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.