The untimely Geoffrey Hartman

Julian Wolfreys in a recent review of the excellent (and award winning) Geoffrey Hartman Reader says something we all have seemed to know for a long time now, but never really can fully appreciate regarding Geoffrey Hartman. I suppose it is the nature of the thing, which Nietzsche tried to show us long ago by calling it untimely or inopportune (unzeitgemäss). Regardless, Wolfreys makes it explicit: collecting Hartman's readings together, he says

is to be welcomed as an accessible, comprehensive, and perhaps even urgent reintroduction to a culture of vision, through some of the most perspicacious and perspicuous interventions in what we call literature and culture. And if this is a reintroduction to a culture of vision it must also be read as both a timely and untimely invention of a vision of culture. Like all the best writers, Hartman remains other to his times, and in this exhibits an abiding apprehension that ‘criticism is not the place where language goes to die’ [he is quoting Hartman], alongside a persistent demand that criticism should not succumb to a certain ‘narcissism’ [again Hartman] prevalent in much critical writing today.

I wouldn't say, however, that what has kept Hartman so fresh is that he resists, on the one hand, lending a sort of authority to interpretation (once it is interpreted, the text is killed off, closed, not needed to be opened again), and, on the other, lending a sort of authority to the interpreter--though Wolfreys is right to suggest both points. I fear even this tribute does not do justice to the the way Hartman is indeed other to his times. I find his continual freshness, rather, in the interesting patience one encounters in Hartman's writings, which does not have the anxious tone of a critic in this sort of double bind. To me, it seems to come from an unbelievable confidence that a responsiveness to history can produce. I mean history in its hugest, almost inhuman sense: that is, not in any (new or old) historicist sense of the word, which thinks it in terms of important dates and solid periods (that is, when they aren't being changed by the historicist--for indeed there is nothing wrong with dates and periods in themselves I think), and theories of influence, progress, and continuity (spanning any apparent discontinuity or, by stupidly asserting/fetishizing discontinuity even more than dumb deconstruction, preserving the continuity).


Open up 1980's Criticism in the Wilderness, and you will find issues there that, of course, are not perennially relevant, but come just about as close to this as possible--precisely because they are so much of their time. Hartman has a knack for what will be of interest in a situation, because he is always attentive to the duration, the historicity, of any event, and sees criticism as the attempt to interpret only beyond this horizon, this perceivable limit of historicity's presence. Interpretation beyond experience: this is what he praises in Derrida in Saving the Text, and (in an earlier text) this is why he sees it as so urgent (and so nearly impossible) to move "beyond formalism." What is "The Voice of the Shuttle" but an attempt at this impossible phenomenology? As he says in "Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony:"

The seduction of understanding through a fiction should provoke something more active than bemusement or suspended disbelief: it should provoke me to break, however provisionally, the very frame of meaning I bring to the text.

I should be taken to that horizon of sense, of what defines my moment and my comportment to the fiction, and from there, return while remaining as open as possible to what can come from beyond. Indeed, wherever he falters, it is only because he is interpreting his particular moment and from his moment too much (to be only slightly more specific--further posts will justify this claim--such is the case with his fear of the mechanical and the methodological in hermeneutics; his fear that "to methodize indeterminacy would be to forget the reason for the concept," also in the essay last quoted: this responds to a particularly crude McLuhan-like conception of the mechanical, though probably only because it has in mind Auschwitz).


So this isn't so much an attempt to escape narcissism on the one hand and objectivity on the other: even these are too local concerns for him. What is at stake is indeed, again, something Nietzschian (not touched upon enough in Deleuze's book on him, nor explicitly enough in Derrida's Spurs): the will to economize, while being precisely in the inhuman, the unexperienced, the unformed. The great via naturaliter negativa he elaborates so deftly in the early Wordsworth's Poetry is, when thought in slightly different terms, precisely this: the going down and under (Untergang) of Zarathustra, conceived as far as possible as an ascent, as a holding-together, as a formalism. Hartman needs to be seen--and in fact can't help but be seen (thus his freshness, his quirkyness, his disarming perspicuity and vagueness, his untimeliness)--as one of the few, perhaps, who indeed have somehow of necessity understood Nietzsche:

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched babble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand style--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...
-The Anti-Christ, Foreword

The supplement here ("And") as a step back--part of the step-no-step (démarcher) of that openness to what is beyond experience, at the limits of a time's historicity--as a holding together or binding of what is unbound... In other words, economizing in the grand style: this is what we really need to understand in (and as) Hartman's untimeliness.

The unconscious(es)

There are perhaps more unconsciouses than we think there are whenever we talk Freud. I've heard three so far, and am realizing that what I've always thought was the right view (the last--Zizek's) might be helpful if it were not asserted as correct against the others but put beside them and used when the occasion permits. I'll therefore do so here:
First, we get the unconscious (Unbewusst) as merely sub-conscious or not-conscious. Freud explicitly rejects this view in The Interpretation of Dreams, a fact that is probably more significant than we usually think. It means resisting, to some degree, any dialectic between the two systems. Thus the perception-consciousness system, which resides between the two in the earlier writings, becomes crucial.
Second, we get the unconscious thought not in opposition to the conscious--that is, as a separate system--but with certain elements that consciousness exhibits attributed to it. This is the unconscious of classical ideology (when it does not merely mean subconscious), but it is also the unconscious of many remarks in the work of trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth. All of these people talk about "unconscious memories," or "forgetting trauma," which are things that would happen not in the unconscious proper, but in the perception-consciousness system. Obviously this gets more complicated with trauma, masochism, and all the economic problems that make Freud change his model to the I, super-I, and It model later, and so it might help to be open to this view.
Third, the totally unconscious. No memories (though there are inscriptions, psychic energies, etc.), and no talk of "changing" anyone's unconscious by reverse-ideology tactics of whatever sort--at least changing it directly. The only one of these that would do anything is the extremely indirect (though, when used badly, direct--and therefore useless) Lacanian model of critique and analysis. It is utterly foreign to discourse, though able to be localized by certain structures of that discourse. In a certain sense, it is like the Kantian sublime: it exceeds our capacity to cognize what it might be whenever it presents itself to us as such. Paradoxically and crucially, it is not able to be cognized precisely because the truth of the matter is that what we cognize daily actually is it already. That is, the effect of its rupturing our consciousness when it presents itself is to keep us from knowing that there is no real difference between what we cognize and it. In a sense, we make our reality uncognizable in order to keep ourselves from cognizing it, when it irrupts into cognition.

Coleridge and Wordsworth

I just want to suggest here that a line in Wordsworth, one of his most amazing images in The Prelude might have resonances with a line in Coleridge--as they so often do. In Wordsworth this image--"huge and mighty forms, that do not live like living men, moved slowly through my mind"--occurs after the famous boat-stealing episode. It echoes the line "Obscure fears of beings invisible," I think, from Coleridge's "Destiny of Nations," in the passage that deals with Fancy and with its frightening effects:

For Fancy is the power
That first unsensualizes the dark mind,
Giving it new delights; and bids it swell
With wild activity; and peopling air,
By obscure fears of beings invisible,
Emancipates it from the grosser thrall
Of the present impulse, teaching self-control,
Till Superstition with unconscious hand
Seat Reason on her throne.
-"The Destiny of Nations," published in 1796

Here is the (amazing) passage in Wordsworth:

...But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through my mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
-The Prelude, 1805, Book I.

The resemblance isn't much, but in my mind when I hear Coleridge, it's there. Obviously the "beings invisible" are much different, both in what they do (the contexts are very different) and in what they exactly are, which makes this more interesting. That is, these "beings" gain an added strangeness in Wordsworth because their life is more emphasized. It is thus able to, simultaneously (by an extraordinary enjambment so typical of Wordsworth's genius), be made less life-like.