Yesterday I came across a potentially quite potent weakness in Deleuze and
Guatarri's thought. I've been looking at Hazlitt's SPIRIT OF THE AGE and
Coleridge's BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA in terms of the rhizomatic/arboreal
scheme outlines in THOUSAND PLATUEAX. It seemed to me that Hazlitt's
formal strategy (a series of brief, pithy portraits of various writers of
his time, each is similar format without formal distinctions for class,
talent, age, etc.) was an act of deterritorialization: he seized the given
map and rewrote it for his own ends, leveling what was stratified,
jumbling the customary levels of mediation between reading and
biographical subjects. In contrast Coleridge's project seemed
authoritarian, Platonic, arboreal: he mapped out the lves of people and
ideas acording to a complex hierarchical scheme starting with a human
infant and ending with divinity. BL does not echo as such the given
coordinates of literary biography, since Coleridge is writing a new sort
of work - but the tone and complex (nearly colonialist) structure of the
work create a sedentary map that must be obeyed - those who cannot are
explicitly excluded, made Jewish or underclass.
So far so good; D+G had given me a good tool for assessing these
difficult works. But, enter Bourdieu and the notion of habitus. Each
writer suddenly seemed caught in their socioeconomic positions: both were
desperately trying to fit into the middle class ascendant and skewed their
published works in that direction. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA appeared as a
pricey book; explicitly excludes any but the middle and upper classes from
its readership; enacts the same implicitly with tone and subject.
Hazlitt, after serializing SPIRITS in lower class journals, turned about
and printed the whole as an expensive tome. Its language is Saxon rather
than Latinate, its rhetoric brisk - yet the subject still removes it from
underclass reading. The deterritorializing fell short, caught in habitus.
Not surprisingly, Hazlitt became a staple of Victorian prosody.
How can we think this problem? Is nomadism too shallow, too
easily a gloss upon the radical surface of class determination? or does
nomadism call for a more radical break?
I have no ready answer; I eagerly await your thoughts on this.
--Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a Bryan Case a/k/a godwin@xxxxxxxxx--
"He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it,
which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can
relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time
being just one more cut better than the real thing, with money no object."
-Robert Penn Warren
------------------
Guatarri's thought. I've been looking at Hazlitt's SPIRIT OF THE AGE and
Coleridge's BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA in terms of the rhizomatic/arboreal
scheme outlines in THOUSAND PLATUEAX. It seemed to me that Hazlitt's
formal strategy (a series of brief, pithy portraits of various writers of
his time, each is similar format without formal distinctions for class,
talent, age, etc.) was an act of deterritorialization: he seized the given
map and rewrote it for his own ends, leveling what was stratified,
jumbling the customary levels of mediation between reading and
biographical subjects. In contrast Coleridge's project seemed
authoritarian, Platonic, arboreal: he mapped out the lves of people and
ideas acording to a complex hierarchical scheme starting with a human
infant and ending with divinity. BL does not echo as such the given
coordinates of literary biography, since Coleridge is writing a new sort
of work - but the tone and complex (nearly colonialist) structure of the
work create a sedentary map that must be obeyed - those who cannot are
explicitly excluded, made Jewish or underclass.
So far so good; D+G had given me a good tool for assessing these
difficult works. But, enter Bourdieu and the notion of habitus. Each
writer suddenly seemed caught in their socioeconomic positions: both were
desperately trying to fit into the middle class ascendant and skewed their
published works in that direction. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA appeared as a
pricey book; explicitly excludes any but the middle and upper classes from
its readership; enacts the same implicitly with tone and subject.
Hazlitt, after serializing SPIRITS in lower class journals, turned about
and printed the whole as an expensive tome. Its language is Saxon rather
than Latinate, its rhetoric brisk - yet the subject still removes it from
underclass reading. The deterritorializing fell short, caught in habitus.
Not surprisingly, Hazlitt became a staple of Victorian prosody.
How can we think this problem? Is nomadism too shallow, too
easily a gloss upon the radical surface of class determination? or does
nomadism call for a more radical break?
I have no ready answer; I eagerly await your thoughts on this.
--Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a Bryan Case a/k/a godwin@xxxxxxxxx--
"He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it,
which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can
relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time
being just one more cut better than the real thing, with money no object."
-Robert Penn Warren
------------------