The Problem

The situation in the South has been such that the master class has been able to limit severely the education and folk participation of Negroes and thus to prolong its paternalism. In that area also the ruling group has succeeded in propagating race prejudice and utilizing it effectively as a retarding cultural force. Perhaps the most confusing approach to understanding the class position of Negroes in the United States has been the assumption that race prejudice is a primary, psychological function. One would think that after the almost laboratory example of the rise and subsidence of German fascism, of how racial antagonism may be fanned to a fanatical pitch and then dramatically arrested, it would now be patently clear that the generation and maintenance of prejudice and discrimination depend upon a definable social situation.

The dominant economic class has always been at the motivating center of the spread of racial antagonism. This is to be expected since the economic content of the antagonism, especially at its proliferating source in the South, has been precisely that of labor-capital relations. The biological difference of color provides a concrete symbol upon which attitudes of fear and hate might be anchored. The dominant class, furthermore, has been explicit in its terms of living together in “peace” and harmony with Negroes. Its pivotal condition has been that the latter be content to work hard, willingly, and unorganized. “Love” tends to vanish as soon as Negroes begin to show signs of unionization, of movements for normal political status, and of desires to bring themselves up to cultural parity.

The schools, of course, are the principal institution for transmission of the culture. Accordingly, that “fine relationship” long existing between the races in the South tends speedily to come to an end when Negroes seek equal educational opportunities. As one Congressional Representative from Georgia, John J. Flynt, Jr., said in the House on February 23, 1956: “The Supreme Court decision [insisting upon equal educational opportunities for all citizens regardless of color] handed down on Black Monday, the 17^th of May, 1954, did more to destroy the progress that had been made in race relations in the South than anything that has happened in the past 80 years.”

The principal conditions for development of mass attitudes of racial antipathy appears to be: (a) a peculiar variant of capitalist production; (b) an exploitable group which can be identified as culturally or biologically different; (c) monopolization of political power by a de facto ruling class; (d) control of the media of mass communication and continuous use of them to direct derogatory and discriminatory propaganda against the exploitable group; and (e) the promulgation of discriminatory laws, the most important of which make segregation mandatory. In a situation such as this the races may be effectively estranged. Each side tends thus to live in some state of endemic social distrust while interracial mass behavior involving violence assumes a continuously potential danger.

The way in which an economic situation may be hinged to racial differences may be illustrated by the following news item:

Tokyo’s big, influential daily, Yomiuri, last week [April, 1955] headlined a series of articles on a startling economic theme: “Japan is at the mercy of the blue-eyed foreigners.” The blue-eyed foreigners, cried Yomiuri, are U.S. business men in Japan, who are charging “exorbitant” royalty fees …. The vicious newspaper articles were a symptom of the worsening relations, now approaching a postwar low, between U.S. companies and the Japanese Government.

This racial situation, of course, is not identical with the one in the South, yet it is easy to sense what profound emotions are touched by injection of the “blue-eyed” element into the economic relationship. It is easy to conceive, also, how blue-eyes might, under certain circumstances, become in Japan a symbol of dishonor and even racial shame. The yellow cap and badge of medieval Jews was intended to serve similar emotional purposes. The Southern oligarchy has lost no opportunity to render the physical traits of Negroes a red cape of mass passions. Indeed, these passions have been so assiduously cultivated that they may now be evoked spontaneously among the white masses of that region.

And yet, even though it may be recognized that the pith of racial friction in the South lies in the exploitative interests of the dominant group, there have been no full-scale investigations of its processes. Professor Key refers to this process as “an extraordinary achievement of a relatively small minority—the whites of the areas of heavy population—which persuaded the entire South that it should fight to protect slave property. Later, with allies from conservatives generally, substantially the same group put down a radical movement welling up from the sections dominated by the poorer whites. And by the propagation of a doctrine about the status of the Negro, it impressed on an entire region a philosophy agreeable to its necessities and succeeded … in maintaining a regional unity in national politics to defend those necessities” (V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics, New York, 1949, p. 9).

Since the inciting element in the antagonism must be discovered in the business activities and conspiratorial planning of this powerful group, which sometimes take the form of related secret organizations, it is perhaps impossible for the ordinary social researcher to uncover all the pertinent data. Doubtless only Congressional investigations with their formal authority to compel testimony on the nature of the network of local and interstate economic, political, and even religious interests behind racial tensions would be reasonably sufficient. In 1948, when civil rights became a major issue in the presidential campaign, Thomas L. Stokes, the noted journalist, made this observation:

More and more people in the South are waking up to a truth which many have known for a long time. It is that the racial issue is capitalized by the demagogic type of Southern politician for his own purposes and for the purposes of the interests which, in turn, use him …. The [the politicians] appeal to the prejudices of many whites in the lower economic levels, because those unfortunate people fear encroachment in their limited field of opportunity. Racial prejudice is nurtured by economics. (Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 5, 1948)

Posture of Organized Labor

A further indication of the fact that the tender spots of typically Southern attitudes lie at the convergence of the races on the workers’ level is the spontaneous reaction which any labor organization entering the South to unionize the masses must expect. When, in 1946, the CIO decided upon such a campaign, the Ku Klux Klan was forthwith revived and the full machinery of employer resistance came into play. As an initial answer to the movement the Southern States Industrial Council, a business men’s organization, declared:

At last the plan and purpose of the CIO-PAC to establish political control over the nation and to supplant our democratic institutions … is in the open. If there has been any doubt about the aims of this organization, or the objects it seeks to attain, that doubt is dispelled by the announcements that the South is to be “organized” …. One of the most pitiful, and at the same time most dangerous features of this drive to organize the South is the way Negroes are being misled and used …. By advocating a system of social and economic equality … these people are promising the Negro an earthly Utopia …. The situation now is not unlike that which obtained when that “great democrat,” Thaddeus Stevens, attempted to enslave the people of the South and to confiscate their property …. I predict that the ones who will suffer most from the abortive efforts of this group … will be the Negro …. He will have no friends among his own race, and certainly he will have none among the Whites …. Like David of old, we … will continue to fight … to preserve our democratic institutions, our free enterprise system, and the Constitutional right of the American worker to be free. (Southern States Industrial Council, The Kiss of Death, Nashville, Apr. 29, 1946)

We have quoted at length from this statement for it represents an abiding attitude of the Southern economic leadership: its determination to combat organized labor; its recognition that the unionization of Negroes is a prospect most dangerous to its own monopolization of power; its suggestion of what inflammatory uses might be made of the “social-and-economic” equality issue; and its certainty that it can inflict such decisive punishment upon colored workers for entering the labor movement that they will not only “suffer most” but also be driven into still greater isolation. The CIO was thus confronted with formidable barriers; and these were the more effective because in that area the legislature, the courts, and the police are closely bound to the purposes and interests of the employing class. Indeed, they ordinarily tend to speak with one indistinguishable voice. By mid-1948 the leaders of the drive reported that they were meeting all the obstacles that “the well organized manufacturers’ organizations” could devise. “Management,” they said, “with years of experience in fighting unions in the North, has hired renegade preachers to preach that unionization is anti-religious. They have cooperated with the Ku Klux Klan to spread word that unions are un-American. Terrorism, brutality, race intolerance, and bigotry have had to be met and overcome” (Ed Stone, “Saga of Two Years in Dixie,” The CIO News, June 7, 1948, p. 6).

The extraordinarily rapid ascent of Polish-born American-based Jan Lubicz-Nycz (1925–2011) and his equally precipitous descent into oblivion falls squarely into this singular dynamic. His remarkable story is a paradigmatic example of an individual capable of conceiving radical as well as factual solutions to real problems, whose revolutionary content, however, was significantly ahead of his time to the point of neutralizing the possibility of its actualization in the real world. The post-war society he designed for awarded his highly ingenious visions with prestigious recognitions and monetary prizes yet deprived him of the opportunity to see his schemes ever realized.

The central concern of all Lubicz-Nycz’s output was the conviction that architecture, taught, narrated, and practiced as an activity devoted to the conception and execution of singular projects of canonical import, failed to address in a substantive way the fundamental interconnectivity of all the components shaping the built environment. He detected an impoverishment of the urban fabric following the epochal changes the Industrial Revolution brought about in the modern city. The shift of focus from a unified conception of settlements, already present in Western and Non-Western traditions belonging to the pre-industrial past, had given way to a much narrower concentration on the single architectural object. Such a stance bestowed on a building alone disproportionate importance as an agent of influence for the vital functioning of its surroundings at a structural level. For Lubicz-Nycz, this was a fatal mistake directly attributable to the process of modernization, a collective error of judgment whose toll was manifested in the qualitative decline of the built environment of the twentieth century. Reacting to such conviction, he made the urban habitat the target of his design thinking. The schemes that he entered in the numerous international competitions earning him top awards were rooted in a new notion of space, which he labeled urbatecture. He wrote:

… the design process transcends the scope of architecture or urban design and transforms itself into an art or skill that I will call “urbatecture”. The realm of this art is the creation of an environmental concepts of an urban habitat, not in terms of separate building, but in terms of a harmonious scape, whether landscape, seascape or airscape, making its edifices out of

concrete and brick

trees and asphalt

glass and flowers

crowds of people

sounds of birds and foghorns

textures and colors

snow and winds

rising and setting sun

fusing all these into new forms of human habitat.1

Formulated during the sixties, when system thinking was occupying much of the architectural debate, this point of arrival in his intellectual development was rooted in his formative years in Europe.

In 1944, Lubicz-Nycz participated in the Warsaw uprising and after its fall became a prisoner of war in Germany. Following the liberation by the British Army, in 1946 he enrolled in a five-year program at the Polish University College School of Architecture in London, earning a diploma with a thesis on hospital design. From 1951 to 1958, he gained practical experience in four different firms working on a variety of project types at various scales. Also in 1958, he was registered as an architect and became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Already at this early stage of his career, he invested significant effort in entering competitions structured around ambitious program briefs invariably connected to the larger question of the quality of the public realm. His 1957 entry to the Enrico Fermi Memorial Competition was a notable case in point.

At the beginning of 1959, he moved to San Francisco, working for six months each in the firm Stone, Marraccini, Patterson and in the office of John S. Bolles. He opened his solo practice in 1960 and entered a string of contests whose results catapulted him from unknown young designer to the limelight of the national and international stage. Lubicz-Nycz’s propositions emerged in the climate of collective interests in megastructures—that is, large-scale interventions in the city that merged the infrastructural layer of city living with the residential demands of communities increasing in density. Over the years, he developed a sequence of remarkable plans for rather large sites, each time offering an environmental totality responding thoroughly to both program requirements and the symbolic demands of the post-war age hungry for a cogent environmental identity.

It was the entry for the Golden Gateway in San Francisco, designed with John Collier and Philip Langley, that first put Lubicz-Nycz on the media map. His scheme, one of eight highlighted in the press, was deemed by Minoru Yamasaki in the expert panel “a daring and imaginative solution.”2 Following Lubicz-Nycz’s presentation of his project, Louis I. Kahn, also a member of the expert panel, reacted: “A very provocative design that would have an immense influence in the architectural world.”3 Kahn added: “He has devised a unit from which growth outward can develop.”4 Together with a shopping center, a bowling alley, and a recreation center, the scheme featured twelve apartment blocks, amounting to 2,135 units all endowed with a balcony, arranged according to a cruciform plan. Their silhouettes, conjuring a futuristic skyline, were profoundly advanced for the time and anticipatory of much later developments in high-rise design as well as in land management. Stacking took a curiously organic turn in the Polish émigré’s hands. Sloping terraced towers with narrower floorplates as they rise in height became the hallmark of a design vocabulary never seen before. Kahn further commented on his entry: “… you never know what beautiful and satisfying building will be like until a man with his [Lubicz-Nycz] make-up comes along and makes you know what it is.”5

That same year, he entered another competition for the design of the Liverpool Cathedral in England in association with architect Mario Ciampi, whose school projects in Daly City had given him nationwide exposure. While their entry failed to receive any awards due to insufficient information on the drawings, it was still lauded for the imaginative qualities illustrated. From a one-story modular podium, a gigantic roof structure of gothic vertical proportions spiked up to create the dominant image of this landmark. Although Lubicz-Nycz abandoned the Cartesian geometry in sub-subsequent projects, he did put forward a grandiose formal ambition of portentous undertaking calibrated to jumpstart a new spatial culture wherever he intervened. From his early works, the belief that the deep investigation of form was a pre-requisite for an architecture of historical identity within the genealogy of modernity was the constant of all his architecture.

The clamor the Golden Gateway scheme provoked in the local community provided the impetus for the talented designer to enter more competitions in partnership with already established local figures. Still with Mario Ciampi, and two other architects, Lubicz-Nycz submitted an entry to the 1961 competition for the Red Rock Hill Housing, Diamond Heights in San Francisco. His scheme was awarded first prize, an honor shared with three other teams, under the auspices of an Architectural Advisory Panel composed of John Carl Warnecke and Ernest J. Kump, among others. The bold concept comprising 990 units allocated in seven free form high-rise towers yielded “organic unity” in the jury’s praise, acknowledging its constructive efficiency and impressive monumentality as well. Leveraging the distinct topography of the site located in a prominent position within the San Francisco Bay, the team designed an ascent of levels of space-age flavor. Landscape, architecture, and infrastructure merged into one spatial continuum of noteworthy impact even for the era of utopian dreaming.

The following year, together with Robert Marquis and Claude Stoller, younger brother of legendary architecture photographer Ezra Stoller, Lubicz-Nycz entered a scheme to the Ruberoid/Matico Urban Renewal Competition for 5,000 dwellings, receiving a National Merit Award. The jury applauded the proposal for the ingenious sculptural skyline the six high-rise Y-towers generated as they grew out of the ground. The membrane-like quality of these structures and the formal handling of the terrain captivated the attention of the architectural circles. This novel approach, a sort of landscape urbanism of sizable dimensions displaying biological geometries, was utterly unprecedented even for the frontier ethos shared among the protagonists of the late phase of California Modernism. Yet, despite its groundbreaking content, there was a remarkable degree of engineering credibility in this project. The vertical thrust of his skyscrapers, a hallmark of his urban visions, would find tectonic resolution in the receding floorplates as the superstructure rose, attending even to the imperative of the real estate marketplace with the upper units available at higher prices than those below for the unobstructed views. Testing the mix-use development on sites as diverse in character as the cities where these ideas would be applied was the common thread of Lubicz-Nycz’s design contribution to architectural discourse. The concept was the same elaborated in many different versions: a tissue of buildings rather than an atomized sequence of individual structures disconnected from each other. This spatial continuum hosts the enmeshment of all living functions, a biological mix-use development of sorts: one large organism—literally an architecture of the size of a city—contains the richness of contemporary life as it happens.

Another leap forward in architectural stardom was the second prize his competition entry received for the redevelopment of the central area (Jaffa) in Tel Aviv, Israel, of 1963. Louis Kahn, who was once again a jury member in this new contest, praised this project, done with Donald P. Rey as a consultant. The brief required a radical idea to connect the historical urban pattern of Jaffa with the new city of Tel Aviv, operating on a large portion of the metropolitan area destroyed during the 1948 war. In this grand town planning exercise, the architect organized along a vehicular axis a large residential grouping of varying types: towers, randomly distributed low-height living blocks, and a pair of symmetrically laid crescents, all served by a level of parking of territorial scale. The result was a heroic sight conjuring images of fluidity, velocity, and modernity.

It was in 1964 that the first built accomplishment demonstrated in physical form the true talent of Lubicz-Nycz. Although the architect of record was John Bolles, the actual scheme for the McGraw-Hill West Coast Distribution Center was by Lubcz-Nycz. It was designed in 1964 and completed in 1966 in Novato, conspicuously visible from Highway 101. The compound, still standing, is comprised primarily of a 130,000 sq.ft. warehouse with a small office building and a cafeteria. The distinguishing features of the project were the hyperbolic paraboloid concrete shells with a 62-foot span forming the undulated roof. Admired to this day, this essay in concrete technology, designed with noted structural engineer Raj Desai, gave a hint of the uncommon capabilities that would single out Lubicz-Nycz from peers of his generation.

In the wake of such a winning streak in international competitions, the Italian architectural historians and critics—both Jewish incidentally, as the architect was—Bruno Zevi and Manfredo Tafuri took notice of his work. Zevi published repeatedly the architect’s projects and ideas throughout the 1960s in the magazine L’Architettura. Cronache e Storia.6 In an in-depth article that appeared in Casabella, Tafuri read Lubicz-Nycz’s proposal for Tel-Aviv as a mix between “surrealismo urbano di sapore avveniristico” (urban surrealism of futuristic flavor) and “tensione espressionista”  (expressionistic tension).7 Furthermore, he detected the clashing of a novel morphology for the city, while at the same time trying to recapture the texture of the existing city—an insight virtually applicable to all the competition entries the architect would fashion through the decade.

Despite the enthusiastic endorsement of the most acclaimed architects of his time and the press around the world, none of his competition-winning entries were ever built. Already in the mid-1960s, the architect’s bitterness was mounting. Realizing that despite the glory, no prospect of getting actual contracts to build his projects was on the horizon, Lubicz-Nycz’s sour taste was palpable. “I have reached the critical point,” he is quoted.8 Disappointment notwithstanding, he continued to enter competitions. He earned first prize in the international competition for Hotel/Apartments/Commercial complex, San Sebastian, Spain (1964–66). His entry for the international competition for the redevelopment of the central area of Varna, Bulgaria (1967), was purchased by the client that promoted the context. He submitted an entry for the design of an International Headquarters and Conference Center, Vienna (1969). He was invited by the Principality of Monaco to participate in a limited architectural competition (1969).

To supplement his intermittent income as he continued his attempt to turn the tide with competitions, the architect started teaching architectural design at various universities across the country: UC Berkeley (1961–63), University of Virginia (1964–66), M.I.T. (1966–69), California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (1970–73). He received his California license to practice architecture on October 17, 1967 (and let it expire on May 31, 2001), but following his latest teaching appointment, his work history appeared scattered. He collaborated for three years with Mario Ciampi (1973–76) working on urban and architectural projects, none of which were built. He later moved to Los Angeles, working for a year or two as a project designer for various firms, to then return to San Francisco in 1983. Although he continued to occasionally submit proposals to open competitions (Les Halles, Paris, 1979, and Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, New Delhi, India, 1986), he progressively and quietly disappeared from the scene.

The precipitous plunge of Jan Lubicz-Nycz is an astounding case study in architectural history. This individual of universally acknowledged talent, featured in history books, hailed as the new promise in the development of a new, and more adequate, vision of the city was totally disposed of from the very system of professions that had initially welcomed him. His gradual fading from criticism is equally astonishing, especially at present, since a great many current urban visions and architectural fantasies propose the same identical formal world that this maverick had proposed sixty years prior. This twentieth century Piranesi, forced by circumstances to see his design dreams remain on paper, is a stark reminder of the contingent nature of the construction of historical memory in architecture, a process imbued with a complexity of human dynamics proportionally similar to the vast problems Lubicz-Nycz’s projects were attempting to tackle and resolve.

Over time, I became adept at reading Weber’s scrawled handwriting—it was equally difficult whether he was writing in English or German—and at identifying his realized buildings and projects. One afternoon, however, I pulled a photograph out of a small suitcase from one of the bedroom closets, an image of a work I had not seen before (fig. 1). It was a tiny structure, mostly open, with a pitched roof and what appeared to be drawers on the lower portion, which opened to one side. Two little girls were seated before it, each holding a doll. Nothing was written on the back.

I took the photo to Erika, who was out pruning in her rose garden, and asked her what it was. She identified the two girls as her sister Ursula and herself (left and right, respectively). The structure, she explained, was the “Seed Shrine.” Weber had designed it for his wife, also named Erika, an avid gardener, after he had moved the family from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara in the early 1930s.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Weber, like most of the Southern California modernists, was having difficulty turning up new—or any—commissions. In those days, the cost of living in Santa Barbara was markedly lower than in the city; Weber made the move to save money. Erika and the four children lived in a small, wooden clapboard house on Alamar Avenue; he lived and worked in Los Angeles during the week, sometimes sleeping in his office or on a couch at a friend’s apartment. Each weekend, he would commute home. Erika (the wife) was growing much of the family’s food; she asked him to build a workstation where she could sort and save vegetable and flower seeds. The drawers, each of which had a fine mesh bottom, were used to dry the seeds.1

Weber, I guessed, had taken the structure’s form from Japanese Shinto shrines, likely the type one might find on a roadside. For some time, I looked for sources but found no direct ones. Recently, I shared the photograph with Daichi Shigemoto, one of my doctoral students, who is working on the history of modern Japanese architecture. His response was that the Seed Shrine’s flat working surface, with the cacti and flowers, and the drawers below suggested something else: Japanese Buddhist funerary monuments.2 It seems that Weber must have drawn inspiration from various traditional forms and adapted them to his purposes.

But this raises a rather interesting question. There are few, if any, other direct Asian borrowings in Weber’s designs. Born and educated in Berlin, he was a notably (better, resolutely) German architect and designer, and to the extent that he derived forms from others, it was invariably from contemporary German modernists—above all, his beloved teacher Bruno Paul.

I have pondered this issue for a long time. Why, at this moment of crisis in Weber’s life and career, when he sometimes had to borrow a few dollars from friends just so he could put gas in his car or have a cheap meal, was he ruminating on Japanese architectural forms?

There is a larger question here, of course. It has to do with the symbiosis between East Asian forms and the rise of California Modern. Evidence of this influence of Asian design is everywhere: most of the leading Southern California modernists at one time or another made veiled or direct recourse to Japanese or Chinese tradition (more often the former); it is distinctly infused into a great deal of the new architecture.

Part of the answer as to why this happened is obvious: there was the extensive Pan-Pacific exchange of that time; the fact that there were many trading companies in California dealing directly with Japan and China; the cultural impact of the largish populations of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the region; and the reality that Japanese architecture—especially—was admired by Western modernist architects.

There are, of course, various ways to get at this historical phenomenon. One could make a survey of the written or published influences, books like Ralph Adams Cram’s Impressions of Japanese Architecture, first published in 1905.3 One might also pursue other sources, from travel diaries and photographs to the then-popular penchant for collecting Asian antiquities. And one might also comb through the archives of the California modernists themselves, looking for direct, written clues.

The question I want to pose in this essay involves the specific role that this amalgam of Asian influences and modernist ideas had in forming the distinctive language of progressive California design. A definitive answer or even a topographic list is not possible here; that would require a far more extensive study—a book, really. Instead, I want to suggest a few corridors of seeing and understanding in the form of three short case studies.

1. M. Schindler’s Kings Road House

In one of the action scenes from Buster Keaton’s 1924 silent comedy film, Sherlock Jr., Keaton speeds on his motorcycle up a mostly empty Kings Road in Hollywood (fig. 2). Visible to the left, past several unbuilt lots, is R. M. Schindler’s 1922 house, one of the landmarks of early Southern California modernism. In this view—and even in the early images in the Schindler archive—the house at first appears fortress-like, with seemingly heavy battered walls and a few narrow slits for openings (fig. 3). But anyone who knows the house is aware that the impression from the inside—especially in the rear-facing unit (there were two, one for Schindler and his wife Pauline, the other for Clyde and Marian Chace)—is light, bright, and rather more “impermanent” in feel. Much of the structure is wood, with open ceiling joists, simple slatted walls, modular (rectangular) windows, and sliding doors. Some of the house’s formal language is lifted straight from Otto Wagner’s “school” at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (where Schindler had studied before leaving for the United States). But more of it is decidedly Japanese in appearance.

Some of the likely sources for Schindler’s interest in the traditional Japanese house are obvious: the popularity of Japonisme in fin-de-siècle Vienna and his time working for Wright at Taliesin and, later, in Los Angeles, just at the moment when Wright was engaged with the Imperial Hotel Project in Tokyo. A team of Spanish scholars, led by José Manuel Almodóvar Melendo, have pointed to Schindler’s relationship with Arata Endo, whom Wright had hired to serve as “chief draftsman for the Imperial Hotel Project and during his one-year stay in Taliesin (1917–1918) … worked with the team responsible for transforming Wright’s sketches into working plans for the Imperial Hotel and into drawings for five Japanese residences and a theatre.” Schindler met Endo during this period, and the two maintained a long friendship.4 Still, much of the evidence they cite for Schindler’s connections to Japanese architecture and architects comes after 1922, after the house was finished. They also speculate about whether Schindler had seen Edward Morse’s 1886 book, Japanese Homes and their Surroundings, which is a likely source for elements of Wright’s Prairie house aesthetic.5

Morse, one of the first Westerners to document Japanese domestic design in detail, spent three years in Japan studying and teaching zoology. His book, which he published after his return, features numerous drawings he made of Japanese houses, including construction details—a great deal of what one would need to build in the same way. There is no evidence that Schindler knew the work. But it makes little difference whether he did or not. Somewhere along the path of his early career, he had seen enough of traditional Japanese building to borrow from it and transform it in his own way.6

I emphasize this because Schindler’s Kings Road House, one of the most manifestly Japanese of the Asian-inspired houses of the early Los Angeles moderns, was no mere replica. As Almodóvar and his co-authors note, Schindler implemented a composite construction system. Their claim is that it is “clearly similar to that described by Morse,” but, of course, that does not necessarily mean that Morse was Schindler’s source.7

What one does see throughout the house is how Schindler adapted traditional Japanese woodwork to simpler joinery—mostly nails—and standard, industrially produced milled lumber (fig. 4). What is also evident is the way in which he opts for an open framing system, with spatial partitions arranged in such a manner that they are not load bearing—in keeping with Japanese tradition. In an article he published more than a decade later in T-Square, Schindler describes his approach: “all partitions and patio walls are non-supporting screens composed of a wooden skeleton filled in with glass or with removable canvas panels.”8

Schindler also followed the standard Japanese practice of leaving the materials—redwood, canvas, and glass—in their natural state, in no way embellishing them. Many of the other features of the house speak to traditional Japanese house forms—the imposition of multi-functional spaces, for example, or direct openings to the gardens, the use of screens in place of walls, and broad overhangs. There is also the house’s general sense of openness and the clear tensions between its geometric formality and the relaxed character of its rooms.

But it is not a Japanese house, any more than it is a Wrightian or a Wagnerian one. The overriding theme is Schindler’s attempt to devise a simple and light constructive fabric that could facilitate indoor-outdoor living, push new ideas of building logic (the lift-slab panels, above all), while granting the whole a decidedly modern cast. The Japanese element is a means to an end; it is not the aim. This becomes even more evident in Schindler’s subsequent house designs, beginning with the 1925 Howe House, which retain some of the spirit of Japanese construction while moving away from its specific forms. As Schindler came more and more to contrive his own distinctive architectonic language in the later 1920s, all that remained were a few abstracted bits of Japanese building logic. He adapted the Japanese forms not because he was seeking some type of verisimilitude—he was, in other words, not attempting to recreate a specific form-language in the mode of the historicists—but because he found the forms useful in his effort to devise an architectonic language suitable for the distinctive terrain and climate of Southern California.

2. Harwell Hamilton Harris’s Fellowship Park House

We can witness a similar process at work in one of the early designs of Harwell Hamilton Harris. Harris apprenticed with Richard Neutra in the late 1920s and early 1930s; he also learned informally from Schindler. He overlapped with Gregory Ain in Neutra’s office, and for a time the two assisted each other after they set out as independent architects.

In 1935, with his future wife Jean Murray Bangs, Harris bought a steeply sloping lot in the Fellowship Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Soon afterward, he received a call from his client, Pauline Lowe (for whom he had designed a house in Altadena in 1933–1934), asking him to replace the Japanese sliding doors from her house, which she complained “rattled in the wind,” and install conventional hinged doors. Harris bought the sliding doors from the contractor for a dollar each and moved them to the lot in Fellowship Park.

Harris stored the doors in a small shed on site, but he soon noticed that they were beginning to warp. He knew he needed to act quickly, lest the doors become entirely unusable, so he removed the shed and built a rectangular platform on wooden columns extending out over the hillside. In the living room of the structure, which occupied fully two-thirds of it, Harris installed the sliding doors, inserting them into a modular frame. When he ran out of doors, he made a solid section that helped brace the structure. The resulting dwelling was little more than the frame, a hipped roof, and the sliding doors (fig. 5).9

Harris asked noted local photographer Fred R. Dapprich to make images of the house while it was still mostly empty (fig. 6). He submitted the project to the 1936 House Beautiful Small House Competition. It won first prize, beating out two houses designed by Neutra. In 1938, it received an honor award from the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects.10

What Harris later said about the design underscores my thesis. He did not opt for Japanese forms because he sought to imitate them, he explained, but because they allowed him to explore an issue arising from the unique conditions of living in the region and his own formal predilections: “The Japanese house most satisfied my liking for immaterial form,—for space. It did not displace space; it marked space, it shaped space. And the materials of Japanese building—hardly more than thin lines and flat planes—were arranged to effect rhythm, rhythm without mass.”11

One could add that the mostly open house, very lightly constructed, was ideal for Southern California living. The house became fused with nature. It was man-made but entirely natural in terms of its materials and fully “connected” with its surroundings. Lisa Germany, who wrote the standard monograph on Harris, reveals that he “planted asparagus fern and mint he got from an aunt” around the house. “I would hose it off,” he recalled, “and so fill the air with mint odor (very fresh).”12

In his subsequent works, Harris would often reference Japanese forms—in the 1939 Blair House, for example—employing screens, a penchant for natural materials, and a pronounced formal modularity. What stands out even more is his interest in the play of light, which to my eye often has about it a Japanese sensibility. Harris was sensitive to fostering light patterns—or better, maybe, oppositions between light and dark, a long view and a truncated one, and the notion of pure subdued light versus shadow and patterning—all present, for example, in classic Japanese tea houses. Many of these mannerisms remained in his work, even in his later periods in Austin and Raleigh, where he spent his final years.

But Harris’s process was always about refinement and purification, about extracting effects from the forms rather than any sort of direct referencing. None of his later works appear directly Asian or Asian-inspired; they are instead the outcome of thinking about what Japanese traditions might yield in modernist terms.

3. Edward Durell Stone and Paul T. Frankl’s Coldwater Canyon House

Of the early Los Angeles moderns, the one who had the most direct contact with Asia was Paul T. Frankl. Frankl visited Japan twice, once in 1914 and again in 1936. He also made a hasty buying trip to China in 1939.13 Far more than Schindler or Harris, Frankl also made a concerted effort to learn about Japanese design philosophy. During his first sojourn in Japan, which took him to Tokyo (he stayed in a traditional inn, not far from the future site of Wright’s Imperial Hotel), then on to Nara, Osaka, and Kyoto, he was careful to observe all he could. And while in Kyoto, he had lessons in Japanese flower arranging, a skill he would use for the remainder of his career.

During his time in Japan, Frankl made note of even the most trivial details of living. He wrote of the “refinement” and “dignity” he saw everywhere; he was especially struck by the “art of elimination,” which he thought posed a potent alternative to Western taste. He described it as “the distilled essence of beauty.” And he took away from his experiences an especially strong love for the Japanese “simplicity of expression” and the “ability to use materials true to their nature.”14

In his later autobiography, he wrote about his love of traditional Japanese dwelling spaces: “The Japanese house always made me feel good and living in it takes me back to my early childhood in the nursery, where life was lived on the floor. The scrupulously clean, resilient tatami mats covering the floors … are pleasant to the touch. Seated on them or on a soft, comfortable silk pillow, you have the feeling of space and elbow room.”15

When Frankl first began to practice in New York in 1915 (he was unable to return to Vienna because of the outbreak of the First World War), he sometimes made distinctly Japanese references in his designs (fig. 7). And he recreated—quite faithfully given the circumstances—a Japanese interior for the play Bushido by Takeda Izumo, which was produced by the Washington Square Players at the Bandbox Theatre in New York in 1916 (fig. 8).16 Frankl’s later Skyscraper bookcases and desks, which catapulted him to fame in the mid-1920s, were based in part on Japanese Sendai chests, which he came to appreciate during his first Japan trip (fig. 9). Later, in his Los Angeles gallery, Frankl sold patio lounge chairs that seemingly borrowed their forms from the bridges in Chinese gardens (fig. 10).

It is hardly a surprise then that when Frankl decided to build his own house in Beverly Hills, he opted for a quasi-Asian “palette.” Frankl, who did not have an American architect’s license, asked Edward Durell Stone to design the house; Frankl would devise the interiors. Stone, who was not licensed in California, in turn worked with local architect Douglas Honnold.17 The house they created drew directly—or so it seemed—from traditional Japanese farmhouses, notably those with low, hip-and-gable roofs (fig. 11).

Frankl, however, explained that part of the house’s appearance was determined by the site, a long, narrow lot framed on one side by a stand of old walnut trees and on the other by the canyon walls. The rooms were arrayed in a nearly straight line, stair-stepped in two places to accommodate the sharply sloping terrain. An unnamed writer for California Arts and Architecture added that the house was “conceived in the modern spirit and kept simple and straightforward by the elimination of all things directly not necessary to the mode of life chosen by the owners.”18

The house was thus, at best, Japanese “inspired.” The interiors bore this out. Frankl made a lovely interior garden arrangement by one of the stairways, lit from an exterior window (fig. 12). It appears to be much in the spirit of a Japanese formal garden—until one makes the direct comparison. Then the differences emerge. It is too condensed with too many elements. It is rather more an interpretation or an adaptation than an attempt at mimicry. The same may be said for the living room, with its pseudo-Japanese flower arrangements (fig. 13). But they are very nearly inconsequential. The cast of the room is Central European, almost Loosian with its changes in level and the deep, vaguely historically inspired veil of comfort. No one with any familiarity with Japanese design would mistake this space for a traditional house in Kyoto. And any good design historian in Vienna would recognize many, if not almost all, of its features.

What Frankl excelled at instead was a clever sort of reworking. He would borrow elements—ofttimes, the essential features of a design—and through thoughtful fusion spawn something new—or almost new. My favorite example is the table and benches he made for the dining room of his house in Palos Verdes, where he moved his family after the American entry into World War II (theorizing that the Japanese were less likely to bomb that far away from Los Angeles proper). They are sandblasted ash with the grain left in high relief—and in that sense wonderfully Japanese in their material sensibilities (fig. 14). But the set is also something quite familiar—an adapted American picnic table, though exquisitely remade with X-supports and long, continuous dowels. It is straightforward, even spartan, but elegant and perfect in its simplicity.

Most of all, like the other examples I have discussed, the table and benches were—to borrow a familiar musical term—a riff on the originals. And to extend this metaphor, in each instance their makers were extracting a few bars from another tune, all the while singing their own song. Los Angeles modernism was never exactly “influenced by” Asian design so much as its makers mined bits and pieces and recast them. The essential features (mostly Japanese, again) are all there—space, light, thinness, lightness, and transparency, with a strong penchant for interacting directly with nature. But they are “re-shaped,” made new and original.

One might ask whether California Modernism would have arisen as we know it without the influence of these Asian forms or concepts. It is, of course, an impossible question to answer. I suspect the closest we can get to the truth is that it was “necessary but not sufficient,” meaning that many other influences and ideas came to have a part in the rise of this distinctive aesthetic. There is certainly research to be done, and with far greater specificity than what I have laid out here.

A Final Note

Weber’s “Seed Shrine” had a brief afterlife. After several of his friends, including Lloyd Wright, admired the design, Weber thought about producing and selling it. He approached one of his old acquaintances, Theodore W. Overlach, who owned a garden accessories shop in San Francisco. Overlach, too, was taken with the design and drew up a contract, agreeing to pay Weber $5.00 for each unit he sold. A few evidently were made, but the “Seed Shrine” was never a bestseller.19 It was, like much else that referenced Asian design in California, a one-off.

In recent decades, as R. M. Schindler has belatedly assumed a position of eminence in modernist architectural history, attention has fallen on “Modern Architecture: A Program,” a manifesto-like essay that Schindler wrote in Vienna during his apprentice years. The essay’s significance is obvious, but its origins have remained somewhat obscure. Researches in the Schindler Papers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have allowed me to pinpoint the document’s gestation with some precision. What follows is a report on that research, together with a new translation of the Program, based on the original manuscript. Schindler’s far-sighted ideas about modern residential design remain the same, but their context has shifted and expanded.

The publishing history of the Program is tangled. The most familiar version is one that Schindler made in English sometime before 1932, when he sent it to Masakazu Koyama, the editor of the Japanese architectural magazine Kokusai Kenchiku, and also appended an excerpt to his short critique of functionalism in the Southwest Review. This rendering was included in the dossier of writings that Schindler gave to the architectural historian Esther McCoy, and it was subsequently published in books by David Gebhard, Judith Sheine, and others.1 Two other drafts, in German, can be found in the Schindler Papers. One, a typescript with corrections and additions, appears to date from the 1920s; in 1995, it was published in the catalogue for the Kunsthalle Wien exhibition Visionäre und Vertriebene (Visionaries and Exiles).2 There is also a set of handwritten pages, some of which carry the date 1913. Barbara Giella transcribed these for her 1987 thesis on Schindler’s work of the thirties; a translation followed in Lionel March and Judith Sheine’s RM Schindler: Composition and Construction.3

Analysis of the Program has been complicated by the fact that its various drafts are scattered through the Schindler archive. Two sheets of the handwritten manuscript, with writing on both sides, surface in a folder marked “Letters not sent.”4 Two other sheets, again with writing on both sides, show up amid Schindler’s correspondence with Neutra.5 Only the typescript version is filed in a folder identified with “Modern Architecture: A Program.” Furthermore, the challenges of reading Schindler’s German handwriting have hindered comprehension. Giella’s transcription presented two of the pages in the wrong order, resulting in several garbled passages.6 No one appears to have taken notice of a few lines on one page that specify the jumping-off point of the entire exercise: a questionnaire sent out by the Darmstadt-based journal Innen-Dekoration in January 1912 (fig. 1). I have concluded that Schindler’s Program took shape in response to that questionnaire.

At the time that Schindler made the notes that evolved into the Program, he was studying under Otto Wagner at the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), in Vienna. He was also attending private lectures by Adolf Loos, in the course of which he first encountered Richard Neutra. The use of the phrase “modern architecture” is, among other things, a nod in the direction of Wagner, who had published the first edition of his famous book of that title in 1896. Yet, as Harry Mallgrave has pointed out, the Program diverges in important respects from Wagner’s aesthetic, rejecting the older architect’s insistence of endowing constructive principles with expressive potential.7 Nor does it necessarily conform with Loos’s teachings circa 1912. It espouses something of a third way beyond Wagner’s beautified modernism and Loos’s reaction against the ornamented exterior.

Alexander Koch, the editor of Innen-Dekoration and of the even more widely read Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, was a vigorous promoter of interior-design reform, his aesthetics closely aligned with those of the Jugendstil movement (fig. 2). Innen-Dekoration is best remembered for having held a design competition in 1901 for a theoretical house to be called Haus eines Kunstfreundes, or House for an Art Lover. The winning designs, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, and Leopold Bauer, offered pared-down, formally striking, internally fluid models for residential design, which gave inspiration to the rising generation of Austrian architects, Schindler included. Koch also drew notice for his role in and promotion of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony. A Wagner student like Schindler would naturally have monitored Koch’s publications, even if, as Sigrid Randa-Campani observes in her study of the publisher, Koch had taken a somewhat conservative, backward-looking turn in the years after 1908.8

The January 1912 issue of Innen-Dekoration featured a questionnaire asking readers what they valued most in the concepts of “Wohnlichkeit” and “Behaglichkeit”—near-synonymous words that connote livability, comfortableness, coziness. The magazine addresses “three questions to all who have talent and sensitivity for Wohnlichkeit”:

1. How do you imagine a comfortable home?
2. What in your view are the main points that must be fulfilled in the achievement of comfort and well-being in the home?
3. What in your opinion are the most common home-furnishing mistakes and how are they to be avoided?9

A summary of responses to the survey was printed a year later, in the January 1913 issue, apparently with the participation of the distinguished art historian Paul Westheim. The headline was “Wie erzielt man Wohnlichkeit?”—“How does one achieve comfortableness?” (fig. 3). Among the replies, the contribution of a young Viennese architect named R. Schindler was singled out for praise and summarized as follows:

While the feeling of “coziness” [Gemütlichkeit] originally created for protection-seeking primitive man a sense of security in the narrow “living cave” [Wohnhöhle], providing protection against the elements, in the hut, in the narrow-walled city, for modern civilized man the concept of comfort [Behaglichkeit] is interpreted anew: it consists above all in the possibility of being able to freely control space, light, air and temperature within the enclosed area.

The editor praises Schindler’s ideas but adds a qualification: sensations of comfort and security are no less crucial for modern people who might have mastered the elements but still require a restful atmosphere as a respite from the stresses of daily existence.10 Anyone who knows Schindler’s Program will have recognized some familiar formulations. One quoted phrase—“formalen Anklänge, welche Erinnerungen an jenes Sicherheitsgefühl erwecken,” or “formal echoes which awaken memories of that feeling of security”—appears almost word for word in the various versions of the Program.

The two sheets that can be found among “Letters not sent” in the Schindler Papers would appear to be a rough draft of the reply that Schindler submitted to Innen-Dekoration. The first sheet is marked February 1912 at the top; Schindler had obviously set to work shortly after reading the previous month’s issue. Schindler writes, “Reply to the general survey by the magazine Innen-Dekoration,” and names Hofrat Alex Koch as the addressee. He then copies out the three questions. What follows corresponds roughly to the final section of the published versions of the Program.

For the Urmensch [primitive man], the value of his cave lay in its hiddenness and narrowness—in the feeling of security which it gave to the occupant—The medieval city supplied the same sense of security through its building principle of crowding as many defenders as possible into the smallest perimeter—

The farmer feels comfortable only in a hut that answers his need for protection from the elements by way of the strongest contrast with the outer world—

For the majority, “gemütlich,” “comfortable” means spaces which can awaken memories of those feelings of security through formal echoes—

Civilized man progresses from flight before the elements to their domination—For him the home is no cowering hideout—through his power he has found the way to nature. The words “gemütlich” “comfortable” have a different ring—The comfort of the dwelling lies no longer in formal shaping—but in the possibility of freely governing time, space, light, air and temperature within its limits.

The dwelling will not wish to have style, personality, expression— will no longer bellow — like an eternal gramophone for every passing mood of the architect and owner — it will be silent and will provide a peaceful setting for the owner.11

When Innen-Dekoration gave a brief summary of Schindler’s commentary in its January 1913 issue, the architect may have been prompted to develop his thinking further. In any case, two further pages with writing on both sides are marked “June 1913.” Here again there is a discrepancy in Giella’s transcription. On the back of the first page was a section on the topic of monumentality in architecture. In the transcription, this has been moved after the material on the following sheet. Giella presumably did this because Schindler himself changed the order when he made his typewritten transcription and English translation. She also followed Schindler in placing the 1912 material last. For the purpose of documenting the first version of the Program, the earlier order should be retained. Incidentally, none of these early documents bear a title; “Modern Architecture: A Program” came later. Here is a translation:

The first living space was the cave.

The first house was the hollow heap of earth.

Building meant—gathering and piling up building material with room for air-living-spaces.

This viewpoint is the basis for understanding all architectural creations from the beginning of time up to the twentieth century A.D.

The goal of architectural striving was—formal subjugation of the mass of building material.

The idea came only from the sculpturally malleable mass of material.

The vaulted ceiling was not a spatial idea, instead it was a form for distributing material so that the mass was kept suspended.

Shaping the projection of the mass into space was the task of wall decoration.

The problem has been solved and is dead.

We—no longer have a sculpturally malleable mass of material.

The modern architect conceives the space and shapes it with wall and ceiling panels.

The idea comes only from the space and its elaboration.

Without the mass of building material, the negative of the space on the inner wall of the house appears unimpaired as a positive on the outside.

Hence the “box-shaped house” emerged as the primitive form of the new line of development.

A new problem has arisen—and, as ever, the concept of purpose guards its birth.

Monumentality is the expression of the memorial of a power.

The first ruler was the tyrant.

His power over the crowd found expression in the physical overcoming of static forces. In keeping with a primitive level of culture and sensitivity, the power-symbol was restricted to overcoming two of the simplest forces: heaviness and cohesion.

The monumental effect grew proportionally with the “work of material distribution” being brought to expression.

Man defers to the heft of the earth.

Today a different power of humanity demands its monument.

Spiritual creative power has broken the might of the physical tyrant.

Man has found a more mature symbol for the overcoming of physical forces—the machine.

The mathematical overcoming of the static renders it formally and artistically expressionless.

The new monumentality of space will adumbrate the infinite limits of the spirit. Man shudders in the vastness of the cosmos.

R June 1913

 

The first house had to give people protection.

The sense of security was heightened through every indication of the durability of the house.

To the architect, therefore, construction must have appeared to be the most effective means of expression.

All building styles up to the 20th century AD are “constructional.”

The quest to symbolize the constructional function of the mass of building material furnished ideas for form.

The last stage of this development is artistically conceived steel construction. In the steel frame, form is no longer a symbol of the constructional play of forces—construction has become form.

With the help of concrete building, the 20th century takes the first steps towards formally dispensing with construction.

The constructional problem has turned into a mathematical equation. The structural calculations filed with the city building authority render formal guarantees of safety superfluous. Construction has become devoid of interest.

Modern man no longer takes notice of the construction—the concrete pillar, the beam, the mass of the wall—because there is no longer a columnar form, architrave, wall plinth, crowning cornice—instead he sees the freedom of cantilever construction, the openness of the span, the space-defining surface of the 7-cm thick wall.

The house-building artist’s quest to use the form as a constructional symbol or to give the construction an artistically expressive form is dead.

There is no longer a constructional style.

The architect’s natural inclination to build constructionally has become a bogus buzzword in a day and age that wishes to give its artists the strangely necessary exhortation: Build with all spiritual and technical resources that your culture offers you.

R June 1913 12

What happens to our understanding of Schindler’s Program when its context is restored? First, it is all the more clear that, as Mallgrave argues, the young architect is distancing himself from—if not rejecting outright—prevailing values of the Jugendstil and Secession movements, not to mention central tenets of his teacher Otto Wagner. In Modern Architecture, the latter had written that “the architect must always develop the art-form out of construction.”13 Schindler, on the other hand, boldly announces that “there is no longer a constructional style.” Indeed, the very notion of construction-oriented building is a falsches Schlagwort.

Schindler comes closer in spirit to Loos, who had argued that architecture must transcend the expression of personality, of the mentality of a particular artist. Schindler also shows kinship to other radical trends in Viennese modernism. Although there is no sign that he paid heed in this period to Arnold Schoenberg—unlike Neutra, who knew the composer and attended his concerts—the idea of an architecture of space supplanting an architecture of form brings to mind Schoenberg’s desire for “complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic,” his desire to dissolve musical architecture into a “vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms, and moods.”14

At the same time, Schindler also declares a degree of independence from Loos. The question of ornament is not under consideration. Schindler’s ideal architecture does not have the air of being embattled against an establishment. The concept of a house that transcends the need to supply shelter and security does not exactly reflect the values of Loos, who, as Mallgrave notes, tends to make a sharp divide between exterior and interior. Loos said in his “Heimatkunst” lecture of 1912: “The house should be discreet on the outside, inside it reveals all of its richness.”15 In a certain sense, Schindler’s interest in transcending the relation between construction and form puts him in conflict with a classic modernist ideology that was still in the process of formation.16 As August Sarnitz comments, the idea of an interior connecting fluidly to the exterior harks back to the principles of the modern English house, which, we can add, had been celebrated in the pages of Innen-Dekoration.17

The new factor that has undoubtedly entered into Schindler’s thinking about construction and space is the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio, which had galvanized Schindler as it had so many other young modernists. In his “Space Architecture” essay of 1934, Schindler recalled his first reaction to the Wasmuth portfolio: “Here was ‘space architecture.’ It was not any more the questions of moldings, caps and finials—here was space forms in meaningful shapes und relations. Here was the first architect.”18 Although Wright goes unnamed in the Program, he hovers behind the essay as a guiding spirit.

Once Schindler came to America, the ideas of his Program continued circulating through his writing and notes, even if his close-up encounters with the American built landscape caused him to make some adjustments. His impressions of New York and Chicago tended toward the negative: he experienced little of the ecstasy that had swept over Loos during his American sojourn in the 1890s. Manhattan struck Schindler as a city “arising from mass demand,” its population crowded into spaces where little natural light can penetrate.19 When, in 1917, he attained his long-sought goal of finding a position with Wright, more disappointment set in. The great man was unable to see Schindler as anything but a peon. There was also a philosophical difference: the architect of open space whom Schindler had admired in the pages of Wasmuth portfolio was going into partial eclipse, as Wright turned toward the hulking masses of his neo-Mayan style. What Judith Sheine describes as a “vocabulary of heavy forms decorated in a stylized motif” struck Schindler as a regression.20 In “Space Architecture,” he complains that Wright “tries to weave his buildings into the character of the locality through sculptural forms.”21

The move West brought more positive perspectives. Schindler had already visited Southern California and the Southwest in 1915—a trip that Albert Narath discusses at length in his 2008 essay, “Modernism in Mud.”22 In the winter of 1920–21, Schindler wrote to Neutra: “If I am to speak of ‘American architecture’—I must say at once that no such thing really yet exists … The only buildings that show true feeling for the earth that bears them are the old adobe buildings of the first settlers and their successors—Spanish and Mexican—in the southwestern part of the country.”23 A blunter assessment appears in Schindler’s notebooks from 1916: “The country is empty—except in the Pueblo domain.”24 After his first Southwestern trip, he designed an unbuilt house for the Taos physician Thomas Paul Martin, which he described as a “low stretched mass of adobe walls, with a rather severe expression for the outside.”25 This was intended to blend into the vastness of the landscape, although, as Narath points out, it retains a monumental weight.

The Program resurfaces in notes for lectures that Schindler gave at the Church School of Art in Chicago in 1916. One page is given over to a translation of a passage from the essay. Schindler’s English was still a work in progress, but the language has a distinctive flavor:

Monumentality—is the expression of a lasting symbol of a power

The first power-possessor was the—tyrant

Mankind gave expression to its awe for his power thru structures, the value of which consisted in the amount of labor spent for theyr construction.

A primitiv state of cultur is satisfied to express in its monuments the overcoming of two elementary forces only: gravity & cohasion

The monumental effect grows in proportion to the expressive: “transposition of matter”

Man worships the might of the earth

Different powers claim other symbols

The creative mentallity breaks the power of the tyrant

Mankind found its ripest symbol for the mastering of physical forces “the machine”

The mathematical solution of the problems of the statics destrois theyr artistic formal expressivenes

The new monumentality of the space will disclose the spiritual freedom of man

Mankind bows facing the unlimited firmament26

In German, the final line is “Der Mensch erschauert in der Weite des Weltalls”—almost Wagnerian in its alliteration. Schindler’s first English rendition has a different ring. It conveys the idea of a house open to the sky, the inhabitant bowing before it—a more quietly blissful scene. An excursion to Yosemite National Park seemed to transform Schindler into an echt-Californian. He wrote to Neutra in October 1921: “I camp on the bank of the Tenaya—sleep on a spruce-needle bed under the open sky and bathe in the ice-cold waterfall.”27

In all, the experience of the Western landscape encouraged Schindler to think more deeply about opening the interior to nature—a concept that is not explicitly articulated in the Program. The architect’s celebrated residence on Kings Road, which was completed in 1922, gives evidence of that shift. From certain vantage points, it presents a cement façade nearly as massive as the ones sketched for T. P. Martin. Yet, as the studios open onto the interior courtyards, they afford a seamless transition from inside to outside, with walls dematerializing into sliding partitions. The structure no longer provides a feeling of total security, as in the past architecture analyzed in the Program; adobe walls are more intimated than imitated. Monumentality has been left behind. The design plainly registers the impact of the proto-modernist Irving Gill, whom Schindler got to know on moving to Los Angeles. Gill’s increasingly abstract take on Spanish revival styles also entailed a lightening of masses, as white-walled buildings dissolve into surrounding foliage and ambient light.

The distance that Schindler has traveled from his Wagnerschule/Loosschule beginnings is manifest in his vituperative reaction to Loos’s 1919 compendium, Richtlinien für ein Kunstamt, or Guidelines for a Ministry of Art, a copy of which was apparently sent to him by Neutra. Against the background of the Social Democratic advance in the early postwar era, Loos and his collaborators called for close government supervision for the arts, equitable pay for artists, and a suppression of arbitrary individual artistic invention. Schindler, in a letter to Neutra, professed disbelief that his old mentor was responsible for the document. He was aghast at what he called a bailiff’s vocabulary—dürfen, müssen, sollen, verbieten (be allowed, must, should, forbid). He was particularly incensed by a section written by Schoenberg, in which the composer demanded measures to “ensure the German nation’s superiority in the field of music, a superiority rooted in the endowment of the Volk.” For Schindler, such nationalist sloganeering demonstrated an obliviousness to the actual wishes of the public. He declared the Richtlinien “tot und modern”—“modern” here connoting rot and decay, not progress and innovation.28

A fascinating note from 1925 shows Schindler searching out another kind of third way, this time in an international context. He distances himself both from the doctrinaire modernism that was taking hold in Europe and from the mass-produced real-estate industry of Southern California: “The European and the American way of reaching the top: the first has one—only one—idea —makes it a religion and becomes its god. The other imports an idea, becomes its sales manager and fortifies his position at the source with gold.”29 Such independence of spirit would be the hallmark of Schindler’s subsequent career, which spurned the strictures of the International Style while making no concessions to the marketplace.

To an astonishing degree, Schindler remained loyal to the principles he had set forth in the Program of his early years. To walk through the most remarkable instances of Space Architecture—the Kings Road house, the Lovell Beach House, the cluster of houses above Silver Lake Reservoir, and the Kallis House, to name a few—is to feel the aptness of Alexander Koch’s summary of the then unknown architect’s ideas: “The concept of comfort is interpreted anew: it consists above all in the possibility of being able to freely control space, light, air and temperature within the enclosed area.”

“Race and race difference alone can never adequately explain the status of the Negro in America. The Negro problem is something a good deal more significant than a mere ‘race’ problem; it is a problem which probes deeply into the historical development of the economic and political structure of the American society and runs parallel with it.” — Ralph J. Bunche, A Worldview of Race

Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma paved new ground for the study of race relations in the United States. While his work went on to influence policymakers and a supreme court decision and eventually drew the violent ire of Southern segregationists, significant dissenters on the left argued early on that the work was, at best, a liberal and reformist apologia for the ideological apparatus needed to uphold a capitalist society. One such critic was Trinidadian-born sociologist Oliver C. Cox, who had begun his assault on the “Caste School of Sociology” in the mid-1940s. Cox argued that Myrdal had mystified political-class relations as those of two discrete and antagonistic racial castes. Cox offered his rejoinder in a major critique found in his 1948 magnum opus, Caste, Class and Race. In America, he said, there was no such caste system; race relations were relations of unequal political-class power and grounded in the incentive structure of a highly developed capitalist society. Race relations, properly understood, were a reflection and the result of the necessary antagonisms between two political classes. Race prejudice first emerged out of the demands of a burgeoning capitalist society and was then fully expressed once that society had become the global imperialist core nation. The solution for race prejudice and exploitation was, therefore, part of the same political future: socialism, which must, he believed, overturn the methods of production and exploitation, eliminate the need for profit and competition, and dissolve the material requirements which undergird the production of race prejudice and racial hierarchy.

1. Gunnar Myrdal and the Caste School of Race Relations

From the moment the book was first published in January 1944 until the present day, there is perhaps no more influential nor more ambitious single work on race relations in the United States than Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The text, funded by the Carnegie Corporation and published in two enormous volumes, runs over one thousand pages of dense and frequently repetitious social science and economic analysis of race relations in the United States. Nevertheless, despite its mid-war publication and imposing length, conditions which could have lost the work to the annals of history, the study proved to have an immediate impact and enduring value for subsequent decades. The influence of the book culminated in 1954 when it was cited in support of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a fact neither Myrdal nor the Carnegie Corporation itself (nor, indeed, opponents of the study, among them Southern reactionaries) would soon forget.1

As political scientist Michael C. Dawson has written, An American Dilemma is “still the seminal work on American race relations,” providing something of an unavoidable touchstone to scholars and activists, even if it is not (or no longer) followed as political doctrine, nor does it continue to exert the same popular influence it enjoyed some half-century ago.2 Nevertheless, while the influence of Myrdal’s study has waned with time, two factors remain of continued importance. First, the research group employed or consulted to produce An American Dilemma reads like a list of some of the greatest social scientists of the twentieth century, many recruited at the height of their powers. Among these extremely capable scholars were Ralph J. Bunche, W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Abram L. Harris, Charles S. Johnson, Alain Locke, and St. Clair Drake. At least one researcher, Doxey Wilkerson, subsequently denounced Myrdal’s project as little more than liberal propaganda in his introduction to Herbert Aptheker’s critical polemic.3 The group itself is of great historical importance not only because it was perhaps the only time such a talented cohort of social scientists had taken part in a single study of American race relations, but because many were or would become influential in politics, the arts, and in academia. Missing among this group, of course, was Oliver C. Cox, a scholar still little known, just a few years out of graduate school, but who had already launched what would become a lifelong attack on the caste school of race relations, a school which he believed reached its apotheosis in the work of Myrdal.4

Second, and relatedly, Cox had firmly rejected the main caste apparatus espoused by Myrdal and many of his fellow researchers, including the most influential account by the University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park.5 Though he was not alone in this denunciation, he provided, to the present day, the most rigorous critique of race-as-caste sociology.6 He argued that placing caste (or race) at the absolute core of social life did not only fail to explain racial hierarchy, exploitation, domination, and the vast array of disparate life outcomes, but it was a form of mystification of material, economic relations. It pitted racial groupings against each other as natural and permanent antagonists. It suggested the replacement of material causation, grounded in the processes and compulsions of political economy, for eternal or nearly eternal ideal-type categories which deploy psychological, libidinal, or ideological explanations almost arbitrarily as the basic pseudo-causes of asocial group behavior and inequality based on ascriptive differences. Therefore, he thought, any social science that understood caste as that which not only describes real social division but posits it as a social and political essence would likely do far more harm than good and would never reach the real mechanisms that provide the conditions for the production, deployment, and the endurance of race prejudice. Witness, for instance, that Myrdal ultimately calls only for minor reforms, such as improved and equal educational opportunities. According to his theory, such reforms would encourage further reforms or alterations in other parts of the social network, eventually leading to a satisfactory change in relations in general terms. “[T]here is no ‘primary cause’ but everything is cause to everything else,” Myrdal argued. He believed this position was “bound to encourage the reformer” for whom “[t]he principle of cumulation—in so far as it holds true—promises final effects of greater magnitude than the efforts and costs of the reforms themselves.”7

On the other hand, Cox unequivocally advocated for the necessity of a class- (or perhaps better, labor-) based socialist revolution. Race-as-caste, race reductionism (to use Touré Reed’s recent phrase), or other common manifold formulations of homogeneous racial group interest therefore amount to a quite similar thing from a Coxian perspective.8 And again today, when a popular, if not mainstream, position is that race (or indeed race as caste) is the primary social determinant for all of life’s prospects, and solidarity among working people is considered hopelessly quixotic, if not politically and ethically suspect, it is wise to reconsider Cox’s materialist critique of these abstract formulations.

In a somewhat simplified form, a summary of the basic argument of An American Dilemma would emphasize its three primary methodological contributions to the study of race relations. First, Myrdal identified and insisted upon the existence of a transhistorical ideological commitment he called the American Creed, exemplified best through a vague but real national commitment to equality and liberty. Second, the American Creed only appears contrary to much, perhaps most, practical social and political reality, which reveals clear economic and social inequality, deep regional divides, practical unfreedom, and, most importantly, a racial caste system. Nevertheless, Myrdal insisted, the American Creed exerts an egalitarian pressure upon society and leads it toward the overcoming of the contradictions between American ideals expressed in our best documents, institutions, leaders, and writers, and the hard reality of American chattel slavery, racism, Jim Crow segregation, subordination, and the virtually uncountable remaining “unsolved task[s] for American democracy” (AD, 21).

Third, Myrdal explicitly rejected, and indeed was hostile to, Marxian categories and methods of understanding causal structures—that there was a basic political economy that structured and influenced prejudices, ideas, attitudes, statutes, legislation, court decisions, and racial violence.9 Perhaps even stronger was his denunciation that there was some class whose interest was to develop, exploit, and deploy race prejudice for their own advantage, even if they themselves did not participate directly. He rejected, for instance, the position that any given capitalist society must necessarily extract profit from the labor of the bulk of its citizens and, at the same time, stratify its population between exploiter and exploited. And to justify its own hierarchies and discrepancies, the capitalist society builds upon itself an ideological, legal, religious, and scientific superstructure which renders unequal power natural. This Myrdal unceremoniously relegated to an unworkable monocausal economic determinism.10 And yet, as Ralph Ellison pointed out in his unpublished 1944 review of An American Dilemma, Myrdal “felt it necessary to carry on a running battle with Marxism. Especially irritating to him has been the concept of class struggle and the economic motivation of anti-Negro prejudice which to an increasing number of Negro intellectuals correctly analyzes their situation.”11 In the place of the ideological production of political economy, Myrdal offered a concept he termed the “vicious circle,” a positing of an extremely complex network of causality in which any single factor in an economic-social system may effect and mutually reinforce another set of causes. For instance, poor blacks may be depraved and uneducated because they are the victims of racism, but they are also the victims of racism because they are poor and uneducated.12 There is no beginning nor an end to power; rather, it loops back and forth, one effect the cause of another, like a great game of tug-of-war.13

According to Myrdal, the American Creed, no matter how faulty it may have been followed by individuals or institutions, no matter how many detractors or movements to the contrary, no matter how much of American history is in contradiction to the principles for which it presumably stands, nevertheless holds firm as a pressure exerting the ideals of liberty and equality of opportunity upon all American life and all of its people. “[T]he Creed,” Myrdal writes early in the text, “once set forth and disseminated among the American people, became so strongly entrenched in their hearts, and the circumstances have since then been so relatively favorable, that it has succeeded in keeping itself very much alive for more than a century and a half” (AD, 8). So firmly has the American Creed secured itself into the core of every citizen (indeed, “adhered to by every American”), that even if very few of those citizens consciously believe or act upon such a Creed, there are nevertheless individual incarnations we can look to who help us to see that the Creed was alive and well, even in the darkest annals of the past (AD, 13). Myrdal, for instance, insists that certain figures—from Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John Dewey—“speak” or, perhaps more accurately, incant the language and perform the rituals of the American Creed when they synthesize the ideals of American nationalism and the basic requirements of a free market society (AD, 5–6, 671–72).

In the second volume, in a chapter whose purpose is to supposedly make clear the distinction between caste and class and the fundamental importance of the former, what Myrdal offers as the ideals of the American Creed resemble little more than the ideals, aspirations, and values of any capitalist society. Indeed, it becomes increasingly difficult to grasp what is particularly American about the American Creed, beyond simply representing the official ideology of and values that maintain the society Oliver Cox describes as a capitalist “leader” nation.14 On the one hand, the Creed, when it appears in a society firmly characterized by class division (a feature Myrdal never denies), “insist[s] upon condemning class differences” (AD, 671).15 Which is to say that the Creed, much like Myrdal himself, is intent on diminishing (if not eliminating) the role of class struggle in a structurally competitive society, and of any political demands that would require the violent confrontation of the class that owns capital and the class that must sell their labor power in order to survive.16 Instead, Myrdal insists that the Creed, when it comes to the equality of citizens, merely demands that they are offered an equal opportunity to succeed on the marketplace in that society (AD, 673).17 He concludes that “[t]he Creed demands free competition, which in this sphere of social stratification represents the combination of the two basic norms: ‘equality’ and ‘liberty.’ And it is prepared to accept the outcome of competition—if it is really free—though there be some inequality. This demand is the essence of American economic and social liberalism” (AD, 672). Here, finally, the distinction between market ideology and the American Creed, if there was a real distinction, dissolves into a general tautology. The American Creed exemplifies the requirements of a capitalist society on the rise, the values such a society needs for labor to be freely available and exploitable on the market. And no matter how vague or inarticulate the Creed’s manifestation, no matter how few concretely incarnate its principles, it nevertheless must always be very much at odds with the caste-like structure of American race relations. In other words, Myrdal offered a version of American history in which two competing spheres, the ideological and the material—the American Creed and American Reality—are eternal antagonists, despite the long arc of justice bending inevitably toward the realization of the ideals set forth at the founding of the nation.

A second feature of An American Dilemma, then, is Myrdal’s insistence that race relations in the United States are best understood as a rigid caste structure. Caste for Myrdal describes two large and antagonistic racial blocs—white and black—which, unless certain extraordinary conditions are met, cannot be broken or breached. In the first volume, Myrdal explains that the term caste “denotes the social status differences between Negroes and whites in America … although the dividing line between Negroes and whites is held fixed and rigid so that no Negro legitimately can pass from over from his caste to the higher white caste, the relations between members of the two castes are different in different regions and social classes and changing in time” (AD, 54 note a). Myrdal continues to say that he has chosen “caste” for his scientific investigation because the term “race” carries unwanted biological associations, and for that reason one may well infer that race and caste are, for Myrdal, interchangeable. This tautology between race and caste will have significant consequences for Myrdal’s approach.

One major consequence of the caste school of race relations is that caste is understood to be the most essential organizing principle of American society; everything develops from and within the fact of the caste line. In this sense, as Preston H. Smith II argues, Myrdal and his team of researchers were part of a larger trend in American race relations politics, a trend which was moving away from material redistribution and toward the management of proto-naturalized difference. “A key element in establishing the primacy of race was the acceptance of racial democracy within liberal philanthropic, academic, and political circles marked by the 1944 publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma,” Smith observes. “The emergence of this view, coupled with a growing anticommunism, discredited any serious attempt by the U.S. government to ensure equal distribution of income, housing, education, and health care to all its citizens.”18

In Myrdal’s schema, black and white citizens are first separated into two distinct and semi-impermeable castes. There then develops, within each caste, a more or less sophisticated class hierarchy. “There is a class stratification within each of the two groups,” Myrdal writes, but class stratification does not and cannot disrupt the rigidity of the caste line (AD, 667).19 Those in the higher caste, white citizens as a homogenous bloc, see that it is to their own advantage to maintain their social and legal (though not necessarily economic) superiority to those in the lower caste. Subsequently, the caste structure is maintained not by specific interest groups or those with common projects, but by those who find themselves in an imposed racial association. “The caste system is upheld by its own inertia,” Myrdal writes, “and by the superior caste’s interest in upholding it,” especially by “whites’ attitudes and behavior” (AD, 669). To be sure, Myrdal admits that there are certain personal strategies that may be available to a specific individual under certain regional or phenotypical circumstances such that they are afforded the opportunity to remove themselves from the lower caste and become a member, however tenuous, of the higher. And that possibility demonstrates that the caste structure is punctuated with flaws. This is the phenomenon Myrdal describes as “passing” and, he thinks, far from showing the vulnerability of the caste system, it is one of the key social phenomena which reveals the fundamental reality and rigidity of the American caste structure (AD, 683–88).

Finally, these issues for Myrdal culminated in a great, enduring, and tragic American dilemma. But it was, he believed, essentially a moral, and not political or economic, dilemma. It was a problem of minds, hearts, and attitudes. If, as Myrdal argued, the “Negro problem is primarily a white man’s problem,” and if “the characteristics of the American society at large [are such that] the Negro becomes a problem,” then the white man’s problem is self-referential; the problem of the dominant caste is their illicit domination over the lower caste and their personal moral failure not to broach the caste line. It is a conflict of personal values, a warping of minds that should and, apparently, very well could have, followed the tenants of the American Creed (AD, lxxiv–lxxxiii). As Michael R. West has put it, “The result [of An American Dilemma] was a moral clarion call either ignored or honored only on ceremonial occasions by liberals who might have been expected to know better, and an obscuring of fundamental matters of power, domination, and inequity behind a mask of consensus.”20 Myrdal’s plea was like that of the moralizing Christian, who alerts us to the sinfulness of the fallen and who wages war not in the material reality and its reconstruction, but directly against the rotten core of sinful hearts: “the conflict in the troubled white man’s soul goes on” (AD, 44). One critic, perhaps the most talented and penetrating yet produced, who was never fooled by the mask of consensus, by the all too easy if seductive plea to change hearts and minds, and who put power and its masters at the fore of his analysis, was Oliver C. Cox.

2. Cox and the Critique of the Caste School

It is not uncommon today to see Oliver C. Cox’s name invoked, especially when a writer wishes to make a point about the connection between the historical development between race and capitalism. In this sense, perhaps the most important work that reengaged Cox’s thought after years of neglect was Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. What is less common, however, is an in-depth analysis of Cox’s works, how his early study of the historical specificity of race prejudice and the needs of a capitalist society led to a career trying to understand the origins, foundations, and structure of that globalized system. After his decades-long study of capitalism (found in three major works: The Foundations of Capitalism [1959], Capitalism and American Leadership [1962], and Capitalism as a System [1964]), Cox returned to the topic of race and exploitation in his final project, the posthumously published work entitled Race Relations: Elements and Social Dynamics (1976).

It was in his first major work where Cox offered his most devastating critique of the caste school of race relations. Cox summarized the caste school broadly. Among the figures of his critique were W. Lloyd Warner, W. Allison Davis, John Dollard, Burford H. Junker, Walter A. Adams, Kingsley Davis, Robert L. Sutherland, Edward A. Ross, Alain Locke, Bernhard J. Stern, M.F. Ashley Montagu, St. Clair Drake, and Horace R. Cayton. He dedicated a chapter specifically to critique the work of Robert Park and Ruth Benedict, among the most influential sociologists of the era. But Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, however, received Cox’s scrupulous and extensive attention (an entire long chapter) and provided something of a capstone and farewell to the caste concept. He had said all he could say, and the caste school, it seemed, would live on.

Perhaps the most important general criticism Cox makes of the caste school, Myrdal included, is that they fail to offer a sufficiently coherent definition of caste itself. Instead of providing a norm with which to compare different caste structures, Cox demonstrates that they argue, by and large, by simply assuring their readers (a) that not only are there multiple caste systems around the world, but that (b) race relations in the United States are sufficiently similar to one of those systems that it can be understood in similar ways.21 Indeed, in a separate essay on Montagu published in 1947 (itself a response to Montagu’s article which criticized him), Cox reiterates what he identified as the basic flaw of the caste school, namely that it fails to provide a coherent standard against which American race relations can be judged.22 Without such a clear standard, Cox reasons, there is no way to know if American race relations are caste relations, let alone the expressions of a caste system. The caste school, Cox argues, “discuss[es] race relations in the United States, totally oblivious of a theory of caste or whether caste ever existed in India. Apparently their thin description of Indian caste is merely intended to provide subject atmosphere” (CCR, 493).23

Two further criticisms directly follow. First, the School seemed to believe that caste relations preceded race relations such that the transition from one to the other was a matter of rhetoric; caste relations and race relations were essentially interchangeable. This facet of the caste school seems to be a constant, as Cox understood it, at least from Park through Myrdal, and represented for him “an almost unlimited expansion of the concept of caste” (CCR, 466).24 Second, for Cox, the caste school tended to view race relations as a static, unmoving line that simply separated two distinct racial groups, one absolutely subordinated to the other. And it was this diremption that characterized the essential social conflict in the United States. Indeed, if the caste school thought of race relations as a stable hierarchy of social prestige, frozen in time and unlikely to change (with the minor exception of Myrdal’s gesture to certain “holes” in or different intensities enforcing the caste system in the North), then it followed that American race relations were similarly understood to be relations between two static, internally homogeneous, conflicting blocs.25 But if, as Cox says, “the race-caste assumption is sterile because it has no way of confronting the real dynamics of race relations,” then the caste school was flawed at its very base because what it missed were the real material relations produced and structured by a capitalist society, relations which are historically specific manifestations of that society’s political economy—class antagonism (CCR, 495).26 Cox therefore identifies what he believed to be the critical mistake of the caste school: they thought that the American struggle for equality was primarily if not exclusively a race conflict in which race prejudice was reducible to white chauvinism, psycho-sexual deviance, and the protection of racial privilege. “The school remains oblivious of the physiology of the society. It presumes that the white man is protecting his color and that the Negro is equally interested in protecting his, so that with the ballot in the hands of Negroes and with the opportunity for cultural participation open to them as normal citizens, the black code which keeps the races segregated will still be the law of the South” (CCR, 495).27

So far Cox’s criticisms have been primarily theoretical, localized to the incoherence of the position of the caste school itself. Caste and race relations, he thought, did not have (and could not possibly be found to have) sufficient similarities, and in two senses. Despite the literature on caste as a race relation, Cox argued that no contemporary American scholar was able to provide specific and exact terms for caste, either in India or anywhere else in the world (CCR, 491). Failing this crucial criterion, Cox argued, there was no basis for the school to say definitively that race relations within the United States constituted a caste relation. Rather, it must be done by abstraction and analogy, and this for Cox meant argument by mystification. By refusing to use a sharp analytic definition, Cox thought, the school found caste relations everywhere, broadened the definition to fit any need, and could describe as caste any relation between one generally subordinate and one superordinate group. These groups were then understood in the terms of homogenous racial blocs (within which developed class distinction), and the relation between them was the primary locus of American conflict: the dominant white group, as the more powerful, would protect itself and its purity as a racial grouping through violence, enforcement of endogamy laws, interpersonal prejudices, and, in particularly extreme circumstances, racialized terror such as lynching.

But for Cox, the caste school of race relations did not merely commit theoretical errors, errors which could be corrected through the presentation of a more coherent (historically and sociologically grounded) concept of caste. Indeed, Myrdal himself argues that much of the caste understanding of race relations was, at best, too simple to explain the differences within each caste group.28 Nevertheless Myrdal did not criticize the caste school in order to transcend it; rather, he aimed to give it its most complete and accurate portrayal, leaving none of American social complexity outside of his analytic dominion. It is perhaps for this reason that, though Cox does not explain why, he certainly believed that Myrdal’s Carnegie-funded study “seem[ed] important enough to justify separate discussion” (CCR, 508). But from his many pages of criticism, Cox presumably agreed that Myrdal had theoretically completed the caste school, and had, most dangerously, offered policymakers, politicians, philanthropists, capitalists, and reformers of all stripes a political program that would, in Cox’s view, let the worst offenders, the material foundations of racism, off the hook. It was therefore necessary not only to show the internal incoherence of the caste school, especially at its most sophisticated; it was equally if not more important to show that there were significant reactionary political consequences, consequences—intended or not—that could never lead to the elimination of race prejudice by adopting the perspective of the caste school.

3. Myrdal and the Cul-de-Sac of Racial Mysticism

Cox begins his specific criticism of Myrdal by attacking the formulation of the American Creed, which he dismisses as unserious and incoherent in only a few pages. He says that the American Creed hypothesis was conceived as supposed “national ideals[,] as if they were phenomena sui generis, having an existence apart from and indeed determinative of the economic life of the people” (CCR, 510). Further, Myrdal insists but does not demonstrate that “the ‘American Creed’ is the vital force in American life.” And yet, it is not just that Myrdal separates ideology from material relations as one primary method of their emergence; he does so in a peculiar and politically suspect way: Myrdal conspicuously separates the American Creed from the ideological requirements developed gradually by an incipient capitalist nation, as if the Creed expressed the divine wishes of a transcendent God and not the material interest of a ruling class. “He seems never to recognize the determining role of class interest,” Cox says, “but rather sets his study against a backdrop of an apparently common American ideology which he says ‘is older than America itself’” (CCR, 511). Already therefore Myrdal has posited an abstraction—transhistorical, vague, and ambiguous—as one of his fundamental premises, which is itself justified using further abstractions, ideal types, and generalizations such as, Cox lists, “‘the citizen,’ ‘American popular thought,’ ‘the American soul,’ ‘the common good American’” (CCR, 514). These, for Cox, are legal categories, popular fictions, and folk abstractions. They are not the historically specific categories that arise from the specific contexts, incentives, or pressures produced by a capitalist society, nor are they the basic material relations most important to that society, namely that between the labor force and the ruling political class. These real and antagonistic forces determine, for Cox, which ideals mark an age, which ideas are forgotten, which transcended, and which are made subservient to the hegemonic (legally and militarily supported) material interests (CCR, 513).29 Myrdal, therefore, was working in the service of the ruling class by assuming that a single, common, and ideal American Creed structured and influenced American society and politics outside of real social and political relations. In other words, the American Creed was the expression of the values of the ruling class, and that ruling class had begun long before its ideals were enshrined in the most precious American documents. Even the American Constitution was a document merely capable of compromising or ignoring the “vitally conflicting interests of the infant capitalist system … it postponed for a later date the real solution of latent antagonisms—postponed it until such time as one side or the other developed sufficient power to force a solution in its favor” (CCR, 514).

From this point in the text, Cox dispenses with the American Creed and moves to his main criticism: Myrdal’s own caste hypothesis. In some ways, this transition merely leads Cox to repeat his previously rehearsed criticisms of the rest of the caste school: the failure to set up a sufficient norm, the arbitrary tautology between race and caste, and the spurious analogy between American race relations and an imaginary ideal-type caste system to which the American situation allegedly cohered. But it also marks a significant shift in the text because if Myrdal represented the most powerful account of the caste school, it is at this point that Cox argues most powerfully, and most rhetorically, against it. It is important to note that after this point, Cox will seldom return to the topic of caste and its political trappings, even in his late work, Race Relations. In any case, it is here where Cox accuses Myrdal’s entire enterprise of engaging in ideological mysticism. In essence, Cox argued that the caste school simply replaced the class struggle with caste as a kind of left-liberal false consciousness of social conflict and supplied an alibi for little more than minor tweaks in the global system of exploitation that had not only reached a highly developed form in the middle of the twentieth century but, so long as it required a large, intra-hostile (but otherwise docile) international labor force, would continue to require some rationale for the domination necessary for its survival.30 Myrdal and his allies simply did not provide a solution to the problems they had so clearly identified.31

Cox observes that the caste school “lumps all white people and all Negroes into two antagonistic groups struggling in the interest of a mysterious god called caste. This is very much to the liking of the exploiters of labor, since it tends to confuse them in an emotional matrix with all the people” (CCR, 520). As we have seen, this accusation combines two familiar features of the caste school. First, that the basic political struggle in America is between discrete racial groups. Second, that those in the superior caste will struggle primarily on the basis of maintaining their superior caste (that is, their superior racial) position. Myrdal attributed social hostility as primarily the work—literally the physical exertion—of the worst off in the superior caste. The worst offenders of race prejudice were poor and lower-class whites, he argued. Without adequate training in proper race relations etiquette, without the advantages of bourgeois education, and set competitively close to the bulk of black Americans, poor whites became Myrdal’s primary target as the ongoing source of racial hostility in America. However, the entire structure of this argument betrays a class project. For Cox, it is the prerogative, indeed the structural incentive, of the upper class to attribute to the lower class an inclination for racial hostility, as if it were a proto-natural fact of poor and working-class whites to segregate and engage in race prejudice and racial violence. That is, as if it were an indication of the fallenness of their souls. As Cox says, this homogenization of racial group interests and proto-natural group behavior absent the material ensemble of economic incentives exploited by the ruling class is “a complete perversion of reality” (CCR, 522n47).

And yet, Cox certainly does not deny that there is intra-class antagonism and that poor and working-class whites were particularly effective soldiers of racial violence. Cox was deeply cognizant of the almost programmatic nature of racial terror in the South, the cruelty of the Jim Crow system, the discrimination faced by black Americans (and, indeed, black immigrants like himself) everywhere. Not lost on Cox either was the violence and discrimination faced by immigrant workers from China and Japan.32 The point was not to deny or diminish the moral and political catastrophe of racist violence and discrimination. But Cox wanted to understand why asocial group behavior took a particular socio-historical form, whose interest it was for it to continue, and to provide a concrete, positive program for its elimination and transcendence. To this end, Cox argued that intra-class conflict was sustained by the exploiting class itself. The focus of race relations, then, should begin not by the abstract notion of racial castes or with the moral or psychological depravity of poor (or, for that matter, working-class) whites, but by identifying the groups whose interests—and the source of those interest—it is for the exploited class in general to engage in conflict among themselves. “Opposition to social equality has no meaning,” Cox writes, “unless we can see its function in the service of the exploitative purpose of [the ruling] class” (CCR, 524).

From where, for instance, do the legal and social boundaries which segregate and antagonize white and black workers arise? Is it due to (working class and poor) white malice alone that neighborhoods, schools, trains, lunch counters, and so on were (and often continue to be de facto) separated according to racial groups? Why did so many accept as natural laws that forbid “interracial” marriage if the castes are inextricably mutually hostile? Cox answers these questions unequivocally: “Every segregation barrier is a barrier put up between white and black people by their exploiters. … Moreover, it is not the poor whites but the ruling class which uses its intelligence and its money to guard against any movement among Negroes to throw off their yoke of exploitation” (CCR, 525).

The signs of a caste system, from the peculiarities of statutes and demands of racial segregation to interpersonal discrimination and white terror were, for Cox, the result and not the cause of an ongoing and far more fundamental class project in a highly developed capitalist nation. That is, the concerted social products of (even if not wholly determined by) the exploiting class—race prejudice, discrimination, and violence—had their roots not in the large-scale betrayal of the American Creed or the deficiencies of workaday white morality, but in the incentive structure of the leading capitalist society and the interests of its ruling class. Myrdal mistook the effects of capitalist society—always in a state of flux—as the causes derived from a caste system. By substituting an analysis of the real, material relations and identifying the incentives of the ruling class for abstract notions of morality, psychology, and the loss of the white soul, An American Dilemma got the story exactly backward.

This is no more evident than in Myrdal’s argument that a “vicious circle” best describes the multiple, reinforcing causal network between and among economic, social, legal, ideological, interpersonal, psychosexual, and moral factors. Beliefs, for instance, become just as important as material causes in the network as basic facets of political economy are. Hence Myrdal’s emphasis on moral and educational improvement. Here Cox states that “[t]his assumption of Myrdal’s, that racial beliefs are primary social forces, leads him to conclude almost pathetically that the ‘white man’s’ beliefs are only a ‘mistake,’ which he would gladly correct if only he had truthful information” (CCR, 531). From this perspective, the main sources of power are obscured, mystified, and lost in the caste analysis. Power is mystified, explained away, and dissolved into a vast array of circular networks. Causality is flattened to the point of dissolution, and the primary scholarly goal is not to lay bare the ruling political class and their interest in maintaining and exploiting race prejudice but to improve the ideas in the heads of those at the bottom of the supposedly superior caste. It is, in other words, the political project of race relations management to produce a more peaceful, docile, and amiable labor relation between worker and capitalist. And to this end it meant especially the inflaming of tensions among workers themselves, which became, almost inevitably, the site of analysis for the caste school; this was where the moral drama played out. The ruling class is therefore not only let off the hook; they are completely disappeared. Or, rather, it is their eyes that gaze upon the world but are not themselves scrutinized. Further, the material interest of the ruling class is replaced by the “sexual drives,” “fears,” “inhibitions,” “labile imbalances” of white workers—further mystical alibis of race relations, which do not identify a material cause, i.e., a structure of material incentives which offer a ground for the existence of these phenomena.

The ruling class—which, for Cox, includes both the bourgeoisie and state actors—must be brought into the analysis so as not to naturalize social relations or disappear the sources of power; that is, so as not to assume that the relations between “racial” groups were either primary or natural, but were the very deliberate outcome of a class whose essence was to extract profit and whose best means to achieve it was to maintain a social atmosphere of constant, if not always explicit, mutual hostility among the labor supply itself.33 Antagonisms, racial prejudices, psycho-sexual paranoia, and so on were “mass psychological instruments facilitating a definite purpose,” namely to secure and perpetuate the exploitation of the working class (CCR, 531). As Cox summarizes, “race prejudice is an attitude deliberately built up among the masses by an exploiting class, using acceptable rationalizations derogatory to the Negro race, so that the explanation of the latter’s labor supply might be justified” (CCR, 532).

With these words, Cox concludes his critique of Myrdal, who has now been reduced to little more than “almost reactionary” or “a powerful piece of propaganda in favor of the status quo” who “contribute[d] virtually nothing to a clarification of the many existing spurious social theories of race relations”—a far cry from the sympathetic liberal social democrat he is so commonly considered to be (CCR, 534n80, 538). From Cox’s perspective, Myrdal falls tragically short at the most crucial moments. Myrdal holds fast to abstractions and to a reformist program where he needed to identify material causes and the overarching requirement of a ruling political class to exploit the labor of the great majority of its population. In a sad but predictable irony, he gave the exploiting class pride of place as the best ally of the dominated caste. Thus, within the laboring population itself, Myrdal identified poor and working whites, uneducated and unsophisticated and yet safely privileged within the higher caste, as that essential place where the smoldering embers of racial antagonism continue to burn hottest. He could not see, or refused to entertain, the possibility that “the [white] aristocracy is less antagonistic to the Negroes but that this class uses more respectable weapons against them, which are also infinitely more powerful and effective. As a matter of fact, the poor whites themselves may be thought of as the primary instrument of the ruling class in subjugating the Negroes” (CCR, 536).34

As we have seen, Myrdal thus displaces the question of power—who rules, who owns, who profits, who decides—for the problem of morals—how the powerful can convert to the Creed the hearts and minds of the weak. And it is this hopeless, perpetual crusade to moralize our way out of the American dilemma that Cox found to be the worst consequence of Myrdal’s work. For it did not, and could never, provide a solution to the problems it purported to identify. Rather, for Cox, it committed the worst crime imaginable for a work of social science: it was an excuse, a justification, and a program to keep all exploited peoples in their place.35

First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.

The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.

The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7

After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.

A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.

By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.

Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.

Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.

But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.

A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.

It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.

That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures’ validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.

That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.

An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.

Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.

The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19

It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20

What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.

Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.

But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.

Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.

The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.

“[H]ow our epoch was extricated from the fin de siècle.”1 A circle of writers and artists with Ezra Pound at its center: James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot. “They were born within a six-year span,” Kenner observes (PE, 551). How poems are made and how they work. How scholarship leads to new ways of seeing: Ernest Fenollosa’s ideogram, C.H. Douglas’s A+B theorem, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations: “For Joyce’s was the archaeologist’s Homer” (PE, 44). The impact of World War I. The potential of vorticism, the tragedy of vorticism. Defending Pound.

What is the book not about?

Modernism. The word only appears twice in the book, both times in quotations. Kenner prefers “modernisms”: “There have been so many modernisms,” he writes (PE, 256). How Pound defined an era. (Joyce and Eliot were more influential, Kenner admits.) A more accurate title for the book might have been, The Pound Circle. But just “try changing ‘petals’ to ‘blossoms’” (PE, 187).

Why is The Pound Era important?

The account of Pound’s poetry. The close readings. The commitment to definition, distinction, explanation. Kenner’s virtuosity, even genius.

Examples?

There are so many. The reading of Pound’s “The Beautiful Toilet” (1915) and Cathay (1915) as a whole:

Its real achievement lay not on the frontier of comparative poetics, but securely within the effort, then going forward in London, to rethink the nature of an English poem. It consisted in maximizing three criteria at once, criteria hitherto developed separately: the vers-libre principle, that the single line is the unit of composition; the Imagist principle, that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind’s eye by naming them; and the lyrical principle, that words or names, being ordered in time, are bound together and recalled into each other’s presence by recurrent sounds. (PE, 199)

The account of how symbolism influenced Pound and Eliot in different ways:

Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand, but behind Eliot’s resonances there is frequently nothing to restore. […] Yet the Symbolist revolution lay behind them both. It allowed Pound to know that there would still be poetry for the reader who could not fill the ellipses back in, who literally, therefore, did not know what many words meant. Or even for the reader who filled them in wrong. […] By contrast, the characteristic mistake of Eliot’s annotators is to annotate at all. (PE, 133)

The account of Pound’s process in The Cantos and the importance of perspective and self-trust:

A poem about history, taking note of recurrences, could go on endlessly, like wallpaper, much as a minor literary tradition can go on permuting elements for decades, moon, June, soon, spring, sing. But as the Provençal tradition contained not only birds and loves but Arnaut, so a poem including history will contain not only elements and recurrences but a perceiving and uniting mind that can hope one day for a transfiguring vision of order it only glimpses now, and that in carrying simple themes to a massive simultaneous orchestration will achieve the poem’s end in discovering its own richest powers. Joyce saw Ulysses as a whole and worked at opening and closing episodes simultaneously; Pound hoped to become, while writing the poem in public, the poet capable of ending the Cantos. (PE, 376)

The reading of Williams’s “Poem” [“As the cat”] (1930), which culminates with an epic simile:

The surfer planes obliquely down a hill that renews itself at just the rate of his descent. But for encountering the beach he could glide eternally, leftward and inward and always as if downward, but never further down: always hung midway on the face of the wave. He shifts, precarious, through innumerable moments of equilibrium. And the wave bears him and there is no moving wave: the molecules of water move not forward at all but only up and down, their forward movement a pattern not a displacement, as his downward movement is no displacement but a pattern: on and on, self-renewing. So through mere words, renewed by every reader, the cat walks safely forever. Williams had achieved “Poem” by 1930. Its wave decades later is undisplaced, unspent, the poem thrown decisively into the language. (PE, 399–400)

And the many, many asides. To quote just one: “The O.E.D. […] is perhaps the 19th-century epic, as the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is that of the 18th” (PE, 366).

Should The Pound Era be a model for critics today?

No. Holding up The Pound Era as a model for critics is like holding up Ulysses as a model for novelists. The book is too virtuosic, too idiosyncratic—too good. “I want it as intricate as FLW’s Hollyhock House AND as light & open as one of Bucky’s domes,” Kenner writes Guy Davenport in 1963—and it is.2

Is that the only reason?

No. The book presumes deep knowledge of an untenably narrow canon. How many readers today will understand the claim that Eliot’s meditative poems make use of the “landscape and the past and the stance of Thomas Gray (‘… But of the old stones that cannot be deciphered’ …)” (PE, 553)? The book was written for readers of the first Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962), not the tenth.

OK, is that all?

No. The book is wildly irresponsible. Here is Kenner’s most extensive comment on Pound’s fascism and antisemitism:

Of Germany and Italy in those years we have two main sorts of general knowledge. We know about their repression of opposition, including the German race-mystique and the miseries inflicted on Jews; and we know about their foreign policies, Hitler’s obsession with expansion eastward, Mussolini’s dreams of African empire. In his preoccupation with their economic recovery Pound was barely noticing these matters, so he and his critics talked past each other for decades. How the Italian economy really worked, or might have worked but for military aggrandizement, seems an unexplored subject, and to what extent he took slogans for implementations, concepts for intentions, no one can yet say. (PE, 410)

Where to begin? The Jews as part of the German opposition? The Holocaust as a series of “miseries”? (Kenner also uses the word to describe Eliot’s first marriage and H.D.’s sexuality—“bisexual miseries” [PE, 176].) The hedges: “barely noticing,” “seems,” “no one can yet say”? Of course one can say! Later in the book, Kenner laments:

[I]t is a pity Pound’s distinction between the financiers and the rest of Jewry was not allowed to be emphasized while he was still in the habit of making it. Correctly or not, it attempted a diagnosis, and one tending rather to decrease than to encourage anti-Semitism. (PE, 465)

“[W]as not allowed to be emphasized”? “Correctly or not”? Discussing Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts, Kenner pivots: “The details are violent, the rhetoric disordered, the phraseology intemperate. The war was outrageous …” (PE, 465).

And then there’s the misogyny. Women hardly appear in The Pound Era, and when they do, Kenner is mercilessly critical. Only Sappho and Marianne Moore evade censure. Amy Lowell is the book’s villain. (“Not a mistaken theory, not a theory ridden too hard, not even ‘inaccuracy,’ makes Fir-Flower Tablets unreadable today, but Amy Lowell’s impregnable vulgarity” [PE, 298].) Discussing Richard Aldington’s contributions to The Egoist, Kenner suggests that they were “read chiefly by cranks, feminist and other” (PE, 279).

Is anyone even proposing The Pound Era as a model? These questions are certainly not “frequently asked.” Why approach the book in this way?

This issue of nonsite.org raises these questions. The book lends itself to a fantasy about literary studies—about a time when great critics wrote great books about great writers. These are also the questions I asked myself while rereading the book for this issue.

Isn’t Kenner’s evasiveness about Pound’s politics an attempt to protect—and respect—the autonomy of Pound’s poetry?

No. Kenner celebrates the connection between Pound’s politics and poetry. Praising Douglas’s Economic Democracy (1920), he concludes: “his words allow us to say that The Seafarer enhances the wealth of the community while two hours of wide-screen cinematic trash does not” (PE, 304). Praising The Cantos, he writes:

Again and again in the Cantos single details merely prove that something lies inside the domain of the possible. It is not necessary to prove that the possibility was ever widely actualized; only that it exists. What was done at Wörgl—once, by one mayor, in one village—proves that stamp scrip will work. What was done in San Zeno, once, on one column, proves the possibility of a craftsman’s pride in an unobtrusive structural member. And any thing that is possible can again be. The Cantos scan the past for possibilities, but their dynamic is turned toward the future. And they enumerate so many places, so many stones, so many buildings, because nothing is so irrefutable as a stone. (PE, 325)

Does Kenner ever criticize Pound?

When he does, criticism is an occasion for praise. He establishes the formula in the book’s first chapter, discussing Pound’s misreading of “newspaper facts”:

For 30 years it had been Pound’s Sisyphean lot to read and misread newspaper facts in the light of the archetypes with which his mind vibrated, never willing to concede a shift of dimension between crystalline myth and the polymorphous immediate. In St. Elizabeths he continued this habit. (PE, 15)

Later in the book, Kenner defends Pound’s “misjudgments,” identifying him with Odysseus:

Yet human misjudgment and the closed curve of human vitality which achieved power at last over the Cantos should not in their triumph obliterate the pertinence of his most radical decision: to experience the poem as he wrote it, himself committed to all of which he wrote, himself Odysseus actually en route. (PE, 379)

By the end of the paragraph, Kenner’s language is messianic: “The mind of Europe, again, had for some decades been adumbrating such a role for someone” (PE, 379).

How can the book be both great and irresponsible?

Not only is The Pound Era great and irresponsible—it’s great because it’s irresponsible. The book sees the world through Pound’s eyes, exemplifying his values. Kenner’s description of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska sculpting the “Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound” (1914) is also a description of Pound’s self-image and self-regard:

Gaudier’s eye explored the high temples, the long straight nose; the intent still eyes, whose color (green) did not concern him; the broad slash of a mouth, a little turning downward; the forelock and jutting beard; the fine cheekbones. (PE, 255)

Disinterested criticism would undermine that identification, and thus the book’s insights. The Pound Era is the autobiography Pound was never willing or able to write. It is a masterpiece of ventriloquism.

Should Kenner’s identification with Pound be a model for critics?

No. At its best, identification is a radical form of intentionalism. (Walter Benn Michaels discusses Kenner’s intentionalism in his contribution to the issue.) But identification as method has so many risks—most significantly, mistaking the poet for the poem as the object of analysis.

How does Kenner avoid this pitfall?

Pound himself. Reading Pound, the line between poet and poem is never clear. “The poem is not its language,” Kenner argues; “Hence Pound’s reiterated advice to translators […]: ‘Don’t translate what I wrote, translate what I MEANT to write’” (PE, 150). Kenner’s argument is correct: what Pound meant matters more than what he wrote. But how do we know what he meant? The words on the page are not sufficient. Pound’s historical context obscures as much as it reveals. Readers must see through his eyes—become Pound. I tried to make a similar argument in an essay about The Cantos that I co-wrote with Michael Kindellan: “Ultimately, the kind of reader the poem requires is not a philologist, but a psychic.”3 Kenner is that psychic. One could understand his commitment to visiting poets—the “visit as method” to adopt Oren Izenberg’s phrase—as a commitment to psychometry.

What should readers do with The Pound Era today?

Read it. It’s the best book on Pound—and perhaps the best book on a twentieth-century writer. It successfully made Pound matter to a wide audience. Many critics can competently criticize Pound’s “misreadings” and “misjudgments,” detail his contexts and influence, and interpret the words on the page. But only one is able to read Pound’s mind and illuminate it for the world.

“… the world is all outside: it has no inside.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

1. Soft Behaviorism

The atmosphere of Oxbridge in the 1940s and 50s was one in which the rejection of various forms of idealism was in tension with new efforts to resuscitate inner experience. That inner experience required resuscitation was due in part to the far reaching influence of Gilbert Ryle’s attack on the “absurd” picture in which every observed action is imagined as accompanied by a shadow process hidden away in a separate place called the Mind, which he called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 And Ryle was himself indebted to what was by far the most pervasive style of thinking in Oxford at the time, the linguistic analysis (later “ordinary language” philosophy) that followed from lectures Ludwig Wittgenstein had been giving in Cambridge in the 1930s, up through his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953). The latter work succinctly encapsulated a position that seemed to echo Ryle’s: “an ‘inner’ process stands in need of outward criteria.”2

Already in her first book Iris Murdoch voiced skepticism about this picture. “The world [described in Ryle’s] The Concept of Mind,” she wrote, “is one in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party.”3 The oft-quoted bon mot neatly captures what she found unpersuasive in the critique of the dogma of the ghost in the machine: the first set of activities seem amenable to what can be observed in behavior (decisions are “simple” insofar as they issue in discrete actions) alongside a kind of caricature of inwardness (ah, let us recall the innocent days of childhood); while the second seems to evade outward verification. To commit a sin, fall in a love, say a prayer, or come to the realization that one would like to become a member of the Communist party are not occurrences that seem straightforwardly readable off external behavior. They seem to be things which occur privately.

Of course, Murdoch’s list is reductive, and there is more going on in Ryle than her tidily dismissive taxonomy. Ryle is not a “behaviorist” in the way, for example, Vienna Circle positivism thought all statements not verifiable by observation were meaningless.4 Ryle’s critique of the ghost is rather a “soft” behaviorism in which, as Julia Tanney puts it, “statements containing mental terms can be translated, without loss of meaning, into subjunctive conditionals about what the individual will do in various circumstances.”5 The grammatical point would seem to leave room for inner episodes just insofar as talk of such states have public rules (outer criteria) for their application. To get soft behaviorism into view, Tanney runs a thought experiment about an extra-terrestrial anthropologist investigating two soccer kicks. In the first a player kicks a ball into a goal, and nothing of any special significance follows. However, a second kick—in which “[t]he trajectory of the ball, the style of the kick, [and] the angle it makes” are identical to the first—results in wild cheering, a flurry of complex financial transactions, and celebrations in the street (we might imagine the first kick to be a player practicing alone, while the second is the winning goal in a world cup match). The anthropologist is perplexed about why such vastly different consequences follow from two identical physical operations, and so accordingly collects the two sets of balls, goals, nets, accurate replicas of the anatomical structure of the players’ legs and feet and begins earnestly studying each in search of the difference that could explain the divergent results. Tanney says the anthropologist is “looking in the wrong place for an explanation,” and by analogy the same may be said for the category mistake of the ghost in the machine: by looking “inside” for the referent of the meaning (or intention) of some observable action, one forgets the complex outer structure of concepts.6

While much has since been written about the relation of mental happenings to outward criteria, that work tends to follow the problem into various kinds of skepticism.7 Here I want to look at Murdoch’s differently attuned understanding of how inner experience is compatible with Ryle on the ghost and Wittgenstein on public criteria, as well as her occasional interlocutor Elizabeth Anscombe’s account of the relation of intention and action and, in a last section, Hugh Kenner’s elaboration of what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative.” In such examples the outer (observable) structure of concepts doesn’t so much block or occlude access to the inner as invite us to consider what it would meant to think that experience, intention, emotion—to use the words of Murdoch, Anscombe, and Eliot respectively—have an outside structure. The complex outer structure of concepts imagined in the Rylean-Wittgensteinian pictures doesn’t commit one to thinking that the inner doesn’t exist (or to mere behaviorism) but rather that experience, intention and emotion might be grasped without privileged access to something hidden or private.

2. Rings and Ranges

In an early piece, “Thinking and Language” (1951), Murdoch may be heard as at once inheriting, deepening, and challenging the myth of the “inner” as linguistic philosophy had imagined (that is, denigrated) it. “I have used the word ‘experience’ … which we have been advised against doing,” she notes, so advised presumably because of the murkiness of the datum to which talk of the mental might apply, whereas “mental terms do have clear and determinate conventions of use in connections with modes of overt behavior.”8 Murdoch’s explicit concern here with “use” invites an ordinary language sort of analysis: just what are we doing when we use the word experience on some particular occasion? One kind of use might be of the sort found when applying for job and noting that one has “five years’ experience” (say, hands-on experience operating a forklift). Another might be experience in the sense of qualia: of noting what it is like to taste coffee or hear a whistle or of skiing, perhaps with the implication that no verbal description quite captures the composite feeling of gravity pulling against your skis, the snow hitting your cheeks, the view of the mountains receding into the distance, etc., i.e., you “just have to experience it.”

Murdoch seems to blur these two kinds of use in a paper a few years later, in which she modifies the question of the inner, asking, “In a philosophical analysis of morality, what place should be given to the ‘inner life’?”9 In this case, the constraint of limiting talk of inner experience to what can be captured in outward criteria begins to seem unsatisfying. According to the dominant view:

the material which the philosopher is to work on is simply (under the heading of behaviour) acts and choices, and (under the heading of language) choice-guiding words together with the arguments which display the descriptive meaning of these words. Here two philosophical conceptions reach out towards each other and, in a hazy region, seem to meet. On the one hand there is no inner life, and moral concepts too must have meaning through definite external criteria. On the other hand, morality is a choice, and moral language guides choice through factual specification. The result is a picture which seems to have the authority of the modern view of the mind …. (VCM)10

If Murdoch wants more than a “hazy region” where acts meet up with choice-guiding words—exasperation with the limits of “the “modern view of the mind” (i.e., linguistic philosophy) —this is going to require a different way of understanding the nature of concepts. “A moral concept seems less like a movable and extensible ring laid down to cover a certain area of fact and more like a total difference,” Murdoch writes, and so “[w]e differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds [such that] differences of moral vocabulary betoken[] different ranges and ramifications” (VCM, 82). By “range” I take it she means something like an entangled, reticulated network, while “world” seems relatedly to be a whole surveyable geography of ramifying concepts.

The move from concepts as discrete rings to concepts as reticulated ranges does not however entail “abandoning the linguistic method [of Ryle and Wittgenstein, but] rather implies taking it seriously” (VCM, 84). Indeed, something very like this move comes through at moments in Wittgenstein, as when he imagines how our words (concepts) are not “clear-cut” [Scharfgeschnittenes] such that when we attempt to analyze them we feel “as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers” (PI, 106). While the tone in this section of the Investigations seems to caution against getting entangled in hopeless complexities comparable to the manual repair of a spider’s web, it also captures what Murdoch means by the difference between discrete cutouts and woven, reticulated networks. Near the end of “Vision and Choice” Murdoch makes explicit her debt to Wittgenstein on this point, noting how differences in “moral pictures” should be understood along the lines of Wittgenstein’s claim that “What has to be accepted [as given] is … forms of life (Lebensforms)” (PI, 226 [VCM, 97]). The implication here is that a range of reciprocally entailing concepts constitutes a form of life.

Murdoch’s longer, more ambitious essay, “The Idea of Perfection” (1964), returns to the relation of decision and action and again concedes that the inner must be understood through public criteria. I learn the concept of “decision,” she notes, by watching someone who says, “I have decided and who then acts,” such that “[t]he concept has no further inner structure; it is its outer structure.”11 The view is something which, as Murdoch says, “originates in an argument in Wittgenstein.” Though she doesn’t elaborate the point, the argument she refers to is likely the following thought experiment:

Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. — Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box … But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use [Gebrauch] nonetheless? — If so it would not be the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. — No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (PI, 293)12

Whatever private introspection accompanies the use of “beetle,” its presence or absence floats free of the role the word plays in the language. Like Ryle’s ghost, the inner thing to which “beetle” is presumed to refer is a myth (or at best irrelevant). It is rather outward criteria that give “beetle” its meaning for the community. Here Murdoch again notes that in the face of “hopelessly hazy inner phenomena” we ought to accept our reliance on “the ‘outer’ face of the concept, since the inner one is so vague” (TIP, 12). But then she immediately pivots to what she finds unsatisfying in the idea that “[w]hat I am doing or being is not something private and personal, but is imposed upon me in the sense of being identifiable only via public concepts … Reasons are public reasons, rules are public rules” (TIP, 15).

If there is reluctant acceptance of the Rylean-Wittgensteinian picture here, it is one which remains unsatisfied with what might be taken to be some form of behaviorism (soft or otherwise).13 The picture of concept application not as decision-guidance but as a range of use which traces in relief whole forms of life should presumably include ways of referring to what Murdoch elsewhere calls “lots and lots of objects, … in orbit in as it were in inner space” (TIP, 13). If a concept’s structure is on the outside, how are we to square this with the idea of inner happenings that remain out of the range of observation? To begin to get an answer here we need to look at one of Murdoch’s own thought experiments.

3. M. and D. (and S.)

A mother-in-law, M., believes her daughter-in-law, D., is “unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement,” is “insufficiently ceremonious,” and sometimes brusque to the point of rudeness. From such assessments M. concludes that she is a “silly vulgar girl” and that her son has married beneath him (TIP, 18). M. arrives at her view of D. as a function of a conceptual scheme which Murdoch says “imprisons” M. To be imprisoned in this way is to draw reflexively upon an unexamined range of concepts. There is simply no other conclusion to be reached about D. given D.’s manners, dress, and accent (accent here presumably a British class marker and not a Japanese or Israeli or German or Italian accent). The scene setting of the thought experiment is necessarily spare on this point: given the emotionally complicated scenario of newly acquainted in-laws, we are presented with a controlled picture of a schema of appraisal.

Presumably drilled since childhood in rigorous patterns of etiquette—nothing if not public criteria—M. may conceal her low view of D.; indeed, D. may never know of M.’s disapproval, may be living abroad, may even be deceased. But at some point, M. may say something along the lines of “Let me look again.” The further effort of “looking” here, extending a more attentive and caring notice of D., seems to require an idea of inner experience as something that may undergo revision and reassessment. M. inwardly reviews her experience of D. and comes to see and evaluate her differently. She may consider the possibility that she is herself stuffy or a snob or that she is jealous of her son’s attachment to his new wife. Remembering Murdoch’s concern to hang on to a linguistic analysis of the sort she associates with “a certain argument in Wittgenstein” we might say M.’s revaluation of D. is nothing more or less than the revision of a network (or spiderweb) of public concepts, and so to a whole new range use: D. is no longer “vulgar” but “refreshingly simple”; no longer “insufficiently ceremonious” but “spontaneous”; not “bumptious” but “gay”; not “tiresomely juvenile” but “delightfully youthful” (TIP, 18). Such revision would not be the sort in which M. “merely changes the application of an unrevised set of concepts.”14 What happens “inside” M. is not to have the thought: I had previously found D. to be insufficiently ceremonious, but I’ve come to see that she is sufficiently ceremonious, and so on. Rather, M.’s coming to see the “unsatisfactoriness of whole ranges of concepts she has earlier employed unreflectingly” leads to a new evaluative Lebensform and so a change of world.15 We might imagine further stretching the range of use upon occurrences “in” M. that further refine her sense of D. (such as: “sure she has a certain candor and charm, but it is liable to spill over into an insouciance not always appropriate for the occasion” or some such further revision).

Without wishing too quickly to assert an untroubled affinity between Murdoch on conceptual range and Wittgenstein on outward criteria, we may wonder whether M. can be seen as falling into the confusion Wittgenstein’s “S.” man falls into. The S. man is involved in an eccentric ceremony by which he christens a rule for marking the occurrence of an inner happening by writing “S.” in a diary. “What reason have we for calling ‘S’ the sign for a sensation?” asks a voice, “For ‘sensation’ is a word of our common language, which is not a language intelligible only to me” (PI, §258). That the example is a prolongation of the “beetle” scenario becomes clear when the voice notes that “it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes S. he has a Something …  But ‘has’ and ‘something’ also belong to our common language” (PI, §260). Then comes the diagnosis: the S. man “must inwardly resolve to use the word in such-and-such a way. And how does he resolve that? Should I assume that he invents the technique of applying the word” (PI, §262)? The problem here is that such a technique could not be arrived at through “mental pointing” but must in the end stand in need of public criteria.16 If both the Beetle people and the S. man are tangled up in a confusion about private introspectabilia, isn’t this comparable to what M. does when she “privately” revises her moral judgments about D. (in D’s absence)? Doesn’t M. “inwardly resolve” to use her new terms of appraisal and so “invent a technique” for how to use the new words?17

4. Beyond Physics

If Murdoch had been working through an argument “that originates … in Wittgenstein” about inner processes and outward criteria, Elizabeth Anscombe considers the same problem, but with the focus on what counts as an action. Early in her 1957 book, Intention, Anscombe distinguishes between the concepts of intention and prediction. Saying “I am going to fail this exam” might be an effort at prophesy or a statement of intent. If you feel you haven’t studied enough, you could say the sentence is a prediction. But if you take great care to get every last question wrong on, say, a macro-economics exam so as later to display the paper on which the failed exam in printed in a glass cube hung from the ceiling of the MoMA (call the piece Failed Economics), you may be said to have intended to fail the exam. Other moments in Intention involve observing an action without any overt statement of intent (or prophesy). Anscombe gives the example of sitting in a chair writing and imagining an observer asserting that her intention in that moment is to write. It seems unlikely, she notes, that the observer would presume her activity of putting pencil to paper while seated as an effort at “affecting the acoustic properties of the room.”18 So, action and intention complement one another for Anscombe in a way that seems expressive of the fit between inner process and outward criteria.

But is there an “inner process” here at all? A version of that question is taken up in one of Anscombe’s thought experiments which involves a wartime scenario in which certain actions will lead certain people to die.19 Imagine that a man is pumping water. This action supplies water to the inhabitants of a house. Another man adds lethal toxins to the water as it flows into the house. Inside the house are Nazis plotting genocide and whose death will be good for the world. The questions for Anscombe are how we are to understand what the man does and why he does it. For not only are pumping and poisoning different actions, so are moving an arm up and down, replenishing a water supply and saving the Jews.20 That the action splits into (at least) four answers to the “why is the man pumping?” question—to pump water, to supply water to the house, to introduce toxins into the bloodstream of the inhabitants, to save the Jews—is all part of the analysis of the concept of “intention.” The upshot is that there may be no need to posit some inner process as the source of the action, since to know how pumping fits together with supplying water and how water may be contaminated and how contaminated water will affect the physiology of the one who drinks it and so on is to know one’s way around in a form of life. This is the same as saying that the concept of “intention” has an outside structure. Its meaning may be given by noticing what is being done by whom in what ways at what times through the observation of how actions ramify.21

In a recent exchange about Anscombe’s account of action Walter Benn Michaels notes a distinction which maps fairly closely onto what I’ve been calling the “inward process and outward criteria” question: Anscombe’s concern with “what someone does” (what can be observed) and the literary theoretical question of the internal “state of the author’s mind.”22 Michaels is making a point about what Anscombe calls “going beyond physics”: “What’s suggested by the juxtaposition of starting with what physically takes place and going beyond physics is the idea that what physically takes place can’t be reduced to physics. If what physically takes place is intentional, and what happens is what physically takes place, what happens must be already under the sign of the intended” (EWS). I take Michaels here to mean that to recognize intentionality is to identify something not directly registered in observation (verification, measurement). But that doesn’t mean that we don’t see intention. While Michaels here refers to a different example in Anscombe’s book (I, §45), the description will also work with the pumping example. We may get answers, under different descriptions, to versions of the “why does he pump?” question—supplying, poisoning, killing, saving, and so on. We can also find external (observable) answers to what he is doing but not intending—for example, as Anscombe puts it, he is not setting out to “generat[e] … substances in his nerve fibres” caused by the movement of his arm, nor is he intending to “cast[] a shadow on a rockery where at one place and from one position it produces a curious effect as if a face were looking out of the rockery” (I, 37). While the man does make the “face” appear when moving his arm, it seems right to say that this is not his intention, whereas other consequences of the action of pumping are part of the intention (provided he and the man adding toxins to the water are in cahoots). The point here is that he knows a certain way of going on in a form of life; the range covered by a conceptual cartography that instantiate a great many linked and overlapping normative practices. And this then seems a good way of explaining why, for Michaels, if you find yourself interpreting a piece of writing, you do so “under the sign of the intended.” If you are reading or interpreting something you are as it were observing a completed action—its having been composed.

 5. Objective Correlative

About exactly the time Anscombe’s Intention was published, Murdoch contributed a short piece to a Festschrift for T.S. Eliot’s 70^th birthday. While there is something of an irony to the historical turn backward here—the linguistic philosophy Murdoch and Anscombe wrestled with at Oxford stemmed in large part from a violent rejection of the British idealism Eliot wrote his dissertation on—the modernist literary theory Eliot created in incidental newspaper pieces and essays in little magazines between 1918 and 1920 form an uncanny analogue with the Rylean-Wittgensteinian problem that preoccupied both Murdoch and Anscombe.23 While Murdoch notes that Eliot “does not trespass on the field of technical philosophy,” she nevertheless sees his work as part of “shared concern with contemporary moral philosophers [namely] the idea that a destruction of morals is a destruction of concepts.”24

It would not be a stretch to say Murdoch found Eliot’s literary criticism to form part of what she had earlier called a “modern view of the mind,” as his claims about art and artists had by the time of her essay become something like received wisdom: that art is not the “expression of personality”; that the progress of an artist is one of “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”; that an artist is “constantly finding an object which shall be adequate to his feelings”; that art should “introduce precise emotion [by] bringing it back to the object”; and so on.25 While Murdoch does not mention it, all of her collected examples converge on Eliot’s enigmatic idea of the “objective correlative,” put forth in a 1919 review of a book about Hamlet:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.26

Eliot here imagines as an aesthetic problem the question I’ve been tracking: inner experience (some “particular emotion”) finds its correlative in an external form which “immediately evokes” it. While the words “formula” and “immediately” may seem exaggerated—suggesting as they do a natural transaction27—Eliot is mostly raising evaluative questions: What will best express a harmony of proportion between felt emotion and observable action? In the case of Hamlet, what the character says is out of sync with the unfolding of the action. Hamlet’s showy, ostentatious soliloquies are evidence of an “emotion … in excess of the facts as they appear” (H, 125). To get this relation right would be to get the inner happenings (emotions) to “terminate in sensory experience” in the right way. And to get that right would be to achieve an “‘inevitability’ [which] lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion” (H, 125). Eliot’s aesthetic criteria are close to Anscombe on action: to get the right relation of dramatic action to emotion is to think that what someone does (or says) on stage just is the inner happening.

In his sensitive and acute 1959 study of Eliot’s poetry and criticism, Hugh Kenner notes that the “famous sentence about the objective correlative” emerges from a tension between “the action of the play” and Hamlet’s “anthology pieces dealing with the cosmos in general.”28 Kenner sees their asymmetry as “so little rooted in the particular action that an actor-manager feels free to shuffle them into coincidence with his notions of pace” (IP, 87). What goes wrong in Hamlet for Kenner’s Eliot is a failure “to fix … just that concatenation of incidents and images which would make Hamlet’s emotion comprehensible and inevitable, and so release the soliloquies just where they occur. … [Such a] concatenation is the condition of artistic ‘inevitability’” (IP, 102). Kenner’s remarks here suggest that getting the “release” point wrong (“freely shuffling” compositional elements arbitrarily) undermines the inevitability of an inner process—some motive, or feeling, or intention—terminating in some action. While Kenner in part attributes the generalizing ambition here to what he calls Eliot’s “dangerous gift of phrase” (“objective correlative” has a ring that made it amenable to institutionalization for a certain New Critical orthodoxy), that doesn’t diminish the genuine philosophical depth of Eliot’s example. The question Eliot seems to ask is: Would a work of art that got the objective correlative right dissolve the distinction between inner process and outward criteria?

Commenting on Kenner’s writing devoted to other examples from Eliot, Todd Cronan notes that in art, “actions are determined by their objects,” whereas in morals, “actions are ‘determined by their motives, which are hidden: hidden, often, from the actor.’”29 Let’s bracket for the moment whether we must always imagine morals deontologically—i.e., that motives are what count and not, say, consequences (the view Anscombe despised) or virtuous or unvirtuous character (the approach Anscombe ends up more or less adopting). Note how we’re back to the problem of what is hidden and what is observable: in art, action just is the work as it is made, observable in the form of a done piece. This comes through clearly in Cronan’s remarks on Anscombe’s pumping example: “The question raised by the pumping action is whether the pumper is intending to kill the Nazis in the house or was unaware of the consequences of the act of pumping water.” (I noted above that we ought to assume from the example that pumper and poisoner are in cahoots.) “[O]ne has to know where the action begins and ends, the action has to take on a ‘form.’”30

But when Kenner gets to Eliot’s later plays, the work of art “purposefully occludes,” as Cronan puts it, what someone really is doing. Let’s treat that thought as contrastive with how Kenner had described the “objective correlative.” What happens in the objective correlative, if things go right, is that what is felt on the inside is, to use Kenner’s language, “just that concatenation of incidents and images which would make [the character or dramatist’s] emotion comprehensible and inevitable.” But when Kenner turns to Eliot’s The Family Reunion, we find a play which “throw[s] attention onto the invisible drama of volition and vocation [such that t]he plot provides, almost playfully, external and stageable points of reference for this essentially interior drama” (IP, 288).31 This, Cronan notes, “‘throws attention’ back on the invisible act of creation.”32 It seems clear to me that Kenner, for whatever reason, deliberately inverts the objective correlative in his remarks on The Family Reunion. Instead of some “interior drama” issuing inevitably in an outward object, The Family Reunion throws attention back on something private and hidden. Why Kenner wished to make a symmetrical reversal of Eliot’s literary theory in his reading of The Family Reunion is an interesting question (perhaps this is part of his own playful intra-Eliot game of cross-reference in The Invisible Poet) not least because it stages, from both sides as it were, the problem of getting inner processes in alignment with outward criteria. The Eliot of “Hamlet and His Problems” wants total objectification of feeling in an exactly calibrated “release” point; the Eliot of The Family Reunion wants the reverse: a drama whose external apparatus is meant only to get us to pay attention to something invisible.

Both sides here chime with what Michaels calls “form that hangs on to process” (EWS). If the work of art manifests as outward form, the choices that went into its making—the whole hazy, tumultuous drama of an inner process, “lots and lots of objects in orbit in inner space,” as Murdoch put it—then this is not unlike delimiting the form of an action. For Kenner’s earlier Eliot, this is imagined as composition which objectively correlates to inner happenings; for Kenner’s later Eliot, it is a matter of composition that throws our attention toward the invisible nexus Cronan calls the “act of creation.”

In both of these scenarios “form hangs on to process,” in the sense in which “inner process” means authorial intention. But “form” here might also be heard in the sense of Lebensform. That is, as the whole ramifying network of overlapping conceptual agreements that make up our everyday practices and sense of going on; the form that tells you how pumping, poisoning, supplying, and saving go together; or how a shift in moral appraisal sets off a revision of a whole conceptual schema. None of this is to reject Wittgenstein’s “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” or Ryle’s critique of the category mistake of the ghost (PI, §580). It is to make a series of clarificatory analyses upon them.

Most retrospectives on Hugh Kenner’s career at some point mention the devoted thoroughness with which Kenner obeyed Ezra Pound’s injunction: “You have an obligation to visit the great men of your own time.”1 Kenner’s life-long devotion to Modernism springs out of the 1948 visit with Pound at St. Elizabeths in which the injunction was uttered—as does, perhaps, his magnum opus, The Pound Era. Other books surely sprang from other visits—with Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and T.S. Eliot.

Indeed, Kenner seems to have elevated the visit into something like a method. Not without cause, Kenner’s Modernism has been understood as a celebration of the great man theory of modernism, of an artistic era shaped by close-up encounters with powerful imaginations and their consequential doings.

And yet there is another abiding interest in Kenner’s work: in the shaping force of technology and its influence on human action, and over the workings of the imagination. Kenner’s other master, also present at that fateful asylum visit, was the young English professor Marshall McLuhan, whose techno-determinism left its own imprint on Kenner’s work.

And so while the acknowledgements of the Pound Era begin with “Ezra Pound, to start with,”2 the dedication of his Mechanic Muse is “In Memoriam Etaoin Shrdlu.”3 Etaoin Shrdlu, as Kenner explains in the bravura opening of that 1987 book, was a frequent protagonist in the newspaper in the days of linotype setting; a nonce name the machine operator would enter to cancel a line to type after a mistake was made. Etaoin Shrdlu entered the news because the machine made the pathway for them to appear: composed of the 12 most frequently used letters in English, arrayed down the leftmost column of the linotype machine so they had the shortest distance to travel.4

In The Mechanic Muse, Kenner describes Modernism as a particular mode of accelerating technological transformation in which “every thinkable human activity save perhaps the reproductive was being mapped onto machinery” (MM, 7). It is, on the one hand, an era of “transparent technology”—in which the forming and deforming links and gears are visible to the eye. (The contrast is with the “screen-and-keyboard terminal” of postmodern technology, about which “your eye will tell you nothing” [MM, 10].) And yet what your eye tells you about modern technology is the curious and sometimes damaging unfitness for the hand that it is meant to extend and supplement, and the way that this lack of fit exercises an agency of its own. Kenner articulates this lack of fit as technology’s own principle: “the way to imitate a human activity is never to replicate the human action” (MM, 7).

Thus, the way a linotype machine works to replicate the activity of the skilled human compositor (creating a page of newsprint) does not involve replicating his actions—“picking letters up one by one and setting them in place”—rather, “matrices would slide down from magazines onto a moving belt for delivery onto the line’s incrementing array” (MM, 8). This mechanism had great advantages when it came to publishing newspapers, but it had deleterious effects on linotype operators. Due to an uncomfortable mismatch between machinic efficiency and human dexterity, the linotype operator has to make 51% of his keystrokes with his “left little finger” (MM, 5).

Modernism conceived this way is, distinctively, “those years, when human behavior, e.g. movements of one’s left little finger, could be inflected by imperatives one needn’t know about” (MM, 9). And those unknown imperatives produced, first and foremost, new forms of life, many of them disorienting and uncomfortable: crowd life, Fordist life, life coerced into clock-bound synchrony; and new forms of art that matter insofar as they orient us to these uncomfortable coercions and synchronizations.

These two different accounts of Modernism, defined on the one hand by powerful people and effective imaginations, and on the other by powerful imperatives that “engulf[ed] people” in their effectiveness (MM, 9), produce not just two accounts of art, but two different ways of understanding the critical task. A dedication to “Ezra Pound, to start with” might set you out on long journeys: to Venice, to wait for the doors of Santa Maria dei Miracoli to be unlocked “at the behest of three words” of the Cantos (“mermaids, that carving”). One visits to confirm that they are there, to see that they are as they have been described, and to affirm that their description tells you what you need to know about “how our epoch was extricated from the fin de siècle” by the work of great men: “I cannot but endorse the accuracy of perception that set in array the words that drew me on.”5

Whereas to “memorialize” Etoain Shrdlu is to retroactively acknowledge one’s determination by the impersonal mechanic forces that set things in array. Why retroactively? If the first of Kenner’s principles of technology described the non-mimetic, inhuman efficiency of action, the second describes the explanatory opacity that follows when inhuman powers determine the shape of human actions. Modernist technology makes actions, and specifically authorial actions, the sort of thing that are explicable, indeed detectable, as actions only in retrospect. What are the crucial features of Modernist writing? What is it that the artist makes, and where is the work of invention realized? In the Modernist text, explanation or interpretation will appear always as a kind of retrospective surprise: “the resulting pressures on human behavior are apt to elude foresight utterly, and be occulted from most present sight, to leave hindsight flabbergasted” (MM, 8).

For Kenner, the opacity of the relation between the occulted present and interpretive hindsight explains a kind of generational evolution in the criticism of Modernist writing as it falls into the (near) past: “First come efforts to justify the whole. Then units of attention commence to get smaller, and yet remain always discrete, like gears and shafts. The penultimate unit is the single word; the ultimate is the very letter” (MM, 14).

Kenner offers the history of critical readings of Joyce’s inclusion of Bloom’s budget in the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses as an example of the way that a Modernist’s actions may be most fully realized in the smallest of units (fig. 1). First, Kenner explains, it fell to a critic (Stuart Gilbert) to explain the nature of modernist narrative “as a whole”—to explain to those “accustomed to being told a story in the old way” why a novel might contain something so seemingly non-narrative and alienating as a budget in the first place (MM, 12).

But once this strange “inclusion” is accepted as a fully intended feature of the novel, rather than a mere “pedantic annoyance,” a critic (like Richard M. Kain) might move on to explain the role it played in the book’s design, furthering the narrative, coordinating individual entries with the book’s incidents. It would fall to Kenner’s hindsight to see the flabbergasting significance of the textual detail so small it was in fact not there: “It was two decades before someone (myself as it happened) noticed that the budget suppressed all record of the visit to Nighttown. Its most notable omission is the day’s largest disbursement (10s, left behind in the whorehouse). So it’s an edited budget, as it were for the eyes of Molly” (MM, 13). This interpretive rescue of what might seem a kind of continuity error, reconceiving an “accidental” omission as decisive “editing,” reveals something important about Joyce’s work as a novelist, about previously invisible places where decisions were being made. But more than that, it reveals something about the transformations that Modernism as an Era has wrought upon Joyce as an actor within it: “Even in Ithaca, the episode of stony fact, fact is manipulable, including numerical fact, the very atom of immutability” (MM, 13).

We might notice, though, that the closer Kenner gets to the workings of the work, the more ambivalent his account of its origins. What distinguishes Richard Kain’s justification of “the whole” from Kenner’s justification of texts at the atomic level is that the former can be referred to something like a structure of intention. For Kenner, the eloquent omission blinks back and forth between intended and determined. Nothing could be more assuredly referred to an authorial hand than these typed bits of numerical fact, the letters of which the words are made, the numbers that tally up income and expenditures. And yet at a distance of retrospect, these letters and numbers—and even the spaces where no letters and numbers are—seem to disclose something like the largest claims for the nature of transformed modernity, the state of affairs in which all facts and not just imagined facts are manipulable. It is not clear just how any individual author could have authored that fact. In Kenner’s account, the movement of the fingers is the way in which tiniest details come to disclose not so much an action as the tremendous power of the Era’s designs on us. The mismatch of scale between individual action and historical change makes it seem that it is forces beyond the self that uncomfortably jerk our little fingers around. Or as Stephen puts it in that same Nighttown visit: “Personally, I detest action. (He waves his hand.) Hand hurts me slightly.”6

This problem, I want to say, lies at the heart of Kenner’s “visit as method” and gives rise in his work to a series of indelible figures for the simultaneous elevation and occultation of artistic agency. Instead of Joyce’s Dublin,7 we have Dublin’s Joyce; or, as we are surely meant to hear it, Joyce’s Dublin’s Joyce. In The Pound Era we may hear a similar ambiguity about whether the “great man” is a cause or an effect. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot is “invisible” in precisely this sense, and it is this uncertain oscillation between first and third person that gives Kenner’s writing its singular texture:

Let us assume that the impassive, stationary Man of Letters from whom the Collected Works are thought to emanate is a critical myth, the residuum of a hundred tangential guesses. Let us further assume (it is a convenient fiction: biography does not concern us) a man with certain talents and certain interests who wrote poems intermittently, never sure whether his gift was not on the point of exhaustion, and reviewed countless books because they were sent him for review and (for many years) he needed the money. Let us station him for some years in the Philosophy Department at Harvard, and allow weight to what passed through his mind there. Let us endow him with a mischievous intelligence, and set him to work reviewing for the Athenaeum. Let us simultaneously put him in touch with Ezra Pound, and make him, for good measure, the invisible assistant editor of The Egoist, which “ended with 185 subscribers and no newsstand or store sales”; all this in London, 1917, at the pivot of an age. Install him then, heavily camouflaged, in the very citadel of the Establishment, the Times Literary Supplement, where, protected by the massive unreality of his surroundings, a man who has mastered the idiom can deftly affirm fructive heresies about Donne and Marvell. Then let us consider the nature of what he wrote and published in those early years, examining as minutely as we like what we are under no compulsion to translate or “explain”: and then see whether the career subsequent to plays, Quartets, and celebrity does not assume intelligible contours. There has been no more instructive, more coherent, or more distinguished literary career in this century, all of it carried on in the full view of the public, with copious explanations at every stage; and the darkness did not comprehend it. Yet never comprehended, an American was awarded the Order of Merit and became England’s most honored man of letters, not in fulfilment of ambition but in recognition of qualities, real and valuable, which he had come to personify.8

Making Eliot intelligible, instructive, and coherent involves seeing him as a kind of personification of “values” particular to a place at “the pivot of an age.” Is this Eliot real? He is “a critical myth.” Is he a person? “Biography does not concern us.” The strange critical action of rendering Eliot retroactively legible involves being concerned with the facts that do not concern us under the correct description: “assuming” (for example) that much of Eliot’s writing emerged from a situation of economic uncertainty; noting that his mind was made what it was by being “stationed” in institutions where certain weighty ideas might “pass through” it; observing that his literary judgments were authoritative to the extent that he was “installed” within an “Establishment” that gave them authority. And yet something about the poet remains uncomprehended by these determinations, “camouflaged,” “in darkness,” “invisible”—or what could be the object of our interest? Kenner renders this paradox between the mind that is made and the mind that makes more concisely in describing the master work of the “most honored” poet: Kenner says of “The Waste Land,” “it is doubtful whether any other acknowledged masterpiece has been so heavily marked, with the author’s consent, by forces outside his control.”9

More than a clear account of Modernism, or a replicable method of criticism, Kenner’s visits with the great actors of modernist texts powerfully bequeath to us a problem of agency that emerges through attention to works of art.

In the remainder of this essay, I want briefly to lay out a kind of interest that I think the ambivalence within Kenner’s method makes visible, focusing on some of the most obviously intentional elements of the one of the most acknowledged master works of Modernism—and some of the least.

2. “What is this man doing?”

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

As just about everyone has noted, the most notable thing about the opening of “The Waste Land” is its striking enjambment. This a feature of style that Eliot was thinking about hard in the years leading up to the publication of the poem. In “Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe,” Eliot celebrated Marlowe’s central formal achievement as the contribution of a “deliberate and conscious workman,” distinguishable from the “pretty simple huffe-snuffe bombast” of his rhetoric. Specifically, he noted a new tonal range in Marlowe’s blank verse made possible by the aggressive enjambments of Tamburlaine: “a new driving power” achieved “by reinforcing the sentence period against the line period.”10

For Eliot, the effects of Marlowe’s of enjambment were two: intensity, and a new “conversational” style. In “The Waste Land,” “conversation” will arrive eight lines later with Countess Marie Larisch: “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain.” Here, in the opening, Eliot goes all-in on intensity. The two periods of the opening stanza unfold as an intense experience of sentences “reinforced,” shored up against ruin; of grammaticality threatened but ultimately unbroken. One experiences the proximity of the threat of breakage because the sentences are driven over the edge of line periods into the rightward fall of present participial forms. Eliot, accelerating Marvell’s “driving” and multiplying his “reinforcing,” produces breeding, mixing, stirring, covering, feeding as objects of intense attention.

It isn’t quite enough to say, with Eliot, that in enjambment we find two compositional principles cutting “against” or competing with each other. We might also say that each system is sponsored by a different governing body. The grammaticality of “the sentence period” points to a national horizon of determination. For Eliot, the rules of sentence-making were administered by The King’s English, the 1906 precursor to H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Reviewing the latter in 1926, Eliot advocated a nightly session of disciplinary reinforcement: “every person who wishes to write ought to read in it (for it is inexhaustible) for a quarter of an hour every night before going to bed.”11

Metrical writing is also a subjection of individual expression to discipline. Vers Libre, as Eliot reminds us, is a “preposterous fiction.”12 Prosodic structures in English are broader than grammar’s national boundaries (“Even in the popular American magazines,” he sneers, “the lines are usually explicable in terms of prosody” [SP, 32]), but they are deeper as well. Their sanctioning body lives in that well of authoritative practice Eliot called “tradition,” offering a formal decorum that did not need to assert itself as “rule”—a “natural” regulative principle he did not hesitate to rhyme with social order altogether: “In an ideal state of society one might imagine the good New growing naturally out of the good Old, without the need for polemic and theory; this would be a society with a living tradition” (SP, 32).

Of the two transpersonal systems operating in the background here, the rules of grammar and the rules of meter, grammar seems perhaps the more powerful. It may be the case that for historical grammarian, “the history of languages shows that changes have constantly taken place in the past, and that what was bad grammar in one period may become good grammar in the next.”13 But there is no sentence Eliot can make that determines whether or not a sentence is grammatical in the present period, which is why someone who wishes to write good sentences should spend a quarter hour a night thinking of England and submitting to the King.

In contrast, although no vers is in practice libre, the thematics of the practice of versemaking is that of freedom. The opening line of “The Waste Land” leads off with a nine-syllable acephalous pentameter line. The second line counts the same nine syllables but counts them differently, as trochaic tetrameter with a dactylic second foot. We perceive this, if we do perceive it, because the rest of the stanza leans tetrameter, though with a trimeter thrown in in the fourth line for bad measure. The variability and instability of the opening proceeds as if to emphasize meter as a field of subjective decision made in relation to rules but not, as it were, strictly determined by them. If grammar works a little bit like a machine, meter feels more like a muse, sponsoring something like invention, autonomy, “life”: “It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse” (SP, 33).

This may be a distinction without a difference, or a difference in mood rather than a difference in fact. The evasion of monotony is surely to be celebrated, but it isn’t quite autonomy: “Vers libre … is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art” (SP, 32). But a difference in mood is a difference that is sought, and what is sought might be better found elsewhere. In “The Waste Land,” it is in the collision between grammar and meter, the superaddition of system upon system, of constraint against constraint, that we find a drama of individual action longed for through its overdetermined denials.

The effect of sentence driving past line, or line sawing through sentence, is to isolate the participial present tense form of the verb not so much from its subject, to which it is always firmly subordinated—we know it is April breeding, mixing, and stirring; it is Winter covering and feeding—as from its object. What does the act of “covering” cover? Only after the drop, we fall to “Earth.” What bounty does “feeding” feed? It is only after the end that its scope is confined to “a little life.”

A verb without an object is an action deprived of the context that delimits or constrains the field of its application or legibility. “Covering” without an “Earth,” or “Feeding” without a “life,” is, as Wittgenstein would never have said, an action without a world. He wouldn’t have said it because he would have regarded it as an impossibility; it is only the world (conceived as “all that is the case”), or the life, conceived as an ensemble of shared practices (“forms of life”), that make our actions actions. Eliot might seem, sometimes against his will, to agree: however much one might wish to assert the force or warmth of life (breeding, stirring, feeding), the (syntactically) determined arrival of “Earth” can only be (metrically) delayed, not denied.

Much of “The Waste Land” seems to turn on the drama of suffering this insight. The titles of the opening sections, for example, “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess” name ways, perhaps rival ways, of conceptualizing the third-person horizons of legibility. The purpose of the Anglican liturgy of the burial of the dead is to render individual oblivion legible by decreeing both death and life to be communal property: “For none of us lives to himself/and none of us dies to himself.” And the purpose of the game of chess is to make oblivion unavailable by making it impossible. All moves, even loss, are a function of the rules; absence from the game just means you aren’t playing anymore. (In its inhuman efficiency at producing meaning out of small movements, a game might seem less restrictive than the section’s cancelled title, “IN THE CAGE.”) The Waste Land may be filled with suffering voices, persons victimized by shattered orders, but the poem seeks not freedom, but the redemptive forms of the collectivities without which they are nothing.

What could action without a world look like? Let us look, as Hugh Kenner has taught us to do, past the sentence to the mark; or past the beat to the strike.

Here we can see “The Waste Land,” just as Kenner described it: “heavily marked, with the author’s consent, by forces outside his control” (fig. 2). Everywhere in the manuscripts, handwritten corrections point us outward into a social field of practice that render Eliot’s action of composing, of decisions and revisions, meaningful. Sometimes judgment is personified by Pound, who policed Eliot’s meters: “Too tum-pum at a stretch”; “too penty”; “Too loose.”  Other judgments were given voice by Vivienne, who passed sentences, some of them to be included, (“What you get married for if you don’t want children?”) others to be excised (“The ivory men make company between us.”).14

Here, however, as almost nowhere else in the manuscripts, we can see a compositional decision made at some notional distance from the “uncontrolled” and external forces by which Eliot had no choice but to consent to be marked. Eliot, famously, composed on the typewriter, “The nearest approach to a manuscript I ever have is the first draft with pencil corrections.”15 Hugh Kenner was among the first critics to see this as a significant, even determining feature of the artist’s work.16 But it’s not quite, or not fully, true: In the second line of the poem we see the action of drafting—which is to say, the combination of invention, reconsideration, revision, and decision happening in something like real time. “The typist home at teatime, who begins / to clear her broken breakfast.” Stop: return; strike out with a sequence of close parentheses; retype: “away her broken breakfast. Lights”.

What is this man doing? What is the description of this action? Is Eliot making a metrical pattern? The question of whether or not “breakfast” should be accompanied by “broken”; isn’t not metrical; both because (by his own account) everything is metrical and also because fact the metrical intentionality of the line can be felt throughout its various preliminary versions: “to clear her broken breakfast, lights”, “clears away her broken breakfast.”, and, of course, in the final poem from which Broken is stricken:

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Is Eliot making sentences? The criteria of revision here absolutely are not not grammatical, since the elimination of an adjective is definitionally grammatical. But they also aren’t obviously “significantly” grammatical—which is to say, they are not obviously semantic: whether we see it or not; “broken” remains inside “breakfast” even when the adjective is eliminated.

What I want to say is that the drafts of the poem isolate here for our consideration an aspect of making a poem that we can see is a decisive action, but one that frustrates our ability to retroactively refer that action to a legible third person horizon of significance. As Eliot put it in his Paris Review interview, “in typing myself I make alterations, very considerable ones.”17 But what is considerable about the elimination and then reassertion of broken in relation breakfast? Eliot typing is an action in present participial form (let’s call it “making”)—whose object is not just delayed but withheld, that seems not easily situatable within the legible world of practices.

Typing, is, of course, as Kenner has already shown us, thinking of the deforming effects of the linotype machine on human action, an inauspicious place to find this kind of action: action that aspires to be meaningful but not to mean the world that determines what is meaningful. Thinking of imperatives that inflect behavior, we might compare the question of what it means that there is typing in “The Waste Land” to what we know, or think we know, about what it means that a typist is in “The Waste Land.” As Lawrence Rainey has argued in his exhaustive account of the poem’s composition, this is an aspect of the “The Waste Land” that is meaningful precisely as a “personification” of such freedom as is available within the horizons of the modern: “The typist was one of a family of figures who represented the promise of modern freedom: an allegedly new, autonomous subject whose appetites for pleasure and sensuous fulfillment were legitimated by modernity itself, by its promise that those new technologies, harnessed under systematic management, would ultimately enhance individual agency and create a richer life-world.”18 Typing is a type of action (technologized, systematic, managed) that makes an intended action (autonomous, agential, expressive) the limited thing that it is. To be a typist is to be the person for whom everything that is entailed in typing makes life what it is as well: a mere type of life, a little life. We might say something different but similar about the centrality of the figure of the typist to the recent debate about “Reading Eliot with the #MeToo Generation.” For Sumita Chakroborty, Eliot’s depiction of the typist is not even nominally concerned with the enhancement of agency, but rather with the violation of agency. But whether a typist is here because she is an ironized figure for technologically enabled “autonomy” or because she is an unwitting admission exacted through the poem of the patriarchally enforced determinations of modernity is, we might say, a difference in mood, rather than a difference in kind. To think of Eliot’s typing as meaningful in the way that his typist is meaningful is to refer typing to some horizon of action that can only be seen as a form of determination.

Would it be better from the perspective of art to think of Eliot’s parentheses as accidents? Would something like sheer contingency get us closer to what we mean by “autonomy?” Here, we might consider what we know about why “The Waste Land” was typed. As Eliot’s secretary tells us, Eliot’s habit of composing by machine resulted from an accident sustained as a young man: Eliot “strained one hand in rowing in a single shell while he was in the Harvard Graduate School and used a typewriter in preference to handwriting thereafter.”19 This might seem like an accident if anything is. But it does not strain the ingenuity to imagine a descendant of Hugh Kenner producing the third-person logic of even this sort of first-hand accident and the “preference” that follows from it: Eliot as he sculls is, as Kenner suggested, “stationed” in the philosophy department at Harvard University; “weighty ideas” from the philosophical tradition are being “passed through” his mind. A sociologically minded critic might well read the meaning of Eliot’s ideas as a function of his location, charting the elusive causal connections between the sculling hand, the typing hand, and the invisible hand, as mediated by an engulfing technology like the school.20

To speak telegraphically, for a moment, it is as if whole intelligence of our current critical moment is devoted toward reading the typing of a parenthesis as an action whose content can be retroactively filled in by powers beyond the self, much like the great parenthesis opened in “Little Gidding”:

(where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)21

But in the parentheses in the manuscript of “The Waste Land,” which close without ever having opened, we find an action that we cannot read as a word “at home” in a “common” world. We cannot see this marking as bound by rules of grammar or meter, as typical of a kind of action, or as the allegorical decisions of a sociological type. Eliot’s typing is an action that points to the person, “typing myself,” whose conditions of legibility present us with a question.

Is it a question that we can abolish with a large enough lapse of time and large enough dose of critical ingenuity? Perhaps. But I would like to at least consider holding it open a while longer. Consider another canonical instance of a man at his task:

A man is pumping water into the cistern which supplies the drinking water of a house. Someone has found a way of systematically contaminating the source with a deadly cumulative poison whose effects are unnoticeable until they can no longer be cured. The house is regularly inhabited by a small group of party chiefs, with their immediate families, who are in control of a great state; they are engaged in exterminating the Jews and perhaps plan a world war. The man who contaminated the source has calculated that if these people are destroyed some good men will get into power who will govern well, or even institute the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and secure a good life for all the people; and he has revealed the calculation, together with the fact about the poison, to the man who is pumping. The death of the inhabitants of the house will, of course, have all sorts of other effects; e.g., that a number of people unknown to these men will receive legacies, about which they know nothing.

 

This man’s arm is going up and down, up and down. Certain muscles, with Latin names which doctors know, are contracting and relaxing. Certain substances are getting generated in some nerve fibres—substances whose generation in the course of voluntary movement interests physiologists. The moving arm is casting a shadow on a rockery where at one place and from one position it produces a curious effect as if a face were looking out of the rockery. Further, the pump makes a series of clicking noises, which are in fact beating out a noticeable rhythm.

 

Now we ask: what is this man doing? What is the description of his action?22

By asking “what is the description of his action,” Elizabeth Anscombe means something like: “what is the description of an action in terms of which all the other possible descriptions of an action make sense?”23 It is in the light of “the” description that we will be able to pick out all the other descriptions that we will agree to call intentional and to sort between the many possible descriptions of an intentional action (pumping, poisoning) from those descriptions that pick, out on the lower end, inconsequential accidents (the clicking sounds that fall into noticeable rhythm) and, on the upper end, consequential effects (the unknown persons in the future who receive transformative legacies as result of what I do).

But let me propose that to regard an action as poetic action is to adopt a distinctive attitude toward it. Regarding poetic action, we routinely fail to exclude apparent “byproducts,” like the clicking that emerges from our linguistic instrument beating out a noticeable rhythm. And we routinely extend a poet’s actions to engulf their apparent sequelae, like bequeathing legacies to unknown future persons. From an Anscombian perspective, such actions ought not to count as intentional, though they might come to pass. For Anscombe, prospective or retrospective reasons that count as intentional must be “practically salient from the first personal, practical perspective,”24 which is to say they depend on a sober English assessment of what we do or can do on this Earth and in this life. From that perspective, if one were to say in answer to the question, “why are you typing that parenthesis?”: “To bring about the Kingdom of God on earth,” you would not be offering a description of your action but a description of your delusion—even if the Kingdom of God were to come to pass, and your poem were to have played a part in its arrival. I want to say that what is at stake in regarding something as a poem is not quite the claim that this is a true description—that in making art, great men are making the future come into being. It is, rather, the claim that we do not know how to evaluate first person actions without measuring their legibility as determined by some third-person explanation, AND ALSO that we do not know how far our third-person understanding of actions might come to extend. Regarding “making a poem,” we are adopting a singular theoretical attitude toward the inflection of the little finger: we maintain the unity of intentional action all the way down, proposing that even the smallest “accidents” might be regarded as actions and extending the rationality of intentional relations all the way out—to encompass descriptions far past the sober consensus that would render what we do “salient.”

Thus, Eliot’s description of the poet’s work in his review essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers an account of mental action that encompasses within intention events that would seem to belong to the accidental environment of making, like the noise of a typewriter:

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (SP, 64)

And he juxtaposes this expanded category of the poet’s intention to an expanded category of the poets’ effect: “something … had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet” (SP, 64).

I want to say that this tradition of implausible explanations helps us to see why poetry might be a powerful place to think about the problem of historical change because poems seem like storehouses of precisely the kinds of action that are hard to see as already legible. They “elude foresight utterly” and are “occulted from most present sight.” They are a site of action in which the third-person category of meaningful action is encountered where it always and everywhere undertaken: in a resolutely first-person form. In poems, we turn the critic’s retrospective ingenuity in describing the meaning of past actions in the light of the world to which they belong into an attribution of intention. In doing this, however implausibly, we acknowledge something true: the future is, will be, has been, caused by the past. And we say something else that is true, but for which we have no adequate description: there will turn out to have been some causal relation between the actions of individuals acting on the basis of reasons they experience in the first-person, and the systems of understanding that make our actions retrospectively legible.

The lack of fit between the movement of the fingers, always undertaken by the poet, and the inflection point of an age, never quite produced by the poet, is what Kenner’s method allows us to visit. I’ll conclude by pointing to one more memorable instance of his descriptive texture, dwelling in the suggestive gap between inscrutable first-person action on the one hand and vast, inevitable, impersonal significance on the other, where the relation between the two is powerfully imputed but never quite arrives. It is in the one visit with Eliot that Kenner records at the heart of The Pound Era. The meeting took place at the Garrick club and places the poet’s careful, deliberate, and baffling manual manipulation of a piece of unidentified cheese alongside the implacable determinations of modernity experienced as impersonal fate:

He then took the Anonymous Cheese beneath his left hand, and the knife in his right hand, the thumb along the back of the blade as though to pare an apple. He then achieved with aplomb the impossible feat of peeling off a long slice. He ate this, attentively. He then transferred the Anonymous Cheese to the plate before him, and with no further memorable words proceeded without assistance to consume the entire Anonymous Cheese.

 

That was November 19, 1956. Joyce was dead, Lewis blind, Pound imprisoned; the author of The Waste Land not really changed, unless in the intensity of his preference for the anonymous.25

Eliot is resolutely, intensely present to Kenner: not dead, not blind, not imprisoned. He is moving his hands, expressing his preferences, in a way that will one day doubtless prove to be significant but that, in the present, can only look comical, pointless, inscrutable, anonymous, poetic. The extent that we take an interest in this action is the extent that we understand Eliot—and ourselves—as agents in history, as great actors who can be held responsible for acting meaningfully in ways whose legibility is not yet determined for us from the outside and in advance, but which will turn out of necessity to have been consequential. It will be as though we have made the future happen. Or, to put it differently, poetry is a place to entertain the inscrutable experience of seeming free.

So, what does Goodman say about Menard’s Quixote? For Goodman, writing with Catherine Z. Elgin, the identity of any text is determined by what they call its syntax—its particular “configuration[] of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks” and has nothing to do with “what the text says or otherwise refers to.”3 So, since Cervantes first produced the configuration of letters and spaces that is the Quixote, Borges’s title, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is a mistake; Cervantes is the author. But the end of the story, which describes Menard’s achievement as having contributed “a new technique” to “the slow and rudimentary art of reading”: “deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution”4 gets it right—properly understood, Menard is not a writer but a reader, and what he produces, according to Goodman and Nelson, is a new interpretation of the text that Cervantes wrote. That is, he attaches a different meaning to the same set of letters and spaces that Cervantes produced, but since what the text is is not determined by what Cervantes meant—it’s the production of letters and spaces, not meanings that makes him an author (or, to get a little ahead of ourselves, it’s what he did described without reference to what he understood himself as doing)—the fact that Menard’s meanings differ from Cervantes is not a problem. Even the fact that Menard is influenced by William James in a way that Cervantes’s could not have been is not a problem since it’s not unusual for there to be interpretations of a work that differ from the author’s; indeed, Goodman and Elgin say, a work can have “correct interpretations that its author cannot understand” (IAI, 574), like for example, Freudian interpretations of Hamlet.

Furthermore, since it’s the letters and spaces regardless of what the text says that constitute the work, it’s not only possible for there to be correct interpretations that differ from what the author might have meant by them, it’s possible for there to be texts whose authors did not mean anything by them. Texts authored by the usual monkeys with typewriters or by a machine would be the “limit case” here. Where Shakespeare might not have been able to understand a Freudian interpretation of Hamlet, the monkeys wouldn’t be able to “understand any interpretations” (IAI, 574) of the text they’d produced. But, if they were the first ones to produce it, they wouldn’t for that reason count any less as its authors. A text, Goodman and Nelson say, is an “inscription in a language” (IAI, 571). When that inscription took place is dispositive for the question of authorship but how it took place—whether by persons with views about history or by monkeys without even the concept of history—is irrelevant to the question of authorship and to everything else.

Of course, their point is not that writing without meaning anything by what got written is the sort of thing that usually, sometimes, or ever happens. That’s why it’s a limit case; what it shows is that a text written by Cervantes is as autonomous from its author as one written by monkeys. And for Kenner too, Menard’s Quixote points us toward a limit case, but not because it shows the way in which the break with the author, as unlikely as it is empirically, must logically always take place but because it shows that the break with the author is not unlikely but “unimaginable” and that, logically, it never takes place.

Why unimaginable? The answer comes clear when we look at Borges’s attempts to imagine it. Since Menard’s intention “was to produce a number of pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of … Cervantes,” he had “no intention” of “copying” Cervantes (CF, 91), Borges says, a point that Kenner insists on by identifying the interest of the project with our ability to “see behind arranged words the act of a man finding and arranging them” rather than “suppos[ing] these words were simply copied.”5 For if the words were simply copied, then there would actually be no point in copying them, you could just sign your own name to a copy that already existed (which is, for example, what Kenner thinks of Andy Warhol as doing with his soup cans). By contrast Menard ended producing “endless” drafts, which he “stubbornly corrected” in the process tearing up “thousands of handwritten pages” (CF, 95). Which makes it clear the process was difficult but doesn’t yet get us to Kenner’s point, which is not just that what Menard was doing was difficult but that it’s difficult to imagine what Menard was doing. Which we can begin to see just by asking ourselves on what criterion the torn-up pages were deemed inadequate.

Borges famously singles out for praise Menard’s description of “truth’ whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past …” (CF, 94). A rejected draft might have said something like this: “truth, whose father is history,” “preserver of time ….” Then “father” and “preserver” crossed out and replaced with “mother” and “rival,” the point of the revision being to express Menard’s thought better and also to make sure the text in which he expressed it coincided (“word for word and line for line”) with what Cervantes had written. Of course, it’s hardly likely that in expressing his own thoughts he would find himself doing so in Cervantes’s words, but that’s the problem that infinite time (like the monkeys and the typewriters or being “immortal” [CF, 91]) is supposed to solve. However, the idea that he could, in revising, check to see how he was doing is a deeper problem. You wouldn’t know that truth whose father is history was wrong unless you checked, but if you checked and then corrected, you’d be copying. So, you could never check. But if you didn’t know what the original said, how could you understand yourself to be trying to reproduce it? The difficulty of Menard’s project, in other words, is not exactly how hard it is to succeed in producing even a few sentences that coincide with rather than copy Cervantes but how hard it is even to try, how hard it is even to know what trying is.

Which is why Kenner calls the Menard “a hypothetical extreme case, uninhabitable like the summit of Everest.” “[I]t is doubtful,” he says, that “we are in the presence of a work of art, if we cannot imagine what a man went through to produce it” (C, 91). Which directly contradicts Goodman and Elgin’s idea that we can be in the presence of a work of art even if no man ever went through anything to produce it, even, that is, if it was produced by accident. For Goodman Menard’s Quixote is a limit case because it shows the fundamental autonomy of the text from the act that produced it; for Kenner it’s just the opposite—its uninhabitability demonstrates the irreducible connection between text and act. We thus have two fundamentally opposed theoretical positions: the act’s only relation to the work is as its cause (so therefore it doesn’t really matter how the Quixote was produced) versus the act determines both the meaning and the identity of the text (so Menard’s Quixote, if it could exist, would necessarily be different from Cervantes’s Quixote). And it’s worth noting that if Kenner’s position opposes him not only to Goodman and Elgin but also to the New Critical consensus in place at the time and to the deconstructive disarticulation of text from author just beginning to emerge, it allies him with philosophers like Stanley Cavell and David Lewis who, with respect to the Borges, urged us to not “to think of a fiction in the abstract, as a string of sentences” but as “a story told by a storyteller on a particular occasion.”6 “Different acts of storytelling, different fictions,” Lewis wrote in 1978, so, “When Pierre Menard re-tells Don Quixote, that is not the same fiction as Cervantes’s Don Quixote—not even if they are in the same language and match word for word.”7

But it’s also worth noting that neither what I’ve called Kenner’s position nor the opposing idea that the text is necessarily detached from the person who produces it is offered by him as a theoretical argument. The main point of The Counterfeiters is not to argue for a theoretical alternative to the idea of the text’s autonomy from its author but to analyze the aesthetic produced by the fantasy of that autonomy. Hence Goodman’s argument that a text can be produced even by someone who doesn’t understand it appears in Kenner not as a theoretical claim but as what he calls a “game”—the game of empiricism whose “central rule forbids you to understand what you are talking about” (C, 173), as when, for example, Gulliver explains human wars to the Houyhnhnms as disputes “whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh” or “whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine” (C, 139). If one way to understand these descriptions is as literalizations that reveal the pointlessness of religious war, the way that interests Kenner is rather as a “chronicle of” (by Gulliver) “uncomprehended externals” (C, 139). In other words, the target of Swift’s satire is less the folly of human behavior than the folly of trying to describe human behavior without reference to what people actually understand themselves to be doing. This is what Kenner calls the Gulliver game, embodied in its purest form in the Turing game, which identifies what it is to be human with the ability to produce the Goodmanian letters and spaces that would look just like the letters and spaces a human would produce, thereby making the computer indistinguishable from the human. The computer (and here he anticipates John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, which makes sense since Goodman’s idea of a text is a syntax independent of any semantics) is the most advanced player in the you’re not allowed to understand what you’re talking about game.

But, again, it’s not the theoretical mistake in imagining a text without a writer that mainly interests Kenner; it’s the aesthetic possibilities made available (or necessary) by what he sometime calls “suppress[ing] traces of origin” (C, 160) but what might be more accurately described as raising the question of origin.

So, for example, he’s interested in Wyndham Lewis’s account of how you forge a signature in The Revenge for Love: first because it’s clear that what you are counterfeiting is not an object but the act of producing an object; second because, Lewis recommends, you do it not by trying to make your own handwriting look like someone else’s but by turning that other person’s signature upside down and then drawing what you see. You achieve success, he says, not by becoming “however slightly, someone else” (C, 165), that is, not by doing what someone else has done, but by manufacturing a way not to see what someone else has done—by not reading the signature and copying what hasn’t been read (not so much imitating an act but replacing one act with another). And, of course, if we invert this process and instead of adding someone else’s signature to something we have made, we imagine ourselves adding our own signature to something we haven’t made (the exemplary instance for Kenner is Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, but more foundational variants would be R. Mutt’s Fountain or what could be anyone’s blank canvas), we can see why Kenner thinks of the relation to the signature and hence to the act as central to Modernism—why he thinks a book called The Counterfeiters is a book about modernism.

In this respect, Kenner is like Cavell not only with respect to his intentionalism (an intentionalism that is built into the idea that what it means to understand a work is to know what the person who made it was doing) but in their shared sense that modernism makes the question of what the artist was doing—of how the object was made—particularly acute. When Kenner says that the counterfeiter of a twenty dollar bill “is imitating … not the bill but the moment when the bill was … issued by the Treasury” (C, 83), he is insisting on the relation between what the object is and what it was made to be. And when Cavell invokes a familiar skepticism about some abstract art—“A child could do it”8—he is insisting on the importance of an account of what the artist did that will distinguish it from what the child (having perhaps made a similar object) did.

But the way Cavell puts his point is by saying that what he calls the “dangers” of the “counterfeit” and of “fraudulence” are in modernism revealed more clearly than ever to be “essential to art,” and so the pressure to distinguish between the “counterfeit” and “the real thing”9 is more intense than ever. Whereas for Kenner, the counterfeit is not exactly the alternative to the real thing. It’s not as if The Counterfeiters is a book about exposing frauds or about defending the real thing—it’s about establishing the real thing under conditions in which the possibility of its fraudulence is understood as internal to it, as part of what it means to be and a resource for making it real.

Maybe a way to put this is just to say that in Kenner, what was about (in 1968) to be called postmodernism was not exactly the enemy of modernism but already part of what had become its logic, that the threat of a work of art not looking like a work of art was precisely what made it crucial to be able to imagine what the artist went through in trying to produce it—not so much because what the artist went through guarantees its sincerity (another term that’s crucial to Cavell but irrelevant in Kenner) but rather because it was the artist’s ability to incorporate a relation to what she went through in making the work that counted as its claim to be a work. Hence making good work and making bad work can’t be transposed into being sincere and being a fraud.

This is the modernism of the postmodern—of what Jennifer Ashton tried to call (Cambridge University Press wouldn’t let her) modernism post post modernism. It isn’t exactly Cavell’s modernism or even, it seems to me, the modernism of The Pound Era. Even though a lot of it is about the eighteenth century, the aesthetic described in The Counterfeiters comes into being after that of The Pound Era. The Counterfeiters needs both Duchamp and Turing—needs a theory that refused the relation between the act and the object in order to be interested in the irreducibility of that relation. The Pound Era understands itself as centered in the world before the First War—Duchamp’s first readymade may have been produced in 1914 but Kenner’s “men of 1914” are the Vortex, and his subject in that book is the simultaneous extension and dissolution of what, in his terms, we could call the pattern of energies the Vortex consisted in. By contrast, the question of the difference between a urinal and Fountain or a person and a computer (or a blank canvas and a painting) is one that would only fully emerge after the Second War.

At the same time (and in the face of these differences), I’d like to end by remembering that The Counterfeiters does nonetheless have a significant relation to The Pound Era—it was written, Kenner says, as an experiment in solving the “formal difficulties” he found himself confronted with trying to write The Pound Era, for which “a linear narrative would not do, and a sequence of essays was unthinkable.” What he wanted instead was to “keep many themes going, by local saturation and cross reference” (C, 180).  I’m not sure how accurately that describes what he actually did in either book, but I do think his desire not to write a single author study is important, as was his success in imagining not quite imitable instances of alternative literary histories. If The Pound Era produces a somewhat different modernism from The Counterfeiters, they’re nonetheless both committed to a formal structure and a kind of coherence that is not of the life or the person or even the text—one that might be more visibly identified with the Foucauldian episteme (or the idea of the vortex itself). And although nothing came easier to Kenner (or to Foucault for that matter) than writing books, The Counterfeiters even more than The Pound Era raises the question of what a critical book that’s not a narrative or a series of readings or a study of a topic (or, primarily, an argument) can be. Of course, one answer is the elaboration of a theoretical position, but that’s not exactly what The Counterfeiters is either—it’s maybe more like a set of historical variations on a theoretical problem. Which both as a thesis about how to understand the history of art and literature and as an intervention in the question of how to write a book, continues to seem to me an interesting provocation.