#post-critical

Critique tends to unravel values and to expose their contingencies. ‘The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert’, claims Latour in his famous essay ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ (sounding a bit Olympian himself here).22 Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48, 239.View all notes The turn to ‘post-critique’ marks in part an urge to connect literary studies and the humanities to a language of positive value. A follow-up collection of essays edited by Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker declares that we are ‘currently in the midst of a recalibration of thought and practice whose consequences are difficult to predict’.33 Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.View all notes Yet, there are strong dissenting voices who suggest that forsaking critique is buckling to reactionary pressure and threatens to strip the discipline of its ethical and political purpose. In a waspish contribution to the PMLA forum on Felski’s book, Bruce Robbins accuses her of putting the discipline through a ‘corporate restructuring’ and even suggests that there would have been less opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq ‘if Felski and her allies were to get their wish’.44 Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76, 372.View all notes (If only the structuralists had done a better job in clearing out the Leavisites, perhaps we might have avoided Trump and Brexit too.)

If some English professors are turning more to the ‘literary’ than the ‘critical’ side of ‘Lit Crit’, there may be good intellectual and political reasons for it. While understandably many in the profession deplore giving up the role of Batman to play Robin, those who advance post-critique are not trembling liberal humanists or anti-‘Theory’ reactionaries, getting their chance at last to reinstate courses on ‘Great Books’. It is no coincidence that queer theory, schooled in the dismantling of normativity, would be amongst the first to twist the spirit of suspicion back onto itself. Cardinal in this regard is of course Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic 2003 essay on ‘paranoid reading’, a sophisticated analysis of how the sclerotic grooves of suspicion and paranoia, in inhibiting shock and hope, can stymie the affective, epistemological and political possibilities of criticism.55 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.View all notes Other figures with backgrounds in feminism, object-orientated ontology, actor network theory and deconstruction have developed the sense of weariness and fatigue with the dominance of a tone and attitude of cynicism and skepticism.

There are institutional reasons too. As Andrew Hadfield argued in this journal in 2014, the calls in the 1980s for literary studies to expand into an all-embracing political criticism ‘actually made subjects like English inchoate, unfocussed, arrogant, and over-ambitious in their aims and understanding of what they could achieve’.66 Andrew Hadfield, ‘Turning Point: The Wheel Has Come Full Circle’, Textual Practice, 28.1 (2014), pp. 1–8, 5.View all notes In this respect, the renewed openness to the ‘literary’ is actually a sharpening of disciplinary focus and indeed social effect, not because it is a capitulation to a managerial university and neo-liberal ideology but rather because it affords the discipline better equipment to defend its province. Felksi claims:

Literary studies is currently facing a legitimation crisis, thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves us struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? In recent decades, such questions have often been waved away as idealistic or ideological, thanks to the sway of an endemically skeptical mind-set. In the best-case scenario, novels and plays and poems get some respect, but on purely tautological grounds: as critical thinkers, we value literature because it engages in critique! (5)

It is precisely this stripping away of evaluative language that has left literary studies shivering on the heath and exposed to the cold blasts of instrumentalism and accountability. In reanimating a language of positive good for literature, post-criticism can contribute not just to the sense of the worth of the discipline and its subject matter, but to its articulation of that purpose to external audiences. Relatedly, there has been a surge in explicit treatment of ‘value’ as a category of analysis in literary studies in recent years.77 For example Cambridge University Press has published a number of ‘value of’ titles designed to encourage affirmative articulations of the point and purpose of a subject. They include Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (2015) and my edited collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (2015).View all notes

The critical spirit seeks to perforate disciplinary boundaries, exposing their constructedness and artificiality. Yet, removing the distinct sorts of knowledge that a discipline like literary studies offers makes it hard to protect from institutionalised streamlining and rationalisation: the deforming pressure placed upon subjects like English to model themselves on the sciences. Arguing for literary studies as having an identity and discrete object pushes against this force, preserving the discipline from bureaucratic equivalence. Moreover, from a student’s point of view, if there is no distinction between literature and other cultural products, why not enrol in media studies? If inculcating critical thought is the main goal of the humanities (and everyone on campus, from radical sociology lecturer to the vice chancellor, tends to pay obeisance to ‘critical thinking’), why not gain that skill through a vocational degree?

It is no longer common, as it was in the 1980s, to hold the word ‘literature’ between ideological safety tongs, a loaded and old-fashioned word that should always be ironised by scare quotes. In diverse hands, from Jacques Rancière to Derek Attridge, the literary has made a forceful return to literary studies.88 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la literature (Paris: Galilée, 2007); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).View all notes But its return tends more to the event than the object, with an emphasis on the sorts of cultural and experiential effects that literary reading enacts. Literary value does not lie in a mummified canon with its eternal verities, but rather emerges through an affective encounter with alternative possibilities, an intimacy with alterity that is incipiently political. Attridge holds that ‘the particular value of literature (which it shares with the other arts at their best) lies in that event whereby closed thoughts, feelings and ways of behaving and perceiving, are opened up to that which they have excluded’.99 Derek Attridge, ‘Literary Experience and the Value of Criticism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 249–62, 254–55.View all notes

Of course, the idea that the literary work enacts its own struggle with history and ideology, before the knowing critic comes along to helpfully point out the contradictions, is hardly new. The broad-brush caricature of critique that Felski needs for her polemic inevitably underplays the complexities and multiplicities of actual critical work. Political-minded critics have often worked with an attitude of attachment, rather than irony, reading with as well as against the grain of an artwork. These readers (and they include a figure like Frederic Jameson, often a target for post-critical advocates) tease out the instability and multivocality of texts not to expose their ideological collusion or self-contradiction but to see social critique anticipated in the work itself. This tradition of political reading, perhaps best represented by Theodor Adorno, demands a merging of critic with text, not the assertion of distance and difference.

The ebbing of the hermeneutic of suspicion is, therefore, exaggerated both by Felski and her detractors, not least because critique has always been contaminated with affirmative moments, just as post-critique is shot through with the negation it often ostensibly disavows. So critique has not run out of steam. But it may have to share the line with other trains. Felski sees it coexisting with other moods and approaches, as ‘one possible path, rather than the manifest destiny of literary studies’ (9). A wholly non-critical literary studies is impossible to conceive, but it would surely be a shudder-fest, the sloppy fandom that Felski’s detractors imagine. Or, worse, it would turn literary studies into a grimly positivist exercise, involving arid fact gathering and bloodless annotation. Neither approach would help define a disciplinary purpose: that would need some critical grit, some engagement with normative discourse, beyond mere taste or appreciation.

Happily, therefore, the post-critical moment is not a putsch but an extension of the franchise. Felski insists that she is redescribing rather than refuting, decentring rather than demolishing. There is nothing parricidal going on here, no reason for the critical minded to get upset. One reason presumably why she emphasises her project as an expansion rather than an overthrow is to escape the glaring accusation that could be levelled at her project: that hers is simply a critique of critique. That she is guilty precisely of that which she decries. And indeed, Felski’s polemic, like Latour’s, does often have a bracing sense of J’accuse. Even as she seeks to disarm critique of its tonal and attitudinal weaponry, it is hard not to notice that she herself is doing quite a bit of ‘debunking’, ‘exposing’ and ‘demystifying’. If symptomatic reading seeks to reveal hidden structures and assumptions in a text or literary work, then this is precisely what Felski does to critique, exposing its ‘repertoire of stories, similes, tropes, verbal gambits and rhetorical ploys’ (7). Like an assiduous critic, she exposes the tone and mood of the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, running her finger around its discursive shape in a metacommentary that assumes the anterior perspective, that gets behind rather than in front. Even as they urge us to own our attachments and to disavow our irony, post-critique manifestos cannot but deploy an attitude of distantiation and debunking.

This seeming bind is inevitable – indeed at the end of her book, Felski tacitly admits the contradiction, claiming that she has sought, ‘through shadings of style and tone’, to lean ‘on the side of criticism rather than critique’ (192). Yet, Felski’s argument, even if it leads her into a performative contradiction, is all the better for its robust suspicion. Her point is that critique has investments and compacts that it represses, an evaluative attitude or disposition behind its knowing ironies. If critique has hidden affects, then, conversely, post-critique deploys the suspicious methods that it ostensibly decries. Critique and credulity are often twisted in the same braid, just as the critical and the creative often interfuse in both literary works and commentary upon them.

Critique is often leery about values and judgments, especially aesthetic ones. Values are there to be ‘interrogated’. Where do they come from? Whose power interests are served by them? Critique produces negation after negation, like a child continually responding ‘why?’ to every answer. The turn against critique emerges in part from exasperation at this tourniquet around evaluative language, including that of literary appreciation. However, even if, as Felski attests, the critical spirit has an ethos that manifests as ‘antinormative normativity: skepticism as dogma’, it does still have an ethos (9). Highly critical movements like Marxism, feminism or post-colonialism clearly have avowed and overt anti-oppressive politics. Though such political and ethical projects deploy critique as a cardinal tool, they also need the vigilance demanded when putting acid in a bucket or handling a Rottweiler. The critical spirit hungers for the anterior, seeks to get outside convention and unveil delusion. All normativity and value judgements are subject to exposure and unmasking by a critical eye, including those held by the watcher. The philosopher who most thought through this dilemma was Nietzsche. Paul Ricoeur, who gave us the influential handle the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, identified Nietzsche as well as Marx and Freud as the great triumvirate who founded the ‘school of suspicion’.1010 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.View all notes However, as Benjamin Noys points out, Nietzsche is often omitted by those advocating anti-critique ‘because although he can be read as a “master of suspicion” his orientation to an affirmative thinking provides one of the major sources of anti-critique as well’.1111 Benjamin Noys, ‘Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21.4 (2017), pp. 295–308, 297.View all notes Noys might have pointed out, conversely, that it is Nietzsche who explores the philosophical path of negation most exhaustively. If the great theorist of nihilism reaches an affirmative, anti-critical conclusion, it is only by thinking through to its end the unchecked power of critique as the solvent of human value. Nietzsche spearheaded the genealogical method, but he saw that the will-to-truth would destroy the edifice of value and that it led to a recursive spiral into nihilism.

The most sophisticated thinkers of critique after Nietzsche – figures like Adorno, Foucault and Butler – have variously sought to grapple with versions of this dilemma, even as they recognised the pressing need to think the negative. What and where are the normative bases on which critical judgments are made? How can those judgments avoid reproducing contaminated abstractions from the given truth regimes? For Judith Butler, the solution to ‘these tears in the fabric of our epistemological web’ is precisely more intense critical thinking: ‘the very debate in which the strong normative view wars with critical theory may produce precisely that form of discursive impasse from which the necessity and urgency of critique emerges’.1212 Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 215.View all notes Nonetheless, if critique starts out as being that which silences and shames cultural value, exposing its historical and social contingency, it can easily throw the basis of its own ethical premises into doubt too. Recent lamentations that post-structuralist theory tends towards evaluative enervation, too suspicious of foundation or normativity to muster a defence of constructive politics, pick up something of the winnowing of ethical judgment in the scorching glare of critique.

II

‘Surface Reading’: Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best’s handle for the way we read now has gained much traction in the post-critical era.1313 Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Further references in the text.View all notes According to Marcus and Best, interpretation has shifted to observation, a search for latent meanings in texts has given way to a concern with their manifest and obvious features. The shift is evident, they claim, in a range of reading practices, including formalism and empiricism, the growth in book history and the rise of cognitive criticism. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the phrase ‘surface criticism’ covers over a fundamental division in the contemporary critical scene.1414 ‘Rónán McDonald, ‘After Suspicion: Surface, Method, Value’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 235–48.View all notes It is not a new division, but it is one that has emerged anew with the ebbing of critique, like a previously covered fork in the road. I refer to the division between scientific and phenomenological methods, those dedicated to describing material objects and those geared to capturing experiential events or values.

As everyone knows, literary studies since its inception struggled for acceptance as a serious academic discipline, shaking off its belle-lettristic associations in various empirical or rigorous methodologies. One of the appeals of critique, one of the reasons for its success in the final decades of the twentieth century, is that it had the advantage, in institutional terms of allying intellectual tough-mindedness with ethical purpose, combining fashionable dissidence with soi-disant critical rigour, and thus by and large, passed under the methodological watchtowers of the modern university. The detachment and distance cultivated in critique imparted a sense of solid knowledge acquisition, a dispassionate and serious attitude that chimed with the protocols of the modern university. In other words, symptomatic criticism unified literary studies, offering both methodological rigour through hermeneutics and ethical seriousness through ideological critique. It tended towards convergent solutions and determinist causes to the meaning of a text.

The subsiding of the hermeneutic of suspicion has ended this compact and exposed anew the old split in the discipline between the hard facts that underlie philology and scholarship, as a form of Wissenschaft, and the more numinous and capricious dimension of literary criticism. The concept of ‘surface reading’ seeks to bring together the descriptive aspects of both sides, as if the affirmative dimension of post-critique could participate in a new empiricism. It cannot. Their distinction between ‘surface as materiality’ and ‘surface as an affective and ethical stance’ is too yawning (9,10). The literary phenomenologist, describing the experience of reading John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, is engaged in a fundamentally different task to a scholar researching transnational reading distribution in early modern Europe. These projects may both eschew critique, and perhaps both feel freed up in some way by post-symptomatic moment in literary studies, but they are engaged in fundamentally different sorts of knowledge acquisition, even different ideas about what knowledge is.

They do not need to be antagonistic, but we should hesitate before trying to unify them. The differences are of greater significance than that between surface and depth or between description and interpretation. The book history or brain mapping project is likely to sail more easily in institutional terms, explicable as it is to historians, sociologists and scientists. It offers a clear addition to knowledge, its outcomes and methodology are based on the falsifiable claims of empirical research and offer little scandal. I highlight these differences not to set the two approaches against one another or to claim one as more or less legitimate, but rather to identify the institutional difficulties that a non-positivist literary criticism is likely to face. These challenges need to be acknowledged in the wake of symptomatic reading insofar as critique was better equipped to elbow itself some room in scientific company. Whether affective or responsive criticism can do so in a university setting is more questionable. This criticism is not about providing solutions, whether the detective work of symptomatic reading or the factual explanations of scientific criticism, but rather about producing new meanings, about creating divergent values rather than convergent knowledge.

Is there a home in literary studies for that sort of approach? Is there room in university research for the cultivation of varieties of enchantment? Ultimately, the success of the post-critical turn in literary studies will be based on the efficacy of the new mood and method in critical writing (I hesitate to call it ‘research’). Felski et al have shown us the limits of writing against something, precisely by writing against critique. But the institutional challenges of making affective attachment part of the pedagogy and research of academic literary studies remain significant. Yes, there are individual scholars of stature, including those identified here, who have attempted to engage affirmatively with literature beyond the frames and tones of critique. But does the current institutionalisation of literary studies afford room for emerging scholars to write in this vein? Could writing about the effects and affects of one’s reading experience be a legitimate ‘research outcome’? Is this a research project that funding bodies are likely to support with the same enthusiasm as, say, a collaborative investigation into literary sociology or digital technology?

It might seem that this question has already been answered: Felksi has received a widely celebrated $4.2 m grant from the Danish National Research Foundation to pursue her work in the use of literature. Felski’s brand of skilful metacommentary will help build bridges between academic interests and a public who, unlike literature professors, have not had their literary loves trained out of them. But her success does not mean that research funding bodies, with their penchant for clear methodology and rational outcomes, are likely to start funding projects on literary enchantment, unless such experiences have a strongly scientific or empirical dimension. My hunch is that if projects on literary affect or aesthetic attachment attract grants, it will be when they are framed as scientific and instrumental research projects, within such fields as neurocriticism or the medical humanities. Subjective, responsive and evaluative criticism will continue to find its major home outside the university, on the internet and in small magazines.

Felski’s answer to the post-critical challenge, as already noted, is to deploy Latourian Actor Network Theory.1515 Felski co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on Latour and the Humanities in 2016. Vol 47, nos. 2–3.View all notes ANT is dedicated to breaking down divisions between the observer and observed, inside and outside, natural and artificial, science and humanities. The assemblages, affinities and networks of the social produce different institutions and ideologies where knowledge takes place. ANT parades its modesty, its recognition of the complex ecologies of knowledge within which it is enmeshed, and above all the relationality and mutuality of the actors within any system.

Yet, literary studies faces institutional challenges that require it to assert the distinctiveness of the literature, notwithstanding its involvement in the social and normative networks that make it visible. If the close, dense, affective, attached and responsive criticism that is celebrated by post-critique is to flower, then literary studies needs to delineate and defend the discrete mode of knowing that the reading experience offers. This knowing may be formed by networks of complex actors, it may have a social as well as singular side. But it also needs to stake out what it specifically offers to the humanities. Literary studies has been tremendously interactive with other disciplines, and has forged many links with the sciences in recent years. But in order to collaborate, it also needs to cohere. The idea that literature offers a profound and complex form of knowing, distinct from scientific knowledge, evokes the old two cultures debate that marked cultural wars from Coleridge and Bentham to Leavis and Snow. But the lack of a distinctive language of literary value during the theory years means that literary studies was ill-equipped to articulate cultural, as opposed to critical, value against the neo-liberal inflating of STEM subjects (and the implied downgrading of the humanities) within the modern university.

The reanimation of the ‘literary’ in the wake of critique may point a way for the humanities to articulate a non-positive value without collapsing into reflexive negativity and suspicion. In some cases, this project has deployed other intellectual tools, the harnessing of philosophical thinkers who can pressure positivism, or find ways of putting into a critical language the idea familiar from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, that the world is known through imaginative apprehension.1616 Charles Altieri, a key figure in thinking about value in literary study, has written about Steven from this perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). His recent work has deployed Wittgenstein to think about literary and aesthetic values, Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).View all notes It is too soon to say for sure whether literary studies will accommodate the experiential approach that some post-critical advocates have been seeking, one open to subjective responses such as recognition, enchantment and shock, that will allow a richer variety of aesthetic experiences or allow such experiences as part of the remit of the field. Yet, if Anthony Cascardi is right in claiming that literary values are ‘proxies for the value of the humanities more generally’, then there does need to be an articulation of literary value as a distinct discursive space.1717 Anthony Cascardi, ‘The Value of Criticism and the Project of Modernism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 13–26, 14.View all notes The subsidence of critique has allowed a concern with literary aesthetics to reappear, albeit rinsed with historical and theoretical awareness. Engaging with the literary, therefore, could also allow the values of the humanities to assert themselves outside the sciences, to choose their agendas and to demonstrate that part of their value resides, in circular form, in the recognition and generation of cultural and phenomenal good.

Notes

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Reviewed in Textual Practice, 30.4 (2016), pp. 787–90.

Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48, 239.

Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.

Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76, 372.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.

Andrew Hadfield, ‘Turning Point: The Wheel Has Come Full Circle’, Textual Practice, 28.1 (2014), pp. 1–8, 5.

For example Cambridge University Press has published a number of ‘value of’ titles designed to encourage affirmative articulations of the point and purpose of a subject. They include Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (2015) and my edited collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (2015).

Jacques Rancière, Politique de la literature (Paris: Galilée, 2007); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

Derek Attridge, ‘Literary Experience and the Value of Criticism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 249–62, 254–55.

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.

Benjamin Noys, ‘Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21.4 (2017), pp. 295–308, 297.

Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 215.

Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Further references in the text.

‘Rónán McDonald, ‘After Suspicion: Surface, Method, Value’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 235–48.

Felski co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on Latour and the Humanities in 2016. Vol 47, nos. 2–3.

Charles Altieri, a key figure in thinking about value in literary study, has written about Steven from this perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). His recent work has deployed Wittgenstein to think about literary and aesthetic values, Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).