The Theory and Practice of Reception Study

Reading Race and Gender in Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison

Philip Goldstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032245027
• eBook ISBN: 9781000567557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines novels of Faulkner and Morrison as well as Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison in order to show that their works forcefully undermine the racial and sexual divisions characterizing both the South and contemporary culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, the book discusses theories of reader-response and reception study and elaborates a theory of reception study based on the historical or "archeological" methods of Michel Foucault. As a consequence, unlike most studies of American literature, which discuss its historical contexts or prescribe its readers' responses, this book explains the reception of these works, including the academic criticism and reviews and, because the internet exerts immense influence in the twenty-first century, the on-line responses of ordinary readers. Unlike most reception studies, this book examines the institutional contexts of the readers' responses.

1 Aesthetic Theory From Adorno to Cultural History

DOI: 10.4324/9781003124573-2

Reader-oriented and reception theories maintain that it is the responses of the reader and his or her social or historical context which explain the import of a text, not its formal features or textual norms. Such theories have developed extensively since the 1970s; however, in the 1990s formal analyses and aesthetic critique experienced a revival. Critics of various types dismissed deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the theoretical and cultural methods of the 1970s and 1980s. Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida, and others were set aside. Instead, critics celebrated the pleasures of close reading and/or the value of aesthetic ideals. As Vincent Leitch says, “various backlashes have called for returns to the common reader, to close reading, to appreciative criticism, and to limited critical pluralism” (“Tasks,” 1).

Isabel Armstrong, for example, proposes “a new definition of close reading” which, unlike established formal methods, would “rethink the power of affect, feeling and emotion in a cognitive space. The power of affect needs to be included within a definition of thought and knowledge rather than theorized as outside them, excluded from the rational.”¹ More importantly, she justifies the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno. What she claims is that Theodor Adorno was much more than a “liberal humanist … vainly attempting to give the old bourgeois humanist terms, the traditional nineteenth-century aesthetics, a Marxist gloss” (175). Similarly, John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas fault the literary theory of the 1970s and 1980s because its analyses neglect or deny “art’s specificity as an object of analysis.” What’s more, Joughlin and Malpas also dismiss critics who neglect the “dynamic role that form plays in Adorno’s conceptualization of the aesthetic.”²

The return to close reading has, in short, revived the aesthetics of Adorno. Critics commend his aesthetics because it engages in substantial sociohistorical critique and still justifies the formal, textual analyses and the aesthetic autonomy and negativity set aside by previous generations. It is well known that, to justify such analyses, Adorno divided high art from mass culture on the grounds that autonomous high art provides realist insights into capitalist commodity production, whereas mass culture turns its readers, viewers, and audiences into supporters of the status quo. Adorno dismissed the aesthetics of Martin Heidegger, who supported the German fascists. There are nonetheless many parallels between Adorno’s views and those of Heidegger. In light of Jacques Derrida’s critiques of Heidegger’s aesthetics, these parallels suggest that the division of high art and mass culture actually results from Adorno’s theoretical framework, not from his realism. In Truth in Painting, Derrida suggests that the aesthetic autonomy of art is a construct of the interpreter or reader, rather than a kind of sociohistorical realism. This critique of aesthetic autonomy opens the study of a text’s reception to the postmodern genealogies of Michel Foucault. As I suggest in the next chapter, his genealogical analyses provide the historical context for the readers’ constructs and justify, thereby, the reception study which shows that readers, viewers, or audiences, not texts nor theories, produce meanings. Instead of defending art’s autonomy, the genealogical analyses of Foucault reveal the reader’s distinct historical conditions, including their influential institutions or, as Foucault says, their technologies.

The Aesthetics of Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger

This approach describes the historical context or aesthetic dispositions explaining why different readers interpret the same text differently; however, Adorno dismisses such reception study and, adopting the realist terms faulted by Derrida, defends high art. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he and Horkheimer wrote in 1944 after they emigrated to the US to escape the German fascists, Adorno and Horkheimer say that the readers, viewers, and audiences of mass art turn into supporters of the status quo because this art is produced by the culture industry, which, denying art’s autonomy, reduces it to mere amusement with no real pleasure, insight, truth, or individuality. The instrumental rationality governing the industry’s technology, language, and institutions ensures that the industry does not achieve its own ends: it promises to grant wishes, to fulfill hopes, and to realize desires, but it actually preserves the status quo. The industry offers creativity, independence, originality, success, and happiness, yet, increasing “the power of conventions,” the industry destroys the individuality, thoughtfulness, and resistance of the artist and the consumer, both of whom learn quickly enough that they are just like everyone else and could easily be replaced. While new works advertise their originality and uniqueness, the commodity-form of these works requires them to adhere to rigid, mechanical formula remaining within predetermined forms or generalities and duplicating other products as well as industrial life; as Adorno says, “The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of conventions” (128). Offering creativity, independence, and even success, the industry destroys the individuality, the thoughtfulness, and the resistance of the artist and the consumer, both of whom learn quickly enough that anyone could replace them.

In 1970, after he and Horkheimer successfully reestablished the Frankfurt School in post-World War II Germany, Adorno published Aesthetic Theory, which faults not only the commodity fetishism produced by the culture industry but also the “psychologism” which the industry as well as reception study foster. He complains once again that the cultural industry produces the “fetish character of commodities” destroying art’s autonomy, but adds that the industry promotes the “psychologism” whereby art caters to the consumer: “Today the consumer is allowed to project his impulses and mimetic residues onto anything he pleases, including art, whereas in the past the individual was expected to forget himself, to lose himself in art in the process of viewing, listening, and reading” (25). Denying the autonomy of art, the industry now frees the consumer to interpret “anything he pleases, including art,” instead of losing himself in it. By contrast, the concrete formal or textual work of high art overcomes the reification imposed by the culture industry as well as the psychologism, which it promotes, and reveals the objective truths mediating between it and society. By virtue of its unresolved oppositions, art can resist its reified character and depict the divisions and conflicts characterizing social life, and as a result, “the irrationality and absurdity of the status quo” (Aesthetic, 79).

In Truth in Painting, Derrida critiques the notion of art’s historical truth or realism. He argues that such realist accounts draw on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which construes art as an independent realm different from scientific or conceptual truth and universally binding ethical ideals. Kant argues that a pure or disinterested judgment of taste is possible because the autonomous work of art, which, as an object in itself, has an interior, intrinsic value independent of its exterior contexts or extrinsic uses or purposes.

Derrida examines at great length this notion of an autonomous work, which he considers central both to Kant’s account of a pure judgment and to Martin Heidegger’s account of art’s truth. What Derrida shows is that the frame of the work, what he terms the parergon, distinguishes the autonomous from the utilitarian work, the intrinsic, interior space from the extrinsic, historical, or social context. The frame allows pure judgments of taste by making works autonomous, but the frame itself is not inside or outside the work; rather, the frame is a construct imposed by Kant’s analytic of judgment which establishes what is intrinsic and extrinsic to a work or where its border or framework lies. As David Carroll says:

Derrida’s choice of the parergon as the primary example on which his own reading of Kant focuses, can be seen as his way of … taking a position in Kant’s work in general-but especially in terms of the frame of art. It is, first of all, an example that reveals how much Kant needs the notion of the frame in order to position his own discourse in relation to art. But Derrida also focuses on the example of the parergon in Kant in order to complicate the notion of the frame, to question it as an effective closure around art. In this way, he reveals its ambiguous, and contradictory function in Kant’s work.

(137–38)

Derrida’s critique of the framework “question it as an effective closure around art,” and thereby undermines the autonomy which Kant attributes to art. In addition, his critique undermines the historical truth which Heidegger attributes to art. That is, as I will show, Heidegger defends a Kantian account of art’s autonomy, but instead of preserving aesthetic disinterestedness or a purely formal text, he maintains that art reveals objective truth about life or the world, what he terms “earth,” which denotes both the work’s concrete materials as well as a perspective which puts them into place. That is, art reveals and conceals what he calls Being, disclosing and hiding truth; in his terms, “The earth juts up within the work because the work exists as something in which truth is at work” (69). Derrida’s account shows however that the frames provided by the interpreter’s theoretical approach create the intrinsic textual context of art, which is, as a result, incompatible with such realist accounts of art as truth. The aesthetics of Adorno shows a similar inconsistency. He too accepts the Kantian notion that the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgment establishes the autonomy, whereby art resists the world rather than providing pleasure or accomplishing a purpose, but like Heidegger, he construes this notion of autonomy as a social truth. As he says, art undermines the reified state which consumer culture imposes on art and which sets it against society. By resisting its commodified character, art preserves its autonomy and reveals the divisions and conflicts characterizing social life. James Finlayson describes these divisions and conflicts as a shudder:

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno claims that the albeit self-inflicted damage to our rational and sensible capacities is so extensive that even the human capacity for shudder, the capacity to experience the true /horror/ of the world for what it is, may disappear. One reason why Adorno values modern art so highly is that when all goes well it manages to preserve and to communicate the shudder even under social conditions that militate against experiences of truth.

(83–4)

My critique of Adorno’s belief that art reveals “the true horror of the world” assumes that what Derrida says about Heidegger’s realism applies to Adorno’s as well. My reader may object however that Adorno differs sharply with Heidegger. For instance, he denies that in ancient times, society experienced a shining of truth, as Heidegger says. More importantly, he forcefully condemns Heidegger’s notion of Being, which he considers a “jargon of authenticity” rooted in Heidegger’s fascist politics, and as his account of Enlightenment and mythology suggests, he adopts the Hegelian dialectical method in which opposites both oppose each other and come together.

Moreover, the origins of Heidegger’s views lie in Husserl’s phenomenology, whereas Adorno’s views derive from Georg Lukács’ Marxism, especially his critique of instrumental reason. In explaining the fetishism and psychologism destroying art’s autonomy, Adorno and Horkheimer say, for example, that the culture industry stems from Enlightenment reason, which opposes mythological outlooks at the same time that it imposes an equally mythological faith in modern science. In their terms, “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology” (8).

This critique of Enlightenment reason derives from Georg Lukács, who revises and extends Karl Marx’s critique of commodity production.³ Marx shows that an instrumental rationality, which calculates means, not ends, evaluates techniques, not values, and seeks autonomy, not community, governs the social and the economic institutions of bourgeois society (see Bernstein, Philosophy 82 and Buck-Morss, 25). Lukács also maintains that this instrumental rationality dominates bourgeois society; however, as J. M. Bernstein points out, he shows that once economic institutions gain their independence, capitalism imposes this rationality on all realms, including the intellectual (Philosophy, 82). The sciences, the humanities, and the other disciplines functioning within this context examine the internal relations of their disciplines and ignore their social relations. Like commodities, these “reified” disciplines consider themselves autonomous and ignore their underlying social conditions.

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer maintain that this instrumental rationality dominates bourgeois social life; they claim however that this instrumental rationality does not begin with the capitalist system, as Lukács says; rather, it begins with the classical Greeks. They show, for example, that in Homer’s Odysseus, Ulysses resists the sirens in order to underline the Greek mastery of nature; “Measures like those taken on Odysseus’s ship in face of the Sirens are a prescient allegory of the dialectic of Enlightenment” (27). The mastery of nature, along with opposition to mythology, characterizes the propositional logic and conceptual discourse of the instrumental rationality of both the Greeks and the modern enlightenment.

More importantly, in the influential essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariot,” Lukács defends the revolutionary potential of the working class, whose practical activity can overcome the divisions and the conflicts of social life. In 1921, when the Soviet revolution was still flowering and Western revolutions looked possible, an optimistic Lukács moved to the USSR to ensure that the revolutionary working class became “the identical subject-object of the social and historical processes of evolution” (149). After World War II, with fascism recently defeated, the Stalinist dictatorship securely in power, the cold war underway, and American capitalism booming, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that instrumental rationality assimilates all opposition, including the working class and the communists, whose parties and governments impose its oppressive domination.

Defenders of Lukács suggest that his belief that at the end of history, communism reconciles subject and object shows his commitment to a Hegelian praxis producing the good life, not the contemplative individualism of an Adorno (see Timothy Hall, 121–23); however, Adorno objects to the reconciliation envisioned by Lukács on the grounds that it represents the domination of Enlightenment reason. Purely conceptual, this reconciliation imposes an abstract identity which denies the subject’s concrete particularity. Adorno maintains, moreover, that the non-identity of subject and object liberates art, preserving its autonomy by dividing form and content and allowing many different totalities. As he says of Hegel, “Nowhere does he define the experience of the non- identical as the telos of the aesthetic subject or as its emancipation” (Aesthetic, 113). By willing the nonidentical, art can undermine conventional modes of understanding and resist its commodified character, reaffirming the Hegelian totality as a negative moment projecting a utopian vision.

Although Adorno derives his account of instrumental reason from Lukács’ Marxism, Adorno rejects Lukács’ faith in the working class, communism, historical development, and Hegelian theory. More importantly, even though Adorno critiques Heidegger’s notion of being and truth, Adorno’s views approximate those of Heidegger, who also says, for example, that equipmental or technological modes of understanding, which are those concerned with propositional truth or with the uses of things, have dominated since the classical Greek era, when Western society lost the capacity to experience what he terms the poetic “shining of truth.” As Richard Bernstein says:

In Heidegger’s fateful, strong reading of the ‘history of being’ … we find a thematic affinity with Adorno’s claim that the seeds of ‘identity logic’ with its hidden will-to-mastery are to be found in the very origins of Western rationality.⁴

Moreover, to preserve the autonomy of art, they both critique the conceptual truth of rationalist and/or Hegelian theory. As I noted, Adorno argues that the Hegelian reconciliation of subject and object at history’s end itself represents the domination of Enlightenment reason. He favors the nonidentity of subject and object because their nonidentity liberates art, preserving its autonomy by dividing form and content and allowing many different totalities. As Hauke Brunkhurst says, Adorno argues that “the shattered form of open works, the incessant struggle never recognizably rounded off into totality, into which the countless endgames of modernity have incurably disintegrated, is as such also a moment of successful emancipation from the constraints of totality and from the triumphal gesture of affirmative art and culture” (117). This nonidentity of subject and object also limits theory, whose classifications, types, and conceptual constructs fail to grasp the concrete text (see Brunkhorst, 126). Appealing to the anti-theorists reviving traditional aesthetics, he claims that only criticism can grasp the historical particular which is the text, although criticism’s grasp is limited too.

Heidegger does not defend a negative dialectics, but Language, Poetry, Thought, and other later works do maintain that art does not preserve its identity with itself. As Heidegger puts it, to let truth be, the artistic text overcomes its technological enframing and reveals and conceals Being, disclosing and hiding truth. This conflicted text never achieves unity because what Heidegger terms “Earth,” which denotes both th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Aesthetic Theory: From Adorno to Cultural History
• 2 Reading in History and in Theory
• 3 Mark Twain’s Detective Fiction: From The Stolen White Elephant and The Double-Barrelled Detective Story to The Adventures of Pudd’nHead Wilson
• 4 Faulkner’s Subversive Modernism: Light in August
• 5 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: Modernism and Democracy in American Literature
• 6 Three Days Before the Shooting: Modernism and Democracy in/and American Literature
• 7 Toni Morrison’s Beloved:The Forgotten History of Slavery and Patriarchy
• 8 Toni Morrison’s A Mercy:The Critique of Patriarchy and History’s Lost Opportunities
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index