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Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Folk Cohesion, the Anti-Intellectualism of Identitarian Politics, and Theoretical Empires
Two quick notes:
For those of you with access to Project Muse, I highly recommend Michael Millner’s “Post Post-Identity" in the June volume of American Quarterly. Millner reviews Walter Benn Michaels’ The Shape of the Signifier and Kenneth Warren’s So Black and Blue. (Excerpts below the fold.)
I’d also recommend the Valve’s own Mark Bauerlein’s review of Theory’s Empire, in which he indicates that he believes the collection
weighty enough to preempt the anti-intellectual tag and count as more than idiosyncratic musings on the subject. The contributors are diverse enough in their interests, training, and politics to escape the standard labels applied to critics.
While I’m inclined to agree, it’s a little strange that John Searle, a contributor listed earlier as a one whose “arguments were denounced as anti-intellectual bile,” will also help the anthology “escape the standard labels applied to critics.” Not that I disagree with Bauerlein’s general argument, mind you…
Of Michaels, Millner says:
For The Shape of the Signifier, the problem with the commitment to subject positionality is what Michaels calls the “disarticulation of difference from disagreement” (30). In his view, two people can’t disagree over anything from two different subject positions: “The point of the appeal to perspective [that is, subject position] is that it eliminates disagreement—to see things differently because we see from different perspectives (through different eyes, from different places) is to see the same things differently but without contradiction; if I see something from the front and think that it looks black, and you think it looks white from the back, we do not disagree” (31). Alternatively, to actually disagree with someone—rather than to simply differ with him or her—is to think that he or she is wrong and you are right, and not that the two of you are simply coming from different places on the issue. Michaels is in part repeating an old problem concerning judgment often discussed with respect to cultural relativism: if all cultures—if all cultural subject positions, he would say—are understood as equally valid, it becomes impossible to arbitrate between them. Under such conditions, how might one argue that a cultural practice, as reprehensible as it might seem, should be judged? Michaels’s point is that to try to argue in this manner is to have no argument at all—there are simply no grounds for argument if you are coming at it from your position and I’m coming at it from mine. So the cultural relativist position (always the position of identitarian, Michaels thinks) is a bad one, but not for the tired, old, usual reason that it doesn’t believe in truth or universals, but because it doesn’t allow for argument.
And of Warren:
Identity understood as in large part folk cohesiveness and cultural particularity has dire political consequences in Warren’s view. Such an emphasis on racial self-affirmation results in precisely the kind of “disarticulation of difference from disagreement” that Michaels predicts. Warren asks with respect to a discussion of the race-affirming objectives of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, “while it is relatively clear how a protest against racial injustice such as police violence or illegal evictions can be readily woven into a web of opposition to social and economic injustice, is it equally clear that a movement centrally turning on racial self-affirmation and expression can lend itself to similar linkages?” (47). In his analysis of Farrakhan’s march, Warren’s answer is a decisive “no”: the gathering’s overriding fixation on racial self-affirmation and particularity helped it evade any real political opposition. (I must say that it’s certainly difficult to imagine a movement politics—one that mobilizes large numbers to some kind of action—that doesn’t rely in part on a particularized, essentialized cohesiveness. It is also difficult to picture an event the size of the Million Man March speaking with the kind of directly political vocabulary Warren is hoping for; gatherings of this sort don’t have such vocabularies, but they are significant nonetheless in that they express strong desire for change, however vague the specifics of that change may be.) In a similar vein, Houston Baker comes under criticism for his understanding of a black culture that is different from, in Baker’s own words, the “stable, predictable, puritanical, productive, law-abiding self of the American industrial-capitalist society” (99).14 Warren has no problem with Baker’s critique of the U.S. regime of the self, only with Baker’s “certainty that black Americans lie fully outside those norms” (99). Contra Baker, Warren challenges cultural criticism to understand African American culture as firmly embedded within those norms; to attempt an analysis of it as outside is inaccurate and tends to limit the possibility for more “direct” political transformation of the normative regime itself. Warren also repeatedly points out how an emphasis on folk cohesiveness and African-American particularity leads to the often unintended valorization of various extremely problematic models of black culture—slave culture, the South under segregation, and a black urban “underclass."
Comments
Benn Michaels sounds more and more like Stanley Fish, and not just because he has been delivering the same polemic for more than 10 years.
Three thoughts:
1. African American critics might respond to Benn Michaels along these lines: the real experience of discrimination and/or violence is the starting point for the articulation of disagreement.
I’m a bit indifferent to most of the Af. Am. criticism and theory out there, but the literature continues to be rewarding. It would be a mistake to reductively define it in terms of ‘affirming identity’. Much more importantly, the best African American literature (broadly defined to include Faulkner) tells the story of American violence.
2. I don’t know if there is just one “discourse of identity” as he puts it; this might be a straw man. African American Studies is quite different Queer Studies (which has always been politically outspoken) and feminism.
If we’re defining them in academic terms, there might be much to criticize. But as political movements (’Queer Nation’ has long been superseded by the issues-not-identity driven Human Rights Campaign), these various groups couldn’t be more different from each other. They have different goals, strategies, and modes of organization.
The failure of the gay rights movement in the past few years in particular has less to do with Benn Michaels’ “subject position vs. disagreement” problematic and more to do with the rise of a hysterical kind of anti-gay feeling on the American right.
3. Doesn’t Millner himself make some pretty direct criticisms of Benn Michaels’ argument?
“But while the dichotomies Michaels introduces—-between difference and disagreement, between an allegiance to subject positionality and ideas/ideologies—-are helpful in understanding the logics of post-identity discourse, the purity he demands with respect to those dichotomies—-one either thinks of the world in terms of nondebatable subject positions or debatable ideologies, in terms of difference or disagreement—-doesn’t match up with the messiness and impurity of political argument and action. It seems to me that it is the tension between subject position (so important to any group’s need to establish itself) and ideology that is most interesting and important to consider. Michaels helps us see that tension and what is at stake in that tension, even as he goes too far in demanding that we attempt to eradicate it.“
Take away the flattering language, and it might be a pretty harsh critique.
There’s much less anti-gay feeling on the right than there once was, it just lacked opportunities for expression.
Amardeep, the Michaels/Fish connection is apt down to their personal interaction with their audience at conferences and talks. (Except Michaels never brandishes note-cards with anticipated stupid questions and his own clever retorts. “The question you’re really asking,” Fish insists, “is [flip flip flip] this one from card seventeen...") But I think one significant difference Millner picks up on is that Michaels has changed (or at least expanded) his argument as of late. It’s become more all-inclusive, such that anyone who now holds to the materiality of the signifier, the necessary indeterminacy of the text, identitarian politics, etc. are all complicit in the same shell game in which difference always wins (and academia qua academia always loses).
I don’t believe Michaels thinks there’s a monolithic identitarian discourse, only that the logic of all identitarian discourses (and arguments about the materiality of the signifier, etc.) rely in practice on an appeal to the subject position of the critic. The significant problem with that is its assumption that the only scholars who queer text are themselves queer, etc. (Michaels would reply that those are exceptions, and would no doubt point to the list of African-American scholars Warren critiques as an example of the typical relation of subject position to identity studies.)
Millner’s criticism of Michaels lands, but I’m not sure it’s anything more than a glancing blow. After all, Michaels would argue that his “purity” is a function of the critical discourse he’s dismantling--one which for all its post-structuralist indebtedness still loves binary logic--and that he can’t fairly call a mulligan without addressing these arguments on their own terms.
All of that said, I’m extremely unhappy with much of Michaels’ argument.
Sean, Thanks for the pointer; I’d missed that post.
I guess I’m having trouble understanding Benn Michaels’ specific argument about the text as a signifier. (Crap, I may have to go read the book...)
Here is the crux of my non-understanding: it seems to me there is a gap between the materiality of the text and the subjective experience of the reader, which Benn Michaels is eliding. And there is another gap between the subjective “experience” of the reader and that readers social inscription vis a vis race, gender, class, sexuality.
I gather he’s arguing that if you accept the materiality of the text, your understanding of both the subjective experience in reading and the sociopolitical context of that reading are already etched out for you in a determinative way. But (even after reading the Millner, your post, and the subsequent comments) I don’t at all see how or why that should be.
As a heuristic, let me throw a prosaic example. The argument of M.H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp is something like this: in Romanticism, there is a shift from mimetic to expressive understandings of what literature is and does. The turn to the expressive places greater emphasis on the figure of the author as Individual, whose feelings spontaneously overflow, Wordsworthily, into language.
For Benn Michaels, is that also a form of identity politics? Can’t the Individual ‘I’ who speaks/writes be a grammatical stand-in (as De Man memorably puts it, in his stuff on the autobiographical), that is as much general as it is particular?
Here is De Man:
“Hegel goes on to discuss the logical difficulty inherent in the deictic or demonstrative function of language, in the paradox that the most particular of designations such as ‘now,’ ‘here,’ or ‘this’ are also the most powerful agents of generalization, the cornerstones of this monument of genreality that is language . . . If this is so for adverbs or pronouns of time and place, it is even more so for the most personal of personal pronouns, the word ‘I’ itself. . . . The word ‘I’ is the most specifically deictic, self-pointing of words, yet it is also ‘the most entirely abstract generality.’ (From “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics)
I hope the relevance of that quote will be apparent. If not, let me run the risk of redundancy and say that it seems like De Man is an extremely unlikely candidate for recruitment by identity politics.
So the cultural relativist position (always the position of identitarian, Michaels thinks) is a bad one, but not for the tired, old, usual reason that it doesn’t believe in truth or universals, but because it doesn’t allow for argument.
So what’s the purpose of argument? It seems to me like Michaels is just creating a second-order problem, that is, not how to convince someone of your conclusions, but how to convince someone to adopt your premises.
I couldn’t access the article.
Could someone give a short description of its main points. Alternatively, you might repost some its highlights here. I dn’t beleive it will infringe on copywrite laws.(Or supply me with an ID and password so that I can read it for myself?)
>"So what’s the purpose of argument? It seems to me like Michaels is just creating a second-order problem, that is, not how to convince someone of your conclusions, but how to convince someone to adopt your premises.” David Moles
Identity is not the same as a conclusion, it is more like a fact, and arguing from that position is like arguing against facts.
This is why arguments based on identity often short circuit discussion.
Isn’t WBM’s argument simply a repetition (and mishandling) of Wittgenstein’s (and, later, Lyotard’s) argument about language communities? To say that the possibility of a variety of perspectives undermines the possibility of (dis)agreement is moronic.
I’m reminded of a brilliant folktale about Eshu-Elegba, in which the trickster is angered by two neighbors who believe they are perfect friends in perfect harmony. The friends farm fields separated by a road down which Eshu rides, wearing a hat painted white on one side and black on the other. After he passes, one friend says, “Did you see that man in the black hat ride by?” His friend says, “I saw a man ride by, but he was wearing a white hat.” The two start arguing, and the argument builds and builds. Eshu laughs at them, warning them of the danger of illusionary “harmony” or agreement: the world is more complex than mere agreement or consensus would have it.
Any text of any value has multiple meanings, bears multiple readings, etc. Agreement is possible provided the interpreters share certain rules or assumptions. That is to say, if my interpretation is not meant to be “scholarly” but is instead meant to persuade readers to take some action, scholarly interpreters and I cannot have a meaningful disagreement at the level of interpretation—but we could have a meaningful disagreement at the level of methodology (i.e., is the goal of criticism to be “right” or to stimulate “right action, feeling, thinking, etc.”?). For example, you can’t “prove” Baldwin wrong in “Everyone’s Protest Novel” by citing evidence of hidden complexity in the representation of Uncle Tom. Baldwin’s not trying to be right; he’s performing an exorcism. He’s only “right” if his own rhetorical goals are met: to move thinking about race in fiction beyond the sociological or naturalistic.
Or, for a different sort of example, from a classic: why, at the height of the poem’s action, does Homer’s Penelope decide she’ll finally choose a husband from among the suitors and set up the bow-stringing contest? Multiple interpretations are possible; the text of *The Odyssey* is open-ended at this critical point. No single interpretation can be “right”—this isn’t a riddle or an algebraic equation. The text demands that we consider the issue, but refuses to feed us an easy answer. We can disagree about the vaildity of various interpretations, we can invalidate a given reading, but we must accept that—unless an alternate version of the “original text” surfaces—there is no “right” answer. (I add the caveat about an alternate text because most scholars agree that the last books of the epic display signs of even more muddled authorship than the rest of Homer. But to write Penelope’s decision off as a problem of textual transmission and not an “intended” ambiguity in the text is itself simply one possible interpretation.)
As for Warren’ argument, it sounds like Toni Morrison’s *Paradise* and her critique both of (a) a search for black cultural purity and (b) an overidentification with a sort of Puritan version of black destiny or black errand in the wilderness. But with that twinned perspective, Morrison moves beyond the critics once again.
Finally, regarding *Theory’s Empire*, I’ll just say this: it’s sad when the critique of theory rests on a repeated claim that theory falls into the genetic fallacy without: (a) ever defining exactly *which* of the countless versions of this fallacy they are referring to; and (b) without admitting that the genetic fallacy isn’t, in all cases, a fallacy at all, a fact admitted by my undergraduate logic and rhetoric professors. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of good material in the collection; but when people criticize theory for being monological or ungenerous to the text, those same people shouldn’t read theory monologically and without generosity (see O’Connor’s essay on “post-post colonial theory”—as if a reductive reading of one essay by one postcolonial critic is evidence enough to prove that postcolonial theory is itself reductive of literature! As if postcolonial textual theory started with Said or Spivak and not with, say, CLR James, Wilson Harris, and other Windrush generation writers, just to speak of the Caribbean).
Some further thoughts about Warren’s argument as presented in the *American Quarterly* review. (I do need to read the book, though, for the Toni Morrison chapter I’m working on now.)
According to Millner, Warren has two major objections to recent African-American Studies scholarship and Af-Am art:
a) settling for “cultural politics” over direct political action in such a way that
b) African-American culture becomes “exceptionalist” or “nationalist” in precisely the problematic forms taken by American exceptionalism
But what forms of politics are available to art *besides* cultural politics? (Even transparent textual exhortations to concrete action are arguably no “stronger” as speech acts than imagining different cultural possibilities.) According to Millner, Warren objects to Toni Morrison’s representation of communal action at the conclusion of *Beloved* as “more spiritual than political, more intuitive than deliberative, more mystical than logical.” Besides the fact that I wince whenever a female writer is criticized for being intuitive and mystical (read: emotional), Warren seems to be setting up oppositions that Morrison thwarts throughout her work. Theophus Smith, in *Conjuring Culture*, shows the imbrication of politics and religion throughout African-American history, and Morrison’s work is a brilliant continuation of the tradition Smith writes of. Sure, the translation of Morrison into the patron saint of “trauma studies” is a problem, but her own work questions the “retreat” (spiritual/poltical) aspect of the discourse of healing. The women of the Convent in *Paradise* are Morrison’s version of damaged souls who become dangerously immersed in their own damagedness (and so fail to recognize real threats to their lives). *Paradise* is in many ways a critique of the “healing” vision of literature of, say, Toni Cade Bambara in *The Salt Eaters*—which isn’t to say that Morrison isn’t interested in how people and groups can heal themselves, but that, in *Beloved* and *Paradise*, trauma is no excuse for social withdraw—and here’s where Morrison is a student of Hawthorne (and not just Faulkner). Both *Beloved* and *Paradise* even moreso end with calls to get your wounded asses out into the world.
As far as (b) goes, I think an attentive reading of Gates and Baker shows how both critics are up front about how their attempts to fashion literary historical traditions for black literature are hybridized fron the get-go: *The Signifying Monkey* admits to being a sort of folkloric deconstruction, while *Blues, Ideology...* is based largely on the work of white/Western scholars, from Perry Miller to Victor Turner.
The goal for Baker and Gates was simply to ensure that black literature wasn’t written off as a footnote to a vision of American literature that was nearly all white. If Morrison is “only” a late Faulkner, then we should just pay attention to the original, not the copy. But if Morrison speaks across the generations to Bambara, Reed, Ellison, and Hurston, then her work, paradoxically, takes on a value it can’t have when seen as a “student” of a white “master.” Of course, the better view is to see Morrison as riffing off of Faulkner at the same time as, say, Cormac McCarthy, and then to use the differences and similaries between those two in order to see to what purposes Faulknerian form and style can be put in the 70s-00s, as well as to see how Morrison tempers her Faulkner with Woolf as well as Hurston-Ellison, and then to see from what additional resources McCarthy draws.
Amardeep, before I recognized that you were thanking Sean at two removes, I was flattered beyond belief that you’d think me Sean. Ah, to’ve already published a book and numerous articles…
I gather he’s arguing that if you accept the materiality of the text, your understanding of both the subjective experience in reading and the sociopolitical context of that reading are already etched out for you in a determinative way.
Not determinative so much as “unarguable.” If the materiality of the text necessarily reduces interpretation to the personal, likely idiosyncratic experience of text by an individual reader, then the best literary critics can muster is an interminable conversation at cross-purposes. So I suppose “determinative” works as well as “unarguable,” and my only quibble would be that “determinative” strikes me as an odd term to use about the infinitely variable potential of the reading experiences on which Michaels planks this point.
Vis-a-vis the De Man/Hegel quotation, I can’t speak to that at this particular moment because I’ve understood Michaels to be talking about the experience of reading here; in the “Against Theory” essays, as well as earlier in TSOTS, he equates the assumption of authorial intent with anti-identitarian readings, because to assume that the text itself means something is to assume it means something to people other than you, i.e. that its meaning transcends your individual reading experience.
LB, as an allegory of academic reading, Michaels would probably consider the folktale about Eshu differently; namely, he’d say that the job of the scholar is to step in front of the trickster and see the black/white hat for what it is--and what it’s author/haberdasher intended to be, i.e. a black/white hat--and not rely on limited, necessarily personal perspectives of two individuals too blind to see that their pretensions of harmony are founded on a faulty a-perspectivalism. What they absolutely shouldn’t do, in his opinion, is accede to the relativist position based on their bad empiricism; instead, they should struggle to find an empirical grounds worthy of the adjective.
(Accidentally hit “Submit.” Meant to start a new paragraph.)
As to the possibility of multiple interpretations, well, of course there are. What there aren’t, of course, are multiple valid interpretations. As Culler famously remarked, “Some texts are more orphaned than others,” i.e. some texts are more open to multiple textual interpretation than others. An example from my desk: Michael Herr’s Dispatches cannot be read as a pro-war novel. Now, it might display some hallmarks of pro-war literature--classical tropes, muscular juxtapositions, paeans to vigorous masculinity, etc.--but to consider the sum total of these features of the text commensurate with its intent would be an interpretive injustice. (That doesn’t mean that their presence isn’t interesting, or that Dispatches can’t be critiqued for entertaining these pro-war gestures despite its evident stance against Vietnam; but to interpret Dispatches as a pro-war novel would be to mis-read it...or, at the least, to so exaggerate its unintentional features such that the text you’re interpreting barely resembles the one Michael Herr wrote.)
I’m going to avoid discussing the Warren right now, as Stephen’s read Warren far more exhaustively; I’ve read an article and seen him speak. (enter Stephen)
David, didn’t mean to ignore you:
So what’s the purpose of argument? It seems to me like Michaels is just creating a second-order problem, that is, not how to convince someone of your conclusions, but how to convince someone to adopt your premises.
Michaels’ argument is intended as a corrective, so I’d say that his goal is to 1) force readers whose work is founded on identitarian premises to question their validity (thus his statements as to the logical continuity between the arguments of Judith Butler and George W. Bush) and 2) stop the continued uncritical use of such arguments in the academy. If nothing else, he provides ammunition for those who criticize the liberatory rhetoric of many identitarian critics. The current state of the academy is one in which the criticism of identity politics necessarily brands one a conservative. (The classic example, exemplified by one occasional Valve-commenter, is when a homosexual man criticizes the universalist application of queer theory in a seminar on medieval literature...and is branded a homophobe for daring to question the validity of queer theory to all things, well, to all things, context be damned.) After TSOTS, anti-identitarian critics can easily align identitarian critics with the policies of the current administration, and if nothing else, that’s powerful rhetorical ammunition.
I think part of the problem of the discussion of Warren here is that everyone’s working from a reviewer’s description, which only touches on a few of the themes of the book. Warren’s basic point, if I’m reading him right, is that because of the exclusion of African-Americans from political representation throughout much of the twentieth-century, black politics has tended to be a politics of professionalism - i.e., of various professional groups, black and white, claiming to speak for the black populace. He develops this argument through a reading of Ralph Ellison. Here’s part of his account of what he’s up to:
“If Ellison’s work continues to resonate in our post-segregation era, it may be because notwithstanding the rather significant changes that the Civil Right movement has wrought in American life generally, and in black American life more specifically, the key in which black politics has been played remains largely the same as it did prior to the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements, when significant portions of black America existed outside of representational politics so that, to quote Adolph Reed, ‘the masses do not speak; someome speaks for them.’”
Warren tries to diagnose some of the various ways in which race scholars and race leaders have tried to speak for African-Americans; he claims that one of the strengths of Ellison’s Invisible Man is that it problematizes all such efforts (although Ellison also ends up reproducing the same logic at various points). Cultural politics is one of the most important examples of this politics of professional representation. As Warren puts it, “in conflicts between and among intellectual elites, the act of aligning oneself with the putatively distinct and relatively autonomous cultural styles emerging from ‘below’ has been brandished as if this alignment guaranteed a proxy from the working class even when no power had actually been ceded to black laborers.”
His reading of Beloved is pretty quick, and I’m not enough of a Morrison buff to know how fair it is. It’s in the midst of a discussion of the rural nostalgia that Warren thinks marrs the work of Cornel West and concerns her take on community ethics. Here’s Warren’s conclusion:
“Cornel West is eager to find within Beloved the ethos of a democratic order. The social vision at the heart of Morrison’s novel, however, is one in which the collective can indeed act redemptively and lovingly toward an individual, but can also choose, without due process, ‘not to give her the time of day’ if she is deemed to have violated its moral beliefs. That is, this vision has less to do with radical democracy than with the kind of southern traditionalism that Eugene Genovese extols in his book The Southern Tradition.”
Hope this helps.
Scott, WBM would then miss the point of the folktale. Eshu seeks to teach the bosom buddies that any relationship that fails to take into account chance, chaos, contingency, and so on is doomed. Of course, WBM might say, “Well, the truth is that the hat is both black and white.” But then Eshu would turn it around again and reveal another, hot pink, side. To speak of “intentions” with a figure like Eshu shows the problems inherent in talking about intentions as if the critique of intentionality never happened. Eshu’s hat isn’t “black and white.” It’s a sign, and it signifies that which confounds certainty in social relations.
But of course, the hat example is just the sort of simplistic exemplar used to prove relativism’s weakness. But let’s take a more complex phenomenon: the relationship between base and superstructure, for example. There is no position from which any observer can observe the “entire” or “true” situation. This isn’t to say that all perspectives are true, equal, valid, or anything else like that. But the elephant is so vast here that we are the blind men feeling about it, each sometimes imagining a different creature.
Empiricism itself isn’t enough to ensure “truth.” And it’s not only because we each have a limited perspective and see from a particular “subject position” or whatever. It’s also because what a chemist qua chemist wants from wine is entirely different than what the guys in *Sideways* want from it. Each get at a truth of the wine—at best—but these truths don’t cancel each other out. Both truths are entirely empirical as well (and a great wine taster has empirical skills that frequently outdo a scientist!).
This has nothing to do with cultural relativism, which is essentially an anthropological practice that ensures non-judgemental empiricism: how can you accurately describe a cultural practice if you’re leaping to immediate value judgments about it?
Cultural relativism should be confused with modernist literature’s perspectivism, which sought formal solutions to formal problems: how to get at an object of representation from a series of lived perspectiives rather than from some “godlike” or “omniscient” perspective? At its best the reader is absolutely meant to make value judgments about the various perspectives given, whether it’s Mr. Dalloway’s versus Mrs. Dalloway’s, or Jason Compson’s versus Dilsey’s.
This is also very different from the theory of “subject positions” in much identity theory. Here we’re largely talking sociology and ideology, not “personal” perspectives. I agree that a deterministic view of subject positions is a huge problem, but I do believe that one’s position in a social network or professional discourse is influential in shaping one’s representation of certain objects of knowledge. Again, this isn’t “relativism,” because few theorists I’ve read seek to level differences. On the contrary: at its worst, it’s all to easy to see which subject positions are privileged by scholars like Butler, Bhabha, et al.
As William James explains in *A Pluralistic Universe*, the universe is, uh, pluralistic. No single discourse can get at some final truth because each practice seeks to do something different with its truth.
How can you say, Scott, that there aren’t multiple *valid* interpretations of a literary text? I think my example from *The Odyssey* pretty much squashes that notion. Every theory as to why Penelope decides at that critical moment to suddenly accept a suitor is limited and problematic; for every aspect it explains, it contradicts some other textual prompt. Some critics have argued that Penelope has intuited that the beggar is Odysseus, but why then does she go to bed convinced her husband will never return? She herself claims that she’s doing it for her father and son, but those pressures have been present all along. Why, after the beggar and the seer have *just* informed her that Odysseus is on his way, does she then decide to hold the contest? Other scholars argue that she knows no man besides Odysseus can string his bow and wants to see the suitors all fail. But of course, this won’t settle anything. Even after their failure in the contest, the suitors are prepared to go back to the practice of wooing Penelope with gifts (and may the biggest gift win). Of course, from a narratological perspective, the function designated “Penelope” is precisely only that which furthers the plot, and to ask “Why?” is to psychologize an inanimate thing made of words. But Homer’s intention throughout the poem (if we can speak of this) is to have us wonder why and how (an epic is precisely a long Q&A session with the Muse: “Speak, Muse, of how so and so did such and such.").
What we have here, of course, is what my *Writing About Literature* textbook I use for freshman comp calls “a problem.” That is, a question raised by the text but which the text refuses to settle one way or another.
Another great example is: who is the ghost in *Beloved* a ghost of? Or is it even a ghost? The novel never tells us exactly; multiple options are put into play.
Which is to say that “intention” only gets us so far, especially in great literature, where the intention is frequently to have the reader ponder such narrative problems, to settle into a single reading, only to have that reading upset by some additional detail. Here we have multiple valid interpretations. To say that the true intrepretation is something like, “The text is intentionally undecideable,” is not an interpretation at all; it’s a description, and a meta-description at that. As Barthes shows in *S/Z*, texts demand that we ask certain questions and they also demand that we attempt to answer them, even when we know that there isn’t any single answer that fully satisfies the conditions set by the text.
Again, this isn’t to say that all interpretations are equally valid. To say that the ghost in *Beloved* is the ghost of Christmas past is just plain wrong. To say even that the ghost is *only* the ghost of Sethe’s slaughtered infant is also wrong; it can’t account for the ghost’s knowledge of Middle Passage experience.
I can’t believe this discussion is even taking place. Multiple interpretations have been a part of literary study since there’s been such a thing as multiple interpretations. To go back to some naive belief in the recoverability of authorial intention is ridiculous and dangerous. As one of my undergrad profs used to say, the author’s intention—even when available—is simply another reading. And given the general unreliability of most authors’ self-knowledge, why should be trust that? Why trust what Pound claims to have tried to do in *The Cantos*, when this same man was convinced he could get Mussolini to commit Italy to Pound’s Social Credit theories? Or, a less loaded example, why stick to Katherine Mansfield’s explanation of what’s at stake in “The Garden Party” (i.e., in a story all about class, Mansfield doesn’t once mention class as an issue in the story). Or what about oral literature, fashioned over hundreds and thousands of years by various poets, bards, singers, and so on. At best, we can talk of the implied author’s intention, but that’s simply a hypothesis: I’ve found a pattern, so there must be someone who put that pattern in place. But even that limits the activity of critics. Wilson Harris doesn’t care about the (implied) author’s intended patterns. He’s interested in isolating key moments in novels in order to transvaluate or “fulfill” the potential he think is present in a certain trope, typological figure, character mask, etc. Not all critical activity is hermeneutic or philological. Some critics want to see what a text can mean *now* for certain people at a certain social/historical moment.
The bottom line is that even perspectivism doesn’t preclude argument: Jason Compson and Dilsey could have a great argument about Caddie and the Compson family, and it’s clear that Dilsey would and should come out the victor. That said, Dilsey doesn’t possess the total truth; she simply has a better angle on a better, fuller, but still partial, truth. (Or take Joanna Scott’s recent novel *Tourmaline*, in which the different narrators have access to each other’s narrations and can and do argue.)
Correction: fifth paragraph should begin
“Cultural relativism should *not* be confused with modernist literature’s perspectivism.”
How can you say, Scott, that there aren’t multiple *valid* interpretations of a literary text?
To be honest, I had bracketed the issue in my head in a manner I never actually got around to writing down: what I meant to say, and what you do an excellent job describing, is that in a given argumentative context--to stick with the Herr example--you have to decide either that Dispatches stands in favor of the Vietnam War or opposes it, and that given this context, there’s only one valid interpretation, i.e. that it opposes it. I didn’t mean that multiple valid interpretations of the book itself don’t exist, e.g. if I’m writing about Dispatches as a work of New Journalism and don’t give a whit about its stance on the Vietnam War, obviously I can generate a number of valid claims about its relation to the NJ canon. (And yes, I do feel guilty for wasting your time defending a position I seemed to stake out of sheer incompetence.)
Color & Culture by Ross Posnock was published in 2000, but I just recently got around to reading it. Posnock made points similar to Millner’s (and Luther Blissett’s here, including the William James reference), and I recommend the book despite its structural awkwardness.
Here’s a thought experiment: Given that Invisible Man, like any artwork, is “occasional”—uniquely of its moment and unique in itself—and given that a reading restricted to universals (including a posited universal of “black experience") would therefore be a misreading—given that, suppose that Baker, Gates, et al., stopped treating Ellison as part of a chain of tradition. How long would it take for Ellison to be squeezed out of the canon in favor of mid-century novels by white Americans taught as part of a different (equally invalid) chain of tradition? Is it any more misleading to associate Ellison with Toomer of Hurston than to associate Bellow with Melville or Twain? Ideally, all these works would be treated with equal attention to their particulars. How likely is that to happen?
Contra Michaels, you can’t usefully describe the problem as a syllogism. Syllogism might sometimes be a useful instigator of change. But no reasonable person thinks that our “performance” of “identities” is under complete conscious control or completely without emotional reward. We’re talking about personal and social dynamics, not Euclid’s beauty bare. The shared comfort of camping it up or dropping into down home dialect is not a hidden plea for disenfranchisement.
I’m comfortable (so to speak) affirming both anti-essentialism on the one hand, and affirmative action or “representative” canon revision on the supposedly other hand. What the latter correct for is a systemic lack of the former. I’ve read good writing that had been quietly dropped from sight before revisionists made noise, I’ve worked with good workers who would likely have been passed over in a “hire who seems right” atmosphere, and it’s hard to picture any civil rights legislation passing without benefit of strange bedfellows.
None of this seems particularly insane once we get down to specific cases. But the powerful on both sides of these debates prefer to caricature rather than treat specifics, since specifics would call into question the foundations of their power. Identity politics go bad very quickly for the same reason that every other strategy does: because any strategy used by the less powerful is also available for use by the more powerful. With recent Republican administrations, the wealthiest class has even succeeded in repurposing income redistribution.
So yes, it’s true that identity politics (including the Butlerian strain) can work beautifully to justify bullying, wilful ignorance, and inertia. Still, it seems to me that the most widely published and publicized arguments against identity politics tend not to issue from bullied parties.
Ray, I like your take on *Invisible Man*. I’d like to think that there is a “third way” beyond either (a) locking a text into its “original,” history-bound meaning; or (b) making that meaning universal and timeless. For me, it’s in asking what a text can mean now and for “us” or for “me” at a given moment and under particular circumstances. We can ask what *Oroonoko* meant in its time. But as interesting to me is why is *Oroonoko* omnipresent now (and for the last decade) as well? What cultural work is the novel doing for the academy today?
Warren is correct that Toni Morrison’s vision of community is more like Hawthorne’s than it is a symbol of a Christian or democratic communitas. But that doesn’t mean that somewhere down the line, a strong reader might not see in the conclusion of *Beloved* an image of Christian love or democractic unity (as does Cornel West)—just as CLR James read *Moby Dick* while stuck in immigration in NYC and feeling like he was “in the belly of the whale,” so to speak. Of course, such readings should be frank and honest about their search for a “usuable past.”
*Invisible Man* has a history-bound meaning, but as the book circulates beyond that meaning and that history, and if it falls into the hungry hands of just the right sort of reader, brilliant things could happen.
Luther, I agree on the importance of that “third way”. (Or those third ways, since looking at a work’s present place in the academy is a bit different than looking at the experience itself.) To my mind, that’s what defines (or redefines) the text as literature instead of history or whatever-the-original-was or whatever-one’s-current-politics-are.
And, as you point out, a scrupulous reader won’t ignore or repress those other aspects, even if some strategic exclusion is needed to produce a coherent essay or lecture. Again, social experiences, including art, aren’t a logic in which the law of noncontradiction holds or exact equations can be found. For scholarly types, accumulation of perspective is a pleasure in itself.
This isn’t as fluffy and noncombative as it may sound. Once we abstract to a more restrictive game such as scholarly argument or canonical rankings, syllogism, contradiction, and rules of evidence kick back in. We’re fully justified to make a fuss when someone states that Finnegans Wake is actually very simple, or that Chester Himes was politically naive, or that William Blake protested the Industrial Revolution. But if someone puts a Blake quote under a photograph of a Manchester factory, all I can do is acknowledge it.
Where does Warren’s question of political efficacy fit into this? Frankly, I’m too politically ineffectual myself to feel comfortable advancing an argument. The problem has always seemed clear enough—use group identity as a tactic against the powerful, and the powerful will eventually figure out a way to profit from group identity—but I have no idea whatsoever whether changing how Invisible Man is taught would make a difference. I do think it’s likely that dropping one lazy reductionist reading of a canonical writer will likely just let the next lazy reductionist reading advance in the queue. Plenty of well-off whites have no trouble reading Toni Morrison as a purveyor of healing fantasy instead of a link in an essentialist chain of tradition.
Sorry I missed this discussion, Scott. But, the compliment was all to me.