Weak theory

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

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

Sedgwick explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reversals

Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb "always"? It reminds me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to "Question Authority." Excellent advice, perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they're ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!
-Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 125

I've always thought this remark of Sedgwick's demonstrates most concretely the misreading of "Jameson's Imperative" so very prevalent wherever his work is considered. The phrase "Always historicize!" is to be taken dialectically, as is clear from the opening of The Political Unconscious in which it first appears:

Always historicize! This slogan--the one absolute and we may even say "transhistorical" imperative of all dialectical thought--will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well.
-The Political Unconscious, 9

One is tempted, in the end, to rewrite Jameson's "we may even say" the other way around. For what gets missed by someone like Sedgwick is that this imperative is also "the one absolute." This means that we have to read such a statement as already expressing a contradiction. Thus the "always" is not to be seen as atemporal, and blindly used as "proof" that the motto's inconsistency is fatal to its integrity. Yet you see that this is what Sedgwick does, planted firmly as she is in the stance of reflection. Indeed, if we view things rightly, we see that Jameson calls it an imperative only in order to anticipate his anti-dialectical readers precisely on this point, to try and get them to actually think the contradiction (this is also why he uses transhistorical, in quotes). Instead, they bastardize the contradiction and act as if Jameson is accountable for it.

There's good reason, however, for this situation. One doesn't point at an inconsistency in the dialectic and say "Gotcha!" just because one takes it reflectively. Rather, it comes from a distrust in general concerning what we might call the dialectical reversal--that shift in emphasis caused by the turning of things into what they weren't supposed not to be. This reversal is, for Jameson, never an instance of something local multiplying relations, inflecting things slightly differently--however quietly it may occur. The tortuous paths that Hegel traces while turning quality into quantity may seem to involve extremely small points (how did we end up discussing gravity?), but these points never reverse things because they are local. Rather, the reversal occurs when something larger comes to force things to put up or shut up, to move towards definite closure--as Jameson always excellently puts it.

It is an intolerance of this sort of pressure from closure, of the totality bearing down on the instance, that then makes us avoid the reversal. Or, as Jameson would rather describe it, a general jadedness with respect to such massive structures--a belief in their irrelevance and even a feeling that they are not interesting, or only are interesting to moralists (who love their generalizations). Indeed, a sense that Jameson's writings are always heavyhanded, that they carry their lesson, seems to float around in discussions of him. We certainly see this in the quote from Sedgwick, who sticks him on that bumper. Personally, I find Jameson much lighter in tone than that.

It's rather those with the unconditional regard for the local who seem to me to couch things in moralistic terms (respect the particular!), in order to emphasize how something can ever have effects beyond the local context. Thus, it's no accident that Sedgwick invokes close reading at the end of that essay where she dismisses historicizing and advocates, instead, weak theory (a promising notion that I'll return to sometime):

What could better represent "weak theory, little better than a description of the phenomena which it purports to explain," than the devalued and near obsolescent New Critical skill of imaginative close reading?
-Touching Feeling, 145

There's the moralistic insistence that the focus which never goes beyond its immediate context is, paradoxically, obsolescent, tougher to do than it sounds, nearly impossible. It's no matter that close reading has from the beginning been "devalued," or rather an attempt to make such attention virtuous (as D.A. Miller rightly argues). Seen beside the dismissal of Jameson's "always," we see that close reading ends up as something like a mere refuge for those who distrust that total shift of emphasis.

At the same time, though, I wonder whether the reversal merits this distrust when dialectic becomes identified with something like what Zizek does. For while everyone seems to worry whether Zizek does violence to the object by ramming it through the dialectic, I'd rather take a Jamesonian stance and wonder whether the victim of Zizek's dialectic is the dialectic itself. Why? Though it reverses things, the dialectic doesn't take up whatever it finds and proceed to turn it around. Such a maneuver may be necessary to get the wheels going, but it amounts to the same thing, really, as "imaginative close reading" and stems from the same overemphasis on the particular--or inability to see the totality. The Frankfurt School did much to widen the gap between the local and the total, and provide many intermediaries--such as constellations--that could allow you to move more carefully from one to the other: Zizek would benefit from using them, because rather than imposing too much of something external on the content, his moves simply are not formal enough. This is why Jameson explains dialectic as something like forcing a closure--the reversal has to come from elsewhere and the effort to get there. And this is also why it doesn't resemble a shock or short-circuit (as Zizek calls it) so much as a different emphasis.

On Latour and Sedgwick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cultivation of irony

In my last post I was basically saying, underneath it all, that one of the most important things literary criticism can do is serve as the chief locus for the cultivation of irony (by which I mean, very broadly speaking, the general experience of things as having more than one meaning, or saying something different than what they say--which can mean, even more generally, possessing a little distance from the sincerity and literalness of what one says when one says it). But this presupposes something else: that the cultivation of irony itself is one of the foremost ethical demands in our society. And I pretty much firmly believe this: one of the big things we have seen in the last thirty or so years, after the rise of a certain theoretical criticism that privileged irony (and was the expression of a more ironic attitude in America as a whole, after the 60's), is that irony is actually something that is very hard to sustain.
Year after year, we keep hearing that the end of irony has come, and this announces not so much that irony is dead, but that our ability to sustain it and its constant demand to achieve a little healthy distance from a situation is something we've grown very tired of and would rather just put away. The last few years indeed have seen a huge preference for wholesome, dangerously serious discourses that people can just consume and be done with: Republican patriot rhetoric of the Bush years and (to a lesser extent, especially when it is seen as the rising up of a minority which brings irony back into it) the Obama rhetoric. What happens then is not so much that we get a set of people with staunch beliefs that won't talk to each other (fundamentalism) but that when these people do indeed talk to each other they lose the ability to also actually express what these beliefs entail: in short, they paradoxically lose their ability to demand something of the other person--especially without being backhanded or resentful (slavish, in Nietzsche's sense) in doing so. (This talking together, I should note, also happens much more often than those who too quickly make belief into fundamentalism would like to think--Stanley Fish being one of them, however much he seems to champion "belief").
So sustaining irony, keeping one's commitment to it, making it something that is cultivated (and indeed this is a most Nietzschian task--cultivating that which precisely and as such resists cultivation) and able to reassert itself steadily--this is what we in reality need more of, precisely after the 80's and such (also because it is so present not just in elite circles, but, more generally wherever there is this belief that I'm talking about). For what I'm saying is that what we see in our being tired of irony is really a growing ability to take irony as serious--which is counterproductive and in fact dangerous because it exploits irony while attacking it (Republicans have increasingly become masters of this--but also theorists, as we'll see). In other words, this doesn't take irony seriously as irony, but transforms irony into seriousness. It folds back what was a difference into precisely the discourse that it has achieved its distance from (unlike the folding back of close reading that I talked about).
In criticism, this manifests itself in the horrible move that is precisely that folding back of the speaker into the position from which he speaks, so as to show how he is complicit in what he speaks about (its a trademark of serious discourse that it takes things--here, even the mechanism of turning irony into seriousness--too literally). This is generally a very de Manian and deconstructionist-Marxist move, but it can happen everywhere (so Fish will fold back a speaker into his disciplinary position, which will always contradict whatever the speaker says). You know what I'm talking about. So in a class the other day we were discussing Derrida and political activism, and someone said that Derrida's discourse, which questions the possibility of activism rather than engages in it pure and simple was a nice thing, but could only happen because Derrida himself was a comfy professor, without any need to get in the streets and fight. What makes Derrida radical as concerns activism can therefore only be accomplished by being someone who doesn't need to know a thing about activism. You see what's going on--besides the remark being false (as the professor pointed out). The sort of ironic position of Derrida (who I'm just using as an example), which is to take up activism by questioning its possibility in the first place, is folded precisely back into a secure and stable notion of what activism is, and, as a result, what happens is that one takes Derrida's ironic position as a serious position. What is the result of this move? You expose the person as a hypocrite! Ooh, interesting--but pointless, because what you see is that they are still hypocrites only on your terms, which are precisely terms that have no sense of irony.
I hope it's clear that I'm not talking so much about Derrida here, but that something that needs to be understood in terms of irony is understood in terms of seriousness--which of course will expose the irony as contradictory, complicit, and hypocritical, because it precisely resists the notion (and practices) of serious discourse. Frankly, a better example is Frederic Jameson, who always, always takes an ironic discourse in terms of how serious it is. The noble thing about Jameson--and the thing that really makes his mode of meta-critique something to keep, rather than, like so many other instances of this same move, something that should be totally, remorselessly, given up--is that he does not do this in order to expose or show anyone to be a hypocrite. That has to be kept in mind--one really can't understand Jameson without knowing this (and I think many of these serious people--Spivak is one of them, cf. her remarks on Jameson on her Critique of Postcolonial Reason--read him this way and find in him confirmation of what they do). It is indeed what makes his discourse deserve the name of a dialectic. But the thing is that the move he makes to bring this about is something that essentially, as it is constituted, does not need to be deployed with these aims: this is evident in precisely the sorts of misreadings it often produces--which work in the context of the books he is writing, but which as readings totally misrepresent whoever they are talking about. So he reads what Deleuze and Guattari say about anti-hermeneutics as precisely something hermeneutical. This would be fine perhaps if it acknowledged the irony of what D&G say, but the mode of the folding back, of the establishment of complicity, does not allow Jameson to do this. So we get what D&G say as something without the possibility of irony, as something that is totally serious, which will in fact ensure the success of the move of folding back that Jameson effectuates:

From the present perspective... Deleuze and Guattari's proposal for an antiinterpretive method (which they call schizo-analysis) can equally well be grasped as a new hermeneutic in its own right. It is striking and noteworthy that most of the antiinterpretive positions enumerated... have felt the need to project new "methods" of this kind.
-The Political Unconscious, 23, note 7

This may be right, but you see that what is lost is any force that the quotes around "method" can have: the putting in abeyance of this term, which precisely seeks to account for the ironic status that any hermeneutic would indeed have in D&G, is a totally empty gesture. This is because it already takes their standpoint as complicit in an interpretive enterprise--in short, as serious. It's done simply to be accurate (consistent to a model that is already interpreted as a serious model, as something that needs consistency). The gesture that irony uses perhaps most--the putting in quotes--is turned itself into something serious. This you will find all throughout recent theoretical discourse, and it contributes, I think, to the real shabbiness and real nonpertinence that theory in particular is suffering from. (A look at this in particular would have really proved my point, since it is this sort of gesture of folding back and complicity condensed: its like seriousness-from-concentrate.) A whole generation of theorists puts things in quotes seriously--and that this is so announces such a gigantic failure of theory in particular to live up to what its possibilities were that it should concern itself henceforth with the sole task of annihilating (by the invention of new pedagogical tools) this little move that establishes complicity everywhere it appears and reestablishing the force behind the quotation marks. But this entails our discipline generally recognizing that these possibilities, however, were not the sole province of theory, but are ones that reach across the whole of literary criticism, and have their foundation in the possibility of cultivating irony.
(I should mention a merit of irony: that it isn't self-consciousness. This is what makes it, actually, very compatible with belief. But at the same time it opens up belief to self-consciousness. It is as if irony is a sort of middle-ground between the reflexiveness of self-consciousness on the one hand and shame on the other. But it's significant that current theorists of trauma and shame--Sedgwick, Leys, others--don't move towards irony: it seems that they want to in fact kill off irony and self-consciousness in the same gesture, which is establishing a very serious discourse which can account for ironic self-distance in terms of unreasoned violence and affect. This might be interesting, but it conveniently forgets that irony also implies an affective state of perplexity, frustration, and embarrassment that is not unlike shame. It might be more important for them--for both genuinely ethical and facetiously moralistic reasons--to keep the focus on serious violence.)
(I should also note that my mention of Marxism specifically above is a bit bitter, no doubt. But this is because Marxism is perhaps the most gravely serious and moralistic of discourses in the academy. Nevertheless, what is interesting is that it also contains the most condensed form of the move of folding-back a speaker into the position he speaks from. This is precisely why Jameson does it: he is a Marxist. And what this means then is that Marxism has the most to gain from cultivating its irony. Please don't take my remarks above as a blatant call to throw away Marxism, then: in fact, this is what many in the academy are doing. Rather, we need to cultivate a distance to Marxism as Marxists: what I would call for here then is a resurgence of the role of Marxism in the academy, but precisely one that learns how to make this move that it makes into the ironic principle of its operation and not its mere tool for resentment. An ironic Marxism: that would be the most profitable element in the work to cultivate irony, and it should be a part of our future.)

Against the New Aestheticism

Perhaps one of the biggest things we're suffering from now in Anglo-American literary criticism is how little we know how to handle a post-hermeneutic mode of interpretation. That is, as we gather more and more of an idea of what post-hermeneutical criticism would actually look like, we are, at the same time, losing a sense of how older critical devices can be turned towards this new form of criticism (or how we can invent new devices out of old ones). In other words, it doesn't take as much effort as some people might think to use a device in a post-hermeneutical way. So what is betrayed is not a lack of knowledge about what interpretation would be like without hermeneutics, but a lack of knowledge about how this new interpretation really is already at work in many ways in what we do already.
We generally know now, I think, that there are several forms this post-hermeneutic interpretation would look. The clearest example--that is, the one that is easiest for us to wrap our head around as far as how its post-hermeneutic operations look--is a sociology of literature: here what is at issue is nothing about the meaning of a text, but how that text fits into a system that produces that meaning as an effect of its (the system's) operation. It does this little switcharoo, however, without trying to say that the system is any more viable a source of meaning than the text: this is what makes it less hermeneutically invested--it doesn't try to find a real sphere where meaning originates. The post-hermeneutic act of interpretation, then, is in the laying out of the system. Franco Moretti gives us some very clear examples of what this work of elaboration can involve: making graphs or maps of data (how many copies sold, where, how, etc.) or just simply the explanation of the paths between these pieces of data.
What Moretti doesn't tell you, though, is that we do this already, sometimes, in hermeneutic interpretation. We just don't emphasize it, or really work on it for its own sake. When I write an essay about a book, I organize whatever I find out about it. A lot of the work of my hermeneutic effort depends on this organization. But I eventually use it for hermeneutic ends. And because I do so--and here is why my hermeneutic effort will look a lot different than Moretti's--I confine myself to the work that exposes sites of meaning. And these tend to be internal to the text (or intrinsic, to use the old term). And even when they are extrinsic (sales figures, etc.), they tend not to extend themselves out into networks that aren't subordinated to the intrinsic work of the book. They therefore don't give us a wide ranging study of the networks themselves--studies like Pascal Casanova's.
But this presence of the post-hermeneutic in the hermeneutic should be kept in mind, I think. For what happens when this isn't recognized is you get post-hermeneutic critics trying to just pick up the hermeneutic devices without caring about how they have to modify them to be post-hermeneutic. In other words, they just use all the old devices and say they are not unlocking meaning with them--and in a lot of cases, we just have to take them on their word that they are doing this. This is how that odd phenomenon that I will call the New Aestheticism--a phenomenon that is catching on--works. New Aestheticist critics (I have Michael D. Hurley in mind, but also bits of Stanley Fish and even Eve Sedgwick) use certain ambiguous but old and commonsense categories like "feeling" or "pleasure" (as in, how does that poem make you feel?) to try and 1) integrate these maligned phenomena back into the work of interpretation (which is laudable) and 2) make these phenomena into a sort of unmeaning excess that is the only point of the text. Not only does the second aim completely undo what would have been the laudable aspects of first (it effectively maligns affect yet again--and I think this is pretty unforgivable, because at the same time these people act as if their crusade in the name of affect makes them a morally justified), the second point really misunderstands what post-hermeneutic interpretation is about. That is, the second point proceeds as if post-hermeneutic interpretation is only the act of pointing out that the only meaning of a text is a non-meaning. In other words, the Aestheticists think that if you come up with a sort of moment where what is at work is something vague (unelaborated) like a pleasure (individual or collective), and then say that all the text does is produce this, you've canceled out any particular hermeneutical work you've done along the way--and that this cancelling out is the goal of post-hermeneutic discourse. But it's evident that this isn't really talking about pleasure (it's talking about meaning) and it isn't really post-hermeneutic, because it doesn't--like the graphs do--use any devices as post-hermeneutic devices. It uses them as hermeneutic devices and then tries to subtract their work.
The real problem would be precisely finding out how these old hermeneutic devices look when they operate in a post-hermeneutic way--and how they have to maintain themselves to keep working, i.e. what demands they make or compromises they have to bring about on the part of the critic. This is what I find in the work of some (and only some) deconstruction: in this area, we have close reading without its hermeneutic goal--close reading that doesn't bring out any meanings but instead organizes a text differently than before. To think about the micro-elements that make up this work of reorganization, and how they must work if they themselves do not produce meaning--this is what deconstruction is, and what makes it a neat site of (still pretty intrinsic, unfortunately) criticism that tries to negotiate these problems, not run away from them.
Or rather, act like it is too in the right to deal with them. For the real bad thing is these New Aestheticists have the gall to attack other post-hermeneutic modes of criticism: they yell at the New Formalism, which has these post-hermeneutic tendencies (especially when it becomes Derridian), and against the sociology of literature people. This is partially because the New Aestheticism becomes merely intrinsic again, shutting itself off from a lot of "statements about society," as it might call the result of these other forms of interpretation--while modestly claiming that it wouldn't presume that it was able to say anything with that weight (when it is in reality presuming twice as much and is half as moral). Most often, though, they yell at "theory." Theory--and what to them is its sidekick, cultural criticism--was nothing other than the subordination of post-hermeneutical efforts (the work of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc.) to hermeneutic ends. Theory is the mistake that the New Aestheticst's approach will reverse by focusing on more traditional, but more overlooked (in the recent years of theory's wildness, particularly due to its fascination with politics) elements of the text.
I'd contest the idea that theory worked this way, however. This seems only to describe bad theory--which is just bad literary criticism in general. Theory might have worked precisely as a way for people to organize their ideas in a post-hermeneutic way. It did this not by actually carrying out what the post-hermeneutic authors that were its progenitors (Derrida, etc.) were saying, but it sort of met them half way by deploying something similar of its own.
For when we talk theory, we are usually describing something we could talk about in a different way. Theory is a sort of shorthand, in most cases, for concepts of interpretation that are often different than those of old (those of the New Criticism). I might say that the particular moment in this text reminds us of Lacan's mirror stage, which I would then outline... and this would be a theoretical remark. I can even use one theorist and then another: the mirror stage can be imbued, here, in this textual instance, with a sort of Foucauldian power... This is the way theorists often talked, and often confused ideas--as the New Aestheticists would say. I'd say instead that while this was a confusion, it was doing something more as well. This sort of shorthand allowed one to proceed more and more without reference to meaning insofar as it originated in the text itself. One could be led, then, from theorist to theorist--submitting the text to the play of this sort of parallel interpretation that was going on. For what happened was the theorists would be elucidated with respect to each other, fit together in new and interesting ways. Or at least one theorists ideas, reified by this process, would be made to work in odd ways that perhaps, if they were submitted to some ideal of systamaticity (or even to the rules of organic, philosophical thought, which theory does not follow), or even to the rest of the system from which they originated, would not have occurred to anyone. In other words, what happened was that the text got related and referred to a discourse that was developing alongside it. And what this did was pry away the interpretive effort from the hermeneutical effort in the first place. This is what theory did, I think, and it is the only way that a more rigorously post-hermeneutical discourse can now (in the Anglophone world) be taken up. Theory, then, was a post-hermeneutical modification of one of the basic tools in the hermeneutical toolkit: the reference to an authority, usually philosophical. This work of reference was made to work in and of itself, and forgo its capability for elucidating the text. The authority would then merely cohabit the interpretive essay with the text, and at this point--though it also was sustained by a huge academic regime, and this I would say was a very bad step--would be working out what interpretation was like without opening up a meaning in the text.
So far from being a mistake, theory was what makes the discourse of the New Aestheticists possible, and may have even operated in a similar way to other forms of post-heremeneutic criticism. What it didn't do, though, was make the post-hermeneutic use of interpretive devices seem easy, which is practically the only thing the New Aestheticism does (although I'd say this only of some theory, in the end: theory also did this, and thus actually made possible the New Aestheticist fascination with canceling out its hermeneutical work--just look at Spivak and her fascination with writing under-erasure and you will see this is the real goal of that erasure). The focus on pleasure, the focus on the excessive feeling that a text gives you, when this is considered as non-meaning, does not give us anything in itself. As I said, it even erases what is left of any conception of pleasure that we have--and it is dependent upon preserving the ambiguousness and thus the maligned and ostracized status of pleasure. (So to the idea of pleasure or feeling that this criticism employs must be opposed, precisely, Raymond Williams' idea of structures of feeling--an idea that has affinities with a sociology of literature.)
Allowing a mere descriptive work of interpretation, a phenomenology without a point (phenomenology's strength is that it invokes the ideal, the invisible), this New Aestheticism should be avoided. Above all, it forgoes the need to explain more what is theoretically advantageous about its conception of pleasure, or even to look into its origins (Hurley, for one, is completely anti-scientific and would resist this project). Without a more elaborated notion of what pleasure is, about what will be cancelled out by the work of the New Aestheticist criticism--and, for that matter, the work of cancellation itself, which is merely effected by the reference to a vague notion of pleasure now--all we have in the end is one of those old vague analyses of style, or, even worse, something like a book club. It is not that literary criticism has to be submitted to the rigors of scientificity--and this is really what the New Aestheticism rejects, not hermeneutics (but passes its opposition for the former off for opposition to the latter). It is just that what this idea of scientificity allows is rational discourse, discourse that is sustained by discussion and by the articulation of points. And this is not in opposition to a post-hermeneutic project. The idea that it is, that we can only have a discussion that operates post-hermeneutically if it is not submitted to the rigors of articulated discourse--this is what is at the heart of this turn back to the excess of (this made-up and unstructured conception of) pleasure, of feeling.