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Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Citations & The Damage Done; or, How Much Lacan Before I Resort to Insult and Violence?
A critic establishes trust with his or her readers by citational proxy. Who cites and is cited by whom means everything when evaluating contemporary criticism. So when I run across an article about Nella Larsen’s Passing which cites seven works by Jacques Lacan, three by Freud, ten glosses of Lacan but only five citations from the rich critical history of Larsen’s novel, I hardly need to read the article to know that I do not trust this critic’s ability to evaluate his or her sources. (All that talk of gazing and yet so myopic. Sigh.) A critic who don’t know merde from cirage à chaussures (that sounds so much snappier in English) cannot expect the majority of readers to consider the points he or she forwards with the seriousness befitting academic discourse . . . and by "the majority of readers," I only mean "all those who don’t share the critic’s supremely constricted set of assumptions."
It is outright unnerving to read criticism in one of the profession’s flagship journals which defiantly refuses to engage the critical history of a novel written about so freqently. Does this critic suggest that only four of the 642 articles and reviews available via Project Muse and JSTOR alone even obliquely address his or her argument? (Before you ask: only four of the five aforementioned articles could be found in a database because the other non-psychoanalytic entry was the introduction to the edition of Passing cited in the article.) One certainly does. The critic’s citation of it begins:
Judith Butler directly engages paranoia and Passing in terms of Freud’s analysis . . .
Did I mention myopia? To put it another way:
Q: What are the odds that this particular scholar would not have found Passing a cornucopia of psychoanalytic conundrums?[1]
A: Zero.
The odds of me trusting that this critic’s reading of Larsen’s novel dimish with every passing Lacan . . . . because the article is not about Larsen so much as it is a recitation of ontological talking points. Needless to say, while I would rather my criticism altogether empty of psychoanalytic position statements, due to recent interactions with intelligent people I have abandoned my hard-line snickering dismissiveness. I can now handle the occasional reference to psychoanalytic concepts with fruitive effects on the literary reading. ("Leslie Fiedler!" Luther Blisset said. "Leslie Fiedler!") So yes . . . . Leslie Fiedler! But Fiedler’s Freud appeared in the service of literary explication; his Freud did not function as the principle of selection behind the literature he analyzed. Selecting works which further flatter the assumptions you have committed your self and career to flattering does not incline your readers to trust you. Passing may exemplify some psychoanalytic hobby-horse, but the fact that Quicksand hardly merits mention leads this reader to believe that it fails whatever litmus test this critic applies to works before he writes about them . . . and that mode of scholarship seems outright Rovian. I feel comfortable saying that such scholarship has all the intellectual substance of spin.
The intended point of this post involved glossing the appearance of Kenneth Deffeyes’ Beyond Oil
"You have to deal with partial information. In oil drilling, you had better be ready to act shrewdly on partial information. Do physicists do that? Hell, no. They want to have it to seven decimal places on their Hewlett-Packards. The geologist has to choose the course of action with the best statistical chance. As a result, the style of geology is full of inferences, and they change. No one has ever seen a geosyncline. No one has ever seen the welding of tuff. No one has ever seen a granite batholith intrude." (133)
Deffeyes’ intellectual flexibility—his determination to fit his theory to the facts and not the other way around—should be a model for humanistic inquiries as much as scientific. A theory should fit the facts it purports to explain; instead, the facts chosen for explication are chosen because they fit the theories the critic intended to flatter all along. This situation saddens me more than anything else. If my tone seems combative, understand that when I see such wanton manipulation I want to scream my cords raw and tendons bloody . . . to invent the next generation of sanguineous parasynthetics. (I link that not to condescend but because I understand that not everyone shares my fascination with all things dictionary.)
[1] Quick note about the word "conundrum." Apparently the plural is "conundrums" instead of "conundra" because it is a nonce-word, a linguistic relic of some Oxford prank from the 1580s. The fact that it retains English pluralization despite being a parodic Latin term astonishes me. You would think that by now someone would have inflected it in accordance with Latin grammar.
Comments
Scott, can you really be saying you don’t need to read what somebody writes to decide whether it’s any good, all you need to do is look at their footnotes?
Yes, and since it’s Collegiality Week, I ask that you at least name the subject of your vituperation. I was curious enough that I looked through Project Muse and found an article from MFS that seemed to be it, but then wasn’t.
Also, in the spirit of Collegiality Week, I’d suggest always assuming that the author of any given piece of criticism is at least as intelligent and well informed (allowing for chronological differences) as you are.
Colleague Jonathan might want to consider that his accusation sounds rather odd, given that Scott’s post does not contain anything about the critic being unintelligent or uninformed. The Colleague might also want to consider that posting this kind of criticism of Scott is hardly collegial, especially since it could equally well have been sent by Email.
That’s really Rich, in light of “ I hardly need to read the article to know that I do not trust this critic’s ability to evaluate his or her sources” and the entire second paragraph.
Being constricted by one’s set of assumptions, and therefore defiantly not engaging with critical history and losing the reader’s trust in your ability to evaluate sources is a symdrome that has nothing to do with either intelligence or how well informed one is.
I think that your running joke about collegiality isn’t going to last the week very well, Colleague.
Laura,
I’m not saying that at all; what I’m saying is that there’s a certain type of article, one which I’ve come to know through experience, whose intentions I can determine from its works cited page. I did indeed read the article--and have, in fact, read many like it--and it did conform to my initial impressions. I’m not a hack, you know. At least not on Wednesdays.
Rich,
Thank you for pointing out that I in no way attacked the intelligence of this critic, only his or her intentions in writing this article.
Jonathan,
I thought it’d be obvious that the omission of the author’s name was intentional, since I didn’t want to disparage the intellect of a particular scholar so much as identify a trend whose underlying assumptions I found wanting. If you’d like, you can send me an email and I can forward you a link to the article in question. I thought it’d be apparent from what I had written that my representation was a good faith, anti-ad hominem version of this critic’s argument . . . but if you believe that I’m involved in invective here--that I’m misrepresenting the article in question--I can rectify that with an email.
Also, Jonathan, I don’t mean to be punctilious, but “I hardly need to read the article” implies that I have, in fact, read the article, but that reading it has confirmed my initial assumptions about it.
So it is a symptom, then, to be enjoyed. Very meta.
What is “it”? How is “it” symptomatic? How do I “enjoy” “it”? Seriously, if you want to step to the table, then step to the table. I’m tired of having to divine your position with a shoot. ‘Cause you know, shoots don’t grow on trees . . . or whatever, you know what I mean.
Would the author of the article accept your characterization? I think not.
I think that if you’re going to snipe at something like this, which is, let’s be clear about it, exactly what you’ve done here, you should identify the article in question in the post itself so that others may judge for themselves and so that even the author may find it and perhaps choose to respond.
I do think the author of the article would agree with my characterization of it. He or she would say, plainly, that “Yes, I was more interested in explicating something about Lacanian psychoanalytic theory than I was about saying anything about Larsen’s novel, and yes, I think that’s an important thing for scholars to do.” I don’t think I diminished that or sniped at all in this post. I said “This is an essay about psychoanalysis which has as much to say about things outside of psychoanalytic theory as Rovian spin does about things outside of White House politics.” Yes, I think it a waste of a sound mind . . . but I don’t insult the intelligence behind the article so much as indicate that I, personally, think it pointed in a supremely unproductive direction.
(That said, for what it’s worth, I know the author of this article, and I know that he wouldn’t think my characterization of it unfair. Yes, this is Miers’ nomination logic, but still.)
But all of this is beside the point. Either you 1) believe my representation of the works cited reliable (i.e. you trust that I can count) or 2) you don’t. If you do, we can continue this discussion. If you don’t, we can’t. I think this article representative enough of a general trend and that we can address said trend as a trend; but for reasons you have, in the past, outlined, I would rather not be specific as to the author of this article. If you want to spend two minutes with a database and two keywords ("Larsen" and “Lacan"), this will be one of the first articles that pops up. (The first, actually, in the database I use.) But I would rather speak to the trend than seem to attack an individual scholar whose intellect I respect but whose methodology I take issue with.
And of course, as I’ve mentioned, I’m more than happy to provide a link to the article via email. You can read it and see whether my accurate account of the article’s intentions is, in fact, accurate; and then, I hope, we could continue the conversation.
I think that Scott’s criticism is in some way related to Holbo’s criticism of the Higher Eclecticism. There was a bit in the last Holbonic piece about the philosopher known as “Z” concerning professional standards and what scholarship really was. As I said then, I think that this line of criticism doesn’t really work, because standards of scholarship are so contested. Normally I’d think that if someone is going to write criticism that bothers to cite 25 sources, they should cite a wide range of sources ... but if you’re doing a specifically Lacanian reading of a work, who knows whether that is really necessary?
In a time of ever increasing specialization, choosing only works which favor a Lacanian reading and using only Lacan to read them may be as good as anything else. Who’s to say that any other approach is more valuable? And of course no one really knows what more valuable would mean. Within a Theoretical framework in which physical science is assumed to produce “knowledge” that is primarily about society rather than about the field of study, literary criticism can not be said to produce any knowledge at all. So I don’t think that this argument really can convince anyone; if you already agree, you agree, if you don’t, you just write another article.
"In a time of ever increasing specialization, choosing only works which favor a Lacanian reading and using only Lacan to read them may be as good as anything else.”
Or to put it differently, we have no idea whether anything in criticism is any good or not, so fuck that shit. (As a crank I can say that non-collegial kind of thing.
Regarding McPhee, my brother the field geologist has told me that all the numbers he needs are 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,000.... Results are acceptable within an order of magnitude, or maybe two.
He could probably leave out 2, 20, 200, etc. except that English grammar makes it seem monstrous to use 1 to approximate 2.
I agree with John Emerson (although, John, Deffeyes did generalize too much with the crack about physicists. Astrophysicists often use only orders of magnitude).
Academic literary criticism has an obvious status-setting function. Industry requires a continual supply of college graduates who know how to read and write a complex sentence, and English Departments exist in their current size in order to teach this to freshmen. But since they are part of academia, they need to set their internal status hierarchy via “research” publication. Showing that one is capable of an involved Lacanian reading demonstrates intelligence and command of a particular abstract system, even though it produces no knowledge or art in itself. Colleague Jonathan’s misperception of what Scott was saying is really quite illustrative in this respect; he thought that Scott was making a status challenge based on denigration of intelligence and received knowledge.
The same analysis of scientific research and publication as purely status-seeking (including the social sciences) fails because the sciences are always eventually brought up short by comparison with reality. With literary studies in its postmodern incarnation, no such comparison appears possible. So the motivation for a change in what is done appears to be fashion. Eventually, Lacanian readings are insufficent to demonstrate individual qualities because they have been done too often, and people start to cast about for new systems. That appears to be the historical moment that we are currently in. When an academic star supplies an arbitrary but complex new system, people will rush to it and forget Lacan.
It is outright unnerving to read criticism in one of the profession’s flagship journals which defiantly refuses to engage the critical history of a novel written about so freqently.
While I suspect, Scott, that I would share your frustration with the article you describe, I’m not so sure I agree with the bit just reprodueced. Some useful and important interpretive labor gets done by folks who engage the critical history, of course. But some useful and important interpretive labor also gets done by folks who really don’t care what their famous or not so famous colleagues down the hall might think. Are you really prepared to disagree?
If the criticism is so Lacan-focussed, then how can it be characterised as being done by someone who doesn’t care what famous people think?
Some useful and important interpretive labor gets done by folks who engage the critical history, of course. But some useful and important interpretive labor also gets done by folks who really don’t care what their famous or not so famous colleagues down the hall might think. Are you really prepared to disagree?
I am. You may not care what your illustrious forebears think, but if you’re writing an article on the novel’s titular substance (Passing), either you 1) imagine that your Lacanian approach entitles you to dismiss all non-Lacanian readings of the novel, because all you’re really interested in is Lacan, or 2) admit that the novel may be more complicated, make work in more registers, than Lacan can account for and then make a studious, informed and possibly still Lacanian reading of the novel. The engagement with earlier critical scholarship lends weight to the conclusions you draw, and a work which steadfastly refuses to lands somewhere between intellectual laziness and arrogance. (Note to Jonathan: not unintelligent.) Standards of quality assurance should demand that familiarity with the critical history of the work being analyzed; but the profession (as Rich and John have said more eloquently than I will) instead has this infatuation with wiping clean the slate, with reinventing the wheel. When the slate’s cleared of all its burdensome “research” every couple of years, you end up reading scholarship with all the weight of the ephemera it is. No depth of engagement; no studious consideration of approaches contrary (or merely different) from your own; no sense of the meaningfulness of this particular text outside of “I found this on my desk one day and put it through the Lacanian meat-grinder.” The fact that is in this article, the author claims Larsen’s text works in this way, but only talks about one of her two novels, indicates to me that Quicksand didn’t slide through the grinder so neatly as Passing, that it contained gristle inimical to the Lacanian machine. And that’s a good thing. Literature, as a product of life, is more complex than the systems with which we account for it (no matter how abstruse they may be).
Scott: “Standards of quality assurance should demand that familiarity with the critical history of the work being analyzed; but the profession (as Rich and John have said more eloquently than I will) instead has this infatuation with wiping clean the slate, with reinventing the wheel.”
I have a slight disagreement with the emphasis of this statement. When one writes academic literary criticism, it seems to me to be primarily a performative utterance rather than one that is intended to communicate content. It says “Look at me, I am tenure-worthy.” Therefore familiarity with critical history isn’t just neglected due to time constraints or something, it’s actively discouraged. Putting in much about non-Lacanian interpretations would spoil the flow of the paper and depict its author as a plodding pedant. Even putting non-Lacanian works in the reference list would be a kind of ideological disloyalty, a kind of reference to the rules of chess while one is playing Go.
One answer to this is to say, as Tony Christini has been saying (in my opinion, anachronistically) in another thread, that of course literary criticism communicates content. Well, what content would that be? Contemporary literary theory directs a barrage of critique at the very idea that there could be “content” that is not more about politics, or about the personal world of the individual reader, than it is about the text. I don’t see how you can hold to this and still treat academic literary work seriously. It would be like having academics write poetry, but telling them that the poetry only counted as helping their career if it didn’t have any aesthetic value (assuming that no one really gets aesthetic enjoyment out of reading these papers).
While some posts here at the Valve drive me mad, like Tuesday’s broad brushstroke tarring of theoretical/cultural studies scholars as not caring about individual works, I found myself in general agreement with Scott’s post. At the very least it reminds me of my encounter in a lit seminar with an essay that applied Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic model of the gaze without once considering the fact that in literature people don’t actually look at one another in any literal way. I’m a little more Theory friendly than the Valve posters tend to be, but I think Scott’s right that scholars positing Lacanian readings of literature should do so to illucidate the literature (or more broadly a literature-society nexus) itself. I can even get behind those for whom the literary text is mere illustration of some general point, but then they should explain why they’re using Nella Larson’s Passing as evidence and not something that, say, is not part of the literary studies canon. In the film/media realm, Baudrillard, for instance, uses Apocolypse Now or An American Family to make some larger point about the collapse of the signifier in postmodernity, but it’s clear all the while why these texts are privileged ones.
I myself am, generally speaking, very Theory-friendly. I suspect that everyone who posts here has a different opinion on this issue, but that only a few could be regarded as completely Theory-unfriendly.
The lesson here is to get annoyed, if need be, with individuals, not the site itself.
Standards of quality assurance should demand that familiarity with the critical history of the work being analyzed.
So one of the “standards of quality assurance"--one an editor might appeal to as a sufficient reason for rejecting a submitted article--"demands" (that authors demonstrate by means of citation?) “familiarity with the critical history of the work being analyzed.”
That’s a bit strong to my ear. ‘x is unoriginal’ (says what has been said before in the critical history and offers no new arguments) is a more modest sufficient reason to reject, since a submission could be original even if its author is unfamiliar with the critical history (or maybe even, perhaps, partly because of that unfamiliarity, since exploring the critical history may sometimes involves adopting biases pervasive in it).
Or how about: ‘x fails to present evidence that blocks the temptation to prefer an alternative reading’ (that happen to have been offered before in the critical history)? That, too, is more modest, since it is possible for an author to present compelling readings that tell against other readings, even if the author is unfamiliar with those other readings.
I have no use for Lacan, so the Lacanian frame is all I need to see before assuring myself that I do not want to read the article.
Passing is a mediocre piece of melodrama that got elevated to a major text for policital reasons.
I am doubly uninterested.
I think that Theory-friendliness is not really the issue: it’s not like the attempt to put literature back into a box is going to succeed. I think that if you accept Scott’s criticism that the field is too interested in restarting from a blank slate, you also have to accept that wherever the field goes from here is going to have to build on major elements of the Theory that has already been done. But some kind of choice among those elements is going to have to be made; the Higher Eclecticism bit is in many ways about that desire not to choose, not to go anywhere.
Scott, I basically agree with you about the critics’ need to *know* the critical history of a text. But I disagree that a journal article needs to discuss in any detail this criticla history unless it adds something significant to the critic’s argument.
Also, you should check out the standards of publication for that journal. Many journals want highly footnoted articles with references to past critical work; many others just want the a argument, and rely on highly informed peer reviewers to make sure that an article is an original contribution to the particular field. Even dissertations more and more don’t include a those long-ass footnotes about past criticism, because most of it ends up jettisoned for the article or book manuscripts. The key, it seems, is to situate your reading in a scholarly conversation, not to prove one’s mastery of the MLA database.
Same goes for the critic’s neglect of *Quicksand* in the article. This could very well be a result of the conventions of that particular journal. For example, *Novel* will *only* publish articles that cover a series of novels. Other journals tend to want single text foci in the articles they publish. Furthermore, we’re dealing with severe space limitations. My dissertation gives 80 page readings of individual novels. I might briefly point to similar or divergant rhythms in other texts by that author, but I personally don’t think that one can do justice to a single literary work in under 20 pages. Which is also to say: perhaps this guy’s article is part of a longer manuscript that *did* treat Larsen in general, and the conventions of the journal necessitated a single text focus.
But what’s wrong with trying to simply explicate one novel? Why must a critic’s ideas hold true for all the work by a given author? If *Quicksand* diverges, well, fine then. Then one could argue that *Passing* displays different dynamics than *Quicksand* (and I’m not Larsen scholar, but isn’t that one of the received critical angles on Larsen—that the two novels are quite different?). I mean, if I were to write about Djuna Barnes’ *Nightwood*, I’d be hard pressed to map the psychodynamics of that novel onto, say, *Ryder*, with its hollow, satirical characters.
So Scott, I agree that certain Theory-heavy readings end up burying the literary texts; and I agree that it’s annoying when a critic simply restates earlier criticism and tries to “shine a turd’ by adding a bunch of Lacan to make the argument seem new. But I don’t think that the lack of in-depth attention to critical history or the single novel focus are necessarily bad things (or even things that can be attributed to the author of the artcle).
Rich,
When one writes academic literary criticism, it seems to me to be primarily a performative utterance rather than one that is intended to communicate content. It says “Look at me, I am tenure-worthy.” [...] Contemporary literary theory directs a barrage of critique at the very idea that there could be “content” that is not more about politics, or about the personal world of the individual reader, than it is about the text.
While that may be true of some critic’s work, I don’t think it characterizes say, my own, or Sean’s or my advisor’s. (And you can read a bit of both of theirs here. All three of us are fundamentally concerned with the content of the literary works...and, to differing degrees, how that content interacts with the formal, i.e. literary, properties of these works. (Here’s a brilliant example of my advisor doing just that.) So while I agree with you that some academic criticism tends in that direction, I don’t see the work I do as necessarily tending so.
...you also have to accept that wherever the field goes from here is going to have to build on major elements of the Theory that has already been done.
I meant to mention this myself earlier: it’s not as if, as a practioner of the responsible scholarly methodology I preach, I’m allowed to skip those works which have a Lacanian approach. Posts like this one typically originate in my doing just that: I’m annoyed that I can’t force myself not to read this or that article, and so I plow through it to see 1) what is interesting and/or useful about it and 2) whether that material can survive once divorced from its original context, or whether it’s so context-dependent that, when stripped of its theoretical frame, it falls.
Chris,
I can even get behind those for whom the literary text is mere illustration of some general point, but then they should explain why they’re using Nella Larson’s Passing as evidence and not something that, say, is not part of the literary studies canon. In the film/media realm, Baudrillard, for instance, uses Apocolypse Now or An American Family to make some larger point about the collapse of the signifier in postmodernity, but it’s clear all the while why these texts are privileged ones.
So well put it demands repition. The blurred objectives of an article like the I describe are in large part responsible for the problems I have with it. Had this been published in The American Psychoanalyst by a working psychoanalyst, I would understand; but to have been published in a preeminent literary journal?
As for my relative theory-friendliness, I’m far more theory friendly now than I was when I first started posting here, due on the one hand to the intelligence of my early critics and on the other to the month I did little else but read back issues of Critical Inquiry.
LB,
Good points, but I’ve got to run. I’ll address them later.
Scott: “While that may be true of some critic’s work, I don’t think it characterizes say, my own, or Sean’s or my advisor’s.”
Well, yes, I was overgeneralizing. Some people hold to other ideas of scholarship, as clearly you do or you wouldn’t have thought that this was worth writing a post about. But I think that there is an important question in whether that form of scholarship can really be normative.
Scott (and Rich)—maybe I’m living in a parallel universe, from which I can communicate with you all but within which people do entirely different scholarly work than the scholars in your universe. But.
Isn’t Szalay’s work an example of the cultural dominant in today’s literary academy? It’s called historicism, right? Here’s the recipe:
1. Take one literary work.
2. For extra spice, add some extra-literary texts (modernist chefs prefer a dash of noir to darken the broth)
3. Choose a major historical event occuring at the same time as the literary work. (Or, if yer a New Historicist, choose a minor historical event, like the King tying his bow-tie.)
4. Show how (1) and perhaps (2) reflect (3).
5. Repeat and serve at room temperature.
I’m being bratty, but such work isn’t some radical deviation from Theory. It’s the new paradigm, especially among Americanists, 18th century novel scholars, Romanticists, and med/Ren folks. I love this work. But let’s not pretend that it somehow pays more attention to literature than Lacanian readings do. Most historicist readings of literature would fit into a contemporary history journal moreso than into a 1950s literature studies journal.
So why is being a historian better than being a psychoanalyst? --when both are tenured in English, that is.
Luther, Scott has objections to psychoanalytic criticism that I’m not particularly invested in except insofar as they involve pseudoscience, but my general description of “find an arbitrary system, apply it, gain attention, avoid other methods until it wears out” works just as well with the historicist formula that you cite. It probably applied equally well to the pre-Theory New Criticism. I don’t think that there is anything particularly Lacanian about it, except insofar as methods named after individuals are almost always more restrictive than others.
LB,
I basically agree with you about the critics’ need to *know* the critical history of a text. But I disagree that a journal article needs to discuss in any detail this criticla history unless it adds something significant to the critic’s argument.
That’s certainly true, but without being able to quantify exactly what it is, I’ll put forward this bold statement: I can tell. When someone has done the research, they address problems in a particular, informed matter; when someone hasn’t, they address each “new” problem as if it’s “new.” Later in the week I’ll pull out some Huck Finn essays I have lying around in which the issue of homosociality in the novel--the very issue at the core of Fiedler’s analysis of it--is treated as if it has never before been recognized. There’s a...thinness to such work, a lack of knowledgeability about the arguments that have come before which manifests in the critic’s rhetoric. Again, difficult to quantify, but very much there.
Now, I see how this could become oppressive, something which confounds genuinely new thought about a text by drowning all the scholars who would work on it in historical minutae...but at the same time, I think once you have an idea, it’s your responsibility to do to the research. But there’s a scholarly culture (more on which in my response to your next response) which doesn’t think that, as evidenced by this particular article appearing in a recent PMLA.
The rest of what you say--consider the journal in which the article appears, &c.--is eminently sound, and something I haven’t thought about but really should as I start to think about sending chapters out. You know, after I write them and stuff.
Scott (and Rich)—maybe I’m living in a parallel universe, from which I can communicate with you all but within which people do entirely different scholarly work than the scholars in your universe.
Mine’s called “Irvine,” and it resides in the even more parallel-y universe of “Orange County.” The world you live in has stuff like culture and cars more than a year old.
Isn’t Szalay’s work an example of the cultural dominant in today’s literary academy? [...] I’m being bratty, but such work isn’t some radical deviation from Theory. It’s the new paradigm, especially among Americanists, 18th century novel scholars, Romanticists, and med/Ren folks. I love this work. But let’s not pretend that it somehow pays more attention to literature than Lacanian readings do. Most historicist readings of literature would fit into a contemporary history journal moreso than into a 1950s literature studies journal."
I don’t think Szalay’s work fits into that paradigm, largely because of its focus on the formal elements of the literary text. For example (and I’m quoting a thesis instead of an argument because it’s shorter, but the close-reading to back these claims is there):
This kind of nostalgia for “artistic independence” misses entirely the significance of those formal and stylistic developments brought about by the rise of both state and corporate patronage--misses, in other words, the transformations undergone by American modernism as it impacted with the New Deal. Stevens’s poetry in particular does not dramatize the antagonism between private independence and public support so much as it demonstrates how the rise of corporate patronage facilitated and was perfectly consistent with a relocation of poetic interest, already in progress, from the private “I” to the public “we.”
Szalay’s book focuses on the effect of these cultural changes on the formal properties of the literary work, its status, and how those two were imagined by writers at the time. In other words, I don’t think it could appear in a history journal because its focus is on exclusively literary matters. This is what I aim to do as well: demonstrate that the way in which literature was imagined to be literary, via realism and naturalism, cannot be disconnected from the various evolutionisms bandied about the time; but note that my focus there is on the literary (and, because they’re almost coterminous at this point in time, the cultural) imagination.
So why is being a historian better than being a psychoanalyst? --when both are tenured in English, that is.
I would say that the historian who works with literature to demonstrate points about the cultural moment in which a given text arose is still superior to the psychoanalyst who uses literature as an occasional to further elaborate his or her pseudo-science because it produces verifiable knowledge about that cultural moment. Whereas another Lacanian reading produces...another Lacanian reading, one no more nor less verifiable than the other. Which is another way of saying that I believe there’s a place for academic historians in the academy, but not for academic psychoanalysts. Practicing, yes, but academic, no.
Clearly the article was not intended to be read. Clearly.[1] So why blame the author for the fact that you foolishly read it? Perhaps this desire to read the unreadable relates to your Oedipus complex, or your object a, or something.
It strikes me that there is something appalling about the existence of those 642 other articles, as well.
[1] Indeed, Lacan himself explicitly claims that his writings were not intended to be read—so it’s especially true in this case that the article was not intended to be read, though I was also attempting to make a general point about literary criticism.
Adam, you dunce, it’s all about the “object petit a.” I desperately want my desire to, you know, desire things and stuff, but I lack “un grand objet,” so I’m stuck not following the advice of my tenth grade chemistry teacher and “sweating the small stuff.” For this, I blame Lacan. One day we’ll do Thunderdome and Lacan’ll learn the real meaning of “I think with my feet.”
(Apologies for the quotation marks. The Valve’s Beast won’t let me use italics. C’mon, John, I’ve already fed it twice this month...)
An enhanced version of the original thesis would be that the Lacanian version of Lacan’s version of Freud is all wrong and just plain no good, and that it ruins everything it touches. There’s nothing intrinsically impossible about this idea. Most of us would probably reject out of hand a Paracelsian, Swedenborgian, LaRouchie, or Scientologist interpretation of literature. What’s in question is whether Lacan belongs on the list.
Why would you “reject out of hand a Paracelsian, Swedenborgian, LaRouchie, or Scientologist interpretation of literature”? Whenever literary studies people use scientific concepts, they always say something about (to quote Rolando Pérez from the essay linked here recently) “no post-modern thinker ever claimed (1) that there was no external reality, and (2) that what he or she was doing was ‘science.’” Pérez emphasizes this with a quote from Elie During: “The authors he quotes and criticizes for abusing scientific jargon (Lacan, Deleuze, or Baudrillard) are in fact not interested in scientific theories as such, nor in their capacity to describe ‘reality,’ but in the concepts they provide, and their possible reappropriation for other purposes.” So what does it matter whether they reappropriate science concepts or pseudoscience concepts? I really see no difference; it’s all grist for the mill.
I would like to hijack this thread by proposing that if cognitive science and especially evolutionary psychology attempt to infiltrate English departments, the tattered remnants of Theory’s Empire should form a strategic alliance with the plucky rebels in order to decisively defeat cog sci and ev psych. I can think of nothing worse for literature than the application of something that thinks of itself as an actual, real-live honest-to-goodness science.
Adam: “the tattered remnants of Theory’s Empire should form a strategic alliance with the plucky rebels in order to decisively defeat cog sci and ev psych.”
Poor Bill Benzon! But it’s too late. In living proof that the Higher Eclecticism isn’t going to let this one pass by, Z is already mumbling about the apogee in today’s brain sciences, and it looks like his extensive readers are going to have to learn to muse thoughtfully over impressive-looking brain scans.
I. In order to understand a Paracelsian or Swedenborgian reading, you’d have to spend months or years learning their systems. Rather than do that, you’d normally just ignore the reading. (Specialists in Blake or in renaissance literature do have to learn some of the terminology, but as far as I know none of them become Swedenborgians or Paracelsians.)
As far as I know, no one still believes that Paracelsus has any real validity. One small church still believes that Swedenborg does. At this moment, Lacan is a wildly different case—rightly or wrongly.
II. Because LaRouche and Hubbard are batshit crazy, that’s why.
Rich, if your point is that every single interpretive framework is just as invalid as every other one, I can’t follow you.
I personally think that everyone everywhere in every discipline should be eclectic and use the various methods as they seem useful, and I think that the enforcement of any paradigm whatever is wrong.
John, alchemical ideas have had a strong influence on various literary texts, and I think that a Paracelsian reading might be quite useful in explicating some of them. As for a Scientological interpretation, I’d say that as more Scientologists write literature, it will become more important. I see no innate difference between a Scientological interpretation and a Christian one other than the number of people influenced by each. And if that’s the important criterion, then I would guess that there are more people in the world who take Scientology seriously than those who take Lacan seriously. I could easily imagine a form of criticism that saw itself as clearing metaphorical engrams from texts, or looking for hidden references to characters’ extraterrestrial past lives.
My point is not that every interpretive framework is equally invalid, my point is that since there are no standards for judging the validity of interpretative frameworks, they are all equally untroubled by validity. I don’t see why literary studies people shouldn’t pick whichever one they want. They’re probably even better off with something that doesn’t sound like an actual science than something that does, because then they don’t get annoying scientists telling them that they’re getting it wrong.
Scott points out that there are people following a different, more classically broad and careful ideal of scholarship. But I don’t see how he can convince others that his form of scholarship is better than theirs.
Adam, you should look at Alan Richardson’s bibliography of this type of work. I doubt much of it is what you think it is.
There’s also the matter of structuralism.
I thought that it was generally agreed that a man’s prejudices are his castle and that they should not be disturbed.
It may be too late to stave off the cognitive and evpsych invasions. For example, Mark Turner is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Case Western and gets to set up his own department of cognitive science, focused on the arts & chaired by Merlin Donald (who is a more interesting thinker than Turner is). The cognitive folks are now having conferences and they’re quite interesting.
As for evpsych, when applied to literature it is, so far, pretty dull stuff. But this Sunday the NYTimes Magazine has a feature organized around *The Literary Animal,* a book about which I am deeply skeptical:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/literary_animals/
http://www.entelechyjournal.com/billbenzon.html
Rich, I was not talking about making an alchemical or scioentologist reading of texts written by scientologists or believers in alchemy. I was talking about taking scientology or alchemy as a privileged window on reality and using their insights to intepret literature of all kinds. That’s what Lacanians do, and if the Lacanian paradigm is worthless, those readings would be worthless.
While I agree that there’s no conclusive decision procedure for validating or invalidating approaches to literary study, I think that it’s still possible that certain approaches, including presently popular ones, are no good, whereas others are very good. And it’s reasonable to assert your judgements, and maybe people will agree and maybe not. “All are equally good, equally bad, and equally neutral” is ludicrous.
Well, I would certainly never stop someone from asserting judgements, and personally I fairly closely agree with Scott about what kinds of approaches I think are good and what kinds aren’t. But bringing up shortcomings in scholarship, as John Holbo and now Scott have both tried to do, reminds me of one of those TV shows where someone is approached by a vampire and brings out a cross to drive them away, only to have the vampire laugh and say that vampires don’t believe in that stuff anymore. There’s not much else you can say at that point.
I try, instead, to follow logical consequences. If a Lacanian says that they have a privileged window on reality, they can be proved to be wrong—that’s not very difficult, in concept anyway. But if a Lacanian is canny enough to deny that they think they have a privileged window on reality, and instead say that they are simply reworking concepts, I don’t see what I can say to contradict the validity of their approach. That’s the point of the Perez quote I cited above. After Sokal, most Theorists have it somewhere in their bag of justifications. One answer to it is to take them seriously and say, in that case, why not Scientology? The only answer appears to be that reworked psychological concepts retain a seriousness that reworked pseudoscience ones do not. That is clearly invalid. So, to be consistent with this answer, they need to explicitly confront that they are saying that the nature of the system that they use is arbitrary. That is a better answer, in my opinion, to the question of why it is bad for them to stick to one system without addressing other methods of interpretation.
John: I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say.
Rich: I think your argument cuts the other way. One can find insights in Augustine or Kierkegaard, without being a Christian. A peculiarity of the twentieth century is that some people pour all of their thoughts into a psychoanalytic mold. But still, there can be something to their insights, even if you reject their theoretical framework.
I no longer am sure what Scott and Rich are disagreeing about.
My own opinion is that Lacan is of purely historical interest, like Swedenborg and Paracelsus, and that if your field of study is anything other than “Humanities in Europe and America at the turn of the millenium”, you are well advised to avoid Lacanian writing.
I now suspect that Rich is using Lacan as a wedge to get at some other (relativist-like) opinion of Scott’s, and that Rich does not actually believe that a Lacanian reading is as good or as bad as any other. However, I doubt that I agree with Rich.
In general, I believe that the kind of peremptory, arbitrary dismissal Scott makes is permissible and often commendable, even though Scott could not have known for sure, and could not have proven to anyone else, that his dismissal was justified. It’s rather like voting, when you’re asserting your opinion without the obligation of proving anything to anyone else. If Scott were to take power in the MLA, he’d be at risk of wrongly ending some hapless Lacanians’ careers, I suppose, but here and now it’s probably Scott’s career which is most placed at risk.
My eclectic, anti-methodological committments would probably require me to defend the Lacanians, were Scott to become the MLA czar, but this would seriously conflict with my anti-Lacanian committments. These hypotheticals are in the grue-bleen zone as far as I’m concerned. If Scott were to become czar, my opinion would still be irrelevant.
"I doubt that I agree with whatever Rich actually does believe”.
Walt,
I concur. It’s only once these systems become, as psychoanalysis has, the dominant mode of accounting for psychological complexity in literary studies that I’m inclined to complain. As Bill points out, alternative models have started to infiltrate, but 9/10 the choice is between a naive appeal to “common sense” or psychoanalysis. I’m not fond of those alternatives (nor am I that fond of overt psychologizing, but that’s meat tossed to a future post).
Rich and John,
It sounds like you’re making variations of the same unfortunate point: there seems no way to avoid sending the baby out with the bathwater. I think there must be, but whoever comes up with it will have to be tons sharper than me, you know, ‘cause like that person will be attacked on all sides by all parties, and will have to muster a justification for the yea or nay he or she decides about everyone’s pet projects. This person may well have to be God. He knows, I don’t envy Him…
Scott, your link above to “I concur” is pretty funny—we all had this same discussion in June.
Well, not quite the same discussion. Speaking for myself only, I thought that scholarship was a better argument then than I do now.
John, I’m not disagreeing with Scott’s belief, I’m disagreeing with his tactics. If the object of literary criticism is, as Luther said in that past thread, to produce interesting readings (or, as Walt says in this one, to produce insights that don’t depend on their theoretical framework), then I don’t see why you can reject Lacan, even though I think that Lacanian thought is probably BS. In order to do so, you have to find some different goal for literary criticism, and I don’t see one handy. In the previous thread I did some handwaving about the critic’s responsibility not to popularize pseudoscience, but I don’t think that argument really has much force.
So I’m left with a different style of argument, which consists of pointing out that the logical implication of accepting Lacanian criticism is the defense of any arbitrary critical method that can produce interesting readings, and asking if people are really comfortable with that. I think that getting to that stage would be an advance, since typically literary studies people love to muddy the waters about whether they are really claiming some kind of scientific backing for methods like Lacanian criticism or not.
I also think that pointing out the arbitrary quality of the formal rules of the Lacanian system is a possible argument for why people shouldn’t restrict themselves to it even if they agree with it, which is what Scott was complaining about in the first place. Being able to play a really good game of chess is an impressive skill, but if writing a Lacanian interpretation is like playing a game of chess (e.g., Scott’s mention of “the critic’s supremely constricted set of assumptions”, and the expansion of this into the idea of a critical formula) then this is a role that I don’t think that literary studies people are ready to assume, even if they don’t care about scholarship.
Isn’t the elephant in the room here the uncritical belief that Lacan’s work is in any way akin to Scientology? I think someone here needs to do the careful, painstaking work of criticizing actual Lacanian ideas
You might argue that it was the responsibility of Lacan and his followers to do hard scientific experimentation. But that ignores the billions of dollars needed to actually do such work. So you can say that Lacanian psychology is moot, but that’s about all, unless you actually criticize the meat of Lacan’s work.
Cuz the bottom line is that, while I can’t quite see the need for Lacanian criticism, I also don’t see that it is in any way far-fetched. Lacan’s work seems much more grounded in social observation than much of Marx or Foucault, for example. Is there any difference, ultimately, between the scientific status of the mirror stage and the scientific status of commodity fetishism?
I would add: How much of this is, at bottom, an objection to Lacan’s writing style, which most reasonable people would agree is in fact quite annoying and over the top?
YET he did actually see patients and even helped a lot of patients (almost certainly more than Freud), including many who were pretty far gone. Lacan’s Ecrits was a best-seller in France not because the French are idiots, but because so many people had been helped by analysts following Lacan’s techniques.
I don’t really know what Lacan has to say about the mirror stage, but I do know the self-recognition in mirrors has been a hot topic in psychology for, say, two decades: when can children do it? why can apes do it, but not monkeys? And what’s the mechanism?
In recent years - the decade or thereabouts - so-called “mirror neurons” have been hot in neuroscience.These are neurons in a monkey’s brain that fire when it observes another monkey doing something that it has done in the past. See:
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_index.html
Now, just howl far we can go toward Lacan’s mirror stage riding the mirror neuron boom, I don’t know. But I pretty much assume that there are folks out there who are working on it.
LB,
I think someone here needs to do the careful, painstaking work of criticizing actual Lacanian ideas.
I’ve done that. I’d copy-and-paste my own work on Lacan--two undergraduate essays, three seminar papers--but then they’d be on the web. I’ve mentioned this before (see link above) but once upon a time I was a hard-core psychoanalytic critic of the Lacanian variety. The best way to prove this may be to link to some of my undergraduate advisor, Patrick McGee’s, work. This is the man who directed my honors thesis, who wrote the letters that landed me in graduate school, and who influenced my initial path into the profession. As you can tell, he’s profoundly interested in Lacan; as a student of his, so was I. That’s what brilliant, energetic and charming professors do: get you interested in the way they think. If you mean I should do such criticism here and now, well, I suppose I could, but there’s a problem with debating Lacanians: you can’t. Any point you make is evidence of denial. To quote from my parody there:
What if I were to say to you, “You’re don’t believe Gangesa’s Tattvacintamani--that classic text of fourteenth century Sanskritic philosophy, that foundational text of Indian ‘New Logic’--you don’t believe it germane to contemporary life on the Continent or in the States? You suffer from the very resistence to ‘New Logic’ Gangesa himself diagnosed in his work on upadhi, ‘the inferential undercutting condition.’ You’re a charlatan, an intellectual fraud, and a waste of taxpayer dollars.” You would respond--for once in your life, correctly--"You are absolutely incorrect. Just because I don’t favor your epistemological account of the world doesn’t mean you can squeeze me between the pincers of a logic which, while internally coherent, is utterly unrelated to the world in which I live. Then you’d know why the people who prefer “thinking” to your sad, reductive version of “theorizing” laugh whenever you “trap” us with Lacan.
So while I could engage in that debate, I know it to be pointless ahead of time. That’s part of the appeal of Lacanian theory for those who practice it, believe me, I know; but it’s also what separates them from deconstructive or Foucauldian thinkers with whom one can, productively, argue.
Adam,
“How much of this is, at bottom, an objection to Lacan’s writing style, which most reasonable people would agree is in fact quite annoying and over the top?”
From my perspective, none of it, and this point’s easy to prove: Freud’s one of the most engaging writers around. Even when you think he’s bat-shit crazy, as in Ego and Id, his works are still utterly compelling reads. And you know what? I dismiss Freud for the same reasons I dismiss Lacan.
Also, I don’t think the best defense of Lacanian thought is through his work as a practicing psychoanalyst. I seem to remember there being quite an uproar about his treatment of female patients and his ideas about truncating sessions.
Rich,
More later. Must work now.
"So I’m left with a different style of argument, which consists of pointing out that the logical implication of accepting Lacanian criticism is the defense of any arbitrary critical method that can produce interesting readings”
The real question is whether a given method can provide a relevant or appropriate reading. Anyone can offer an “interesting” reading by saying anything and everything. But is it a reading that can be supported by the text itself--that reveals something necessary to the text?