Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

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24 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


with Ren é e Schatteman, Phillips echoes Foucault’s insistence that
the subject is more than simply a passive expression of particular
historical circumstances. In his own words, He argues that “indi-
viduals are ultimately much more complicated than historical forces
or events.”^4 Both Foucault and Phillips’s thoughts are complemented
by Pierre Macherey’s theory, which holds that subjectivity comes
into being through a process of “disintegration or detotalization”
within the individual’s historical context and involves a “rupture
or refolding within the historic-totality.”^5 In this light, the subject
is not defined by its “belonging to a historically determined social
system” but, rather, by its success in “manipulating it [... and] ‘pos-
sessing’ it.”^6 These ideas are not only to be found in Macherey and
Foucault’s work. Dennis J. Schmidt, a philosopher of history, takes a
similar approach to the difficult subject of the conjunction between
self and history. Significantly, he also identifies subjectivity in terms
of a struggle for the individual in a particular historical milieu and
contends that it involves an effort to “actualize freedom” and express
“self-understanding” in a peculiar context.^7 Schmidt’s contribution
is also helpful in that he elaborates upon the dynamic, negotiatory
processes by which history is conceived in different cultural and
temporal settings. While defining each of us and “defining the con-
text and possibilities that circumscribe what can emerge from out of
[one’s] times, it summons [us] to the infinite task of understanding
what history itself might be said to be.”^8 As explained below, this
historically situated conception of subjectivity also dovetails with
many of the concerns outlined in Paul Gilroy’s seminal work, The
Black Atlantic , some key ideas of which (particularly “double con-
sciousness,” which is borrowed from W. E. B. Du Bois’s work), reso-
nate with cosmopolitan thought.
In this discussion, I demonstrate the ways in which Higher
Ground and The Nature of Blood employ literary techniques that
evoke images of subjectivity within history, in keeping with those
outlined above. In doing so, they also prompt the reader to view
history not as a static and monolithic concept but as a highly unsta-
ble and ambiguous term. As Abigail Ward observes, Phillips’s
polyphonic novels prompt us to consider “an alternative means of
discovering the past.”^9 Among the most salient techniques Phillips

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