romanticism - or why history is undone

I want to make it whole, to think it as whole - for to do so is always to think in ways that irritate the mainstream scholarly community. I'm talking about romanticism. I want to think it whole not because I am naive or stupid, but because thinking against the grain of micro-historicism, it seems to me, is now more timely than ever. To dare to generalise, to dare to name, even - these are the sins that our contemporaries cannot bear. So let's do those things - let's refuse their law and make out with the epoch...

onwards epochs, chapters, periods and eras... let us imagine history once more as grand, meaningful, open to change and up for grabs

The historiography of romanticism is fraught. In the 1970s and 80s, we began to question the viability of ‘Romanticism’ (with that epoch-making upper case initial) as a useful historiographical label, and to rethink the very terms on which its periodisation might be possible. To use the term now, then, is to attract critical attention and to place oneself in a certain jeopardy: there is a great unease among our contemporaries at the notion that there might exist a coherent ‘Romantic’ symbolic economy; it is as if, in the very act of naming, one problematises, as if, in that very moment of appellation, one disperses the field. I hope in future work, without seeking to recuperate the most indiscriminate usages, to rethink this problem of naming in terms of two theoretical trajectories, both of which deal to a greater or lesser extent with the historicity of gender and the meaning of listening.

The first trajectory is that outlined by Friedrich Kittler in Aufschreibesysteme in which periodisation is back on the table in grand style. His assertion that, around 1800, poetry and philosophy are dominated by a worldview he terms ‘romantic’ is of course susceptible to critique, but that generalisation is strategic, posed not so much as a ‘fact’ or ‘truth’, but as a way of opening up the field, of beginning to think romanticism as a dispersed but chartable territory. This starting point is also useful because it requires us to address again, almost from the beginning, the terms on which the relationship between local and larger historical scales can be thought.

The second trajectory is more difficult to articulate as unitary because it is not, really. Broadly speaking, it encompasses several mutually incommensurate French traditions of critical and historiographical enquiry – I draw on Paul de Man, Roger Chartier, Foucault and, more implicitly than explicitly, on Lacan. This trajectory is both historicist and concerned with trying to come to grips with the nature of the relationship between local particularities of cultural practice and the broader articulation of epoch. It is also concerned with what might be termed the historicity of the subject – how the notion of subject is put into play, made whole and fragmented again, thought through, made real and represented, manifested, dissolved, phased, opened up and closed down. In line with these two approaches, then, I want to begin with his kind of strategic generalisation.

I will, then, begin ...