Some notes on Michaels's method and argument in The Gold Standard

I have been reading Michaels along side Slavoj Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, and several things about this juxtaposition strike me as noteworthy. Initially, Michaels's use of William James's psycho-philosophizing of the self seems jejune--if only because of James's historical position near the beginning of psychology--next to Zizek's use of Lacan (whose greater "sophistication" is probably mostly explicable by his more arcane writing). But of course, Michaels has deliberately chosen a contemporary of naturalism to illustrate his points. (For the same reason, he will use Josiah Royce in chapter 6.) But he never says anything like "these ideas were in the air" or refers to a sense of zeitgeist, so we have to wonder just what are "his points" in using by now outdated intellects to articulate the "logic of naturalism." I think the best answer to this question is to see that not insisting upon any universal status for his claims is merely a way of qualifying his argument. Nevertheless, he is articulating a logic of naturalism, and clearly William James is more useful for this purpose than is Jacques Lacan. Michaels's project is, after all, historicist, and thinking through this difference in method (between Michaels and Zizek) has helped clarify what should have been an especially familiar notion to me by now: what distinguishes the project of new historicism.

Another thing about the new historicist method: it's said to be time-intensive in its heavy research about the period. Obviously, Michaels's dexterity with James, Royce, John Proffat (55), Ida Tarbell (69), William Goodell (94), Georg Simmel (140), Joseph Le Conte (170), Albert Parsons (172), Albert Machen and John "Cyclone" Davis (197), and Alfred Stieglitz (218) and John Bigelow (223)--to name a few--exhibits the heavy lifting required to do new historicism. And yet it's valuable archival work (for readers) and surely not uninteresting (for the researcher). Nevertheless, because it is (must be) so labor-intensive, the research itself must commit Michaels to a method and theory of argumentation that already precludes the kinds of ahistorical (or at least trans-historical) theorizing Zizek is after (in looking at the work of the symptom or the function of the Real in constituting the subject). To put it another way, if William James's psychology is less sophisticated than psychoanalysis in its work on the Self, what are you to do with all the work you've done reading James's Principles of Psychology ? You limit your scope to a period--or a genre--end even though you don't argue for rigid categories--containers into which ideas and letters can be dropped--you make arguments about similarities among historical (and historicized) (ideational and discursive) productions.

So why then make the two nods to Derrida (including the bizarre one on p. 239 where Michaels intimates he could have had a very different conclusion to the "Action and Accident" essay) and invoke Foucault on ideology and subjectivity (in "The Gold Standard")? These two aren't interested in the sign and the subject because they are historically emergent notions (even if they are interested in the sign and the subject as historically contingent functions ). What is these post-structuralists' role in Michaels's work if he is so much more interested in historicity? He says that Foucault criticizes "the concept of ideology" because it "assumes" "the existence of subjects complete with interests and then imagines those subjects in more or less complicated (and more or less conscious) ways selecting their beliefs about the world in order to legitimate their interests" (177). Michaels then critiques the "subject of naturalism" saying it (he) "is typically unable to keep his beliefs lined up with his interests for more than two or three pages at a time, a failure that stems...from the fact that his identity as a subject consists only in the beliefs and desires made available by the naturalist logic--which is not produced by the naturalist subject but rather is the condition of his existence." Michaels's point, despite his "however," is not so much a divergence from Foucault (and Foucault's identification of the constitution of the subject) as it is an application of Foucault to the historical production of naturalism. In other words, Foucault's work isn't peculiar to naturalism even if it has a particular valence in the naturalist logic. So Foucault's observation that the subject is constituted by the ideological field is (or may be) transhistorical; Michaels just isn't interested in how it applies outside the logic of naturalism.

And yet there is a strain of transhistoricism (the components of ideology are historically contingent, but the structure of society vis-à-vis ideology isn't) when Michaels identifies the work of ideology (which he does a couple of times--though not enough to garner an index entry for "ideology"). Even when he doesn't use the term, Michaels seems to be discussing what Marx and Marxists have come to see as ideology, whose " real goal is the consistency of the ideological attitude itself " (Zizek 84). Any ostensible opposition to a system merely ends up re-constituting the system because the system has already constituted the opposition, so for Marxism, (bourgeois) liberalism in its very hatred and opposition of (bourgeois) conservatism conserves the liberal democratic structure of (bourgeois) capitalism when (and because) it believes possible progress within the democratic structure that is itself produced by the bourgeois economy (and economic system). And what else than ideology is Michaels observing when he claims, "The consistency--indeed, the identity--of naturalism resides in the logics and in their antithetical relation to one another, not necessarily in any individual, any text, or even any single sentence" (173)? For Michaels, antithetical relations (here, of the logics of naturalism) don't reflect different ideologies so much as they exhibit two strands of the same ideology, and in doing so, they constitute the consistency of the ideology. In this analysis, naturalism is simply a name for the ideological attitude made available at (by?) the turn of the 20th Century.

But Michaels wants to resist this homology when he adumbrates his project in the introduction:

the spaces I have tried to explore are all very much within the culture, and so the project of interrogation makes no sense; the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it. If, then, I speak of the logic of naturalism, it is not to identify a specific relation between literature and the real, or even a specific ideological function of literature in relation to the real. I want instead to map out the reality in which a certain literature finds its place and to identify a set of interests and activities that might be said to have as their common denominator a concern with the double identities that seem, in naturalism, to be required if there are to be any identities at all. (27)

At this point, Michaels's use of the term "culture" seems analogous to Marx's "ideology," but having used Marx throughout the introduction, Michaels "makes no sense" when he deploys this terminology, saying he will not identify "a specific ideological function of literature in relation to the real." In some sense, Michaels misleads when he says that literature is nothing more than "part of" culture. His implication is that literature is neither a constituent part, nor a constituted part (or, better, that it is neither possible to tell how many parts constituent and how many parts constituted literature is), but rather it just happens to "find its place" in the culture. Whether he can get the ratio right or not, Michaels's work shows literature "as such" to participate both in producing (like ideology) the "naturalist subject" (177) and in being produced (like subjects) by "naturalist logic."

Recognizing the homology (that makes Michaels's "naturalism" Marx's or Zizek's ideology) helps me adjust to Michaels's tortuous path of explication. He constantly visits one side of a controversy, confronts it with its opposition, and then shows both (in effect) to argue for (and/or from) the same principle (we can probably, now, safely call this ideology, though if we do, the effect isn't surprising). Out of this "antithetical relation" arises something like a synthesis when Michaels notes that the ostensible oppositions aren't oppositions at all because they are both constituted by (and on) the same field (or plane) of discourse. I have copied below three such examples, which I take also to serve as theses of their respective chapters.

Ch. 2: "Nature in The Financier is the speculator's ally, not his enemy, but she is nevertheless as implacably uncontrollable as she was for [Ida] Tarbell, and even more powerful. For Dreiser not only thinks of capitalist production as natural, he goes on to think of nature in all her manifestations as capitalistic; art and sex are as speculative as the stock exchange" (83).

Ch. 3: "The point I am urging in this essay is the rather different one that for Hawthorne qualities like independence and integrity (artistic or otherwise) do not exist in opposition to the marketplace but are produced by and contained within it" (111-12n).

Ch. 4: "But the point here is not simply that, by means of a certain logic, the love of freedom may come to seem as perverse as the love of tyranny; it is instead that from the standpoint of the market, from the standpoint, that is, of the phenomenology of contract, the love of freedom and the love of tyranny are the same thing" (131).

In chapters 5, 6, and 7, this dialectic process only gets more complicated by its increased iterations--which probably explains why the experience of reading Michaels is such that readers feel they can follow him, but that they find themselves surprised by where they end up. He never reveals where he is going in advance of getting there, but having recognized his method, we might see his patterns as comfortingly proleptic.

Works Cited

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology . London: Verso, 1989.