Back to the Future

Abstract

In 2009, poet, critic, and essayist Maggie Nelson published Bluets. Comprised of 240 loosely linked propositions modeled after Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, the text's numbered fragments offer a meditation on blue, loneliness, sex, pain, death, and—notably—divinity. Indeed, in its opening pages, Nelson's Bluets reads: That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this. (Nelson 2009, 2)Nelson has been classified as a practitioner of queer theory, autotheory, the lyric essay—her work is heralded for its formal and generic innovation—but none have attended to the implications for the secular–religious binary within these cited lines and in the text's very form. In fact, though Bluets continues to offer a sense of the sacred amid the quotidian, blending the discourses of mysticism and sexuality, its references to angels, providence, and burning bushes have not been engaged by critics. Nelson remains firmly ensconced within the American “high art” imaginary, and that realm is imagined—perhaps no more so than by literary critics—to be secular.1Nelson is by no means a singular example; the contemporary, I would argue, abounds with figures whose work troubles the boundaries of the secular within literary form—though many of these figures may not themselves identify as “religious.” In this article I will turn to Bluets and to Ben Lerner's 2014 novel 10:04. I am interested in these texts as they not only disrupt the supposed boundaries of the secular but straddle generic boundaries as well, whether between the poetic and the essayistic, the theoretical and the literary, or the autobiographical and the fictitious. What is it about the very form of a text like Nelson's, not just literary, but beyond the simply confessional, poetic, or realist, that might enable a deconstructive project of the secular, a thinking of modernity otherwise, a pluralizing of our conception of the now? My primary interest is in the connection between such disruptive literary form and what I term a postsecular sensibility within the texts under examination. In such literature, the opposition of the secular and the religious is not reinscribed—rather, forms, practices, and experiences resist and undo such categorizations. In these cases, I argue, to employ the unreflective vocabulary of “secular” or “religious” is to obfuscate something else at work in the text, a different set of discursive effects.The “post” of postsecularism as I deploy it is not, critically, a temporal “post”: It does not signal that the era or episteme of secularism is, somehow, over. It is, rather, a sensibility, project, and indeed, mode of reading and critique that works to trouble the neat binary that secularism erects between that which it deems “secular” and that which it names “religious.” We might understand the postsecular as stemming from a “desire to resist any master narrative—whether . . . a narrative of secularization or a triumphal narrative of the return of religion” (Kaufmann 2009, 68). Postsecularism denotes a deconstructive reading of the secular project, an acknowledgment of its contingency and historicity. The postsecular is founded on the very structural undecidability and unknowability that lead to a skepticism regarding its own ends and yields. The question, then, becomes, what is the connection between textual form and the gap it can open between the virtual and the actual, revealing fissures in the fabric of secular hegemony?This article sets about exploring this question in five parts: In part 1, I offer a brief historical account of literary studies’ relationship to the secular as well as to the “post-.” This account reveals how the English discipline's own history was concurrent with a certain German university model, one predicated on secular empiricism. We might then better understand why texts like Nelson's and Lerner's do not register as anything beyond the secular by literary critics: such reading practices have a long institutional history. Part 2 explores the temporal questions at stake in this argument, complicating associations between “the modern” and disenchanted linear temporality. Part 3 turns to Bluets, arguing that we might read it, against the current grain of literary studies, as a kenotic spiritual exercise: one that can be classified as neither religious nor secular, but that instead blurs the boundaries between them and, indeed, of subject and object. Part 4 takes up Ben Lerner's 10:04 as a different sort of example of the literary postsecular, one in which the progressive temporality of messianism and financialiazation alike are replaced by a more temporally complex messianic mode, which looks not to a redemptive future but seeks, through the future's looming unpredictability, to disturb the order of the present. In part 5, I finally argue that we must understand both these texts—Bluets and 10:04—as embedded within a neoliberal moment, which can itself be read as postsecular. A postsecular mode of reading reveals Bluets and 10:04 to be at once products of this moment and its antagonists, envisioning alternative futures and temporalities in the face of neoliberalism's foreclosures.To rethink contemporary literary forms as postsecular in the sense proposed above involves a reflection on the secularist assumptions of the discipline of literary studies itself. For the past several decades, disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology, and sociology have been revolutionized by a reexamination of the secularization narrative and of the secular more generally: Thinkers as varied as Charles Taylor, José Casanova, Rodney Stark, Peter Berger, and Talal Asad have critically interrogated secularism in its various forms. In the work of Asad in particular, secularism is called into question as not merely that which limits the reach of religion, but as something that “define[s], transform[s], or generate[s] the meaning and structure of religion” (Asad et al. 2013, ix). Put simply, if the traditional understanding of secularism is a separation of church and state, or a separation of religion from public life, then in order for the state to separate out that thing called religion, it must first determine what it is. Definition is therefore immanent to the process of separation, and that activity of defining is never neutral. This is how, in what Asad would term a “discursive operation of power” (Asad et al. 2013, ix), secularism comes to designate what is and is not religion and to generate whole spheres of human life, assigning religion its proper content. Indeed, as many have now argued, it is the terms of Christianity that dictate those of the distinctions between the “religious” and “secular.” In many secular states, what is determined as properly religious, and as proper belief is determined within the confines of a Christian model (Asad et al. 2013, ix). One arm of secularism's discursive power is the university—it is not only the government official who defines, transforms, or even generates religion but the anthropologist, the scholar, the religious studies department.Literary studies, however, has undertaken far less disciplinary self-examination in light of such findings than have anthropology or religious studies. And yet literature, as it developed within the university, is entwined with secularism. Literary critic Lori Branch has charted an account of how secularism came to take hold of the English discipline, leading to an impasse that, she argues, can be overcome precisely by a postsecular literary criticism. In her genealogy, we find an institutional history of secularism, one that is concurrent with the trend of the German university model and its disciplinary formations. Moving through the New Critics to the age of critical theory, Branch claims that the “crisis of deconstruction”—particularly the religious questions onto which deconstruction opened just before the wane of high theory and advent of New Historicism—is a trauma that has led to the field's “current crisis of legitimation” (Branch 2014, 19). Literary studies has turned variously to digital humanities or to neuroscience as a means of grounding the discipline in so-called empiricism against the residue of a Derridean history left unresolved, one that seeps into English scholarship's present as an “inexorable specter of faith” (Branch 2014, 20).Undergirding this argument is the claim that what deconstruction reveals—and what the field knows deep down, but must repress in order to maintain its secular, institutional existence—is that literary studies is at every instant tied up in meaning-making, in faith, in uncertainty. To turn to materialism and historicism is to turn away from the urgent need to grapple with what Branch terms “our own act of construction . . . in every instance of interpretation and writing” (Branch 2014, 20). This vision of postsecular literary criticism, then, is one that views faith as inherent to the linguistic condition, and that sees “religious concerns” as the questions of all those “who make meaning” (Branch 2014, 28). Branch is absolutely right to note this tension within the discipline and to link it to the late work of Derrida (and others), which much of the field has yet to integrate. The face of literary studies has understood itself as bound up with secularization, from Lukács's understanding of the novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (1974, 38) to Jameson's claim that “the very concept of belief is a casualty of [the postmodern period]” (1990, 388). However, note the conception of “faith,” which becomes synonymous, in this account, with “religion.” It is crucial to contextualize and specify the religiosity defined as central to the work of literary scholars; “faith,” a term whose genealogy is inextricable from the Christian church, reads like secularism-approved “meaning-making,” where another term would have very different resonances.Others have reconsidered literary studies with such questions in mind. In his essay, “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession,” literary critic Michael Kaufmann (2009) suggests that literary studies should parallel the self-reflexive work that religious studies has undertaken in light of revised understandings of the secularization thesis. Following Asad, he attempts to think through reconceptualizations of the religious and the secular as discursive fields, and proposes that this become the basis for interrogating and reconfiguring historical understandings of literary studies’ self-definition. Kaufmann sketches an overview of some of the main narratives through which the field has conceptualized itself, chief among them Matthew Arnold's “replacement theory,” in which literature, as the modern Western world secularizes, becomes religion's replacement, a differentiated but analogous tool for moral and spiritual guidance, as well as the “rise-and-fall” model, in which we were once religious, but become fractured and secular in a period of professionalization and disciplinary separation. What is particularly important about Kaufmann's argument is the emphasis he places on what gets designated as “religious” or “secular” at various moments in the profession's self-conceptualization, and how such acts of differentiation construct professional identity. His is a useful call for a self-reflexivity that has been absent in literary studies. Simply signaling the “return of the religious” remains within the secular paradigm; we must look to our own subject positions, which are themselves always within an academic discourse that has made strategic claims about what it designates to be “religious” and “secular.”Accordingly, my own “postsecular” analytic seeks not to reinvest texts or authors with “belief” or “faith”—critical religious studies has long ago revealed the Christian genealogy of such terms. The aim, instead, is to read without religious or secularist imposition, ever conscious of the critic's own institutional situatedness. The text becomes anthropological object, and the critic an ethnographer who must insist on preserving the unknown as unknown, rather than reducing or homogenizing fissures and figures to a sovereign, predetermined literary-theoretical modality. Without the blinders of the secular–religious binary, many texts begin to speak on their own terms.It is important to note that the term “postsecular” is not a utopian designation freed of the entanglements of “religion” or “secular,” nor one that inherently entails the self-reflexivity described above. In practice, existing postsecular literary accounts and paradigms fall broadly into one of two camps: critics tend either to theologize the discipline of literary studies, extending Christianity into the academy (often using the banner of “postsecular” as a means of “revitalizing” one religion in particular), or to identify “religion” in exclusively diasporic and decolonial spaces, in the literary texts already deemed “other,” thus perpetuating the world–religion and world–literature–construction machine from the global-anglophone center.2 I am therefore engaged critically with the objections that religious studies scholar Tracy Fessenden has justifiably raised to literary criticism's “postsecular” turn: the operative narrative of secularism, she claims, continues to govern the postsecular criticism that seeks to destabilize it (2014). The most difficult element of the secularization narrative to shake is secular time: postsecularism is envisioned as pluralizing, liberating us not only “from a constraining past, in this case from the analytic and existential confines of secular categories that no longer serve,” but also from “the burdens of religion . . . from the competencies, obligations, and complicities associated with a putative past tense of shared religious belief and practice” (Fessenden 2014, 157). The worry about the emerging field of postsecular literary criticism is twofold: first, that the specificities of particular histories and contexts are reduced to the interchangeable and unnameable; and second, that the postsecular constructs a monolithic religious past “gone to ruin” (Fessenden 2014, 162). Why can we assume that the spiritual lives of our predecessors were any more homogeneous than our own? Here “spirituality” comes to play the role of “good religion” against a constructed, imagined, once-uniform religious past.Such inherited notions of temporality are where I part ways from much existing postsecular literary criticism. First, the texts I designate as “postsecular,” as exemplified by those I examine in this article, are varied in their temporalities—there is no singular, monolithic “postsecular time.” To my mind, the postsecular present—if such a thing can be said to exist—must always be viewed alongside an equally heterogeneous and postsecular past. This is to say: Where the secular–religious binary can be reexamined in the contemporary, so too can it be rethought throughout and before modernity. I am convinced that, in spite of dominant trends in historical thinking, the time of what is termed modernity is not exclusively “homogeneous [and] empty” (Benjamin 1969, 261) and what is termed pre-modern is not devoid of the imposition of the calendrical, unifying temporality that Benedict Anderson describes (Anderson 1983).3 This imagined twinned process, of modernization and temporal homogenization, is famously illustrated in Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The oft-cited critique of historicism (and of the Social Democratic Party at the time of Benjamin's writing) weds the notion of progress precisely to the notion of homogeneous, empty time (Benjamin 1969). Historicism's progress is thus imagined as a blank but totalizing force—one that the messianism evoked later in Benjamin's essay seeks to interrupt.My concern is not to revise definitions of the modern, but to ask what such binary oppositions—between the “modern” and “nonmodern” (or “pre-modern” or “medieval” as it is variously termed)—occlude and reify. As recent work on the logic of periodization has shown, though many have critiqued theories of secularization, even such critiques tend to reaffirm an imagined divide between the modern and medieval, the homogeneous and empty and a temporal alterity (“precapital,” “pre-modern”) with which to combat it (Davis 2017).4 The conviction guiding my argument is that there is no single “medieval” conception of time, nor any one single “modern” notion of it. As we will see, Nelson's and Lerner's texts pluralize our conceptions of modernity, allow us to rethink our assumed notion of the secular, and indeed reveal resonances across the hegemonic divide of “modern” and “pre-modern” that are beholden to neither the religious nor the secular. I am interested in pluralizing our understanding of “the now” precisely by attending to its gaps and fissures, to that which exceeds our definitional, historicizing grasp, as well as the old domain of “Western” linear time—one that, in an age of political insurrections, uprisings, climate change, and a pandemic in which futurity becomes increasingly unimaginable, seems no longer to be operative, or at least exhaustive.The empty homogeneity so commonly expected of modernity and all things modern is nowhere to be found in Bluets—it functions not linearly, but serially and recursively, its Wittgensteinian propositions working episodically and cumulatively, circling around a medley of themes.5 The numbering of each proposition does build to a sense of finale, exerting a narrative force—and yet Nelson's propositions and motifs operate like fragments, roving iteratively in and out of the frame.6 The philosophical investigation, we might say, that nominally structures Bluets is phenomenological: The speaker (a writer who would seem to resemble the author herself7) sets out to investigate the color blue. “For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?)” she writes (Nelson 2009, 15). But the question of definition, and of language more broadly, haunts the narrative: How does one account for something that is perhaps in itself undefinable, ineffable? Is there a way to give it some kind of shape, and what would it mean to attempt to do so?Early on in the text, it becomes clear that the investigation into “blue” might in fact be something larger, an attempt to explain that which resists explanation: With “each blue object a kind of burning bush,” Nelson's project might be said to be no less than to explain God's imprints on the quotidian (“shreds of blue garbage”; “bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty”) (Nelson 2009, 2, 7). Such apprehensions of divinity continue to appear throughout: In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. (Nelson 2009, 9)Blue figures allegorically: Beneath the surface of the profane, yellow paint of the narrator's gym there lurks something sacred—a blue that, when the light shines on it, reveals God. I suspect that what most interests Nelson is this process of revelation: the blue's attempt to “creep in,” the light and the tiles’ Godly combination. In this section, I will go on to argue that Nelson's own inquiry into color operates more broadly as spiritual exercise8: Less a meditation on ontological categories, the text enacts a process through which the events and categories of the quotidian dissolve into affects.In this vein, Nelson complicates any easy equivalence between Bluets’ Godly invocations and the presence of some “religiosity” in the text: 123. Whenever I speak of faith, I am not speaking of faith in God. Likewise, when I speak of doubt, I am not talking about doubting God's existence, or the truth of any gospel. Such terms have never meant very much to me. To contemplate them reminds me of playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey: you get spun around until you wander off, disoriented and blindfolded, walking gingerly with a hand stretched out in front of you, until you either run into a wall (laughter), or a friend gently pushes you back toward the game. (Nelson 2009, 48)Faith is not the operative term in Bluets’ framework, nor religion, it would seem: These are within the confines of the “game,” a game in which, as she goes on to write, “hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blinding is as much a part . . . as is pinning the tail on the donkey” (Nelson 2009, 49). Attempting to withdraw from religion or to outright resist it are still moves that leave a subject within its framework—secularism is bound up with our definitions of “religion” proper.Yet through Nelson's formal exposition, blue comes to far exceed the para-religious in its signification; it is the tool through which Nelson thwarts temporal and generic expectations. Blue allows her to move “beyond the game,” to transform the most standard of linear, novelistic plotlines—the failed love story—into a drawn-out present rich with texture and possibility. Throughout much of the text, blue is associated with the pain of an absent lover, one whose loss the speaker mourns throughout. This man, of whom we are told little, is referred to as the “prince of blue.” In the absence of biographical details about either the speaker or her lover, Nelson offers glimpses of their sexual encounters: 18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking. (Nelson 2009, 7)The matter-of-fact diaristic tone again offers a sense of the sacred amid the profane, of “dank providence” amid the quotidian, and amid vulgarized language used to convey it. Nelson is playing with genre, drawing on an old trope of eroticized divinity, but doing so in brutally physical language: providence can indeed be fucking at the Chelsea hotel. Her next proposition reads: 19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue's pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue's unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate door. (Nelson 2009, 7–8)The biblical trope of angels descending in dreams has now been invoked: yet here, again, the narrator attempts to reconcile her erotic desire with her desire for the divine. Blue serves as the allegorical hinge between the two, at once figuring eros and divinity. We are reminded that Nelson and her text inhabit the cruelly optimistic neoliberal secular order: one of unfulfillment, of abandonment “to sob with [one's face] against the blue slate door” (Berlant 2011). Bluets seeks to carve out a space from within—and yet against—a narrative whose future has already been determined.The arc of mourning the prince of blue is Bluets’ major narrative structure, and yet the recursivity and seriality of its fragmented form allow us to hear an alternative temporal note—one juxtaposed to the chronological. Where a neoliberal reading might see the future of this plot as already foreclosed, the relationship already having ended, Bluets seeks to narrate a vision of time far more complex than reconciliation to a singular future. Nelson's relationship to temporality might best be encompassed in her propositions on a fragment of Heraclitus: “‘You cannot step into the same river twice,’” or, in its alternative variations, which she offers, “‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow’; ‘We step and do not step into the same river; we are and we are not’; ‘You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on’” (Nelson 2009, 80). What is staying the same, Nelson asks, between each of these variations: 201. I believe in the possibility—the inevitability, even—of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters, as in the variant: ‘No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.’ But I also sense something in Heraclitus's fragment that allows for the possibility of a mouse shocking its snout on a hunk of electrified cheese over and over again in a kind of static eternity. (Nelson 2009, 80)Nelson is allowing for both episodic seriality—the clean slate of a new proposition, the new self it might enable, the transformed self who might emerge at the end of Bluets itself—and for a “kind of static eternity” that defies linearity, the very static eternity typically identified against the figure of the modern. Her own text enacts this “mouse shocking its snout” as the same motifs recur; pain lingers; the memory of the “prince of blue” is not quick to fade.Where Bluets stands in clear distinction to the genre of memoir or love story, however, is in Nelson's attempt to find oblivion in these sites of “static eternity”: to submit to something beyond the self, beyond the ego of confession. “Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue” she writes; “it does not purport to be me, or anything else for that matter” (Nelson 2009, 67).9 Against the trend of the commodified neoliberal subject, we find a distinctly kenotic impulse in Bluets, as when Nelson writes, “Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things—I don't want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things” (Nelson 2009, 77). In traditional Christian doctrine, kenosis refers to the self-emptying (heauton ekenōsen, in Greek) of Christ's will in becoming receptive to the divine will. The motif of self-emptying and of relinquishment recurs throughout Nelson's text: “133. I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith,” she proclaims. We might be tempted to read Nelson as merely secularizing a theological trope. But I would argue that the kenotic impulse is not merely thematized, but indeed motivated by the text's aphoristic, serialized fragments, demanding not that we identify Bluets as therefore theological, but that we consider the theological trope it mobilizes and ask what material and affective consequences it produces.10We are given a clue in Nelson's formal play with pronouns. The “I” is ambiguous, unspecified, but so, too, is the “you” kept open: at times seemingly used to refer to “the prince of blue,” the “you” also functions to invoke the text's future imagined readers. What this structure reveals is that self-emptying exceeds divisions between self and other, and even subject and object.11 Throughout the text, Nelson raises the question of whether color is ontological or phenomenological: “‘We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object’—this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there—not just yet. I believed in you” (Nelson 2009, 20–21). The “you” of this passage could be read most obviously as the lost love object, but so too could “you” be blue itself, which Nelson is unwilling to attribute to mere illusion or perception. Rigid ontological distinctions between the you, blue, and even the I are revealed to be overwhelmed by the kenotic movement at the heart of the text: The “self” is consistently undone, in the process of dissolving, in the name of a groundless “belief.” Though Nelson is often read in the vein of memoir or confessional,12 I would argue that the book's serial aphoristic structure enacts a different form entirely: one that resists the standard linear account of the individual subject, operating instead in a mode not unlike the de-subjectivating exercise such as that of Ignatius of Loyola, in which the reader traverses through the stages of memory, intellect to ruminate on those memories, and finally the heightening of affect, with the final goal of the will's dissolution and the introduction of God's will. This is no longer the autobiographical realm of a static subject—one of “religious” confessional or “secular” memoir—but that of a subject's dissolution.13Poet, novelist, and critic Ben Lerner offers another case study of what I term the postsecular mode in his 2014 10:04,14 which similarly complicates the notion of the presumed secular temporality of modernity. In its movement between realism and what we might term virtuality, prose and poetics, and, most crucially, spectral pasts and futures, it seems to function in the space of the messianic, a term that it engages throughout. The text is often referred to as “autofiction”15 or “metafiction”: Its narrator, named Ben, coincides very nearly in biographical detail with Ben Lerner the author (acclaimed poet and novelist, from Topeka, Brooklyn-dwelling). In the opening scene, the narrator is commissi