Reflections on . . . the first half of Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1789)

I have been focusing on my QUEER THEORY minor field, reading ALL OF Abelove, Barale, and Halperin's "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader," I fear to the detriment of my LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY BRIT LIT major field. Uh oh! Comp field guilt!

So, in an effort to gradually become more systematic in my comps studying, I went and took the VERY FIRST text on my major field list, Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1789) out of the library. Burke's text is as meandering and repetitiive as it is important; from what I remember of my "Marriage and Nation in 19th Century Britain" class, his Conservativism, primarily his ideas about inheritance, bubble up in some "great estate" books like Persuasion. So, here are some passages I am find illuminating, that is to say "quotable-for-the-purposes-of-orals" . . .

1. Burke doesn't like the idea of a people's natural right to form their own government. Consequently, sorry Jean Valjean, "revolution bad." Unless of course, its the revolution that established the government Burke is writing under, then its a completely different story. To wit . . .

The principles of the Revolution of 1688 . . . are . . . found . . . in the statute called the Declaration of Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration . . . not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general right "to choose our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to form a government for ourselves. (163) 

2.  Revolution should only happen when absolutely necessary in maintaining the succession of the already existing crown and existing order because, Burke says, the rights of the individual subject are bound up with the constancy of that order.

This Declaration of Right (The Act of the 1st William and Mary) is the corner-stone of our constitution . . . It is called "an act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown." You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together. (163) 

And, in a way, his logic holds: if the social body has a right to determine their government, a new government that is, at will, then the rights of subjects protected by that government are also being overturned or put in danger.  

3. Also, when change or revolution does occur, it should be circumscribed. Individuals in power can change, but the offices they hold and they structures they fill, should remain constant. The system needs to be preserved.

Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the house of commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements. (169) 

It is far from impossible to reconcile . . . the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation; the sacredness of an hereditary principle of a succession in our government, with a power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency . . . the change is to be confined to the peccant part only; to the part which produced the necessary deviation. (169) 

4. The idea of succession, it turns out, is a trope of inheritance. As such, the king's right to his crown guaranteeing continuity of station is cut from the same cloth as a first born son's right of primogeniture to father's land. This leads to an interesting supporting argument as to the law . . .

On this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by common law; in the new by statute law operating on the principles of common law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode, and describing the persons. (169) 

For Burke, succession is inheritance, inheritance is law, and law operates on a strict rule of stare decisis.

5. But not everything is so elegantly parallel and continuous. The rule of the law, for instance, stops short of the crown.

Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense . . . any thing like servants . . . The Great kind obeys no other person. (179) 

6. For Burke, the "natural" right to representation in government the Revolutionists are pumping is specular and opportunistic, a made up idea that operates as a pre-text for those "heated with their particular religious theories" to vindicate those theories with bloodshed and disorder. (216) Burke is a skeptic who believes Revolution asserts a social order no more legitimate than the one existing presently and, indeed, less legitimate because the one existing presently . . . you know . . . exists presently.

Far am I from denying in theory . . . the real rights of men . . . Men have a right to live by . . . [the beneficent rule of]; they have a right to justice . . . They have a right to the fruits of their industry . . . They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents . . . But as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual out to have in the management of the state, that I must deny  to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society . . . It is a thing settled by convention. [my italics] (218)

7. Inheritance, succession, convention, constitution . . . These are the watch words for Burke.

8. Interesting note: I am reading an edition that is all-foot-noted and stuff . . . And, apparently, Burke's sense of constitution was a lot more holistic and organic than an American like myself, who thinks of a "constitution" as a program-like document for a system of government, would assume. Instead, Burke has an almost Bourdieu-ish sense of the word; it includes all the offices and practices and conventions of a state, really how things operate, as opposed to any discrete document. Though, as his example of the Declaration of Right would attest, Burke's working definition of a constitution doesn't preclude such a document. For Burke, the document is more a distillation or a re-application of the constitution, than the constitution itself.

Queer! The Abiding Influence of Gayle Rubin's THINKING SEX (1984)

Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" is the opening essay of Abelove and company's Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. And with good reason: it's crucial and multiply canonized. I must have had to read it twice before, once in "Gay and Lesbians Studies class" as an undergrad and at least one more time in law school in "Feminist Legal Theory." Re-reading it for studying for comps, it's forthrightness about the political  dimension of the sex act (not just identities) and prescient critique of the ways we continue to arbitrarily value some sex acts above others is really surprising. 

          Rubin performs a quick historical gloss to illustrate the ways sex acts are politicized, and hierarchized, her battle cry: “It is time to recognize the political dimensions of erotic life” (35) and her thesis: “a radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression.” (9) Sexual oppression is constituted and enabled by sex negativity, sexual essentialism, and the misplaced scale of sex acts where “small differences in value or behavior are often experienced as cosmic threats.” (11) The idea of misplaced scale, for Rubin, explains why in some jurisdictions, at the time of her writing (1984), consensual sodomy still carried twenty year prison sentences. This concatenation of ideological forces, Rubin famously offers, creates an arbitrary hierarchy of sex acts where married, reproductive, monogamous heterosexual sex, from the top, looks down upon homosexual, promiscuous, commercial and S&M sex.  She provides two classic graphic images to illustrate this concept: first, the "moving line" that demarcates good from less good to bad sex and, second, "the charmed circle." 

And . . . 

Just kidding! Gayle Rubin didn't create CHARMED, silly!!! She's important; but not THAT important! Ok . . . 

Ok, I'm still fucking with you. That's not it either. Here we go . . . 

Ok, that's really it. Honest. Anyways . . . 

The weakness of Rubin’s formulation, on her own and De Lauretis’ view, is that it sunders sex acts from gender identity, thus acting coy as to the identity politics that informs the hierarchization of sex acts. For instance, male homosexuality and female homosexuality are almost never legally sanctioned equally. In the modern era, sodomy between males got tougher criminal sentences than females, in the Middle Ages, vice versa. The disparity in legal response to the same sex acts performed by different kinds of subjects suggests that sex acts are not themselves politicized without reference to the social positions that perform them. Rubin anticipated this critique and responds to it in a footnote. In her defense, perhaps her article is so important precisely because it attempts to look at acts independent of identity, even if that separation potentially results in paradox i.e. an “act of homosexual sodomy,” in our regime of sexuality, references a “homosexual identity”     

Rubin, from what I remember, is struggling against Second Wave Feminists (especially my favorite snitty-kitty, Catharine Mackinnon) and Conservative social forces, which she counter-intuitively but perspicaciously links in their sex negative ideologies. This said, I can't help but think that Rubin's focus on acts as opposed to identities creates a wider lens with which to see the politics of sex. Not limited to focusing on "suspect classes," Rubin's theoretical focus can hone in on all the arbitrary politicizations of sex that plague not only minorities but white, heterosexual monogamists, like video-ed sex. 

Her other, more explicit theoretical moves? Rubin confronts sexual essentialism with Foucaudian constructionism (History of Sexuality Vol. 1, though not included in the anthology, citationally asserts its centrality to the field on page 10). But Rubin has to square her personal bogey man, “sex negativity” with Foucault’s potentially contradictory “repressive hypothesis.” Rubin says there isn’t a contradiction at all. “Because of his emphasis on the ways sexuality is produced,” she remarks, “Foucault has been vulnerable to interpretations that deny or minimize the reality of sexual repression . . . Foucault makes it abundantly clear that he is not denying the existence of sexual repression so much as inscribing it within a larger dynamic.” (10) And, having read a lot of Foucault interviews, I am inclined to agree with her.

It’s worth noting that misappropriations of Foucault are a genre of theory in and of itself. In Medieval studies, in Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw repeatedly repeals over-simplified, hyper-specified, rigidifications of Foucault’s ideas, namely, the Foucaudian New Historicist’s insistence that the human subject, and all its psychological depth, is historically specific to the Modern Era, and that humans before that time didn’t, you know, identify as people or think of themselves as individuals or something. In point of fact, though his rhetoric in the Archeology of Knowledge is a little  . . . melodramatic, Foucault doesn’t quite maintain so rigid a claim.

But – to return to Rubin – reading this foundational, career defining article in 2013, I couldn’t help but marvel how prescient it is about our society's abiding arbitrary moralism in regards to sex acts as demonstrated by our culture’s obsession with “sex tapes.” Indeed, twenty nine years ago, Rubin identified sex involving communications technology as arbitrarily oppressed. On page 7 of the anthology, she bemoans overzealous child pornography laws that would imprison someone caught with “a nude snapshot of a 17-year-old lover.” And then, through a chain of association with better known sex oppressions, cites the taboo surrounded video-ed sex as a form of discrimination: “Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video, should not be ethical concerns.” It was reading that that I realized how influential and foundational Rubin’s essay is for me personally; it both conceptually and, apparently specifically, provides the framework for my own thoughts on the intersection of communications technology and sex as I expressed them here last year. Reading it over, some of the ideas and phrases, the attention to the arbitrariness of the sex taboo, seem unquestionably Rubin. 

Money and Marriage in Anthony Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875)

     I'm such a go-getter; I actually started reading-and-writing for my comprehensive exam this winter. Over Christmas break I read The Moonstone (1868), whose plot completely escaped me, I might as well have not read it, and The Way We Live Now (1875), which has made me quite the smitten-kitten for fellow "Anthony," Anthony Trollope. I even wrote some stuff! But first, here is a photo of Anthony Trollope. 

Look at that bushy daddy! Anyway, here are some of my first impressions of The Way We Live Now. 

Comprehensive Exams Aren't Just About READING Your Lists . . .

This picture is kind of emblematic of what my summer should be . . .

(1) The arginine enhanced "gym crack." (2) The super-hero fan boy realness of the Comic-Con pass. (3) The double fisting of Victorian lit with (4) the menu to a health food restaurant used as a book mark . . . Look at all my lazer thin, kiddy pool deep levels . . .

Anyways, this December, pursuant to his Doctorate in English Literature, yours truly will be sitting for a comprehensive oral exam in which he will be tasked with convincing four of his professors that he is an *EXPERT* in the major historical field of "Nineteenth Century British Literature," and two minor fields, the "Novel as Genre" and "Queer Theory."

The lists of texts on which I will be tested are all but set. Now I just need to get to reading them, and proceed to produce brilliant, insightful connections amidst their pages that my memory will preserve through the day of the exam at which time I will deluge my teachers and mentors with sparkling, electric insight thus rendering unassailable my sassy genius. Or, at the very least, inspire a "pity pass."

Reading alone doesn't cut it, however. According to this study skills sage, writing daily is a crucial element of a comprehensive exam study plan. And Leonard Casuto seems to warn that the exam itself is something of a short-term goal and institutional hoop the studying for which should be aimed at contributing to more long-term, substantive goals, namely, developing my dissertation. The Chair of my Exam Committee (one of the four), Eva, agrees with him. All in all, the reading of my exam lists should be an active, synthetic, productive, goal oriented affair, and I figure what better way to do that then to set up a publicly visible, informal-in-tone blog on which I can send ideas up a cybernetic flag pole and see if any avatar hands salute.

Right now, I am reading, as an audio book, one of my personal least favorite authors, Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Abelove's Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader, and I have yet to choose a third something or other for "the novel."