Problems

One interesting thing that I find deconstructionists do is reduce differance to an epistemological problem. This is so in both de Man and Spivak, though they both well know that this epistemological problem is also an ontological problem. Or rather, they know it isn't even that, since it is a pre- or post-ontological problem. In each case, we're trying to say that we've hit a sort of epistemological problem that is deeper than any epistemological problem, but actually can best be characterized or envisioned epistemologically, in an manner analogous to how we can deconstruct metaphysics by looking at philosophical texts--which at first sight looks absurd. Thus, it is the question of "epistemology," in quotes, or doubled, different. And in the case of texts, it is the question of how much, in each case, we are to provisionally generalize textuality. The latter question is the real one being interrogated, I think, in these issues regarding "epistemology," and insofar as it still remains interrogated, is not exactly a mistake or misinterpretation of Derrida. The real issue is whether transferring the problem of generalizing textuality--which I'll repeat, is the fundamental problem deconstruction faces--encourages us to dissolve the problem and presume it solved. (I'll mention that in my view de Man does indeed do this, to the extent that he almost does misinterpret Derrida by virtue of this alone, while Spivak doesn't.) Derrida often sticks to texts precisely for this reason. Whether his resulting insistence on the problems of textuality really does encounter that problem, well, that's a another (and indeed pressing) question. But unless one understands that this is what Derrida is up to, his reading of texts of philosophy will seem very odd, not unlike how Heidegger's reading of texts from the tradition (the most amazing of which is, of course, the book on Kant) will also seem odd. I think, however, a legitimate objection would be to why this process of reading went on so continually and so consistently, almost as if expanding the amount of reading in philosophy and its nearest neighbors would indeed insist on the problem of textuality (even though his claim is always that these texts are singular). In this case that other question I spoke of just now (the "pressing question" of how far an insistence on the problem of textuality encounters the problem, which is not unrelated to the problem of transferring the problem of textuality, as one can see in Spivak, who than rather going de Man's route does this), indeed arises.

Best of... Marxism

Nothing truly interesting is possible without negativity; error or ideology, false appearance, are also objective facts that have to be reckoned back into truth.
-Fredric Jameson, "On 'Cultural Studies'" in The Ideologies of Theory, 633

I know I said a phenomenology collection would be next, but returning to Marx and Hegel recently in my reading has given me a fondness for my (somewhat more sketchy) writings on Marxism:

Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach: A very, very lengthy attempt (it extended into six posts, and still remained incomplete) to piece together some basic characteristics "Theses on Feuerbach" and comprehend the level at which Marx's "overturning" of Hegel proceeds. I'm not as technical here as I should be, especially in explaining Hegel, but I hope my simplifications (especially the use of Foucault, who I toyed around with as an explanatory mechanism, and, quickly after this, threw away) are generally helpful in making the problem Marx encountered clear. I should add that in short, I am generally trying to outline something like what Fredric Jameson says (as usual, excellently) here, or find out why and how exactly it is the case:

...it is a mistake to think that Marxism is simply a type of interpretation that takes the economic "sequence" as that ultimately privileged code into which the other sequences are to be translated. Rather, for Marxism the emergence of the economic, the coming into view of the infrastructure itself, is simply the sign of the approach of the concrete.
-"Towards Dialectical Criticism" in Marxism and Form, 322

...and Here are the other posts in the series: post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, and some rough notes on where I am going after the sixth post.

On Hoarding and Specters of Marx: a detailed analysis of the "hoarding" chapters in Capital and the Grundrisse, and a general perspective on the usefulness of Marx, via a somewhat unorthodox (or at least less Marxist) take on Derrida's Specters of Marx.

Marx, Economics and Law: explaining the "Critique of the Gotha Programme."

Spivak v. Derrida on Value: A look at "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" and a localization of differences between Spivak and Derrida when it comes to Marx. I should say that Spivak seems closer to what Marx says, which refuses analogies between capital and subject, and insists on analogies (in order to demystify them) between capital and society (the demystification proceeds by then seeing society in terms of the means of production), if I can speak loosely.

Gramsci on Hegemony: my presentation for a class with Spivak on Gramsci (and, in a shockingly productive pairing or contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois--whose Black Reconstruction I can't recommend enough), which tries to explain in detail how the concept of hegemony emerges in Gramsci's analysis of history.

Structuralism and finitude: I touch on structuralism mainly, but I have a nice part on the famous "effective causality" passages in Althusser and Balibar's Reading Capital.

You can also expect in the future more detailed treatments of Raymond Williams than the ones I have written so far, as well as considerations of Althusser and Fredric Jameson.

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).