Jeffrey M. Perl

Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and after Eliot.

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The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature

Jeffrey Perl presents in this book a comprehensive reassessment of modernism and an effort to enrich our understanding of the direction literary culture has taken since the Renaissance.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

DEVALUED CURRENCY Elegiac Symposium on Paradigm Shifts Part 2

INTRODUCTION: REGARDING CHANGE AT ISE JINGŪ There is something — two or three things, actually — provincial about the idea of paradigm shifts. In its heyday, the notion of incommensurable paradigms was useful in defense of local cultures against encroachments from the outside. Anthropologists and historians in particular took to the notion as support for the happy thought that outlandish systems of belief could not be judged with reference to any universal standard. The leading candidate for universal standard (Science) was understood as itself a province — a remote island continent, with its uniquely intimidating language, hermetic concepts, and incomparably fastidious manners. In the sense most relevant to this symposium, the idea of paradigm shifts is provincial in that it relates to a quintessentially modern and Western experience of continuity as monotony. Kuhn argued that changes so basic can ensue during a shift in paradigm that “what were ducks . . . before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.”1 He is not talking about a change in mere nomenclature

Introduction: The Undivided Big Banana

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal’s editor questions the assumptions that underwrite standard approaches in the social sciences to the issue of how non-state, tribal societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012). Whereas Diamond’s theme is that modern states can learn much about many things from traditional hunter-gatherer societies, with respect to peacemaking and peacekeeping he finds traditional societies distinctly inferior, and the arguments by which he reaches this conclusion are tautological and also beg the question. This prefatory essay explains that “Peace by Other Means” will analyze and detail non-Western and premodern European means of keeping peace that modern theorists of conflict resolution are reluctant to credit or incompetent to assess.

Introduction: A Caveat on Caveats

In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal’s editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis (1521), that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed caveats about how justice and truth must take precedence over peace, how recovery from ill treatment may be impossible, how quietism is not a moral option, and how realism demands a national policy and a personal strategy of, at best, contingent forgiveness. He concedes that the attitudes of those opposed to quietism are healthy but suggests that there may be goods worthier than health of human devotion. This essay concludes that the main differences between what it terms “judgmental” and “irenic” regimes are disagreements over anthropology and metaphysics. The presumptions that truths are objectively knowable and that human beings are moral and rational agents characterize judgmental regimes; irenic regimes are characterized by disillusionment with those assumptions.

Introduction: Bland Blur

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge , introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal’s “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors’ assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” (on Switzerland’s Lake Neuchâtel) with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing , chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist (and sinologist) Francois Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “ de-tente , relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness.

Introduction: de-Differentiation

In this introduction to part three of the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” the journal’s editor argues that blur is not a medium of concealment, confusion, or evasion. Making distinctions between kinds of relative unclarity (for instance, haze , wool , and fudge ), he reserves the word blur for the kind that results from de-differentiating objects or qualities or states of affairs whose differences have been overstated. To refine what blur is and is not, he compares kinds of unclarity found in images by Giotto, Rubens, Hokusai, Kunitora, Manet, Zeshin, and Richter. With reference to art criticism by Hubert Damisch, Wayne Andersen, Anthony Hughes, Robert Storr, Julian Bell, Christopher Prendergast, and especially T. J. Clark, he agrees that choosing between focus and blur can be a moral decision, though not in the sense for which Clark arraigns the Impressionists. Characterizing the way of seeing that Clark encourages in The Painting of Modern Life as a form of staring, this essay argues that “lean and hungry looking” is indecent, whereas unfocused receptivity is irenic. What Bell calls the “aestheticized halfheartedness” of Manet is redescribed here as a genre of moral heroism, and the essay concludes that it is differentiation (rather than de-differentiation and lack of moral focus) that is on morally shaky ground.

Introduction: “The Need for Repose”

This essay introduces the second installment of a symposium in Common Knowledge called “Apology for Quietism.” This introductory piece concerns the sociology of quietism and why, given the supposed quietude of quietists, there is such a thing at all. Dealing first with the “activist” Susan Sontag’s attraction to the “quietist” Simone Weil, it then concentrates on the “activist” William Empson’s attraction to the Buddha and to Buddhist quietism, with special reference to Empson’s lost manuscript Asymmetry in Buddha Faces (and to Sharon Cameron’s work on the topic in her book Impersonality ). The author, who is also editor of the journal, argues against the effort of some contributors to substitute new terms for quietism and emphasizes instead what he calls (quoting Sontag) “the need for repose.”

Vagueness Is Huge

In this essay review of Megan Quigley’s Modern Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (2015), the editor of Common Knowledge comments on the explicit relationship between that book’s arguments and those of the journal’s sixpart series “Fuzzy Studies: A Symposium on the Consequence of Blur,” published in 2011–13. He points out that there are aesthetic forms and concepts of vagueness that are related only tangentially to what analytic philosophers, in treating the “sorites paradox” and its implications, have meant by the term, and he suggests that this book suffers by limiting itself to Anglophone works, when the most relevant work is perhaps in French, and by limiting its reach to fiction, when the most relevant genres of art are perhaps poetry, painting, and music. The review concludes by regretting Quigley’s making T. S. Eliot her study’s straw man and by observing not only that her interpretation of Eliot’s relationship to analytic philosophy is demonstrably incorrect but also that there is no point in valorizing vagueness or “fuzzy studies” if the upshot is not a sort of mutual respect and acceptance that scientistic clarity in the arts and humanities does not foster.

Introduction: Greco-Latin Findings

In this introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal’s editor reflects on the difference between the contributions to parts 1 and 2. Whereas the first installment concentrated on ethnography, the second focuses on the peacemaking repertoire of the Greco-Latin tradition, whose basis is psychological. That tradition is characterized by its refusal of wishful thinking about human nature and, in particular, by its doubt about claims that human drives other than thumos —the rage for self-aggrandizement—motivate the initiators of wars. Given this assumption about motive, the Greco-Latin tradition tends also to regard negotiations based on the rational discussion of material interests as unlikely to succeed. Success requires symbolic and ritual gestures—acts of self-humiliation on the part of those apparently with the greatest power—by which thumos is propitiated and pacified. Most of the introduction considers cases of such settlements, including two contemporary efforts at ritual peacemaking, a successful one by Queen Elizabeth II in Ireland and an unsuccessful one by Pope Francis in the Middle East.