Soundings in Critical Theory

Introduction

This book addresses some general issues in contemporary thought through the medium of dialogic exchanges with other critics. This situated notion of critical theory tends to reverse the more conventional format in works that approximate the status of a treatise on method or a theoretical system. Conceptual problems are here approached through—or at least introduced by—specific arguments with significant contemporary theorists. And what is often relegated to footnotes is here embodied and interrogated in the principal text. These procedures attest to my attempt to leave certain traces of production evident in my own writing. The larger incentive in this approach is to enact within my own textual practice an open dialectical interaction both between concrete interlocutors and between thematic unification and those challenges to it that may prove to be provocative in carrying critical reflection further. My conviction is that the critique of totalization that has been so prominent in recent thought should not devolve into an indiscriminate reliance on techniques of fragmentation, decentering, and associative play. It should be conjoined with a critical and self-critical attempt to elicit the actual and desirable articulations among aspects of culture and society—articulations open to forces that contest and displace but do not simply eliminate them. One such articulation joins three important intellectual tendencies: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. The elaboration of connections among this trio of critical theories has been a primary preoccupation of intellectual life in the modern context. I try to put forth some reasons why this has been the case—and in a transformed fashion should continue to be. I also indicate ways in which this preoccupation may be inflected in directions more pertinent for a critical and self-critical historiography.

Ideally these chapters should be read as dialogic interventions in an ongoing debate. They do not attempt to be the last word in, or a judicious summary of, that debate. They are essayistic interventions precisely to the extent that they try to address and counteract either a hypertrophic or a stunted development and to prepare the way for a more desirable interaction of discursive and institutional forces. Nonetheless I at times defend the provocative role of hyper­bole in a larger discursive network of forces. I also try to distinguish the person from the idea or argument, however difficult this distinction may be to establish or maintain. Proper names in these pages should be taken as shorthand for positions or perspectives, and I hope that argumentative exchange, even when it turns polemical, may remain good-spirited while not abandoning either commitment or wit.

In the recent past, two tendencies have been prominent in the work of some influential historians and literary critics: the interpretation of low or popular culture (often conflated with mass or commodified culture) as bearing an oppositional charge and a utopian potential, and the understanding of high or elite culture as typically—or even by definition—functioning to reinforce a structure of dominance in society and politics.¹ Because I take issue with this combination of interpretive tendencies in its marked form, I have at times tried to compensate for its excesses by stressing what it tends to obscure or misconstrue. But this corrective strategy should not be confused with the defense of the polar opposition between high and low culture. Nor should this strategy be seen as leading to the idea of a separate aesthetic realm or a discrete sphere of canonized artifacts that should be the elitist object of displaced religious devotion and detached contemplation. By contrast I am stressing the need to analyze and criticize the constitution and functioning of high, low, and commodified culture and to explicate in detail how specific texts or artifacts relate to a larger sociocultural configuration in ideologically reinforcing, critical, and potentially transformative ways.

One crucial problem that has become increasingly insistent, particularly in Western industrialized countries, is the role of a commodity system in assimilating and affecting the qualitative character of various areas of culture. Mass culture tends to be commodified culture, and it is open to question not because it appeals to many people but because of its commodified character. The controversial issue is to what extent mass culture reinforces a commodity system and to what extent it harbors a viably critical or even a transformative or utopian charge. It is difficult to avoid the general conclusion that the level of commodification and capital investment in mass culture is so high that ideologically reinforcing or adaptive forces tend to be marked or even preponderant and that utopian elements tend to be restricted to contained fantasy and wishful thinking. But only the close reading of artifacts and their relation to institutional settings and pressures can address these issues with the required specificity.

One should of course elicit and try to build upon any critical currents that do indeed exist in artifacts of mass culture. Still, it is dubious simply to conflate mass culture with popular culture and to ascribe to it the characteristics—especially those of resistance and legitimate utopian potential—that have often been attributed (accurately or not) to popular culture. How mass culture assimilates and modifies elements of popular and high culture is as intricate a problem as that posed by the interaction of high culture with both popular and mass culture.

To the extent that certain segments of high culture (particularly print culture)—while never transcending a more or less unconscious participation in existing ideologies—contain a relatively pronounced critical force, it may be because they are objects of relatively small capital investment and not central to the functioning of a commodity system. But this marginal status itself lessens the social and political role they can play. The ineffectiveness of marginalization is exacerbated by the compulsion toward, or cultivation of, hermetic inaccessibility in artifacts of high culture. The monumental difficulty in both the creation and the reception of these artifacts—a difficulty confronting intellectual and cultural history itself—is how to render their critical and transformative potential more accessible without either domesticating or sacralizing them. One dimension of this problem is simply put but not simply addressed: how should one read and interpret texts and other artifacts?

A specific object of criticism in these chapters is the meagre status accorded to the problem of textuality within professional history. When one raises the problem of reading texts and of conceptualizing their relations to inferential reconstructions of other activities, including their contexts of production and reading, one still tends to meet with two responses from professional historians. The first is the belief that a close interest in problems of textuality leads to the end of historiography. The second is the view that historians have in fact been interested in these problems all along and that criticism of reductive forms of contextualism, historicism, and neopositivism trades in caricatures, beats dead horses, and fabricates straw men. These mutually contradictory (and metaphorically mixed) responses are, in psychoanalytic terms, themselves evidence that criticism in this area still has a point. I try to offer some additional evidence for its continued pertinence in the course of this book.

There are, however, signs that some historians are indeed becoming interested in an approach to texts that does not reduce them to simple documentary indexes of a hypostatized reality and that even poses differently the very problem of reading and using documents.² And the inevitable traces of interpretation, transference, and dialogic exchange in research are beginning to be thematized as problems in the self-understanding of historians. It would be premature to refer to a new history or even to a new intellectual history. But the problem of how to read texts or documents and how to relate them to processes of contextual understanding and the inferential reconstruction of other sociocultural activities is finding a place on the agenda of historical studies today. To aid in formulating a better notion of what that place should be is one major purpose of this book.

It should be evident, in reading these chapters, that I do not reject social history, eliminate the referent, or defend an intellectual history fixated on canonical artifacts and great books. Canonicity is an important issue but not because it provides an exclusive list of great thinkers and artists for quasi-transcendental humanistic education. Nor does it simply serve as the occasion to display cultural snobbery by adorning texts with learned allusions. A canon has intellectually ambivalent functions, and it is related to institutional and disciplinary problems. On the one hand, it is a source of authority, and it often functions to legitimate hegemonic class, gender, and racial elites. On the other hand, canonical artifacts themselves have complex, internally divided relations to their contexts of creation and use. These relations may be better investigated if we reopen the question of the canon by reformulating the text/context problem as crucial for intellectual and, to some extent, social history and by examining closely the precise way given texts come to terms with their contexts, including their canonical status. I have intimated that the objective of a more or less noncanonical reading of them is to bring out critical and possibly transformative potentials ignored or repressed in canonical uses. But in the course of my argument I add two further points. Certain anticanonical readings (such as those fostered by the appeal to Foucault in the so-called New Historicism) may focus exclusively on the symptomatic role of texts and their function in reinforcing canonicity and other dimensions of a power structure. And the desire to stress the critical or even potentially transformative implications of texts should not induce presentism or procedures of forced interpretation and projective reprocessing of the past.

Given its role in this book and elsewhere in my publications, it may be useful if I turn explicitly to my relation to the work of Jacques Derrida, a relation I characterize as one of highly selective appropriation. I do not attempt to emulate Derrida’s style—his extravagantly playful enactment of a disseminatory, nonproductive movement of the signifier that supplements his rigorous deconstruction of traditional metaphysics. I make the admittedly problematic attempt to elaborate a critical and self-critical historiography that remains open to the risks Derrida explores but also insists upon certain constraints in a manner that engages the disciplinary conventions of professional historians.

The notion of appropriation may, however, be inadequate to characterize my relation to Derrida’s texts or, for that matter, to account for the relationship between any interpreter and an object of inquiry or selective use. In this book and elsewhere, I attempt to conceive of the relation between the historian or critic and the other on the model of transference in Freud. In a transferential relation one tends to repeat in a displaced way the very processes that are active (at times uncritically) in one’s object of inquiry. The point, however, is not simply to indulge in transferential relations or to deny them. It is to work through them in a dialogic (or openly dialectical) fashion that strives for empirically and critically controlled reciprocity in an exchange.

I find a questionable reprocessing of the past to be characteristic of important dimensions of Derrida’s own recent essay on Paul de Man.³ (This tendency may of course be induced by strong transfer­ential relations attendant upon close friendship and a degree of intellectual identification.) Particularly in Derrida’s analysis of Les juifs dans la littérature actuelle, an article published by the young de Man in 1941, strained interpretation is abetted by a process of analytic dismemberment that eliminates the argumentative direction and thrust of de Man’s appalling article. This interpretative procedure culminates in an extremely implausible attempt to transform what is manifestly anti-Semitic into an anticonformist critique of anti-Semitism—an attempt that in my judgment receives little or no support in de Man’s text. This is not the place for an extended critical reading of Derrida’s essay; let me simply say that certain proclivities evident in this essay do not represent the dimensions of Derrida’s work that I defend. My basic point in this context—with reference both to Derrida’s reading of de Man and to my reaction to it—is that one has to refer to texts in making arguments about them, and one must be open to the possibility that the text may indeed resist one’s interpretations. Of course the arguments of other interpreters are crucial in helping one to detect one’s shortcomings, but these arguments are convincing insofar as they appeal to the textual evidence and enable one to see things one did not see at first.

One dimension of Derrida’s work I have found quite fruitful is his sustained undoing of binary oppositions that are themselves crucial for a scapegoat mechanism. Among the binaries deconstructed by Derrida is that between continuity and discontinuity in the understanding of time. In complex fashion, Derrida connects with both Heidegger and Freud in rethinking temporality in terms of interacting processes of repetition and change—change that may be traumatically disruptive. I also consider deconstruction important both as a strategy of reversal of the dominant hierarchies in which binaries are organized and as an attendant and equally necessary method of displacing and rearticulating relations. The undoing of binary oppositions does not, however, eliminate the need to investigate carefully their actual role in intellectual, social, and political relations where they may be quite constraining intellectually and have strong institutional support. Nor should the undoing of binaries eventuate in the obliteration of distinctions. Instead it leads to the problem of rearticulating distinctions and attendant relations in a larger, transformed field or network.

This larger field or network of relations is precisely what Derrida refers to as the general text. Derrida could not be more consistent and insistent in stressing that he is not using text in the ordinary sense but in a different or infrastructural sense to refer to relational networks of instituted traces in general. I take this view in the direction of a reconceptualization of the relation between texts and contexts in historical interpretation. I argue that in intellectual history one should not take context as a simple explanatory concept; rather one should pose as an explicit problem the question of how texts come to terms with contexts and vice versa. But this does not imply a conventional intratextual perspective or a so-called linguistic turn. One respect in which I very much agree with Mikhail Bakhtin is in his departure from a narrowly linguistic perspective and in his insistence upon an investigation of language in use as a historical issue. In the chapters that follow, I often attempt to supplement Derrida with Bakhtinian perspectives, particularly in the investigation of specific historical or institutional matters and in the combination of empirical-analytic techniques of research with a dialogic exchange vis-à-vis the object of inquiry.

In specific terms, this book makes a qualified defense of intellectual history as a disciplined but self-questioning attempt to read and interpret artifacts in context. But it also indicates the need to arrive at a better understanding of contexts themselves in terms of an informed conception of modern culture and society. In this sense, intellectual history is both constituted and deconstituted in the course of the argument. It is constituted and defended—at times polemically—against dubious conceptions of it or attacks upon it. But it is simultaneously deconstituted with reference to a larger critical and historical conception of culture and society to which intellectual history must contribute and into which it may enter in still unpredictable ways. The broadest ambition of the book is to further a process of self-criticism and reconstitution in historical studies, a process that is intimately bound up both with the understanding of the past and with sociocultural and political critique bearing on the present and future. Thus the essential tension between the professional status of the historian and the paraprofessional status of the critic must not only be tolerated but actively affirmed as a crucial index of one’s place in the contemporary conflict of interpretations. In entering this conflict, one need not abandon all hope of common ground or consensus. But achieving common ground should not be confused with settling into the benevolent intolerance of a commonsense hermeneutics, and it cannot result from unearned declarations of interdisciplinary convergence. Consensus itself is at best a problematic, limited component of the present and a figure for a more desirable future that can never entirely transcend the scarred imprint of the past. It should also go without saying that, even in the most ideal and genuinely cooperative of futures, agreement must be open to criticism and to more engaging, self­critical modes of difference or radical questioning.

The reader may find it useful if I provide a brief indication of the contents of the following chapters. Criticism Today offers a general assessment of the problems and the prospects of criticism as a contemporary genre that questions its own limits, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and raises issues relevant to a variety of fields. It refers specifically to the roles of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Mikhail Bakhtin as important reference points in contemporary criticism.

History and Psychoanalysis assesses the implications of Freud’s thought for the writing of history. It departs from the more common historiographic practices of explaining psychoanalysis through the attempt to place Freud in fin-de-siècle Vienna and of employing psychoanalysis to account for the life and work of historical figures or the nature of movements. Instead it turns the question of psychoanalysis back on historiography itself in order to explore the extent to which the attempt to come to terms with Freud may transform the manner in which we both understand history and practice historiography.

Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre treats the recent debate between two important historians, Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton—a debate whose occasion was Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre. Here the focus is on the question of reading texts and documents in historiography. To test Darnton’s use of texts in his acclaimed book, the chapter concludes with a reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prefaces to La nouvelle Hélöise.

The Temporality of Rhetoric was originally planned as an inquiry into the problem of temporality in history and, more particularly, into the interpretation of Romanticism through a comparison of M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism and Paul de Man’s Rhetoric of Temporality, and critical analysis still constitutes the major part of the chapter. Like many others who had written about de Man just before the discovery of his early World War II articles, I was placed in the double bind of either not addressing the problems they posed or adding something, however premature and partial, about them. I decided upon the latter course, but I stress that my discussion is based on limited information and that it is quite possible that further disclosures may affect my response in positive, negative, or more complex and even ambiguous ways. My discussion of Les juifs dans la littérature actuelle is in good part motivated by my critical reaction to Derrida’s treatment of it in Like the Sound of the Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War. The body of the chapter was already written in substantially the form in which it appears before I learned of the wartime articles and wrote the postscript.

Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx acknowledges Clifford Geertz’s important contribution to the understanding and use of a protean concept, but it attempts to argue for a qualified return to Marx’s conception of ideology. The chapter tends to assume a point that may deserve explicit treatment: the concept of ideology itself raises the intricate issue of the displacement of religious categories into secular forms of interpretation and justification. The concept of ideology arises in the context of the secularization of culture, and it requires the elucidation of the relation between religious and secular forms in terms of involved processes of recurrence and-transformation. Thus the chapter’s topic is closely related to the issues treated in the two chapters that precede it.

Up against the Ear of the Other: Marx after Derrida begins with the question of the implications of deconstruction for the reading of Marx. One of the most important of these is the need to attend to heterogeneous tendencies that challenge the coherence and unity of a corpus of writing. The essay offers a general schema for reading Marx in terms of Hegelian-utopian, positivistic, and more openly dialectical (or dialogic) voices or forces that run through his work and provide bases for often contradictory interpretations of it. It also defends the third of these voices as the most fruitful and deserving of further development.

Intellectual History and Critical Theory tries to explicate and explore the project of establishing a link between intellectual history and critical theory. In the process it reviews the contributions of deconstruction and the New Historicism, and it discusses one of John Pocock’s recent essays as a statement of an important and influential tendency in the historical reconstruction of the past. It also inquires into the interaction between historical reconstruction and dialogic exchange, and it is premised on the basic point that we should neither disavow nor freely act out a transferential relation to the other but rather attempt to work critically through it.

¹ See, for example, Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981); idem, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, Social Text 1 (1979), 130-48; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedesci (1976; Baltimore, 1980); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986).

² See, for example. the lucid and informative discussion in John Toews, Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience, American Historical Review 92 (1987), 879-907.

³ See Like the Sound of the Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War, Critical Inquiry 14 (1988), 590-652.

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