Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community

by Joseph Albernaz

What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of communal life collapse? The Romantic period's upheaval cast both traditional communal organizations of life and outgrowths of the new revolutionary age into crisis. In this context, Joseph Albernaz argues that Romantic writers articulate a vital conception of "groundless community," while following this idea through its aesthetic, ecological, political, and philosophical registers into the present. Amidst the violent expropriation of the commons, Romantic writers including the Wordsworths, Clare, Hölderlin, and the revolutionary abolitionist Robert Wedderburn reimagined the forms of their own lives through literature to conceive community as groundless , a disposition toward radically open forms of sharing―including with nonhuman beings―without recourse to any collective identity. Both a poetics and ethics, groundless community names an everyday sociality that surges beneath and against the enclosures of property and identity, binding us to the movements of the earth. Unearthing Romanticism's intersections with the history of communism and the general strike, Albernaz also demonstrates how Romantic literature's communal imagination reverberates through later theories of community in Bataille, Derrida, Nancy, Moten, and others. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.

Genres: Literary Criticism

370 pages, Hardcover

Published August 20, 2024

Reviews

[TNVR]

In The Rebirth of History, Alain Badiou recalls an exchange between himself and Antonio Negri in which the latter accused him of being one of "those who pretend to be a communist without being Marxist." Badiou's riposte: that's better than being a Marxist without being a communist.

I thought of this while reading Albernaz's book which is concerned, among other things, with pre-Marxist visions of communism (or "groundlesss community") articulated in poetry around the time of the enclosures. A consequence of the terminal crisis of the workers' movement and discrediting of programmatism is that the history of pre-Marxist communisms can no longer be easily subsumed into a narrative that sees them preparing the way for (and therefore necessarily deficient vs-a-vis) a Marxist one with the sanction of history. One of the virtues of Common Measures is to draw a genealogy that stretches from this early Romantic moment to contemporary formulations of abolition and destituency.

At the same time, to abandon "historical materialism" (admittedly a much abused term!) is to forfeit any real ability to critically analyze how this state of affairs came to be, much less grasp the terrain of the present. Albernaz, thankfully, does not do this — the book has a good account of the history of the enclosures and how it informs its key figures — but poetic evocations of open fields, groundless community, forms-of-life, etc. can only go so far before one feels the need to return to the ground, however fraught.