Lola Chamberlain
Anyone who has taken a Knox literature class has probably sat through a discussion (or many) that never seemed to get off the ground because the class couldn’t stop talking about how problematic (racist, sexist, classist) the assigned text was. The women are objects! The people of color are construed as monstrous! The lower class are portrayed as irrational and uneducated!
The problem with this kind of discussion is not that any of these things are untrue, especially of most classic literature. Nor is it precisely because these things are uninteresting (they are certainly not unimportant). No, the problem with this kind of discussion is there are only a certain number of times you can have the exact same one without it seeming like you haven’t really learned anything new, about a text or about the world. In these discussions, I often have the sense that we’re going around in circles, nobody saying anything particularly controversial (at least, to the group of people in the room), everyone dutifully getting their participation points for the day before they clock out. And even worse, I often leave them with a sense of pessimism and dread: this critical attitude tends mostly to do the work of exposing the problems of the word, of pointing out the bad. Although it’s never explicitly stated, these discussions make me feel like we can never escape these problems, that no new world is possible. I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s term capitalist realism, which argues that the most pervasive and stultifying ideology (unique to late stage capitalism) is our inability to even imagine the future, the sense that there’s no way out, that it’s impossible for things to be otherwise (Fisher 5). While there are plenty of reasons we have and should criticize the modern status quo, these negative critical attitudes mean nothing without a corresponding positive vision of the future. I think one place this work can start is in our classrooms.
Now, I’m not saying we should go back to the ‘good old days’ of New Criticism, when the text was king and any mention of social or political context or impact was irrelevant. But I think it’s worth considering how our theoretical practices, both in discussion and in writing, contribute to or detract from our shared goal of liberation. This problem has come into the spotlight in the last twenty years, mainly through debates about “post-critique” aptly christened the “method wars”
Although post-critique comes in many different flavors, many scholars trace its origins to a highly influential article written by Bruno Latour, entitled “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern.” In this article, Latour points out that the skepticism of scientific objectivity he spent his academic career (until that point) developing was being exhibited more and more by right-wing conspiracy theorists to justify their own skepticism of things like climate change, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the moon-landing (Latour 226). If no scientific objectivity was possible, these conspiracists touted, then how can we trust scientists who say the earth is warming?
Today, Latour’s fears about the radical right seem more than justified. Vaccine-skeptics justify themselves with references to profiteering Big Pharma and health organizations that are aligned with the deep state, Trump supporters talk about fake news, and climate denial is still in full swing. His major point was that it’s worth reconsidering the value of our critical outlook if our political enemies can use the same basic tools or mode of understanding without difficulty or contradiction. When comparing the outlook of the critic and the conspiracist, Latour writes that he “finds something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below” (Latour 229). But beyond the unsettling similarity between these ideas, he writes that criticism, like the Enlightenment, is excellent for “debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions” but needs “another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care” (Latour 232). I tend to agree with him. I think through our undergraduate years, at least in my experience, we all tend to become excellent debunkers of this sort, but that we often struggle with the ethic “to protect and to care.” Pointing out the deficiencies in a texts portrayal of a marginalized group is only the first step to articulating how future texts or societies might understand and care for these groups better. While I agree with his major point, however, I can’t quite get on board with the Latourian solution, which (to my understanding) is to reaffirm the importance and agency of things (as opposed to objects), to be larger than the meaning ascribed to it by humans, to exist independently of our petty social constructs and fetishism.
Other post-critical scholars have formulated different solutions to this problem. Another approach, which I find equally dissatisfying, is the rejection of the whole apparatus of critical thought in general and a reaffirmation of the value of ‘lay-reading.’ Rita Felski, in her book The Limits of Critique, advocated for a technique called surface reading, in which analysts abandon trying to get to the “deeper” meaning underneath the surface of the text and instead explore the affective contours of the surface itself. But this pursuit of lay-reading seems to devalue and delegitimize the teaching literature at all—if the goal is to just read a text ‘like a lay-person,’ then what’s the point of having entire departments dedicated to its study and pedagogy? Second, as Tobias Skiveren has argued, what “lay-reading” means has not yet been demonstrated by any scholar even in the very works they praise such methodology, making the point of this kind of argument increasingly unclear (Skiveren 173).
So where does this leave postcritique? I am most convinced by scholars who, while acknowledging the failings of purely negative critique (i.e ideology unmasking), try to reassert that this is not necessarily the limit of traditional critical theory. Fredric Jameson argued way back in 1981 that proper Marxist criticism should contain the practice both of ideological unmasking and of the search for repressed Utopian content. He argues all art is instrumentalized by a specific class of people in the present class conflict, but that such instrumentation suggests a sense of collectivity which could in the future be universal instead of oppositional, which he defines as Utopic (Jameson 291). Jameson writes that while Marxist analysis of culture “must also seek, through and beyond the demonstration of the instrumental function of a given cultural object, to project its simultaneous Utopian power as a symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity” (Jameson 291). The point here is that there is a double imperative of criticism: to unmask, as I hope we all are well practiced and equipped to do, but also to unearth the Utopian, which, to me at least, is a much more laborious process. Especially reading older fiction, I can easily see how small, blinkered and limited the texts’ portrayal both of what is and what could be is, and it takes some work to unearth what its positive vision of the future might tell us.
I argue that this is one of the most important tasks facing our generation of scholars: to identify not just what is unjust and wrong, but also what should be and is right. A common (and valid) criticism of Joe Biden is that his entire campaign strategy boils down to his opposition to Trump, while offering few tangible goals of his own. We should take our own criticism to heart, and in our discussion and writing seek not just to degrade but also to lift up, in hopes of envisioning a better future.
Bibliography
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. 7th printing edition, Cornell University Press, 1982.
Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, Jan. 2004, pp. 225–48.
