Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature - Hardcover

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Mitchum Huehls is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time and co-editor (with Rachel Greenwald Smith) of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

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This book is about three big ideas—art, theory, and revolution—that have persisted in contemporary fiction despite having been supposedly killed off by postmodernism. Why, if the late twentieth century witnessed the “end” or “death” of art, theory, and revolution, do those themes remain so prominent in twenty-first-century literature? Did literary authors not get the memo? Or might contemporary literature’s treatment of art, theory, and revolution reveal new ways to think about those big ideas after their apparent ends? That’s what I argue: art, theory, and revolution didn’t die, but the forms they took throughout the twentieth century—along with the political claims made on behalf of those forms—have little purchase on the twenty-first. Instead, a close investigation of a cross section of contemporary US fiction reveals new approaches to art, theory, and revolution that deploy forms of generality in an effort to rethink—and in many cases, to attenuate—the politics typically linked to those three big ideas.

Historically, art, theory, and revolution have acquired distinct political valences through homological thinking, specifically through homologies that scholars and critics identify between the conceptual forms of art, theory, and revolution on the one hand, and political forms on the other. Throughout the book, I will refer to the correlation that results from such homological thinking as the form-politics homology, a concept that I treat expansively: for me, homologous thinking includes but isn’t limited to structural or formal isomorphism. In addition, I will also use the concept to describe any relation of perceived entailment—necessary or potential—between conceptual and political forms. Rhetorically, scholars and critics articulate those relations of perceived isomorphism or entailment in any number of ways. Form might be said to mirror, model, echo, adhere to the same logic as, prefigure, point toward, give shape to, make possible, open onto, or even necessitate and require a specific political mode or ideology. For example, Walter Benn Michaels deploys the form-politics homology when he ascribes an anticapitalist politics to aesthetic autonomy, or when he suggests that memoir is a quintessentially neoliberal literary form. Caroline Levine uses it to derive a progressive model of labor from the rhythm and rhyme of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Slavoj Žižek relies on it to argue that the horizontal immanence of Deleuze and Guattari’s work looks too much like global capitalism to ground an effectively resistant politics. Fredric Jameson depends on it to proffer the speculative forms of science fiction as the only space available for utopian thought today. In fact, artists, theorists, critics, and scholars—myself included—use the form-politics homology all the time to give their concepts just a little bit more heft and significance in and for the world, to extend conceptual form into the political sphere.

In this book, the form side of the form-politics homology designates the conceptual forms of art, theory, and revolution, not their specific material forms. Conceptual forms are the structures of thought that shape a given field’s self-understanding; they are the abstract theoretical ideas that have dominated the respective discourses of art, theory, and revolution for decades and sometimes centuries. For example, in the first chapter, I don’t focus on the formal qualities of specific art objects but instead on art’s formal autonomy and heteronomy, two conceptual forms that have governed Western aesthetic theory since at least the eighteenth century. (Broadly speaking, aesthetic autonomy names an art object’s separation from the world, and aesthetic heteronomy names its engagement with it.) Similarly, the second chapter isn’t particularly interested in the form of specific theories but instead highlights the mandated reflexivity of theoretical thought itself. There I will situate theory’s demand that thought think its own conditions of possibility, that knowing must always be self-aware, as the dominant conceptual form of a wide swath of poststructurally oriented theory from the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, rather than investigating the form of actual historical revolutions, the third chapter explores the tension between immanent and transcendent theories of revolution. Those two conceptual forms—immanence and transcendence—are at the core of a longstanding theoretical debate within revolutionary discourse about whether revolutions should develop organically, out of the everyday lives of their participants (that’s the immanence position), or if they require hierarchies and top-down leadership (that’s the transcendence position).