The theory ceiling

Theory is often referred to as an abstract discourse that aspires to elevate certain points dealing with art to a philosophical status of sorts. Anti-theory people often complain that theorists depart from the specificity of the artistic--in my case, the literary--object and the rules of critical analysis that are developed to deal with that particular object. So Judith Butler, we might say, is not such a good reader of literary texts, even though she has invaluable philosophical points to make, because she departs from the specificity of the literary object to try and use statements about it as a jumping off point for larger issues.
But perhaps theory doesn't function this way. What if, in fact, theory were more like a discourse that precisely prevents certain statements about literature or art in general from immediately, without any check, expanding themselves into philosophical reflections? What if theory actually tempers and refines statements about literature, and in fact is a constant process of laying down boundaries for a properly literary-critical analysis of literature?
I say this because I find it is often the case that New Critical (and, currently, formalist) statements about texts, which often have such an unbelievably specific notion of the literary object, often go crazy when they expand themselves into generalizations or more wide-ranging reflections. Part of what theory does is take over that process of generalization and allow it to become a complex field of debate in and of itself.
No doubt this often tempers statements about the general value or merit of a text: a New Critic might often generalize by saying that a particular text shows universal principles of the human mind, say, that it is important, nay imperative, for a humanist education to draw attention to. Theory would oppose this humanism by showing these merits are quite questionable.
But rather than see it as a process of drawing these humanist evaluations into question (which is a more pertinent way of characterizing theory when theory is seriously trying to take over--i.e. in the past), couldn't theory precisely be the process of opening up a certain area in which the operation of generalization from a text, which underlies this humanist universalizing, would be able to be articulated and refined?
Indeed, now we might have other, more accurate ways of trying to make this generalization more refined: sociological analysis is one of them (you can talk about a text as it fits into an actual market or into a practice). But I think it is useful at this juncture to think of theory as precisely operating in this area where (to put it in a different way) the micro meets the macro. In other words, theory is like a process establishing a ceiling, an upper limit, for the wild generalizations about a particular literary object, that, when reached, provokes the statement to begin to justify itself in a different way--a way that does not deal as directly with the literary object but with a sphere of more general concerns that approaches the philosphical arena. We can also reconsider it positively (that is, besides its work as a limit) as a certain vocabulary that proliferates in order to expand and give coherence to this more general zone--and not as a sort of uselessly and aggressively unspecific pseudo-philosophy: a view of theory that, I think, only produces more bad and overgeneral theory, because it instills a notion that theory's job is not to be specific at all, when it is, in my view precisely an attempt to be specific about the general.

Evaluating literature

I was in a great class a couple weeks ago (Peter Brooks' wonderful seminar Reading Law Reading) with Robert Post of Yale Law School, and we were talking about the the First Amendment and the current legal test for obscenity. Built into the test is a certain provision that basically allows expert testimony as to whether something under consideration for obscenity is politically, socially, or artistically valuable: if, say, an offensive work of art is determined to be valuable in one of these ways, this will factor in any determination as to its being deemed obscene. Post moved past the considerations of social value and went straight towards the odd question of artistic value, rightly posing to us the question of what, as literary critics, we might have to say if we were there testifying as experts on a piece of writing. Does the writing have literary value? What would we say? He came to the dismal conclusion that as it stands, we wouldn't be able to say much. This was both a failure of literary studies for him and a failure of the law for asking this particular question to critics in this particular (perhaps outdated) way. For him, it presupposes a set of Leavises out there, when we have a conception of literature that has moved far away from that.
Alexander Nehamas, who was there in the seminar, rightly rejoined that this was a bit of a mischaracterization of Leavis: Leavis--I'll expand on his point here--by no means was trying to make literature something that could just either have value or not--which is how the test seems to characterize literary evaluation--but trying, primarily to rescue value from scientificity (in a specific sense: scientificity as having the qualities of pure positivistic empiricism), from having a particular type of value that he saw as pernicious. But just because a value is not as determinable as a sort of scientifically or pseudo-scientifically determined value doesn't mean that it is a sort of value that would be inherent to the work of art, or be commensurate with some sort of essential literariness, which is what Post seems to want us to give the court. The fact is that Leavis was just as firm a disbeliever in the "phantom aesthetic state" and claims of essential literariness as was I.A. Richards--his theories indeed would not be possible without this disbelief. Terry Eagleton, for one, completely mischaracterizes this in his "study" (it's more like popular fiction) Literary Theory, and is largely responsible for this particular misunderstanding of Leavis (though Leavis' virulence as a critic didn't help this either: sometimes people can't distinguish a very intense statement of support for a work or a very intense castigation from some positing of an essence).
But all that aside, the point is that Leavis too is part of a tradition in literary studies that precisely keeps at bay the question of whether something is literary or not by studying other things about this object--and this is the deeper thing that Post was rightly getting at. The problem for me is when this movement away from some notion of the essence of the literary object is confused with a movement towards scientificity or towards theory, and away from something like appreciation. For inevitbly the task of evaluating literature gets aligned with the latter task: evaluation is something more appreciative. For me, personally, I don't find literary study scientific enough (in a broad sense, which is not necessarily positivistic empiricism): perhaps in no other field in the humanities would we be as concerned with appreciation as we are in literature. Perhaps art, but not history, say, or even studies in film, and definitely not architecture. That's a broad statement, but the point is less about other fields than it is about literature, where we are still very much concerned with an idea of our object as something that is resistant to determination, and that promotes a an almost completely indeterminate act of "appreciation." So the more and more we lock down this object, the more and more we see literature as a determined cultural object, with both external and intrinsic patterns that can and should be specified and not just consumed--the more and more we do this the more and more we can actually then allow the work to cultivate students, and, through teaching, actually control appreciation, or reduce it to a mere effect of that much more important thing, learning.
Personally, I also think seeing the literary object as something more scientifically able to be determined (which doesn't always mean empirically studied, remember--something like sociology, in my view, scientifically studies its objects without being as dependent upon the empirical, and the best aspects of psychology do something similar) would allow us to provide an answer to the test: not necessarily through a scientific analysis, but in the same way that a sociologist would be able to say, yes, this has value because it is something we could study as significant to a society, or a political scientist could say, yes, this is a politically significant document that not only has immediate effects but is part of a larger discourse that, through our studies, we have seen to be important and pervasive in some way. But this all in a way only extends the problem that I pointed to: that we characterize this study of the determinateness of the literary object as scientificity (this determinateness--as you'll see--is really what I'm advocating when I say that we aren't scientific enough: it is what resides in scientificity and is the best part of all science), and then see this scientificity as opposed to appreciation--and see the history of the discipline as beginning in appreciation and moving towards this scientificity. Not only is this wrong because it overlooks the (to me, blech, disgusting) aestheticism that still escapes this movement (which produces little cliques not over theoretical issues but over personal quirks and sensibilities that inform one's study of literature because the literature merely reflects these quirks, as Evan pointed out commenting on a previous post of mine), but it is wrong because it conceives of the sort of determinateness that comes with a statement about a literary object with something like a buzzkill. Saying something definite about literature cuts away at something else in the work, which is usually (but I'd say, mistakenly) conceived of as affective, personal, private (or belonging to a select group), or what have you. But definiteness doesn't have to work that way, and therefore scientificity does not even have to be opposed to appreciation in the first place. Once this is admitted, evaluation can operate on both sides. The progression of literary studies then, would not be a movement away from appreciation and evaluation, but a movement of varying degrees of specification and definiteness, and evaluation in all sorts of ways.
The only thing is that statements about literature must then be definite: they cannot appeal to something vague, or whenever they do, this vagueness must be systematized--preferably be something able to be diagrammed or modeled, though that is asking a lot, perhaps (this is what I particularly like about Franco Moretti--though I could also say the same about I.A. Richards, both of whom are often ostracized as "scientific:" he understands that it is not so much graphs or models that are important for literature, but that what we say about literature must be clear and definite enough to be represented otherwise, in a diagram). I don't know if this would produce better answers to the question Post put to us (remember, part of the problem is that the law poses the question funnily--and not just to us, but to other experts too), but I do think that it would remove the notion that evaluation is saying something significant and rich about the significant and rich work of literature, when it is often more of an effort of saying something definite and clear about a work of literature that fits into complex systems of discourse, more of which is being studied every day. In other words, it would basically do away with evaluation in its still (still!) current sense, and place it alongside the other functions of the study of literature that we deal with--it would no longer be something like an ultimate question, but a product or effect of the study of literature. As this effect, it would be then be something quite easy to determine for a lawyer if questioned, not something highly complex requiring tortuous and confusing justifications. At the same time, neither would it be a simple yes or no: it would still be the product of an analysis that fits the object (or fails to fit it) into a system that isn't essentially one way or another way, but is constantly at work, functioning in all sorts of ways.

Tenor, vehicle, transference

I.A. Richards on psychoanalysis:

A "command of metaphor"--a command of the interpretation of metaphors--can go deeper still into the control of the world that we make for ourselves to live in. The psycho-analysts have shown us with their discussions of "transference"--another name for metaphor--how constantly modes of regarding, of loving, of acting, that have developed with one set of things or people, are shifted to another. They have shown us chiefly the pathology of these transferences, cases where the vehicle--the borrowed attitude, the parental fixation, say--tyrannizes over the new situation, the tenor, and behavior is inappropriate. The victim is unable to see the new person except in terms of the old passion and its accidents. He reads the situation only in terms of the figure, the archetypal image, the vehicle. But in healthy growth, tenor and vehicle--the new human relationship and the family constellation--co-operate freely; and the resultant behavior derives in due measure from both. Thus in happy living the same patterns are exemplified and the same risks of error are avoided as in tactful and discerning reading.
-The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 135-6

This interesting reflection, made way before there were Lacanians (Richards delivered these lectures in 1936 at Bryn Mawr, pictured above), is made really specific and useful through the use of the tenor/vehicle distinction which Richards introduces earlier in the lecture.
This distinction, one of those many unbelievably handy tools that Richards in particular and the New Critics in general gave us, runs like so: metaphor is often described as the comparison (roughly speaking) of two things, one through the other (or, as we also often say, by substituting itself for the other). But we can specify those things, the one and the other--through which the one is compared. Tenor is the original thing (the one) which, through the introduction of another (the other) thing, the vehicle, gets related to that new other thing in a meaningful way. In other words, the vehicle is that which modifies the tenor and in doing so establishes a relation which is meaningful (it creates a new meaning) and is called metaphor (the new meaning is metaphoric). So in the old lines Johnson quotes,

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great exemplar as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full.

The flow of the mind of the person to whom the poem is addressed ("thee") is the tenor--it is the original thing, the one thing--and the river (or "stream") is the vehicle--it is the other thing through which the original gets compared (cf. Philosophy of Rhetoric, 120-121).
The tenor and vehicle, insofar as they share some commonality or resemblence, can be said to have a ground, and it is in the shifting of this ground (by the transfer between tenor and vehicle) that is effected by the establishing (through the introduction of the vehicle) of a relationship. Meaning is the effect of this shift, and metaphoric meaning can only be said to take place when both tenor and vehicle are present. In other words, if either tenor and vehicle are not there, or if one can't establish where both are taking place, then there is no metaphor, and there is no metaphoric meaning being produced.
Thus in the above, what happens is that there is an overemphasis upon one of the two aspects of the metaphor, preventing the copresence of tenor and vehicle, and thus no understanding of the shift happening in the metaphor, or an adequate ability to engage in healthy transference.
I don't think I've brought this all out adequately insofar as it bears on the amazing quote above. But part of this is that the remark on psychoanalysis occurs close to the end of a huge, huge effort of Richards which is not easy to reconstitute. But this gets at a problem concerning Richards in general: his sensibility is so subtle, and his conception of the function of literature so refined and, while not abstract in the least, is so hard to easily capture--in fact, precisely because he sees literature and language working so dynamically, and at the same time in such a determinable and determinate way (not unlike Nietzsche, whose forces are dynamic and at the same time very specifiable if one has the right way to get at them)--that it isn't easy to really summarize a point of his without reference to the real intuitive sense of language that he gives you. This is part of the reason why he in particular, as well as the New Critics I think in general, are so maligned now, or at least have largely been forgotten: the sense of the work of literary language is more intuitive than able to be expressed, and unless one really spends time with them, anything they say can be easily and pointlessly dismissed. The best refutation of the New Critics in my mind is Raymond Williams', but this is only because literature for Williams is almost equally complex and subtle and dynamic--in other words he has such a rich and comparably acute sense of what it is. In other words, New Criticism is first and foremost a practice before it is a theory, and so dismissing it as a theory (or even theoretically summarizing it) is doomed to have too shallow a conception of what the New Criticism is doing. This doesn't mean New Criticism isn't profoundly wrong in certain respects, but merely that it has to be addressed as a practice, as a sort of vague sense of what literature is doing and how to address it.