The Character of Criticism

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136088667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why are some critical texts more compelling, memorable, or engaging than others? Can criticism be judged as a discourse of description, explanation, and analysis alone, or do our evaluations reflect other kinds of investments in it? In this book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that the most powerful and effective criticism demands to be read as an expression of a distinctive sensibility, a way of being in the world; it demands, in other words, to be read as a discourse of character.
Through a series of detailed and intimate intellectual portraits of leading critics--Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, and Edward Said--Harpham unfolds the complex and indirect ways in which human character is expressed in criticism. A final chapter on Criticism in a State of Terror assesses the contemporary situation. The Character of Criticism represents not just a snapshot of contemporary criticism but a fresh approach to criticism itself that clarifies the stakes involved for writers and readers of criticism alike. It does so not by making difficult thinking easy but by making it stranger--more idiosyncratic, exotic, and singular.

CHAPTER 1

The Character of Criticism

1. What Matter Who’s Speaking

Many years ago, I acquired a marvelous book called Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Written by Charles Mackay in 1841, it had been reissued in paperback in 1970, one year before I found it in the legendary Papa Bach Bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles.¹ The book detailed instances of popular enthusiasm, in which large groups of hitherto sane people became convinced that black was white, up was down, one could safely leap before looking, tulips were more valuable than any other commodity including money itself, witches were plotting among them, or that the Crusades were an excellent idea easily realized. Throughout history, Mackay wrote in his preface, “we find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first” (xix). I found the book endlessly entertaining, partly because I was untroubled by any suspicion that I was at that very moment at the margins of an event that might have qualified for inclusion in an updated edition.

Just two years before Mackay’s book was reissued, Roland Barthes wrote a brief essay that immediately became a classic. It was called “The Death of the Author,” and in it he argued that “the author,” a personage whose existence had long been taken for granted, was in fact “a modern figure,” conjured into being by a combination of “English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation.”² The author was unknown, Barthes contended, until the modern era of “capitalist ideology,” when “the prestige of the individual” was first conceptualized, along with a host of other ideas that have become so deeply ingrained that it is difficult to think without them. Indeed, the “image of literature” to be found in “ordinary culture” is “tyrannically centred on the author,” in whose person, life, tastes, passions, and ideas are sought the work’s meaning or “explanation” (143). The author blocks our access to a deeper, richer truth, for, buried beneath the ideological deposits of recent centuries lay an unconstrained semiotic infinitude that Barthes presented as if it were both an ancient verity and a modern discovery. “We know now,” he reported, in a tone that sounds today like the anthem of 1968, “that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146).

The implication was inescapable: we must now replace the ideologically useless figure of the Author with that of the “scriptor,” who is to be conceived as simply a kind of writing machine possessed of a dictionary from which words are drawn; and we must replace our veneration for the point of origin with an equally intense but disintoxicated interest in the “destination” of language in the act of reading, which is itself “without history, biography, psychology” (148). The tone of austere derision that Barthes commanded so expertly during his brief period of infatuation with linguistic “science” was, especially to those for whom anything produced in that great year enjoyed a presumption of authenticity, extraordinarily effective in demolishing the prestige of the individual, and indeed prestige in general. The death of the author stood for other deaths—of humanism, subjectivity, literature, interpretation, authority, agency, originality, intentionality. All this—the entire melodrama of creation and its consequences—was now to be discarded, its place taken by the concept of writing, “that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (142).

Like other popular delusions, this one had a bit of truth that had been inflated beyond its natural dimensions. It is reasonable to consider rare and beautiful things such as exotic tulips valuable, but they cannot bear the weight of an entire economy. Similarly, it was interesting and productive tohistoricize the figure of the author and to consider that this figure supported a wide range of unreflected ideological and historical forces; but when this argument was puffed up into a general statement about the nature of language and deployed in the service of a general repudiation of “humanism,” gross distortions crept in. One of the most aggressively antihumanist thinkers was Michel Foucault, who, one year after Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” issued a kind of companion essay called “What Is an Author?” in which he repeated Barthes’s attack on the phantasmatic figure of the author.³ Attempting to detach language from any point of origin in the conscious or intending individual, Foucault insisted that the only object of a properly critical attention was “the functional conditions of specific discursive practices,” for which the “paradoxical singularity of the name of an author” is merely a convenient, if reductive, name. The “essential basis” for writing, Foucault said, “is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears” (116). In perhaps the best-known comment he made in his entire, highly prolific career, Foucault noted that the very concept of man, of which the author is a special instance, is “an invention of recent date,” brought into being by Enlightenment philosophy, copyright laws, and disciplinary and knowledge regimes, soon to be washed away like a figure drawn in the sand.⁴

Under this doomsday paradigm, which Foucault elaborated in The Order of Things, The Archeology of Knowledge, and with an even greater dramatic force in the subsequent “genealogical” phase of his work, the author is to be considered a function of discourse rather than its originator. This emphasis on the ways in which the self is shaped, formed, corrected, normalized, and documented by agencies and structures beyond its knowledge or control made it difficult to imagine how such a thing as a self-aware or self-determining individual might arise within the “regime” of modernity, with its proliferating sites of control. So powerful was the rhetorical force of this work that the “ethical turn” to a concern for the “care of the self” taken in Foucault’s last works seemed to some of his readers almost a self-betrayal rather than a self-realization, thin and unpersuasive by comparison with his earlier and more magisterial anthihumanism.

What the very late work lacked was precisely what made the earlier work so very compelling: an almost visible relish in the contemplation of forms of discipline, observation, and punishment; a certain eagerness to conjure up the thought of large inhuman structures that determined in their deepest interiority the small human subjects that had been under the impression that they had created those structures; a thoroughly awakenedif icily uncompassionate interest in what he seems to be condemning. The late work lacks, in other words, the psychological complexity of what preceded it, and communicates instead a spirit of accommodation and resolution. In early and middle Foucault—the period in which Foucault was considered an exciting, corrosive, and dangerous figure—a line of inquiry and critique is pursued with such fascinated antipathy for the humanistic figure of the enlightened, autonomous, and self-determining subject that the work manages to communicate, beneath its formidable scholarly reserve, something else: a certain pleasure, which nearly deserves to be called perverse, taken in the experience of humiliation.⁵

Most of the schools of thought that were beginning to assert themselves in the 1960s and 1970s contributed something to this perversity. Foucault’s teacher Louis Althusser rejected humanism in all its forms and argued for a more scientific approach that, for example, described ideology not as a coercive system of oppression or even as an ambient atmosphere of convention, but as a “process without a subject.”⁶ Lacanian psychoanalysis updated Freudian thinking by assimilating it to Saussurean linguistics, which had achieved “scientific” status by eliminating from language any consideration of the processes of communication in a social or historical milieu. Under the leadership of Fredric Jameson, Marxist criticism attacked the longstanding critical emphasis on “ethics,” which focused on the choices and fortunes of the individual as a late-capitalist mystification. Jameson proposed instead that “history,” inflected by structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, should serve as the ultimate if unrepresentable horizon of critical reflection. Jean-François Lyotard contributed to this movement a meditation with the title of The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.⁷ Jacques Derrida began his career with work of extraordinary power, range, and complexity built on a thematics of loss, absence, and fatality, in which language, exemplified by the letter or grapheme, was depicted as the ultimate rebuke to humanist fantasies, beginning with the fantasy of life. “Writing in the common sense,” he wrote in 1967, “is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. It exhausts life.”⁸ For these and many others, the figure of the reflective, expressive, communicating subject was an historical relic disproven by modern knowledge, like phlogiston or a benevolent God. For the jubilation of infinite semiosis to be released, it was necessary to embrace inhumanity, process, mechanism, and death.

Perhaps the most manifestly perverse form of the death-of-the-author argument was Paul de Man’s account of language as “inhuman” and “mechanical.” “There is, in a very radical sense,” de Man wrote, “no such thing as the human”; in fact, “actual language… has invented the conceptual term ‘man.’” ⁹ Once again, the theoretical advance came at the expense of “ethics,” which, in de Man’s view, had

nothing to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject.… The ethical category is imperative (i.e., a category rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective.… The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a transcendental imperative but is the referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should say, ethnicity) is a discursive mode among others.¹⁰

In the wake of the great scandal that arose in the late 1980s surrounding de Man’s wartime journalism, when it was discovered that de Man had indeed been the victim of profound ethical confusion, all of his work was reread from a different perspective. Such passages were taken to signify de Man’s wish to do away with the entire issue of ethical responsibility, to draw attention to the helplessness of the individual caught in the snares of history, or to argue for a scholarly obligation to set aside vulgar notions of propriety or good behavior in favor of rigorous analysis. A subdiscipline rapidly emerged that was devoted to the task of disclosing in de Man’s work a series of deeply coded confessions, explanations, rationalizations, recantations, and apologies.

All these theoretical discourses understood themselves as committed to a principle of analytical rigor that was set against “naive” humanist illusions and mystifications, and all gathered to expression in the sentence from Samuel Beckett, quoted with great effect by Foucault in “What Is an Author?”: “What matter who’s speaking?” (115).

What matter who’s speaking? A truly extraordinary popular delusion.

Whatever salutary effects this movement had—and the theory movement was in many respects extraordinarily vivifying, despite its sometimes macabre or mechanistic thematics—the defiant hostility to the question of who was speaking constituted an own-goal of massive proportions. For the single most compelling feature of the theoretical discourse of this era was not the new knowledge introduced into scholarly discourse, but the way in which it focused and channeled the energies of a truly remarkable set of maîtres de penser—powerfully individualized, charismatic, often deeply conflicted or troubled figures whose lives were dramatically visible not only in the world of events but in the mediated form of their work. Whether they understood it in this way or not, those who were drawn to the project of theory were attracted in part by the spectacle offered by theoretical discourse of complex and passionate minds engaged in vivid encounters with each other, with great figures from the artistic and philosophical past, andwith the broader forces of culture, politics, and history. The identity of the speaker was one of the best things theory had going for it.

The de Man scandal—an astonishing case in which the most revered theorist was ensnarled in the ultimate evil—might actually have awakened a new kind of interest in theory or criticism, centered on the expressive subject. Disclosures of a past tainted by lurid and bloody forms of unreason in one who had posed as the apostle of cold-blooded lucidity had, after all, made possible a new reading of theoretical discourse in general. Instead, the de Man affair only resulted in general demoralization on one side and a sterile triumphalism on the other. With the deaths of Barthes (1980), Lacan (1981), de Man (1983), and Foucault (1984) (not to mention the incarceration of Althusser in 1980 for strangling his wife), the theory movement was already in difficulties. But by the time the revelations came in 1987, theory had become too broadly diffused and integrated into ordinary critical practice for academe simply to shrug off the episode and move on. What survived in departments of literary study was a general climate of professional occultation in which literature lost its aesthetic specificity and became enfolded within a generalized textuality, the study of which was said to be highly technical. Buoyed by the continuing interest of amateurs, literature survived; but literary criticism suffered by being subordinated to theory, with a circle drawn around the initiates.

Through the self-replicating process of education, the circle grew somewhat wider but no less exclusionary, until what began as professional autonomy began to seem, to those on the outside, like a phenomenon, an extraordinary popular delusion. The reasons an educated nonacademic reader might have for taking an interest in criticism dwindled, and, in a well-documented and widely lamented turn, critics themselves stopped buying each others’ books. Eventually, the discipline of criticism found itself in the anomalous position of having failed to persuade the general public of anything except its own indifference to public concerns, and therefore its own irrelevance to the culture at large, on which point it had carried the day, sweeping all opposition aside. Having defined textuality as an oblique space where the subject slips away, academic critics now found themselves slipping, or rather being filed away, their disappearance unmarked, their absence from the cultural conversation unmourned and even celebrated.

Intellectual movements have a determined lifespan, and a movement as sharply articulated, difficult, and in some ways counterintuitive as the theory movement could not have expected to survive forever. What concerns me here, however, is not the process of inevitable decline, but the striking fact that, for a long season, it became not just possible but almost necessaryto think that it did not matter “who’s speaking” because language had its own structures and functions that could be studied independently of any particular human circumstance. For an argument that focused on the “destination” of all writing in the act of reading, this argument is determinedly ignorant of the fact that criticism is read not just for information, but for the sense of communication with another mind. If “we know now,” as Barthes put it, that we do not need to concern ourselves with the other mind, but only with the linguistic structures on the page, then that reason vanishes, leaving in its place a merely academic interest in the behavior of semiotic units.

Some critics, to be sure, protested against theoretical antihumanism by insisting on the distinctive features of the feminine, subaltern, American, black, postcolonial, or queer identities; but their arguments were largely confined to literary texts.¹¹ And when critics or scholars did advance their own identities, they often did so in ways that were either immediately obvious, through memoirs or testaments; or reductive, through announcements of their “subject position” as members of a certain sexual, political, economic, national, or ethnic group. Sacrificing the author to language, theoretical criticism eliminated a primary source of interest in itself, and went a long way toward arguing itself out of an audience.

This book is an attempt to recover the real interest of criticism by demonstrating that it is, or can be at its highest levels, a richly expressive discourse. Criticism has been said to have any number of “characters,” and it seems that almost any adjective can modify this term, depending on the argument being made. Foucault spoke of the “local character of criticism”; others have argued for the “historicizing,” “scientific,” “secular,” “rational,” “oppositional,” and “equivocal” characters of criticism.¹² My argument here is that none of these terms designates the essence of criticism, but that all capture some dimension of it. The argument that supports this position is that criticism absorbs all these terms so easily because it is a discourse of character in general.

Criticism is a scholarly discipline that includes textual commentary, historical research, and theoretical reflection; it is also a human practice of reflection and meditation that enlists every intellectual, affective, and experiential resource that a person has. I will try to make this case by examining in detail the critical practice of four thinkers who make a particularly powerful claim on our attention. What Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Žižek, and Edward Said have in common and in abundance is the capacity to communicate in their scholarly work something more than just the scholarly virtues of intelligence, training, integrity, discipline, andimagination; what their work gives voice to is a distinctive way of being in the world that I will call character.

I distinguish character from mere personality, a collection of attributes expressed in the course of one’s social existence. Criticism is not a medium for the expression of personality. One may be loyal, gluttonous, obtuse, inconstant, weak-willed, flirtatious, nonresponsive, or greedy in life, and never reveal these attributes in one’s work; or, correlatively, the perspicacity, dullness, incisiveness, patience, conventionality, or rigor evident in one’s work may not find expression in one’s personal life. The character of the critic is implicit, not explicit, in the criticism, and may not be continuous in any obvious way with the critic’s personality. Character in criticism is above all mediated through the conventions of scholarship and through the resources provided by the text being discussed. This mediation may take any number of forms. Criticism may be a refuge for alienated attributes that one cannot, or chooses not to, express directly; it may be a stage for attributes one chooses to display; it may be a safe place where one hides aspects of oneself that one wants to shelter from the warlike conditions of existence; it may be a confessional where one blurts out, in distanced or displaced forms, one’s secrets. It may be all or any combination of these things, but what it is always is a particular form of expression different from the forms in which one engages with one’s body, in real time. If we understand criticism as, at least in potential, a discourse of character—if we grasp, that is, the character of criticism in both senses—then we will not necessarily write differently, but we might become newly sensitive to what makes criticism a permanently valuable practice, and the value of tha...