Akrasia and the Aesthetic: Human Agency and the Site of Literature, 1760-1820

This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced in representing human action and the will. The study focuses in particular on cases of “acting against better judgment” or “failing to do what one knows one ought to do” – concepts originally theorized as “akrasia” and “weakness of the will” in ancient Greek and Scholastic thought. During the Enlightenment, philosophy increasingly conceives of human minds and bodies like systems and machines, and consequently fails to address such cases except as intractable or incoherent. Yet eighteenth-century and Romantic narratives and poetry consistently engage the paradoxes and ambiguities of action and volition in representations of akrasia. As a result, literature develops representational strategies that distinguish the epistemic capacities of literature as privileged over those of philosophy.

The study begins by centering on narratives of distempered selves from the 1760s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey narrate cases of knowingly and weakly acting against better judgment, and in so doing, reveal the limitations of the “philosophy of the passions” that famously informed sentimental literature at the time. These texts find that the interpretive difficulties of action demand a non-systematic and hermeneutic approach to interpreting a self through the genre of narrative. Rousseau’s narrative in particular informs William Godwin’s realist novels of distempered subjects. Departing from his mechanistic philosophy of mind and action, Godwin develops the technique of free indirect discourse in his third novel Fleetwood (1805) as a means of evoking the ironies and self-deceptions in how we talk about willing.

Romantic poetry employs the literary trope of weakness of will primarily through the problem of regretted inaction – a problem which I argue motivates the major poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and John Keats. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to characterize his weakness of will in philosophical writing, Wordsworth turns to poetry with The Prelude (1805), revealing poetry itself to be a self-deceiving and disappointing form of procrastination. More explicitly than Wordsworth, John Keats identifies indolence as the prime symbol and basis of what he calls “negative capability.” In his letters and poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Keats reveals how the irreducibly contradictory qualities of human agency speak to the particular privilege of “disinterested aesthetics” – a genre fitted for the modern era for its ability to disclose contradictions without seeking to resolve or explain them in terms of component parts.

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past, An Introduction

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).