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Romantic Historicism and Good Old Causation: Some New Models of Change

Paper Delivered at the 2022 MLA Convention

Published onJan 21, 2022
Romantic Historicism and Good Old Causation: Some New Models of Change

Romantic Historicism and Good Old Causation:
Some New Models of Change

“The Discrimination of Historicisms,” MLA 20221
Samuel Baker
The University of Texas at Austin
[email protected]

As it happens, Walter Scott’s 1826 Historical Romance Woodstock was a key exhibit in my last MLA talk, which concerned antiquarianism and the ethos of stewardship. At that time, while reading the novel from a perspective interested in such practices of care, I also noticed, as I imagine anyone would, that Scott’s romance of the English Civil War concerns itself with tracing causes, on several levels, or in several senses. Woodstock takes place several years after the shocking execution of Charles I by the English Parliament, as the usurper General Oliver Cromwell is consolidating power on behalf of, and increasingly beyond the reach of, Parliament, hunting down the Royalist remnant as he does so. On the scale of macropolitics, the party of Parliament in the novel aligns itself with what it calls “the good old cause,” “the great national cause,” and “Heaven’s cause.”2 The Royalists, meanwhile, are styled, by the Puritans and by themselves, as “the Royal cause,” “a private cause” and “the failing cause.” For his part, the fugitive future Charles the Second, in hiding after his father’s execution and his army’s defeat, laments how it has been his “lot … to become the cause of ruin to his best friends.”

Here, with the person, and the problem, of the Stuart heir, the political language of causes intersects with the physical and the metaphysical. After Charles hides himself at Woodstock Castle, outside Oxford, the plot of the novel comes to turn on the so-called “wonders of Woodstock,” and what might be the cause of them. These supposed supernatural events at the old castle are correctly discerned to be a screen for Royalist activity by no less an investigator than Cromwell himself, who arrives on the scene to determine what may in truth “cause” these events. Cromwell traps his royal quarry in the castle, but Woodstock’s ancient labyrinth enables young Charles to escape. Reading this romance plot, I sensed, card-carrying Romantic Historicist that I am, that Scott intended me to interpret this play of causes in Woodstock as some sort of allegory of historical form. But it hasn’t been until recently that I knew enough about causation to substantiate the interest of this particular allegory. Now I think I do, and that is the origin story of this paper about Romantic historicism and causation.

So I’m here today to suggest that one useful way to discriminate among historicisms is to consider the accounts they give of causation, and to propose that the Romantic historicisms we’ve developed over the past half century share a common concern with tracking and modeling causation, even if they seldom describe their practice in such terms. I argue that literature, like historiography, involves models of causation, and that Romantic historicism tracks and models causation in both historical and literary modes. In particular, we often model causation when we think historically about counterfactuality, mediation, or intention (even, or especially, collective, non-subjective, or non-human intention), and it would be good if we were to elucidate that this is part of what we literary scholars do.

Romantic Historicism’s attention to causation is one of its strengths, and we should claim it as such. As many of you will have anticipated, I see the recent “counterfactual turn” in literary studies as allied with this renewed attention to causation, and I’ll try to firm up that connection in what follows. Now, I want to recognize at the outset that this may be the kind of argument that at once appears obviously right, obviously wrong, obviously consequential, and obviously merely about the definition of terms. I believe this is because, with a few notable exceptions that I’ll try to mention, causation and its related terms were systematically undertheorized in the twentieth century, by literary scholars, by “theorists” in the broader sense, by social scientists, and by philosophers. As a result, most of us have access to a bunch of conflicting, loosely-held ideas about causation that line up both with and against any claims about it one might make. Sorting out how we think, and could think, about causation thus has to be part of the present argument, as does considering the history of thought where causation is concerned.

To some extent, I’m sure I’ve been inspired to try and think more rigorously about causation and Romantic historicism by the work of Jim Chandler and other Romanticists on forms or discourses related to causation, such as casuistry, and the case.3 But the more proximate cause, as it were, of today’s argument about causation and Romantic Historicism has been some twenty-first century theories about causation I’ve encountered recently while collaborating with roboticists at my university, and discussing conceptual problems in artificial intelligence with them and with other computer scientists and information theorists.4 These new ideas about causality have emerged along the disciplinary border between computer science and philosophy, but have clarified for me resources we already have, I believe, in our own proper discipline of literary studies. One might think the philosophy of causation is committed to models of dynamic change—of Making Things Happen, to cite the title of a leading work on the topic, while literature remains by contrast committed to Making Nothing Happen, as in Auden’s

famous formula for poetry. Yet Auden’s slogan captures, in its very neutrality toward events, a moment of formal description, one that becomes an enveloping landscape in which poetry, on his account, “survives” as “a way of happening,” as a framework in which events find their explanations conjured.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth. [My emphases.]

Exploring such landscapes is how works of Romantic historicism, like Auden’s poem, or our books, provide resources for modeling causation.

To elucidate such a process for the literary modeling of causation, in the balance of this paper I’m going to sketch what most of us think we know about causation, and then what these new theories of causation suggest about it, before developing my claim that Romantic Historicism already possesses comparable ways of modeling causation, and could say so forthrightly. I’ll then conclude with a coda that returns to Woodstock, and to a more famous intertext of that novel’s, to suggest how such a Romantic Historicism would develop a method already at work in historical romance. Now, what I’ve left out of this paper, for reasons of time, are detailed exegeses of how causation gets treated in historiographic work on Romanticism or in a Romantic mode; please let me know what you’d suggest the full version of this paper cover in that regard. If I don’t much discriminate among historicisms, or leave such discrimination to be inferred, I would like to think that I do so in the ecumenical way that Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian do in their recent discussion of “Form and Explanation,” which surveys a field of literary criticism that has, I would venture to say, a romantic, as well as a historicist, cast. Indeed, I will go a step further toward affiliating this paper with Kramnick and Nersessian’s project. If form is one thing we explain, causation is, classically, another, and my overriding point here is that we would do well to adduce causation to form as a quarry of ours, perhaps as a way of being more precise about what fresh perspectives our methods afford on historical and political questions.

So what then would it mean to talk about explaining causation as an aim of criticism? Here are some things I think it's safe to say we think we know about causation. We have a canon of thinkers on causation—here are some précis of their takes, which I won’t read aloud, but will just summarize as follows, asking you to remember that I’m gesturing toward a vernacular understanding here. Aristotle makes ideas of causation fundamental to his Physics, and Thomas Aquinas crystallizes the scholastic conversion of those Aristotelian ideas into a Christian cosmology that is also a sacred history. From Hume to Russell and beyond, the Enlightenment response is largely to sideline causation as a topic of interest. Causation begins to reemerge as a topic, however, in postwar thought, as diverse kinds of structural analysis affiliate their descriptions with causal explanation, if only in the last instance. Somewhere between Althusser and Anscombe on this list hovers Michel Foucault, who in 1969 asserts that “what defines structuralism is the field of effectuation of a causal explanation,” and who by 1980 is proposing that “the weight of causality be lightened by scaffolding it with an ever-expanding polyhedron of intelligibility, whose number of faces is not given in advance.” The poststructural method of much Romantic historicism can be seen emerging into view here, in the opening of an infinite horizon for structural explanation, and moreover in the acknowledgement that material facts such as causes remain what such explanation must reckon with and judge.

It’s hard enough, though, to maintain post-Voltairean habits of thought, let alone poststructuralist habits. While we have some new resources for thinking about causality, when we ponder it, we’re more likely to default to a standard view that goes something like this. Correlation, we know, doesn’t necessarily involve causation—and indeed, we can’t say much about causation, it’s always around, but probably often illusory, unless we understand its exact mechanism. Yet, hearteningly, when scientists avail themselves of their best new tools to think about causation, they unweave its webs by availing themselves of approaches we might think of as “ours.” For moving now to what recent theories of causation propose about it: to begin with, it is so true that correlation doesn’t necessarily entail causation, that it is best to consider causal claims as fundamentally qualitative. Past a certain point, more data doesn’t help us elucidate causation: only a better model can. Dwelling with uncertainty helps, and especially with the help of probabilistic constructs, such as Bayesian Networks, we can weigh causation more effectively than we’ve thought. Above all, it turns out, if we wish to model causation effectively, we need to not just intricately describe material mechanisms, but also imaginatively explore counterfactuals, thereby revealing in what contexts our causal explanations can have meaning.

The artificial intelligence scientist Judea Pearl has issued an invitation to join a “causal revolution” by ascending “the ladder of causation.” Literary critics might understand Pearl to be inviting us to our own party. At the bottom rung of Pearl’s ladder, we understand causation by making associations. We ascend to the middle rung when we use interventions to explore causation; this is the data-gathering approach of a materialist empiricism. The true revolution arrives, however, and we reach the top rung, when we reason counterfactually, and imagine qualitatively developed models in which causality’s full contingency can be on display.

The stress Pearl places on “imagination” as a vector of “revolution” seems all the more remarkable, and romantic, when one remembers that the Romantics fashioned the idea of imagination very much in response to the emergence of the machine age, the era an AI scientist like Pearl aims at once to extend and to transvalue. Artificial intelligence, this transhistorical chiasmus suggests, may have a longue durée just as the Anthropocene does, and be likewise entwined with a reflexive critical consciousness from its start.

Turning now, in conclusion, back to Romantic Historicism, I hope a picture is starting to emerge of how literary explorations of historical counterfactuals might give us purchase on new models of causation of our own. To this end, in just the past few years, we have a burgeoning “counterfactual turn” in literary studies to draw upon, with Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t the flagship of the flotilla taking this course, and Damian Walford Davies’ collection Counterfactual Romanticism of special interest to our subfield.

These works provide plenty of bracing arguments about the role of a whole variety of causal arguments in the cosmologies concerned in the Age of Revolution, and conceptions of providence, necessity, and contingency all get their due. Still, much room remains for more intimate engagements with counterfactuals at the level of subjective historical experience, of a sort that might align with Andrew Miller’s explorations of the optative mode, as well as for more theoretical engagements with the range of concepts surrounding the causation problematic. One source for the latter is Riyukta Raghunath’s patient engagement with the possible worlds theories of the narrative theorist Marie-Laure Ryan and of the philosopher David Lewis, who bridges, perhaps better than any other single figure from late twentieth century thought, the span between the logical methods of computer science and the imaginative methods of science fiction. For the former, more intimate mode of exploring counterfactuals, we have Emily Rohrbach’s patient unraveling of the psychological drama of Emma as a multilayered counterfactual causal self-analysis.

Making their point that literary critics use concepts of form “whose meaning is keyed to their use in a specific context,” but that “cannot be associated with a single description.” Kramnick and Nersessian analogize those critics on form to Elizabeth Anscombe on cause. For Anscombe, they point out, “someone shows that he has the concept cause” simply “by having such a word in his vocabulary,” because “the manifest possession of the concept presupposes the mastery of much else in language.” Anscombe’s quotation continues:

the word “cause” can be added to a language in which are already represented causal concepts. A small selection: scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, burn, knock over, keep off, squash, make (e.g. noises, paper boats), hurt. But if we care to imagine languages in which no special causal concepts are represented, then no description of the use of a word in such languages will be able to present it as meaning cause.

For Kramnick and Nersessian, we “might thus say that a literary critic who uses the word form is already in possession of formal concepts and therefore of a working concept of form itself.” I would just add that if we generate accounts of form to suit our explananda and modes of explanation, we also generate accounts of causation that so suit. The resulting interactions between forms and causes within our explanations may not be just one example, but more like the example, of how productively incommensurate commitments mix therein, commitments often expressed as investments in aesthetics and politics.

By way of conclusion, then, let’s return to Woodstock and consider it anew as the site for a romance of form and cause, now as it makes that romance available for future historicist writers to adapt. Scott, we’ll recall, layers the political language of cause with problems in the causal analysis of agency and perception. If we want to read this engagement with cause allegorically, we can find in it an expression of the difficulty of properly theorizing, then as now, the gap between grand “Causes” and ordinary causes, and of the hubris of those who claim the former without due respect for the latter. By the same token, we can see it register the imperative to explain, as best one can, these causes, and how they appear and reappear in the world we inhabit and in the possible worlds we imagine counterfactually. Such explanation entails respect for the patient work of orchestrating effects, however illusory they might prove to be, even or especially if that work aims to uncover real causes, however evanescent.

In Scott’s romance, the impresario of its Royalist plots, the antiquarian Rochecliffe, figures himself as “a spider” who “knows every mesh of his web.” And when that most scientific of historical novelists, George Eliot, wants, in Middlemarch, to express the truth of romance by invoking Walter Scott himself, it is Scott’s “spidery lines,” per her chapter motto verse celebrating him, that connect Fred Vincy and Mary Garth to each other and to the world they rewrite in his mode. The counterfactual imagination at work in Middlemarch tells of “many Dorotheas,” some of whom “may present a far sadder sacrifice” than that which the actual Dorothea makes, and brings the reader to wish, counterfactually, that Lydgate had not left off reading Scott. Had he done so, he might have been able to animate his “counter-idea of remaining unengaged” to Rosamond; instead, however, “this was a mere negative, a shadow cast by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking. Circumstance was almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond’s idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it.” Such formlessness is here imagined as the effect of renouncing the romance of good old causation: a romance that elsewhere in the novel, through the counterfactual power of fictional imagination, grants form to Eliot’s more modern iteration of Romantic historicism.

Comments
18
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Hannah Wojciehowski:

this is really interesting. I’d love to talk to you more about this.

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

when we engage in counterfactual storytelling, how is that rethinking causation? Is the idea that if only this one thing had happened at this certain point, then everything would have turned out differently? Also, how does this connect to AI specifically? How does AI turn on counterfactuals?

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

hmm. Very interesting.

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

example?

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

:)

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

very interesting. He is moving away from structuralism at this point, but then what is his update regarding causation? I’d like to hear more about this. I’ve never thought of Foucault in relation to causation, but of course you are right. It’s an interesting way to think about his work.

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

does form align with Auden’s making nothing happen?

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

I like this idea

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

would that be stasis as opposed to change? a pause in time? the synchronic vs. the diachronic?

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

I agree that it’s not a very focused discussion.

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Hannah Wojciehowski:

causation in what sense? Narrative causation? Causation in the natural world? Causation in subatomic physics? We had Schroedinger’s Cat and quantum physics, which some thinkers in these categories picked up on. Are there other major developments or advances that would require updating our models?

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Myles Jeffrey:

I feel like I’m left wanting a bit more out of Woodstock by the end of this paper in its current form. The move to Middlemarch feels apt and warranted, but it seems a bit thin before we get there. Maybe it’s just that I’m unfamiliar with the novel, but teasing the causal connection early on and only having the sentence ‘In Scott’s romance, the impresario of its Royalist plots, the antiquarian Rochecliffe, figures himself as “a spider” who “knows every mesh of his web”’ does not fully pay off for me. Can we return to the labyrinth mentioned in the early paragraphs and invoke it, metaphorically or structurally, to help make the point here before moving on to Eliot?

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Myles Jeffrey:

i.e. turning the raw material of story into something with shape and form, our old friend “plot”

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Myles Jeffrey:

You could always say “schemes” if you want to avoid any other possible meanings for the word here

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Myles Jeffrey:

FWIW, I would highlight and put stars by this as a reader

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Myles Jeffrey:

Shots fired! (In the best way)

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Myles Jeffrey:

Again, with the “intent” here, “romance plot” seems warranted

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Myles Jeffrey:

Peter Brooks calls plot “the principle of interconnectedness and intention which we cannot do without in moving through the discrete elements of a narrative;” the Russian formalist name sjuzhet as plot. If you want to highlight Scott’s agency, I think “plot” works here—if you want to point to the historical happenings, you could go with “story”