Symbolic Investiture and Modernity

 Eric Santner’s book My Own Private Germany, addresses and explores the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber. Schreber suffered a psychotic breakdown after being appointed to the role of High Court Judge, unable as it were to metabolise his new title, his mandate.

The ritual whereby someone is admitted to the High Court is an instance of what Santner calls “symbolic investiture”, which he defines thus:

by symbolic investiture I mean [..] those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferal of a title and mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared symbolic universe.

Santner reads Schreber’s breakdown in the context of a wider “crisis of investiture” in modernity. Here is part of a synopsis of Santner’s book:

The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject’s self-understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some “other” who threatens our borders and our treasures.

Unable to “assume” the symbolic mantle, the title, Schreber experiences it as a kind of obscene and external injunction from an invasive and persecutory God.

What’s interesting to me is the suggestion that this suspension of symbolic investiture (ie the suspension of its self-evidence, of its digestibility) occurs at times of historical instability, and is readable as a historical symptom. A particular “symbolic universe” has disintegrated or been eroded, such that faced with a particular symbolic mandate, the subject does not salute it and say “Yes, that’s me, that’s my destination”, but instead confronts it as something external and disagreeable. I’m interested also in the space that this suspension or crisis opens up – whether it be a space of madness or a space of freedom.

Inevitably perhaps, my point of reference is Yeats. First of all, in fact, Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats. The Yeats family is fairly solidly of the Anglo-Irish ruling bloc. There are certain expectations that go along with that, certain educational and career destinations and trajectories that go unquestioned. Or they do until a certain historical point. That certain historical juncture is Yeats’s Father. John Butler Yeats embarks on the expected Protestant Ascendancy biography. He trains in the law at Trinity College with a view to becoming a barrister. He then abandons all this to become a portrait painter, and to exist in way that can accurately be named bohemian.

On the one level, this decision is attributable to John Butler Yeats’s “capricious personality.” But it is also the case that such a choice would have been inconceivable even a generation previously. The historical substance itself has altered. The social substance in which such a destiny could naturally and unproblematically be lived has hardened and cracked. Land Acts, Catholic emancipation and social advance, the imminence of Home Rule, all represent the ‘silent weaving of the spirit’ which leaves the Anglo-Irish groundless.

John Butler Yeats’s refusal of his social destiny, the mantle of barrister, is surely based on this recognition that the historical substance has changed. A space of freedom opens up wherein the social substance no longer exactly fixed, foreseen, predictable, prescribed. 

On W.B. Yeats’s birth certificate, “Father’s Profession” is listed as ‘barrister’, when the Father had already given up that title and the class trajectory that went with it. Susan Yeats, the Poet’s mother, who made this entry, was still wedded to the symbolic universe that the father had refused. AS the William Murphy the family’s biographer puts it

She entered on a game with one set of rules only to find them changed as soon as the game began.

Murphy (and WBY himself) says that Susan was often a silent presence in the Yeats household. And her subsequent silence can be interpreted as a ‘symptom’ not just of some personal malaise but of a kind of knot in history, whereby one person is still invested in the (disintegrating) symbolic “game” of a particular class, whilst the other refuses and negates it.

What I'd like to talk about in the next post is the secret societies that W.B. Yeats belongs to, which are all about acts and rituals of investiture, albeit often theatrical and even parodic.