"A co-operative technique of enquiry:" I.A. Richards

I.A. Richards, in Coleridge on Imagination, on taking some of Coleridge's ideas about critical method (as applied to literature) and furthering their development "into a cooperative technique of enquiry that may become entitled to be named a science" (all emphases are mine unless noted):

A large part of the subject matter of these enquiries is the behavior of words in poetry, and many people, by training, must resent any suggestion that this should be treated by a science. I may anticipate here to point out that one of Coleridge's clearest and most certain principles preserves the autonomy both of the poetry and the critic. "Could a rule be given from without [Coleridge's emphasis], poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art." None the less, a further development of Coleridge's method would fundamentally change current conceptions of the relation of Poetry to Life, and with this the contemporary tone of criticism. I do not mean that it would become more solemn or more acrimonious. Instead it would be more experimental and less self-assertive.
Most evaluative criticism is not statement or even attempted statement. It is either suasion, which is politics, or it is social communication. As social communion (in a lecture, for example) it is a method of preparing the scene and conducting the occasion, of maintaining the civilizing convention that things are well, of inducing a a reassured, easy and decorously receptive mood. It is a stream of gestures or ceremonies, a spirit calming and mildly stimulating ritual. If nothing happens, if nothing is said or nothing done, it is not the ritual that we should blame.
Experienced critics know this, more or less; though they do not often proclaim it so frankly as Professor Garrod at p. 158 of his Poetry and Life: "More than any other of the literary kinds, criticism approximates to a social [Garrod's emphasis] art--and this may be why the poets are unsuccessful in it. It is one of the most natural things in the world to discuss a book or a poem--far more natural than to write one. It is one of the most obvious of social acts or behaviors, but, like any other social act it perishes in the defect of those qualities which make a man interesting."
It perishes as one kind of social act, certainly; but has criticism no purposes beyond these? Are poetry and life only related so? Are there not other kinds of social acts, the invention of the radio valve [the vaccum tube] for example?
-Coleridge on Imagination, xxiii-iv.

It is a bit tough to reconstruct what Richards means here, because he moves quickly is pretty oblique--as usual. But it shows some interesting assumptions that he has. While Richards is usually the whipping boy for a sort of criticism that is disconnected from social activity, what we see here is that Richards was actually trying to expand and refine the social tendencies of criticism that were in place already.
In characterizing this criticism, and particularly its work of evaluation, he is thinking primarily of his old colleagues at Cambridge (England), now that he is safely ensconced at Harvard. These were professors who pontificated about the pure aesthetic pleasure of works, asking students how much more one certainly liked Shakespeare more than stodgy Pope (one can find a good--if polemical,--summary in the collected edition of the Leavises' Scrutiny). In other words, the evaluative aspect of criticism was the product of criticism being a little boys club, where people got together and liked books in conversation. One could talk about the worth of poetry or prose only in the most abstract and least specific way: with reference to personal experience and with a view to showing that one, like the rest of the group that is discussing the piece, is refined or cultivated.
So this is why he goes on to say that most criticism is not a statement about what is criticized. It is usually a way of maintaining decorum, like what one does at a party: you say that you liked that author but found him a bit tedious in some parts, and that is the end of your critical activity. What Richards wants to do is introduce this social tendency, this drive to talk about a work in this gossipy way, precisely into something that requires thinking and specificity about the work. This will actually produce a statement about the work.
But what is interesting then is that this statement is precisely not something performed by the isolated academic: it comes right out of a sort of social situation already there, as a new cooperative technique of inquiry. In fact, it is the disruption of the social situation that exists through the refinement of this social situation into a technique. This is so to the extent that, modified thus, the new social activity allows one to see that polite discourse in a classroom isn't the only kind of social activity--thus the reference to invention at the end of this excerpt. The lecture hall is brought back out to the world--not directly as a form of activism (as Leavis would have it), but as a recognition of the specificity of the particular communal act going on in the class (and not the perpetuation of it being taken for granted).

What to say about a poem: Wimsatt and explication

Below is a little paper I wrote for a class where we were discussing W.K. Wimsatt's "What to Say About a Poem," in his excellent collection Hateful Contraries. What I say about Wimsatt's notion of legitimacy should fit somewhat with what I have recently be saying about the function of close reading in the last few posts:

“What to Say About a Poem” begins by repeating its title, with a period (“What to say about a poem.” In Hateful Contraries, 215), as if to emphasize the particular oddness of the phrase: the way that it hovers between being a question, uttered perhaps almost in desperation (“What to say?!”), and a being a directive or prescriptive statement (“This is what to say…”). As if, in other words, saying something about a poem were a problem and at the same time an activity to which Wimsatt can confidently give some direction, can lend some advice as to the manner in which it should proceed. It is no mistake that these two tones, these two ways of articulating “What to say about a poem” coexist here, because I think it is clear that for Wimsatt it can only be understood when problem and prescription are in it together, when one is heard through the other, as implying the other. For Wimsatt, that is, one can only know what to say about a poem and the manner in which one should say it precisely by understanding how saying anything specific about a poem is essentially problematic, is what introduces the need of clarification or explication of the unclear or difficult into the experience of the poem as art. In other words, one can only know the way a remark on a poem or text should be directed—one can only know that this is what to say—insofar as this remark comes out of an experience that is never assured that it isn’t perhaps inferior to the uncomplicated enjoyment of art on the one hand, or a confident, scientific approach (proceeding in a technical, methodologically pure way) which could in fact say just about anything scientific it wanted to about the art since it merely translates whatever it wants to claim into technical terms. It is not that these other experiences are bad: they just don’t create a problem about what to say about a poem. What to say about a poem, in other words, will always be—like the structure of the phrase itself—a problem requiring clarification.
Thus Wimsatt, in the first paragraph of the essay, will show that interpreters must question whether they should have a solely scientific or “shop interest” in the text, as well as question why there is something to be said about it as an object and not as a mere thing to be consumed. He does this obliquely, of course, as if he were just introducing the topic of the essay by noting that “our professional preoccupation as teachers, scholars, critics, sometimes conceals from us the fact that our kind of interest in poems is after all a very special thing—a vocational or shop interest,” or that “poems, a cultivated person might suppose, are made to be read and enjoyed” (215). But remarks like these also situate the place of the true interpreter already as well as their activity or “what they do with [the poem]”—which, as he goes on to say “is the problem of the essay,” (215) the problem that is what to say about a poem. In other words, Wimsatt is already outlining the place of true interpretation as situation between two temptations, temptations of interpretation that the notion of true interpretation that he eventually develops—interpretation as explication or explicitation—will directly try and resist: the temptation to fall back into a sort of interpretation that just takes the text as something to be enjoyed for what it is, and therefore as something totally self-evident in its meaning, already explicit, and the temptation to criticize while having no relation to the text as something one also experiences, to reduce it to an object that has no other purpose in its world than to be interpreted by an unproblematic technical procedure—which again takes the text as self-evident in its meaning, as already explicit (it just means what the technical language of poetics says it means). Both of these temptations are ones of thinking of interpretation as something which can assuredly address the text, and not something that introduces a problem or difficulty into saying anything about the text.
This is why his Wimsatt’s question is so basic to begin with: why do anything more with the text than just experience it? “If I read a poem and enjoy it, why should I then proceed to dwell on it as an object about which something deliberate and elaborate has to be said…?” The answer is not just that the immediate experience of a poem or text is wrong and needs some critical or interpretive activity to unlock it (this would be merely substituting one unproblematic notion for another). The answer is that to just read and enjoy the poem presupposes an assured notion of what one can say about it: nothing much more than “oohs” and “aahs,” in this case. This assurance may be fine in this case if all one is out to do is enjoy the poem. But if one does want to say anything about it at all, one has to see that saying something about it will not be an assured effort: one will be confronted with the possibility that one will not know what one can legitimately claim regarding the text.
And this is a significant step in problematizing the experience of the text, because then it means that one is not just confronting some self-evident text (whether it is self-evident in being something to be enjoyed, or self-evident in only being the object of a technical critical vocabulary that will be able to completely decipher it). One is rather confronting a text that is not at all self-evident, that is not really meaningful if one just takes it explicitly. In other words, one is confronting a text that is implicitly meaningful, as Wimsatt will say. And this means it is meaningful in such a way that the process of interpretation will have to demonstrate the legitimacy of its claims without entirely knowing what constitutes this legitimacy beforehand. If what is said about a poem is said about something that is not presumed to be explicit, to be clearly visible, but which needs to be made visible precisely through this process of saying something, then one will not know whether what it ends up saying will be legitimized by what is made explicit. In other words, because one has to go beyond what is already explicit to what is not self-evident—because one has to give up what the experience of the text can see or feel about it, and on the other hand, what a specialized critical methodology can say about a text (which still takes the text as self-evident for criticism, even if what it says surpasses the self-evidence of experience)—because one has to get beyond all explicitness, one must actually create the legitimacy of what one then says (the terms by which it is to be considered correct or incorrect and the reasons and assumptions that made one go to the implicit in the first place). Only then can one conceivably have an something to say that is genuinely not legitimate or incorrect, because what will be made explicit about the implicit will not match up with the terms by which one went beyond the self-evident in the first place. In other words, only then will what one says also have to be articulated alongside the reasons why one says it; or only then will the reasons why one says something, the terms in which it thinks it is legitimate, not remain something that the critic takes as given—given either by the experience of the text or by alleged purity of one’s method.
Wimsatt calls this process explicitation or explication, and contrasts it with description, which remains at the level of what is already explicit about the text. It is the former (explicitation) that is not assured, and that constitutes the real beginning of genuine interpretive activity for him, while the latter (description) remains either with the pure enjoyment or consumption of the text or with the mere technical method that, in truth, can be applied to any text and does not say anything that one does not already know about it. To use a different formulation which Wimsatt develops in an earlier essay (“Explication as Criticism,” in The Verbal Icon, 235-253; 237), the task of interpretation is to move beyond explicating the explicit—which would still be description—and into explicating the implicit—which would be genuine explication or explicitation. If one reads Wimsatt quickly, explicitation really can be seen quite unproblematically as just the process of taking what is not self-evident about the poem as what one points out about it, as what one says about it. But a closer look shows that what is involved with this is also the adoption of a particular critical posture which sees its task as a problem and therefore as an ethical demand to make concrete the assumptions one is making about the legitimacy of anything that one will have to say. This is why description can remain useful and interesting, but ultimately does nothing more than outlines the possibilities for real interpretation: it helpfully directs attention to the surface of the text (“we hereby succeed in turning the attention of the class to the poem, to the surface,” 222), showing its parts and relations (224), but this only is useful in order to go beyond the surface (“they may begin to suspect the whole of this surface,” Wimsatt continues), to not take the text itself or one’s approach to it as self-evident. This is what explicitation or explication, the explication of the implicit, really entails for him.

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.)