>Slightly up the "ladder of being" (as Eighner calls it) in America are the
>so-called "white trash." (see Spike Jonze's character in _Three Kings_.)
Lars Eighner writes:
***** One of the yuppie excuses for not giving money to panhandlers is that the money might be spent on liquor. Surely the money would not be put to a better purpose if it were donated to an agency and used to make a payment on a social worker's Volvo.
The truth is that the vices of the homeless do not much differ from the vices of the housed, but the homeless, unless they become saints, must pursue their vices in public. (_Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets_, NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1993, p. 165) *****
One of the ideological problems under capitalism is that it displaces the fundamental contradiction between capital & labor onto futile & yet endless antagonisms between better-off & worse-off segments of the working class (yuppies versus homeless; clients versus social workers; workers in rich nations versus workers in poor ones; etc.). Better-off proletarians are delegated by capital to shame & control worse-off proletarians; and by doing so, better-paid proles are, in the end, controlling themselves, becoming "responsible citizens" who are eager to maintain Law & Order, abolish social welfare in the name of "personal responsibility," etc. In turn, moralism & workerism condemn, in vain, better-off proles as if they were the main source of the sufferings of the poor. Both sides are unfortunately committed to the politics of experience & the epistemology of empiricism.
The politics of experience & the epistemology of empiricism are dead ends, for capitalism as the mode of production is at bottom determined by what is unrepresented & unrepresentable in experience & empiricism.
Bruce Robbins writes in "Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in _Bleak House_," _Bleak House / Charles Dickens_, ed. Jeremy Tambling (NY: St. Martins's P, 1998):
***** In the decade of the 1840s, 'there occurred a cataclysmic event, far more dramatic than anything that happened in England, a very short geographic distance away....That was, of course, the famine in Ireland -- a disaster without comparison in Europe. Yet if we consult the two maps of either the official ideology of the period or the recorded subjective experience of its novels, neither of them extended to include this catastrophe right on their doorstep, causally connected to socio-political processes in England.' According to the editors of _New Left Review_, who offer this statement for Raymond Williams' consideration in _Politics and Letters_ (1979), English fiction of the nineteenth century and the English criticism concerned with it have both privileged 'national experience', and thus have omitted what by many accounts would be the most significant aspects of the period. Because the French Revolution of 1848, for example, is 'not a national experience in the direct sense', neither it nor other 'foreign or overseas development' can turn up in Williams' account of the English literature of the 1840s. For Williams' interlocutors, the conclusion extends to literary criticism as a whole: 'It is not possible to work back from texts to structures of feeling to experiences to social structures.' Since literary texts are tied to 'experience' and since 'experience' seems to neglect whatever is distant or international, the study of literature cannot be asked to furnish knowledge of 'the total historical process' or of how human beings might act in and upon 'an integrated world economy'.[1]
In response to this challenge, Williams offers the counter-example of Dickens. Dickens' novels, he says, attempt 'to find fictional forms for seeing what is not seeable' (p. 171). If it is generally true that the novel produces knowable communities only at the cost of blindness to international effects, determinants, and analogues, it is no less true that Dickens managed to represent a world 'increasingly dominated by processes that could only be grasped statistically or analytically -- a community unknowable in terms of manifest experience' (p. 247). In effect, Williams suggests, Dickens has made experience out of what seemed beyond experience -- and in so doing has proved the possibility of continuing to write novels adequate to 'an integrated world economy'.
Whether or not a political defence of literary study rests upon it, this argument seems a valuable one to interrogate further....
[1] Raymond Williams, _Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review_ (London, 1979), pp. 165-70.
(Robbins 139-40) *****
The question asked by the NLR editors & Raymond Williams' answer to it are important, even _or especially_ aside from how one evaluates the roles of literature & literary criticism in general & Charles Dickens' novels & criticisms of them in particular.
The interview brings the problem of empiricism to light and in doing so points to the necessity of theory. As Robbins argues in the aforementioned article, "a detached, impersonal point of view which subordinates individual feelings to the perspective of the system as a whole" has become "indispensable." Theory is another name for this point of view, the point of view that refuses to conflate the political with the ethical, the personal, the experiential, etc.
Yoshie