The Irony of Critique Daniel Rosenberg Nutters American Book Review, Volume 38, Number 5, July/August 2017, pp. 14-15 (Review) Published by American Book Review For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/678780 Access provided by Temple University (3 Dec 2017 21:06 GMT) The Irony of Critique Daniel Rosenberg Nutters CritiCism after Critique: aestHetiCs, Literature, and tHe PoLitiCaL Jeffrey R. Di Leo, ed. Palgrave Macmillan www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137428769 229 Pages; Print, $69.99 Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s collection Criticism After Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political emerges at a moment when academic critique—a politically animated critical skepticism that draws upon the insights offered by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and various forms of historicism—seems to have become stale, ineffective, and formulaic. Now that scholarship has debunked assumptions about the transcendental value of art, unmasked myth, illusion, and ideological aberrations, opened up an insular canon, exhumed repressed voices and forgotten histories, and demonstrated the complicity of the liberal-humanist tradition with the worst of Western Civilization, what next? The digital humanities, new formalism, surface and distant reading, new materialisms, and the self-proclaimed return to aesthetics represent some of the new critical fashions competing to carry the baton for literary studies into the twenty-irst century. They promise relevance, innovation, a renewed political urgency, the ability to overcome common impediments such as the critic’s fallible subjectivity, and different ways of “reading” that can yield new forms of historical and sociological knowledge. With a range of new methodologies from which to choose, what is left of what Di Leo calls “the modus operandi of the humanities,” namely, critique? Invoking the essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” by the French sociologist Bruno Latour, Di Leo argues that there is a frustration with “a mechanical form of critique that responds more or less the same way to any and all new events.” He thus poses the following questions to the volume’s contributors: How do we engage criticism at a time when critique seems to have run its course? What does sustained theoretical research and discussion look like when the notion of critique is under attack? Might we be confronting an aesthetic, practical, philosophical, New Formalist, or New Critical emphasis on the literary text? What, if anything, is the political project of literary and cultural criticism after critique? Di Leo’s concise introduction orients Criticism After Critique toward future generations who, he argues, “are just coming to critique [and] will do so in a less doctrinaire manner” than orthodox scholars of a “Baudrillardian, Foucaultian, or Jamesonian” persuasion. The eleven essays in the collection thus offer a diverse set of responses pithy in length but demanding in intellectual rigor. The range of igures they engage—Kant, Adorno, Žižek, Rancière, Derrida, and Foucault as well as Danto, Cavell, Rorty, Wittgenstein, and literary examples including Yeats, Morrison, Carson, and the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau—point to the numerous topics and subjects covered. It is the ability to cover a wide terrain without losing sight of the past, present, and future of critique that makes Di Leo’s collection an important intervention into what can only be described as the Page 14 American Book Review latest chapter in literary criticism’s perpetual crisis of self-identiication. Criticism After Critique is divided into three sections sandwiched between Di Leo’s introduction and an afterward by R. M. Berry. The irst section, “Criticism, Judgment, and Value,” provides an overview of some of the central contexts leading scholars to question the value of critique. David Shumway’s opening essay offers a short genealogy of critique. Taking his starting point from Žižek’s critique of ideology critique, Shumway explores the Kantian origens of critique and traces its legacy through German Idealism, philology, and the rise of the New Criticism to highlight how the humanities continually reproduces oppositions such as “interpretation versus judgment…hermeneutics of suspicion versus the hermeneutics of recollections …the text as object of critique and the text as bearer of knowledge” that also ironically sustain it. Sue-Im Lee’s contribution contextualizes the disillusionment with critique by examining the relation between the surge of interest in neglected literature (e.g. writing by minorities and disenfranchised groups) and the decline of aesthetic judgments. By summoning Arthur Danto, Lee emphasizes the need to theorize a way of making value judgments that might complicate the familiar The value of Criticism After Critique is its ability to question the terms of the debate set forth by those scholars who believe critique has run its course. conlict between the academy’s democratization of literature and the hierarchy implied by articulating standards for good writing. Charles Altieri draws upon Wittgenstein to locate the value of literary studies in appreciation. His ambitious essay puts forth a defense of appreciation by deining the humanities as the “domain of expressive activity” which allows him to avoid appeals to art’s utilitarian purposes or the deconstructive cult of otherness. Altieri has since developed his account of aesthetic engagement in Reckoning with Imagination (2015), an important work of scholarship that returns to the German idealist tradition through Wittgenstein to challenge critical fashions such as surface reading. Finally, Robert Chodat provides an erudite comparison of Cavell and Rorty to defend the agency of the irst-person that is necessary to authorize the critical judgments Lee and others advocate. If the opening section reminds us of some of the topics missing from current critical conversation, the essays gathered in “Globalization, Historicism, and Ideology” respond to more widely discussed debates surrounding global literature, postcolonial criticism, historicism and periodization, and ideology critique. Christian Moraru, for example, espouses “planetarity instead of globality” as an ethical way to sustain critique in a postnational world. Looking at the “emerging ‘post-postcolonial’ turn,” Nicole Simek examines the work of Patrick Chamoiseau to defend “ironic utopias” as a way to contest “absolute synthesis” while remaining open to “new modes of being.” In a different vein, Hassan Melehy conjures up Derrida’s debate with Foucault over Descartes to remind us that Derrida’s historical poetics can help us overcome “the tyranny of strict periodization and recognize our relationship of mutual belonging with the past.” Zahi Zalloua concludes the section by comparing Žižek’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with that of Homi Bhabha in an effort to show how “critique both opens up new opportunities for reading and forecloses countless other meanings.” The importance of aesthetics is an underlying theme in Criticism After Critique, and the inal section, “Aesthetics and Anticritique,” includes three essays addressing different aspects of Rancière’s work, possibly the central theorist dominating conversation about the return of the aesthetic. Allen Dunn distinguishes between “halfhearted critique”—a mode of historicism that renders its objects of study as “products of an anachronistic, enchanted world” but at the same time desires to preserve them—and the “anticritique” exempliied by Rancière’s espousal of art that “destroy[s] and thereby transform[s] our familiar and habitual ways of receiving and processing sensory data.” Yet Dunn argues that both forms of criticism can only account for “aesthetic experience by separating it from the rest of the world” and thereby diminish the value of aesthetic judgment. Alan Singer preserves a space for such judgment by arguing that Rancière’s attempt to escape the constraints of “reason as a self-corrupting enterprise” undermines his emancipatory politics by impeding agency. Reading Ann Carson’s Noxa, a contemporary work of art which Rancière might otherwise enlist for his cause, Singer persuasively claims that the poem “sustains the agency and the human life enhanced by the agency that…is otherwise unlivable without recourse to some métier of determinate reasoning.” Brian O’Keeffe’s essay examines how Rancière reads literature, especially novels by Balzac and Flaubert, and concludes that in them he continually “inds a igure for his own political hopes” and subsequently implicates himself in his own romance of liberation. The value of Criticism After Critique is its ability to question the terms of the debate set forth by those scholars who believe critique has run its course. In this respect, the contributions by Dunn, Singer, and O’Keeffe are especially valuable for casting a skeptical eye toward Rancière. In addition, the turn to Danto, Cavell, Rorty, and Wittgenstein, and the effort to make critical judgment a focal point of conversation is welcomed. Taken as a whole, it may be best to read each contribution as a provocation, a position paper that forces us to reexamine, as Di Leo puts it, a future for “criticism both without critique and with new variations of it.” Yet if the collection addresses itself toward the future, we must not lose sight of our past. The Nutters continued on next page Nutters continued from previous page search for new directions for literary study tends to rest on the academy’s teleological narrative of self-identiication that moves from the New Critics through structuralism, post-structuralism, New Historicism, and its various manifestations in cultural studies. It is too often a story of emancipation from naïve assumptions about the autonomy of art. As a consequence, scholars championing new methodologies reproduce generational divides and occlude alternative styles of criticism that do not conform to those that ground their polemics. By not presenting counter-narratives—we might look to Trilling’s cultural critique, the idiosyncrasy of Burke’s playful dramatistic thought, the uncanny (and unacknowledged) resemblance between Frye’s universe of literature and the current ixation on planetary or world literature, the relation between surface reading and the aesthetic movement’s valorization of surface, Said’s secular criticism, or even Bloom’s antithetical criticism—we are liable to sacriice the great intellectual and creative achievements of the past and unwittingly legitimate our current crisis of self-identiication. Nevertheless, the ultimate takeaway from Criticism After Critique is that a self-conscious recognition of that crisis constitutes the ironic ground for renewed critical activity. R. M. Berry’s afterword suggests as much when it describes how each of the volume’s essays “transform[s] what might otherwise be a rariied conlict over subsequence—over what if anything comes after what—into a struggle for criticism’s possibilities.” We see this struggle in terms of Simek’s pursuit of “ironic utopias,” Chodat’s fallible irst person subject, Lee’s ongoing dialectic between the need for, and constraints intrinsic to, value judgments, Melehy’s emphasis on our inability to step outside the very history we wish to organize, Zalloua’s belief that “critique’s perpetual negativity… energizes literary criticism,” or O’Keeffe’s claim that “arguably, the condition of the possibility for criticism is that it constantly performs its own self- critique.” Shumway puts the matter succinctly: “We cannot get beyond the reality that our project is deined by tensions between fact and value and criticism and critique. The hope of doing only one or the other is in vain, for it could only lead to the disappearance of the disciplines we practice.” Acknowledging the irony in the eponymous “after” is, in other words, what will allow critique to remain fecund at a historical moment when it is surely needed more than ever. Daniel Rosenberg Nutters recently received his PhD in English from Temple University. His work is forthcoming and has appeared in the Arizona Quarterly, Henry James Review, Journal of Modern Literature, and symplokē. He is currently working on two book projects: The Man of Imagination: Transformations of Romanticism in Late Henry James and The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said. Critique Has Its Uses Lee Konstantinou Is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) fake news? I haven’t been able to stop asking myself this question since the election of Donald Trumpov in November. Whitehead’s novel is, after all, constructed around an historical falsehood. As a kid, the author reports, he thought that the Underground Railroad was a literal subway slaves used to escape to the North. Many children who learn about the Railroad make the same mistake (as did Porsha Stewart in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta). Taking his former confusion as a point of departure, Whitehead literalizes the metaphor. His protagonist Cora escapes from slavery in Georgia on an underground steampowered locomotive. Fleeing the slave-catcher Ridgeway, she traverses a variety of states, each of which skews from the historical record in more or less dramatic ways. “Every state is different,” one character in the novel suggests. “Each one a state of possibility.” Historically informed readers will note that Whitehead’s novel incorporates anachronistic references to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazism, as well as twenty-irst-century modes of oppression (such as stop and frisk and mass incarceration) into his vision of the 1850s. My opening question is, of course, ridiculous. After all, everyone knows (or at least all literary critics know) that we don’t turn to iction for a strictly factual report about the world. Philosophers and narrative theorists have long cautioned against asking whether ictional utterances are true or false. These are exactly the wrong questions to ask; the truth of iction—whether in the mode of realism, magic realism, or science iction—is in no case reducible to the truth status of its individual sentences. Meanwhile, almost everyone knows (and not just literary critics, this time) what fake news is. For the Macedonian teenagers in Veles who disseminated it, its purpose was to make them money. For those of us who consume it, fake news reinforces our political biases; it promises comfort, titillation, shock, delight. It helps us feel as if we’re reading the news—we are, after all, starved for real news—without having to confront the unwanted narratives of oficial media. The difference couldn’t be any clearer. On the one hand, Whitehead offers a fantastic world whose distance from our own is carefully staged as iction, and which is meant to be interpreted as different from the historical record. On the other hand, disseminators of fake news offer an alternative world of ersatz facts designed to go viral on Facebook, which is meant to be mistaken, even if only briely, for truth. And yet this distinction doesn’t wholly satisfy me. As a novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad arguably has a special place in US literature and culture. In the absence of more signiicant memorials or reparations, the neo-slave narrative has for decades been a major political staging ground upon which we have reenacted and reconsidered the history and consequences of our nation’s founding sin. And for a long time, Whitehead has resisted stepping onto this staging ground. His previous novels have addressed race, as many critics have noted, more obliquely. Indeed, I would venture an even stronger claim. Whitehead didn’t only avoid writing about slavery; his early iction sought to resist the literary equivalent of We need readers who care about the distance between the real and the fake. what in the realm of criticism has come to be called the historicist-contextualist paradigm. As Mitchum Huehls argues, Whitehead has long approached race in a way that resists “representational forms of meaning-making.” That is, the novelist has rejected the view that how we represent race determines (or is, in an uncomplicated way, equivalent to) how race is lived. I read the author’s The Intuitionist (1999) as a satire of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In her slim but inluential book, Morrison argues that the American literary canon must be reread in light of what she terms a disavowed “Africanist presence.” Drawing on a powerful tradition of African American literary criticism, Morrison transforms the paint factory scene of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) into a critical credo. Playing in the Dark is a paragon of suspicious hermeneutics. We think we’re reading canonical texts in which African Americans play little or no part, but Morrison teaches us we’re actually reading a text whose whiteness requires a complex disavowal of blackness. Blackness is the racial unconscious of whiteness. The job of the critic becomes to attend to the historical deinitions and contextualizations of race across our literature. The Intuitionist resists this imperative in amusing terms. The book’s African American protagonist Lila Mae Watson discovers that James Fulton—the founder of the Intuitionist school of elevator inspection—passed for white. His great theoretical treatise on the ideal elevator, which he called a “black box,” seems in the inal analysis to be a coded racial allegory. Theories of elevator repair come to represent debates about racial uplift. But the allegory is obscure, and one comes away from the novel feeling unsure how Lila Mae’s revelation might change her life. Whereas for Morrison history’s disavowed presence is determinative of contemporary racial dynamics, for the Whitehead of The Intuitionist history has present-day consequences that are far from clear. History is an alien visitor whose language we ind dificult to comprehend. But with The Underground Railroad, Whitehead has taken on a seemingly different view of history’s power. In this novel, history doesn’t so much revisit the present as never depart in the irst place. Cora escapes slavery only to discover that the slave system’s boundaries extend well beyond the geography of the plantation. Formal emancipation guarantees nothing. Whitehead here seems to revert to the sort of ideology critique—the historicist-contextualist paradigm—he previously repudiated. This is a surprising turn. We are, after all, reading a novel by the same author who, as Thomas Chatterton Williams has noted, once wrote an editorial mocking the very notion that he might write a novel about slavery. In the editorial, Whitehead jokes he might someday write a “Southern Novel of Black Misery” that would “investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers.” He warns his imagined reader, “[b]ut hurry up—the hounds are a-gittin’ closer!” One way to read Whitehead’s apparent shift is as an allegory of the fate of postcritique. Like Whitehead once did, many critics have mounted intelligent attacks on the historicist-contextualist paradigm, of which Morrison’s Playing in the Dark was just one prominent example. This moribund paradigm has, they say, failed to theorize the speciicity of literature and the uses to which readers put texts. Rita Felski argues that we should analyze how readers identify with characters, are enchanted by texts, learn things about the world from novels, and so on. Caroline Levine has suggested that our historicist-contextualist inclinations predispose us to overlook how forms persist across time. And Joseph North has recently arrived at a similar conclusion, Konstantinou continued on page 18 July-August 2017 Page 15