A better way to make a distinction I made a couple posts ago--a much better way, I think, because it doesn't separate sense from knowledge or oppose them, as I bordered on doing--is to just say that there is a new aestheticism out there that is actually trying to ask a question it is hard to take seriously in the study of literature: namely, what is the place of beauty in our lives?
Or, rather, it is actually defining that place, showing that it is a place where knowledge is not undermined. In other words, aestheticism tries to find the proper consistency of that knowledge: the harangues against aestheticism throughout the history of literary criticism in the last century (which--and not enough people recognize this--is mostly a history defined by modernism), and indeed variants of this harangue throughout the history of the arts (Plato, etc.), would make it out to be precisely a movement that undermines knowledge, but the opposite is the case. Precisely because it doesn't hedge its bets like Aristotle or Sidney (though the latter's elaborations of the statement show it is not as negative as it sounds), and affirm only that poetry does nothing affirmeth, it doesn't give into the thing that this supposes: that truth wholly abstracted from sense is the only form of truth or knowledge, and thus that the sensuous arrangements of art mainly work to undermine or question that knowledge. Aestheticism takes the measure of the sense's knowledge (this is one reason why, as Angela Leighton points out in a book I can't recommend enough, On Form, that the favorite philosopher of aestheticists throughout history is Lucretius).
Close reading, I'm adding, is just really placing the emphasis on this place indeed being a place of positive knowledge. That is, we might define the standpoint that uses it as one that takes the measure of the knowledge delivered by sense: it's a stricter sort of formula, where the emphasis falls more on sense as a form of knowledge, rather than the knowledge that inheres in the senses or sensuous. The downside is it works by analogy, as you can see (it works by supposing the knowledge of the sensuous is like the knowledge we normally deal with in regular propositions), and so lends itself to the undermining of our normal idea of knowledge (it may be the main legacy of deconstruction to have convinced us close reading only does this). But talking about what a poem is about should be a bulwark to this sort of aestheticist enterprise, rather than something the downfall of which the new aestheticism celebrates.
But to get back to my main point, beauty is the name for this sort of this positive, sensuous knowledge. That sounds pretty sappy, I know, and perhaps undignified. But it is the lack of a place of beauty in our lives, perhaps, that makes us assume so immediately that anything dealing with knowledge the senses can give (other than the knowledge from sensuous experience purified of sensuous experience which the sciences give) is going to be undignified, not a real form of knowledge.
That is, I've knocked aestheticism in the past for precisely being sappy, giving too much away to the senses. I wonder now, though, whether this opinion of mine precisely came from those noble and moralistic theorists who, I often found, precisely lapsed into sappiness whenever the issue of something near-beautiful about their austere systems crept to the fore. Of course, its also simply the way of the French to acknowledge the beautiful in the ugly, almost as if it were an imperative (though occasionally the English have this moralistic sense of the beautiful as well, though it is usually surrounding the commonsense rather than the ugly: it probably is a vestige of living in a place with a rich civil society rather than "social networks"). But I've always hated that narrow and perverse sense of beauty one finds in Foucault; it is probably Sartre and Derrida though who remain mostly responsible for this style. Frederic Jameson, who like many Marxists is actually someone who gives an important role to the traditionally aesthetic, indeed notices this exact thing about Derrida in his essay on Specters of Marx; of course, it is what we also notice all the time when we disparage his "literariness." But it's not just the French. I'll ask whether the valorization of the sublime against the beautiful in the 80's was not precisely aestheticism (in the bad sense) by other means for many people. In the 90's, it is trauma and the negative theology: isn't the work of Cathy Caruth so offensive, not because it veers into the most perverse forms of argument, but because it turns trauma into the most traditionally aesthetic (that is, ignoble, sappy) thing, such that we can find something like satisfaction in it? And closer to our own time, the "ugly feelings" we like to hear so much about are perhaps more of the same. Theory in general seems sometimes to be motivated by this sappiness in its avant-gardism, or the enjoyment it takes in its in its politics.
In short, I wonder whether it is those who precisely rail against beauty who lapse into the most traditionally sappy versions of aestheticism--indeed, much more often than the true aestheticists. I hesitate to say people like this (its not all theorists) practicse aestheticism by other means, though, because what's crucial is that the sappiness arises from ignorance and inexperience with it, and indeed the eradication of the place of beauty in our lives this accomplishes, a narrowing of it down to the most horribly sentimental version. If we let the beautiful back in, we might see it contains something to say, or is at least more complex of a thing than we think it is. Alexander Nehamas and Charles Taylor, among others, have been saying this for some time. Familiarity with the thing is what is crucial, since we have none of it as long as we keep encouraging the myth that it only undermines knowledge.
Showing posts with label Literary theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literary theory. Show all posts
Friday, January 7, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Close reading and formalism, knowledge and sense
The new formalism, as it has been called, has gotten much less flack than the old one (Michael Wood writes of this in his new book). Perhaps because there is a realization going around that, well, we're smarter now, we've done the theory, now we can look at all those small formal things in the text with less rigidity (or however you want to characterize the crimes of the formalists). In particular our attention can wander to historical issues, political issues, but we'll always have the right object in view: form.
Maybe. What I find odd, however, is not so much the people who would identify with the new formalism (they're often trying to work out just what this might mean), as those who take comfort in it, and assume something else: that it was not formalism which lent a problematic basis for literary studies, but close reading. Saying we're new formalists, for these people, just means we can look at form and close read only really when we need to, when it is advantageous and sensible--not all the time.
This tendency here--and I don't mean to describe anything as clear cut as a position, and I'll probably be much too hard-and-fast as it is in trying to just to give some accentuating weight to a pull we might find in contemporary criticism--the tendency, I think, is more than reasonable. What's particularly good is its utter rejection of facile claims made in the 80's and 90's about "the ethics of reading," which assumed that close reading is something we do everywhere (just as the world can be understood as a text), and that to distantly read something amounted to being unethical (by which they really meant, immoral). In another context, Peter Brooks has said it was clear this position was bankrupt when it came time to explain how people like John Yoo could willfully misread statutes in the law to justify torture with something that looked a lot like what these ethical readers did constantly: it was clear just from the abandonment of poetics in anything like this form of ethics that reading and ethics had to be brought together in a less mashed-up, less defensive (in that this "ethics" was essentially something only the humanities could give you, since it couldn't really give you knowledge, like the sciences), less immediately politicized way (which is just to say that it actually had to be thought through).
The inclination I'm describing involves thinking something similar, but also involves a willingness to go, sometimes, much further in the formalist direction than the new formalists themselves. Indeed, it reworks the basic components that constitute form, rethinks the matter of form and what the literary object can be made up of. Instead of the poetics of Brooks (which I might recommend to a , it claims the territory of aesthetics, and there is something exciting about that. At the same time, I'm not sure it brings us any further towards answering questions about the knowledge the literary object can contain, and in fact may block certain ways into asking questions in this area. For it is knowledge which is ultimately the reason for close reading--why it was invented, and why we do it--and to celebrate the death of the close reader at the same time as you find comfort in form is to assume that there is no urgency to the question of whether the literary object can know something, and that we can better address our reading problems by attending instead to the nature of its sensuousness.
For close reading is much more about construing messages in the act of communication than about paying attention to form. It is about meaning, ambiguity, parables, plots: rhythms, to encapsulate things, and use a more small-scale example, more than meters (or, maybe, meters more as beats, since I don't mean to say at all that prosody only goes in the formalist direction--indeed, it becomes a tool in going the opposite way). So to align it with formalism in order to bash it, which is what has been going on at least since the 60's in the US (and actually earlier), is actually a strange move. Form was the first thing I.A. Richards actually attacked in his litany of aesthetic bogeys (Angela Leighton is the only person who I've seen actually figure this out, in a recent book On Form--perhaps because she actually went back to read Richards). It was because of the prominence of formal (if not exactly formalist) approaches that he thought we needed close reading in order to to eradicate. It only really became a formalist practice in the way we know it now after people like Wimsatt, Brooks, and the Yale people turned it into explication (or "explicitation," as Wimsatt nicely put it), and Modernists like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters gave the object itself that hard minimalist, sculptural edge to it. To accelerate the narrative, we might just say that PoMo poetry people, for all their bashing of formalism, actually only got more excited about that minimalism (the people into novels tended to do much better, as they recognized getting rid of form opened up logics of desire which really had a different texture than what verse form broke down into). We've been stuck in the formalist jam ever since, really, so to blame close reading makes little sense, since it never was close reading's fault. The English I think have a richer sense of why close reading can't go away, I think, because they never had such a stringent formalism there (though not having one leaves them with fewer moves to make ultimately with readings--it's pretty much always towards history).
In short, not unlike the hyper-political-theory people this position wants to move away from, it is an approach that seems to suppose we can always make sense of what poetry is about if we want to, if we look hard enough. Close reading is precisely asking whether we can make such a supposition, or at least in its real practice--which I think people do less often than we think--complicates such an assumption. Which is why we keep reading Christopher Ricks and Helen Vendler (not that there's no other reason to read them, of course).
I don't mean to be dualistic about knowledge and sense. I mean only to note that there is another aspect to poesis besides or rather beside making, which this tendency I'm describing occasionally recognizes often only to forget it: namely, the the vatic, possessed, oracular, inspirational aspect. And that close reading attends to this.
I'm less sure whether I don't mean to (that's certainly a phrase that hedges your bets) champion close reading over formalism. It remains a more open question to me whether the part formalism should play involves breaking down whatever dualism there is between knowledge and sense, and pushing sense (via their fates, as Susan Stewart might say, their own kind of knowing) towards questions of knowledge. Even if the tendency I'm describing often forgets knowledge it can occasionally break things down precisely by its focus on the sensuous side of things--maybe sometimes better than a smartly directed new formalism could. I think when it gets polemical, though, the dualism can't help but be deepened, and most of the time anyway such a mode sinks knowledge too far in sense to allow any jumping of the gap. In this case, it might be smart to see more of what we can accomplish by close reading without the formalist crutch.
Maybe. What I find odd, however, is not so much the people who would identify with the new formalism (they're often trying to work out just what this might mean), as those who take comfort in it, and assume something else: that it was not formalism which lent a problematic basis for literary studies, but close reading. Saying we're new formalists, for these people, just means we can look at form and close read only really when we need to, when it is advantageous and sensible--not all the time.
This tendency here--and I don't mean to describe anything as clear cut as a position, and I'll probably be much too hard-and-fast as it is in trying to just to give some accentuating weight to a pull we might find in contemporary criticism--the tendency, I think, is more than reasonable. What's particularly good is its utter rejection of facile claims made in the 80's and 90's about "the ethics of reading," which assumed that close reading is something we do everywhere (just as the world can be understood as a text), and that to distantly read something amounted to being unethical (by which they really meant, immoral). In another context, Peter Brooks has said it was clear this position was bankrupt when it came time to explain how people like John Yoo could willfully misread statutes in the law to justify torture with something that looked a lot like what these ethical readers did constantly: it was clear just from the abandonment of poetics in anything like this form of ethics that reading and ethics had to be brought together in a less mashed-up, less defensive (in that this "ethics" was essentially something only the humanities could give you, since it couldn't really give you knowledge, like the sciences), less immediately politicized way (which is just to say that it actually had to be thought through).
The inclination I'm describing involves thinking something similar, but also involves a willingness to go, sometimes, much further in the formalist direction than the new formalists themselves. Indeed, it reworks the basic components that constitute form, rethinks the matter of form and what the literary object can be made up of. Instead of the poetics of Brooks (which I might recommend to a , it claims the territory of aesthetics, and there is something exciting about that. At the same time, I'm not sure it brings us any further towards answering questions about the knowledge the literary object can contain, and in fact may block certain ways into asking questions in this area. For it is knowledge which is ultimately the reason for close reading--why it was invented, and why we do it--and to celebrate the death of the close reader at the same time as you find comfort in form is to assume that there is no urgency to the question of whether the literary object can know something, and that we can better address our reading problems by attending instead to the nature of its sensuousness.
For close reading is much more about construing messages in the act of communication than about paying attention to form. It is about meaning, ambiguity, parables, plots: rhythms, to encapsulate things, and use a more small-scale example, more than meters (or, maybe, meters more as beats, since I don't mean to say at all that prosody only goes in the formalist direction--indeed, it becomes a tool in going the opposite way). So to align it with formalism in order to bash it, which is what has been going on at least since the 60's in the US (and actually earlier), is actually a strange move. Form was the first thing I.A. Richards actually attacked in his litany of aesthetic bogeys (Angela Leighton is the only person who I've seen actually figure this out, in a recent book On Form--perhaps because she actually went back to read Richards). It was because of the prominence of formal (if not exactly formalist) approaches that he thought we needed close reading in order to to eradicate. It only really became a formalist practice in the way we know it now after people like Wimsatt, Brooks, and the Yale people turned it into explication (or "explicitation," as Wimsatt nicely put it), and Modernists like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters gave the object itself that hard minimalist, sculptural edge to it. To accelerate the narrative, we might just say that PoMo poetry people, for all their bashing of formalism, actually only got more excited about that minimalism (the people into novels tended to do much better, as they recognized getting rid of form opened up logics of desire which really had a different texture than what verse form broke down into). We've been stuck in the formalist jam ever since, really, so to blame close reading makes little sense, since it never was close reading's fault. The English I think have a richer sense of why close reading can't go away, I think, because they never had such a stringent formalism there (though not having one leaves them with fewer moves to make ultimately with readings--it's pretty much always towards history).
In short, not unlike the hyper-political-theory people this position wants to move away from, it is an approach that seems to suppose we can always make sense of what poetry is about if we want to, if we look hard enough. Close reading is precisely asking whether we can make such a supposition, or at least in its real practice--which I think people do less often than we think--complicates such an assumption. Which is why we keep reading Christopher Ricks and Helen Vendler (not that there's no other reason to read them, of course).
I don't mean to be dualistic about knowledge and sense. I mean only to note that there is another aspect to poesis besides or rather beside making, which this tendency I'm describing occasionally recognizes often only to forget it: namely, the the vatic, possessed, oracular, inspirational aspect. And that close reading attends to this.
I'm less sure whether I don't mean to (that's certainly a phrase that hedges your bets) champion close reading over formalism. It remains a more open question to me whether the part formalism should play involves breaking down whatever dualism there is between knowledge and sense, and pushing sense (via their fates, as Susan Stewart might say, their own kind of knowing) towards questions of knowledge. Even if the tendency I'm describing often forgets knowledge it can occasionally break things down precisely by its focus on the sensuous side of things--maybe sometimes better than a smartly directed new formalism could. I think when it gets polemical, though, the dualism can't help but be deepened, and most of the time anyway such a mode sinks knowledge too far in sense to allow any jumping of the gap. In this case, it might be smart to see more of what we can accomplish by close reading without the formalist crutch.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Wimsatt's Law
I've been thinking a lot about the intentional fallacy, especially after trying to explain it to my students under the assumption it would get them to write more about the narrative and less about the author's design--and finding it not really helpful.
This, by the way, is now how I do literary theory: if something breaks down in the process of teaching, there's probably something wrong with it. Of course before questioning it you first question your methods and how you explained it etc., but the teachability of the thing is still a real good indicator about what needs to be adjusted in a theory. The function of pedagogy here (to pick up on my last post) is not entirely critical, in the sense of performing a critique of the theory in question: the proof works both ways, and often you know how right a theory is because it feels right when you teach it, makes intuitive sense to people. This is why, even if we refuse to be formalists, we are always in a sense practical critics when we teach: we're not out to split hairs about things, ultimately, even if we're out to multiply meaning; we're not out for what might seem wrong but beneath the surface of things is right--like a philosopher. This is why the high theory of the 80's, it seems, sometimes hits brick walls in the classroom: it's often trying too hard to be impractical, to make the stakes all-or-nothing, as they indeed are in philosophy (except there, this also makes for good classes).
Indeed, it's the practical context itself that is oddly missing from the theory of the intentional fallacy. It makes no sense to say that an author's intention is not "available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art" as Wimsatt and Beardsley put it (in The Verbal Icon, 3), except as a sort of thought experiment that opens up some space for discussion. And that's, of course, what the statement did: as a sort of postulate, it further solidified the nature of the classroom space in which one finally could encounter a work, something that outlives the intentions of its author. That is, it encouraged a type of discussion that was truer to the way a genuine encounter with a literary text works: one that doesn't try to search back to the origin of the work in the author's head in order to make sense of what is said or meant or indeed even intended, but instead just construes the meaning then and there. So it works as an axiom, you could say.
Except it isn't stated like an axiom. Empson mockingly called it "Wimsatt's Law," most hilariously in his later book on Using Biography (a very significant title in this context) to make this clear--and he's right:
Any such work [like what I'm doing in this book] is excluded by the Wimsatt Law [...] which says that no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author. This paradox results from a great failure to grasp the whole situation. Any speaker, when a baby, wanted to understand what people meant, why mum was cross for example, and had enough partial success to go on trying; the effort is usually carried on into adult life, though not always into old age.
-Using Biography, vii.
Indeed, he's right about more than one thing in this wonderfully deadpan statement, as I'll try and say later sometime. But the point is that once you start treating it as an axiom, you are actually altering the theory, and you can't really pretend otherwise.
Because, as Empson makes clear, the theory doesn't ultimately say that an author's intentions should not determine the course of your reading and discussion of the thing. It says, "no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author." It doesn't exactly say this, of course, as we already saw, but Empson's paraphrase is, I think, pretty right. It certainly makes clear--as paraphrases should do, but often precisely avoid--the implications of the argument, how it is skewed.
There's an indecision, first of all, between what's "available" and what's "desired," and it's clear that the emphasis falls, despite appearances, on the second word: the first is there to cover their bases so they can get to the real point. You see what happens when the theory is softened: the stress falls back upon "available." And perhaps if they would have said just "available," that would have been fine. This is truer to the literary encounter, and actually opens up neat questions about how far our "reach" is while reading, if we fail to reach back to the author: it's not just that we can't find some statement about the intention of the author, or that the author isn't there with us in the classroom (though Wimsatt and Beardsley probably actually only mean "available" in the first, very literal sense, if I can speculate upon their intention for a second), but that when we read we can't really find a plausible, author-like intention there--the words come in sentences, flow forth from that, and don't come shooting one by one from the mind of someone to you like invisible bullets (to move from Greenblatt to Derrida, there's a nice description of this telepathic fantasy, more often engaged in discussions of communication than you'd think, in Of Grammatology).
But if in practice you warn people about the unavailability of intention--which is what I'm suggesting most people do anyway in warning about the intentional fallacy--you still go wrong, because it's not just the stress on that authoritative, tensed "desired" (barely qualified, in truth strengthened by the "even") that is the problem with the theory: it's the way both words, and the indecision between them, are required. In other words, what's wrong with the theory is that it makes the indecision in this phrase work in its favor: it's the gap between what is available and what is desired in an interpretation that is always negotiated in the act of reading, and Wimsatt and Beardsley conveniently let the connection between the two remain blank, acting as if what is available is only what's most immediately around you, and what's desirable is just a preference, something not taken seriously. How, in other words, does the unavailability of the author's intention actually get us to the conclusion that consulting that intention, seeking it out sometimes, or even speculating upon it, actually is undesirable in interpretation?
It doesn't, is the answer. I just stumbled upon a nice discussion on the intentional fallacy right after my class, where things are put straight:
Wimsatt and Beardsley were no doubt too extreme in their suggestion that knowledge of an author's intention is "neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." Often unavailable, often interesting, quite often misleading, and always insufficient as a critical measure, would be closer.
-Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence, 96.
That is indeed closer. And it's important to say why we have to rethink this:
[T]here is something wasteful and disagreeable about not wanting to know what writers thinking they are doing, and about the accompanying assumption that critics know better. It doesn't seem implausible that writers often achieve what they intend and that their intention has something to do with their achievement. If I find enormous subtleties in a literary work, chances are the writer put them there. The subtle mind at play is the writer's rather than mine. I'm doing what I'm can but I'm just following clues, not placing them.
-Yeats and Violence, 97.
I think its that "accompanying assumption" that is most dangerous about Wimsatt's Law, and, also, most useful. It is important in the history of literary criticism that this theory was put in way it was put, I think, since critics do have important things to say and authors indeed never say anything really sufficient for critical purposes about the work they are doing. But the kids in my class cringed at something when I explained the thing to them (even in the chaster version I sort of outlined above), and I could see in their faces not only their lament of the wastefulness of it all but something really skeptical of this self-serving aspect. We aren't at cross purposes, authors and critics, and some of the serious marginalization of literature might be attributed to the critical assumption that we are. The case for our role in the work is put better just after the last remark above: "We don't have to suspect them of lying," Wood says, "but neither can we assume they are immune to the ordinary frailties of human self-knowledge" (97). And the purposes of criticism aren't predatory upon this, so much as in the same boat with those of the author, at least insofar as both are trying to articulate something sufficient about what happens when that author is read.
But if Wood has a sounder theory of intentionality and its role in criticism, what can we now say about Wimsatt and Beardsley's theory? A theory that, ultimately, would make the court of appeal the cogency of the explication of the critic (see Wimsatt's wonderful later essays on what he calls "explicitation" for a concise summary of this), rather than, as Wood rightly goes on to put it, language--or, even better, the words themselves?
I think that in the end what the theory of the fallacy is trying to do is make possible what it presupposes, the strange afterlife of words when read and discussed. And what's crucial to remember (and Wood reminds us of this, since he is really out to get at this afterlife) is that this is actually a very different task than deciding upon the role of intention--though intention is obviously a way into the question. In other words, Wimsatt and Beardsley are trying to explain something like that "perpetual present" of a preserved verbal utterance, which allows us, when we come to a work, to actually pick apart its meanings as if we were construing the sense of the thing right there before us. Indeed, we are doing this, and we are able to do it more easily if we disregard authorial intention, since it makes us cease to think of the words as faded historical entities, exhausted in their meaning as soon or right after they are written down. For words aren't historical like this: they slip through history strangely, as if on a different sort of time-scale, and so are able to confront us in an act of reading with startling immediacy, at the same time as others are able to carry a fog about them, a distance of sorts. Wimsatt and Beardsley seem to have this particularly in their sights as they discuss the fallacy, no doubt because they are waging a war against philology (and, of course, we're all on their side except Paul de Man here, who would rather return to it), and seem to want to make this encounter more recognizable, and thus more likely to happen.
This, by the way, is now how I do literary theory: if something breaks down in the process of teaching, there's probably something wrong with it. Of course before questioning it you first question your methods and how you explained it etc., but the teachability of the thing is still a real good indicator about what needs to be adjusted in a theory. The function of pedagogy here (to pick up on my last post) is not entirely critical, in the sense of performing a critique of the theory in question: the proof works both ways, and often you know how right a theory is because it feels right when you teach it, makes intuitive sense to people. This is why, even if we refuse to be formalists, we are always in a sense practical critics when we teach: we're not out to split hairs about things, ultimately, even if we're out to multiply meaning; we're not out for what might seem wrong but beneath the surface of things is right--like a philosopher. This is why the high theory of the 80's, it seems, sometimes hits brick walls in the classroom: it's often trying too hard to be impractical, to make the stakes all-or-nothing, as they indeed are in philosophy (except there, this also makes for good classes).
Indeed, it's the practical context itself that is oddly missing from the theory of the intentional fallacy. It makes no sense to say that an author's intention is not "available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art" as Wimsatt and Beardsley put it (in The Verbal Icon, 3), except as a sort of thought experiment that opens up some space for discussion. And that's, of course, what the statement did: as a sort of postulate, it further solidified the nature of the classroom space in which one finally could encounter a work, something that outlives the intentions of its author. That is, it encouraged a type of discussion that was truer to the way a genuine encounter with a literary text works: one that doesn't try to search back to the origin of the work in the author's head in order to make sense of what is said or meant or indeed even intended, but instead just construes the meaning then and there. So it works as an axiom, you could say.
Except it isn't stated like an axiom. Empson mockingly called it "Wimsatt's Law," most hilariously in his later book on Using Biography (a very significant title in this context) to make this clear--and he's right:
Any such work [like what I'm doing in this book] is excluded by the Wimsatt Law [...] which says that no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author. This paradox results from a great failure to grasp the whole situation. Any speaker, when a baby, wanted to understand what people meant, why mum was cross for example, and had enough partial success to go on trying; the effort is usually carried on into adult life, though not always into old age.
-Using Biography, vii.
Indeed, he's right about more than one thing in this wonderfully deadpan statement, as I'll try and say later sometime. But the point is that once you start treating it as an axiom, you are actually altering the theory, and you can't really pretend otherwise.
Because, as Empson makes clear, the theory doesn't ultimately say that an author's intentions should not determine the course of your reading and discussion of the thing. It says, "no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author." It doesn't exactly say this, of course, as we already saw, but Empson's paraphrase is, I think, pretty right. It certainly makes clear--as paraphrases should do, but often precisely avoid--the implications of the argument, how it is skewed.
There's an indecision, first of all, between what's "available" and what's "desired," and it's clear that the emphasis falls, despite appearances, on the second word: the first is there to cover their bases so they can get to the real point. You see what happens when the theory is softened: the stress falls back upon "available." And perhaps if they would have said just "available," that would have been fine. This is truer to the literary encounter, and actually opens up neat questions about how far our "reach" is while reading, if we fail to reach back to the author: it's not just that we can't find some statement about the intention of the author, or that the author isn't there with us in the classroom (though Wimsatt and Beardsley probably actually only mean "available" in the first, very literal sense, if I can speculate upon their intention for a second), but that when we read we can't really find a plausible, author-like intention there--the words come in sentences, flow forth from that, and don't come shooting one by one from the mind of someone to you like invisible bullets (to move from Greenblatt to Derrida, there's a nice description of this telepathic fantasy, more often engaged in discussions of communication than you'd think, in Of Grammatology).
But if in practice you warn people about the unavailability of intention--which is what I'm suggesting most people do anyway in warning about the intentional fallacy--you still go wrong, because it's not just the stress on that authoritative, tensed "desired" (barely qualified, in truth strengthened by the "even") that is the problem with the theory: it's the way both words, and the indecision between them, are required. In other words, what's wrong with the theory is that it makes the indecision in this phrase work in its favor: it's the gap between what is available and what is desired in an interpretation that is always negotiated in the act of reading, and Wimsatt and Beardsley conveniently let the connection between the two remain blank, acting as if what is available is only what's most immediately around you, and what's desirable is just a preference, something not taken seriously. How, in other words, does the unavailability of the author's intention actually get us to the conclusion that consulting that intention, seeking it out sometimes, or even speculating upon it, actually is undesirable in interpretation?
It doesn't, is the answer. I just stumbled upon a nice discussion on the intentional fallacy right after my class, where things are put straight:
Wimsatt and Beardsley were no doubt too extreme in their suggestion that knowledge of an author's intention is "neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." Often unavailable, often interesting, quite often misleading, and always insufficient as a critical measure, would be closer.
-Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence, 96.
That is indeed closer. And it's important to say why we have to rethink this:
[T]here is something wasteful and disagreeable about not wanting to know what writers thinking they are doing, and about the accompanying assumption that critics know better. It doesn't seem implausible that writers often achieve what they intend and that their intention has something to do with their achievement. If I find enormous subtleties in a literary work, chances are the writer put them there. The subtle mind at play is the writer's rather than mine. I'm doing what I'm can but I'm just following clues, not placing them.
-Yeats and Violence, 97.
I think its that "accompanying assumption" that is most dangerous about Wimsatt's Law, and, also, most useful. It is important in the history of literary criticism that this theory was put in way it was put, I think, since critics do have important things to say and authors indeed never say anything really sufficient for critical purposes about the work they are doing. But the kids in my class cringed at something when I explained the thing to them (even in the chaster version I sort of outlined above), and I could see in their faces not only their lament of the wastefulness of it all but something really skeptical of this self-serving aspect. We aren't at cross purposes, authors and critics, and some of the serious marginalization of literature might be attributed to the critical assumption that we are. The case for our role in the work is put better just after the last remark above: "We don't have to suspect them of lying," Wood says, "but neither can we assume they are immune to the ordinary frailties of human self-knowledge" (97). And the purposes of criticism aren't predatory upon this, so much as in the same boat with those of the author, at least insofar as both are trying to articulate something sufficient about what happens when that author is read.
But if Wood has a sounder theory of intentionality and its role in criticism, what can we now say about Wimsatt and Beardsley's theory? A theory that, ultimately, would make the court of appeal the cogency of the explication of the critic (see Wimsatt's wonderful later essays on what he calls "explicitation" for a concise summary of this), rather than, as Wood rightly goes on to put it, language--or, even better, the words themselves?
I think that in the end what the theory of the fallacy is trying to do is make possible what it presupposes, the strange afterlife of words when read and discussed. And what's crucial to remember (and Wood reminds us of this, since he is really out to get at this afterlife) is that this is actually a very different task than deciding upon the role of intention--though intention is obviously a way into the question. In other words, Wimsatt and Beardsley are trying to explain something like that "perpetual present" of a preserved verbal utterance, which allows us, when we come to a work, to actually pick apart its meanings as if we were construing the sense of the thing right there before us. Indeed, we are doing this, and we are able to do it more easily if we disregard authorial intention, since it makes us cease to think of the words as faded historical entities, exhausted in their meaning as soon or right after they are written down. For words aren't historical like this: they slip through history strangely, as if on a different sort of time-scale, and so are able to confront us in an act of reading with startling immediacy, at the same time as others are able to carry a fog about them, a distance of sorts. Wimsatt and Beardsley seem to have this particularly in their sights as they discuss the fallacy, no doubt because they are waging a war against philology (and, of course, we're all on their side except Paul de Man here, who would rather return to it), and seem to want to make this encounter more recognizable, and thus more likely to happen.
Friday, October 29, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, September 17, 2010
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).
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).
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Simile
Just ran across one of my favorite similes from Virgil, at the beginning of Book VIII of the Aeneid. But I should say something about similes in general first, because they are very strange things. This is especially true when they take the extended "epic" form, which I actually think is the purest. Now, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise: the epic simile provides a comparison which does not so much compare as narrate another story in miniature, and when they are not annoying for taking us away from the action, they vex our attempts to make sense of them, as they force even best interpretations to turn towards the awkwardness of allegory.
But many of these reasons come from a sense of the rhetorical canon (it doesn't have to be even an explicit rhetoric) that subordinates the simile to metaphor. Never mind the fact that this tendency often comes from the modern sense of metaphor as a function rather than a--for lack of a better word (the traditional "trope" having been coopted by de Man et. al.) I'll just say an artifice--which tends to justify itself with references the psyche empirically understood. Whether these take place in studies that present the empirical psyche straightforwardly as such (in a marriage of psychology and poetics that begins with I.A. Richards), or studies that veil it in a pseudo-phenomenological garb of anxiety and trauma (in a deconstructivism or late-Lacanianism), such view is problematic--not because empiricism provides its foundation, or because the reference is too psychological, but because such it sees the place where the psyche meets rhetoric as language, which is thereby both kept obscure and granted too much power (it becomes Language). This, by the way, is why this sense of metaphor as a function is really only helpful in structuralist poetics, which interprets the psyche psychoanalytically (as in Barthes) or with a genuine phenomenological intent (Ricoeur often, or the more un-de-Manian aspects of Derrida). Situating the link in a linguistic system which, made up as it is of signs, is able to be studied (that is, neither undifferentiated or wrapped in the mystery of infinite differentiation), these stay true to the real aim of the functional sense of metaphor, best outlined by Jakobson: to recover rhetoric by recovering its explanatory power, which means making it more economical (two tropes, which are brought into closer relationship to schemes) so as to restore some sense of the urgency of debates over typology (it will matter again whether the instance in question is an instance of metaphor or not).
But never mind all that: the point is that everything that makes us subordinate simile to a metaphoric function doesn't help us when it comes time to actually get a sense of the purpose of the simile. Here, it is more helpful to turn things around and say as Pope once did that a metaphor is really just a little simile: this junks all the deeper things we have learned about metaphor, and reduces them to the comparative purpose of the simile, but it gives us a perspective that doesn't take this comparative purpose for granted. More significantly, it changes the relationship between metaphor and simile from one of explicitness (when we think of simile subordinated, we often say that it is just a more explicit metaphor: we are apt to explain it as a metaphor that just "has" like or as) to one of size: we thereby understand the comparison accomplished by the "littler" simile as something more like a short illustration, and the comparison of the actual simile as something elaboration. There is something disgusting to modern ears in this, because it comes close to the late-19th century finishing-school sense of such tropes as ornaments that make everyday speech more noble, decorated, and serve to puff it up. But comparison as elaboration is something different than comparison as ornamentation, and it gives us some sense of the essential role that earlier generations felt such tropes played. For they did not have such a disgusting sense that proper speech should be utterly unornamented, devoid of anything but the most rudimentary grammatical connections and the plainest, most dumbed-down meaning: they did not have the sense that meaning was utterly opposed to the means that expressed it (a sense which is only exacerbated by weak attempts to dissolve this opposition and make everything "linguistic," like those of the empirical/postmodern theories I mentioned above--which is why I complain about them).
If we view the simile then in this light, we understand more its relationship to narrative. Perhaps we even see it see it as a modification of the storytelling impulse itself, a modification which seeks to put the fictional aspect of stories to good use: it seeks to find what in fiction compares or elaborates reality, and uses it to work up a fiction already being elaborated. Such a role might actually bring it more in line with a different, lyric impulse, which does not oppose fiction and reality but sets them side by side: the simile might be lyric trying to tell a story, in other words, or narrative trying to return to its similar lyric-like--sorry for the similes--lack of opposition to reality (considered as something different from history, which is mimetically duplicated--more on this in a moment). This view of similes can perhaps most be opposed to view that has to make sense of them as allegory, relating the components together into a hard lump which, in its self-consistency, opposes itself holistically, at one go, to whatever is being compared: maybe it is even the trope that is the very antidote to allegory itself, being always closer (even in its more condensed, illustrative moments) to something like a parable.
Of course, what challenges such a view is the mimetic function that is most explicit in a simile. But what if we rethought mimesis in our rethinking of this very explicitness above, though we did so in a (supposedly--I'd say seemingly but that's what is precisely in question) different connection? Elaboration, like fiction itself, surely involves mimesis, but is not therefore an elaboration of anything that would bring it into opposition to reality, or, as was often said in the height of a celebration of postmodernity, undermine reality (for similar--sorry again--perspectives on check out the writings of Paul Fry and Michael Wood: Fry has been advancing this "realist" view since the 80's). Once we admit the fact that fiction, with mimesis at its center driving it on, is not as opposed to reality as it is to history (the weird internal timeframe of literature, which you can sit down and slip back into at any time, is an index of this--which does not, for all that, make literature itself something ahistorical), we begin to see how tropes that involve it, that mobilize it, might actually be the stuff of literature that is most in connection with the real.
This probably requires a bit more thought (how does literature's non-opposition to the real differ from its elements? how does a novelistic fiction's elaboration of reality differ from lyric's, which is obviously more direct? and how much is rhetoric fictional, especially when it is used in "non-fictional" [a pejorative term, that brings fiction back into opposition with reality qua history] discourses?). But in the meantime, it certainly shows you why I grant the epic simile primacy, as something like the "model" of all similes, and explains as well perhaps the most fascinating thing about epic similes (and perhaps all similes, then): their amazing translatability. Because from a practical perspective they serve to elaborate first and foremost (or tend to open up into something more than illustration), they gain a certain freedom from the selection of words that tends to modify illustrations (metaphors) more. They differ, of course, from translation to translation, but are wonderfully portable.
Perhaps I'll give you an example with the following simile, to which I finally come:
quae Laomedontius heros
cuncta uidens magno curarum fluctuat aestu,
atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc
in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat,
sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen aenis
sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae
omnia peruolitat late loca, iamque sub auras
erigitur summique ferit laquearia tecti.
-Book VIII.18-25
Meanwhile the heir
of great Laomedon, who knew full well
the whole wide land astir, was vexed and tossed
in troubled seas of care. This way and that
his swift thoughts flew, and scanned with like dismay
each partial peril or the general storm.
Thus the vexed waters at a fountain's brim,
smitten by sunshine or the silver sphere
of a reflected moon, send forth a beam
of flickering light that leaps from wall to wall,
or, skyward lifted in ethereal flight,
glances along some rich-wrought, vaulted dome.
-Theodore Williams' (pretty literal) translation.
While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war,
The Trojan, floating in a flood of care,
Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare.
This way and that he turns his anxious mind;
Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd;
Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part,
And gives no rest to his distracted heart.
So, when the sun by day, or moon by night,
Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light,
The glitt'ring species here and there divide,
And cast their dubious beams from side to side;
Now on the walls, now on the pavement play,
And to the ceiling flash the glaring day.
'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep
The birds of air, and fishes of the deep,
And beasts, and mortal men.
-Dryden's translation (I include three more lines because I think Dryden is doing a balancing act of some sort between night and day which nicely takes off from Virgil.)
I'll add other translations as I hunt them down.
But many of these reasons come from a sense of the rhetorical canon (it doesn't have to be even an explicit rhetoric) that subordinates the simile to metaphor. Never mind the fact that this tendency often comes from the modern sense of metaphor as a function rather than a--for lack of a better word (the traditional "trope" having been coopted by de Man et. al.) I'll just say an artifice--which tends to justify itself with references the psyche empirically understood. Whether these take place in studies that present the empirical psyche straightforwardly as such (in a marriage of psychology and poetics that begins with I.A. Richards), or studies that veil it in a pseudo-phenomenological garb of anxiety and trauma (in a deconstructivism or late-Lacanianism), such view is problematic--not because empiricism provides its foundation, or because the reference is too psychological, but because such it sees the place where the psyche meets rhetoric as language, which is thereby both kept obscure and granted too much power (it becomes Language). This, by the way, is why this sense of metaphor as a function is really only helpful in structuralist poetics, which interprets the psyche psychoanalytically (as in Barthes) or with a genuine phenomenological intent (Ricoeur often, or the more un-de-Manian aspects of Derrida). Situating the link in a linguistic system which, made up as it is of signs, is able to be studied (that is, neither undifferentiated or wrapped in the mystery of infinite differentiation), these stay true to the real aim of the functional sense of metaphor, best outlined by Jakobson: to recover rhetoric by recovering its explanatory power, which means making it more economical (two tropes, which are brought into closer relationship to schemes) so as to restore some sense of the urgency of debates over typology (it will matter again whether the instance in question is an instance of metaphor or not).
But never mind all that: the point is that everything that makes us subordinate simile to a metaphoric function doesn't help us when it comes time to actually get a sense of the purpose of the simile. Here, it is more helpful to turn things around and say as Pope once did that a metaphor is really just a little simile: this junks all the deeper things we have learned about metaphor, and reduces them to the comparative purpose of the simile, but it gives us a perspective that doesn't take this comparative purpose for granted. More significantly, it changes the relationship between metaphor and simile from one of explicitness (when we think of simile subordinated, we often say that it is just a more explicit metaphor: we are apt to explain it as a metaphor that just "has" like or as) to one of size: we thereby understand the comparison accomplished by the "littler" simile as something more like a short illustration, and the comparison of the actual simile as something elaboration. There is something disgusting to modern ears in this, because it comes close to the late-19th century finishing-school sense of such tropes as ornaments that make everyday speech more noble, decorated, and serve to puff it up. But comparison as elaboration is something different than comparison as ornamentation, and it gives us some sense of the essential role that earlier generations felt such tropes played. For they did not have such a disgusting sense that proper speech should be utterly unornamented, devoid of anything but the most rudimentary grammatical connections and the plainest, most dumbed-down meaning: they did not have the sense that meaning was utterly opposed to the means that expressed it (a sense which is only exacerbated by weak attempts to dissolve this opposition and make everything "linguistic," like those of the empirical/postmodern theories I mentioned above--which is why I complain about them).
If we view the simile then in this light, we understand more its relationship to narrative. Perhaps we even see it see it as a modification of the storytelling impulse itself, a modification which seeks to put the fictional aspect of stories to good use: it seeks to find what in fiction compares or elaborates reality, and uses it to work up a fiction already being elaborated. Such a role might actually bring it more in line with a different, lyric impulse, which does not oppose fiction and reality but sets them side by side: the simile might be lyric trying to tell a story, in other words, or narrative trying to return to its similar lyric-like--sorry for the similes--lack of opposition to reality (considered as something different from history, which is mimetically duplicated--more on this in a moment). This view of similes can perhaps most be opposed to view that has to make sense of them as allegory, relating the components together into a hard lump which, in its self-consistency, opposes itself holistically, at one go, to whatever is being compared: maybe it is even the trope that is the very antidote to allegory itself, being always closer (even in its more condensed, illustrative moments) to something like a parable.
Of course, what challenges such a view is the mimetic function that is most explicit in a simile. But what if we rethought mimesis in our rethinking of this very explicitness above, though we did so in a (supposedly--I'd say seemingly but that's what is precisely in question) different connection? Elaboration, like fiction itself, surely involves mimesis, but is not therefore an elaboration of anything that would bring it into opposition to reality, or, as was often said in the height of a celebration of postmodernity, undermine reality (for similar--sorry again--perspectives on check out the writings of Paul Fry and Michael Wood: Fry has been advancing this "realist" view since the 80's). Once we admit the fact that fiction, with mimesis at its center driving it on, is not as opposed to reality as it is to history (the weird internal timeframe of literature, which you can sit down and slip back into at any time, is an index of this--which does not, for all that, make literature itself something ahistorical), we begin to see how tropes that involve it, that mobilize it, might actually be the stuff of literature that is most in connection with the real.
This probably requires a bit more thought (how does literature's non-opposition to the real differ from its elements? how does a novelistic fiction's elaboration of reality differ from lyric's, which is obviously more direct? and how much is rhetoric fictional, especially when it is used in "non-fictional" [a pejorative term, that brings fiction back into opposition with reality qua history] discourses?). But in the meantime, it certainly shows you why I grant the epic simile primacy, as something like the "model" of all similes, and explains as well perhaps the most fascinating thing about epic similes (and perhaps all similes, then): their amazing translatability. Because from a practical perspective they serve to elaborate first and foremost (or tend to open up into something more than illustration), they gain a certain freedom from the selection of words that tends to modify illustrations (metaphors) more. They differ, of course, from translation to translation, but are wonderfully portable.
Perhaps I'll give you an example with the following simile, to which I finally come:
quae Laomedontius heros
cuncta uidens magno curarum fluctuat aestu,
atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc
in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat,
sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen aenis
sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae
omnia peruolitat late loca, iamque sub auras
erigitur summique ferit laquearia tecti.
-Book VIII.18-25
Meanwhile the heir
of great Laomedon, who knew full well
the whole wide land astir, was vexed and tossed
in troubled seas of care. This way and that
his swift thoughts flew, and scanned with like dismay
each partial peril or the general storm.
Thus the vexed waters at a fountain's brim,
smitten by sunshine or the silver sphere
of a reflected moon, send forth a beam
of flickering light that leaps from wall to wall,
or, skyward lifted in ethereal flight,
glances along some rich-wrought, vaulted dome.
-Theodore Williams' (pretty literal) translation.
While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war,
The Trojan, floating in a flood of care,
Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare.
This way and that he turns his anxious mind;
Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd;
Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part,
And gives no rest to his distracted heart.
So, when the sun by day, or moon by night,
Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light,
The glitt'ring species here and there divide,
And cast their dubious beams from side to side;
Now on the walls, now on the pavement play,
And to the ceiling flash the glaring day.
'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep
The birds of air, and fishes of the deep,
And beasts, and mortal men.
-Dryden's translation (I include three more lines because I think Dryden is doing a balancing act of some sort between night and day which nicely takes off from Virgil.)
I'll add other translations as I hunt them down.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Self-reference and metafiction (and realism)
There's a distinction to be made between self-referential stories and metafictional stories. While self-reference rolls itself up into a ball, seeking to disappear in indexicality, metafiction sprawls, unfolds, and interrogates the consequences of self-reference and parody more than it engages in either. In metafiction is room for development, where self-reference aims for merely a more pithy postmodern version of the modernist paradox Frederic Jameson describes so well: resolution in paradox, fragmentation that effectively means closure--all of which announces the inflexibility of form at the same time as it mourns the loss of an unironic formal achievement. Of course, modernism can't be reduced to just that, but this is precisely the reduction postmodernism accomplishes in order to turn this fatalism into a weird schizophrenic joy, closing off all the utopian modernist alternatives in order to elaborate, rather than change, this relation to form. So the pithiness here comes from the sense that metafiction can be dissolved into a series of instances of self-reference (otherwise known as allegory), or the sense that in instances of self-reference, we are getting all that metafiction allows.
But the overturning of this relation between the two has itself to be overturned, set back on it's feet. Instead of narratives like that of "Seinfeld," which rigorously--and wonderfully, in its last episode, though everyone hated precisely this fact--stuck to its self-referential pseudo-closure, we need more stories like "It's Garry Shandling's Show," which is a wonderful example of the possibilities of meta-fiction. Where "Seinfeld" constantly got laughs because it was a parody of the sitcom's premise, a show about shows and so really "about nothing"--or, to put it more accurately, referring (via its plots mostly) constantly to its own status as merely plausible--"It's Garry Shandling's Show" allows Shandling the metafictional possibility of actually commenting upon the way the show will unfold, and motivating this moment of self-reference into a drama: plots often involve Garry trying to avoid having to do an upcoming scene, and all self-reference actually dissolves into a fiction that is actually about fiction. Rather than making fiction's status as merely probable the beginning and end of the story, the status actually motivates a story about fiction.
The difference is subtle (I have a little difficulty bringing it out here), but the effect is a completely different sort of tale: while "Seinfeld" maintains the division between fiction and reality and exploits it, "It's Garry Shandling's Show" has no use for such self-consciousness of fictionality, and spills over into reality, blurring it's lines. This produces, basically, realism's brand of fiction (it's this more than anything like the science fiction of which Latour speaks). Garry maintains the notion that you can actually come over to his show, and often invites the audience in for dip: the point is not that the show is accounting for it's status as a show, but rather that you don't know where the fiction begins or ends. Garry is a guy who can be on a stage and be fictional--fiction is something different than acting, in other words, or it is only that. The odd doubling-over that Latour describes so well as the point of a dualistic notion of reference--this is just another event in reality, and can interact with it only because reality is really not as opposed to fiction as we thought it was.
Another way of making the distinction is to say that the opposition of fiction is not reality but history, not in the sense that fictions are ahistorical (though this actually does apply in some ways), but that fictions are negated by an idea of reality that claims to be objective and different than the narratives we tell about it. Fiction has no problem dealing with reality, but when it meets the claim that the people it deals with are not historical persons (and, as Michael Wood explains, especially when they are real people who are embellished through fiction, like the heroes of Homer Aristotle has so many problems with), it then has all sorts of problems. It's only when we believe reality has anything to do with history in this sense that reality then becomes opposed to fiction in such an austere way. Otherwise, like Latour says, the world interprets itself: what's crucial is that meta-fiction tries to restore this state of things, while self-reference or the restricted play between allegory and irony, comes from that despairing state of things just described, and will preserve the distinction between historical reality and fiction at all costs.
A final note: I had a little trouble distinguishing between the self-referential and the metafictional above, partly because "Seinfeld" is only explicitly self-referential in its form, and this actually makes it less visible (thus the disappointment with the last episode came from people mistaking the show's form for something else that involved the sort of everyday comedy that was its subject, something that would be about something). A cleaner example might be a reality show, especially one about trying to get on TV: Kathy Griffin's reality show is a good one, while "The Comeback" is pretty much a perfect example, because it takes the premise of reality TV (something lurking behind both Shandling and Seinfeld's ventures, but not really crystallized yet) to the max, and shows it to be precisely this sort of infinite self-reference. But that's still too formal, even if it shows just how dead and boring postmodernism is when it's view of things really hits TV. A more direct example can just be taken from "It's Garry Shandling's Show," since it uses self-reference to get to the plane of metafiction. The direct reference in the scene above to the monologue that opens the show is self-referential, while what it implies in terms of action is metafictional: Nancy has to stop what she's doing to wait for Garry to finish the monologue, because it's a monologue, something that, in fiction, has a particular shape and has to be traversed in a particular fashion--and not just because Garry refers to the show and what he is doing in general, in the abstract. What's funny is the waiting, and then the fact that she realizes that because the monologue is this particular object (I think like the realists we might call it an "object," or at least that's my take on how to turn people like Harman towards narrative, via their excellent reflections on what is involved in aesthetics) she can go do something else while Garry finishes--it's this that's funny, not the reference. You can also probably distinguish between them if you look at the great theme song, though things get hazy when you try to distinguish between types of utterance, as Derrida a long time ago (and this realist possibility of metafiction is, in my reading of him, what he tries to preserve here) showed with Austin:
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The theme to Garry's show,
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song,
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's show.
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The opening theme to Garry's show,
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle,
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show."
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.
"This is the theme to Garry's Show" is self-reference, while the amazing, hilarious turn "I'm almost halfway finished," picks up the narrative potential in "Garry called me up" and starts something metafictional, which doesn't take the plausibility of fiction for granted, and doesn't try to shore it up, but explores it, makes it spill out into and merge with reality.
But the overturning of this relation between the two has itself to be overturned, set back on it's feet. Instead of narratives like that of "Seinfeld," which rigorously--and wonderfully, in its last episode, though everyone hated precisely this fact--stuck to its self-referential pseudo-closure, we need more stories like "It's Garry Shandling's Show," which is a wonderful example of the possibilities of meta-fiction. Where "Seinfeld" constantly got laughs because it was a parody of the sitcom's premise, a show about shows and so really "about nothing"--or, to put it more accurately, referring (via its plots mostly) constantly to its own status as merely plausible--"It's Garry Shandling's Show" allows Shandling the metafictional possibility of actually commenting upon the way the show will unfold, and motivating this moment of self-reference into a drama: plots often involve Garry trying to avoid having to do an upcoming scene, and all self-reference actually dissolves into a fiction that is actually about fiction. Rather than making fiction's status as merely probable the beginning and end of the story, the status actually motivates a story about fiction.
The difference is subtle (I have a little difficulty bringing it out here), but the effect is a completely different sort of tale: while "Seinfeld" maintains the division between fiction and reality and exploits it, "It's Garry Shandling's Show" has no use for such self-consciousness of fictionality, and spills over into reality, blurring it's lines. This produces, basically, realism's brand of fiction (it's this more than anything like the science fiction of which Latour speaks). Garry maintains the notion that you can actually come over to his show, and often invites the audience in for dip: the point is not that the show is accounting for it's status as a show, but rather that you don't know where the fiction begins or ends. Garry is a guy who can be on a stage and be fictional--fiction is something different than acting, in other words, or it is only that. The odd doubling-over that Latour describes so well as the point of a dualistic notion of reference--this is just another event in reality, and can interact with it only because reality is really not as opposed to fiction as we thought it was.
Another way of making the distinction is to say that the opposition of fiction is not reality but history, not in the sense that fictions are ahistorical (though this actually does apply in some ways), but that fictions are negated by an idea of reality that claims to be objective and different than the narratives we tell about it. Fiction has no problem dealing with reality, but when it meets the claim that the people it deals with are not historical persons (and, as Michael Wood explains, especially when they are real people who are embellished through fiction, like the heroes of Homer Aristotle has so many problems with), it then has all sorts of problems. It's only when we believe reality has anything to do with history in this sense that reality then becomes opposed to fiction in such an austere way. Otherwise, like Latour says, the world interprets itself: what's crucial is that meta-fiction tries to restore this state of things, while self-reference or the restricted play between allegory and irony, comes from that despairing state of things just described, and will preserve the distinction between historical reality and fiction at all costs.
A final note: I had a little trouble distinguishing between the self-referential and the metafictional above, partly because "Seinfeld" is only explicitly self-referential in its form, and this actually makes it less visible (thus the disappointment with the last episode came from people mistaking the show's form for something else that involved the sort of everyday comedy that was its subject, something that would be about something). A cleaner example might be a reality show, especially one about trying to get on TV: Kathy Griffin's reality show is a good one, while "The Comeback" is pretty much a perfect example, because it takes the premise of reality TV (something lurking behind both Shandling and Seinfeld's ventures, but not really crystallized yet) to the max, and shows it to be precisely this sort of infinite self-reference. But that's still too formal, even if it shows just how dead and boring postmodernism is when it's view of things really hits TV. A more direct example can just be taken from "It's Garry Shandling's Show," since it uses self-reference to get to the plane of metafiction. The direct reference in the scene above to the monologue that opens the show is self-referential, while what it implies in terms of action is metafictional: Nancy has to stop what she's doing to wait for Garry to finish the monologue, because it's a monologue, something that, in fiction, has a particular shape and has to be traversed in a particular fashion--and not just because Garry refers to the show and what he is doing in general, in the abstract. What's funny is the waiting, and then the fact that she realizes that because the monologue is this particular object (I think like the realists we might call it an "object," or at least that's my take on how to turn people like Harman towards narrative, via their excellent reflections on what is involved in aesthetics) she can go do something else while Garry finishes--it's this that's funny, not the reference. You can also probably distinguish between them if you look at the great theme song, though things get hazy when you try to distinguish between types of utterance, as Derrida a long time ago (and this realist possibility of metafiction is, in my reading of him, what he tries to preserve here) showed with Austin:
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The theme to Garry's show,
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song,
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's show.
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The opening theme to Garry's show,
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle,
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show."
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.
"This is the theme to Garry's Show" is self-reference, while the amazing, hilarious turn "I'm almost halfway finished," picks up the narrative potential in "Garry called me up" and starts something metafictional, which doesn't take the plausibility of fiction for granted, and doesn't try to shore it up, but explores it, makes it spill out into and merge with reality.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Moral music and the shirt-sleeve manner
Paul Fry makes a great point about the "undue solemnity" of literary theoretical writing in the following, which is from his excellent 1988 book, The Reach of Criticism. Fry is introducing a (particularly good) chapter on Dryden:
Shelley's Defence of Poetry [...] rivals any theoretical text of which I am aware in its metaphysical precision and range, but also succumbs in a good many places to the undue solemnity and curdling of expression that lessens the impact of much current writing [...]. Dryden's "Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern," to which I now turn, is theoretically precocious almost by accident, perhaps, although its intricacy of thought remains extraordinary however one accounts for it, but is written in the enviably casual manner that has been tacitly forbidden in modern criticism, especially in American universities, ever since impressionism became a code word for irresponsibility and laziness.
-"The Other Harmony of Dryden's 'Preface to Fables,'" in The Reach of Criticism 87.
This is of course right about Dryden, and the idea of not an answerable, but an enviable style is a wonderful one, exactly capturing how we feel while reading his flexible (and often funny) prose: we sink under Milton, as Johnson (quoting Addison) once said, but we reach out and over to Dryden--despite having been put to shame.
But Fry's remark is also right about "current" writing: though the solemnity in theoretical writing has definitely fallen off from the unbearable years--right at the time Fry pens these lines--I think Fry might be (and probably is) surprised at just how solemn theory still is. Lightness is returning as theory rediscovers literature (and critical theory fritters itself away, gets replaced by more practical theoretical ventures like architecture and media studies, or turns to philosophy departments finally made tolerant by its efforts), and we are truly entering a new age of interpretation and theorizing about interpretation. But we still are subjected to so much "curdling of expression" or, to use another apt characterization, "weird moral music." This last phrase is used by Michael Wood to characterize "certain sentences" of Paul de Man (in a current work, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, see p. 181), and I think it not inappropriate--as de Man, however much the solemn also solemnly detest him, can be considered the type and symbol as well as a key originator of this sort of attitude.
Fry takes a broader view of the origin of this phenomenon, and attributes it to a certain tradition that has governed criticism in America. But what's most fascinating about this is that, for Fry, the tradition doesn't directly encourage solemnity: the curdling of expression isn't a result of any sense that American criticism needs to be serious. It emerges instead from a prohibition of unseriousness, of a casual manner in interpretation.
This is a claim that supports and is supported by the main position of the book and his massive, more nuanced, more expansive, more recent Defense of Poetry (1995): namely, that interpretation proceeds despite its method, surrendering to the suspension of sense produced by the multiple senses of words. This might seem completely unrelated, but the connection is easy to make and forceful one it's made. Though Fry isn't an enemy to all method in all endeavors, he believes that methods for interpretation try to minimize this suspension of sense. It is not that the aim of following a method will often limit the attentiveness one can have for multiple meanings, but in every interpretation it is the words that call to us, not the procedure, regardless of whether we follow method or not. So what we end up doing when following a method of interpretation is remain open to meanings, and then proceed to sacrifice the openness we had to produce a reading. The interpretation comes from this jockeying between what the method accepts and what we read in the text, not from the effort to bring out more of we read in the text and to supply it with some shape. Naturally, this latter effort is going to be more frivolous, more playful, since the suspension of meaning involves precisely allowing that words might not have a serious, earnest intention behind them. So method cultivates solemnity as it curbs meanings, and the tradition of Anglo-American criticism in America has always encouraged the subjection of interpretation to a method or methodized sort of procedure. Indeed, for Fry, this is encouraged by much "current" theory as well. We never really have allowed to experiment with casual interpretation.
But all this is clear enough from the passage, though the point is made by developing this last claim. This, however, actually makes things more poignant, since it involves developing its other side: the notion that everything we take to be casual in interpretation never really has been truly casual at all. We think the casual manner is the freedom allowed to impressionism, but the real situation is that the latter only flourishes with solemnity--as evidenced by the fact that it can turn back into solemnity in an instant (de Man, for me, is again the best example of this). Never acquainted with the hard work involved in the casual manner--which is hard work, involving a deft control of that indirectness Americans have never tolerated--we think we can pass of the products of laziness as the same thing.
But in the book Fry adds to a wonderful footnote to all this, which is really my reason for discussing his claim. Why? Because it recommends two critics who defy this prohibition. Now, you might think Fry may or may not be right about all the above. I personally don't think method is as responsible for the problems of criticism as the desire to follow a method in criticism, and I think that while it is very justifiable to group these things together and oppose method tout court, it might be better to stress the difference. Another way of putting this is actually to put Fry's claim another way as well: real methods are developed only after we think we have followed them. So the problem is the desire to get out in front of a method and just coast. But what this tells you is that the desire to methodize is something different altogether than the desire to follow a method, and I myself think this former desire should be cultivated--instead of the desire for theories, which we could for the sake of argument just call the grounds of various methods. It has become too easy to come up with the ground of something, and we have too many of them now: instead of developing grounds, what needs to be developed are more ways over the ground, which are more closely related to the paths actually traversed in an interpretation. And involved in that is (if you'll indulge the overdrawn metaphor one last time) a refusal to conflate these ways with those actual paths, such that people can come along and think they can just follow a way instead of an actual path--as if the way existed before they interpreted. Fry isn't, you see, too far from this, and of all the critics out there I think he most admits of this other approach (and certainly in my eyes he has the most definitive view of what a literary text is and what interpretation involves). But regardless of what you think, you have to grant that he is exactly right in the following, the footnote, which I'll leave you with:
Nearly all critics adopt the shirt-sleeve maner from time to time in order to indulge their audience or themselves, but the only modern critics since the decline of belletrism who consistently write with negligent ease (though others write very well in more formal, more severely plain, or more playful styles) are two of the best, William Empson and Kenneth Burke.
-The Reach of Criticism, Note 1 to Chapter 3, 217.
Shelley's Defence of Poetry [...] rivals any theoretical text of which I am aware in its metaphysical precision and range, but also succumbs in a good many places to the undue solemnity and curdling of expression that lessens the impact of much current writing [...]. Dryden's "Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern," to which I now turn, is theoretically precocious almost by accident, perhaps, although its intricacy of thought remains extraordinary however one accounts for it, but is written in the enviably casual manner that has been tacitly forbidden in modern criticism, especially in American universities, ever since impressionism became a code word for irresponsibility and laziness.
-"The Other Harmony of Dryden's 'Preface to Fables,'" in The Reach of Criticism 87.
This is of course right about Dryden, and the idea of not an answerable, but an enviable style is a wonderful one, exactly capturing how we feel while reading his flexible (and often funny) prose: we sink under Milton, as Johnson (quoting Addison) once said, but we reach out and over to Dryden--despite having been put to shame.
But Fry's remark is also right about "current" writing: though the solemnity in theoretical writing has definitely fallen off from the unbearable years--right at the time Fry pens these lines--I think Fry might be (and probably is) surprised at just how solemn theory still is. Lightness is returning as theory rediscovers literature (and critical theory fritters itself away, gets replaced by more practical theoretical ventures like architecture and media studies, or turns to philosophy departments finally made tolerant by its efforts), and we are truly entering a new age of interpretation and theorizing about interpretation. But we still are subjected to so much "curdling of expression" or, to use another apt characterization, "weird moral music." This last phrase is used by Michael Wood to characterize "certain sentences" of Paul de Man (in a current work, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, see p. 181), and I think it not inappropriate--as de Man, however much the solemn also solemnly detest him, can be considered the type and symbol as well as a key originator of this sort of attitude.
Fry takes a broader view of the origin of this phenomenon, and attributes it to a certain tradition that has governed criticism in America. But what's most fascinating about this is that, for Fry, the tradition doesn't directly encourage solemnity: the curdling of expression isn't a result of any sense that American criticism needs to be serious. It emerges instead from a prohibition of unseriousness, of a casual manner in interpretation.
This is a claim that supports and is supported by the main position of the book and his massive, more nuanced, more expansive, more recent Defense of Poetry (1995): namely, that interpretation proceeds despite its method, surrendering to the suspension of sense produced by the multiple senses of words. This might seem completely unrelated, but the connection is easy to make and forceful one it's made. Though Fry isn't an enemy to all method in all endeavors, he believes that methods for interpretation try to minimize this suspension of sense. It is not that the aim of following a method will often limit the attentiveness one can have for multiple meanings, but in every interpretation it is the words that call to us, not the procedure, regardless of whether we follow method or not. So what we end up doing when following a method of interpretation is remain open to meanings, and then proceed to sacrifice the openness we had to produce a reading. The interpretation comes from this jockeying between what the method accepts and what we read in the text, not from the effort to bring out more of we read in the text and to supply it with some shape. Naturally, this latter effort is going to be more frivolous, more playful, since the suspension of meaning involves precisely allowing that words might not have a serious, earnest intention behind them. So method cultivates solemnity as it curbs meanings, and the tradition of Anglo-American criticism in America has always encouraged the subjection of interpretation to a method or methodized sort of procedure. Indeed, for Fry, this is encouraged by much "current" theory as well. We never really have allowed to experiment with casual interpretation.
But all this is clear enough from the passage, though the point is made by developing this last claim. This, however, actually makes things more poignant, since it involves developing its other side: the notion that everything we take to be casual in interpretation never really has been truly casual at all. We think the casual manner is the freedom allowed to impressionism, but the real situation is that the latter only flourishes with solemnity--as evidenced by the fact that it can turn back into solemnity in an instant (de Man, for me, is again the best example of this). Never acquainted with the hard work involved in the casual manner--which is hard work, involving a deft control of that indirectness Americans have never tolerated--we think we can pass of the products of laziness as the same thing.
But in the book Fry adds to a wonderful footnote to all this, which is really my reason for discussing his claim. Why? Because it recommends two critics who defy this prohibition. Now, you might think Fry may or may not be right about all the above. I personally don't think method is as responsible for the problems of criticism as the desire to follow a method in criticism, and I think that while it is very justifiable to group these things together and oppose method tout court, it might be better to stress the difference. Another way of putting this is actually to put Fry's claim another way as well: real methods are developed only after we think we have followed them. So the problem is the desire to get out in front of a method and just coast. But what this tells you is that the desire to methodize is something different altogether than the desire to follow a method, and I myself think this former desire should be cultivated--instead of the desire for theories, which we could for the sake of argument just call the grounds of various methods. It has become too easy to come up with the ground of something, and we have too many of them now: instead of developing grounds, what needs to be developed are more ways over the ground, which are more closely related to the paths actually traversed in an interpretation. And involved in that is (if you'll indulge the overdrawn metaphor one last time) a refusal to conflate these ways with those actual paths, such that people can come along and think they can just follow a way instead of an actual path--as if the way existed before they interpreted. Fry isn't, you see, too far from this, and of all the critics out there I think he most admits of this other approach (and certainly in my eyes he has the most definitive view of what a literary text is and what interpretation involves). But regardless of what you think, you have to grant that he is exactly right in the following, the footnote, which I'll leave you with:
Nearly all critics adopt the shirt-sleeve maner from time to time in order to indulge their audience or themselves, but the only modern critics since the decline of belletrism who consistently write with negligent ease (though others write very well in more formal, more severely plain, or more playful styles) are two of the best, William Empson and Kenneth Burke.
-The Reach of Criticism, Note 1 to Chapter 3, 217.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Emotion, experience
As I read Sianne Ngai, she wants to say that emotion produces the very distance or distantiation that is at the heart of the experience of an aesthetic object qua object, via a modification (not at all Marxist) of Benjamin's concept of aura. Where for Benjamin, this sense of the object crystallizing out of a more richer intimate experience was itself only a nostalgic projection of the bourgeois conception of art (i.e. there was never any actual aura of the artwork, but rather the divorce of art from communal experience as the ruling class consolidates itself produced the retrofiction that there was, and it is now imbued with a power to ironically individualize the artwork), for Ngai, this is actually the function of emotion itself. The resulting ahistoricality of this formulation isn't entirely the most suprising thing about it, nor the complacency with which it distorts (under the aegis of modification) the already overpopular Benjamin. Rather, what's odd is it seeks to at once dissolve the process of reflection which produces the object into emotion, at the same time as it would seek to make any sort of pull away from that process also emotional, so that the solution to the objectification of the art object is also to sink it back into some even more primordial emotional structure.
But one might say that this in turn supposes that one can't present the experience of the artwork in any other form. And this is typical of an extremely regressive post-postmodern movement going on now (not conscious of the ramifications of what it is really saying, and at worst just anarchic like the high theory it seeks to replace) that would try to overcome the sort of difference-producing logics of that earlier moment by showing how more traditional logics can be based upon them instead of upon logics of presence--something akin to having your cake and eating it too. Thus Ngai cites the "post-structuralist turn away from experience" (or some interpretation of emotion as a very thin form of testimony) as all the more legitimating her return to emotion and experience (even though--and this seems forgotten--all that was actually articulated in any generally sane post-structuralist theory like Lacan or Derrida's was a distance in levels between experience and what it would not grasp). But returning to emotion and experience in order to aestheticize both, and then pass them off as difference-friendly, doesn't seem legitimated at all. What is needed is rather something like a sense that the critical presentation or exposition is indeed based upon a different logic than our experience of the text, such that both come to meet each other from different places. As it is, Ngai still supposes, like all the close readers in the post-formalist days of high theory, that our criticism unproblematically expresses our experience, and that the more detailed this gets, the more experience there would be. Instead, I would suggest that I can have an intensely emotional experience of an artwork, and yet that my present explication of it (however impassioned) does not at all immediately reflect that experience, but another one instead. Moreover, I would claim that it is only because of this that I indeed can investigate an emotional experience in any concrete way.
But one might say that this in turn supposes that one can't present the experience of the artwork in any other form. And this is typical of an extremely regressive post-postmodern movement going on now (not conscious of the ramifications of what it is really saying, and at worst just anarchic like the high theory it seeks to replace) that would try to overcome the sort of difference-producing logics of that earlier moment by showing how more traditional logics can be based upon them instead of upon logics of presence--something akin to having your cake and eating it too. Thus Ngai cites the "post-structuralist turn away from experience" (or some interpretation of emotion as a very thin form of testimony) as all the more legitimating her return to emotion and experience (even though--and this seems forgotten--all that was actually articulated in any generally sane post-structuralist theory like Lacan or Derrida's was a distance in levels between experience and what it would not grasp). But returning to emotion and experience in order to aestheticize both, and then pass them off as difference-friendly, doesn't seem legitimated at all. What is needed is rather something like a sense that the critical presentation or exposition is indeed based upon a different logic than our experience of the text, such that both come to meet each other from different places. As it is, Ngai still supposes, like all the close readers in the post-formalist days of high theory, that our criticism unproblematically expresses our experience, and that the more detailed this gets, the more experience there would be. Instead, I would suggest that I can have an intensely emotional experience of an artwork, and yet that my present explication of it (however impassioned) does not at all immediately reflect that experience, but another one instead. Moreover, I would claim that it is only because of this that I indeed can investigate an emotional experience in any concrete way.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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.
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.
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