Criticism and critique

You might have caught me defending critique against the anti-critical trend of certain work in the humanities, but I think I've figured out why I've been doing it, and why it has never quite felt genuine on my part: I've been defending critique because it's often tied up with criticism, as if it implied the latter. I was worried, in other words, by a sort of guilt-by-association sort of thing, which could be used to accuse literature departments especially of screwing up the humanities in over the last few decades. And I've seen it happen, so it's not a baseless fear.

And critique certainly still is an important thing to engage in, just as critical theory (with which I should have more closely identified it) is, in the sort of watered down form that I have been comfortable defending: as, essentially, politicization.

But even so watered down what's important to note is that critique isn't the only form of politicization: critical theory is so annoying, and so doomed, precisely because it acts as if this is the case (much, much more than the Marxism whose place it usurped), and thus even reduces politics itself to a form of critique. And once you note this, you begin to recognize that if that's true of politicizing things, it's certainly true of criticism: critique, in other words, has really quite little to do with criticism, and we've been tricked somehow into thinking that the two are really more related than they are.

It's the calculated vagueness of the "critical" in the appellation "critical theory" that did this: this, in other words, is the source of the association that somehow entailed the guilt. But once you see that at the very best the vagueness only works one way (criticism might build up into something that implies a definite critique, but a critique can never really work itself out through criticism of the literary type), you don't have to defend anything about critique if you don't want to--as a literary critic. This is really only what's implied, I realized, by my splitting off literary theory from critical theory--something I've engaged in quite happily.

So I think I'm going to be less hedgy about bashing critique in the future: certainly the critical stance is the source of a whole host of problems described very clearly by Latour, not the least of which is the very sad separation of literary criticism from criticism of something having to do with the real world, the world science also describes. That is, the idea that criticism is critique or vice versa actually reinforces the separation of reality from the literature we deal with, so that we ourselves actually start to marginalize literature by saying we are dealing with lies about the world, things that can only, with a little help from us, critique the hard reality that only science can give us (John Guillory has described how this works quite well). But fictions are not lies; they don't lie about reality.

The thing to be asserted, though, if the guilt-by-association ever pops up, is the following:

Literature departments were really, really interested in moving beyond interpretation after the 60's, because they were really, really interested in moving beyond formalism (literary formalism, that is, or the sort of view of the artwork as a self-enclosed form, with clean divisions between it and the reader, and society, and history, and implies that all you can do with a work of literature is just fix the meanings of its words). This, initially, is why they turned to the people in France and Germany with the weird philosophies. What they both had in common was this anti-interpretive move.

If anything, it implied an anti-critical (in the sense of critique) gesture on the part of the literary critics, since formalism had gotten so rigid (that is, had gotten so much justification) because of Kant's third critique (the big deal literary critics made about the sublime, in the 70s and 80s, was precisely because it was the moment when Kant seemed to open up to work against his own intense formalism). And indeed it met up with an anti-critical (in the sense of critique) impulse going on especially in France then. This is just what allowed literary critics eventually to jump the gap and claim that they were also doing critique (that, and of course the huge interest in allowing criticism to address pressing social issues--issues, which, however, and as feminism in particular showed, you didn't absolutely need critique to address through criticism).

You'd think, of course, that two anti-critical stances meeting up would indeed make literary critics claim they were precisely not engaged in critique. But the problem was that the philosophers who they read (Derrida and Foucault especially) were coming at the anti-critical stance precisely from a philosophical point of view, and derived their anti-interpretive perspective from that. The problem was that the stress began to fall on resisting critique by resisting interpretation, and as more interesting things (things now that don't really look very different from interpretation) could be done instead of interpretation in both philosophy and in literature, we forgot that it was critique that also needed to be resisted.

Still, people think that our insistence upon "the world is a text" or theses like that mean that literary critics wanted to make everything into interpretation, but we were better (and worse) readers of philosophy than that. We were arguing against interpretation, alongside the philosophers, with the aim of opposing critique: the whole notion of textuality is what we might call a interpretation-resistant, and supposedly critique-resistant ontology.

On the face of it that sounds bizarre and backwards, but it's because interpretation for philosophers meant something that was an offshoot of phenomenology: hermeneutics in a Heideggerian and Gadamer-like sense. Paul de Man got this exactly, if he also in the process made it all too simple and thus, ultimately, extremely confusing: he called what you interpreted precisely what was phenomenal, and the goal always when doing literary criticism was to avoid that like hell, and to get to the non-phenomenal, what you couldn't see at first glance as it were (this is why irony and allegory were so important for him). This was the text, or the writing, or, in a different sort of framework, the discourse, and what you did when you did criticism was no longer interpretation but reading (the text didn't have to be non- but only anti-phenomenal, and there were squabbles, rightly, over this, which were much more illuminating philosophically than the philosophy that was done with these figures, and still was until just recently (after a flock of students of comparative literature actually moved over to philosophy)).

But you see what's involved even in "getting" this: the philosophers have a context in which interpretation is a genuine phenomenological issue in a truly phenomenological sense, and so are able to directly (or at least more directly) relate that to the issue of critique. For us, the phenomenon is precisely a matter of practical criticism. Interpretation, in other words, even when understood as a phenomenological issue is going to be a matter of dealing with words rather than the world (by this I don't mean to suggest that words don't deal with reality any less than what philosophers deal with), and so can't be related philosophically to opposing critique except by a sort of very indirect route, which can't be made into a direct one except by evading all sorts of issues and just acting like it is. Some of the structuralists in France and Paul Ricoeur were able to travel it, though they even didn't really do it because they relied on Saussure's theory of the sign to pull it off (there's a big difference, from literary critical perspective, between signs and words).

But that's what people did. And because they did that, they could strangely circle round and engage in what was essentially critique. The issue here then becomes one of the influence of cultural critique on literary studies, which had already somewhat related critique with interpretation. Drop the interpretive element, and you can have few scruples about what you're doing.

You see that from a philosophical perspective especially you have two sorts of frameworks in play in literary studies, one critical and the other anti-critical. What's particularly fascinating for the literary critic, for whom the issue of avoiding interpretation will always be more important (and so justified their simultaneous use), is that the stress on cultural critique actually made us forget that we wanted to avoid interpretation as well! Suddenly all our "symptomatic" criticism looks eerily like the thing that we wanted to avoid in the first place, and caused all this mess to begin with.

That narrative should make things clearer: what it shows most concretely, though, is that criticism and critique are two different things, and it's wrong to blame us as if we all thought they were. What it really teaches you too is the getting beyond critique, actually doing it, doesn't necessarily mean getting beyond criticism or even getting beyond interpretation: you have to develop alternatives to interpretation, which is what we've been doing in our criticism. That is, you can't act as if criticism is the thing that's been holding you back from reality, unless you're going to equate cultural critique and the backsliding into interpretation which I just described that seems to come with it (which is a pretty detailed process I need to much time to outline right now), with all literary criticism.

If you're set on making the equation, you're much better off equating what you're calling criticism with critical theory, which has little to do with criticism and everything to do with critique. But even then you should also remember (I hope this isn't too confusing, I've tried to be as straightforward as I can) that philosophers and indeed people all sorts of other disciplines do a lot more interpretation in general than people who write literary criticism right now, even if they don't do critique, because while they've been bringing us past critique's great divide, we've been busy developing a criticism full of alternatives to interpretation.

Object-oriented Wordsworth

(Many apologies for the sloppiness of everything below, and all the fulminations on the place of literary criticism etc.: I wrote it all way too fast, and with the intention of showing how what we've been up to in the last 10 years especially has really been more philosophy-friendly than in past decades, and especially friendly to the realist sort of view.)

Paul Fry's new book Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale, 2008) is something that the object-oriented ontologists/realists should probably take a gander at: Fry has been defending what can be called a realist, objecty sort of aesthetics since the mid-80's, against both Derridianism and historicism, and this book pushes that argument even further. Tim Morton has gained a lot of attention in OOP circles because he understands the metaphysics of the realism better than Fry, and is just more interested in it, for good ecological as well as literary-critical reasons. And thing-theory has become a branch of critical theory, though I don't really think it is object-oriented at the moment (preferring to deal with discourses, representations, etc.). But we should look at Fry for a very fully developed account of what an object-oriented literary theory looks like (and I use the words "literary theory" precisely: that is, meaning basically a methodology for literary criticism that opposes itself to a wide-ranging, PoMo, pseudo-philosophical critical theory which most philosophers are encouraged to think is literary theory as well--mostly by critical theorists themselves).

Graham Harman has done an amazing job of working out what an object-oriented aesthetics would be, or rather teaches us what the role of aesthetics is in a object-oriented philosophy. He has also married philosophy and the use of literature quite well, much better than most philosophers (and critical theorists) who use it as a sort of mix between an illustration and a case-study and then switch back into an aesthetic concern about what art is (this goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, though the relation between literature and philosopy before Aristotle especially was very different). Even Stanley Cavell, who uses literature more than most, does this a bit, though his work on the marriage-plot is great (Cavell sticks with film more, though, because I think it's a more friendly medium for his reflections). This sort of attitude is not a fault, by the way (as some critical theorists would contend): I don't want philosophers doing something like literary criticism/theory, because it'd keep them away from doing good philosophy.

What I like about Harman is that he doesn't really stick with the "illustrative" end of things and moves the philosophizing back to the more aesthetic area: it's here that philosophy actually works best with literary theory, actually, because what literary theory does is to work out aspects of aesthetics by testing them against methodological consequences for literary criticism, and work out methodology by testing it against aesthetics (the purest example I can think of is William Wimsatt, though Northrop Frye comes to mind). Nothing more, nothing less, really: you either descend into literary criticism proper when you do too much of the latter, or become an apolitical criticial theorist when you do too much of the former (more on the proper, productive role of critical theory in a moment--for now I want to focus on how it screws up both literary theory and philosophy). The illustrative/case-study sort of philosophizing (though using case-studies is better than illustration, in philosophy all things on this end of the scale tend towards the latter, unless you really resist the tendency like Cavell), is good for ethics if you have the patience for that sort of stuff (Nussbaum), and for outlining more clearly what you are already saying on the aesthetic level (think Aristotle on plot). But the literature here is like flat soda, warm soda (Harman had a great post on warm soda a while back), warm beer: it has to be treated as a sort of empty vessel in order for the job to get done. You read it like a parable, and indeed I think philosophy in these moments is closer to religious interpretation than literary studies gets, for all the talk about the origin of the latter (not exactly historically accurate, more a convenient fiction) in scriptural exegesis (Ricoeur I think would support this argument: Gadamer isn't exactly the one to go to here since for him interpretation is--rightly for his argument--too vague and huge a thing). That's not entirely bad, but it often passes itself off as interpretation in a literary critical sense, either by critical theorists or literary critics looking for a sort of cheap alliance between philosophy and literary studies--one that can be and should be based on something that we have more in common than this vague thing (the goddamned badass mission of the humanities, and particularly our less-historically-minded end of the humanities). And in the end it makes us (lit. crits.) look bad, since philosophy at least has big questions to answer through this method (and is much more precise about what exactly interpretation is, while we feel what it may be more keenly because we practice it), while we seem like we're using it to do what we're always accused of doing: nothing substantial except reading or at most teaching literacy (though I know philosophers will come back with the litany of things they are accused of not doing, which is substantial--what we should take away from this is that perhaps no two disciplines are as actively marginalized as us both together since we don't do history as much, which is something we should both, together, fight against). But enough of the big talk, which I use just to sort of work out how, from a lit. crit. perspective, literary criticism can work with OOP--and why lit. crit. could actually add to the OOP enterprise.

The more immediate point is the following: this is why addressing things in a more aesthetics-minded way, like Harman, is going to be better for literary criticism. Where the literary object is brought up as an object, which is what aesthetics does, you don't do this sort of illustration. But Harman doesn't exactly confine himself to this: his definition of aesthetics is, generally, something that happens in reality amongst objects that adds to them (it is something like the touch of objects on objects, their feelings in the more literal sense of this word and of the word aesthetics), and as such can veer away from the literary object to what we might say (if we weren't Fry or a realist) are "representations" that are in the world (the ugly words "discourse" or "textuality" might be invoked here, and the former surely would be extremely inappropriate--the latter might be more friendly to the object-oriented if it was tweaked [you all know I think Derrida is ultimtely reconcilable with an OOP perspective]).

I'll say why this use of "representations" is wrong in a moment, but let me just say that this is where phenomenology comes in: because Harman lets phenomenology do the work of taking us towards what is "represented" in the literary object, as well as what is added to reality amongst objects and their sensitivity to other objects ("representations"), Harman does a much better--because phenomenology-friendly--job than Latour's realist "scientifiction." The latter outlines a neat sense of what the literary object does, or what it is (no representation layered upon the real, no dualism [no dualism at least that could be opposed to monism], no folding of reality as Latour says in Irreductions somewhere, which I would agree is a sort of folding-over, a concession to history's view of reality that I'll get to in a minute I promise), but Latour can only really use literature as a case-study to get at what he means. At his best, he does that shifting between trying to use Rick Powers as a case study and using Powers' works as an object (as I've said on the Latour blog), but most of the time he tries to sink that shifting into the former sort of interpretive use of the work. So Powers can be considered right beside the amazing Turing, and we don't have any sense where fiction begins or ends: it's all mush, when what literary criticism wants is a precise sense of where the fiction is. We don't want to know that hypotheticals or thought-experiments in philosophy or science are basically fictions, and that fictions do something a lot like thought-experiments. Granted, Latour is working in weird territory, and that what Turing does is surely more like fiction than even the richest thought-experiment (he presupposes so much more than any "experiment," and--Latour is magisterial in bringing this out--even more than this the swiftness with which he slides into these sorts of fictions is the thing that really makes them extraordinary, or more fiction-like [only Latour could make us feel the urgency of the fiction-like, by the way--even if this is a central subject of literary theory which we know a lot about and we do think is crucial] than the thought-experiment in general). But we feel there is something different between Powers and Turing, even if we refuse to say that there is less of a distinction between the science each does. There is something different, in other words, between them, even if we try and curb our desire to say that the one is an artist and the other's work traditionally is seen as computer science or engineering or whatever thing you want to characterize it as which belongs on the other side of campus (Turing just is that hard to pin down). And we want to know what that is, or rather where that is. In the grand scheme of things, in short, there might be little difference between them, but we feel something is different. And the job of the literary critic/theorist is to find out what that is, in a real practical sense. The philosopher can find out what it is too, but he's probably--and rightly--going to be more willing to keep looking at the big picture or argue against the feeling in favor of the big picture.

This is why I'm always sort of confused when I see Lovecraft as the darling of the object-oriented philosophers (not just Harman), when Wordsworth, the poet who wanted to treat words themselves as objects (see the "Essay upon Epitaphs"--written itself "upon" the epitaphic, in an object-like, "physical" sense rather than the "representative" sense), is right there. I know it's important to get at what's weird, and stick with the weirdness of reality, and even that the object-oriented view of things actually probably maps onto the amazing Lovecraftian sort of weirdness better than with what we normally associate with Wordsworth (Lovecraft may better outline the differences between a general new sort of realism and an object-oriented sort of realism, maybe). I also know that frankly Lovecraft isn't paid enough attention in literary studies, though you'd actually be surprised if you looked at just how much is actually written on him. I also know he's a figure is more popular than "high" literature.

But Wordsworth is weird. He's really, really bizarre. Trust me, and trust everyone who studies Romantic poetry now or has studied it in the last 50 years or so, who, like Fry, have actually done a lot to make literary studies the place where an object-oriented view of things can really be accepted, as we sort of get frustrated with all those into representations/discourse and textuality who wanted to steer us more towards pure critical theory (the classic study of all this, its chapters published right in the thick of it all, was Frances Ferguson's amazing Solitude and the Sublime, which is extremely realist and even object-oriented--it is another bit of required reading alongside Fry for the philosopher who has the time for all this--though it wants to then ask, rightly I think, what happens precisely to what we once called representations [see Ferguson's more recent Pornography: The Theory for a more worked-out picture of the result, which recuperates much in classical Utilitarianism]). The Victorian view of Wordsworth, as well as the Modernist view of Wordsworth (and there's a lot the two eras share with each other), was just a guy who likes nature in a sort of pantheist way. But he's nowhere near that: if you read the writings with that in mind, they just don't make sense (okay, maybe the daffodil poem, but that's about it). The rest of it, the stuff that really matters, is way like Lovecraft. Morton can attest to that (listen to his course on Romanticism, and his great classes on Wordsworth, which are spot on--note: opens iTunes link to all Morton's courses), but so can Fry, whose reflections on Wordsworth lead him to a Harman-like thought in his book A Defense of Poetry:

The thinking that is accomplished by matter, to turn then to the hard-to-grasp notion of what I want to call the "embodied," appears on the face of it to be a strange transumption of the nature of matter that may or may not some day reveal its neurophysiological secret in terms that make sense within the Cartesian tradition; but in the meantime its nonuman task is to think itself as matter and not prefigured as res cogitans. Perhaps the way to do this [...] is not to think mind as matter but to think matter as mind, which, when it fails to think, can then stand revealed for what it is, like Heidegger's hammer.
-A Defense of Poetry (1995, collecting essays from the 80s), 206.

You see Fry struggling to articulate what he means, and he has lots of recourse to PoMo, textualist sorts of rhetoric in order to do so throughout his writings--which might have the stink of language-centered philosophy that the object-oriented people rightly don't like (though it's really not that bad, is it?)--but the impulse towards the object-oriented is there. It is also, yes, an impulse that very wrongly gestures towards what Harman continually tries to fend off, which is panpsychism. This too is what seems to be lurking behind Wordsworth for people, and is really what we mean when we fling the old accusation of "pantheism" at him. But precisely following Wordsworth, being led there by him, Fry stresses the "failing to think" of matter, and does so through precisely the hammer of Heidegger, through tool-being--and this, however inaptly put, is just one indication of an underlying tendency in Fry that is deeply, I think, object-oriented (or at least realist with an object-oriented sort of drive). It is obviously going to be less clear about the metaphysics, but this is because Fry isn't a metaphysician, nor does he want to be. He is outlining the consequences of a view of literature that sees its purpose as providing that sort of suspension of--he calls it "knowledge," but that's again too postmodern sounding (remember Fry is a huge critic of PoMo, but that literary theory is now dominated by a French-centered vocabulary which makes it sound critical-theoryish all the time, when it isn't). What is suspended is, as he says elsewhere in the book and all throughout the new one on Wordsworth, intention as human-centered. He also calls this knowledge or meaning, because that is what we are concerned with in intention in literary studies (as opposed to say, haptic, double-touches, lost limbs, all the great stuff of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), and so we talk about intention in that vague way (believe me who once entertained the philosophy path for a while, that yes I know this is very frustrating for philosophers who spend so much time trying to be precise about this stuff!). But Fry means the non-human, and precisely the non-linguistic-centered (less fashionable to think around 1995, certainly):

To think the nonhuman. To stand back from the anthropocentrisim and pathetic fallacy that is built into our very language, here begins necessarily, the release from signification, not just as the already shopworn gesture of decentering the mental subject but also as the less fashionable through or around the determinate linguisticity that so quickly and suspiciously acquires human attributes in post-structuralist thought. It is only by thinking human being in its objecthood, in its continuity with being in general, that we can suspend the dialectics of reflection...
-A Defense of Poetry, 205.

He's talking about Lyotard in this moment, thus the vagueness of the last phrase: what he means is the sort of drive to interpret that we get when we literary critics pick up a poem, which is actually so different than the drive to actually write literary criticism on the thing--that is, what we normally do and do well. The first tendency is the one we share with the parable-reading people (philosophers, exegetes, everyday readers), who see meaning multiply as reality gets folded over more and more. The literary critic, whether she thinks this or not (we do a lot by intuition) brings the work closer to reality though, back away from this meaning-making, which treats the literary object precisely as a sort of extension of a man-made-intention, or essentially crystallization of it, a representation that folds it over, however much we try to water-down this New Critical, formalist, Aristotelian (that is, Aristotle of the Poetics and Rhetoric) attitude towards the work by seeing it as a chunk of language, discourse, whatever. We bring it back as an object working against and with other objects, all of which are nonhuman or just thought in their objecthood, like the hammer which discloses more, more and more, but not more human-centered meaning, when it breaks down (Harman and Fry might differ as to how this moment is interpreted, but I think Fry might like Harman's reading of it better than his own, which is vague but pretty good for a literary critic).

All this is Fry, and all of it comes from a Wordsworthian sort of view of things:

An Epitaph is not a proud Writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all, to the wise and most ignorant; it is condescending, perspicuous, and lovingly solicits regard; its story and admonitions are brief, that the thoughtless, the busy, and indolent may not be deterred, nor the impatient tired: the stooping Old Man cons [knows, understands] the engraven record like a second horn-book;--the Child is proud that he can read it;--and the Stranger is introduced by its mediation to the company of a Friend: it is concerning all, and for all:--in the Church-yard it is open to the day; the sun looks down upon the stone, and the rains of Heaven beat against it.
-Wordsworth, "Essay upon Epitaphs"

That's just a bit of the amazing essay: notice that it admits of a pantheism, but what matters actually are the things and their precise, definite, hard and soft interactions--you have to read the list as a list of individual things, and not just a rattling on. Because it's clear Wordsworth thought all his writings were something approximating this writing on tombstones: Geoffrey Hartman was the first to point this out in the 60's in his Wordsworth's Poetry, which first enlightened us as to just how un-Victorian, how weird he was. This was the real motivation behind his resistance to "poetic diction," which everyone knows about. That's not about encrusted phrases versus a lower, more homely language that everyone can understand. When Wordsworth says the poet should be a man talking to men, he means it quite in the sense that the person speaking is just a man and he has a just a man as his immediate audience: the humans are there in their objecthood, their hardness, in this sort of way. If this sounds too human-centered, also reflect that this isn't a sort of "let's get together in language" sort of thing: that's what 18th century poetry is like; that's why you use stock phrases like "finny coursers" (as a metonymy for fish) or invoke muses. The community he seeks is very much like the society of objects that Latour often describes (politically too, much like Wordsworth) and that Harman describes more clearly: this is why the poetic object doesn't even have men as its "audience," but just as men who are witness to it, to the talking. The phrase, essentially is a tautology--something Wordsworth defended vigorously (see his long note on his poem "The Thorn") as not a fault of language but perhaps its chief beauty. The reason is that the tautology (and he means it not logically but rhetorically, so it's not the tautology you hear rightly condemned in philosophy departments but the sort of repetitious saying of the same thing that you hear in speeches) just says what there. It gets rid of reference as representation and opens up a saying of what, well, is just said. The man talking to men is like a brute description of what poetry is; it's not what it should be like if you understand this to mean the poet should "represent himself as a particular type of speaker." Read all of Wordsworth's poems with this sort of distinction in mind, and you'll see that he's right up your object-oriented alley:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I think I better stop there: what's important though is not that there are objects "represented" in the poem (this is what thing theory sadly looks at most of the time, though Latour plays a big part there, and why most of the time it isn't object-oriented; but that's also why it is a critical theory more than a literary one), but how the poem works and how it is in touch with the real and with these objects. For instance, pay attention to what the word "seemed" is doing: the only representation-producing word here, is actually working to undermine the human-centeredness of feeling and touch, bring them closer to the earth, by setting them up precisely as what death--or is it death as is usually assumed (because of the sequence of poems it is in)? has anyone really died here? or is it just a sort of change of viewpoint that is being registered? you don't need to die to roll around like this--undercuts, or as what is in contrast to what the speaker "now" finds.

The other main things I wanted to note are that 1) the most explicit example of what type of fiction this realism-fiction is (it's not exactly object-oriented, but it has something like OOP's realism), then, can be seen It's Garry Shandling's Show as I said a while back; 2) that history (or a certain view of it) is the thing that prevents a lot of this realism from catching on (history opposes fiction and reality, whereas fiction considered alone just has no opposition to reality at all but adds to it: see Michael Wood's Literature and the Taste of Knowledge on this, and in a more exploratory way Fry), and that literary history is a huge part of literary studies--whereas history is never at all really an issue in philosophy departments except when it is made a philosophical issue--which is why we are more likely to view literature in terms of the representational even if we don't really criticize it that way; and 3) what critical theory does well is combine various idioms across departments, and direct them towards neglected areas, thereby politicizing the fields they join (it can easily be a reactive stance, though it seems progressive, which is why feminism and labor don't really need it, nor various groups when they get some real power behind them), and is very important if what you are theorizing is neglected. All these things can be got into more: the best thing to read on 2) is Fry and also Michael Wood (as I mentioned above). On 2) I'll also say I think philosophy does what it needs to do without much history, though history can be a great resource for it philosophically (you can dig up neglected philosophies if you look for them); and I really mean history in the history-department sense of it, which I think once it hits philosophy gets turned into what they call politics or political metaphysics (look at the work of history of philosophy people to see what happens there: it is a lot more like the bad sociology of science that Latour hates), whereas in English we marry the two a lot (no Milton without the Civil War). And I'll add that it is the historicists who really battled alongside the deconstructionists in promoting a view of fiction that was opposed to reality, that subtracted from it or undermined it, and promoted a representational sort of view of it all (Foucault, who should be the enemy of OOP, was the foundation of New Historicism, and the impact of the latter was massive; and though Derrida I think is just philosophically less of a problem for OOP, as I said above, Paul de Man's Derrida, which was hugely influential, basically turns him into a thinker of language qua representation/underminer of reality).

And I should add one more thing to this history angle, which is that I know the status of history is changing in philosophy through OOP and OOP like projects, because Latour is the one person who can write histories of objects, ideas, everything: there has been a focus on Braudel by Levi Bryant and Harman is actually making his way through Gibbon (though I know less about what he's going to do with it once he's done: it's awesome though, because Gibbon is amazing and changes the 18th century view of history radically, and well it's just an amazing read). I'd add that the reason this is able to happen is because Latour writes narratives, understands objects compose narratives or that reality is a composition of narratives, and that despite the fact that this sounds like something linguistic which the perverse PoMo critical theorist would love, it means nothing of the sort. In fact, it actually means we as literary critics are in a good position to understand what Latour means in a different way, in a more substantial way than the hard line PoMo linguistic angle, if only because that's just critical theory and doesn't really reflect what we do with narratives or even how we think of them in literary theory. To be blunt: there is a moment in the LSE event, when Harman and Latour are talking to the audience (I think it's the LSE event since it had to be, but my memory is shoddy of this), and someone brings up some possible objection to what he says about, well, reality. The objection is, well how do you know where these narratives begin or end? How are you able to tell where the narrative you are composing, the account you are giving of the way objects work and public transit systems are developed and decomposed etc., begins or ends? In short, it's a legitimate question, but it has a sort of false epistemological sort of dualism about it which Latour must destroy: he says rightly that this is a question that scientists don't ask when they try to account for their work, and so it brings you away from the reality and towards the critical sorts of histories of science that he always wants to avoid. The position is right: the narrative is just the narrative, and it's over when it's over, when you've accounted for the events. But there's a practical angle to this, which is on the level of narrative and how you compose it: when do you begin and end your narrative? It is literary criticism and literary theory that can come in and answer this question, because it is a question about the limits of fiction and how narratives work, which we can answer. This is the area that was exploited by people allied with literary studies in the 80's to undermine science for the humanities: but in practice, we deal a lot with these questions and less with the undermining, and can help with the narrative issues (see Wood again for this).

And one last note: criticism and critical are two words that get thrown around a lot in OOP circles because of Latour and it is important to note that when I talk of literary criticism I mean nothing like the sort of Kantian critical attitude. The "critical" of critical theory, or its sort of criticism, definitely are of this Kantian sort, and it is in critical theory's interest to equate literary criticism with something critical. (I've heard that what the "critical" means in "critical theory" is the "close reading" of theoretical texts: perhaps, yes, this technique is used there--though it really isn't the same thing even then, since the close reading in theory is just so much more flighty--but still we then have to say that there is a huge difference between the theoretical text and the literary one, and that this leaves "theory" undefined. Essentially we have to enforce the gap between the two senses of the term, the one implying a whole Kantian task and the other--the literary critical, literary studies sense--is actually only adopted because in literary studies we need a word for what we do when we don't do literary history, or the historiographical sort of work we also pursue, and it looks a lot like the stuff they called criticism--i.e. judgment and analysis--they did way before Kant in the 17th and 18th century). So I don't really see anything wrong with combining the words "object-oriented" and "criticism," or maybe even speaking of "object-oriented criticism," when I mean objected-oriented literary criticism--though I think it's probably good to avoid that phrase in general ("literary critical realism" might be more accurate, since we rarely hold to any precise sort of philosophical distinctions when we criticize, and only use them for practical purposes when we theorize).

Molecular, shmoelecular

I often recall this statement of Fredric Jameson whenever the dissolution of the Left becomes too much to bear:

The critique of totalization in France goes hand in hand with a call for a “molecular” or local, nonglobal, nonparty politics: and this repudiation of the traditional forms of class and party action evidently reflects the historic weight of French centralization (at work both in the institutions and in the forces that oppose them) as well as the belated emergence of what can very loosely be called a “countercultural” movement, with the breakup of all the old cellular family apparatus and a proliferation of subgroups and alternate “life-styles.” In the United States, on the other hand, it is precisely the intensity of social fragmentation of this latter kind that has made it historically difficult to unify Left or “antisystemic” forces in any durable and effective organizational way. Ethic groups, neighborhood movements, feminism, various “counter-cultural” or alternative life-style groups, rank-and-file labor dissidence, student movements, single-issue movements—all have in the United States seemed to project demands and strategies which were theoretically incompatible with each other and impossible to coordinate on any practical political basis. The privileged form in which the American Left can develop today must therefore necessarily be that of alliance politics; and such a politics is the strict practical equivalent of the concept of totalization on the theoretical level. In practice, then, the attack on the concept of “totality” in the American framework means the undermining and the repudiation of the only realistic perspective in which a genuine Left could come into being in this country. There is therefore a real problem about the importation and translation of theoretical polemics which have a quite different semantic content in the national situation in which they originate, as in that of France, where the various nascent movements for regional autonomy, women’s liberation and neighborhood organization are perceived as being repressed, or at least hampered in their development, by the global or “molar” perspectives of the traditional Left mass parties.
-The Political Unconscious, page 54, note 31.

Looking back on the last decades of the 20th century, where we saw the rise of a neoliberalism (which translates to the rise of an effectively Libertarian Right, a Left that is often anti-Labor, and a far-Left that threatens to desert the Democratic Party [remember Bush got elected because so many defected to Nader, thinking him greener (!) than Gore] more than it compromises with a more moderate Left politics)--a neoliberalism that, we now plainly see, has utterly destroyed this country's infrastructure (and if it isn't plain to you, you need to look around), you have to wonder why theorists who prided themselves on their politics didn't pay more attention to statements like this. And you really have to wonder why Jameson got so much flack in the U.S. for making them at the time, from people who claim to recognize the force of his critique of the critique of totality, but who nevertheless go on to stick him in a long line of totalizers.

Because it is basically right on every single point. Getting behind people like Deleuze in the late 20th century without really adapting them to the American context made no political sense in the U.S. whatsoever. The only way it even seemed to make sense was precisely because of the state of the forces that Jameson here outlines: you denied the narrative was valid from the perspective of your particular group, concluded this meant the only valid totality was non-totality, multiplicity, a proliferating pluralism--and thereby subscribed to that narrative.

Of course, everything turns on what counts as a valid "adaptation." What I like about the quote is that it sets the bar for this so low: all Jameson asks for is some sensitivity to the resonance of the words, rather than what we might call their grammar: that is, their ability to cohere and build up a (non-totalizing) political ontology of whatever sort. But people in those days were better humanists than they thought they were, apparently, and loved their system-building: they argued, effectively, that merely "using" these theorists (as it was called) was precisely a mode of adapting them. Thus the popularity of Foucault: he's easier Deleuze.

But it is no accident that smarter theorists (Judith Butler is a good example) affirm the correctness of this Jamesonian narrative with very few reservations, because--well, a lot of them spent some time in France, and have some familiarity themselves with the resonance of the terms. To put Jameson's demand in a different way, all he is asking people to do is familiarize themselves a bit with the contexts in which these statements are made. It isn't even a demand that people familiarize themselves with the "original" context of the statement (just as it isn't the ideas of Deleuze or any of the Frenchies that Jameson is here indicting): it isn't translation, but simply reading the rhetoric (another word for this sort of resonance, which you would think would have resonance here, where Yale School ideas were popular) of the texts that is necessary, and picking up on the fact that that they come from, and address, a different situation.

In short, what I like about this quote is that is basically comes from experience, though it does not require that experience to be forceful: it doesn't take much to see that certain political concepts developed in France are meant to address a certain political state of things, and while plurality might work there, its near-inevitable result would be to further fragment a country where there has been nothing like a significant (post-Depression) Communist Party, where social issues have always been thoroughly divorced from economic ones because of the inexistence of a history of a landed aristocracy and the subsequent tenuousness of any class distinctions (a situation which is unfortunately changing today, as the lower-middle "class" of tax-paying baby-boomers screwed over by Wall Street bankers starts to develop something like the first serious class-consciousness in America since before the Depression), and groups and interests face nothing like the centralization in France.

Or, to put it more mildly--for I can't say this fragmentation didn't also provide a beneficial sort of shift of the situation in some ways (while the Labor and the Women's Movements were, however, both slaughtered in the 80's and 90's)--imported along with the ineffective political theories was a suspicion of centralization which had no practical application at all in the U.S., except as a way to protest the Vietnam War or something like the "corruption" (something so vague and unbounded it now hovers over things as banal and routine as occasional government overspending) of the Nixon administration. The repression of various groups, and a lack of means for forms of this repression to become visible, wouldn't end with the dismantling of this centralization--which, after all, has its roots in policy and could have been corrected or (but you never heard anything of the relation of theory in general to policy except by feminists and Marxists, though in the early 90's things started to turn more generally that direction under the pressure of events) retheorized.

It seems like a history of thoroughly short-sighted people: people who concluded that a sort of pluralistic local-government politics was the natural outgrowth of everything that started in the 60's, and so anything that seemed theoretically to push in that direction, or further develop that idea, was deemed useful. And there seemed no threat of losing various federal guarantees that created and sustained the environment in which such ideas could be fostered (it is especially depressing now to hear older academics remember the ample funds sluiced into universities in the 60's). But as the forces opposing everything that politics stood for grew and grew, and even used its ideas to oppose it (still happening: again, prior to an election, Republicans are making the Democrats into the politically-correct and pluralistic, concluding that the much vaunted "respect for the other" also means love of terrorists)... well, you have to be glad that things (at least in the humanities) seem to be turning in other directions: critical theory is dissolving, or rather expanding, into more focused, concrete endeavors, which nevertheless posit genuine totalizing concepts (the media of media-studies is one of them). Which also means Deleuze's rhetoric--and many other rhetorics--might finally be read, after all these years.

Footnote to "bad theory"

Bad and good are probably the worst ways to characterize anything, and I tried to mess with this binary a bit in my post by introducing a (somewhat antiquated and Nietzschian) notion of health: bad theory was rotten, spoiled, or ready to fall off and decompose. Since bad theory though would rail against any binary whatsoever, though, rather than (like Derrida) see the limits of its usefulness (and assert that doing the former is precisely the same thing as the latter), I don't mind this as much (or its attendant organicism). That said, a lot of good theory was present already in this post on bad theory--present in the form of alternatives, really, each of which may eventually crystallize into a second term, but are never destined to do so, marked from the beginning for that particular fate (i.e. their crystallization needs to be produced). So it's not necessary, then, to go any further and cordon off what should remain area of possibility in another, separate post on good theory.

If the generation of such alternatives can itself be seen as a characteristic of good theory--for essentially I was saying that all good theory works on the level of paragraphs (keeping itself open to more and different theory by opening itself up to a political context, transcoding and somehow even co-interpreting through the finitude of any one theory's usefulness), rather than on the level of the essay or book as a whole--if this is the case, we might end up accomplishing precisely that dreaded compartmentalization or marking.

It is best then to remain ambivalent, and say that the approach might also produce regressions or outright refusals to listen to theory and what it has to say about the immense importance of decentering and remaining open to and fractured by multiplicity and otherness. Not too long ago much thought was indeed humanist, and while humanism perhaps too quickly became a bogeyman, upon realizing this we are all too quick to embrace him again under the aegis of so many self-proclaimed post-postmodern notions--now branded as weird, complex, problematic, locally effective, heterotopic in order to retain exactly enough of that of postmodern schizophrenia necessary to make the latter's lesson seem integrated or absorbed. This is merely to say that historicizing theory is more necessary than ever--and is to be accomplished less and less by way of linking theory quickly to all sorts of historicist microfacts and documents on the one hand (what Jameson a couple years ago said was precisely "how not to historicize theory,") and on the other by registering what certain notions did to advance previous thought through the destruction of its more unsavory commitments (which is what the Heideggerian and Derridian periodizing--or perhaps the emphasis needs to be put more strenuously now the other way around--ends up doing, or perhaps the more philosophical attempts at historicizing in general).

Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

A note on Orientalism

So, I divorced literary theory from critical theory a bit last time. But I did so not to knock at the latter so much as show how literary theory is really doing something else, something less critical in the sense that people have been lately been referring to this--that is, negatively, and with its Kantian overtone. This isn't to say that ideology critique isn't also what we do in literary studies sometimes or even often. It's just that this necessarily takes the form of an extended meditation and analysis (or reading), that, because it has to pass through its object and really explicate it, can really only be something like dismissing conditions of possibility if it's done superficially. And, yes, there's probably a lot of superficial stuff. But there is that in all sorts of disciplines, and you can't dismiss critique by equating its most superficial performance with its most accomplished work, unless through that very Kantian maneuver. Regardless, the relationship of literary criticism to critique in general is not a simple one (critique has so many valences, and even if you mean it in the "proper" sense--and which applies, in the Latourian area from which this talk comes, primarily to critical sociology--the import of what you're saying starts to apply to the other significations), and the similarity of the words shouldn't make us think so.

It gets a little more complicated with the rise of critical theory and postmodernism, which sought to really play on this similarity of words and tie literary analysis with critique (and even reading itself into something like critique): it's a way to make criticism in any form (qua close attention to something) seem relevant, after all. However, we shouldn't forget the reasons in America that this desire for relevance was sought. It wasn't just opportunism. Certainly the way it proceeded was a bit suspect, since it also attempted to beat American philosophy (for one) to death. But this was already a dead horse, in many ways, and philosophy's renewed relevance in America might be attributed, in some way, to the slight pressure of this postmodern challenge, which, along with new (and perhaps much more heavy) pressure from the sciences, allowed it to develop its Continental aspects--though of course it did this mostly through internal changes, with much infighting, negotiation, and thinking and reading (the sort of unbelievable fixed positions of someone like a Dreyfus or a Schacht or Searle seem symptomatic of the sort of struggles they went through).

But this is why I once said critical theory is primarily the politicization of other disciplines. Here I just wanted to show that it also politicizes literary studies--and sort of undo the general sense that this critical theorizing started and ended here, or didn't become something with its own agenda. The particular way this politicization occurs--and I should be clear that when I say this I mean that literary studies isn't apolitical, just that it might have other possibilities for politics than the critical one--has generally put people like me in an awkward position, and my interest in literary theory is first and foremost one of trying to figure out how we can negotiate the legacy of literary theory in its relationship with this critical tendency, such that it doesn't all end with the situation we're currently in. This is a situation where last generation of readers has put the next generation in an untenable position, having pissed off everyone through its too-radical-but-strangely-not-radical-enough attempts to change the system by making this theory map directly onto with a critical-political project much larger than any particular field (which end up mainly just collapsing into a weak and less political attempt to deal with increasing "professionalization" or the compartmentalizing of literary studies--see John Guillory's good Bourdieuvian account of this).

But I also wanted to do this all in order to show that critical theory isn't something to be avoided. It just has its particular purpose, which I'd like to make clear is distinct from the purpose of literary criticism. This doesn't mean either that critical theory means "forgetting literature," as some people (Jonathan Culler, though reluctantly) have put it--cultural studies (which we can say is something like a side-by-side critical adventure which we can't quite reduce to the theorization, along with AfAm, Feminist, PoCo, more explicitly Marxist studies, and Queer Studies) certainly doesn't do this, though it sees literature primarily as taking place beside other media, and I see no reason to say critical theory does this either.

So--the general field of things sufficiently stratified or differentiated (and I'd rather insist on this stratification than in the way it's now all organized)--I'd like to suggest that one can jump into critical theory when necessary or even when not (though I'd personally show more hesitance to do so than in former times and not ask whether there were other ways to articulate what I'd say). One can even do so as a literary theorist (or, for that matter, as a literary historian). And I'd like to show the relevance of that particular jump (which can again be made by architecture students, philosophers, etc. etc.) by just presenting again a little contribution to the little spat around an essay by Harman, which I dealt with perhaps a little too roundly a while ago (though not, I think, as roundly as others). It comes up again as a sort of afterthought in Paul Ennis' next-to-last post explicating the essay in question. The posts are excellent by the way (here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, and again 5), mostly because they show what I thought was obvious but I guess needs more stress (in a way that makes me for the first time doubt the supposed ubiquity of phenomenology as the main background against which most Continental philosophy works), which is that there's a lot of phenomenological ways into the issues discussed and that Harman is in a way making a contribution to them as well: as Paul says early in the first post, "in order to understand Harman's metaphysics one also needs to understand his motivations and these are tied to an overcoming of the overcoming-of-metaphysics in Heidegger." Anyway, as I suggested last time I spoke of this, going through all this as Paul did was one of the most helpful ways to address the larger concerns that dealt with the internal aspects of Harman's project.

But then there was that issue of Orientalism. Paul addresses it, as he nears the end of Harman's essay:

Harman makes an important claim next: “We must ignore the usual connotations of sensuality and fix our gaze on a more primitive layer of the cosmos” (Collapse II, 206). Here I think we can go some way to dispelling the idea that Harman is projecting sensuous qualities upon exotic objects – at least from the strictly philosophical mode. The question of the aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors is a different issue to be addressed later in the round-up. Within the orientalist lens one might also question the notion of a “primitive layer” but this too is a major theme of Western philosophical thinking from Schelling to Heidegger (and already problematic for Jacobi in his depiction of German idealism as a step toward emptiness/nothingness).

It's the last point that was the issue, as I gathered, but in a way had to also deal with that "aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors," though only vaguely. To recapitulate, Harman was accused of Orientalism, or Orientalistic thinking--and that you can't really be "accused" of this will be my point below--for asking us to fix our gaze in the way he does in Paul's quote: on "a more primitive layer."

Now, its the last sentence of Paul's here that will probably give us only cold comfort, since it doesn't really oppose the charge of Orientalism as--to whoever is interested in such charges--show it is more diffuse than ever! In short, making the primitive in this sense into a theme which is traditional doesn't really combat the charge and sounds like an argument from authority (which doesn't have much clout, however sensible it may indeed be).

What does oppose this charge is, however, the critical theory of Orientalism itself as formulated by Edward Said! In other words, it is the charge of Orientalism or Orientalisticity or Orentialisticalismicality which is precisely not proceeding along the lines which Said (alongside his literary theory and literary criticism) developed--as the parties involved to their credit said was the case. And so far from attributing the attack to an interested critical theorist, a critic critiquing, say, we should really understand how critical theory actually, in this case, comes to help philosophy figure out what's going on and, indeed, defend itself.

For, as my quote from Paul was meant to show, it doesn't always have the resources with which to account for things. That's no essential fault--as over-interested people might have said in the past--but just the sign of a place where it can turn to others, and others can be ready to help out.

So in a comment on Paul's blog, I made my contribution, and I'll make it again in more detail here: I said that Orientalism, for Said (one can find this in the first pages of his book), is more of a locus for the operation of power, not a one way dynamic with good and bad sides. So this is why you can't accuse someone of Orientalism. Orientalism is not something like a property of a thought or a taint upon it. Rather, Orientalism is a thoroughfare. Or, more vividly put, Orientalism is like a panopticon. And Said does this because he thinks that seeing orientalism as some taint of exoticization which needs to be expunged from whatever someone says--according to the weak and reactionary protocols of political correctness--are missing what is really at issue. One can always link exoticization with anything. The issue is larger, more collective or more widespread than that, but also has less to do with the character of the ideas themselves as the linkages to the relations between East and West that are the most hard to pin down. And so the concepts, as such, are not good or bad, either because they are old concepts that have come from something like a tradition of oppressing the Near or Far East, or because they carry their exotic flavor. This is because because the association of exoticization with the Orient, and the use of concepts in such a tradition, is the symptom of a more complex dynamic actually playing out between East and West--one that doesn't simply produce the oppression of the former or work in one way, and which never really stops if the concepts in which we see it most manifested disappear.

You see how this relies on Foucault's employment of that nice structuralist notion of discourse (Said himself says this). Now, you can disagree with this, with Foucault's ontology or whatever you want to call it, all you want. You can say it's too based on language (and I'd agree with you), but that's not enough. It's not enough here, because the theory allows us to begin to understand what is going on. Just because we knock away at that the notion of discourse (or language) doesn't mean we can't see how it helps us here, because at least negatively it shows us there can't be anything like a one-to-one correlation of concepts with political or social ramifications. Philosophy has a hard time arguing when this fact comes to the fore, because it means it has to creep past the interior of the concepts, just beyond their edges, and show their formative requirments--in short their historical character. Harman has actually been pretty good about trying to historicize his own concepts, at least on the personal level (I've never heard a person so frankly admit exactly when they really figured out Husserl before, as he does in Prince of Networks)--and philosophy, as history of philosophy as an area of study grows, is no doubt getting better in general in this area. But here we have a critical theory that works pretty well, and so why not use it? It doesn't always have to entail some agreement at bottom with the whole "system," and the efficacy of the notion doesn't always fall away with an attack at its foundations--simply because it might not so philosophically be "based" on such foundations.

It's also a theory that is trying, primarily, to get beyond the alleged crudeness of the Marxist way of going about this, which is through ideology. I think, though, we might see the Foucauldian notion of discourse against this Marxist background, almost as a modification of it rather than anything radically different than it--along with Derrida's much maligned talk about Western metaphysics. What's going on there is some attempt to not just dismiss philosophical concepts as tie them to the tendencies that shape them, their typical directions. If this then has ramifications on the interior, as it were (I'm using a poor conceptual scheme here, as if concepts were black boxes, but whatever--that's Latour's contribution). I think fundamentally, too, it is in this Postcolonial context (as it is called) that the arguments are the best: that is, I find Derrida's talk about Western metaphysics most convincing when it comes out of his attempt to deal with the historical ramifications of France's relation to Algeria--as I think it often does (and not just because he was Algerian). I think of what Foucault does as addressing a similar--though perhaps less starkly drawn--set of relations. Orientalism works too by trying to map the dynamics--not just in philosophy--that obtain at this crossroads. It might not be the best way to go about this, but in this case I think it works, in the sense that the theory makes us grasp how quickly we are moving from something like the content of the philosophy to statements about its general contours, by way of invoking the Orient itself (these large concepts often do too much work, as some people, in other situations, point out well). This is what Said was trying to account for with Orientalism--which is not one such big concept so much as the name for a dynamic which we can trace.

Overlapping/transcoding

Overlapping: one way, I'd argue, we can understand Jameson's crucial notion of transcoding–a notion he is right to consider as the asset and task for theory, its one and only unquestionably valuable (and, or rather, because collectively shared) procedure. For transcoding means not just the convergence of two discourses, but a distinct but provisional attempt to subordinate another discourse (to overlap, such that not only lines but planes are, from a vantage point, seen as related), and lift the inferior elements up onto a different level--not primarily through judgment, of course, but through the act of translation. Or rather, through mediation, that unpopular holdover from dialectic which is surprisingly absent in our critical realm, filled as it is of virtualities and immanence (which are indeed immediacies beyond immediacy, relating to themselves not through the lifting up and destruction of content but by juxtaposition or through the suffusion of a gathering-dispersing power).

For questioning this absence is really what is going on in transcoding: Jameson is encouraging not only that we relate discourses (as if he were merely endorsing some sort of empty interdisciplinarity) but that in doing so we feel the immense complexities of mediation, which our fear of teleology itself has reduced to a simple passage between where we are and what we already know is right (i.e. what in our judgment must be excised or left out, not negated, from what we know). In short, when we mediate, we see that whatever judgment is indeed present in the process, on whatever basis we need to destroy something in order to bring one discourse into another, we must posit explicitly as coming from the procedure itself--not in order to smuggle it away in that procedure, but to show that such elimination or such selection (for that is what it is, we need not be afraid of it) was necessary in order to produce a certain result.

Indeed, such smuggling-away is precluded by the fact that it is mediation we are involved in: since the focus is on the results, what we do is merely show that such and such a selection is indeed tied to such and such results. But the process as a whole allows these results, then, to be seen together, as an ensemble, which at the same time as it attributes the cause of this ensemble to various selections, does not allow us to get sufficiently worried about selection itself as their origin, or what necessitates their presence on this new level or not: those origins are now viewed in terms of the ensemble, of the new level, such that we can get past sophists who would merely insist that because the object had a cause, its origin is to that extent (and no more) contaminated, because we can see how a selection might have its reasons in the ultimate coherence it gives to its product. In short, what Jameson would make us see is that a certain homogenizing tendency of theory is itself combated precisely through mediation, and thus that overlapping itself is not just the flat relation of two forces in the guise of discourses, but can take place on different levels.

Like a language

I want to go over something pretty basic here. One of the objections constantly levied against structuralism is that it treats things as languages when it should treat the things as things. It is generally a legitimate frustration with the oddness of the founding structuralist gesture, which is to say that the thing being investigated is a language, or is structured like a language, or can be understood as a language, or comprehended by using the insights from linguistics, etc. etc. etc.

The criticisms (whether they come from phenomenologists, post-structuralists, or post-post-structuralists) claim that this simplifies the thing in question, and ultimately just projects upon the thing the very terms in which it is being analyzed.

The concern is legitimate, as I said, because it wonders at an analogy being taken so seriously and worked out to the fantastic length and intricacy involved in structural interpretations like those of Lévi-Strauss. But what it fails to understand is that the main term in the analogy, language, has to be understood differently if the analogy is to make any sense.

In other words, the critics of structuralism think they know what language is when they hear the phrase, x can be understood like a language. But the structuralist emphasizes that language, when considered as a structure, looks nothing like what they are imagining.

Language for the structuralist is more like a logic ("structure" is the name for this type of logic, or rather logic working in this way), and as such already doesn't have to be made up of words used in speech, or even something like a grammar (insofar as we think we know what "words," "speech," and "grammar" are when considered independently of the logic in which, according to the structuralist, they are merely minimal units or relations between of these units). So you can't object to a structuralist by saying that x or y doesn't exhibit any features of a language--by saying that it isn't something, for example, that is determined by a culture, or exhibiting conscious organization. For if it involves something like a logic, it will have already worked something like a language.

That is, if the thing has a logic in the way that it also participates, say, in dialectic, it will have worked like a language. "Logic," in other words, is helpfully understood in a pseudo-Hegelian way here. Lévi-Strauss himself articulates the commensurability between structure and dialectic in the famous last chapter of The Savage Mind, in a hugely influential attack on Sartre's fascinating (and too neglected) Critique of Dialectical Reason. In doing so, he is making the case that structural logic is immanent to the being of things in the way Sartre (rightly) says it it is in Hegel and Marx.

It is only after this that he overturns Sartre's notion of dialectical reason, grounding it in what Sartre calls analytic reason, ultimately leading him to conclusions which are more familiar, and which involves further qualifying the way this logic or structure works. Sartre says:

[Scientific, Analytic] Reason is the mind as an empty unifier... Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other... It is therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty of always being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever present possibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and for the world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation.
-Critique of Dialectical Reason, 20

In short, dialectical reason does not remain one-sided: it is speculative, and therefore not a function of the understanding. Lévi-Strauss replies simply that:

all reason is dialectical... since dialectical reason seems to me like analytical reason in action; but then the distinction between the two forms of reason which is the basis of Sartre's enterprise would become pointless.
-The Savage Mind, 251

If we understand the logic established by dialectical reason's "legislation," or, in Sartre's terms, the totalizations, as the crucial thing, it does seem legitimate to say that analytical reason can establish them just as much as dialectical reason, if we add something to the former.

This is the other crucial aspect of structure, which is that it is not a logic that can be taken over by consciousness:

Linguistics thus presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, and unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing.
-The Savage Mind, 252

This, then, is the usual claim which we recognize in structuralism, and to which the objections usually are directed, since it makes the subject a mere function of "language." Thus, Levi-Strauss' immediate response:

And if it is is objected that it is so only for a subject who internalizes it on the basis of linguistic theory, my reply is that this way out must be refused, for this subject is one who speaks: for the same light which reveals the nature of language to him also reveals to him that it was so when he did not know it, for he already made himself understood, and that it will remain so tomorrow without since his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws.
-Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 252

But notice that such claims about language only make sense when we understand the more basic claim that "language" here is fundamentally like a logic. Thus the structure gets its non-internalized character because it is a logic immanent to things, not just because it is so determining (which is nearly always read as constraining) of the subject's role. The fact that the subject is a function of language here does not have to do with how determining the structure is, but how language is a logic. It is only in this sense that we can really understand why such a language resists internalization: for even if it were internalized, made conscious, it would still only be operative or produce effects because it was a logic. In short, making it conscious doesn't matter. The logic matters. And it is in this sense that the analytic reason can, when active, produce dialectic effects of totalization, because in that instance this only means what is always the case is indeed the case: the logic, the structure, is producing effects.

Let me just say that this fact complicates dismissals of poststructuralism as well as structuralism which rely upon the fact that, in absence of a deconstruction of something, one falls back upon structures and thereby remains within a certain cultural, linguistic sphere, or just involves deconstructing "cultural" structures--as if all taint of structuralism had to be removed. Such things are said of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan (leading to a move away from the tensions between the symbolic and the imaginary and a sole focus on the symbolic and the real). All of this is complicated if the critic understands that in each case language as a structure means something different than language--especially if we take language in its Heideggerian sense. By this I don't just mean that it is made up of binaries, either (though of course this is involved). I mean that it is a logic in the sense I explained earlier, and one which Lévi-Strauss is not so quick to immediately call "cultural" (that is, unless we reconsider our notion of that latter term).

On Latour and Sedgwick

(I have been rewriting this over the last few days, adding a bit to the end especially, so I am reposting it.)

The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts.
-Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"

Latour has been a guiding light for many people looking for a way to transform critical theory (that is, to give it more specificity) and bring it out of the morass of heavy ideological/cultural critique that was so prevalent in the last twenty or more years. (I should say he hasn't only been influential in critical theory, but also in the regular activities of various fields, like philosophy.)

I won't recapitulate his more recent (and not so recent) arguments about associations and things. Suffice it to say that many people find his critique of critique insightful because it stresses adding to the reality of whatever is being studied rather than undermining it, or searching for its conditions of possibility. (Latour is quick to say that phenomenology does something similar, but still goes the wrong way: I'd totally agree to the first part, the fact that phenomenology adds reality, as the main reason one gets interested in phenomenology in the first place.)

His parallel in literary studies and literary theory has to be the late Eve Sedgwick, whose paper on paranoid reading and reparative reading has become increasingly popular over the years as the Latourian critique of critique has hit home more and more.

Unfortunately, both reparative reading and positive or realist criticism (as I'll call it), remain too close to 1) a shift merely in attitude, not of method and 2) the creation of new objects, not tools. I'll admit Latour is, to my mind, much more productive of tools, and so the criticism of him here is a bit less harsh. But when he says something such as the above statement (that we need somehow to condition ourselves to act positively) what he is doing is turning a question about method, indeed about the creation of tools, into something indistinct, something which the critic can either have or not, a property that is assumed to be too self-evident. Sedgwick is horrible on this front: the reparative reading, which does not suspect its text, which does not try to undermine it in order to prove a point, which does not try and look for contradictions but which, well, it's hard to say what it actually does... perhaps inflect it in a different way (I try to extract something good out of it in this later post)... well, this reparative reading (whatever it is), remains more a banner or sign which one can pin to one's analysis without having to make any methodological concessions or innovations at all, without citing differently, without writing differently, and fundamentally without thinking differently. It involves the worst of what theory does: it announces a methodological change without at all making this change, or, perhaps more accurately (and more perversely), announces a methodological change and turns methodology into an evaluation of the announcement.

While Latour shies away from such a perspective by the creation of a particular level at which his analysis will move, and both he and Sedgwick generally escape these criticisms because of the insightfulness and innovation of their work (in short, because of their sophistication), it isn't hard to see their statements producing a sort of criticism or critique that merely replaces the disasters of recent theory with other disasters. Before I say what these disasters actually are--for all of recent theory and all of the new theory aren't themselves disasters--let me say that this criticism would be, basically, feel-good criticism overconfident in the actuality of its object (though the diffuseness of Latour's object again keeps him from being so overconfident--not so for simpler associations), or a criticism that values individual judgment insofar as it is confident of its contributions and its grasp of rich areas of investigation. One can look at various philosophical realists (championing, like Latour, their pre-criticality) glimpse, at times, this sort of confidence that says now, we're not only getting at the real things, but also that our attitude, our willingness to add to the reality of things, assures us that we get at the reality of things--a field that I should say is less subject to this particular feel-goodery, however, because it has to pay attention to its method, or its way of inquiry, and so can't totally be assured of much. One can certainly look at literary criticism, however, and see that the turn to two areas in particular, affect and aesthetics, while they also respond to other necessities in the field (the return of aesthetics is a very much needed return, though the question is how much it ever really died off), also exhibits a certain Sedgwickian self-satisfaction--by which I mean less of a focus on method and on explicitly looking at how interpretation will proceed, in favor of creating a new object of inquiry with the old tools by the sheer force of one's individual grasp of the real (one can see both aesthetics and affect return in this way in Sianne Ngai's overrated, but sometimes insightful, Ugly Feelings).

What both here rely on is some notion that previous acts of criticism or critique somehow don't really display the qualities they attribute to a reparative or realist criticism. And this, this dismissal of the previous as too critical, is precisely the disaster of old critical theory that new critical theory would repeat. When Latour says, for example,

Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained, then you realize too that the so-called weak objects, those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism, were never mere projections on an empty screen either...

in short implying that once you see your object as a richness rather than a mask, a fetish (Marx's sense), you begin to see the world of objects itself as things, as richnesses, as the real, which cannot serve as some ground with which to undermine the former set of objects--when Latour says this, how can he seriously think that previous theory and previous critique in general did not operate this way? I agree, there was a period when all you got was the social and the ideological. But good critique works this way pretty much whatever the situation.

Interestingly, Latour (along with Sedgwick) don't seem to really get at the problem--a problem literary theory (and not critical theory) has dealt with for a while. When they say that exposing the social or ideological conditions of possibility of an object has gone on too long, and that we need to care and protect our objects by adding to their reality, they're still assuming that there is some social or cultural connection between the individual critic's work and the societal effect of such exposure or protection. Yes, I agree with Latour: if you add to the reality of the object, you won't get such crazy things happening, probably, as the sociological critique of science hoisted on its own petard by crazy Republicans saying global warming isn't a fact, or inanely claiming that affirmative action is itself racist--thereby enlightening the enlightenment, or bringing down the idols that are the results of the process of bringing down the idols, a critique meant to advance learning, not impede it. But then again you might also still have these things happening, because fundamentally the way the public picks up these habits is not through the results of research but through instruction. That is, if they pick them up at all: frankly, it doesn't seem to me at all clear that academic work has much connection to the society whose products it unmasks. Or, because this borders on sounding unduly pessimistic, I should say that this connection is very very mediated, through all sorts of complexities (teaching, and I'd like to add method, are two of the more direct connections still available--the first direct because it is still immediate, the second because it has mediated, the connection, installed itself in a symbolic field or discourse and triangulated itself--to use a term from Frederic Jameson's "cognitive mapping"--in some way). Just adopting another attitude supposes that the power to point out the object, along with the object's being produced by society, is enough to guarantee that the resulting statement will be in some sense about a societal object. In philosophy, the same maneuver will allow one to talk about real or natural objects, "bypassing society," because they are produced by nature (or man controlling nature).

On this point, one is reminded of that dictum of Fredric Jameson: "In matters of art, and particularly of artistic perception [...] it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty." It strikes me that both Latour and Sedgwick want to resolve difficulties, even if they aren't entirely dealing with artistic perception but interpretation more generally (with critical perception in general). We might also follow Jameson, who, in the essay from which I extract this remark (the famous "Metacommentary"), points toward Paul Ricoeur and his distinction between a negative and positive hermeneutic. The idea of a positive hermeneutic which would oppose a sort of demystifying critique (the negative hermeneutic) might be more helpful in the long run than Latour's realism (though it could be supplemented with the work on objects and things), and certainly, I think, is more helpful than Sedgwick's reparative reading (who cites Ricoeur only to, in effect, bypass him and replace his powerful notion with a hazy one). Why? Because, unlike reparative realism (as we might call it) Ricoeur links the positive hermeneutic to a search for an origin. In other words, the positive hermeneutic is not just a shift away from demystification, but is an effect of an effort to restore a forgotten meaning. In this respect, it points towards a goal (it is the explicit search for origin, though not as ground), that brings about a method, a process, or at the very least installs the work of criticism within a certain field that requires elaboration, systematic extension, which the conception of criticism as merely additive (ironically) does not do and, frankly, isn't interested in doing (since all that is required is the blank assertion that by adding one is immanent to the process of extension itself--and indeed perhaps what criticism does is think long and hard about the distinction between addition and elaboration).