Distant reading, again

Franco Moretti is, as I've said before here, the most virulent of the increasing number of opponents to close reading in American literary criticism. He coins the term “distant reading” in order to suggest how his method of using abstract models for literary history--graphs, maps, and trees--actually makes sense of texts. I want to go over that once more.

Quite simply, distant reading makes sense of texts through the process of gathering immense amounts of empirical data about literary works—the presence or absence of various traits, noted by collaborative efforts considering texts in dozens of languages—and organizing it all into various systems or wholes that seek to make sense of their distribution—projecting representations of the evolution of a genre, say, and its spread across Europe as it becomes more or less viable in various markets. Such effort is continually motivated by astonishment at the “minimal fraction of the literary field we work on,” given that the empirical amount of literary works produced in a span of time often dwarfs even the most expansive canon of that period that we indeed study (one of his favorite observations is that even a canon of two hundred nineteenth century novels would be still less then one percent of what was then produced ), and because these works continually overflow the national and linguistic borders within which literary research often moves.

Against this, then, attempts to expand the canon over the years to include alternative literatures meet something like their limit case, but so too does close reading. For it is the organization of canons—or attempts to expand them—around the latter that makes the study of the actual, empirically existing literary field impossible: as Moretti says, “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases.” This study is only possible if we begin to plot what we have not looked at closely in order to extrapolate tendencies that we cannot actually observe at all. The entire project of literary studies suddenly becomes not one of avoiding paraphrase in the sense of avoiding reduction--which, I’d suggest, is the most fundamental motivation of close reading--but what literary structuralists like Propp, Greimas, Genette and Todorov long ago discovered could constitute a powerful poetics: negotiating reduction, simplifying, and then working off of these reduced systems.

Lest Moretti's study of these particular systems of distribution sound too much like work on the economics of literature, however, which has sometimes been treated very extensively in literary study, Moretti assures us that the effort is ultimately directed to the study of where and when formal innovations in literature--the province once proper to close reading—occur, since the traits that will be noted and plotted on graphs, maps and trees will indeed be formal ones: the presence or absence of clues in the evolving genre of the mystery, for example, which is then able to be represented in tree form. This has significantly led Jonathan Arac to call Moretti’s work “formalism without close reading,” an appellation Moretti himself says defines his work perfectly.

But if Moretti can actually affirm his work’s formalism, he still cannot give us much sense of what the close reading to which it is opposed actually involves. “At bottom,” he says, “it’s a theological exercise--very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously--whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” Such vagueness is typical of many recent critics who seek to turn away from close reading or, indeed, find new ways for critique in general to proceed. For specificity is not, ultimately, necessary: “close reading” can remain a label for the most tenacious of our basic critical dependencies—in Moretti’s case, at most it is the sort of scrutiny or attention that denies us access to the wide distribution of world literature that “distant reading” considers fundamental. “It’s a theological exercise,” in other words, only hints at what we need to make explicit in order for any widespread resistance to close reading to take place, and not collapse, as it sometimes does in Moretti, into the mere belief that anything different is better than what we have. In this respect, what is also necessary is a sense that distant reading is not only a name for Moretti’s work with models, but something like one pole at the end of a wide continuum whose opposite, while indeed being close reading, is only so if we cross many intervening levels of reading, from the more to the less distant over to the less and the more close. Looking for other distant readers than Moretti (I'd suggest Raymond Williams is such a reader), is then one step in both refining what we mean by close reading and showing how we can be lead out of it and brought towards something more distant, precisely by refusing to set up distant reading as some homogenous space outside of which, immediately, we fall into the close. Such a maneuver in fact capitalizes on what Moretti’s and other such attacks, in their vagueness, actually restore to close reading: its functional aspect, which ties it to methodological decisions that have alternatives.

Richards himself used the term “close” primarily in this functional sense, in order to denote the level at which one’s approach to the text in reading could, not make meanings appear, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning. Only subsequently in America would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which the practical Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with except by becoming Utopian: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent meanings with care. If the term and the practice have been able to remain less questioned, it is perhaps because its functions have become so intertwined with notions of virtue that, in the days of deconstruction, the cry “you have not read me closely,” could become just as prevalent, and just as much an accusation, as the historicist’s cry we just mentioned. And since it had become an empty term for, at bottom, interpretive work in general and what it does well, it is no surprise that “closeness” can veer round in Moretti to become an empty term for all that is bad.

Three names

I've been wanting to write a post on Jameson for a while, since wading through his immense corpus is basically all I've been doing over the last month or two. This won't be that post. Rather, I just want to give a little review of a few chapters of his new book, Valences of the Dialectic, which came out Sunday, the first of the month.

The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), "Three Names of the Dialectic," is hard reading. Harder, I think, than Jameson usually is. Things get a much better in the two following chapters on Hegel, and the last chapter (or two) on Ricoeur is a masterpiece, over much quicker than you expected, like a good movie. That said, "Three Names" does excellently what many have tried and few have actually accomplished: a full-on characterization of what dialectic is about. This is, no doubt, why it is so tough, for Jameson is not concerned just with the Hegelian dialectic, but all of it--indeed, when he allows himself the luxury of just confining his analysis to just Hegel, things get more concrete (and that's saying something, as you'll soon see). Where Jameson particularly succeeds though is in showing, not how this diversity reduces to one particular thing we can clearly grasp--the dialectic, which is only the first name of the dialectic in this first chapter--but just how diverse this old thing really is. By spraying dialectic around, then sluicing it in certain directions--indeed showing us many dialectics (dialectic prefaced with the indefinite article is the second name) the whole thing seems much richer, more expansive, more exciting, than the old definitions we carried in our heads before picking up the book.

If this doesn't sound like what philosophy does, well, that's because this isn't philosophy. But that doesn't mean it is unhelpful, or that the account ends up being the lyric meditations of some novice (or that philosophers couldn't learn from the account). Jameson knows what he's talking about, as is evident from the chapters on Hegel, but chooses to do something different--something particularly Sartrean--with this knowledge. I'd characterize this as follows: Jameson gives an overbalance of reality to what otherwise would remain a knowable, but ultimately impoverished, conception. Many people (including me) are finding Sartre useful in particularly this way, and Jameson himself has long valued the Critique of Dialectical Reason especially (though of course he has fondness for all of Sartre) for this particular performance.

One shouldn't however, confuse this performance with the effects of style. And, as usual, Terry Eagleton's crassness has to be just as crassly rejected as it encroaches on this issue, for it causes him to do precisely this. His recent essay in the New Left Review, "Jameson and Form," starts off with some nice observations. Eagleton has always lived off of the supposed aptness or incisiveness of these: they're certainly the only reason, really, to read Literary Theory: an Introduction, even if you have to throw most of them away when you actually start thinking about the figures mentioned. Here, we find the following:

My own sense is that, as with all Jameson’s finest writing, these lines [he has quoted a passage in Jameson on de Kooning, as if, like a New Critical couplet, it could be concretely universal outside its context, or at least folded back unproblematically into that larger whole which is the sonnet analysis] stay just this side of too portentous an awareness of their own brilliance, unfurling with all the mounting drama and excitement of the great Proustian period yet with something of its tact and finesse as well, if not exactly its air of naturalness or civilized lucidity. One feels, as one does not with Proust, that there is a turbulent linguistic energy at work here which might breed some disturbingly frenetic effects were it to let rip...

-"Jameson and Form," NLR 59 (September-October 2009), p. 124

But we might say this is right, not because it is good stylistics--as Eagleton thinks it is--but because it starts to create that "overbalance" that Jameson too creates. The difference between pure style and style that functions, or that thickening we find in Sartre, should now become a bit clearer, and we can just dismiss the rest of what Eagleton tries to wring out of what is no longer an "apt" but a functional characterization. This is the following: because we can see Jameson has a style, and because this style resists the moral and even the political insofar as it resists the empirical or really simply is style (you can't talk about the facts if you have linguistic energy), Jameson's writing should therefore be deemed, alas, "problematic," while at the same time, alas, rewarding. Everything, as usual with Eagleton, gets tied up by that that nice New Critical bowtie that is irony or paradox: the sense that there is, in this whole, success only because it is fraught with conflicting parts, that there are benefits only because their are costs; essentially what Irigaray once mockingly called the use of the second law of thermodynamics in criticism, which only serves really to give the illusion of a stable system, to give us some notion there really is some whole at work here--a Jamesonian corpus as rich and varied and deep as "The Canonization," which, yes, exists (no "producing the concept" here, since there's production of the... empirical!). It's all basically a repeat of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, which was once somewhat illuminating but now gains its force only because Jameson actually has explicitly taken anti-empiricist and anti-moralistic stances.

These positions are indeed reiterated in Valences, because it is Jameson's conviction (following Hegel) that dialectic itself has, on the one hand, the function of destabilizing Verstand, commonsense understanding which would indeed suppose a non-totalized empirical world (just stuff, no system), and, on the other, the function of suspending empty moralistic condemnation where the analysis can be extended, a richer vision of things can be obtained by tarrying with the negative, and less superficial condemnations generated (this ultimately leads him to see Utopian elements in Wal-Mart in chapter 16 of this book--though he also says nothing good can come from this institution). Indeed, Jameson's reply to Eagleton regarding his corpus might be simply, "it's dialectical!" (the phrase he uses to give us the third name of dialectic, the adjective), something that would probably be lost anyway on someone who thought good Marxism means merely a commitment to empirical (as history itself: it's plain as day to Eagleton that Jameson's "always historicize!" is refuted by the question "Does this include geometry?"--and lest you think I'm joking, I quote directly page 135) and empty moralistic outrage (it's clear to Eagleton that Jameson's writing is "constructed... to distance personal feeling," 137--or rather, as I'd claim, to distance affective caricatures that some take for feeling).

So if we refuse this notion that what Jameson is doing is purely stylistic, what really is involved in this "overbalancing of reality," as I've called it? We might say it involves the "thickening" I mentioned earlier, by which Jameson takes a thought and turns it into what he likes to call a "thought-mode." Take--not a description out of context--but a simple remark at the end of a discussion of Hegelian "categories" (the various structures we find in the text, like Quality, Becoming, etc.):

As for Kant, not yet being a Habermassian or feeling the sway of any structuralist or postmodern doxa about the primacy of language and communication, he sticks to the mind itself and grasps the categories as so many "concepts of the understanding" which operate both judgments and those perceptions understood to be mental "syntheses of representations." Still, he disposes of some fairly recognizable traditional "space"--the mind--in which, as in Aristotle's "speaking" [just discussed], the categories can comfortably be housed and find their field of efficacy. Whatever Hegel thinks about mind or language, those are not the "places" in which his categories evolve: and to call this last Spirit or even Objective Spirit is to beg the question, insofar as it is precisely the space of the categories which will be called on to define Spirit in the first place. So they seem relatively placeless and disembodied (Valences, 78).

Basic stuff, yes (we're still at the beginning of the essay "Hegel and Reification"), and while there's a somewhat humorous remark to kick it off (which might be approached more accurately and more philosophically in terms of the history of philosophy), and some nice talk about "places," basically everything's just good old thinking (and good thinking) until we get to that last sentence. It is here that we find something thickening, just in this offhand remark: there's no real purpose except to explain, not even how we feel reading Hegel (he'll come to that later, on page 80-1), but the sorts feelings that shape the contours of Hegel's thinking when we follow it. In this seeming placenessness and disembodinedness there is something like the aesthetic projected by this aspect of Hegel, and pinpointing this aesthetic not only give us a better hold on him, but also shows what sort of field Hegel feels his conceptions work within. There is an effort, in short, to connect whatever is in question to experience--though not necessarily "our" experience.

Jameson then is able to seize on this, and perform, precisely, dialectical reversals:

...So they seem relatively placeless and disembodied: they are not the thoughts of a Mind, even a transcendental one (since for one thing, they are not yet even thoughts as such): Absolute Spirit may be, or however Hegel's combination of Substance and Subject may be understood, it is not an omniscient and anthropomorphized narrator of some sort. In fact, I tend to think it would be better to imagine the "space" of Hegel's categories in the absence of all such modern container notions of subjectivity or of element, in a kind of spacelessness. This makes the categories in Hegel far more situation- or event-specific; all the while acknoledging the evident fact that whatever "space" or "context" may be invoke, it will always also itself be precisely one of those categories it was alleged to have governed or contained. Thus once again here we confront the well-known paradox of the "class which is a member of itself," something "solved" by the attempt to imagine a state of things--or better still a type of discourse--itself free of such representational homogeneity, and able to accommodate a series of "events" without a frame or background. Add to this the characterization of these moments as somehow related to pensée sauvage in that the Logic effectuates the construction of local universals out of particulars in a situation in which universals do not yet exist, and we have an even more paradoxical approach to hegel opening up before us (Valences, 78-9).

The aesthetic, given overpresence I might even say, allows a certain leap by which we're able to say that we have to basically suspend our belief (and not disbelief, for once with Hegel!) in Absolute Spirit. All of which involves a project of seeing "Hegel's Marxism" (as Jameson puts it, 100), a project that he picks up back in "Three Names," rather than line things up in the regular order.

Indeed, back in "Three Names," we find positions Jameson has held for some time elaborated more explicitly: Verso's book jacket says Jameson moves towards the "innovation" of a "spatial dialectic," but this is old news, really. Jameson--and this is why, primarily, I like him (and why I like Derrida)--doesn't innovate. All his concepts are tied together and slowly grow, inflecting each other. Often (much more than in Derrida, who struggled for consistency much harder than was, for anyone other than him, productive) there are local eruptions of something completely new and weird, but then the rest of the web comes to meet it by stretching itself over some abyss. This is the work of producing closure that I've stressed was essential to understanding Jameson in a previous post (in which I basically tried to anticipate what Jameson might say in such an introductory chapter as this one)--and it's important to distinguish it on the other hand from the production of a system, which can be just as productive of "innovations." Indeed, this sort of language of what we might call the "theory industry" is parasitic on theory itself, and it is this structure--which I wouldn't say is necessarily organic, and rather involves something like what long durations of concept-formation can produce faster than thought (whether of advertisers or of lesser-experienced thinkers) itself, in a sort of short-circuit that "innovation" precisely misdescribes--that seems to resist such an industry. This is, at least, what I would add to how Jameson describes theory, which is indeed very concerned with the "theory industry:"

The persistence of the proper name in theory, indeed--as when we identify various texts as Derridian, Althusserian, or Habermassian--only serves to betray the hopelessness of the nonetheless unavoidable aim of theoretical writing to escape the reifications of philosophy as well as the commodifications of the intellectual marketplace today (Valences, 9).

Again, he's held this position for some time (see my old post from last year on this, though the position is even older). What is new is the presentation, and of course the particular "thickenings." We see an even more incisive characterization of Derrida in these pages ("it is as though the dialectic moves jerkily from moment to moment like a slide show, where deconstruction dizzily fast-forwardds like a film by Dziga Vertov," 26, a thickening of what has essentially become my view, which we find in Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, that Derrida "unlike Adorno [...] refuses any positive or substantive concept of its own negative method, and indeed of method as such," 180), as well as a striking and more explicit take on what's wrong with Foucault (his thought is not non-dialectical but "too dialectical:" "Foucault attributes the positive valorization of Enlightenment to his deluded bourgeois readers and positions it as an error which the new narrative of paranoia and conspiracy is to correct: whereas from a dialectical perspective both narratives are correct and both narratives are equally in error," 52), and a thought-provoking characterization of Adorno and Zizek (the latter producing paradoxes not to undo the stupid first impression that it is indeed paradoxical, but rather "to undo that second moment of ingenuity which is that of interpretation [...]: the paradox is of the second order; what looked like a paradox was in reality simply a return to the first impression itself," affirming the "objective appearance," 59--and if this is true my reading of Zizek in that earlier post is faulty, but I still distrust Zizek more than Jameson does). What's also promising and somewhat more explicit than in previous works are the readings of Capital and some of its most visible dialectic moments--a subject Jameson will tackle more in a more focused manner in yet another book.

Also more explicitly formulated is the notion of "neutralization" as it relates to the dialectic, which was worked out perhaps most visibly in Archaeologies of the Future, but also has been around basically since Jameson began considering Greimas. Here, though, like everything else, it gets a bit more thorough treatment, due again to this clean though perhaps too formalistic presentation that divides up the dialectic into its three names: the dialectic, a dialectic (or many dialectics), and dialectical (it's dialectical!). The first makes the case that the dialectic, whether Marxist or Hegelian, has to be seen as not a claim to unity but a presentation that is an aspiration to totality (this mirrors the rejection of the Absolute Spirit we saw above). It passes over into its opposite, which actually is the most fruitful albeit complex section of this first chapter, where we see the dialectic at work in what were antinomies and binarisms of all sorts (the large thread running through this--again worked out more explicitly than in other works--is that structuralism is dialectical in a Sartrean sense, despite what Lévi-Strauss said at the end of La Pensée Sauvage; however many good and unexpected examples appear here). The basic move (which we saw in the analysis of Foucault, above) is made as explicit as it could be: Foucault's work, and anti-dialectical work like it (a topic picked up in the third chapter on "Hegel's Contemporary Critics"),

should seem to generate a situation in which power has no opposite (or is its own opposite). I believe that this seeming impasse can at least be clarified by the suggestion that this particular type of opposition is to be grasped as the superposition of at least two binary systems: a purely logical opposition between essential and inessential or center and margin. Here the "negation" lies in the differentiation between the initial equivalents, while its ideological investment--the very content of domination itself--derives from the way in which this second opposition reappropriates the first one. The force of negation is then transferred from the latter to the former (Valences, 21).

This is clean and openly didactic--more typical of this particular essay than most of Jameson's work. Nevertheless, it is indeed good to have out there when dialectical reversal is indeed harder to grasp for most people than it perhaps should be. Or so Jameson claims in the next section, where he considers the adjectival form (dialectical), and how (following Sartre) the dialectic "will always be its own illustration or example; that any exercise of it wil already be its own presentation," and thus is always difficult to grasp, since "you have to be grappling with a dialectical reality reality in order to be able to show" (and perhaps we might add see) "what the dialectic is" (50). We can close on this note, which brings us to the most essential aspect of the dialectic that--as I said in a previous--always has been the most imperative to bring into overpresence, or deepen:

[F]or the present it is the contagiation of the dialectic, rather than its structure, that we are out to catch a glimpse of: some essential restlessness or negativity that fastens onto our thinking at those moments in which we seem arrested and paralyzed by an antinomy--for, as has been observed above, the relationship between antinomy and dialectic is a crucial one in the contemporary period, where the antinomy has taken the place of the contradiction, expressing intractability rather than energy or construction (or indeed incommensurability rather than relationship).

What happens in moments like these--at least when the dialectic unexpectedly proposes itself, and when it suddenly crosses our minds that "it's dialectical!"--is that the problem itself becomes the solution, and that the opposition in which we are immobilized like a ship in the ice must itself now become the object of our thinking... (Valences, 50-51).

Mono-individual

These classifications were necessary to enable us to emphasize, without risk of misunderstanding, the sociological and at the same time relative nature of the notion of a species as well as of an individual. From the biological point of view, men who belong to the same race (assuming that a precise sense can be given to this term) are comparable to the individual flowers which blossom, open and wither on the same tree: they are so many specimens of a variety or sub-variety. Similarly, all the members of the species Homo sapiens are logically comparable to the members of any other animal or plant species. However, social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion no longer recalling specimens within a variety but rather types of varieties or of species, probably not found in nature (although there is a suggestion of it now and again in the tropical environment) and which could be termed "mono-individual." What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of ideas and modes of behavior as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops out of the simple chemical substances common to all species. When the loss of someone dear to us or of some public personage such as a politician or writer or artist moves us, we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were Rosa centifolia to become extinct and its scent to disappear for ever. From this point of view it seems not untrue to say that some modes of classing, arbitrarily isolated under the title of totemism, are universally employed: among ourselves this "totemism" has merely been humanized. Everything takes place as if in our civilization every individual's own personality were his totem. [...] In so far as they derive from a paradigmatic set, proper names thus form the fringe of a general system of classification: they are both its extension and its limit. When they come on to the stage the curtain rises for the last act of the logical performance.
-Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 214-15

Latour v. Derrida

Over at my Latour reading group blog, I explain that wonderful first thesis of "Irreductions"--nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else--and say the following:

In other words, Latour is saying that nothing is singular (irreducible) because it always needs others. Derrida would say everything is singular (irreducible) because it (a thing) needs others. Both, yes, say nothing is reducible to anything else. But such a statement comes from two different concerns. Latour is interested in saying that the misunderstanding ["translation is by definition always a misunderstanding, since common interests are in the long term necessarily divergent"--Latour] comes in to affirm the fact that a thing needs others. While Derrida is interested in undercutting how a thing needs others precisely through misunderstanding.

Of course it's much more complex than that--as the rest of the post(s) should make evident.

Weak theory

I said last time that while I find Eve Sedgwick's position in her essay "Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading" extremely problematic--largely because of her unquestioning (and, indeed, last ditch) commitment to close reading, her authoritative, hyper-moralistic, and accusatory tone, and her general feeling that "big thoughts" are really irrelevant--I'm confident one suggestion of hers is extremely valuable. This is that theory needs to become what she calls "weak theory," following Silvan Tomkins.

Tomkins opposes weak theories to "humiliation theories," or "strong theories." He uses the word "humiliation" because a strong theory tries to account for every relevant phenomenon that pops up and might contradict its claims, thereby continuously anticipating its own failure. To counter this, the theory grows even more expansive, trying to explain and connect more and more extant cases and demonstrate how other theories are insufficient. The theory humiliates because it tries to stave off being humiliated.

Sedgwick explains:

As this account suggests, far from becoming stonger through obviating or alleviating humiliation, a humiliation theory becomes stronger exactly insofar as it fails to do so. Tomkins's conclusion is not that all strong theory is ineffective--indeed, it may grow to be only too effective--but that "affect theory must be effective to be weak."
-"Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading," in Touching Feeling, 134

The point is that affect theory, which seeks to recognize more than just the cardboard-cutouts that are the simply positive and simply negative affects (love, hate), must have done its work on the theorist in order for any alternative to strong theories to present itself. That is, we must have cultivated a more sophisticated relationship to feeling, must have diversified our experience of emotion, in order to be able to create theories that do not constantly humiliate and end up humiliated.

This important for Sedgwick not only because she thinks that criticism at this juncture works too easily off of negative affect--stirring up bad feelings in order to use bad feelings against what makes us feel bad--but also because she believes theory can anticipate other things than failure all of the time.

This, I think, is an extremely useful thought, even if I also believe that Sedgwick's sense of what is indeed possible with theory remains extremely narrow, and that this in turn causes her to (unsuccessfully) try to humiliate D.A. Miller. Miller's expansive and truly excellent study, The Novel and the Police, is, along with Judith Butler's pathbreaking Gender Trouble, Sedgwick's exemplary paranoid critical text. And, when it comes time to stop accusing it of being paranoid, and praise Miller's work for what it anticipates besides the failure of its own project, Sedgwick only points to generally aesthetic aspects of the theoretical text:

I don't suppose that too many readers--nor, for that matter, perhaps the author--would be too surprised to hear it noted that the main argument or strong theory of The Novel and the Police is entirely circular: everything can be understood as an aspect of the carceral, therefore the carceral is everywhere. But who reads The Novel and the Police to find out whether its main argument is true? In this case, as also frequently in the case of the tautologies of "sexual difference" [her description of what Judith Butler does in Gender Trouble] the very breadth of reach that makes the theory strong also offers the space--of which Miller's book takes every advantage--for a wealth of tonal nuance, attitude, wordily observation, performative paradox, aggression, tenderness, wit, inventive reading, obiter dicta, and writerly panache. These rewards are so local and frequent that one might want to say that a plethora of only loosely related weak theories has been invited to shelter in the hypertrophied embrace of the book's overarching strong theory.
-"Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading," in Touching Feeling, 135-6

It should be obvious that not only does this description damn by faint praise, as well as turn Miller's main argument into a joke, but also end up portraying Miller's lengthy readings of Collins, Dickens, Trollope, and others (the majority of the book) basically as filler. These readings, in the end, are only good for their production of what Sedgwick later calls a "glue" forming between their many words, made up "of surplus beauty, surplus stylistic investment, unexplained upwellings of threat, contempt, and longing" ("Paranoid Reading," 150).

Now, yes, it perhaps is also seems reductive to describe Sedgwick's interest in this surplus of feeling, skill, and beauty as interest in the merely "aesthetic" aspects of Miller's text, as I have done. But, when isolated from the involved and important arguments that make up the book, this glue is aesthetic, and even the feelings themselves are made into mere contributions to readerly enjoyment. For Sedgwick, the weak elements of Miller's text do not just resist the anticipation of his theory's failure--they confine themselves to anticipating nothing except the end of theory itself (and I'd read this phrase in the most expansive way) in pure writerly creation. Against this, can't we see how Miller's theories might be anticipating something different? And indeed, something that, seen against what the book is actually arguing, isn't as humiliating?

Now, I take the time to point out this (attempted) humiliation of Miller because I think there is a crucial place for negativity in criticism: when someone is doing something wrong, we should point it out, explain it, and oppose it. Negativity especially has its place in the inflection of explanation and opposition: it produces a movement which allows the unfolding of the position in question to produce one's distance from that position, thereby making room for a thicker--not thinner--account of what gets opposed (which might not even be the position itself, but what it entails). And here, considering Sedgwick's reading of Miller, where there is the temptation to enact her positive alternative that is being theorized in order to prove the validity of that alternative, and where the questioning of so many key aspects of theory itself occurs, I think it is especially important to show where Sedgwick is also going wrong, rather than accept such a characterization of Miller. I'm being so negative, in short, because being negative can help us preserve what is positive here--and indeed make the realm of the positive more expansive than Sedgwick is here making it.

For, as we said, positive affects, when aligned to weak theory, don't just involve that "wealth of tonal nuance," or indeed that "glue of surplus beauty, surplus stylistic investment." In fact, they might also involve what Sedgwick later calls "nonce taxonomies:"

There are important phenomenological and theoretical tasks that can be accomplished only through local theories and nonce taxonomies...
-"Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading," in Touching Feeling, 145

And these, most importantly, don't produce rewards that, in their authotelic, aesthetic perfection are only "local and frequent." Nonce taxonomies can, in other words, outlive their immediate present. Thus I think we can use what Jameson says about how we should judge the political effectivity of Utopias--

In the case of Utopian texts, the most reliable political test lies not in any judgment on the individual work in question so much as in its capacity to generate new ones...
-Archaeologies of the Future, xv

--and also apply to judging the theoretical yield of weakness--instead of Sedgwick's aesthetic test. For when a weak theory remains weak, and yet also can proliferate by an process where its local use is unexpectedly displaced into another locality (as I am doing with Jameson right here), it becomes a nonce taxonomy twice over. In other words, instead of judging the yield of weak theory by itself, as we would a (individual, high-modernist, Proustian--all qualifiers that enthralled Sedgwick) artwork, we should perhaps think its potential differently. That is, we should consider its potential as more than in its its ability to resist, by the self-confining gesture of rolling into a ball of pure "panache," any and all diffusion beyond the local, any and all spilling over the borders of feeling and the realm of beauty into an area of writing that expands, connects, and attempts to account for various cases--like argument (on this point, I think it is extremely significant that Tomkins distinction is about scientific theories: in English, our theories have never been that strong, and Sedgwick's need to think that they are makes her opposition to the expansive and totalizing almost seem phobic). In other words, we should see that if weak theory can anticipate something other than its own failure, this means that a theory could anticipate its success precisely in its expansion and expandability in a way similar to these "nonce taxonomies"--and thus all theoretical expansion cannot simply equatable with a process of becoming strong, as Sedgwick, by making the only other possibility of anticipation a local and aesthetic one, would have it.

It's in this way that even a dialectical criticism--surely something that involves "big thoughts"--might become weak or weaken, perhaps precisely through that process of pushing towards closure that, following Jameson, I described last time.