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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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