Hensley 2016

Hensley, Nathan. Forms of Empire. OUP, 2016.

Introduction

• 1 Marx wrote abt the Indian Mutiny for the NY Tribute in 1857
• 2 tracking a handful of C19 poets, novelists, as they stretched the boundaries of their thinking to account for the seeming paradox by which a project of universal modernization could unfold hand in hand with generalized killing.
• ...the years between 1837 and 1901 were characterized not just by salutary social progress, widening democracy, or mechanized enlightenment but also by ongoing war: extrajudicial killing as everyday life.
• [telegram abt uprising] Compressed into a kind of stylized poetry, the document, like all pieces of writing, conveys conceptuality and formalizes a theory of the world.
• 3 Progressive models could not admit that a modernity that was by definition pacific could also be an ongoing war... JS Mill opened...The Subjection of Women with the assertion that rule by force already "seemed to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's affairs"
  • can connect to Freedgood about fictions of displacement: we can't think imperial violence directly, we think it through (for example) Magwitch's tobacco
• 4 ...a still active critical tendency, both within and outside the field of Victorian Studies, to see liberal societies not just as "unfinished projects" but as opposed in some way to violence as such.
• 5 "Law"...brought the world to order with hands stained in blood.
• It was in the Empire, in other words, that Victorian progressive idealism came up against the most disorienting challenges to its core conceptual assumptions. Forms of Empire focuses on these moments of friction to show how certain C19 thinkers turned to the resources of literary form to negotiate with what I treat as the central impasse of Victorian modernity: the curious intimacy between legality and harm. As I work to show, the question of how this intimacy was to take concrete shape - how sovereign violence would be distributed and on whose bodies its touch would fall - depended on mechanisms of exclusion that separated the discounted from the counted, the vulnerable from the protected.
• 6 ...the Victorian state's structurally unfinishable war against uprising natives, antagonistic regimes, and other enemies of universal principles is best understood not as one topic within the broader field of Victorian Studies, but as the general fact subtending the entirety of domestic life and therefor cultural production in the period.... In this sense every artifact of Victorian culture is an artifact of Empire.
• 7 The writers I treat here required all the resources of literary form to comprehnd how the world's first liberal democracy might have the threat of death coiled at its very heart.
• Lauren Goodlad has recently noted that liberalism in particular has tempted scholars to hypostasize an internally disparate and often self-critical set of positions into an oversimplified straw man, a synthetic "liberal theory" or, still worse, a monolithic "logic, impulse or urge available for our later, allegedly more enlightened critique." As I show, the tendency of criticism to moralize on an (oversimplified) past itself replays the procedures of the Victorian progressive idealism whose internal crises I work here to track. In fact neither liberalism nor Empire obeyed laws of behavior that were given in advance; still less were they simplistic or univocal ideological constructions.
• [aiming to] trouble any comfortable sense that we have disentangled ourselves from the mixed legacies of that internally diverse tradition... [and] to locate in those prior forms raw materials that might help us rethink and thus remake the present.
• 9 ...authors I focus on in the following chapters...tested the boundaries of the liberal idealism that has become our common sense; they labored to devise figural and therefore conceptual languages adequate to what many of them viewed as their era's constitutive antinomy: the intimate, scandalous intertwinement of violence and law.
• 10 lyric poems, realist novels, sensation fictions, and adventure romances constitute highly mediated engagements with the limit condition of the liberal state, and so bear witness in slantwise fashion to the violence animating modern democracy.
• Yet even the most engaged cultural and political criticism in our moment continues to prove vulnerable to the lure of progressive schemes. Despite a robust debate aimed at querying just this methodological procedure, criticism continues to cast C19 texts as violent, racist, or otherwise blinkered others to our implicitly more enlightened ideational projects: they have ideology while we have theory.
• 11 Where a culturalist approach might focus on racial stereotypes in Haggard's romances, say...the point of view I test here would construe such racism and cultural jingoism -- however virulent -- as secondary effects of the material interests and geopolitical imperatives driving England's expansion abroad. It follows that where culturalist models might understand a heightened respect for difference or commitment to intercultural tolerance as the opposites of, and therefore antidotes to, empire as such, the Victorian case helps us see what recent experience ratifies, which is that values like tolerance and racial understanding are better seen as two tools used by imperial states -- from an arsenal of many others -- to maintain hegemony in a global system.
  • footnote: Brown 2006, Davis 2015
• 12 ...this book aims to wrest the term "power" from its designation as a Foucauldian field of discursive or representational possibility, reconceiving it instead as the capacity to inflict somatic [bodily] harm.
• 13 ...This book seeks to prise apart the departicularizing equation between epistemic violence and the somatic kind - an equation that has structured work in culturalist postcolonial studies since the 1980s - even as it works against metaphysicalizing gestures appropriate to the bumper-sticker claims that would see sovereignty as a transhistorical mechanism or timeless dynamic in some fetishized sphere of "the political."
• telegrams - These relics of the British response to the 1857 uprising are material and technological in an important sense, since they [14] record not just the information that was conveyed from Agra...to London -- the mere communicative content, interesting though it may be -- but also the forms through which that content was conveyed: the complex codes and shaping protocols that both constrained and enabled that transmission.
• 14 form/genre as "enabling constraint" - ...the laws of genre are doubly firm when a genre's enabling constraints have to do with the capacity of another physical medium - in this case early electronic signaling.
  • or serial fiction
• ...This and other dispatches from the frontier of the Empire's merciless counterinsurgency are complex records of constraint and adaptation, conformity and freedom, in which technological apparatus, verbal and visual genre, and institutional conventions commingle with human will to shape [16] communication into highly stylized, I will say poetic, presentations.
• 16 The journey of these compressed tidings of insurrection thus sketches in miniature some version of the Victorian world system at mid-century. It draws together periphery, semi-periphery, and core into a single narrative, while also linking public and private interests, multiple types and scales of actors, and almost unthinkably disparate social and political spaces -- including the researcher's archive.
• 17 To account for mediation in this sense - as formal protocol and technological patterning - is to account for the imbrication of medium and message with superadded attention to genre... [in] "Determination" and "From Reflection to Mediation" Raymond Williams addresses the challenge, in any materialist criticism, of connecting the figural or cultural realm to the more fundamental or concrete sphere of material social processes. Describing the different models available for imagining this relationship of determination, he explians that the paradigm of reflection imagines culture as a mirror of the world; it posits an allegorical or otherwise direct "correspondence" between "levels" - a homology, for example, or isomorphism between historical and cultural forms. To the contrary, the term "mediation," Williams writes, "indicates an active and substantial process," "an indirect connection". John Guillory (2010) [LOOK UP] has taken Williams' essay as a starting point to argue that ideology critique and discourse analysis undertaken by the New Historicism and Foucauldian cultural studies, respectively, rely on the metaphor of representation to flatten the mediating work a text is able to accomplish.... Instead of focusing on alleged ideological distortions or unwitting betrayals, a shift to mediation enables this book to take stock of productive reconfigurations and critical recoding operations - that is, acts of thinking - texts themselves perform.
• 18 With Levine and others, I conceive "form" as an enabling constraint while emphasizing the productivity, not the restriction, of that dual understanding.
• Insofar as they reconfigure conceptual content in ways unique from themselves, these formal strategies are productively viewed, I suggest, as technologies of mediation. No doubt the effort to treat aspects of literary style as media technologies departs from the widespread tendency in the fields of media studies and book history to treat mediation and technology as matters of merely physical equipment. But as Mary Poovey and Lisa Gitelman among others have noted, media history and the history of forms and genres must be told together.
  • footnote: the point is to account for the traffic between physical equipment and literary performance.
  • l/u Poovey and Gitelman
• Instead "form" marks, for me, the capacity of literary ensembles to set ideas into motion in ways particular to their suite of affordances -- ways that, by definition, other modes of presentation cannot.
• 19 his situating of the literary as against media studies "domain" over "devices, structures, and practices" - not convincing (or even consistent with his earlier claim)
• 20 As they transfigure their moments into complex ensembles of conformity and resistance - works of literature - they register the fundamental contradiction of liberal imperialism while testing in advance the frameworks of interpretation we bring to bear on them.