Bowen 2009

Bowen, John. "Time for Victorian Studies?" Journal of Victorian Culture 14:2 (2009), 282-293. Web.

• 282 An apparently essential aspect of the academic study of Victorian literature and culture is its historicist nature...but the pervasiveness of this kind of framing and the fact that it seems difficult to shake off, does not mean that it is necessarily right.
• [Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History"] show a deep scepticism towards this key intellectual and institutional note of contemporary cultural analysis: its historicism.
• 283-4: For Victorian studies in its dominant forms, I want to argue, may be historicising, but is not in any real sense historicist. The common claim that Victorian studies has a strongly historicist bent is often accompanied by the idea (explicit or implicit) that it is historicist as opposed to, or distinct from, 'theoretical' in nature. This is misleading, for historicism, for better or worse, is not the opposite to, or the lack of, a theory, but a theory itself.
• [Benjamin's] challenge to our work does not lie in its critique of progressivism or the political errors of the Second International, but of our unwillingness to think seriously about time. For what has replaced the progressivism that Benjamin so rejects may not be a stronger or better historicism but a worse and weaker one: a historicism that simply historicises. This may be the real danger, or, rather, lack of danger in our work. Considering how deeply (or, rather, how shallowly) historicist most Victorian studies is, it is striking how little it concerns itself with those wider conceptual questions that Benjamin's work so forcefully raises: of memory, temporal arrest, retrospective causality, untimeliness, the messianic and the punctual.
• 288 The consequence of these graftings for Patocka is that the essential core of historical life consists of 'on the one hand, a differentiation of the confused everydayness of prehistoric life, of the division of labour and functionalisation of individuals; on the other, the inner mastering of the sacred through its interiorisation.' Questioning at this level of generality and abstraction about the very idea and meaning of 'historical life' does not, it should be emphasised, lead [289] to an evasion of the historical but to its excessive reopening at the limits of rational everydayness in such questions as death, sacrifice and secrecy.
• 289 [Quotes opening passage from Dickens's Tale of Two Cities] It is a familiar-enough opening passage but less often noticed are the words that precede it, which form the chapter's title: 'The Period'. The chapter that follows offers a telling encapsulation of an epoch but it also radically exceeds any such framework. Indeed, I would argue, it constitutes a superlative and hyperbolic deconstruction of the very idea of period and periodicity, through the evocation of a time or times that is/are simultaneously both and neither two ages, epochs, and seasons, spring and winter, and a beginning and an end, all, bizarrely enough, [290] also 'like the present period', whenever that may be or the reader may be reading.
• 290-1 What I have tried to argue is that much work in Victorian studies has a weaker and more impoverished conceptual and temporal vocabulary than it could have, and that a particular philosophical inheritance unthinkingly dominates its ideas of time. In response, an attunement to tempralities that are not regional, progressive, periodising or chronologically contained may enable a less defensive and disavowed intellectual formation. Walter Benjamin's work, like Derrida's, is exemplary in showing at a sense of temporal complexity is no barrier to a fascination with the minutiae of empirical research or temporal detail. On the contrary: the two inspire each other.