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).

Talking about poems

You all might be wondering, why the continual interest in I.A. Richards? Well, quite frankly, strange, brilliant, complex, and fragmentary discourses, like Coleridge's, like Derrida's--these are always the most exciting and productive for me to research and to read. Bordering on incompleteness, they provoke you to think in order to complete, and then test and weigh, in a way that something more finished fails to do.

And Richards' certainly belongs in this group. His fault, I think, is that he is actually too fragmented. His remarks are so scatterbrained in what they are trying to get at, that he falls far short of someone like Coleridge (whose fragments have more to say in them), and often embarrasses those who would defend him. In short, he ends up being too idiosyncratic, too quirky--a quality that is actually thankfully lacking in the strange, complex, fragmentary discourses I mentioned earlier. These, I would say, remain unique or singular, and repay--much more than Richards can--the effort of reconstruction.

Nevertheless, Richards still has amazing things to say that are often too quickly dismissed. Here's a bit, for example, that should get people thinking:

Northrop Frye has written: "The great writer seldom regards himself as a personality with something to say: his mind to him is simply a place where something happens to words." This, as it stands, looks like a generalization from biographies; but that, I think, is largely a façon de parler. Language invites us continually to talk about poets under conditions which only entitle us to talk about poems. The substance of this sentence, for me, is that well-organized poems can be studied as places where transactions between words take place.
-from "How Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished?" (1970)

"Language invites us continually to talk about poets under conditions which only entitle us to talk about poems." Notice he says language, language in general, and not as an abstract medium or force but as a system (which is what the next sentence implies, when it talks about "the substance" of Frye's sentence) that is psychological and social at once. When we talk about poems, we talk about minds, but minds that we can only talk about in terms of poems. My point is that this doesn't necessarily reduce to something like "the autonomous text," which anti-formalist critics (and even some formalists) hate, even though it is a pretty quirky view.

More radically, I'd say it accomplishes two things that anti-formalism misses--the bad, first aspect of which it actually ends up unselfconsciously (that is, stupidly) repeating:

1) Making the work immanent to language itself qua communication, and by way of this, to an immediate situation of language-users, and then to society at large. That is, the work becomes a concretion of the capabilities of minds to form and understand sentences, which can can be projected onto various capabilities of society as a whole. This is absolutely torn apart even by Geoffrey Hartman (no anti-formalist he) in his various discussions of Richards, and rightly so. The notion is this: the work, as read, represents a psychology (as we said above), which in turn represents a linguistic capacity (talks about itself by putting itself into language, or is, at some level, an instantiation and internalization of language structures that are social because universally shared, like metaphor), which in turn represents some level of acculturation, or of health more generally, within society. Thus, Richards can point, in Practical Criticism, to the horrible misreadings of his classes at Cambridge and say that if this represents the reading abilities of the best educated in England, the state of society must be horrible. What we have here is the remnant of a certain Arnoldian insistence that the act of criticism must be ultimately social in its influence: here, criticism is clearing away the misreadings of the text, and thereby improving the capacities of the nation in general to understand, to comprehend, to communicate effectively. Richards is at least rigorous enough (unlike someone like Empson, I believe, and unlike some cultural criticism) to say that these capabilities are indeed psychological, and have to unfold themselves along lines that are ultimately at work only in one sort of cultural capability. But the notion that poems let us talk about minds, minds that use a social language and therefore have the same (linguistic) structure, preserves a sort of linkage between the poem and society that is dubious, because so little mediated.

2) The other side of this (and this is certainly not present in Empson or in bad cultural criticism) is the creation of a sort of network through which the poem is indeed triangulated in its relationship to structures larger than itself, situated within a context that is concrete, and yet ultimately not empirical. In Richards in general we see both the empirical and the ideal coalesce: we have a psychologist who is at the same time a Platonist, and so he brings into birth both an empirical poetic text with immediate, and also empirical, ties to culture and society--which we said were dubious, though concrete--while at the same time we have the poem as a representative of a structure that is not actually on the page, a mind. I'll be clearer: if the poem is what we talk about when we talk about minds, it is not really there on the page. At the same time, if it is precisely what we need to talk about, if it is only what we have to talk about, it has to be the thing there--it has to be these words, concretely there, so organized. The poem here is then both empirical and ideal, and where Richards is good is in actually saying that our reading of the poem is, ultimately, an ideal process with empirical consequences at each point. When we read, we are reading a mind, a thing not there in the poem, however much it is there as the poem. What this does is direct us to another structure which produces the reading. What this does is make us explain whatever we read in terms of something that is not empirically there, and what this does is start to involve us in a series of questions about where the reading came from. Richards proceeds to answer these psychologically, but is continually made to articulate them also as ideal structures responsible for the production of such and such effect, which brings out such and such effect, which eventually produces the poem. The process of reading is then dependent on the model with which we explain this reading to an unprecidented degree. This is how Richards can move from psychology to linguistics, ultimately, throughout his career: he switches models. But what this sort of explanation does is also create vectors along which possible explanations of the poem must proceed, which are indeed ideal. In this way, what we have is the creation of a process which methodizes research into the meaning of the text. As such, it situates the text in relationship to the critical approach which intends to explain it, and does so explicitly. In this way, we have a better, more accurate version of a connection to society: insofar as society creates certain critical procedures, the text can be explained in terms of them. Ultimately, this is how Richards' continual insistence that rhetoric is a structure of the mind needs to be taken: he is both making an empirical claim, in saying that certain psychological operations correspond to the structure of metaphor, but he is also saying that certain psychological operations have a relationship to constructs that are created by institutions in order to understand texts. Thus he can ask for a revival of metaphor in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, as well as update the trivium in Interpretation in Teaching, and imply that a particular amount of attention which earlier forms of society exhibited with respect to communication will be necessarily brought back. The claims here are much more minimal, of course, but I think they are more solid. I think they are hard to appreciate because they are often explained away in terms of the empirical, or by generalizing about the way language just works--as Empson does. Richards situates himself in between these approaches, and thus makes literature into something that we have to have a method to adequately deal with critically.

If I have explained this last accomplishment of Richards' doctrine less clearly, it is because it is, really, just so hard to articulate. It is easier in a person like Coleridge, for whom these same two points can be seen at work in the notion of the clerisy. With Richards, each of these things is done on the level of a more modern psychology and a more modern empiricism, so it is harder to abstract the second, ideal layer. At the same time, we get a sense of textual concreteness as well as concreteness in method in Richards that is way beyond anything Coleridge had precisely because of this psychology and empiricism.