:Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewInfectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism. Robert Mitchell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. x+322.Colin JagerColin JagerRutgers University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLeft-identified intellectuals have enjoyed beating up on liberalism for some time. Liberalism’s omnipresence, not to mention its association with individual liberty, private property, and (especially) a market economy, have made it an irresistible counter in the academic parlor game of demonstrating that those who seem to be our friends are in fact our enemies. In his excellent book, Robert Mitchell writes that, having absorbed the critique of liberalism in graduate school, its primary theorists seemed to him “cramped, provincial, and reactionary” compared to the excitements of continental theory (vii). I imagine this bit of intellectual autobiography will resonate with Mitchell’s readers; it certainly did with me. I too learned in graduate school that novels inculcated liberal norms (individualism, agency, freedom) and that liberalism was pernicious—or, as Mitchell puts it in more measured terms, that literature was “a technology of normativity” (2). Was I supposed to hate novels, then?Infectious Liberty guides its readers beyond this intellectual cul-de-sac. Mitchell writes that when he read Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, and Roberto Esposito’s development of Foucault’s ideas, he came to see the liberal tradition as concerned with groupings, averages, and collective experiments, not simply with individual agency and private property. Liberalism, in short, was a mode of biopolitics: it was a way of seeing the world in terms of populations, regularities, collective bodies, and the overall processes of life and death (illness, production, birth, etc.). Like Foucault and Esposito, Mitchell is not interested in condemning biopolitics or getting rid of it, “whatever that might mean” (x). Rather, he follows Esposito by parsing it: on the one hand, into the death-dealing “thanatopolitics” that emerge in the work of Agamben and others, focused on security and survival; on the other, into an “affirmative biopolitics” focused on openness and transformation. One name for that affirmative biopolitics, Mitchell argues, is Romanticism.Infectious Liberty is divided into six chapters. The first three are organized by way of concepts familiar to literary scholars: genius, difference, character, and free indirect discourse. Chapters 4 through 6 take up more general concepts in critical sociology: flow, experiment, and self-regulation. All the chapters are characterized by an admirably dialectical impulse toward complication and nuance. Mitchell seems interested in clarity rather than academic point scoring, and so I fear my summary below will scarcely do justice to his arguments. This is particularly ironic because Mitchell himself is a marvelous summarizer of complicated material; I particularly admired the economy and clarity of his accounts of John Guillory (41–42), Franco Moretti (68–73), Ulrich Beck (173–78), and Bruno Latour (220–26), which are almost worth the price of admission on their own.The first chapter considers the relationship between genius and population. Some eighteenth-century commentators thought that the matter was arithmetical: a larger population would increase the number of geniuses. Others thought that genius might be related to particular social environments. A more complex possibility was that there were plenty of geniuses around, but that they were in danger of being overlooked or forgotten. Those latter possibilities, of course, are associated with literary texts: Gray’s Elegy, in the first instance, and Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in the second. In a move that will be characteristic of the book as a whole, Mitchell argues that these literary texts deepen a reader’s ability to grasp the “complex internal dynamics” of populations (47). In this way Romantic literature makes the question of genius a biopolitical one, not in the blunt sense of increase and decrease (a paradigm associated with thanatopolitics) but rather by “approach[ing] populations as entities that have capacities for creating new norms” (49).The idea that literary writing complicates a given discourse in the direction of transformation rather than security carries over into chapter 2, on “imagining the population” (50). Here Mitchel revisits the Godwin-Malthus controversy, observing that despite their real disagreements both men regarded differences within populations as largely irrelevant; they thought in terms of the mass, not the individual. Mitchell contrasts this with Frankenstein, a novel that endeavors to train its readers to see and imagine multiple kinds of populations—including a population of creatures in South America, a possibility famously destroyed by the Malthusian Victor.In chapter 3, Mitchell expands the claim that “population” names not only a homogenized group but a collection of mappable differences. The novelistic development of character systems and of free indirect discourse makes this clear: “characters” include not just humans but nonhuman agents, and free indirect discourse registers not only thoughts in human minds but “nondiscursive forces that bear upon collective biological existence” (79), like the structural logic of assumptions that underlie particular experiences. Free indirect discourse, in other words, is the place where consciousness intersects population dynamics; in Zola’s The Human Beast, for example, a character’s “pathological relationship to women” is linked to “the vast transportation network and administrative bureaucracy created by the train system” (101). Appealing to systems theory and Latour rather than to models of ideology or disciplinarity, Mitchell argues that free indirect discourse maps intersections between “biological forces and social relations at which pressure can be exerted” in a more liberatory direction (101).Chapter 4 investigates how Romantic-era writers thought “globally” (113)—how, that is, they came to understand phenomena like weather or population as intrinsically global. Mitchell turns to texts by Erasmus Darwin and P. B. Shelley that reflect on human transformations of their global environment by means of terraforming and improving the weather. What Shelley and Darwin grasped, he proposes, is the concept of flow: since we are on a globe, any movement in a particular direction will ultimately come back around to its point of origin. This is true for physics, meteorology, and political economy. Mitchell argues that this Romantic tradition has much to offer our age of climate change, for while most theories of the Anthropocene are focused on security and mere survival, the Romantic emphasis on flow is oriented toward joyful repair.Wordsworth and Coleridge famously described the Lyrical Ballads as an experiment, and Burke called the French Revolution a “dangerous experiment.” In chapter 5, Mitchell argues that not only was the Romantic era one of collective experimentation, but the notion of collective experiment was more important to the development of liberalism than individual liberty. The chapter thus proposes a counterhistory of liberal biopolitics itself as a series of variations on the notion of collective experiment, from early eighteenth-century smallpox inoculation through the institutional foci of Burke and Mill to two latter-day developments: the neoliberalism of Hayek and the neo-Romantic “risk society” of Ulrich Beck. Echoing the transformative aspects of Romantic experimentation, Beck makes it possible to articulate normative projects that depart from the mechanisms of security and survival that dominate neoliberal theory. The “liberal schema of survival is contested,” Mitchell writes, “whenever a community refuses to accept expert risk thresholds” (182); for Beck, at stake in such refusals is an implicit normative claim of the form this is how we want to live. As Mitchell is all too aware, it becomes impossible not to think of contemporary vaccine hesitancy and climate change discourse as exemplifying such neo-Romantic collective experiments—for better and for worse.Does regulation come from a sovereign who establishes a rule, or from a more mysterious quality of self-regulation? The first may be exemplified in the institutions of standard weights and measures, the second by monetary policy, where the “natural” rate of interest is determined by a series of inspired guesses by actors who possess neither sovereign authority nor all the facts. The oscillation between sovereign regulation and self-regulation is the subject of Mitchell’s sixth and final chapter. Admirably in my view, Mitchell wants to wean humanities scholars from the tendency to read “self-regulation” entirely through the lenses of governmentality, as if it is necessarily a normalizing project. Inspired again by Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics, Mitchell traces the possibilities of transformation in Kant’s “regulative ideal” of reason and Hannah Arendt’s Kant-inspired “common world.” In this tradition, thinking is inherently social, done in the presence of others and undertaken always from a particular position. Such self-regulation may of course lead to the neoliberal assertion of the market as the “natural” model of all relations; but it may also lead, Mitchell argues, to those practices of collective resource management that we know as the Commons.Methodologically, two points stand out in this consistently enlightening study. The first is how little of its argument hangs on readings of literary texts. To be sure, imaginative works by Thomas Gray, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley do appear, alongside prominent works of Romantic-era prose by Burke and especially Malthus. Still, the only chapter that really gestures toward an interpretive reading is chapter 2, where Frankenstein is posed against Godwin and Malthus as a representative of literary “difference.” Even here, the claim for literature is a comparatively weak one: that Frankenstein “enabled readers to think through the implications of multiple models of population” (68). The second point, very much related to the first, is Mitchell’s studious distance from symptomatic reading. Aside from a couple of measured paragraphs critiquing the “general literary-critical tendency to understand biopolitics as something that should be opposed at all costs” (12), this is not a polemical book. Mitchell simply remarks from time to time that he has little interest in viewing liberalism, biopolitics, Romanticism, or indeed literature itself, as engaged in projects that need to be either exposed or celebrated. Here he follows the lead of the late Foucault, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour. Of course, Romanticism and liberalism are entwined in all sorts of complicated ways; but Mitchell’s goal “is not, fundamentally, to critique Romanticism as a mode of liberal ideology, but rather to understand Romanticism as an attempt to steer the biopolitical critique of liberalism toward more liberatory shores” (9). These two methodological points are related, I think, because by definition symptomatic reading presupposes the importance of its target—why else expend so much interpretive energy on it? By sticking to the entirely correct observation that there are good and bad kinds of biopolitics, just as there are more and less desirable forms of liberalism, Mitchell also lowers the moral and ideological weight assigned to any given text or its interpretation. Rather than proffer ideal solutions to material problems, he says, literary texts propose “a multitude of different models and norms” for grasping the social whole of which they are a part (5). One inevitable result is that Romanticism as a literary movement remains mostly offstage. What we see instead is a Romanticism that helps to orient an affirmative biopolitics—that is to say, one with self-transformation rather than self-preservation as its goal. Readers interested in moving beyond the historical-contextual paradigm that has dominated so much literary study will find much to think about—and to celebrate—here. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722228 Views: 114Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 09, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.