Professor Tim Milnes's Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Tim Milne's Inaugural Lecture View media transcript Thanks, Alex, for that very generous introduction, and also thanks to the school events Office for arranging and organising everything today. I want to start by thanking family and friends for attending today, especially my wife, Michelle, and I'd like to thank my son, Sam Which who unfortunately is not able to be here today for various reasons. I'd like to thank my dad for flying up all the way from the Balmy south of France to Stay Chilli Scottish spring to attend today. James, my father for coming all the way from South of England. I have far too many academic debts to mention, but I cannot not mention my old defile supervisor at Oxford, the Late Great Roy Park, whose absolute brilliance as a supervisor. I didn't really appreciate until after I graduated. I also want to mention colleagues with whom I've collaborated on various projects over the years, particularly Felicity James at Lester and are Sinan at Winnipeg. And of course, I'd like to give a huge thanks to colleagues all and in the Department of English literature basically for just being a great bunch of people to work with. Thank you to all. This is starting to sound like a retirement speech actually. And thanks for everybody for coming today. I hope it's interesting. We'll see. I'm going to talk today about my work on romantic literature and philosophy and how it's evolved over the past 20 years or so. Attempting to tie together what in many ways is quite a dog eared story of digressions and dead ends. I'm going to focus on a single idea cat ex no or creation from nothing. The reason for focusing on creation is that this idea, which was the main focus of my D fill work back in the 1990s has unexpectedly cropped up again in my latest research project. So I find out whether click is working. There we go. Okay. What I hear you ask is so important about the idea of Croatian X N. Well, I'm going to try and make a bold argument here. I'm going to try and go out on the limb. I think the idea of Croatian X Nilo as a model for literary and artistic creativity enables a new concept of literature to emerge at the beginning of the 19th century. What a concept of literature that for convenience, I'm calling, but I want to make absolutely clear the romantics absolutely did not call literature with a capital L. That's not all because ultimately, it's this concept of literature that is encoded in the discipline of English literature. As we study it today, so we still do. What I'm going to suggest then, is that the romantic idea of creation from nothing forms the historical condition of possibility for the emergence of English literature as a discipline. I'll also briefly suggest that it's one of the reasons why the discipline of English literature is often seen as lacking propriety. Before closing with some remarks on why romantic poets like Percy Shelley thought literature's very impropriety was something that was worth defending. Now, when I started my D fill, which was much longer ago than I care to remember, it was because I was intrigued by comments such as this one by William Wordsworth. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe. Now, actually, in context, this bold declaration is more hedged and qualified. But nonetheless, it seemed to me that Wordsworth and other writers of the romantic period were making a kind of argument that hadn't been made before about how knowledge progresses or, in fact, doesn't progress. Because one of the things that struck me at the time was how this idea seemed to challenge the idea of knowledge as progressive, as building steadily upon the accumulated gains of previous scientific and philosophical achievements. For Wordsworth, the creation of poetic truth was instead achieved by a divine feat. The poet introduced some new element into the universe, not by building on established knowledge, but by spontaneously producing it from nothings. I should register two caveats at this point. The first is that the idea that poetic genius creates from nothing wasn't some kind of creed. I'm not arguing that it's some kind of creed that was shared by all writers in this period by Lord Byron, for example, or Jane Austen, or Charles Lamb, or Charlotte Smith. In fact, I would say that it's probably actually a minority view. The second caveat is that the idea that the artist or poet is creative and the sense of making things up is obviously hardly new. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato had cited the tendency of poets to make up stories lying about the gods as he saw it as one reason for excluding them from his ideal republic. Even the idea that poets create, as it were, from nothing wasn't new. So Philip Sidney had already got there in 15 95 in his apology for poetry, where he wrote that only the poet does grow in effect another nature in making things either better than nature bring force or quite new forms such as never were in nature. Yeah. But these caveats don't make the idea any less important. True, the idea of the poetic genius as a no creator wasn't universally accepted at the time. But no creativity would become central to what we now view as romantic aesthetics, thanks to the work of thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his massive influence upon subsequent military theory. Secondly, there was actually something new about the way in which writers like Coleridge adopted the idea of creation no. Yes, the idea that the poet created from nothing had been circulating before the 19th century, that's certainly true. But this applied only to fiction, a domain in which truth and falsehood is not an issue. Before Romanticism, the division of labour between poets and scientists or natural philosophers was fairly clear cut. Natural philosophers discovered truths that already existed, but were previously unknown. Poets either made things up that weren't true or by holding the mirror up to nature, imitated existing truths. For writers like Coleridge, however, what distinguished poetic genius is that it created new truths. It added something new to reality. It was this reality changing truth constructing element that was the radically new component of Wordsworth's claim that poetic genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe. So in my depo thesis, I examined the ways in which writers of the period struggle to accommodate and justify this new model of artistic creativity. Yeah. In my first monograph, knowledge and indifference in English romantic prose, I broadened out this inquiry to consider its wider implications for the relationship between philosophy and literature. Now, here, I was influenced by a originally published in French way back in 1978, but still influential today. Philip La C bar and Jean Luc Nancy is the literary absolute. Now, Lac Bar and Nancy's arguments in this book are actually mainly about German Romanticism, but they are apply equally in a British context. Their main claim is basically this. By rejecting the communication of knowledge is the foundation of literary art, emancism creates the idea of literature itself as a genre. Okay. So this is Beyond divisions and all definition, this genre is thus programmed in mantism as the genre of literature, the genericity so to speak, and the generativity of literature, grasping and producing themselves in an entirely new infinitely new work. The absolute therefore of literature. So in this way, literature undergoes a revolution in its status between the 18th and the 19th centuries. That is from what I'm calling literature with a lower case L to literature with a capital L for convenience. For an 18th century writer like Samuel Johnson, Literature, as defined in his 17 55 dictionary of English language was decidedly lowercase L. It meant simply learning skill in letters. Four years later, the Reverend Hugh Blair gave the first of his lectures and rhetoric and Bell letter here at Edinburgh, arguably the first lectures in English literature, or were they? For Blair, the study of what he called the study of polite literature provided useful knowledge in the cultivation of taste, eloquence, and virtue. And yet over 60 years later, we find a very different conception of literature being outlined by the romantic essayist Thomas De Quincy. De Quincy complains in one of his essays for the London magazine in 18 23 about this word literature. He says, The word literature is a perpetual source of confusion because it's used in two senses and those senses liable to be confounded with each other. In a philosophical use of the word, literature is the direct and adequate antithesis of books of knowledge. But in a popular use, it's a mere term of convenience for expressing inclusively the total books in the language. In this latter sense, a dictionary, a grammar, a spelling book, A almanack belong to the literature. Effectively, dismissing Samuel Johnson's sense of literature as all learning, everything written, Dequincy insists on a new philosophical sense of literature. It's in this sense as what De Quincy calls the direct and adequate antithesis of books of knowledge that the romantics invented what I'm now referring to as capitalised literature. Not as everything written, even as what the Reverend Blair called polite literature, but as a writing with a special quality. One that conferred upon it a higher, even transcendent value. Now, this value in turn depended upon the creative power of the writer. The problem with this power was that it was wrapped in mystery. Now, it's telling here that De Quincy initially defines this new sense of literature negatively as the antithesis of knowledge. Because pinning down what this something else was that made literature so special in his sense, the special quality proved to be very difficult. But simply, he was trying to come up with a new answer to an old Philistine question. What's so special about King Lear and paradise lost. If it's not knowledge that is communicated, fundamentally, what does one get from these works of great literature that one does not find in a dictionary? A almanack. In an unpublished and dated manuscript, D Quincy had another stab at this, and he defines this elusive quality as power, or the communication of what he calls an incommunicable excellence of human character. This quality he claims is always found in a true literature reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it will, not as a passive mirror, but as a self moving power. Okay. So by identifying the defining characteristic of this new idea of literature as power rather than the representation of truth, D Quincy opens up a domain for a literature based on human creativity, its self moving power, rather than its ability to represent reality. Once merely the medium for the transmission of truth as it was for Johnson, literature in D Quincy's hands now assumes a privileged relationship with truth. This capital L literature becomes in Lacuba Nancy's terms, the absolute of everything written of all literature, including philosophy. A Luka Bar Nancy argue, This is the reason Romanticism implies something entirely new, the production of something entirely new. The romantics never really succeed in naming this something. They speak of poetry of the work, of the novel or of romanticism. In the end, they decide to call it all things considered literature. Okay. So what I was trying to do in my first book was connect Lakulaba and Nancy's claim about the romantic invention of literature in the literary absolute to my thesis about radical creation. Literature with a capital L achieves autonomy, I claim or I claimed because unlike lower case literature, it creates from nothing. Consequently, literature in this sense, has nothing to communicate. It has no knowledge that it wants to convey nothing beyond its own creativity as writing, its own endless generativity, as Luba Nancy saying. So my thesis and my first book shared a key assumption. And that was that this idea of epistemological creation no, this idea of creating new truth from nothing, pulling wisdom out of the void was inherently paradoxical. And that all the attempts made by romantic writers to make sense of it, to rationalise it, to theorise it were ultimately doomed to fail. In my second book, the truth about romanticism, my view shifted, and this was for two reasons. Okay. Okay. The first reason was that at this point, I was reading a lot of neo pragmatist philosophy by thinkers like the Richard Rorty. As part of a long tradition of American pragmatist philosophy. Roti saw truth not as the object of inquiry, but something that was created for better or worse, he thought for the worse by human language. If truth is itself just linguistic fiction, albeit not a very useful one, according to Rorty, then there's nothing paradoxical about claiming it's created. Fort, truth was just a tool like any other tool and it was a tool that humanity no longer really needed. On these terms, he claimed, we should follow the romantics and recognise that truth was something created or made rather than found. As he puts it from contingency irony and solidarity. If we could ever become reconciled to the idea that the human self is created by use of a vocabulary, rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at least have assimilated what was true in the romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is that languages are made rather than found and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, sentences. Consequently, Roti insisted that insofar as pragmatism privileges, the imaginate, the creative imagination, over reason, it was as he put it on the side of the romantics. As a point you like to make repeatedly throughout his work. The second reason behind my shifting view of romantic creation theory was my discovery of what I thought and to a certain extent, I still think was a similar discourse of pragmatism in British thought in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries. Yeah. It was a tradition that I thought had been neglected by scholars of particularly scholars of philosophical romanticism. The single most important figure in this movement was the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Now, Bentham argued, albeit a bit later in his career. He did eventually get around to arguing that ideas like truth should not be seen as representations of real entities in some platonic sense. But it fictions of belief that had an important role to play with communication. No just essential role to play within communication. Here was a very different concept of creation from nothing. Truth was a miraculous creation, but not of any individual psych genius, but of discourse itself. We need the construction of truth as part of the background of our thought. Despite their differences then, Bentham and Rorty seemed united on one point at least. We need truth not as a goal of inquiry, but as a starting point in order to communicate. In the truth about Romanticism, then, I investigated the ways in which the literature of the period reflected this new pragmatic thinking about creative truth. I focused on the writings of Samuel Til Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Shelley, in particular, all of whom, like Bentham, had very strong connections to the linguistic reform movement of the romantic period. In all three poets argued, one finds a similar pattern in the way in which they depicted the pragmatic independence of truth and communication, something that standard narratives of romantic idealism tended to skate over. When I finished the truth about mancmF once, I knew immediately what I wanted to do next. And that was trace this pragmatic discourse of truth back to its 18th century origins. The research that I conducted ultimately led to the publication of my third monograph, the testimony of sense. Now, the testimony of sense argues that this idea that truth is a socially constructed fiction that human beings really require for communication, that this idea can be traced back to the philosophy of David Human. Okay. Okay. Now, Hume's main reputation was as an atheist and sceptic. In his treatise of human nature, he extended the scepticism even to himself, in a sense, his own selfhood, finding that there was ultimately no empirical evidence that the self exists. Turning his empirical method of inquiry upon himself, Hume finds that instead of a substantial thinking self, he encounters merely a gap, avoid lying between thought and experience. Okay. He puts it in this very famous passage from the treatise. For my part, it's very compelling passage. When I enter most intimately into what I call myself. I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light, or shade, love, or hatred, pain, or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time, without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception. Our eyes cannot turn on their sockets without varying our perceptions. Now, this gap or cleavage between what we think ourselves to be what I call myself, as put it, and what we experience ourselves as heat or cool light or shade, love or hatred, meant that for if there was a substantial entity called a self, we certainly could have no knowledge of it. So much for hum the sceptic. What's perhaps less well known about Hume is what he did next, which was to completely reorientate philosophy around the idea of social correspondence. For Hume, since locating absolute truth through experience or reason was impossible, truth had to be seen instead as a social construct that regulated human belief and made communication fundamentally possible. Underpinning this construction in turn was trust. Okay. As Human explains in an appendix to his inquiries, Unspoken trust is the precondition of truth, justice, and language. He compares this tacit arrangement to the relationship between two rowers in the boat. Thus, two men pull the ars of a boat by common convention for common interest without any promise or contracts, so nothing explicit. Thus, gold and silver are made the measures of exchange. Thus speech and words are fixed by human convention and agreement. This tacit trust between subjects, people, individuals, led Hume to emphasise the performative dimension of rationality. Social truth depended upon consensus. This in turn rested upon the unspoken observance of the conventions of intersubjective communication. Hence, the importance to Hume and other 18th century sais like Joseph Addison of politeness. Politeness reinforces the social solidarity required for truth. As I chart in the testimony of sense, however, by the time the romantic period. What we think of as the romantic period was in full swing in 1790s. The controversy around the French Revolution had polarised opinion, public discourse to such an extent that completely paid to the idea of basing social and epistemological norms on some kind of unspoken social consensus. Instead, writers of this period began to experiment with the idea that norms are created by singular acts of individual genius. The role envisaged for the writer by Wordsworth and Coleridge then is not that of maintaining the norms necessary for truth to exist, but that of producing them of creating them as it were Niler This brings me back to creation from nothing and literature with the Capital L. In my more recent work, I've come back round to the idea that the paradoxes of creation from nothing can't be pragmatically sublimated into trust. This was partly the result of reading a book that actually came out the same year as the testimony of sense. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to incorporate it into that book. That was a book by a philosopher called Robert Brandon called Spirit of Trust. You can see why I wanted to read that full title a Spirit of trust a reading of Hagel's phenomenology. Okay. So when I did read this book, at first, I was really heartened and cheered by Brandon's neo pragmatist reading of the philosopher, George Hagel, because it chimed in many ways with my own reading of hum. Okay. Now, Hagel is often seen as quite an authoritarian thinker, whose work effectively slams the door on enlightenment radicalism. But Brandom sees Hagel as actually the ultimate anti authoritarian thinker. Because Brandom claims, Hagel argues that all norms are in the end relational. There are no absolute norms. Truth is not some kind of big other sitting in some platonic realm, demanding that we recognise its authority. Instead, this is Brandom reading Hagel, it's determined by relationships and alterity. Consequently, for Hegel Brandon claims, there are no statuses of authority and responsibility apart from subjects practical attitudes of taking or treating each other as authoritative and responsible. Now, I was very excited by this because it's very similar to the point I tried to make in the testimony of sense about Hume and the performativity of reason or Hume's ideas about the performativity of reason. As long as everybody is in the boat and pulling on the s, as it were, we have truth. Similarly, Brandon claims that Hagel reveals how the practises that underpin normativity, as he puts it, are structured by trust a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit and talking and acting at all. It's not some optional thing in a way. It's the precondition of talking and acting at all. Put simply without trust, there's no truth. However, there's a problem with this idea that truth as a human creation can be reduced in some way to trust. As Slavoj points out in his critique of Brandom. The trouble with basing the construction of truth and trust is that trust is by definition excessive. It always goes beyond what we strictly speaking believe. Consequently, trust always involves minimum amount of internal friction, bad faith, or j puts it, A minimum of alienation as a condition of freedom. The only way to think and interact freely, the only way to think and interact freely implies not only that we rely on shared rules of language and manners, as Brandon argued, but also that we accept these rules as something given of which we are not reflectively aware. If we were to reflect on and negotiate these rules all the time, our freedom would be self destroyed by its very excess. This minimum of alienation involved in trusting in the fiction of truth reveals that in the end we cannot escape this bind. It turns out that we cannot live without the ethical big other. But nor can we act freely in conformity with it. There's no way out of this paradox. It seems that creation from nothing even when treated purely discursively or performatively is inherently paradoxical. But what I've become interested in recently is in how rather than this being necessarily was a problem for romantic writers, they actually came to see an opportunity in this paradox for a normative rebellion for a volcanic disruption of the epistemological order. This is most clear in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, above all, I think, in his famous definition of the imagination. Now, for Coleridge, the imagination is the seat of creativity in every individual. In his biography of literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions from 18 17, he distinguishes between the primary imagination, which constitutes the kind of metaphysical being or essence of the imagination and the secondary imagination through which imagination engages with the individual will and actualizes itself in the world. In its primary form, he argues, the imagination repeats the original divine act of self creation, whereby God summons his own being from nothingness and establishes order from void. He writes in biographia the primary imagination, I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. Should have put more emphasis on the I am, you say? I am. In pronouncing I am, God engages in the ultimate performative utterance, bringing himself and the universe into being by declaring his own existence. By claiming that this act repeats itself somehow in the human mind, courage connects the creative and unifying power of human imagination to God's eternal act of creation, no. Just worth thinking back to Lukla Bar and Nancy's claim that mentioned at the start of the lecture that mancism implies something entirely new, the production of something entirely new. This is exactly what Coleridge is about here. Just as God's I am miraculously orders what it creates from nothing. Coleridge's imagination makes the reality it represents. As the seat of artistic activity, the imagination create works that did not merely reorder pre existing reality. They add something genuinely new to it, something that did not exist before. By making God's ex nileo creation the basis of imagination, Courage rejected a model of literature as the representation of truth in favour of what might be called the production of truth. The production of not just something that is entirely new, but something that in some peculiar way is true because it is new. This is a very odd idea. My own attempt to understand what's at stake in this puzzling notion has been helped by Nicholas Compads work and what he calls the normativity of the new in philosophical Romanticism. As Cartus argues, the romantic idea of freedom as a new beginning, as he calls it, challenges the basic picture of truth that was shared by many earlier thinkers. According to this earlier picture, what was true was true because it corresponded to established epistemic standards or norms. Any new candidate for had to be verified by normative principles or standards that were themselves law like. But by basing normativity, your standards of truth, in spontaneity, rather than in rules, romantic writers like Coleridge initiated what Comrade memorably calls the normativity of the new. Through which they hoped to articulate freedom as a new self determining beginning. So should stop paraphrasing Cradson quote. As he puts it, the new poses a normative challenge to our sense making practises. If we insist on thinking that no normativity means the process by which standards are established, if we insist on thinking that normativity necessarily takes rule governed or law like form, we will be unable to recognise or explain the normativity of the new. Put simply then, the new poses a challenge to normativity, the setting of rules, values, and standards because it cannot be introduced in a law like way. My claim is that for romantic writers like Coleridge, the challenge posed by the normativity of the new is that it literally comes from nowhere. Normative standards based in pure spontaneity are generated nil. The reason why this is such a radical departure at the time was that such a picture of how new standards are created violates one of the cornerstones of enlightenment thought, the principle of sufficient reason. So we benefit here from a very elegant statement of the principle of sufficient reason by one of its great exponents, Gottfried Bilhamignitz, and this is from his resume of metaphysics. And he states for Lignitz the principle of sufficient reason is just foundational for human knowledge. And he writes in his resume, there is a reason in nature why something should exist rather than nothing. This is a consequence of the great principle that nothing happens without a reason. I couldn't be more straightforward. But this principle that nothing happens without a reason is very difficult to reconcile with creation No. Since it's part of the very definition of created truth that it cannot be validated in terms of pre established norms. It carries with it a normativity of the new that cannot be determined by reason. The significance of this radical novelty for the Romantics is nicely expressed in a very famous passage from one of John Keats's letters written to Benjamin Bailey in 18 17. May be familiar with this where Keats says, I am certain of nothing, but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not. For I have the same idea of all our passions as of love. They are all in the sublime, creative of essential beauty. As Keats claims, what the imagination sizes as truth must be true. Not because it happens to be true, not because there's a reason for it, not because the imagination has discovered that something is as a matter of fact, true, but because the imagination makes it true. Create a truth then is a truth for which normatively speaking, there is no justification. One may speak of faith as Coleridge tends to do or power, as Dequincy does, or beauty as Keats does. But it is essential to this new idea and tearly part of this new idea of literature with the Capel as the expression of imagination that one cannot define its essence. It has none. It can't be rationalised. So I mentioned at the start of the talk that creation no cropped up again in my current research project. So in this final section, I'll explain how. I'll try to explain how. So over the past year or so, I've been working on a project called the Waste of m, which I hope to turn into a book at some point. Working at the advent of industrial production and mass consumerism, writers of this generation experience the early effects of commercial waste and their writing not only reflects the deep connection between early industrialization in Britain and its excesses and discards, but also how the creation of surplus value by capitalism inevitably creates waste, including wasted or redundant humans. Many literary works of the period address the wasting of human lives and habitats by enclosure, the Enclosure acts, pollution, urbanisation, slavery and war. The romantic era also coincides with the discovery of geological deep time and the stirrings of evolutionary theories that would rethink humanity's relation to the wasting of the continents and the biosphere. At this point, the history of waste gives way to considerations of wastes ontological significance as a marker of human of the inevitability of decay, dispersion and extinction. Now, the topic of waste might seem quite remote from creation no. But this distance is less apparent when one thinks of what is created from nothing as a gratuitous excess, a surplus that offends the natural order. Whatever disrupts the continuity of this order or system, what springs from nothing for no reason, for instance, is literally excessive, in a sense, prodigal or wasteful. Yeah. The thing about waste is that it is neither object nor subject, neither organic nor inorganic. Consequently, it constitutes a radically indeterminate zone in which the permeable boundary between the human and the non human can be negotiated. It's this disruptive potential of wasteful creativity that I'm interested in. In contesting the waste generated by industrial modernity, romantic writers cultivate alternative kinds of waste or excessiveness as forms of resistance to ideological power and commercialised society. I mean by this alternative wastefulness is a purposeelessness that could not easily be absorbed into systems of production and consumption and consumption, so these writers hoped. To illustrate what I'm trying to get at, I'm still thinking this through. I want to close with a romantic poem that celebrates waste in this sense. It's a very famous poem Percy Shelley's 18 16 sit, Ozymandias, one of my favourite poems. Not so much that I've committed it to memory though. Here it goes. I met a traveller from an antique land who said, T vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that it sculptor well, those passions red which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. On the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozymandius King of Kings. Look on my works, mighty and despair. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sand stretch far away. Now, Shelly sonnet is, of course, a celebration of waste, specifically the decomposition of tyrannical monuments. This wasting process not only decays the vast statue of Ramessc but also lays waste to its pretensions, reversing the original meaning of the inscription. Look on my works, mighty and despair. The poem confronts the vanity of human excess with a vision of infinite waste dispersal through which the vast waste of the monument yields to a decay that is succeeded in turn by the boundless and bare sands of the desert, hovering above a low and level horizon of near nothingness. Shelly's wasted desert presents reality as radically contingent through a kind of non human, infinitely reminded sublimity in which nothing beside remains. What this ingenious double entendre suggests is not just that nothing remains beside the ruined monument, of course, but also that this monument exists in a world in which there is nothing beside remains. Shelley resist the temptation to recuperate any value from such leftovers, especially in terms of wisdom gleaned or knowledge gained. Waste will excess Ozymandus suggests is absolute and its losses are recuperable. There is only waste in nature, what the German romantic philosopher Friedrich Von Seling calls the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder. In being defiantly useless in this way, writers of the romantic period release the subversive potential of a new literature, what I've been calling literature with the Capital L, a literature that as Dequincy put it, presents the direct and adequate antithesis of knowledge. Perhaps this is why literature in this sense has never managed to quite free itself from the suspicion that its aura of profundity is just a sham. That is to say that its active creation ex nileo, its miraculous production of wisdom from the void, really amounts to nothing, that it's timeless truths are just a waste of both time and energy. We see this today continues in the rumblings from some quarters of government and media, that the study of English literature lacks propriety. It is, in other words, not a proper academic discipline. To the extent that it avowedly originates itself from nothingness, however, Romantic literature exposes itself to this charge of wastefulness to the question, why waste your time with those poems? On one level, this is a charge the romantics never tire of answering or trying to answer because of power. They say, because of beauty, because of poetic truth and so on. Shelley's genius, I think in this poem, at least, is to take another tack. He actually turns the tables on propriety by embracing the waste of romanticism. By celebrating in other words, creativity as waste, whether as wasted time, idleness, or wasted action, daydreaming, aimless wandering, or wasted space, ruins and deserts. For Shelly, this waste constitutes a strange liberation. Only through a radical expenditure and emptying out or wasting of oneself, can there be freedom, freedom from relentless productivity, purpose, discipline, and system? Here Shelly would want to adapt the old capitalist adage, you can't get something for nothing. What Shelly's reveals is that you can't get something without the nothing. Shelly suggests a different possibility for literature. That is literature is a site of resistance to what he called life to system to productivity, to the acquisition of knowledge, and the ruthless domination of nature. In short, to the rebellious enjoyment of literature, Capital L literature as a creative waste of time and space. Okay. Thanks very much. Okay. Yes. I was I was there. Feb 19 2025 14.36 - 14.36 Professor Tim Milnes's Inaugural Lecture 'Ex Nihilo: Romanticism, Creativity, and the Invention of ‘Literature’', an Inaugural Lecture celebrating the appointment of Tim Milnes as Personal Chair of Romantic Literature and Philosophy.
Professor Tim Milnes's Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Tim Milne's Inaugural Lecture View media transcript Thanks, Alex, for that very generous introduction, and also thanks to the school events Office for arranging and organising everything today. I want to start by thanking family and friends for attending today, especially my wife, Michelle, and I'd like to thank my son, Sam Which who unfortunately is not able to be here today for various reasons. I'd like to thank my dad for flying up all the way from the Balmy south of France to Stay Chilli Scottish spring to attend today. James, my father for coming all the way from South of England. I have far too many academic debts to mention, but I cannot not mention my old defile supervisor at Oxford, the Late Great Roy Park, whose absolute brilliance as a supervisor. I didn't really appreciate until after I graduated. I also want to mention colleagues with whom I've collaborated on various projects over the years, particularly Felicity James at Lester and are Sinan at Winnipeg. And of course, I'd like to give a huge thanks to colleagues all and in the Department of English literature basically for just being a great bunch of people to work with. Thank you to all. This is starting to sound like a retirement speech actually. And thanks for everybody for coming today. I hope it's interesting. We'll see. I'm going to talk today about my work on romantic literature and philosophy and how it's evolved over the past 20 years or so. Attempting to tie together what in many ways is quite a dog eared story of digressions and dead ends. I'm going to focus on a single idea cat ex no or creation from nothing. The reason for focusing on creation is that this idea, which was the main focus of my D fill work back in the 1990s has unexpectedly cropped up again in my latest research project. So I find out whether click is working. There we go. Okay. What I hear you ask is so important about the idea of Croatian X N. Well, I'm going to try and make a bold argument here. I'm going to try and go out on the limb. I think the idea of Croatian X Nilo as a model for literary and artistic creativity enables a new concept of literature to emerge at the beginning of the 19th century. What a concept of literature that for convenience, I'm calling, but I want to make absolutely clear the romantics absolutely did not call literature with a capital L. That's not all because ultimately, it's this concept of literature that is encoded in the discipline of English literature. As we study it today, so we still do. What I'm going to suggest then, is that the romantic idea of creation from nothing forms the historical condition of possibility for the emergence of English literature as a discipline. I'll also briefly suggest that it's one of the reasons why the discipline of English literature is often seen as lacking propriety. Before closing with some remarks on why romantic poets like Percy Shelley thought literature's very impropriety was something that was worth defending. Now, when I started my D fill, which was much longer ago than I care to remember, it was because I was intrigued by comments such as this one by William Wordsworth. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe. Now, actually, in context, this bold declaration is more hedged and qualified. But nonetheless, it seemed to me that Wordsworth and other writers of the romantic period were making a kind of argument that hadn't been made before about how knowledge progresses or, in fact, doesn't progress. Because one of the things that struck me at the time was how this idea seemed to challenge the idea of knowledge as progressive, as building steadily upon the accumulated gains of previous scientific and philosophical achievements. For Wordsworth, the creation of poetic truth was instead achieved by a divine feat. The poet introduced some new element into the universe, not by building on established knowledge, but by spontaneously producing it from nothings. I should register two caveats at this point. The first is that the idea that poetic genius creates from nothing wasn't some kind of creed. I'm not arguing that it's some kind of creed that was shared by all writers in this period by Lord Byron, for example, or Jane Austen, or Charles Lamb, or Charlotte Smith. In fact, I would say that it's probably actually a minority view. The second caveat is that the idea that the artist or poet is creative and the sense of making things up is obviously hardly new. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato had cited the tendency of poets to make up stories lying about the gods as he saw it as one reason for excluding them from his ideal republic. Even the idea that poets create, as it were, from nothing wasn't new. So Philip Sidney had already got there in 15 95 in his apology for poetry, where he wrote that only the poet does grow in effect another nature in making things either better than nature bring force or quite new forms such as never were in nature. Yeah. But these caveats don't make the idea any less important. True, the idea of the poetic genius as a no creator wasn't universally accepted at the time. But no creativity would become central to what we now view as romantic aesthetics, thanks to the work of thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his massive influence upon subsequent military theory. Secondly, there was actually something new about the way in which writers like Coleridge adopted the idea of creation no. Yes, the idea that the poet created from nothing had been circulating before the 19th century, that's certainly true. But this applied only to fiction, a domain in which truth and falsehood is not an issue. Before Romanticism, the division of labour between poets and scientists or natural philosophers was fairly clear cut. Natural philosophers discovered truths that already existed, but were previously unknown. Poets either made things up that weren't true or by holding the mirror up to nature, imitated existing truths. For writers like Coleridge, however, what distinguished poetic genius is that it created new truths. It added something new to reality. It was this reality changing truth constructing element that was the radically new component of Wordsworth's claim that poetic genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe. So in my depo thesis, I examined the ways in which writers of the period struggle to accommodate and justify this new model of artistic creativity. Yeah. In my first monograph, knowledge and indifference in English romantic prose, I broadened out this inquiry to consider its wider implications for the relationship between philosophy and literature. Now, here, I was influenced by a originally published in French way back in 1978, but still influential today. Philip La C bar and Jean Luc Nancy is the literary absolute. Now, Lac Bar and Nancy's arguments in this book are actually mainly about German Romanticism, but they are apply equally in a British context. Their main claim is basically this. By rejecting the communication of knowledge is the foundation of literary art, emancism creates the idea of literature itself as a genre. Okay. So this is Beyond divisions and all definition, this genre is thus programmed in mantism as the genre of literature, the genericity so to speak, and the generativity of literature, grasping and producing themselves in an entirely new infinitely new work. The absolute therefore of literature. So in this way, literature undergoes a revolution in its status between the 18th and the 19th centuries. That is from what I'm calling literature with a lower case L to literature with a capital L for convenience. For an 18th century writer like Samuel Johnson, Literature, as defined in his 17 55 dictionary of English language was decidedly lowercase L. It meant simply learning skill in letters. Four years later, the Reverend Hugh Blair gave the first of his lectures and rhetoric and Bell letter here at Edinburgh, arguably the first lectures in English literature, or were they? For Blair, the study of what he called the study of polite literature provided useful knowledge in the cultivation of taste, eloquence, and virtue. And yet over 60 years later, we find a very different conception of literature being outlined by the romantic essayist Thomas De Quincy. De Quincy complains in one of his essays for the London magazine in 18 23 about this word literature. He says, The word literature is a perpetual source of confusion because it's used in two senses and those senses liable to be confounded with each other. In a philosophical use of the word, literature is the direct and adequate antithesis of books of knowledge. But in a popular use, it's a mere term of convenience for expressing inclusively the total books in the language. In this latter sense, a dictionary, a grammar, a spelling book, A almanack belong to the literature. Effectively, dismissing Samuel Johnson's sense of literature as all learning, everything written, Dequincy insists on a new philosophical sense of literature. It's in this sense as what De Quincy calls the direct and adequate antithesis of books of knowledge that the romantics invented what I'm now referring to as capitalised literature. Not as everything written, even as what the Reverend Blair called polite literature, but as a writing with a special quality. One that conferred upon it a higher, even transcendent value. Now, this value in turn depended upon the creative power of the writer. The problem with this power was that it was wrapped in mystery. Now, it's telling here that De Quincy initially defines this new sense of literature negatively as the antithesis of knowledge. Because pinning down what this something else was that made literature so special in his sense, the special quality proved to be very difficult. But simply, he was trying to come up with a new answer to an old Philistine question. What's so special about King Lear and paradise lost. If it's not knowledge that is communicated, fundamentally, what does one get from these works of great literature that one does not find in a dictionary? A almanack. In an unpublished and dated manuscript, D Quincy had another stab at this, and he defines this elusive quality as power, or the communication of what he calls an incommunicable excellence of human character. This quality he claims is always found in a true literature reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it will, not as a passive mirror, but as a self moving power. Okay. So by identifying the defining characteristic of this new idea of literature as power rather than the representation of truth, D Quincy opens up a domain for a literature based on human creativity, its self moving power, rather than its ability to represent reality. Once merely the medium for the transmission of truth as it was for Johnson, literature in D Quincy's hands now assumes a privileged relationship with truth. This capital L literature becomes in Lacuba Nancy's terms, the absolute of everything written of all literature, including philosophy. A Luka Bar Nancy argue, This is the reason Romanticism implies something entirely new, the production of something entirely new. The romantics never really succeed in naming this something. They speak of poetry of the work, of the novel or of romanticism. In the end, they decide to call it all things considered literature. Okay. So what I was trying to do in my first book was connect Lakulaba and Nancy's claim about the romantic invention of literature in the literary absolute to my thesis about radical creation. Literature with a capital L achieves autonomy, I claim or I claimed because unlike lower case literature, it creates from nothing. Consequently, literature in this sense, has nothing to communicate. It has no knowledge that it wants to convey nothing beyond its own creativity as writing, its own endless generativity, as Luba Nancy saying. So my thesis and my first book shared a key assumption. And that was that this idea of epistemological creation no, this idea of creating new truth from nothing, pulling wisdom out of the void was inherently paradoxical. And that all the attempts made by romantic writers to make sense of it, to rationalise it, to theorise it were ultimately doomed to fail. In my second book, the truth about romanticism, my view shifted, and this was for two reasons. Okay. Okay. The first reason was that at this point, I was reading a lot of neo pragmatist philosophy by thinkers like the Richard Rorty. As part of a long tradition of American pragmatist philosophy. Roti saw truth not as the object of inquiry, but something that was created for better or worse, he thought for the worse by human language. If truth is itself just linguistic fiction, albeit not a very useful one, according to Rorty, then there's nothing paradoxical about claiming it's created. Fort, truth was just a tool like any other tool and it was a tool that humanity no longer really needed. On these terms, he claimed, we should follow the romantics and recognise that truth was something created or made rather than found. As he puts it from contingency irony and solidarity. If we could ever become reconciled to the idea that the human self is created by use of a vocabulary, rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at least have assimilated what was true in the romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is that languages are made rather than found and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, sentences. Consequently, Roti insisted that insofar as pragmatism privileges, the imaginate, the creative imagination, over reason, it was as he put it on the side of the romantics. As a point you like to make repeatedly throughout his work. The second reason behind my shifting view of romantic creation theory was my discovery of what I thought and to a certain extent, I still think was a similar discourse of pragmatism in British thought in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries. Yeah. It was a tradition that I thought had been neglected by scholars of particularly scholars of philosophical romanticism. The single most important figure in this movement was the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Now, Bentham argued, albeit a bit later in his career. He did eventually get around to arguing that ideas like truth should not be seen as representations of real entities in some platonic sense. But it fictions of belief that had an important role to play with communication. No just essential role to play within communication. Here was a very different concept of creation from nothing. Truth was a miraculous creation, but not of any individual psych genius, but of discourse itself. We need the construction of truth as part of the background of our thought. Despite their differences then, Bentham and Rorty seemed united on one point at least. We need truth not as a goal of inquiry, but as a starting point in order to communicate. In the truth about Romanticism, then, I investigated the ways in which the literature of the period reflected this new pragmatic thinking about creative truth. I focused on the writings of Samuel Til Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Shelley, in particular, all of whom, like Bentham, had very strong connections to the linguistic reform movement of the romantic period. In all three poets argued, one finds a similar pattern in the way in which they depicted the pragmatic independence of truth and communication, something that standard narratives of romantic idealism tended to skate over. When I finished the truth about mancmF once, I knew immediately what I wanted to do next. And that was trace this pragmatic discourse of truth back to its 18th century origins. The research that I conducted ultimately led to the publication of my third monograph, the testimony of sense. Now, the testimony of sense argues that this idea that truth is a socially constructed fiction that human beings really require for communication, that this idea can be traced back to the philosophy of David Human. Okay. Okay. Now, Hume's main reputation was as an atheist and sceptic. In his treatise of human nature, he extended the scepticism even to himself, in a sense, his own selfhood, finding that there was ultimately no empirical evidence that the self exists. Turning his empirical method of inquiry upon himself, Hume finds that instead of a substantial thinking self, he encounters merely a gap, avoid lying between thought and experience. Okay. He puts it in this very famous passage from the treatise. For my part, it's very compelling passage. When I enter most intimately into what I call myself. I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light, or shade, love, or hatred, pain, or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time, without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception. Our eyes cannot turn on their sockets without varying our perceptions. Now, this gap or cleavage between what we think ourselves to be what I call myself, as put it, and what we experience ourselves as heat or cool light or shade, love or hatred, meant that for if there was a substantial entity called a self, we certainly could have no knowledge of it. So much for hum the sceptic. What's perhaps less well known about Hume is what he did next, which was to completely reorientate philosophy around the idea of social correspondence. For Hume, since locating absolute truth through experience or reason was impossible, truth had to be seen instead as a social construct that regulated human belief and made communication fundamentally possible. Underpinning this construction in turn was trust. Okay. As Human explains in an appendix to his inquiries, Unspoken trust is the precondition of truth, justice, and language. He compares this tacit arrangement to the relationship between two rowers in the boat. Thus, two men pull the ars of a boat by common convention for common interest without any promise or contracts, so nothing explicit. Thus, gold and silver are made the measures of exchange. Thus speech and words are fixed by human convention and agreement. This tacit trust between subjects, people, individuals, led Hume to emphasise the performative dimension of rationality. Social truth depended upon consensus. This in turn rested upon the unspoken observance of the conventions of intersubjective communication. Hence, the importance to Hume and other 18th century sais like Joseph Addison of politeness. Politeness reinforces the social solidarity required for truth. As I chart in the testimony of sense, however, by the time the romantic period. What we think of as the romantic period was in full swing in 1790s. The controversy around the French Revolution had polarised opinion, public discourse to such an extent that completely paid to the idea of basing social and epistemological norms on some kind of unspoken social consensus. Instead, writers of this period began to experiment with the idea that norms are created by singular acts of individual genius. The role envisaged for the writer by Wordsworth and Coleridge then is not that of maintaining the norms necessary for truth to exist, but that of producing them of creating them as it were Niler This brings me back to creation from nothing and literature with the Capital L. In my more recent work, I've come back round to the idea that the paradoxes of creation from nothing can't be pragmatically sublimated into trust. This was partly the result of reading a book that actually came out the same year as the testimony of sense. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to incorporate it into that book. That was a book by a philosopher called Robert Brandon called Spirit of Trust. You can see why I wanted to read that full title a Spirit of trust a reading of Hagel's phenomenology. Okay. So when I did read this book, at first, I was really heartened and cheered by Brandon's neo pragmatist reading of the philosopher, George Hagel, because it chimed in many ways with my own reading of hum. Okay. Now, Hagel is often seen as quite an authoritarian thinker, whose work effectively slams the door on enlightenment radicalism. But Brandom sees Hagel as actually the ultimate anti authoritarian thinker. Because Brandom claims, Hagel argues that all norms are in the end relational. There are no absolute norms. Truth is not some kind of big other sitting in some platonic realm, demanding that we recognise its authority. Instead, this is Brandom reading Hagel, it's determined by relationships and alterity. Consequently, for Hegel Brandon claims, there are no statuses of authority and responsibility apart from subjects practical attitudes of taking or treating each other as authoritative and responsible. Now, I was very excited by this because it's very similar to the point I tried to make in the testimony of sense about Hume and the performativity of reason or Hume's ideas about the performativity of reason. As long as everybody is in the boat and pulling on the s, as it were, we have truth. Similarly, Brandon claims that Hagel reveals how the practises that underpin normativity, as he puts it, are structured by trust a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit and talking and acting at all. It's not some optional thing in a way. It's the precondition of talking and acting at all. Put simply without trust, there's no truth. However, there's a problem with this idea that truth as a human creation can be reduced in some way to trust. As Slavoj points out in his critique of Brandom. The trouble with basing the construction of truth and trust is that trust is by definition excessive. It always goes beyond what we strictly speaking believe. Consequently, trust always involves minimum amount of internal friction, bad faith, or j puts it, A minimum of alienation as a condition of freedom. The only way to think and interact freely, the only way to think and interact freely implies not only that we rely on shared rules of language and manners, as Brandon argued, but also that we accept these rules as something given of which we are not reflectively aware. If we were to reflect on and negotiate these rules all the time, our freedom would be self destroyed by its very excess. This minimum of alienation involved in trusting in the fiction of truth reveals that in the end we cannot escape this bind. It turns out that we cannot live without the ethical big other. But nor can we act freely in conformity with it. There's no way out of this paradox. It seems that creation from nothing even when treated purely discursively or performatively is inherently paradoxical. But what I've become interested in recently is in how rather than this being necessarily was a problem for romantic writers, they actually came to see an opportunity in this paradox for a normative rebellion for a volcanic disruption of the epistemological order. This is most clear in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, above all, I think, in his famous definition of the imagination. Now, for Coleridge, the imagination is the seat of creativity in every individual. In his biography of literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions from 18 17, he distinguishes between the primary imagination, which constitutes the kind of metaphysical being or essence of the imagination and the secondary imagination through which imagination engages with the individual will and actualizes itself in the world. In its primary form, he argues, the imagination repeats the original divine act of self creation, whereby God summons his own being from nothingness and establishes order from void. He writes in biographia the primary imagination, I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. Should have put more emphasis on the I am, you say? I am. In pronouncing I am, God engages in the ultimate performative utterance, bringing himself and the universe into being by declaring his own existence. By claiming that this act repeats itself somehow in the human mind, courage connects the creative and unifying power of human imagination to God's eternal act of creation, no. Just worth thinking back to Lukla Bar and Nancy's claim that mentioned at the start of the lecture that mancism implies something entirely new, the production of something entirely new. This is exactly what Coleridge is about here. Just as God's I am miraculously orders what it creates from nothing. Coleridge's imagination makes the reality it represents. As the seat of artistic activity, the imagination create works that did not merely reorder pre existing reality. They add something genuinely new to it, something that did not exist before. By making God's ex nileo creation the basis of imagination, Courage rejected a model of literature as the representation of truth in favour of what might be called the production of truth. The production of not just something that is entirely new, but something that in some peculiar way is true because it is new. This is a very odd idea. My own attempt to understand what's at stake in this puzzling notion has been helped by Nicholas Compads work and what he calls the normativity of the new in philosophical Romanticism. As Cartus argues, the romantic idea of freedom as a new beginning, as he calls it, challenges the basic picture of truth that was shared by many earlier thinkers. According to this earlier picture, what was true was true because it corresponded to established epistemic standards or norms. Any new candidate for had to be verified by normative principles or standards that were themselves law like. But by basing normativity, your standards of truth, in spontaneity, rather than in rules, romantic writers like Coleridge initiated what Comrade memorably calls the normativity of the new. Through which they hoped to articulate freedom as a new self determining beginning. So should stop paraphrasing Cradson quote. As he puts it, the new poses a normative challenge to our sense making practises. If we insist on thinking that no normativity means the process by which standards are established, if we insist on thinking that normativity necessarily takes rule governed or law like form, we will be unable to recognise or explain the normativity of the new. Put simply then, the new poses a challenge to normativity, the setting of rules, values, and standards because it cannot be introduced in a law like way. My claim is that for romantic writers like Coleridge, the challenge posed by the normativity of the new is that it literally comes from nowhere. Normative standards based in pure spontaneity are generated nil. The reason why this is such a radical departure at the time was that such a picture of how new standards are created violates one of the cornerstones of enlightenment thought, the principle of sufficient reason. So we benefit here from a very elegant statement of the principle of sufficient reason by one of its great exponents, Gottfried Bilhamignitz, and this is from his resume of metaphysics. And he states for Lignitz the principle of sufficient reason is just foundational for human knowledge. And he writes in his resume, there is a reason in nature why something should exist rather than nothing. This is a consequence of the great principle that nothing happens without a reason. I couldn't be more straightforward. But this principle that nothing happens without a reason is very difficult to reconcile with creation No. Since it's part of the very definition of created truth that it cannot be validated in terms of pre established norms. It carries with it a normativity of the new that cannot be determined by reason. The significance of this radical novelty for the Romantics is nicely expressed in a very famous passage from one of John Keats's letters written to Benjamin Bailey in 18 17. May be familiar with this where Keats says, I am certain of nothing, but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not. For I have the same idea of all our passions as of love. They are all in the sublime, creative of essential beauty. As Keats claims, what the imagination sizes as truth must be true. Not because it happens to be true, not because there's a reason for it, not because the imagination has discovered that something is as a matter of fact, true, but because the imagination makes it true. Create a truth then is a truth for which normatively speaking, there is no justification. One may speak of faith as Coleridge tends to do or power, as Dequincy does, or beauty as Keats does. But it is essential to this new idea and tearly part of this new idea of literature with the Capel as the expression of imagination that one cannot define its essence. It has none. It can't be rationalised. So I mentioned at the start of the talk that creation no cropped up again in my current research project. So in this final section, I'll explain how. I'll try to explain how. So over the past year or so, I've been working on a project called the Waste of m, which I hope to turn into a book at some point. Working at the advent of industrial production and mass consumerism, writers of this generation experience the early effects of commercial waste and their writing not only reflects the deep connection between early industrialization in Britain and its excesses and discards, but also how the creation of surplus value by capitalism inevitably creates waste, including wasted or redundant humans. Many literary works of the period address the wasting of human lives and habitats by enclosure, the Enclosure acts, pollution, urbanisation, slavery and war. The romantic era also coincides with the discovery of geological deep time and the stirrings of evolutionary theories that would rethink humanity's relation to the wasting of the continents and the biosphere. At this point, the history of waste gives way to considerations of wastes ontological significance as a marker of human of the inevitability of decay, dispersion and extinction. Now, the topic of waste might seem quite remote from creation no. But this distance is less apparent when one thinks of what is created from nothing as a gratuitous excess, a surplus that offends the natural order. Whatever disrupts the continuity of this order or system, what springs from nothing for no reason, for instance, is literally excessive, in a sense, prodigal or wasteful. Yeah. The thing about waste is that it is neither object nor subject, neither organic nor inorganic. Consequently, it constitutes a radically indeterminate zone in which the permeable boundary between the human and the non human can be negotiated. It's this disruptive potential of wasteful creativity that I'm interested in. In contesting the waste generated by industrial modernity, romantic writers cultivate alternative kinds of waste or excessiveness as forms of resistance to ideological power and commercialised society. I mean by this alternative wastefulness is a purposeelessness that could not easily be absorbed into systems of production and consumption and consumption, so these writers hoped. To illustrate what I'm trying to get at, I'm still thinking this through. I want to close with a romantic poem that celebrates waste in this sense. It's a very famous poem Percy Shelley's 18 16 sit, Ozymandias, one of my favourite poems. Not so much that I've committed it to memory though. Here it goes. I met a traveller from an antique land who said, T vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that it sculptor well, those passions red which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. On the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozymandius King of Kings. Look on my works, mighty and despair. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sand stretch far away. Now, Shelly sonnet is, of course, a celebration of waste, specifically the decomposition of tyrannical monuments. This wasting process not only decays the vast statue of Ramessc but also lays waste to its pretensions, reversing the original meaning of the inscription. Look on my works, mighty and despair. The poem confronts the vanity of human excess with a vision of infinite waste dispersal through which the vast waste of the monument yields to a decay that is succeeded in turn by the boundless and bare sands of the desert, hovering above a low and level horizon of near nothingness. Shelly's wasted desert presents reality as radically contingent through a kind of non human, infinitely reminded sublimity in which nothing beside remains. What this ingenious double entendre suggests is not just that nothing remains beside the ruined monument, of course, but also that this monument exists in a world in which there is nothing beside remains. Shelley resist the temptation to recuperate any value from such leftovers, especially in terms of wisdom gleaned or knowledge gained. Waste will excess Ozymandus suggests is absolute and its losses are recuperable. There is only waste in nature, what the German romantic philosopher Friedrich Von Seling calls the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder. In being defiantly useless in this way, writers of the romantic period release the subversive potential of a new literature, what I've been calling literature with the Capital L, a literature that as Dequincy put it, presents the direct and adequate antithesis of knowledge. Perhaps this is why literature in this sense has never managed to quite free itself from the suspicion that its aura of profundity is just a sham. That is to say that its active creation ex nileo, its miraculous production of wisdom from the void, really amounts to nothing, that it's timeless truths are just a waste of both time and energy. We see this today continues in the rumblings from some quarters of government and media, that the study of English literature lacks propriety. It is, in other words, not a proper academic discipline. To the extent that it avowedly originates itself from nothingness, however, Romantic literature exposes itself to this charge of wastefulness to the question, why waste your time with those poems? On one level, this is a charge the romantics never tire of answering or trying to answer because of power. They say, because of beauty, because of poetic truth and so on. Shelley's genius, I think in this poem, at least, is to take another tack. He actually turns the tables on propriety by embracing the waste of romanticism. By celebrating in other words, creativity as waste, whether as wasted time, idleness, or wasted action, daydreaming, aimless wandering, or wasted space, ruins and deserts. For Shelly, this waste constitutes a strange liberation. Only through a radical expenditure and emptying out or wasting of oneself, can there be freedom, freedom from relentless productivity, purpose, discipline, and system? Here Shelly would want to adapt the old capitalist adage, you can't get something for nothing. What Shelly's reveals is that you can't get something without the nothing. Shelly suggests a different possibility for literature. That is literature is a site of resistance to what he called life to system to productivity, to the acquisition of knowledge, and the ruthless domination of nature. In short, to the rebellious enjoyment of literature, Capital L literature as a creative waste of time and space. Okay. Thanks very much. Okay. Yes. I was I was there. Feb 19 2025 14.36 - 14.36 Professor Tim Milnes's Inaugural Lecture 'Ex Nihilo: Romanticism, Creativity, and the Invention of ‘Literature’', an Inaugural Lecture celebrating the appointment of Tim Milnes as Personal Chair of Romantic Literature and Philosophy.
Feb 19 2025 14.36 - 14.36 Professor Tim Milnes's Inaugural Lecture 'Ex Nihilo: Romanticism, Creativity, and the Invention of ‘Literature’', an Inaugural Lecture celebrating the appointment of Tim Milnes as Personal Chair of Romantic Literature and Philosophy.
