Dé studie over Spinoza en de Romantiek moet nog verschijnen - #Spinoza

althans volgens hoogleraar aan het College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan [cf.] Marjorie Levinson, van wie vorige maand bij OUP verscheen

Marjorie Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry. Field Reports on Romantic Lyric. Oxford University Press, 02 August 2018 – books.google

TOC

1: Introduction: Crooked Lines and Moving Targets

Part 1. Theory: Materialism against Itself

 2: The New Historicism: Back to the Future

 3: Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art

 4: Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialism: Modeling Praxis Without Subjects and Objects

 5: A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza

 6: What is New Formalism?

Part 2. Criticism: Field Theories of Form

 7: Of Being Numerous

 8: Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers

 9: Parsing the Frost: The Growth of a Poet's Sentence in 10: The Plain Sense of Things

 11: Conclusion: Lyric-The Idea of this Invention

 

Het vijfde hoofdstuk was eerder verschenen als

Marjorie Levinson, “A motion and a spirit: Romancing Spinoza” [In Studies in romanticism 46 (4):367-400 · December 2007 [cf. abstract bij scinapse, cf. jstor]

In dat artikel lezen we: “The genre of what follows is better considered as an introduction to a full-length study of Spinoza in and for Romanticism than as a free-standding demonstration of that connection. The key figures in that study will be William Blake, Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and P.B. Shelley.”

Het is een zeer gedegen artikel – nu hoofdstuk -, waaruit blijkt dat Marjorie Levinson Spinoza en het Spinozisme sinds de 60-iger jaren diepgaand heeft bestudeerd.

Om dat te illustreren neem ik hier bijlage D van vijf bijlagen over.

Appendix D: Althusser's borrowings from Spinoza were seminal for the theorists who followed. Specifically, Althusser cited Spinoza as the source for his theory of structural causality and his theory of knowledge, Althusser's two great departures from both mainstream (at that time) Marxism and from the Hegelian Marxisms that followed. Althusser famously challenged the classical Marxian binary, knowledge vs. ideology, defining the latter as the way that individuals live their relation to the real, which, in his system, signifies the totality. On this reading, ideology is not false consciousness (as in, an idea without an object) but consciousness plain and simple, and as such (given the immanence of mind in body and of the individual in the body-social, body-politic, etc.), ideology is also the expression (or, instantiation) of the real. This position is now nearly normative in the humanities and has been from the emergence of new historicism more than twenty years ago, travesties of its crudely realist epistemology (and moral-ism) notwithstanding.

At the same time, Althusser insists upon different levels of knowledge. He correlates these, however, not with perceptual or reflective powers arising from praxis but as the differential effects of the structural whole (or, we might say, of its internal systemic interactions), resulting from (again, my gloss) the organizational complexity of the system: that is, its consisting of many relatively autonomous levels. (That last phrase is Althusser's, a famously inscrutable one, and doubtless related to Spinoza's adequacy standard of truth). That phenomenon, "structural causality," is formulated by Althusser as the effectivity of a structure on its elements (does elements designate persons, classes, subject-positions, apparatuses, levels?). Structural causality is also, in his phrase, the effectivity of the whole on the part, implying that the part does not come into existence until the whole crystallizes as a totality: the part, thus, being a kind of back-formation of the whole. This concept of causality serves to link base to superstructure (and all the levels in between) by a logic other than that of either reflection or production, surpassing thus the theory-praxis binary and also collapsing the time-line of historical change, folding cause into effect and past and future into the present. One can feel how bewildering a design this is, i.e., a cause that comes into being only in and as its effects, a cause that, although it does not precede those effects, does explain them, remaining, however, as an explanation, absolutely immanent to those effects. Bewildering, but enthralling.

Sadly, Althusser, whose total output on Spinoza numbers only 50 pages, never actually said what he took from the philosopher and maddeningly, he never said how structural causality worked (nor, how it squared with his law of "determination in the last instance," which could seem its direct antithesis). Even the modest expansion above is mine, not Althusser's. Fredric Jameson helpfully distinguished structural causality from mechanical and expressive causality (respectively, billiard balls and organisms) but not even he could go beyond negative definition.

I think we can finally begin to understand these ideas because they tally in a deep and precise way with models of determination and of thought-action relations developed in those biological and physical research domains I have mentioned. Moreover, contemporary models of recursion provide a good gloss of the causal looping—the circularity and retroactivity—central to the description of structural causality.