Criticism after Critique

Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137428769
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137428776
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Presenting different ways to imagine criticism without critique, this collection provides a survey of both the difficult times facing ideological critique and the ways in which literary criticism and aesthetics have been affected by changing attitudes toward critique.

Part I

Criticism, Judgment, and Value

Chapter 1

Criticism and Critique

A Genealogy

David R. Shumway

The charge given to the contributors of this volume asked, “How do we engage in criticism at a time when critique seems to have run its course? What does sustained theoretical research and discussion look like when the notion of critique is under attack? Might we be confronting an aesthetic, practical, philosophical, New Formalist, or New New Critical emphasis on the literary text? What, if anything, is the political project of literary and cultural criticism after critique?” While, as I will later explain, I have been aware of a critique of critique, it did not come from any of the quarters listed here. While I acknowledge that the fashion in literary studies may be reverting to various apolitical concerns—the most important of which, not mentioned in the list just cited, is a new old historicism—this trend is not the result of any attack on critique. It is not persuasion but habit that is at the root of these changes, and hence theoretical intervention is unlikely to have much impact.

The exception to that which I just alluded comes not from the political or theoretical Right but from the Left. In 1989, Slavoj Žižek asserted that the critique of ideology is no longer a valid project because of the rise of cynical reason as charted a few years earlier by German theorist Peter Sloterdijk. In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk defined cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness . . . Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.”1 Žižek’s version of this conception has been more influential among English speakers. He holds that “the most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it . . .’”2 According to Žižek, Marx’s definition makes naïveté constitutive of ideology: “The misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it. That is why such a ‘naïve consciousness’ can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure.”3 But that “naïve consciousness” has been replaced by cynical consciousness, in which “‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.’ Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox . . . one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.”4 Under such circumstances, Žižek asserts, “the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to ‘symptomatic reading,’ confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency—cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance.”5 Now neither Sloterdijk nor Žižek actually want to abandon critique, as the former’s book already makes clear, yet neither theorist has successfully suggested how their new conception of critique can evade cynicism. Hence it is cynicism itself that readers carry away from these texts and therefore also the sense that we now live in a moment “after critique.”

But if what we can call the Sloterdijk-Žižek thesis is a particularly cogent formulation of the ineffectiveness of critique, it is worth keeping in mind that this general claim is not new. Sloterdijk himself quotes Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse of 1928, “Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out . . . ‘Disinterestedness,’ the ‘unbiased perspective,’ have become lies, if not the completely naïve expression of plain incompetence.”6 Horkheimer and Adorno in “the Culture Industry” had already discovered pervasive cynicism when they claimed, for example, that “what is decisive today is . . . the necessity, inherent in the system, of never releasing its grip on the consumer, of not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possible.”7 Given the influence of these thinkers over cultural studies, especially that of “the Culture Industry,” the idea that critique is passé should have come as no surprise, yet the rise of their influence corresponds to the rise of critique or “critical theory,” revealing an essential paradox about the way in which critique has been taken up since the 1970s. While the Frankfurt school in general and Horkheimer and Adorno in particular became some of the cornerstones of literary and cultural theory, they were understood to represent critique, not its failure. Indeed, the coincidence of “critical theory” in the Frankfurt school sense, and as a more general name for literary and cultural theory, meant that the idea of critical theory was for several decades a major project within the humanities.

It is one of my arguments that this coincidence is not merely a coincidence but a moment where genealogy is revealed in the sedimentation of language. Critique and criticism are names for diverging but related elements of the Enlightenment project, and my claim is that if one is passé, so is the other. In order to demonstrate these connections, some further exploration of etymology and historical usage is warranted. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists 1719 as witnessing the first usage of the term critique as a noun meaning “an essay or article in criticism of a literary (or more rarely, an artistic) work; a review.” As “the action or art of criticizing,” the first usage listed is from 1815, while the second is a translation of the title of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1856. It is, of course, this second meaning, narrowed so as to concern particular objects, with which we are concerned today. The term “criticism” overlaps with both meanings of “critique.”

One definition of criticism in the OED is “Philos,” “the critical philosophy of Kant,” with examples also from the nineteenth century, demonstrating the historical indissolubility of this term from critique. It is true that Kant’s “critiques” are not usually understood as “critique” in the sense of “critical theory,” and in fact Hegel’s critique of Kant is often regarded as foundational to “critical theory,” defining Kant as antithetical to it. But the genealogy of critique starts with Kant, whose works represent its point of emergence. As Fred Rush has argued,

Kant’s understanding of critique is important to early critical theory for a number of reasons. First, it specifies the object of critique, that is, what critical activity operates upon. Kant’s critical philosophy directs itself upon “reason.” One of Kant’s leading themes is that reason has an inherent tendency to seek application regardless of cognitive context, and it is the job of critique to circumscribe reason’s epistemic application to what Kant considers to be the bounds of knowledge . . . Second, Kant’s conception also supplies Critical Theory with its understanding of the subject of critique, that is, with a specification of the agent that carries out criticism . . . Critique is for Kant, then, necessarily self-critique and freedom from dialectical illusion possible only upon rational self-regulation . . . Critical Theory’s reflexive structure is thus a third inheritance from Kant.8

While it is certainly the case, as Rush notes, that “Critical Theory dissents from some specific core elements of this Kantian picture,” contemporary critical theorists have not entirely abandoned Kant.9 Habermas acknowledges this in Knowledge and Human Interests, in which he states, “The critique of knowledge was still conceived in reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and reflective judgment as naturally as critique itself, that is a theoretical reason that can dialectically ascertain not only its limits but also its own Idea.”10 It has been suggested that Habermas allows us to see Kant, not as a foundationalist but as a “cohernentist” or “constructivist.” The latter point has been made rather frequently in discussions of “constructivism” in recent decades. My argument, however, is not mainly about Kant’s continuing interest or validity but the way in which he represents a key point of emergence for both critique and criticism.

While Kant’s critique may seem a long way from literary criticism, his Critique of Judgment has long been a starting point for theories of criticism, including I. A. Richard’s Principles and John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism. While it is clear that Kant’s systematic approach to matters of judgment differs significantly from the criticism practiced in England by Addison, Steele, and others in the eighteenth century, the two approaches should be seen as elements of the same broader epistemic development. According to Raymond Williams, the term criticism entered into English in the early seventeenth century, but its predominant early sense was “fault-finding.” Williams observes that by 1762, Kames could title a work Elements of Criticism, where the term now entailed “assumptions best represented by taste and cultivation: a form of social development of personal impressions and responses, to the point where they could be represented as standards of judgment.”11 In Williams’s account, criticism retains this specialized sense of authoritative judgment into the twentieth century, but the basis for such authority comes into question causing a failed search for supposed objective standards. One could argue that the origin of the post–New Critical turn to theory was motivated by a similar concern, though now pertaining to meaning more than value. Structuralism was seen as a potential science and desired for its potential ability to impose order on literary studies.

But Williams’s history, perhaps in part because of his British bias, omits several important historical developments needed to understand that last claim. He fails to mention not only the philosophical sense of criticism but also another definition noted in the OED: “The critical science which deals with the text, character, composition, and origin of literary documents, esp. those of the Old and New Testaments,” a definition that is often signaled by the addition of the adjectives “textual” or “higher”: “textual criticism: that whose object is to ascertain the genuine text and meaning of an author. higher criticism.” This meaning became important in the nineteenth century and is connected to the development of philology as an academic discipline. While application to the Bible was perhaps most widely influential, application to the texts of classical antiquity would be more important for the development of literary studies.

The modern fields of learning, academic disciplines and subdisciplines, are no more ancient than the Enlightenment, and those we call “the humanities” are bound to the development of critique. The modern humanities disciplines emerged as a result of three conditions: (1) a shift in the conception of knowledge that demoted texts to objects of study, (2) the breakup of philosophy into the sciences, and (3) the invention of the disciplinary form itself. The latter entailed, among other things, the new pedagogical spaces of the classroom and the laboratory and new practices, such as the seminar and the demand that students write, which were especially important to the humanities.12 As this genealogy shows, the emergence of the sciences as disciplines separate from philosophy is an essential component of the development of the humanities and the emergence of critique. Kant’s critiques represent a decisive break of philosophy with science, but they do not represent the opposition of philosophy and science.

It is important to specify that the humanities emerged as distinct from other sciences but also as sciences themselves. The emergence seems to have occurred first in Germany, but probably not as early as 1777, when Friedrich Wolf (who is usually said to be the father of the field) enrolled at Göttingen as the first official student of philology. Philology is usually said to have emerged as an academic discipline at that moment. According to John Edwin Sandys’s venerable 1903 history, “A new era begins with the name Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824).”13 Anthony Grafton has cast doubt, however, on Wolf’s paternity by arguing that many of the innovations attributed to him were in fact received from earlier scholars, and the treatment of Wolf in the histories does have all the earmarks of an invented tradition. Wolf’s influence, deserved or not, would help make philology the dominant discipline in nineteenth-century German universities.

Wolf’s own major contribution is usually said to be a critique of the standard text of Homer, which he argued bore scant resemblance to the original poems. As Grafton summarizes, “A modern editor could hope only to restore the Alexandrian vulgate. He could never know which sections really went back to Homer.”14 Grafton asserts that, while this idea was not original with Wolf (that indeed the basic point was accepted by Cicero and Plutarch), Wolf’s argument “evoked violent reactions.”15 ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Ruins of Critique
• Part I: Criticism, Judgment, and Value
• Part II: Globalization, Historicism, and Ideology
• Part III: Aesthetics and Anticritique
• Afterword
• About the Contributors