The Future of Possibility

Anne-Lise François’s Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience announces on its back cover that it will deal with movements of “affirmative reticence” and of “recessive action.” So what do we make of these deliberately near-paradoxical phrases? Throughout her book, which consists of a chapter gesturing “Toward a Theory of Recessive Action” and three long chapters of literary analysis, François continues to offer carefully worded near-synonyms that together circumscribe the particular kind of experience that she is interested in; we read about a “nonemphatic,” a “self-canceling,” and a “non-epiphanic” “revelation,” about an “affirmative passivity,” or about a “reticent assertion” (xvi, 3, 43, 267, xix). It is easy enough to see that all of these phrases are structured in a similar way: a moment of affirmation goes together with an element that checks the thrust of that affirmation. Yet it is crucial that we do not simply understand the tension between these two conjoined elements as a movement of disappointment or limitation: François insists that we read it in the opposite direction and instead consider this tension as the expression of a “nonappropriative” or “minimal” contentment, as, indeed, an “oddly satisfying reprieve or ‘letdown'” (xvii-xxi). We must, in other words, understand the book’s signature list of near-synonymous near-paradoxes not only as compressed movements of self-restraint or disillusionment, but also as the expression of a capacity to find sufficiency and value in ostensibly non-promising, and potentially disappointing, places. Such admittedly unspectacular experiences of a mildly surprising lack of disappointment, grief, or pain are at the heart of François’s book.
 
These experiences suggest a manifestly non-heroic capacity to, quite simply, make do with less. That Open Secrets phrases this suggestion in a vocabulary that combines more or less familiar theoretical lexicons points to its ambition to articulate its “less is, if not more, then at least enough” ethos as an original theoretical intervention in its own right. The most obvious positions from which the book’s appreciation of “patient or benevolent abandonment” (xx) is to be differentiated are traditional utilitarian ideologies of improvement. Such ideologies measure the value of a given action by looking at what this action materially produces; they go together with an implicit or explicit call to convert all potentialities into an actual yield (François’s paradigm here is the biblical parable of the talents). This ethos is unwilling to credit a desire unless its externalization is actively pursued; it remains blind to experiences that do not enter the public record; it impels us to act upon the knowledge we have. As such, it presents an immensely influential model of action that defines action as “confer[ring] actuality on the previously latent” (16). The unobtrusive movements that François deals with set aside the domination of actualization and production by making room for “experiences that may not want, need, or be capable of louder articulation” (16). The point of these experiences is that they manage to credit the merely private life of desires that are not relentlessly pursued and of wishes that are, for whatever reason, not accomplished. The latency and potentiality of these experiences is not condemned as defective or incomplete–they are simply not considered from the point of view of maximization or fulfillment. François’s main example here is the story of Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678). In this novel, the death of the heroine’s husband leaves her free to pursue her passion for the man she loves, a possibility that she rather startlingly leaves unactualized. While doing nothing so heroic as resisting the ethos of production and actualization, the princess manages to render it inoperative.
 
The critique of Enlightenment discourses of utility and improvement has of course long been a staple of literary and cultural studies. What is remarkable in François’s book is that her insistence on the sufficiency of potentiality (independent of its manifest and material actualization) allows her to show that many critical discourses notably deconstruction and the new historicism–simply adopt the primacy of actuality. Where proponents of the Enlightenment only count achieved production and full articulation, these critical perspectives admittedly do consider that there are forces and experiences below the visible surface of things; still, they tend to interpret these things’ lack of visibility too one-sidedly as the result of a violent repression, as an injustice that they then seek to rectify by bringing hidden experiences to light. Like more traditional perspectives, deconstruction and the new historicism (and any number of projects that aim to recover the historical experiences of non-privileged groups) thus fail to consider latency and potentiality as anything other than a defective, imperfect articulation. Intent on recovering hidden meanings and lost histories, they remain unprepared to accept the evidence of experiences that do not require “either the work of disclosure or the effort of recovery” (xvi). Especially in her discussion of the poetry of Dickinson and Wordsworth, François presents poetic instances of apparent indifference, blankness, or “tonelessness” that are, as she argues, not so much the result of the willful suppression of particular historical experiences or of the elision of inexpressible grief, but simply “a form of constative simplicity” (157); these examples indeed produce very little emotional effect, and they convey a sense of energies carelessly spent, but this unremarkableness is a property of these experiences themselves, and emphatically not of the wilful repression of a positive content. As such, they make clear that the revisionist and redemptive zeal of many critical studies misses an admittedly slight but vital dimension of experience.
 
While criticism since the 1970s has confronted the Western tradition by recovering (racial, sexual, cultural, etc.) perspectives that have remained “uncounted” in that tradition, Open Secrets corrects these approaches by showing that their ethos of recovery in its turn fails to count the kind of experiences that do not require the effort of recovery. The reason François’s book does not itself qualify as another work of retrieval is quite simply that the experiences she focuses on escape the opposition between absence and actuality, and thus the movement from loss to recovery. For all their inconspicuousness, these experiences remain outside the very dialectic of loss and retrieval that has been so important for criticism since the 1970s. As critics like Eric Santer and Greg Forter have argued,¹ the categories of loss and absence determine the “melancholic” model of subjectivity that has reigned in many dominant critical currents: so the poststructuralist subject is a linguistic being who lacks the fullness of being, and politicized critical agendas tend to define the subject through the particular losses he or she has endured. François’s correction of this dominant “melancholic” trend is nowhere more clear than in her discussion of the “graveside loiterers” that abound in Wordsworth’s poetry and of Thomas Hardy’s dispassionate poems on the death of his wife; these poems, she writes, stage mourners who abjure “the heroism of loss” (131): “Hardy’s elegist cannot make himself feel the difference between his wife’s absence in life and in death,” and the poem thus only revisits her death in order to affirm that he has “not suffered a loss” (153-54).
 
These “indifferent mourner[s]” or “bearer[s] of weightless loss” (194) recognize that the loss of a life does not always lead to unbearable feelings of guilt or grief (and what is equally important is that this lack of feeling does in its turn not lead to feelings of guilt about not feeling guilty enough). François’s critique of the dialectic of loss and recovery also takes issue with a tendency in much contemporary theory to invest an almost infinite ethical responsibility in the subject who finds him or herself confronted with injustice and loss.² She shows how such an imperative to act and to speak out is complicit with the conception of action as production and articulation. François not only discerns this conception in the standard Western “fantasy of the all-responsible subject” (267), but, more surprisingly perhaps, also in “the numerous tropes of passive agency, singularity, and nonrelation informing postmodern ethical thought” (27). Such an “overemphasis on limitless responsibility and infinite debt” is most famously encountered in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and they tend to “elevate the infinitesimal to the status of an impossible and absolute ideal” (61-64). Because situations that are perceived as not entirely satisfactory or complete are all too hastily interpreted as radically lacking, these perspectives fail to account for those elements of experience that do not require either articulation or actualization, and for those aspects of our response to reality that are experienced as simply adequate and sufficient.³
 
The greatest merit of Open Secrets is the way in which its attention to the intrinsic sufficiency of minimal experiences allows us to appreciate the continuity between many of the dominant critical paradigms in postmodern thought and Enlightenment models of action-as-production. Because these critical paradigms tend to interpret every representational inadequacy as a violent repression, they cultivate the loss of a particular content and attempt to restore it to full actuality. This insistence on full actualization, which these perspectives inherit from the very tradition they criticize, cannot but lead to a disappointment with the real world; the injustices and the losses in this world place a demand upon the subject that it can never hope to meet. Wordsworth’s poet, Hardy’s indifferent mourner, and Lafayette’s princess confront this tradition (and the more recent “tradition” of criticisms of that earlier tradition) with instances that escape its organizing dialectic. They are, François writes, protagonists who “show their colors, sometimes to shocking effect, by what they are prepared to accept and settle on–if not as ‘normal’ then as ‘sufficient'” (65).
 
The truly strange thing about the alternative that François formulates is that the instances she presents are, as the last quote makes clear, at the same time deliberately unremarkable and potentially “shocking.” In order to understand this almost paradoxical combination, we must be aware to what extent we in our critical climate have grown accustomed to seeing in figures of unobtrusive passivity, of unemployment, of désoeuvrement, a subversive or even a messianic potential. When the protagonists of the book claim “the privilege to ignore” (2), I think that we are entitled to see them as notso distant relatives of that unlikely hero of contemporary theory, Bartleby, the Scrivener. Thanks to Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of Melville’s famous story in his influential work on potentiality, we have learned to consider Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” as the expression of an attitude that neither consents nor refuses, but that instead declines the choice between these two options. For Agamben, Bartleby’s deflection effectively renders inoperative the logic that would force him to choose. Bartleby’s potentiality not to participate is thus thoroughly effective as such, without it having to pass into actuality (through, for instance, a form of active resistance). François’s attention to her protagonists’ setting aside of the demands put upon them by ideologies of improvement similarly wants to propose a potential “that is already fully effective and significant as potential and whose value has nothing to do with its being realized” (104).
 
This comes so close to Agamben’s work on potentiality that it is hard to avoid viewing François’s protagonists through the lens of Agamben’s Homo Sacer and to resist attributing to them a radical, even messianic significance. That François yet wants to avoid these claims is most clear when she mentions Agamben’s recent work as symptomatic of the current theoretical compulsion to radicalize negativity (64). Another indication that we should not take the insistence on “affirmative passivity” as part of a messianic politics is the book’s choice of Fanny in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as its clearest example of such a passivity. Fanny, François writes, sits uneasily “between the sense of passivity as submissive acquiescence and that of passivity as privileged leisure” (267); I believe that François intends the explicitly bourgeois and politically tainted status of this example–to which Edward Said, among others, has made us attentive–to keep her theory from being misread as a radical political statement (and the same goes for her candid acknowledgement that the “open secret” in her title, which indicates something that is simply there without lending itself to investigation or affirmation, can be considered as “a trope for the implicit workings of ideology itself” [5]).
 
The care with which François attempts to render the experiences on which she focuses unavailable for political recuperation gives us a better clue to the political import of her book than do Agamben’s grandiose claims for figures of potentiality. The book intuits that what may be required in order to maintain the effectivity of potentiality as such is an active intervention that pre-empts the actualization of potentiality. In a brief passage, François tells us that the book began as a thought-experiment to understand the strange value accorded in environmentalist discourse to doing “as little as possible.” Her example of such a quiet intervention is the practice of tree spiking, in which eco-activists drive ceramic nails into trees in order to discourage logging, because the nails threaten to damage the logging machines. The activist thus attempts to render these trees safe by arming them “with a power to harm that she hopes they will never actually have to use” (37). Apart from offering an example where (a) potentiality (to harm) becomes effective as such, this practice also removes the possibility of using the trees’ wood for industrial purposes (in the same way, I would argue, that François’s book renders her protagonists unavailable for political recuperation). The activists, in François’s words, “give notice of an unrealized x and, just as surely and swiftly, put it irretrievably ‘off limits,’ beyond development” (36); they exemplify a “type of minimally inflected transition from the latency of unactualized, dormant possibility . . . to ‘more’ absolute privation” (38). While this is not the place to discuss all the ramifications of this immunization of (a) potentiality (for abuse), it seems safe to say that it has less to do with the “strong” messianism of Agamben than with the more minimalist “weak” messianism of Benjamin, who wrote that “every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it . . . even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” (391).
 
Although I focus here on Open Secrets‘ theoretical merits, I need to add that François’s readings of literature not only reveal a stunning capacity to concentrate on formal details, but also manage to put forward interpretations that future critics of the works in question will likely have to contend with for a long time to come. François’s choice of texts–a seventeenth-century French novel, three poetical oeuvres from the very long nineteenth century (Hardy, Wordsworth, and Dickinson), and a novel by a writer who is famously hard to periodize (Mansfield Park)–seems almost deliberately to bracket questions of literary history. What interests François is the formal means through which these works make room for “recessive action” and for potentiality in two genres that serve as important ideological tools of the dominant ethos of production and articulation: the novel, which raises the expectation of goal-oriented action and self-improvement, and the lyric, which generally serves as a vehicle for self-expression. François shows how an “antinovelistic conception of experience” (200) is embodied in La Princesse de Clèves through the use of the passé simple, the “tense of completed action,” the tense that locates “the event outside of the person of the narrator,” which contributes to an impersonal style that allows the princess a “release from responsibility” (87, 84, 89). In the case of Austen’s novel, François demonstrates that the novel allows Fanny to escape the ideology of improvement through the use of free indirect speech. This tense “makes available for silent reading experiences that may not want, need, or be capable of louder articulation” without conferring actuality “on the previously latent” (16). By presenting Fanny’s experience through such third-person narration, the novel “relieves Fanny from first-person assertions” (224), in the same way that the passé simple releases the princess from the burden of having to take responsibility for her each and every action. In the discussion of the poetry of Hardy, Wordsworth, and Dickinson, finally, the focus is firmly on the distinction between “narrative telos and lyric inconsequence” (139). François coins a “lyric subgenre,” the “lyric of inconsequence,” which attempts to give shape to a release from narrative expectations and to make room for “the possibilities of nonsequential connection” (154). The poems of Wordsworth, Hardy, and Dickinson that she categorizes under this label “release” temporal difference “from the obligation to produce significant narrative difference” (180). While we can only hope that these literary analyses point the way to further research on the formal means through which other media shape such a release from teleological progression–“temporal” media such as music and film immediately come to mind–it is no small merit of Open Secrets that it so convincingly argues for the possibility of wresting literary media away from their recuperation by ideologies of production and articulation.