Soundings in Critical Theory

Dominick LaCapra

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781501705182
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Historiography

In Soundings in Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his attempt to fashion a historiography that is at once critical and self-critical—a project he initiated in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983); and History and Criticism (1985), both available from Cornell University Press. This new collection of essays offers a provocative assessment of the nature of historical understanding and the role of critical theory in historical understanding; of the practice of historical writing as a dialogic exchange both with the past and among professional historians and critics; and of the problem of how to read texts and documents in relation to processes of contextual understanding.

A central concern of the volume is the interaction between Marxism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism, and all of the essays demonstrate the complex ways in which this trio of critical theories continues to affect how historians frame their task. LaCapra first provides a general appraisal of the problems and possibilities of criticism as a genre that questions its own limits, and examines the roles of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Mikhail Bakhtin in the development of contemporary criticism. Subsequent chapters address such issues as the implications of psychoanalysis for the writing of history, the debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier concerning the status of the symbolic dimension in history, and the problem of how best to read and make use of Marx's work. LaCapra concludes by exploring the larger project of forging viable links between history and critical theory and by evaluating the contributions of deconstruction and the new historicism to this project.

Contemporary cultural and intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, philosophers, and social scientists will welcome this book.

1

Criticism Today

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the whitewashed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; [. . .] he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

How can one try to account for critical discourses today? At best one acknowledges that any attempt to do justice to them can never attain metanarrative or megatheoretical mastery and must by contrast accept, indeed actively affirm, its own status as one discursive venture engaging in dialogue with heterogeneous others. One also begins with a brief and inadequate evocation of the problematic nature—the frustrations and the hopes—of contemporary criticism.

Any assembly of “critics” today will have representatives of various established departments who are uneasy with their own representative function and may find more to say, listen to, or at least argue about with other critics than with more securely “representative” members of their own department or field. Indeed contemporary critics are no longer content with interdisciplinary efforts that simply combine, compare, or synthetically unify the methods of existing academic disciplines. Their questioning of established disciplines both raises doubts about internal criteria of purity or autonomy and unsettles the boundaries and protocols of given fields. Criticism in this sense is a discursive agitation running across a variety of disciplines and having an uneasy relation to its own institutionalization. It seeks out threshold positions that cannot securely locate their own theoretical grounds, and it may even cultivate the risks of insistently hybridized discourses—discourses that may breed fruitful variants but may also prove to be sterile if not monstrous. At least in terms of academic politics, the strategy of criticism is thus transgressive, and it demands not a quarantined place in the margins of established discourses or disciplines but a generalized displacement and rearticulation of them.

Yet it is also the case that disconcertingly liminal criticism has proved more compelling in certain established fields than in others: in literary criticism, Continental philosophy, interpretive social theory, and intellectual history, say, than in literary history, analytic philosophy, positivistic social science, and conventional historiography. And within the fields or disciplines in which it has made a difference, it has been most pronounced in already marginalized areas of the university, even if mainstream thought has subsequently accommodated it in more or less naturalized form. Hence it has appeared first in French or comparative literature before making significant inroads in English departments, and it has had a sporadic, uneven role in intellectual history, sensitive to the exceptional voices and counterdiscourses of the past, before affecting social history, attuned to representative discourses and collective mentalities. Elsewhere criticism in the sense I have evoked makes its mark at best through the active resistance or renewed stimulus for self-definition it provokes as well as through the convenient image of the “radically other” it provides for those seeking a reaffirmation of their identity.

In these respects, criticism is itself a paradoxical genre that contests the limits of generic classification. It brings down on itself the ire and the irony of those with an interest in reasserting the conceptual and institutional integrity of realms of discourse and disciplines. The very discourses of critics speaking in hybridized or “undecidable” voices are difficult to classify, and they at most bear the marks of certain disciplinary inflections which give them a relative specificity. Yet signs of internal strain also appear; for disciplinary and professional bonds have their hold even on those who grow restive with their constraints, and one may tire of the repeated sounds of the new or the predictable discovery of the uncanny in every discursive nook and cranny. This strain may help to explain the reversions to type and the “god-that-failed” reactions of some critics who become disenchanted with their earlier “experimental” selves; but it may also induce reflection about what specifically ought to be changed and what preserved in a discipline one questions. It may also induce one to confront the general problem of how the relations among disciplines or fields should be rearticulated.

Especially for those critics who see Continental thought as a reference point, the most imposing tradition of critical theory is represented by Marxism. And one of the tasks of recent criticism has been to try to sort out the elements of the Marxist tradition in order to discern what is still relevant to contemporary sociopolitical and interpretive issues. One current in Marx’s texts that was further codified by Engels and the theorists of the Second International is, of course, positivism, and it has been subjected to a far-reaching attack in the recent past. One might define positivism as the isolation and autonomization of the constative dimension of discourse. It fosters a narrowly “social-scientific” delimitation of research in empirical and analytic terms, and it avoids or occludes the very problem of a critical theory of society and culture. Jürgen Habermas has been a foremost critic of Marx in this respect, and he has attempted to recast critical theory in a complex manner that includes a relativized “constative” dimension in a more complex hermeneutic and emancipatory paradigm for social research.1 In Louis Althusser’s powerful rereading of Marx, however, one may perhaps detect tendencies that lend themselves to a subtle rehabilitation of positivism. Althusser’s important conception of ideology as centered on the subject seems to obviate the possibility of an objectivist or scientistic ideology, notably one that privileges science by presenting it as a “subjectless” discourse. Science seems to become a “realm of discourse” that unproblematically transcends ideology, and the very role of a “scientific” subject in constituting an object realm is itself occulted. Yet other aspects of Althusser’s conception of ideology would imply that its wiles are many-sided, and the recurrent displacement of the necessary blindnesses it brings is a sign of the necessity of recurrent critique.2

A second tendency in Marx’s texts has had remarkable staying power in modern thought despite the criticism of Althusser and many others. I am of course referring to Hegelianism. At times in Marx, for example, in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, it is amalgamated with positivism in a composite image of a positivist dialectic that is revealed as the inverted Hegelian “rational kernel in the mystic shell” of speculative idealism. But, whatever the precise form it takes, Hegelian Marxism provides the basis for a metanarrative or “dialectic” in which the proletariat becomes the “materialist” surrogate for Geist as the redemptive subject of history. Hegelian Marxism has recently received a new lease on life in Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious, which, through a disarming ruse, construes the vast metanarrative of class struggle leading to redemptive emancipation as itself the repressed content of contemporary thought.3

My condensed and truncated account thus far should at least indicate that I stress in Marx’s texts the heterogeneous forces that help to account for the divergences and inner strains in subsequent Marxism. Two further aspects of Marx’s thought remain, I think, highly relevant today—aspects that deserve to be defended, if need be, against other aspects of Marx’s thought itself. One of them is general: it is the very understanding of critical theory in contrast to both narrowly positivistic and expansively metanarrative inclinations. The problem is of course that of the nature of the critical theory one would defend. I argue for a displacement of totalizing dialectics in the direction of supplementarity and dialogism that raise the issue of articulating the relations between contestatory, indeed incommensurable, forces in thought and practice. This displacement requires an investigation of language, and of signifying practices in general, that Marx never provided and even tended to obscure in his binary opposition between base and superstructure.

Another aspect of Marx’s thought is more specific. It is his critique of a commodity system, much of which remains applicable even to a transformed capitalism and may, furthermore, furnish a model for the critique of other developments in modern history. Crucial to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form is his delineation of the process of reductive equalization or commensuration whereby qualitative differences are bracketed in the constitution of exchange value. A commodity as an exchange value can replace or be substituted for another commodity. Substitution implies that commodities have something in common beneath their appearances in phenomenal form. (Marx is here rendering and developing the metaphysical assumptions of classical economics in free indirect style.) This principle of identity is asserted by Marx to be abstract labor power—an identity implicit in the theories of classical economists but never made explicit by them. Abstract labor power is itself produced through a reduction of qualitatively different modes of living labor to a commensurable, equalized, homogeneous form—human labor in the abstract—which is then employed as a means in the production of exchange values. The process of equalization or commensuration reaches its reductive apogee in the designation of one commodity, ultimately in the money form, as universal equivalent.

Marx’s crucial analysis of the commodity harbors internal difficulties. The very voice in which it is formulated is divided: it is both positivistic and critical. The analysis, even in its critical dimension, seems to accept the binary opposition between exchange and use value. Use value is related to qualitative differences between commodities and seems entirely transparent in nature. The culminating account of “commodity fetishism” itself seems to trace the mystified, fetishized character of the commodity to a simple reversal: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor.” This statement has the virtue of calling into question the process of naturalization or normalization essential to ideological mystification. Yet the difficulty is that the strategy of simple reversal invests the social with foundational powers, and it readily accords both with a redemptive rendition of class struggle and with a productivist image of the revolutionary goal. The unproblematic notion of the transparency of use value, moreover, obscures the more basic issue of the very opposition between use and exchange value as well as the implication of use value in utilitarian norms that are operative in the reduction of living labor to instrumentalized labor power. (But does “use value” also evoke an older idea of usufruct as well as function in a newer, utopian register?) The more forceful dimension of Marx’s account, I think, lies in the critical delineation of the mechanism of equalization involving a reduction of labor to “the same unsubstantial reality in each [exchange value], a mere congelation of homogeneous labor power.” This critique enables one to question the very division between instrumentalized labor and autonomized symbolic meaning in the fetishized commodity, and it may be extrapolated into a more general displacement of what Marx saw as the “absurd” forms of relationship in a commodity system.

Equalization is itself a normalizing device, and it is crucial in the formation of pure binary oppositions insofar as each opposite is fully homogeneous, identical, or equal to itself and totally different from its other. The critique of normalization and of pure binary opposites has, of course, been pronounced in so-called post­structuralism, and it signals a way in which the critique of language and of signifying practices in general finds a point of contact with a critique of the commodity system as a crucial signifying practice in modern society. Here the investigation of processes of signification may be seen as a necessary supplement to Marxism understood as a critical theory of society and culture, but of course it is a supplement that takes Marxism in certain directions rather than others.

The three “poststructural” figures to whom I shall briefly allude in the attempt to indicate the relation of a critique of signifying practices to a critical theory of society are Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Except for certain facets of Foucault’s work, all three may be seen as engaging in a critique of positivism—positivism which is characterized by a reductive equalization of all texts and artifacts into a homogeneous body of documentary “information” or constative statements as well as by a disavowal of any transferential relation to the object of inquiry. All three also elude the familiar charge that poststructuralism is a neoformalism, especially in its manifest avoidance of political and historical issues and its autonomization of texts as scenes for the narcissistic play of liberated (or what Derrida would call transcendental) signifiers. In addition, I contend that their work suggests the project of a critical genealogy of both positivism and formalism as complementary, fetishized enterprises: one reducing texts or artifacts to their narrowly constative dimension as documents in the reconstitution of “contexts” or “social realities,” while the other becomes fixated on the internal play of the performative dimension of texts isolated from the “external” (or externalized) contexts of their writing, reception, and critical reading.

In different ways, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard attempt to intensify a legitimation crisis in modern society as well as to suggest antidotes to it. Their variable modes of writing are strategic interventions in the linguistic institution that has often been taken as the bedrock of communication and community. At times they almost seem to engage in stylistic guerrilla warfare waged under a black sun. They may even carry to an explosion point the crisis of representation that artistic and intellectual elites have confronted at least since the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the stylistic experimentation and “alienation effects” in the writing of modern cultural elites may be interpreted as a complex response to disorder and alienation in the larger society—a response that resists, however problematically, symbolic and contemplative solutions to these problems in either analytic or narrative form.

One of the recurrent motifs of social theorists such as Marx or Durkheim is that the established modern order is in fundamental ways an established disorder. For Nietzsche the established disorder is both the scene of nihilistic decadence that had to be worked through and the setting for unheard-of creativity, at times played out on the edge of madness. The most potent modes of thought had to be the most radically ambivalent and dangerous, open both to the best uses and the worst abuses. One point on which Durkheim and Nietzsche, who are so different in many respects, might nonetheless agree is that modern society and culture posed with special urgency the problem of the relation between the exception and the rule or, in other terms, the relation between transgression and normative commitment. They both also advocated the careful study of mores, routines, and practices in everyday life.

It may well be true that a desirable goal of sociocultural life is to provide the institutional and ethical basis for strong commitment to practices and routines in daily life that create trust among members of society. This context might both lessen the prevalence or the need of routine transgression and make “sublime” or “uncanny” overtures more engaging and less banalized. It may also be the case that certain tacit ties and practical commitments have retained greater resiliency in areas of everyday life, and it would be foolhardy to root them out on the pretext that a cultural revolution must be furthered in every conceivable manner. But it is, I think, self-deceptive to point to everyday practice and routine or to identify face-to-face conversation (in contrast with the written text) as a pragmatic origin or source for the generation of meaning and thus the answer to doubt and criticism. This gesture is suspiciously ideological in a number of ways. It is altogether unspecific in its characterization of routine and the everyday “life world,” thereby generalizing and normalizing what may well be only partial realities. It also ignores the problem of the extent to which a legitimation crisis has affected the level of everyday routine itself, turning routine into empty ritual and making cliché the linguistic definition of ordinary social reality. (One need not recount the familiar catalog of daily mishaps and routine horrors that have helped to make the sitcom and the disaster movie two of the most “representative” documents of contemporary life.) Indeed in proposing everyday phrones is or practical consciousness as the “meaningful” way out, one occults the very role of ideology in creating routine complacency, and one threatens to replicate its role in one’s own analysis. One also transfers to a commonsense level the metaphysic of origins and of presence one believes one has transcended, and one may even further a methodological populism that in recent sociology and social history has at times taken a decidedly anti-intellectual turn.4

It should no longer be necessary to observe that Derrida does not privilege writing in the ordinary sense and that his notion of the text is not to be identified with the discrete written artifact (and certainly not with codes). The very propensity, despite all evidence to the contrary, to see his work in this light is instructive, however, for it testifies to the deep-seated nature of the metaphysical desires Derrida deconstructs. Derrida has insisted that philosophy, despite its own desire for totality and closure, is not a separate realm and that the “logocentric” metaphysic of presence, which significant philosophical texts stage in a powerful Darstellung, may be operative in a more offhand and routine manner in everyday life as well as in the social sciences that study it. Derrida has also recently stressed the need to rethink the very notion of the institution, and he has made some attempt to connect his readings of written texts with a critique of institutions and forms of everyday life, notably in the cases of education, technology, mass media, and nuclear power.5 But it is initially plaus...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Criticism Today
• 2 History and Psychoanalysis
• 3 Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre
• 4 The Temporality of Rhetoric
• 5 Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx
• 6 Up against the Ear of the Other: Marx after Derrida
• 7 Intellectual History and Critical Theory