The Turn to Ethics
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The Turn to Ethics

Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

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eBook - ePub

The Turn to Ethics

Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

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What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135205256
Topic
Art
Edition
1
What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics
Lawrence Buell
in literary studies today, the ethical turn seems a groundswell of still uncertain magnitude and even more uncertain focus—a prospect offering grounds for both excitement and caution.
To take the magnitude part first, clearly something is afoot when a half dozen conferences and journal symposia are created around ethics and the literary in the space of a single year; when the Lentricchia-McLaughlin compendium of Critical Terms for Literary Study omits ethics in 1990 but includes it in 1995.1 Exactly how strong a trendline exists? PMLA received forty-six submissions for its special 1999 ethics issue—about the same as for the issues on evidence and on teaching, but far fewer than for those on ethnicity or postcolonialism or African-American studies. My MLA database search for 1981–1997 ethics-related literature scholarship yielded 1339 entries: twice that of deconstruction and epistemology, 30 percent more than hermeneutics, but one-third that of aesthetics, one-quarter of poetics, one-fifteenth of narrative, and one-thirtieth of theory. Yet one-thirtieth of theory is perhaps not such an inconsequential fraction after all.
So much for statistics. Now to ruminate on the more elusive why and what of the matter.
Several interlocking influences must be taken into account if one is to begin to give a satisfactory answer to the question of “Why ethics now?”—Why ethics talk should lately have flourished in literary studies. First, to a considerable extent, it always has, although its chief traditional subgenres (the evaluation of aesthetic merit and the reading of literary texts as moral reflection) were thrown into disarray by the coeval perturbations of the theory revolution and canonical revisionism of the 1970s. Second, ethics talk, of certain kinds anyhow, has been relegitimated during the past dozen years by currents within high theory itself: by Foucault’s revaluation of the category of the self, conceiving of care of the self as an ethical project; by the argument on behalf of deconstructive critical practice as itself an ethic; and by the emergence of Emmanuel Levinas as a post-poststructuralist model for literary-ethical inquiry.2 Third, the turn by philosophers toward the literary as a preferred mode of ethical reflection, such as moral philosophy à la Martha Nussbaum and Richard Eldridge and postepistemological pragmatism à la Richard Rorty.3 Fourth, the ethics-in-the-professions movement, which in medicine and law and other fields has turned to literature as exemplum and/or model.
Much more could be said about background, but this is enough to suggest that the ethical turn is pluriform, not singular, and that it is not ascribable to any one catalytic event, be it the so-called fall of de Man, or the threat to Marxism posed by the Soviet unravelling, or to cultural politics by moral majoritarianism.4
Hence too the rationale for the first of four dimensions of the contemporary ethics-and-literature conversations that I want to single out for remark here:
1. Ethics as earnest noise. The origins of the newer literature and ethics work being disparate and sometimes mutually antagonistic, confusion is predictable, all the more so as “ethics” (whatever we mean by it) becomes increasingly fashionable, thereby tempting one to make a mantra of it, tempting more and more parties to lay claim. There is something that feels extremely heartening and reassuring about placing ethics, with its implication of right conduct, at the center of one’s intellectual enterprise—as a pursuit, ethics may well appear far more high-minded than epistemology or ideology or politics. But by the same token, one may easily also feel—especially in those moments when the sense of exhilaration at engaging in the noble pursuit of ethics recoils to haunt one with the demand for a keener, more scrupulous self-criticism about the rigor and consistency of one’s critical practice—the result may be a considerable sense of queasiness over how freely that signifier (“ethics”) can slide around and metamorphose into something other or less than it seems to denote at first.
A bald recitation of the titles of some of the first twenty items unearthed in my MLA search begins to give a flavor of the as-yet insufficiently acknowledged cacophony:
• “Robert Coover’s The Public Burning and the Ethics of Historical Understanding”
• “Misogyny, Homosexuality, and the Ethics of Passivity in First World War Poetry”
• “Moral Identity and the Good in the Thought of Iris Murdoch”
• “The Ethics of Suspicion in Augustine and Foucault”
• “Of Law and Forgetting: Literature, Ethics, and Legal Judgment”
• “Ethical Roles for the Writing Teacher”
The protean ductility exemplified by this short list of heterogenous projects is a phenomenon hardly unique to the late twentieth century. It dates back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when the emerging culture of professionalism simultaneously began to produce both ethics specialists and “ethics of” discourse, built upon the notion of an ethics specific to this or that given field. The concept of a medical ethics, a legal ethics, a business ethics all seem to take root during the nineteenth century, as also does something sometimes called “literary ethics.”
To my knowledge, the first attempt to define an ethics of the “literary” by a major literary figure occurs in a speech of 1838 by Ralph Waldo Emerson called “Literary Ethics,” delivered to the assembled literary societies of Dartmouth College.5 Unfortunately, like many such firsts, “Literary Ethics” makes a quite underwhelming read today. It is little more than a dumbed-down version of the more famous “American Scholar,” sprinkled with telltale images about the wilderness state of the American hinterland that likely reflected Bostonian presuppositions about the condition in which Emerson fancies he’s found his hinterland auditors. What’s nonetheless strikingly anticipatory about Emerson’s speech in present context is that he doesn’t so much define “ethics” as hold it up as an umbrella term for diffuse reflection on the intellectual resources, the subject matter, and the personal regimen proper to the paradigmatic “scholar” or man of letters. Appeal to “ethics” makes possible a strategic blurring of standard boundaries: between life and work, persons and texts, poesis and academic exercise—as a consequence of which the notion of “ethics” becomes user-friendly to both mainstream and counterhegemonic listeners: both a critique of overspecialized pedantry through its emphasis on how much wider or deeper true scholarship is than that and a way of making even workers in the conventional academic vineyard feel not rejected but endowed with a lofty mission—if they do their jobs right.
Emerson does have an identifiable preferred theoretical matrix for doing ethics, namely, a version of Foucauldian care of the self, but it gets stretched and ambiguated during the course of his semiautonomous reflections on writing, reading, the academy, the state of contemporary American literature and citizenship. Likewise, today, in literature and ethics talk a strong “ethics is this, ethics is that” emphasis may well open up into a more eclectic approach than at first seems likely. J. Hillis Miller did not shrink from invoking “the law of the ethics of reading” in his book of that title, and to define that law as the scrupulous practice of deconstructionist attention to fissures within the text (“rigorous unreliability,” in Barbara Johnson’s phrase);6—as contrasted with (say) how Wayne Booth identifies ethics of reading especially with the vision of literature as moral reflection.7 Yet in practice Miller certainly does not decline to enter into this latter, more traditional mode of ethical reading, as in the studies comprising his sequel, Versions of Pygmalion,8 while Booth for his part acknowledges that certain texts, if not most, border on the unreadable owing to internally inconsistent rhetorics.9 Indeed, the famous passage in de Man’s Allegory of Reading in which he characterizes ethicity as the symptom of “a linguistic confusion” (central to Miller’s formulation of the law of reading ethics) does not flatly restrict the scope of ethics only to that. It acknowledges using “ethics” in an especially stipulated sense, and that the “confusion” at issue arises from dissonance between “two distinct value systems” within the text: a statement that, like portions of the essay leading up to it, at least begins to reopen a vista onto ethics that comprehends ethical values other than discourse codes.10
All this is not to claim that all literature and ethics talk boils down to the same thing, only that it is a scene of overlapping epicenters whose peripheries overlap.
2. Ethics as Relationship. Clearly literature and ethics have to do, among other possible things, with relationships between texts and readers—but what? At one end of one continuum sits the via negativa of rigorous undecidability, at the other Booth’s revival of the neo-Victorian via positiva of reading mediated by the image of the book as companion and friend. Philosophers, such as Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, who turn to what they consider fiction’s more supple and full-blooded ethical mimesis as a corrective or counter to formal reasoning seem to resonate more with the latter view, while the vision of reading as an ethics of difficulty has by and large been maintained more by literary professionals. It is worth a great deal more examination than I am able to provide in this short paper that contemporary literary theory overall has so far been so much more responsive to the dream of philosophy as a form of writing than the dream of literature as moral philosophy. The explanation that the latter is less attractive because less critically sophisticated does not quite seem to suffice. After all, when Clifford Geertz took anthropology on its literary turn, we responded enthusiastically even though his model of ethnography as reading was based on an already obsolescent new critical formalism. Likewise, when Hayden White gave us history as discourse, we cheered him on even though his model of metahistory was based on Northrop Frye’s obsolete archetypalism.11 But when Rorty and Nussbaum try to give us literature as ethical reflection, we are more reluctant to be pulled back to what looks suspiciously like old-fashioned values thematics: the “pre-modern strategy” of making “aesthetic sensibility ultimately subservient to the goal of moral improvement.”12 Perhaps the key difference between this and the previous two cases is not so much the specter of rampant moralism as such as it is longstanding reluctance on the part of many if not most literary scholars to allow the central disciplinary referent or value to be located in anything but language.
Conceivably the situation may change when literary theory more fully assimilates Levinas, whose long-range influence on literary studies remains to be seen. From a distance, Levinas can seem the perfect abettor of the ethical turn away from both poststructuralism and Marxism: trumping Derrida with the claim of ethics’ priority to epistemology, and preempting political criticism by identifying ethicity with acknowledgment of the other. But it takes some fancy footwork to get past his platonistic distrust for art as substitution of image for object. To the extent that one can plausibly redeem Levinas from himself and for literary-ethical theory via the notion of language as ethical expression, as a kind of “saying” unfolded in Otherwise than Being,13 one must sooner or later grant what literary theory has been most reluctant to: a model of artistic representation as surrogate personhood, whether of authorial agent or fictive utterer or evocative text. A Levinasian ethics of criticism would presumably need to fuse a revised version of a deconstructionist vision of the impossibility of reading with a revised version of Booth’s book as friend: the other for whom we feel responsibility prior to any awareness of it.14 I for one would hope to see such an ethics of reading worked out. But one could not succeed without finding plausible ways of rescuing Levinas from himself in other respects also: for example, from his undifferentiated and indeed deliberately underimaged image of the other and his adherence to the model of ethical relation as an affair between two persons, reducing “justice” to the status of a socially necessary but ethically secondary apparatus.15
3. Ethics as imperative. In addition to relationality, “ethics” connotes authoritative, shared operating principles, either as key objective or as central metaphor. In the first vein (principles as key objective), Habermasian so-called communicative ethics is the obvious case: seeking to set conditions that would enable and regulate rational interchange within a discourse community. In the latter vein (principles as metaphor), Geoffrey Harpham takes the position that ethical inquiry in literary studies does not point toward “an ultimately coherent set of concepts, rules, or principles,” but does imply “a factor of ‘imperativity’ immanent in, but not confined to, the practices of language, analysis, narrative, and creation.”16 As the rhetoric of multiple options suggests, however, to define that imperativity factor is much harder than to declare allegiance to it—and the same is true for the Habermasians.
Harpham himself is I think at his best when applying his vision of ethics to formal structures like narrative plot, which he elegantly defines as “a principle of formal necessity that governs the movement towards the union of is and ought.”17 That is by no means imperativity’s only possible locus, however. Just to take one other example, Martha Nussbaum’s view of the ethicity of the worlds that novels imagine—which she characterizes as a dialogue between rule and perception—constitutes a mapping of narrative mimesis equivalent to Harpham’s mapping of plot teleology, though the domain of reference is entirel...

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