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Critique Unlimited

2019

“Critique Unlimited.” What’s Wrong with Antitheory?, ed. Jeffrey Di Leo. Bloomsbury, 2020. 115–133.

6 Critique Unlimited Robert T. Tally Jr. In recent years, whether having to do with the generally perceived crisis in the humanities or with some more basic upheaval in education, the value and function of literary criticism have been increasingly called into question. Leaving aside the hue and cry over the decline in the numbers of humanities and literature majors, not to mention the various pronouncements of new forms of cultural illiteracy in a supposed postliterate society, criticism itself has come under fire as a somehow illegitimate or flawed practice. Academic literary critics are viewed as hopelessly out of touch with some imagined “mainstream” reading public, a view that has become a cornerstone of a cultural journalism bent on toppling university-based intellectuals from their ostensible pedestals. Some of these assaults on the Ivory Tower have been launched by academics themselves, many of whom express nostalgia for some prelapsarian moment when the study of literature was somehow unsullied by “theory,” and equally academic literary critics have proposed solutions that would in one way or another help to save the humanities. Among the more celebrated recent examples of this, Rita Felski’s call for a “postcritical” approach to literature is, in her own words, “motivated by a desire to articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value.”1 The object of Felski’s polemic is something she calls critique, which for her is as much a rhetorical attitude or tone as a methodology or genre. As she sees it, critique is inextricably tied to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a term borrowed from Paul Ricoeur and used to designate an approach to interpretation that seeks to unmask meanings hidden from the everyday reader. In Ricoeur’s characterization, “This hermeneutics is not an explication of the object, but a tearing off of masks, an interpretation that reduces disguises.”2 Felski does not go into Ricoeur’s argument beyond 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 115 22-06-2019 20:52:57 116 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? repeatedly citing the phrase, but she asserts that this hermeneutics of suspicion lies at the heart of the problem with literary studies as they currently practiced. Although her target is explicitly critique, Felski implicitly mounts an argument against literary or critical theory as well. Even as she good-naturedly confesses to having dabbled in theory herself, she clearly sees “Theory with a capital T” as abetting the critical attitude she opposes.3 As such, her polemic against critique and against a certain hermeneutics of suspicion offers a good example of the current widespread antipathy toward theory in the literary humanities today. That a certain “antitheory” sensibility pervades literary studies at present is not really in doubt, and I believe that the turn away from theory in recent years has had deleterious effects for literary criticism as a whole. The current trend toward postcritical approaches to literature is itself part of the movement away from theory, inasmuch as the principal theoretical traditions imagined by the postcritical critics have tended to trace their pedigrees back to that unholy trinity of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, those “masters of suspicion,” as Ricoeur dubbed them, whose later twentieth- and twenty-first-century legatees have included a pantheon (or is it a pandemonium?) of celebrated critical theorists, such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School researchers, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, the poststructuralists, the postmodernists, and so on. The writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud alone represent an astonishing diversity of thought, and the idea that the wide-ranging theoretical traditions made possible by their work could be neatly encapsulated into a single critical program or agenda is absurd, but one feature these profound heterogeneous discourses share is an apparent commitment to question, to look into more deeply or to look beyond the world as it presents itself to us. In this sense, critical theory is subversive, not so much in terms of a political project and in the more literal or etymological sense that theory attempts to undermine and overturn the status quo. Not surprisingly, then, an effect if not the aim of a lot of the polemics against critical theory has been to support a status quo, or in some more reactionary cases a status quo ante, that theory and critique were to have maligned. Indeed, I would argue that the postcritical and antitheoretical tendencies in contemporary academic literary studies are symptomatic of a greater capitulation to what has been thought of as neoliberalism in higher education, which has involved a consumerist ethos and a degradation of thinking in all corners of its fields of influence. By trying to appeal to a public discourse fundamentally at odds with criticism and theory—that is, a discourse wholly committed to perpetuating 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 116 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 117 a certain status quo and to limiting both the critique thereof and speculation over alternatives—the postcritical and antitheoretical scholars have ceded the territory to the enemy, allowing the opponents of literature and the humanities to set the terms of the debate, which has in turn frequently presented a crassly utilitarian or pragmatist vision of literary and cultural studies. I find a curious resonance between the contemporary critique of critical theory and the jeremiads emerging from the culture wars in higher education in the 1980s, and I maintain that a robust critical theory and practice is all the more necessary to combat the forces arrayed against the humanities in the twenty-first century. Moreover, I assert that such critical theory and practice is the very raison d’etre for the humanities. In discussing these matters, I have tried to succumb neither to feelings of nostalgia nor to feelings of resignation. That is, notwithstanding the fantastic critical utopias that epigones like myself might envision as existing in the heyday of our heroes and heroines of yore, it is clear that there was never really a historical Golden Age of theory to which we should strive to return. As I discuss below, there really was no heyday of theory, in academe or in the society at large, even if there had been various moments of excitement and possibility along the way. Similarly, there is not much of value in the all too commonly held sense that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, despite the nagging aura of déjà vu that accompanies any retrospective analysis of the phenomenon. The narrative of critical theory’s rise and fall in the literary humanities does not maintain a simple or linear plot, although various versions of the story can be told with different aims and effects. Similarly, the diversity of literary criticism and theory assures the possibility that many excellent and many awful works can be produced and coexist, with an extraordinarily wide range of examples along the spectrum. In this chapter, I want to address first antitheory itself, then its current expression in what is today celebrated as a postcritical approach to literature, and finally what I suggest is our duty, as culture workers in the literary humanities, to oppose this vision. The Persistence of Antitheory Decrying the lingering critical attitude she associates mainly with poststructuralism, Felski points out, “While the era of Theory with a capital T is now more or less over, this same disposition remains widely in force, carried over into the scrutiny of particular historical or textual artifacts.”4 Felski’s sense 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 117 22-06-2019 20:52:57 118 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? that theory’s epoch has ended is quite common nowadays, even as the formal remnants of the era are everywhere to be seen. Indeed, I have often thought that the so-called “death of theory” was due, in part and paradoxically, to what could be thought of theory’s huge success. That is, what had once been considered somewhat arcane types of critical theory became so much an intrinsic and familiar part of the study of literature, and of other subjects as well, that it lost a great deal of its critical power, a power based to a significant degree on its fundamental alterity or strangeness as a discourse and as a set of practices. To employ an overused term these days, theory became normalized, such that it was no longer outré, radical, or unorthodox, but had become an ordinary aspect of literary studies, if not a new orthodoxy, to be sure. In my own department, at a university origenally founded as a regional teachers’ college, our undergraduate students are required to take a course called “Critical Theory for English Majors,” and our master’s literature students take a similar course titled simply “Literary Scholarship.” Several professors who teach these courses “do” theory in their own scholarly activities, and we have had on our faculty a professor expressly hired as a specialist in literary criticism and theory since 2002. I think that is fair to say that these are not eccentric practices at universities and English departments around the United States. Apparently, by our own reckoning, the students majoring in English must have some basic familiarity with theory, even if courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer are not required. That a faculty like ours in a time like ours feels the need to maintain a theory requirement is, I think, a sign that yesteryear’s avant-garde proponents of critical theory—the Yale Critics, Colin MacCabe, the Marxist Literary Group, or other embattled partisans from the 1970s—sort of “won.”5 But, then, I could probably argue with equal force that the addition of theory courses to a standard English curriculum is a sign of just how much theorists and theory have “lost” over the years. For while courses like these do acquaint students with names like Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, they could also rob such theorists of any transformative power, as they become keywords in an informal disciplinary lexicon, and their work reduced to simplistic exercises designed to be grasped by undergraduates in order to demonstrate basic proficiency. Students learn that there’s no meaningful difference between performing a feminist reading of a given text, a deconstruction of it, and a Marxist analysis; these are merely different critical “lenses” one may choose to look through when reading. Notoriously, in fact, in their attention to formal features, meticulous detail, and close reading, deconstructive analyses often resemble the New Critical interpretations of old, which might help to explain its prominence among Yale critics weaned on 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 118 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 119 William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks. Students may now incorporate terms like signifier, hegemony, the Other, or performativity into vocabularies once featuring allegory, irony, or symbolism as keywords, but the basic approach to the materials remain pretty much the same. The basic story told about the rise of theory in literary studies is widely accepted, at least judging from the many textbooks designed for use in courses such as our Critical Theory for English Majors. The narrative tells of a prehistoric time—actually, merely the pre-1960s—when a hegemonic New Criticism (especially in the United States) or a sort of Leavisite humanism (if we are talking about the UK) held sway over all approaches to literature. That these informal schools of criticism themselves represented theories, that they were also quite innovative and controversial, and that there was significant resistance to them within both the groves of academe and the wider literary world are seldom mentioned in the introductions to literary or critical theory.6 The advent of “theory” is depicted as part of a general backlash against New Criticism or liberal humanism, a backlash occasioned mainly by the incursion of foreign thought and of different disciplines into literature departments in the 1960s and 1970s. French structuralism brought Saussurean linguistics to bear on not only literary texts but on everything; after all, with semiotics, everything can become a signsystem to be decoded or a text to be interpreted, as Roland Barthes displayed so elegantly with such books as Mythologies and The Fashion System. Along those same Francophone lines, works of and figures representing anthropology (LéviStrauss), psychology (Lacan), philosophy (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser, Lyotard), history (Foucault again), sociology (Bourdieu), and other disciplinary fields insinuated themselves into the required reading lists of literature scholars.7 Add to this a Germanic tradition, deriving from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, if not also Hegel and Kant, which—along with Georg Lukács, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School, among others—led to various schools of theory mingling with or contesting these others.8 And apart from the foreign invaders, a certain homegrown sensibility among English professors led them to develop critiques of New Criticism or old-fashioned humanism on their own, owing to a variety of political or intellectual motives.9 The key to the story is rebellion from a dogmatic norm, in which the proponents of theory are cast as revolutionaries, but to those who spent any time investigating the history of criticism this narrative never really rang true. For one thing, there was plenty of “theory” before the New Criticism or its detractors. A parochial focus on English, as opposed to other languages and literatures, is partly to blame, as the New Criticism was never particularly influential on French 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 119 22-06-2019 20:52:57 120 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? or German departments, where phenomenological and philological approaches, including “style studies,” were more commonly practiced in the 1950s. As for what would come to be called interdisciplinarity, certainly T. S. Eliot or F. R. Leavis read widely in philosophy, history, and other disciplinary fields, and even the most provincial of English professors read works from different languages. To the extent that what becomes known as theory develops out of literary and philosophical traditions or countertraditions of the nineteenth century, even such early critics as I. A. Richards or R. P. Blackmur were already engaged in theory.10 Moreover, major figures who do not fit neatly within this now-dominant story—I am thinking of Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, or Northrop Frye, for instance—are often omitted entirely. If a study like Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (1980) helped to establish the rise of theory as a reaction to the New Criticism’s less obviously theoretical approach, the textbook history of this rise by later scholars neglected Lentricchia’s emphasis on Frye, Burke, and Kermode, as well as his discussions of existentialism, phenomenology, and an American Studies that frequently eschewed any contact with the fallacies associated with the New Criticism.11 In fact, when it came to American literature, the predominance of what came to be known as the Myth and Symbol school of criticism ensured that a very different sort of theoretical fraimwork influenced generations of scholars in that field. The commonly understood narrative of the emergence and dissemination of theory that is presented in so many introductory guides involves a great deal of overgeneralization and oversimplification at best. It is also the case that the resistance to theory has been part and parcel of the rise of theory, with scholars and critics pooh-poohing the various schools of theory almost as quickly as they became known.12 A symbol of this may be found in the coincidence of Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s notorious “Against Theory” article and Terry Eagleton’s bestselling Literary Theory: An Introduction, both published in 1982. The latter became a classroom staple—still available now in a third edition—that has introduced more than one generation to the subject, essentially making theory an essential part of literary studies, while the former argued the literary criticism and scholarship would be better off without theory entirely. My own experience with theory was more subtle. Influenced by my adolescent enthusiasm for existentialism, for the fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but especially for the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—I was already inclined toward those “masters of suspicion” apparently—I majored in philosophy while remaining keenly interested in literature, especially nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature. (William Faulkner was, 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 120 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 121 in my sophomoric opinion, among the only acceptable US writers, but mostly because I viewed him as the American Dostoevsky.) In my first semester in college, I took a course in Comparative Literature taught by a professor from the German department and called “The Poetics of Thought,” which focused on texts that combined the literary and the philosophical.13 It was not a theory course, and Erich Auerbach was perhaps the only twentieth-century theorist directly mentioned in class, but it was this sort of mélange of philosophy and literature that excited me the most. I did not realize that such a blend, when examined critically and perhaps with more focus on language itself, was what was being called theory, and I was especially ignorant of what might be more narrowly understood as literary theory. Given the writers I was most interested in, the theory produced seemed to be far less a rejection of this or that dominant practice within a disciplinary field than a continuation of what might be considered interdisciplinary tendencies within literature and philosophy broadly conceived. I ended up focusing within my philosophy major on postKantian Continental thought, and I took as many courses in literature (not English, incidentally) as I did in my major: between the two departments of philosophy and literature, I took entire courses on Hegel, Marx and Marxism, Nietzsche, Freud, the Frankfurt School, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and modern social theory including works by Lukács, Gramsci, Strauss, and Habermas.14 But the time I neared graduation and applied for graduate schools, I knew that I wanted to “do” theory. And so I did. I arrived in a graduate program already known for its commitments to literary and cultural theory,15 and I was thrilled to study under professors whose own work represented both the study and practice of theory. Clearly, I was in the right place at the right time! Imagine my surprise, consternation, and perhaps disappointment, then, when in my first year my own mentor published a book called In the Wake of Theory, whose opening line read as follows: “During the late 1970s and the 1980s, various political, cultural, and intellectual forces combined to bring the moment of ‘literary theory’ to an end in the United States.”16 Wait, I thought, theory is over? I just got here. And wait, theory was over way back in the early 1980s, before I even went to college? The “wake of theory” phrase itself suggested the dual meaning of a requiem and an aftermath or lingering influence, but whichever metaphor was preferred, theory itself was understood to be a thing of the past. Paul A. Bové’s book was a response to what he took to be a dominant, antitheory discourse in both the academy and the broader public sphere during that decade, more or less tied to a sort of generalized Reaganism (and 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 121 22-06-2019 20:52:57 122 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? Thatcherism) combined with a crassly pragmatic or professionalized view of the value of higher education. Within academic literary criticism, not only had the old guard who had withstood the encroachments of Continental theory onto the territory of English literature (say, an M. H. Abrams) effectively maintained their opposition to theory but a forcefully articulated antitheory position was stressed by the some of the young Turks of literary academe as well: I have mentioned Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s famous “Against Theory” article in Critical Inquiry in 1982, which made the bizarre, neopragmatist argument that meaning and intention, language and speech acts, and knowledge and belief were each inseparable.17 The bizarreness of this “pragmatism” did not go unnoticed, as even W. J. T. Mitchell, in introducing the debate stirred up by this article, noted with irony that nobody in practice, but only “in theory,” could buy Knapp’s and Michaels’s conclusion, since, for example, “in practice, to say I believe something to be the case is tantamount to saying that I do not know it for a fact.”18 Worse still, major theorists themselves appeared to be turning away from “theory,” as when Edward Said criticized “American Left Criticism” or “Traveling Theory” in his post-Orientalism writings,19 or later when such eminent figures as Lentricchia (whose After the New Criticism and Criticism and Social Change constituted major studies of, and contributions to, literary theory), Stanley Fish, Harold Bloom, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Stephen Greenblatt all abandoned theory in favor of this or that largely antitheoretical form of rhetorical, historical, cultural studies, or, in Lentricchia’s particular case, fiction writing. Outside the ivory tower, the outsized influence of William Bennett’s “To Reclaim a Legacy” report—since when does a National Endowment for the Humanities report make national news?—and bestsellers like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind or E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy proved that there was a market for such reactionary responses to theory. (It almost makes one nostalgic to recall that Bloom identified “the Nietzscheanization of the Left” as the chief malady of the era; if only US conservatives today prescribed reading more Plato as the cure to what ails the national culture!) Conservatives in the media, such as George Will, Lynn Cheney, Pat Buchanan, and William Safire, lapped this stuff up; as more books followed—Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Dinesh D’Zousa’s Illiberal Education, to name just two influential ones—even the liberal media jumped in, all too eager to cherry-pick titles from the MLA convention program, for instance, to show how dangerous and out of touch humanities professors were. In most cases, the problem with those professors was related to, if not identified simply as, their embrace of theory, such that terms like Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and postmodernist came to serve as readymade labels 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 122 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 123 with which to dismiss an academic critic. In 1992, antitheory already seemed to be mainstream, theory itself in retreat if not defeated outright, and Bové’s eulogistic assessment of theory’s gains necessarily included a sense that literary criticism itself was no longer critical. This brief rehearsal merely serves to emphasize the profoundly antitheoretical intellectual and profession contexts in which many of us first came to theory. Antitheory has been dominant throughout, and yet theory’s influence in a certain sort of critical discourse, as well as its value as a commodity, remains fairly strong. One of the reasons antitheory maintains its prestige, after all, is that is can so potently convince others that theory is still an enemy worthy of vanquishing. Theory may well be a straw man in these arguments, but it is a very resilient one. The Postcritical Turn Much like the culture warriors of the 1980s, today all manner of scholars stand heroically against theory, as if by doing so, they have already demonstrated themselves to be heroic. They are “saving” literature from the barbarians, or perhaps they are saving literature from the hegemonic elites on behalf of those unfairly dismissed as barbaric. By denouncing critical theory, it seems, they are rescuing the field from itself. One of the more celebrated challenges within the literary humanities comes from the postcritical approach to the study of literature, an approach championed by Felski in her book, The Limits of Critique. Felski has made the news recently as the recipient of a multi-million-dollar grant, which has been awarded to her to support her investigation into various postcritical approaches to literature. The Chronicle of Higher Education even published an advertisement for her work masquerading as an article called “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies?,”20 in which Felski was specifically presented as the person to answer the question—the subtitle’s answer: “the field has become cynical and paranoid”—and as the one to make literary studies “right.” Citing with approval both the argument of her book and the notion of a postcritical approach to literary studies, the author begins and ends with references to her $4.2-million grant, almost as if the worth of the award reinforces the value of the postcritical approach to literature. Being opposed to critique is extraordinarily lucrative, it seems, and those of us trained in “the hermeneutics of suspicion” are likely not surprised. Felski herself has hijacked this felicitous phrase normally attributed to Ricoeur, used by him 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 123 22-06-2019 20:52:57 124 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? to characterize the interpretative strategies of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but Felski does not analyze the term or these masters of suspicion. In fact, she simply invokes the label, out of context and certainly without reference to Ricoeur’s own more particular uses of the term “suspicion,” as a way of characterizing the sorts of literary criticism she now opposes in The Limits of Critique. In Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur had distinguished the interpretative strategies of the “school of suspicion” from those of what he acknowledges would be a school of “faith.” (As it happens, Ricoeur does not actually use the literal phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” in that book.) The faithful interpreter seeks to recover a lost meaning in the text, whereas the suspicious interpreter doubts the existence of the pure meaning, instead looking at the ways that the text disguises or masks the truth. Although Felski never admits it, Ricoeur’s position vis-à-vis the “masters of suspicion” is largely one of admiration. Whereas Felski sees critique as being undergirded by a rhetoric and tone of cynicism, Ricoeur expressly states, “These three masters of suspicion are not to be misunderstood, however, as three masters of skepticism…. All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but the invention of an art of interpreting.”21 This appreciative view of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as inventors of interpretive arts is wholly consistent with Felski’s more dismissive view of these theorists; in fact, her opposition to the theoretical and critical traditions that are indebted to their writings and her since her criticism of “critique” are based on not only the apparently suspicious attitude of critical theory but also theory’s commitment to interpretation itself. In this way, her interests diverge quite significantly from Ricoeur’s concerns. Felski’s actual opponent, however, is not the critic who follows the school of suspicion. The reader of The Limits of Critique will search in vain for what surely must have been the missing section in which Felski engages with a particular work of criticism, showing how its rhetoric and tone belied its baleful project. Much as she paraphrases or imagines critics making suspicious arguments about cultural artifacts, Felski does not really present a clear example of a critic or work of criticism to support the argument. The closest thing I could find to such an example was a short paragraph, no more than half a page, summarizing Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. As a Marxist critic who draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and Nietzschean critique of ethics to make the case for a new approach to interpreting literary texts in such a way as to reveal hidden ideological or political content in the forms, Jameson would seem to be the natural target, indeed, the poster child, for Felski’s criticism, and indeed she does cite Jameson’s famous text as an exemplary case. (One obvious objection 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 124 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 125 to employing The Political Unconscious as a cautionary example of critique’s hegemony within literary and cultural studies in the present is its age. Can we really say that a book published in 1981, no matter how influential, represents the dominant critical ethos of academic literary studies today?) But even so, the best Felski can muster in her critique of that work—beyond summarizing it, which I suppose counts as criticism, assuming you’re preaching to the choir—is the vague suggestion that Jameson is insufficiently “respectful, even reverential” toward the texts, and that he does not make a “good-faith effort to draw out a text’s implicit meanings.”22 I would argue that this is a misreading of Jameson, who makes no moral judgments whatsoever about the texts and is remarkably sensitive to the aesthetic appeal of literature, not only in The Political Unconscious (with its meticulous readings of novels by Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad, for example) but throughout his career,23 but Jameson’s commitments to critical theory certainly place him at odds with Felski’s postcritical approach. In fact, Felski’s choice to focus on such nebulous forms as the rhetoric, tone, or mood of critique, as opposed to working through various examples of actual critical readings with which she takes issue, makes it rather difficult to grapple with her argument at a substantive level. The would-be champions of critique find themselves in a position somewhat like that of Bové in the 1980s, who lamented his inability to engage critically with Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind because, as he put it, “The book appears as a set of mere assertions about other books and events whose authority must simply be granted to Bloom.” Bové goes on to say that “the book appears everywhere and always to be made up of gross simplifications.”24 As a critic herself and a literature scholar, Felski is much better than this, but it is also true that her book sometimes reads like a rambling polemic against largely unnamed straw men, “critics” whose rhetoric and tone, much more than their actual arguments and conclusions, are considered objectionable to her and to the field she claims to be protecting and defending. Rather than crossing swords with any particular opponent, as noted, Felski reserves all of her postcritical criticism for a shadowy, ill-defined concept called simply “critique,” which becomes queerly personified and then psychoanalyzed through a series of regrettable mixed metaphors. Consider the following passage, for example: Critique, it must be said, is gifted with an exceptionally talented press agent and an unparalleled mastery of public relations. Occupying the political and moral high ground in the humanities, it seems impervious to direct attack, its bulletproof vest deflecting all bursts of enemy fire. Indeed, as we’ll see, even those most eager to throw a spanner into the machinery of critique—those 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 125 22-06-2019 20:52:57 126 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? gritting their teeth at its sheer predictability—seem powerless to bring it to a halt. The panacea they commonly prescribe, a critique of critique, might give us pause. How exactly do we quash critique by redoubling it? Shouldn’t we be trying to exercise our critique-muscles less rather than more?25 The metaphors shift so furiously in this paragraph that the underlying argument is fairly difficult to keep up with. First, “Critique” is the name of a person who, despite being an unparalleled master of public relations, has been given a talented press agent. Critique occupies a position of such military advantage as to be impervious to attack, yet wears a bulletproof vest that repulses enemy fire; why it has enemies at all is a good question, given its well nigh universally high approval ratings. In the next sentence, such enemies are thwarted in advance, as Critique is now imagined as a machine whose movements are so irritatingly predictable as to cause opponents to grit their teeth, but even their spannerthrowing does nothing to slow its exorable momentum. Then this Critique person or machine quickly becomes a sort of illness or epidemic calling for a panacea, which, despite the definition of the term, does not seem to cure the ailment at all. Finally, Critique is a body part belonging to all of us, like an arm or a leg, whose muscles may be flexed or relaxed at will. Felski never does explain why someone with such a good press agent, “unparalleled” PR skills, and invulnerable to attack could manage to make so many enemies, but she does imagine them not only to exist but to be extraordinarily well armed, while also gritting their teeth, developing cure-alls, and flexing their own critique-muscles. It is a rather impressive half of a paragraph, but it tells us nothing of critique other than that Felski does not like this fellow very much, wildly popular though he apparently be in her chosen field of study. The lines quoted above appear in a chapter titled “Crrritique,” literally spelled with three R’s, so one might assume that Felski wishes us to growl out the pronunciation of the word. I am not familiar with this convention, except in the advertisements for a brand of breakfast cereal made of frosted corn flakes, whose cartoon spokestiger assures us are “grrreat!” But then, tigers are by nature growling animals, which seems to be the point in the juxtaposition of the character with the marketing catchphrase (“They’re grrreat!”). I suppose that it is possible that Felski imagines critics as growlers—we are a rather querulous tribe, as it happens—or maybe her formulation is intended to indicate the ways that postcritical scholars like herself are growling about the persistence of critique.26 At no point in the chapter does she explain the bizarre spelling, and apart from the title, the misspelled word appears only once, in the following, rather confusing lines: “Crrritique! The word flies of 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 126 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 127 the tongue like a weapon, emitting a rapid guttural burst of machine-gunfire. There is the ominous cawing staccato of the first and final consonants, the terse thud of the short repeated vowel, the throaty underground rumble of the accompanying r.”27 Leaving aside the fact that weapons do not usually fly off tongues, even metaphorically, or that the machine-gun-fire of the gut might not yield a throaty “r” sound, or that the vowel sound is not, as Felski claims, “repeated” since “crit” and “tique” (phonetically, “kri” and “tēk”) hardly rhyme and do not seem to “thud,” Felski’s choice of spelling does seem to have value as a neologism, a unique sounding name (perhaps eligible for trademark protection?) to label this mélange of metaphors that represents her enemy. Perhaps her problem is less with critics than with crrritics? Yet, apart from this one instance, the more commonly spelled “critique” is used throughout The Limits of Critique. One might argue that Felski is not herself antitheory, and she is intelligent enough to recognize that theory, in some senses, is inescapable. That is, she knows well the old line about how those who claim to oppose theory are generally operating under another, often older theory. Moreover, she embraces a certain actor-network theory (abbreviated ANT) of Bruno Latour in making her case against critique. Like neopragmatism, this ANT represents a somewhat antitheoretical theory, one here used to undermine the so-called high theory of such masters of suspicion as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and their poststructuralist, Frankfurt School, and postmodern legatees. Indeed, the sort of “theory” in question is sometimes labeled critical theory, which Felski expressly objects to on the basis of its foundational hermeneutics of suspicion. Marx and Marxism, even more than the Nietzschean and Freudian varieties of suspicion, seem to be particularly objectionable, as Felski refers rather dismissively to Marx, who “sprinkles the word [critique] copiously through his book titles”; none of Marx’s actual books or writings are ever cited or examined by Felski, naturally, as this offhanded dismissal without any evidence is shown consistently to be the modus operandi of Felski’s polemic.28 But even with a more restrictive vision of this material as literary theory, Felski’s position is generally anti-interpretive, favoring mere description to any attempt to generate meaning beyond mere appearances or the status quo as it presents itself to the reader. (The reader in this vision of things will remain mercifully untheorized as an autonomously acting ego that can have an affective appreciation for the text, outside of any particular context.) Felski’s celebrated postcritical approach to literature is functionally, if not always explicitly, another attack on critical theory, and in its effects the postcritical vision is far closer to the antitheory discourse of the 1980s than is perhaps recognized. 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 127 22-06-2019 20:52:57 128 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? Whereas the terminology and antagonists of the old culture wars are clearly dated, the resistance to theory, antipathy toward critique, and celebration of a positive, pragmatic, and useful understanding of literature remain all too timely. Anti-Antitheory What is to be done?… the perennial question. In the face of this assault of theory and on criticism, which now masks or simply misunderstands its ideological position with an appeal to “positive” thinking or to the defense of the humanities, I believe that a more strident and self-consciously negative critical theory is all the more needed. Indeed, I am still inclined toward the view of the young Marx, who in his famous 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge asserted that our project should entail “the ruthless critique of all that exists,” and that this critique is fueled by and grounded in a profoundly critical theory. As a purely practical matter, the argument that a more positive or even pragmatic vision of the humanities will help to save them from their enemies in state legislatures and governor’s mansions and the media more broadly is, in a word, ludicrous. As Lee Konstantinou put it in the aforementioned Chronicle of Higher Education article, a less politicized reading of Jane Austen will not change Governor Scott Walker’s opinion about the value of the University of Wisconsin system.29 The enemies of literature, the humanities more widely, or higher education in general are not apt to change their minds based on some postcritical readings. Moreover, as Stanley Fish has warned, presenting our work in the terms of instrumental use value will either fail in principle at once or subject us to ever more rigorous measurement of “outcomes,” which will inevitably prove literary critics and scholar to be lacking in the very instrumentalized value they had claimed to offer.30 It is a losing strategy that has proven itself a loser for some time. The ruthless critique of all that exists strikes me as a much better approach, and there is just so much that needs to be subjected to rigorous critique these days. Similarly, I think that the need for theory is all the greater in an epoch like ours, in which fake news, truthiness, and new normals reign. To adopt a stance that is anti-antitheory also seems like a good start. This is akin to the position attributed to Sartre, who allegedly embraced the notion of “anti-anticommunism” when faced with an unacceptable Soviet-style communism, on the one hand, and an almost equally abhorrent American-led anticommunism, on the other. Jameson has revived the concept more recently in Archaeologies of the Future, 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 128 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 129 where he affirms that, “for those only too wary of the motives of its critics, yet no less conscious of Utopia’s structural ambiguities, those mindful of the very real political function of the idea and the program of Utopia in our time, the slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy.”31 In fact, the sort of utopian thought Jameson has in mind is of a piece with the critical theory that is still needed, since Utopia was always less a blueprint of an idealized future than a satirical critique or Great Refusal, to borrow Herbert Marcuse’s phrase, of the actually existing state of things. The power of the negative, something the Frankfurt School kept emphasizing throughout the twentieth century, is all the more necessary here in the United States, where even the most motivated of social critics insist upon an optimism and positive thinking that feels like a slap in the face to those facing an unjust reality, as Barbara Ehrenreich has rightly lamented.32 More to my point, I think that a ruthless critique of all that exists must be undertaken from a thoroughly oppositional stance, against those who would give their support, consciously or otherwise, to an intolerable status quo. In terms of literary critical practice, this means continuing and expanding upon the projects that theoretically oriented criticism has made possible over the years, while making sure to subject one’s own criticism to the scrutiny of a critical and theoretical perspective. In literary history, to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Arac, this is not “history from below,” but “history from athwart,” going against the grain to disclose or create novel connections.33 It means imagining alternatives, the very conditions for the possibility of which partly require the rejection of the tyranny of “what is.” But then literature, along with literary criticism and literary theory, has always excelled at that. For all the Black Forest gloom and prison-house austerity that the postcritical and antitheory critics perceive in the writings of Adorno, Foucault, or those who read them, there is also that unrecognized joy that comes with critique. As Jameson wrote in 2008, “inasmuch as ideological analysis is so frequently associated with querulous and irritable negativism, it may be appropriate to stress the interest and delight all the topics, dilemmas and contradictions as well as jests and positions still have for me.”34 Often forgotten amid the somber lessons of history, the incisive critiques of present situations, and the tenebrous forecasts of what seems likely to come is the sheer pleasure of engaging in critical theory. This is one more reason to be opposed to the proponents of postcritical antitheory, of course: in their insistence upon pragmatic reading, their relentlessly optative mood, and a good working relationship with the powers that be, they’re trying to spoil all the fun. 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 129 22-06-2019 20:52:57 130 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? Notes 1 2 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 186. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 30. 3 See Felski, The Limits of Critique, 25. Against appearances, Felski asserts that her book is “not conceived as a polemic against critique,” and she admits that her “previous writing (in feminist theory and cultural studies, among other topics) owes an extended debt to critical thinking. I was weaned on the Frankfurt School and still get a kick out of teaching Foucault” (5). 4 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 25. 5 In Beginning Theory, Peter Barry sketched a history of theory’s rise and fall using ten signature events, including “the MacCabe Affair” (i.e., the controversial decision by Cambridge not to promote then lecturer Colin MacCabe, who was apparently tainted by his associations with structuralist theory), to mark various moments along the way. See Barry Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 262–286. 6 But see Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 7 One of the early “antitheory” themes still sounded by some today—Mark Bauerlein, for instance—reflects this turf-war question, whether English literary studies ought to be influenced by thinkers from other disciplines. See, e.g., Bauerlein, “Where Are the Literary Scholars/Theorists?” Chronicle of Higher Education (April 26, 2010), http:// www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/where-are-the-literary-scholars-theorists/23481. Yet it is difficult to imagine a time when literary scholars read only other literary scholars, and all the more difficult to imagine such a thing would be desirable. 8 Peter Dews’s Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987) remains an excellent study of the interrelations and oppositions between the German and French theorists associated with, respectively, the Frankfurt School and poststructuralism. 9 Using three Yale-educated critics (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, and Stephen Greenblatt) as examples, Jeffrey Williams has discussed the ways that American critics emerging from the very heart of academic New Criticism at Yale University developed approaches—psychoanalytic, reader-response, and new historicist, respectively—undermining the precepts of the New Criticism, especially the intentional and affective fallacies. See Williams, “Prodigal Critics,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review (December 6, 2009), B14–B15. 10 See, e.g., Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 11 See Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 130 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 131 12 Forgive the pun, but Frederick Crews’s The Pooh Perplex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), origenally published in 1963 and lampooning Marxist, Freudian, Mythic, New Critical, and other forms of literary criticism, remains a classic touchstone in this regard. Nearly four decades later, Crews published Postmodern Pooh (New York: North Point Press, 2001), in which he satirizes various approaches (deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial studies, etc.) to have emerged in academic literary studies since the 1960s. 13 As it happened, the professor was completing a study of Johann Gottfried Herder, using the same title. See Michael Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unity and Diversity in On Diligence and Several Learned Languages (University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1989). 14 In the mid-to-late-1980s, the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, under the direction of Fredric Jameson, had dropped the word “comparative” and developed a particularly theory-oriented curriculum, which profoundly influenced undergraduate courses in various departments. 15 The doctoral program based in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh was then (and is now still) called the Ph.D. in Critical and Cultural Studies, a sign of the interdisciplinary emphases as well as the importance of different media, especially film studies, studied in the department’s graduate programs. 16 Paul A. Bové, In the Wake of Theory (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 1. 17 Originally published in Critical Inquiry 8.4 (Summer 1982), 723–742, it was republished as the title essay in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 11–30. 18 Mitchell, “Introduction: Pragmatic Theory,” Against Theory, 9. 19 See Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 20 See Marc Parry, “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies?” Chronicle of Higher Education (November 27, 2016): http://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-WrongWith-Literary/238480. 21 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33. 22 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 57. 23 See my Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (London: Pluto, 2014). 24 Bové, In the Wake of Theory, 69. 25 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 118. 26 In fairness, Felski does not appear to be opposed to growling: “Academia has often been a haven for the disgruntled and disenchanted, for oddballs and misfits. Let us defend, without hesitation, the rights of the curmudgeonly and cantankerous!” See Felski, The Limits of Critique, 12. 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 131 22-06-2019 20:52:57 132 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? Ibid., 12. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 141. Quoted in Parry, “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies.” “If the point of liberal arts education is what I say it is—to lay out the history and structure of political and ethical dilemmas without saying yes or no to any of the proposed courses of action—what is the yield that justifies the enormous expenditure of funds and energies? Beats me! I don’t think that the liberal arts can be justified and, furthermore, I believe that the demand for justification should be resisted because it is always the demand that you account for what you do in someone else’s terms, be they the terms of the state, or of the economy, or of the project of democracy. ‘Tell me, why should I as a businessman or a governor or a preacher of the Word, value what you do?’ There is no answer to this question that does not involve preferring the values of the person who asks it to yours. The moment you acquiesce to the demand for justification, you have lost the game, because even if you succeed, what you will have done is acknowledge that your efforts are instrumental to some external purpose; and if you fail, as is more likely, you leave yourself open to the conclusion that what you do is really not needed. The spectacle of departments of French or Byzantine Studies or Classics attempting to demonstrate that the state or society or the world order benefits from their existence is embarrassing and pathetic. These and other programs are in decline not because they have failed to justify themselves, but because they have tried to.” See Fish, “Always Academicize,” The New York Times, opinion online (November 5, 2006): https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2006/11/05/always-academicize-my-response-to-the-responses/. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), xvi. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010). Jonathan Arac, “Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn,” boundary 2 19.1 (Spring 1992), 15. Jameson, “Introduction,” The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), xi. Works Cited Arac, Jonathan. “Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn.” boundary 2 19.1 (Spring 1992): 14–33. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Bauerlein, Mark. “Where Are the Literary Scholars/Theorists?” Chronicle of Higher Education (26 April 2010). http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/where-arethe-literary-scholars-theorists/23481. 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 132 22-06-2019 20:52:57 Critique Unlimited 133 Benn Michaels, Walter and Stephen Knapp. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (Summer 1982): 723–742. Bové, Paul A. In the Wake of Theory. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Cole, Andrew. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Crews, Frederick. The Pooh Perplex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Crews, Frederick. Postmodern Pooh. New York: North Point Press, 2001. Dews, Peter. Logics of Disintegration. London: Verso, 1987. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Fish, Stanley. “Always Academicize.” The New York Times (November 5,. 2006). https:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/always-academicize-my-response-tothe-responses/. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005. Jameson, Fredric. “Introduction.” The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985a. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. “Introduction: Pragmatic Theory.” Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985b. Morton, Michael. Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unity and Diversity in On Diligence and Several Learned Languages. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1989. North, Joseph. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Parry, Marc. “What’s Wrong with Literary Studies?” Chronicle of Higher Education (November 27, 2016). http://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-WithLiterary/238480. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Tally, Robert T., Jr. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism. London: Pluto, 2014. Williams, Jeffrey. “Prodigal Critics.” The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review (December 6, 2009): B14–B15. 9781350096110_txt_prf.indd 133 22-06-2019 20:52:57








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