Angry criticism and the name

Obstinate old man--senex
sapiens, it is not. What is he saying;
why is he still so angry? He says, I cannot
forgive myself. We are immortal.
Where was I? Prick him.
-Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love

I'm interested in a type of criticism I've seen lately, one that can't stand other people's thoughts unless it has them held in a position, under a name. It is not so much that it can't stand people that don't have clear positions, as it is that it can't stand the difficulty of naming, in general, and at this historical juncture. Naming has become harder, somehow, in the postmodern world. This criticism concludes that it is better to have a name than none at all. So, frustrated with you, it gives you a name. And what it does in the process is not so much confine you to a position or that name, as think that you once had no name, no position at all, prior to their giving it to you.
This is the problem. I don't mind names, call me whatever you want. Names usually only help a situation: they label, they identify, they correct themselves, they allow you to see what faults describing something as X instead of Y produces, etc. The problem is that hesitation over what to call something or someone is not the same as indecision over it or, more significantly, a refusal of naming.
I just went to a talk, for example, where the phrase "ideological critics" was applied to certain people. By this was meant those who gave either new historicist or deconstructive or feminist or queer readings of a text, though in a looser way to also imply those all that work that is influenced by these modes of looking at texts. This was useful. But it was applied as if these ideological critics were refusing to take a stand on something crucial about textuality by being concerned with ideology. In short, the name was circularly applied: by calling these critics ideological critics, you could criticize what you call them. Thus, you only criticize the name: but the slippage here between the name and the referent is all that counts. It destroys any responsibility to try and rigorously demonstrate that the name applies to the referent. In the end, it assumes that the ideological critics refusal to call themselves your name is a dismissal of naming itself. And in the process what it does is not use naming so much as a process that elucidates as a process that just is frustrated with the problems of naming in itself.
What am I getting at? This criticism just seems angry, at the end of the day. And nothing more. By that, I don't mean it does nothing or is nothing. By no means. It is simply is frustrated with the conditions of its own possibility, and wants to impose those conditions upon everything. So it doesn't develop them, when it is placed in a new situation, but merely uses that situation to confirm its conditions of possibility. So it is in the end a type of criticism that doesn't do anything but can say a lot about everybody. It's just pissed off. When it does say something, it doesn't come from this way of criticizing: it seems external, like it could have been achieved by a critic who wasn't so angry. And this is the case because, indeed, under the guise of trying to quickly name something so the critic can get somewhere already and stop worrying about its conditions of possibility, it worries only about its conditions of possibility--because it doesn't think its responsible to step beyond them. So instead of engaging with its object, this criticism sucks its object back into its own sphere of problems. The name is the tool for this non-engagement: it labels, it makes it possible to talk about the thing, but at the same time it does this disingenuously, because it also believes labels or names don't hold. It aspires to a radical provisionality, while at the same time trying to impose its stamp upon everything.
Here is a position for you, angry critics: all pragmatism is this angry criticism.
This doesn't mean that the theses of pragmatism--what it has to say about truth, for example--have this character trait. It merely means that the way pragmatists, or those who fall into pragmatism (which is a more common phenomenon than you might think), go about articulating these theses is by getting angry. In short, what this means is that pragmatism (or its modern form) is a certain style of dealing with the investigations of Wittgenstein (among others), most notably characterized by the two pronged idea that a) we are beyond Wittgenstein, we should know better than him, and b) given the theses of Wittgenstein, which we know and are beyond, you can't get beyond him. Taking up this frustrating two pronged thesis and militantly waving it around, that is what makes you angry. Rorty was great at this, and played a lot with the possibilities of this anger. That is, he often appeared angry and calm at once, and it is this cognizance of his own position on positions that I personally enjoy about him--and why I think he resists a lot of the criticisms that people levy against pragmatists.
But those who do not at first appear to be pragmatists are also angry: Marxists, for one. Gayatri Spivak is constantly infuriated. This isn't bad, as I should emphasize: it simply is a way of presenting ideas and reducing your opponent's position--one which makes them into, in fact, your opponent. And especially under the guise of usefulness, that quality of the name that I tried to outline earlier. The name, the name for the position, is exceptionally useful. But to use its usefulness against itself, as a ruse that will allow you to claim to be, at least, clear about something--this is a strategy that angry critics constantly deploy. So in her essay on Foucault and Derrida, Spivak believes she is being clear when she tries to parcel out their respective positions. This doesn't in the future preclude her from criticizing Foucault in a pretty base manner--that is, in a really angry way, frustrated with her own real inability to criticize him.
But then there are other political thinkers, obsessed with the civic and with solidarity in different ways, who are exceptionally angry: Gillian Rose, perhaps is the most concrete example. The fury she displays (a lot like that of Geoffrey Hill, her friend) is extraordinary, and most precisely of all these examples takes the form I elaborated above with reference to naming. Let's look at her attack on Derrida, often a figure that this criticism grows unbelievably frustrated with. We can imagine why: not only does he criticize clarity as a virtue in itself--he calls this somewhere a naive belief in a sort of philosophical Esperanto--but he precisely resists the frustration one feels with the name. That is, unlike the pragmatist, he thinks the two pronged, contradictory relationship to Wittgenstein precisely as a contradiction to develop, to explore, such that it breaks down. It is not something that is constantly trying to be resolved for him, and it is not something that can be preserved by the work of philosophy: the work of philosophy takes it up and destabilizes its function as philosophy's premise or condition of possibility, no matter how contradictory it is. But back to Rose, for whom this is all intolerable: watch her infinite rage in motion:

All this stems from the logophobic ethos of Derrida's thinking (pardon my neologism). Desperate for expiation and for ethics, he nevertheless desires to avoid at all costs renewing the question (yes, the question), which Marx himself posed and from which his thinking, young and old, proceeded: "How do we stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic?" Only our taking on the burden of posing this question anew would permit us to investigate the possibility of an ethics which does not remain naive and ignorant of its historical and political presuppositions and hence its likely outcomes.
-Mourning Becomes the Law, 70-71 (italics in original).

Notice the neologism with the immediate criticism of what she named. Nowhere is there a second thought as to whether this name applies to Derrida--thinker of the dialectic and the problems of the dialectic par excellence (has she ever read "From Restricted to General Economy?" or Glas?). The assumption, I think, is that he will respond, and that if he can prove the name logophobic doesn't apply--and it doesn't, as he addressed explicitly in several interviews and papers (cf. "For the Love of Lacan")--well, then, Rose will take back her position. She thus seems to demonstrate a good faith in discussion. Seems to: for will this taking-back ever happen? Well, the short answer is no: for what Rose here also deploys is the fact that the name will still stick unless she herself takes it back. So not only does Derrida have to say, no, that does not apply, he has to make her take the thing back herself. It's like we are in fourth grade, and saying bad things about each other's mothers. Take it back! You take it back! The good faith in discussion is the same thing as the anger with the frustrated possibility of naming something I outlined earlier--in short, faith in discussion is the imposition of her inability do discuss upon someone else. So she will say, with a fury it is oddly hard to dissociate from anti-Semitism (and I'm not the first to say this, of course), Levinas, Bloom, Derrida, Jabes, and others (but the term applies most forcefully to Levinas, I think) all "operate according to what might be termed neo-Hebraism" (Mourning Becomes the Law, 79--while she acts like this is well-known, the name is in fact Rose's), a quality that does not just remain as a label but also rings throughout her writing like a sort of accusation, like it also names a stain, a disgusting pathology. This excess in the act of naming is the frustration with naming: the name applies, but it applies itself knowing that it won't ever be exactly right. So what happens? You name anyway, without hesitating over the name--and here is where frustration turns into anger. The residue of affect here--the anger at the futile position of the neo-Hebraists--is not just one about whether this name applies or not. That would be too simple, too Rortyian (this is the technique I spoke of above: Rorty turns anger back against itself to merely end up with this frustration). This residue of affect is concerned with how the neo-Hebraists will not themselves ever accept the name that Rose gives them... even if they were to say they did. This is the same thing, I am suggesting, as the determination to skip over one's own inability to deal with the name: Rose wants to impose the frustration she feels upon others, to never look like she is hesitating. What this completely, utterly overlooks, is that Levinas, Derrida, Jabes, even Bloom all might feel this frustration too. In the process, she makes it seem as if her opponents don't ever think what she thinks--that they, in fact, renounce thinking, questioning (yes, questioning).
That the other might feel this frustration with language, with naming, is what Frederic Jameson understands. He is a great example of someone who escapes this angry sort of criticism while genuinely exploring all the virtues that angry critics think naming allows. Constantly calling the thing by a name, at the same time he never gets frustrated with naming. This can make him extremely difficult to read, especially in his later work, because the names he calls something keep shifting around, and don't apply in the way that you normally think they will apply to something. In short, he does not abuse the clarity afforded by the name, but puts it to work. Deceptively clear, he tries to produce a community where names can be used and are used, but one in which we all understand the other's frustration with their inappropriateness. Using a name is not a fatalistic act for Jameson--it doesn't demonstrate that one is making a resolute decision despite what one already knows about how the name will not apply. It doesn't want to "prick him," as Hill says in the poem above, as if this is a lamentable but responsible act. It simply is what happens in an effort to communicate.