "read, and as far as possible, read everything", without prejudice, and cultivating a "constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction with their analogues and opposites" - in other words, utilizing comparison rather than analysis. You need to read a lot to do this at the level Saintsbury does, but you do not need to read in any specially "close" way, for which you have been expensively trained. You simply need to be part of what Saintsbury called the "general congregation of intelligent people". In spirit, that is democratic criticism: its ideals are essentially Arnoldian, even if Saintsbury was a High Tory himself.

It is the same with art history. Criticize Kenneth Clark's patrician tones all you like: he was the last representative, in the age of television, of a humanist critical tradition that goes back through Bernard Berenson to the great Germans of centuries previous. His picture of the canon is insensitive to the place and perspective of a great many alternative identities: in that sense his rhetoric is exclusive. But is it more inclusive to write sentences such as the following?

"Once we insist that sexual difference is produced through an interconnecting series of social practices and institutions of which families, education, art studies, galleries and magazines are part, then the hierarchies which sustain masculine dominance come under scrutiny and stress, then what we are studying in analysing the visual arts is one instance of this production of difference which must of necessity be considered in a double frame: (a) the specificity of its effects as a particular practice with its own materials, resources, conditions, constituencies, modes of training, competence, expertise, forms of consumption and related discourses, as well as its own codes and rhetorics; (b) the interdependence for its intelligibility and meaning with a range of other discourses and social practices" (Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, p. 9)

The relentless pluralization alone becomes rhetorically wearisome. That is an interesting point to dwell on, actually: I might agree with Pollock that many of these abstract entities ("discourse", "history of art", "hierarchy") can and ultimately should be construed in more than one way; but does this need to be insisted on at every moment? The effect is not of liberation but of bewilderment: I cannot imagine all the points in these multiply interconnecting series, and as with Bhabha, my own sense of human agency and autonomy is thereby diminished.

I could carry on with other disciplines, including music, and philosophy (whom would you rather read, Nietzsche or Foucault? Or psychoanalysis: Freud's Introductory Lectures, or Lacan's Ecrits?). Just about the one discipline of which all this does not hold true is history: and it is there that scholars are making up the deficit of readable books on the arts aimed at a general audience - Tim Blanning's The Triumph of Music, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Rembrandt's Eyes. Popular philosophical writers and broadcasters such as Alain de Botton or Bryan Magee have also done a commendable job with everything from Proust to architectural criticism to the great philosophers. Perhaps this will be dismissed as a lamentable return of what Hermann Hesse called the Age of the Feuilleton, in which journalistic values took precedence over academic integrity. But if one takes a closer look at that late-Victorian/Edwardian period when intellectual celebrities such as Tagore, Mark Twain, Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson et al travelled the world giving public lectures to large audiences, there is much we ought really to be envious of. If poetry, philosophy, classical music, and painting do not enjoy the vital popularity they once did, the attitudes of the academy are largely to blame.