Regenia Gagnier

On work and idleness

In this essay we review a number of important historical and everyday conceptions of work, which reveal both the diversity of such conceptions, and also deep tensions, especially between positive (self-fulfilling, sociable) aspects of work and negative (laborious, exploitative) aspects. Due attention to these complexities suggests great caution in deciding how domestic work, including caring work, should be seen in relation to other kinds of work. We also argue that a very broad conception of work including, certainly, domestic and other work outside the market, while not appropriate for all purposes, is essential for considering the appropriate place of work, as opposed to idleness, in the good life. The possible value of idleness, we argue, has been obscured by the productivist ethic embedded in the major Western conceptions of work.

Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice: Historical Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages

IN The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, I traced a broad cultural shift during the second half of the nineteenth century from an Enlightenment conception of Reason as the mind’s ability to understand and improve the world to rationality as the individual’s chosen path towards a goal irrespective of the quality of the choice.1 Under this shift, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as universal or collective consensus, sensus communis, would give way to individual choice as Taste, or mood, or lifestyle. The goal of Rational Choice theory is not the particular substantive end or product but rather the formal mapping or modelling that leads to a desired end (whatever it is) in the form of subjectively ranked preferences. In these mappings and rankings, any attempt to comment on the quality of revealed preference is typically labelled “pater-

Freedom, Determinism, and Hope in Little Dorrit : A Literary Anthropology

In the sesquicentennials of Darwins The Origin of Species and Mills On Liberty, determinism and freedom returned to grand and popular narrative. NeoDarwinian books like The Literary Animal (2005) and Madame Bovarys Ovaries (2005) returned us via evolutionary psychology or E. O. Wilsons socio-biology to a universal human nature based in genes and reproduction. Whereas Habermasians grounded freedom and constraint solely in community and communication, NeoDarwinians reduced human decisions to reproductive instincts. Then 2010 saw the tenth anniversary of the completed human genome sequence, and reductive conceptions of the genome were rife. Confronted with such reductionisms, we are challenged to maintain a more complex understanding of the interworkings of nature and culture in species self-formation.This essay does so by reconsidering the methods of the philosophical anthropologists who valued the human capacities for freedom and choice, self-creation, and self-formation, within natural limits and constraints. In the complex workings of nature and culture, humans cannot be reduced to genes or reproductive strategies, nor can they be reduced to mere cultural constructs. The philosophical anthropologists studied the way culture and technology mediated biological nature, and vice versa, the way nature mediated culture and technology. When they wanted to know what humankind was, they looked at the history of its interactions with nature. Through that history, they saw its capabilities and limits. There was no essence of humankind outside its historical existence, and the ability to reflect on that history opened the world to ideal goals.This empirical or historical ontology that asked what kinds of creatures humans were at home in both nature and their diverse cultures was at its height in the mid-nineteenth century and is only now returning after a century and a half of reductions to either nature or culture. From geneticists to meteorologists, scientists are looking at the ways in which culture interacts with the environment at both molecular and global levels. They write of onto-genetic or developmental niches in which nature is nurtured as the product of mutually influencing genes and environment. The terms they use are Emergence, post-genomics, and the new epigenesis.My contention is that cutting-edge science today is much closer to the pre-disciplinary sciences of the mid-nineteenth century than we have seen for 150 years and that when reading the Victorians we should celebrate their epistemic pluralism and diversity. We should celebrate the uneasy pleasures of knowing that we are both nature and culture, free, but only within limits. Dickens was characteristically knowledgeable of the science of his time, and his work shows the scope and limits of the human animal as conceived in the 1850s. I use Little Dorrit to demonstrate this because it is a novel about limits and constraints. I present my argument in the form of four theses on Nature, culture, technology, and hope, and I claim that these not only reflect the science of Dickenss time but also of our own.

Irma Adelman: A Pioneer in the Expansion of Economics

Major innovations and extensions require that economists change their focus. This entails the destruction of some of their human capital. Even though this is a process of creative destruction, typical of progress in industry, the process is somewhat painful and therefore is not undertaken lightly. Typically, most of the enthusiasm for our work on social and political aspects of economic growth was expressed by people either at the very top of our profession, who had human capital to burn, or by new entrants into the profession, who, as yet, had no human capital to lose. And, most of the resistance to our work came from the middle of the profession, who either could not afford to lose any human capital or could not be bothered to engage in the relearning effort required to absorb it. The initial reactions to our work exemplified this dualism. . . . Many graduate students came to Berkeley from all over the world in order to study under me. I then discouraged them from writing dissertations in the interdisciplinary tradition, fearing the potential damage to their careers.

THE DISTURBANCES OVERSEAS: A COMPARATIVE REPORT ON THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH STUDIES

This is an adaptation of a talk first presented to the Council for College and University English (CCUE) conference on English for the Millennium, Sept. 1996. CCUE is the British professional body that represents the discipline and departments of English in England, Scotland, and Wales. The talk was meant to provide a transatlantic perspective on the future of the discipline. Originally it was published in CCUE News (June 1997) and later adapted to presentations throughout the U.K. The excerpts here focus on issues of multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, and cultural studies. W HEN I DRAW ON MY EXPERIENCE in the United States it is not because I am unaware that the centrality of English literary history is less controversial in England than in its former colony, but because the areas that I see as fundamental to the future of English — a diverse Anglophone population and the demands of the marketplace — are fundamental to both. Twenty years ago, American and British academics were different worlds. The formal democratization of the university and official ideologies of neoliberalism, or market orientation, have brought them closer together. My argument is that the future of English depends less on theories or ideas than on human geographies, institutional conditions, and our embeddedness in market society.

INTRODUCTION: BOUNDARIES IN THEORY AND HISTORY

Introduction to special issue on Victorian boundaries. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

A SYMBIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SEX, GENDER, AND DESIRE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract The first part of this essay describes a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to world literatures and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literatures. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Both sex and gender should be understood as the outcomes of developmental processes more or less stabilized by a wide variety of more or less variable factors in the loop of nature, culture, and technology. Understanding the nature of these processes and their social, biological, and technological causes is essential for comprehending the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the extent to which these are mutable. The essay concludes with some reflections on love in the Anthropocene.

Whither Victorian Studies? The View from BANAVSA

This address by the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and the 2010 keynote speaker at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) takes an overview of the professional state of Victorian Studies in Britain and North America in their institutional contexts. It focuses on new work in literature and science/technology studies, new formalisms, and new collaborative projects in digital humanities that are both interdisciplinary and international; and it extends invitations for further collaboration with scholars of Victorian Britain and cultures in contact outside Europe and North America. It also reports on the commitments of BAVS and NAVSA to their growing constituencies, their statistical growth in their respective first decades, and their support of graduate students and postdocs in times of economic hardship.

The Ironies of Western Individualism

This chapter analyzes conceptions of individualism from the middle of the nineteenth century to the interwar period by specifying the contexts in which these conceptions functioned. The Spencerians were concerned with the individual in relation to the State; Arnoldians with individuals in relation to national character; and Freud and Adorno in relation to war and massification. Major secondary critics like Colin Campbell and Ian Watt were concerned, later, with the Protestant ethic under increasing consumerism and its effects on individual subjectivity. With primary sources from Spencerian Individualists, through Arnoldian culturalists, to Freudian philosophical anthropologists, it would be distorting to systematize the speculative orgy. Rather, in approaching these distinctly scrappy sociological, psychological, and physiological (or instinctual) thought-experiments on the scope and limits of individualism, my aim is to establish the extra-individual units of analysis in which the individual was always conceived in relation to others, whether coteries, classes, nations, the market, or the State. Having clarified distinctive contexts for the conceptual development of individualism in this chapter, remaining chapters will discuss in more detail the specific social environments in which the individual evolved.

Introduction: Individuals-in-Relation

This book began with points to which I kept returning since I began to write on the nineteenth century and social theory. These included, first, Holbrook Jackson’s description of the 1890s as “a decade singularly rich in ideas, personal genius and social will” whose “central characteristic was a widespread concern for the correct — the most effective, most powerful, most righteous — mode of living.”1 Second, the compatibility in that period of individualism and socialism that has been increasingly difficult for later generations to comprehend. Third, polarized reactions to the excesses of modernization that could culminate, on the one hand, in political action to the point of physical force (William Morris) and, on the other, in hagiography and religious conversion (J. K. Huysmans). And fourth, the intricate dissection of relationships of symmetric and asymmetric mutuality. It also began with the experiments of people who attempted to live their lives creatively, as if they were works of art, and treated decorum as formed behavior, civility as formed interaction, beautiful objects as formed labor, beautiful Nature as formed matter, games as formed competition, ascesis as formed self, and, often, socialism as formed society, forming self-interest for the social good: people, that is, who embodied and performed detachment as both critical and aesthetic.