I. Literature
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On a recent trip to the library to find an essay that a visiting speaker was
going to talk about, something odd (and a bit embarrassing) happened to me. I got the
call number for the volume, and bee-lined directly to the library's "P" shelves (the
Library of Congress designation for language, literature and literary criticism/theory).
But I found that the whole section had been moved--there were students
working on laptops in the corner where literary criticism and theory used to be. I
eventually found the volume I was looking for, along with some old friends like my own
first book (a proud alum of PS 228, Class of '93), relocated in the 5th floor stacks. I
later asked the humanities librarian, when I saw him at the talk: "Hey, when did
the 'P' section get moved to the 5th floor?" "2002," he answered, a bit incredulously.
I could see him wondering: this guy makes his living as an English professor, but he
hasn't been in the literary criticism section for years?
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It struck me as puzzling as well. When I was in grad school--not
that long ago--just about everything I needed to know was in the P section. I
knew those shelves like the back of my hand. But I guess it is true that, in
Library of Congress terms, for my work in recent years it's been all B's, H's,
and J's
(Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics), hardly any P's--both in terms of the theory
and criticism that I read, and in terms of the work that I publish. At first
I thought that this was simply an anomaly of my research agendas; but an overwhelming number of
colleagues I've since talked to about this experience have similar tales of the swerve
around P. Others of course have different preferred Library of Congress designations for
their research: the vast D through F shelves for the department historians, Q and R for
science studies, more H and J for the queer theorists and cultural studies
people, as well as a healthy smattering of G and T (geography and technology). And even
those whose work remains firmly on the language and literature shelves admit
that much of what goes into their books on literature requires research from
other places: history, sociology, social science, not to mention the unclassifiable
archival research that informs so much of the work on the P shelves. In short, even the
scholarship on the language and literature shelves isn't "literary" in quite the same way
it was even a decade ago. There's plenty of superb "theory" and "criticism" being
produced in and around English departments, but the adjective "literary" seems oddly out
of place when it comes to describing it--inapplicable as much to the work of historians
("don't call us literary historians," a colleague warns) as to theorists (editors
at Rowman and Littlefield quickly wrenched the word "literary" out of the title of my
co-authored textbook, The Theory Toolbox--marketing death, they said).
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This swerve around P is probably something that most people reading this will recognize,
in one way or another. And rather than coming before you to celebrate or denounce the
demise of the "literary," I'd like to think about how
and why this situation came about, and how it may or may not be related to another story
that's making the rounds in literature departments, the so-called "death of theory." To
anticipate, I'll suggest that research in and around language and literature is no longer
"literary" most obviously in the sense that it's no longer primarily concerned with
producing interpretations of existing or emerging literary artifacts.
This--let's call it for now "anti-hermeneutic"--thrust is additionally the transversal
line that connects the decline of the literary to the demise of "big theory." As Jane
Tompkins had pointed out in the heyday of theory, specifically in her 1980
collection Reader-Response Criticism, even as theorists fought seemingly
life-and-death battles against new critical formalism, in the end those battles had the
paradoxical effect of intensifying a crucial tenet of formalism: namely, what Tompkins
calls "the triumph of interpretation" (219). Whether Wallace Stevens was all about
organic unity or whether he was all about undecidability, either way it was interpretation
all the way down.
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Of course, there's a semantic confusion involved when one argues that literary theory was and is
beholden to interpretation, insofar as big theory in North American literature departments got off
the ground in the 1970s precisely through its critique of new critical notions of literary
meaning. The attempt or desire to go "Beyond Interpretation," as Jonathan Culler names it in a 1976
essay, was part and parcel of the attempt to go beyond New Criticism. As Paul de Man writes, for
example, with criticism's departure from the universe of new critical reading, "the entire question
of meaning can be bracketed, thus freeing the critical discourse from the debilitating burden of
paraphrase" (28)--from any mimetic or thematic notion of meaning--and thereby allowing new horizons
of interpretive possibilities. Which is to say that literary theory of the 1970s and 80s hardly
abandons the project of interpretation wholesale--J. Hillis Miller famously insisted that
"'deconstruction' is . . . simply interpretation as such" (230)--but the era of literary theory
crucially shifts interpretation's emphasis from the "what" of meaning (new criticism's
"debilitating burden of paraphrase") to the "how" of meaning, the strangely "enabling" task of
infinite interpretation. In retrospect, it seems clear that the era of poststructuralism
was characterized by a decisive intensification of attention to the process (rather than the
product) of interpretation. This interpretive mutation from what to how comprised
"the triumph of theory."
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However, as theory triumphed over content- and theme-oriented criticism (as reading or
interpretation became unmoored from older, new critical or structuralist versions of meaning), it's
important to recall that "meaning" nevertheless remained the privileged site of
poststructuralist critical endeavor; in fact literary "meaning," far from remaining a thematic unity
hidden away within a rarified realm of dusty books, becomes in the poststructuralist theory era the
slippery lure for "readings" of all kinds, the hermeneutic gesture exploded throughout the literary
and social field. Despite the overt and constant critique of univocal meaning within literary
theory (or more likely because of this critique's ubiquity), the hermetic or insular notion
of univocal meaning remains the structuring other buried within poststructuralist celebrations of
interpretation's open-endedness, a kind of shadow passenger who must always be kept at bay by
interpretation. Interpretation, in short, becomes the enemy of univocal meaning in the theory
era--but that old-fashioned sense of meaning still thereby remains a central concern, if only as
that which is to be warded off by the critical act. (What, one might wonder, are the tasks or
results of poststructuralist reading if they are not first and foremost gestures towards
interpretation as an interminable enterprise?) As Culler writes in his 2006 defense of theory as
poetics, The Literary in Theory, "One could say that literary studies in the American
academy, precisely because of its commitment to the priority of interpretation as the goal of
literary study, was quick to posit a 'poststructuralism' based on the impossibility or
inappropriateness of the systematic projects of structuralism, so that interpretation, albeit of
different kinds, might remain the task of literary studies" (10-11).
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This decisive mutation from the what of hermeneutics to the
how--in shorthand, from revealing meaning to performing readings--doesn't simply
abandon the structural position of "meaning" in the hermeneutic enterprise. Far from
fading into the background, the interpretive act here swallows up
everything: even death
(as de Man provocatively insisted) becomes a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
Meaning is reborn, even as it arrives stillborn in each and every reading.
Interrupted,
reading-as-interpretation nevertheless continues--and it lives on even more
strongly in its new-found assurance that the text will never be totalized. Meaning
remains the impossible lure, the absent center, the lack or excess that continues to
drive the critical enterprise. Textual undecidability of this variety
has been very good to literary criticism. Instead of producing the
nihilism
and critical irrelevance that many traditionalists feared, the jettisoning of
meaning-as-content was in retrospect absolutely necessary in order for poststructuralist
hermeneutics to succeed. Open-ended interpretation was the
practice that launched
a thousand successful tenure cases (including mine). In the era of big theory, the stakes
among competing methodologies were high, but they remained interpretive stakes.
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Indeed, we need to recall that the MLA "theory wars" were characterized not so much by
disputes between interpreters of literature and those who held that there was some other
thing or set of things that critics should be doing in and around the literary; rather,
the theory wars were largely internecine battles among interpretive camps or
methods. Perhaps the most striking thing about some of the larger methodological
claims from the "big theory" era is the way they feel now like clunky advertising
campaigns or the remnants of a marketing war in which various methodologies jockey for
market share, often deploying slogans that would seem to us now to be hilariously
"totalizing"--something like your local bar's claim to have "the best hot wings in the
universe!" Perhaps the most infamous of these claims comes about in the aftermath of
de Man's reading of Proustian metaphor and metonymy in 1973's "Semiology and
Rhetoric":
"The whole of literature," de Man writes, "would respond in similar fashion,
although the
techniques and patterns would have to vary considerably, of course, from author to
author. But there is absolutely no reason why analyses of the kind suggested here for
Proust would not be applicable, with proper modifications of technique, to Milton or to
Dante or to Hölderlin. This in fact will be the task of literary
criticism in the
coming years" (32). From the vantage point of the present, it's a little hard to believe
that the "task of literary criticism in the coming years" could have been so earnestly and
seriously (or perhaps winkingly and ironically?) presented as the application of one
method among others.
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Indeed, it's hard to imagine someone today arguing that we should dedicate ourselves to
the task of re-reading the canon according to the protocols of a particular interpretive
approach (Geneva School phenomenology, Butler's gender performativity, Foucaultian
biopower, or Shlovsky's Russian Formalism), but such claims were in fact ubiquitous in the
era of big theory. Recall Fredric Jameson from The Political Unconscious
(1981): "My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and
ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism . . . . Only Marxism
can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past" (19).
Jameson thematizes his entire project in this book as the articulation of a "properly
Marxist hermeneutic" (23), responding to the "demand for the construction of
some new and
more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model" (23). One could go on multiplying these kinds of claims from the big theory era, recalling for example
that the subtitle of Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey (1988) is
nothing less comprehensive than "A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism," or
recalling the claims made for certain kinds of interpreters--resisting or otherwise--in
reader-response criticism.
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My point here is not to underline the hubris of the North American theory era, but to
suggest that the big claims of big theory were underwritten by a disciplinary apparatus in
and around literature departments that was completely beholden to interpretation
(especially in terms of research publication). Whether it was deconstruction, Marxism,
African-American criticism, or almost anything else, the era of big
theory was an era
of interpretative models that fought for the status as the most powerful and universally
applicable one--the "winner" being the critical method that could succeed in festooning
the pages of the most journals with its inventive new readings of texts. As Josue Harari
writes in his hugely successful 1979 anthology Textual Strategies,
"method has
become a strategy" (72). As Harari continues describing his anthology of strategic
interpretive methods, "I have presented the various critical struggles at play among
contemporary theorists. It remains to inscribe these strategies in a more global
framework, to put them in a ring of criticism, as it were, and to determine how the rounds
are to be scored" (68-9). And back in the day, scoring those rounds amounted to judging
which was the most persuasive "new" interpretation of a given text. The era of
big theory constituted a decisive intensification, rather than a reversal or abandonment,
of literary meaning and its discontents.
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While it's taken a quarter-century, contemporary criticism at this point seems
to have
fully heeded Tompkins's 1980 call for research to swerve away from
interpretation and
reconnect to what she calls "a long history of critical thought in which the specification
of meaning is not a central concern" (201): a criticism based not so narrowly
on the interior or formal relations among discourse and meaning, but focused instead on
"the relations of discourse and power" (226). Tompkins's "break with
formalism" (226)
seems plausible enough as a description of recent history in literary criticism and theory
(when was the last time you heard a junior job candidate do an actual close reading of a
poem?), and one could at this point begin multiplying anti-hermeneutic references:
critical theories invested in Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Gumbrecht, the later
Jameson, Irigaray, Franco Moretti's sociology of literary forms, or Bourdieu's work on
cultural capital; virtually the whole of fields like cultural studies, rhetoric, science
studies, globalization studies, and a strongly resurgent (in fact, hegemonically dominant)
"old" historicism in literary studies. One could add the decidedly
other-than-hermeneutic
thrust of artistic formations like the "unreadable" postmodern novel, almost all
contemporary American poetry (both the so-called workshop tradition--which
relies largely on communicating subjective affect rather than semantic
meaning--and more
experimental traditions), contemporary painting, performance art, and so on.
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While something like Tompkins's account of recent American literary critical
history seems plausible enough to me (tracing a path from the hegemony of
research questions concerning textual interpretation or meaning to the reign of
questions about literature's inscription in history, discourse, power, or the
everyday), I'd like to supplement or combine it here with a wholly different
account of the swerve around the literary, Alain Badiou's in Manifesto for
Philosophy. I'd like to do so not only because of the interest
of Badiou's account of continental philosophy's current state, but also because
hybridizing Tompkins's account with Badiou's may actually help to re-situate or
re-imagine a future for the literary. In short, it seems to me that on
Tompkins's account (and others like it), the literary remains the marker for a
kind of stale, apolitical formalism obsessed with questions of interpretive
meaning and little else; if one accepts this rendering of recent critical
history, it's hard to be concerned about the passing of the literary, and/or
equally hard to imagine any productive research future for the
adjective "literary" in "literary criticism and theory."
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The question of meaning is, and I think will remain, the bread and butter of classroom
practice in literature departments; in particular, the undergraduate theory class will
continue to function as an invaluable introduction to interpretive protocols for some time
to come. For faculty research, however, I think it's a different story: while
research surrounding the mechanics and production of meaning (and/or its flipside
undecidability) experienced a boom during the big theory years, it's almost impossible
only a few years later to imagine a publishing future that consists of new interpretations of Pynchon, Renaissance tragedies, or Melville. Contra much of
the reactionary hope invested in the passing of "big theory" ("Finally, now we can go back
to reading and appreciating literature, without all this jargon!"), the decisive
conceptual difference separating the present from the era of big theory is not so
much a loss of status for theoretical discourses (just look at any university press
catalog and you'll be quickly disabused of that notion), but the waning of literary
interpretation itself as a viable research (which is to say, publishing) agenda.
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In the end, it is the taken-for-grantedness of literary interpretation's centrality,
rather than a wholesale disciplinary rejection of something called theory, that separates
our present from the era of big theory. And if there's no "next big thing" coming down
the theory pike, it's precisely because such a notion of "next big thing" (like feminism,
deconstruction, or new historicism in their day) has tended to mean the arrival of a new
interpretive paradigm. There's no new interpretive paradigm
on the horizon not so much because of the exhaustion of theory itself
(there are many under-explored interpretive models or theorists) but because
the work of interpretation is no longer the primary research work of literature
departments. There will be no Blanchot revolution, televised or otherwise.
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To put the same problem somewhat differently, in the era of big literary theory there was
a certain unease at the perceived increasing distance between classroom practice and
research publication--producing close readings in classrooms, deconstructing
them in
journals. But in the present context, that perceived "gap" seems like a positive
continuity, because back in the day, at least it was the same general
operation--interpretation--at work both in the Introduction to Literature class and in
PMLA. But if the work that we're publishing these days is increasingly
driven by questions that seem foreign to interpretive classroom practice, that should give
us pause--if for no other reason than to consider how the future of our discipline might
be related to the practices that dominated its recent past. It is, in the end, precisely
in the name of re-imagining a future for the "literary" that I turn to Badiou's account of
its demise in recent philosophy.
II. Philosophy
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While Badiou's work is becoming well-known in North America--the
Chronicle of
Higher Education recently tagged him as a potential "next big thing" in the theory
world, surely the kiss of death (see Byrne)--a brief discussion of some of his
thought is relevant in this context. Against the thematics of the twilight of
philosophy, and against all messianisms, Badiou calls for thinking's
revitalization, primarily through an emphasis on what he calls a "positive,"
non-sacramental relation to infinity--a relation that, for Badiou, is on display
most
forcefully in the axiomatic thrust of mathematics. In returning to what he sees as the
Greek origins of philosophy--he goes so far as to call his thinking a "Platonism
of the
multiple" (Manifesto 103)--Badiou locates four "conditions of philosophy":
"the matheme, the poem, political invention, and love" (35). Western
philosophy is said to have begun in Greece with these four topics (science,
literature, politics, desire), and for Badiou
"the lack of a single one gives rise to [philosophy's] dissipation" (35), which isn't to
say its end. Philosophical thinking is in danger whenever it becomes tied
too closely and exclusively to one of its four-fold conditions. The danger, for Badiou,
is "handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure . . . . I call this type
of situation a suture. Philosophy is placed in suspension every time it presents itself
as being sutured to one of its conditions" (61). So, for example, Marxism has often been
too sutured to the political condition--here Badiou even implicates his own earlier
Maoism (76)--while analytic philosophy has on the whole sutured itself too
closely to the scientism of the matheme. "Philosophy," in its simplest definition, is for
Badiou "de-suturation" (67), the interruption of an exclusive thought-suture to either
politics, science, love, or the literary. Hence, Badiou calls his a "subtractive"
thinking, one that subtracts itself from constrictive sutures, to reconnect with
the multiple.
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The most totalizing suture of recent philosophical times, Badiou
writes polemically, is
not the political or the scientific-mathematical, or even privatized "love,"
but the poetic, the literary suture. As he
insists, today "it so happens that the main stake, the supreme difficulty, is
to de-suture
philosophy from its poetic condition" (67). Badiou rather cannily chooses Heidegger as
his main foil in this argument. Even Heidegger's staunchest proponents would
agree that the literary is in fact the ground of his thinking; he has
relatively little compelling to say about politics, mathematics, or love for that
matter--or, more precisely, anything compelling that he might have to say about those
topics would have to run through the poetic, as this suture is the ontological ground
of the space of possibility in Heidegger's thinking. Anything that emerges does so in
Heidegger through the structure of the literary opening, that privileged path to the
meaning of Being.
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Of course, my two exemplary accounts of the literary's demise (Tompkins's and
Badiou's) do not map seamlessly onto one another, for a whole host of
disciplinary, historical, and
geographical reasons. Most obviously, one might point out that the lion's share of
American literary theory (or most continental philosophy, for that matter) isn't or never
was so Heideggerian as Badiou's account would seem to suggest. However, much of
the "big theory" era in literature departments did, I think, share the bond that both
Badiou and Tompkins point out: the questions of "meaning" or interpretation as the
ultimate horizon of inquiry. This hermeneutic thrust was prominently on
display in
virtually all big theory in literature departments, even in the polemically new
historicist work of people like the boundary 2 New Americanists, as
well as
in much of the early new historicist work in English literature (think here of
a great book
like Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, which deploys its historical
materialist mix of religion, ideology, and power primarily to produce startling new
readings of Renaissance tragedies). Likewise, however anti-Heideggerian much
Tel Quel
thinking may have been, it did nonetheless protect the horizon of hermeneutics (the
literary suture) as the royal road to larger philosophical and cultural questions. Like
Tompkins's call for literary criticism to reconnect to a non-hermeneutic
tradition, then,
Badiou's critique of the poetic suture in philosophy is less a spring-green
avant gardism
(calling for a radical new direction in thought), than it is an attempt to return critique
to a series of other questions, ones not treated well within the poetic idiom. As Badiou
writes, "Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant or Hegel might have been
mathematicians,
historians, or physicists; if there is one thing they were not, it was poets" (70).
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Contrary to Tompkins's diagnosis of literary criticism circa 1980, however, Badiou
doesn't treat
the poetic suture of neo-Heideggerian thought primarily as an ideological swerve away from
the real or from crucial questions of its day--politics, power, gender, etc. For
Badiou, the
poetic suture is not primarily the offspring of a false or deluded consciousness
concerning the centrality of literature: "there really was an age of poets" (70)--Badiou
dates it from Hölderlin to Celan, 1770--1970--when the central problems of philosophy
were worked out most forcefully and concisely in poetic texts. Literary works for a long time presented us with our most crucial philosophical enigmas: "the most
open approach to the question of being," "the space of compossibility least caught up in
the brutal sutures" of political coercion, "the enigma of time" (70), and of
course the
undulations of love and desire. Badiou, in other words, hardly seeks to dismiss the power
of the poetic suture in philosophy: "Heidegger's thinking has owed its persuasive power
to having been the only one to pick up what was at stake in the poem, namely the
destitution of object fetishism, the opposition of truth and knowledge, and lastly the
essential disorientation of our epoch" (74). On Badiou's account the literary
became central to a whole era of thought not
primarily because of the ideological investments of its proponents (the general claim
that's not too far below the surface of Tompkins's critique of formalist
fetishizing of the
poem), but precisely because the literary spoke most forcefully and succinctly to a whole
set of crucial questions (political and otherwise): literature's critique of object and
commodity fetishism (the poem's anti-instrumental resistance to appropriation), poetry's
singular epistemological force (the impossibility of assigning it an "objective"
meaning), and the literary's testimony to the existential disorientation of the era.
These were all crucial philosophical questions that could be accessed in their most
intense manifestations primarily through the literary or hermeneutic suture--through the
question of meaning and its discontents.
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Badiou's concern is less to debunk the prestige, ideology, or inherent
interest of the
literary relation to philosophy, but to explore or emphasize what we might
call the
"cost" of a primary suture onto the literary--how it recasts or downplays thinking's
relations to what Badiou sees as its other properly philosophical themes (the political,
love, and the mathematical - scientific). If, as Badiou insists, "ultimately,
being qua
being is nothing but the multiple as such" ("Being by Numbers," n.p.), then the literary
suture can do little more than endlessly demonstrate or gesture toward this
multiplicity, in what Badiou suggests is a primarily theological register. Poetry, he
insists, functions largely as the "local maintenance of the sacred"
(Manifesto 57), as repository of hidden meaning or the marker for infinite
possibility. Badiou, on the other hand, takes his primary task to be the "secularization
of infinity," which is why for Badiou the mathematical language of set theory becomes a
privileged one. It drains infinity or the multiple of its Barthesian
"jouissance": "that's the price of a deromanticization of infinity," he writes. Quite
simply, "Mathematics secularizes infinity in the clearest way, by formalizing it" ("Being
by Numbers"). The project for Badiou is less guaranteeing the openness of infinity (which
was the primary job of the literary during the age of the poem), than it is mobilizing
said infinity (the job that characterizes politics, science, love).
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This, unfortunately, is also where Badiou's account begins to become unhelpful for
rethinking a genealogy of recent developments in the history of literary criticism and/or
philosophy, as his mathematical impulse is driven in large part by an attempt not to
connect thinking to this or that transversal field, but to insist on philosophy's
(absolute) autonomy as that discourse dedicated to the ahistorical "truth" best
represented by mathematics: "I propose to tear philosophy away from this genealogical
imperative" (Manifesto 115), he writes. "To forget history--this at first
means to make decisions of thinking without returning to a supposed historical sense
prescribed by these decisions. It is a question of breaking with historicism to enter, as
someone like Descartes or Spinoza did, into an autonomous legitimating of
discourse.
Philosophy must take on axioms of thinking and draw consequences from them"
(115). For Badiou, this ahistorical thrust must break with poetic suture, precisely
because the poetic comprises (as its inherent strength) a thinking "vis-à-vis,"
always in relation to the object or the world (rather than the ahistorical truth) as the
bearer of the multiple.
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Unfashionable as it surely is, Badiou's Platonism of the multiple is just that, fidelity
to a "truth without object" (Manifesto 93): "The task of such a thinking is
to produce a concept of the subject such that it is supported by no mention of the object,
a subject, if I might say, without vis-à-vis. This locus has a bad
reputation, for it invokes Bishop Berkeley's absolute idealism. As you have
realized, it
is, yet, to the task of occupying it that I am devoted" (93). As much as I appreciate
(and to a large extent agree with) his sizing up of the "cost" of thinking's primary
suture onto the literary, this absolutist notion of the "subject" and
ahistorical "fidelity" (to the originary "truth-procedure" or the founding "event" of
truth) is where I get off the Badiou boat, desperately seeking again the literary bateau ivre. Badiou's thinking here seems to put us all somewhere in
the vicinity of the quarter deck of the Pequod, consistently menaced by a kind of
dictatorial subjective decisionism masquerading (as it so often does) as absolute fidelity
to the ahistorical truth. As Badiou writes, "there is no ethical imperative
other than 'Continue!,' 'Continue in your fidelity!'" ("Being by
Numbers")--perhaps one could
translate it as "Keep on Truckin"? As the outline of a potential ethics, this notion of
single-minded fidelity toward an ahistorical "truth without object" for me summons up the
words of a great literary figure who himself most rigorously refused the world of relation
(the vis-à-vis): "I would prefer not to."
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Badiou's North American popularity, such as it is, may come from his sledgehammer
critique of liberalism: in an American political world where the
moniker "leftist" is virtually synonymous with "flip-flopper," Badiou's self-founding
subject and Maoist political "fidelity" solve some of the problems that
traditional liberalism creates for politics. If nothing else, Maoism is good for things
like knowing what the truth is, or the only correct way to find it; tenacious commitment
and fidelity to the cause; knowing which side you're on (an intensified version of
Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction comprises virtually the whole field of Badiou's
"prescriptive politics").[1] It also
offers a virtual
guarantee that what you're doing at any given point can be called "authentic
resistance" (insofar as someone in the truth is by definition fighting the good fight
against the enemy). Despite the guard rails that Badiou consistently throws up against a
purely subjective decisionism (e.g., that truth procedures must be "generic,"
thereby open
to all), one might argue that his thought remains not so much haunted as it is
grounded by a decisionism or voluntarism.
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The "plus" side of Badiou's Maoism is, ironically, that it looks like a pretty
good description of Bush Administration practices (the war on terror is "without
vis-à-vis" indeed!); but at the end of the day, one person's universal
and ahistorical "truth-procedure" is--a thousand references to Plato, Leo
Strauss, Hayek, or the Koran notwithstanding--inexorably another person's doxa.
This conceptual slippage (between the individual and the group, the universal
and the particular, absolute truth and mere opinion) is, of course, the central
problem around which liberalism configures itself; but as tempting or satisfying
as it might be to jettison the inherent slipperiness of political events in the
name of an absolute subjective and group commitment, this comes only at the cost
of intensifying the fundamental problems of liberalism (and, indeed, the central
problems of the contemporary economic and political world): fidelity toward
those who share my commitment, and little but suspicion for all the others.
What we might call the "Badiou cocktail"--as Daniel Bensaid suggests, a potent
mix of "theoretical elitism and practical moralism" (101)--hardly offers much of
a hangover cure from liberal political theory's failures and historical
disasters. While there are myriad problems with contemporary liberalism (or
even more so neo-liberalism), the most pressing among them is hardly that
liberalism displays too little moralism, decisionism, or elitism.
So why be interested in Badiou's account at all? Or what can it offer us over and above
something like Tompkins's swerve around the literary?
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It seems to me that Badiou offers a way to think the literary again as one of a
series of other crucial topics (love, science, politics, etc.), without
literature's having to carry the burden of being the privileged or necessary
approach to those other questions. I think that Badiou is right when he
suggests that literary interpretation has been the primary suture of our recent
past, and that this suture has proven costly or ineffective when it's exported
wholesale into other fields of inquiry. Politics, science, and love (one might
add here most art forms in general) are hardly realms where "meaning" of a
literary kind makes much difference, and it can be a bit of a
"disaster" (Badiou's word) to confuse political or mathematical questions with
questions of literary interpretation. But, and this seems to be the most
serious problem with Badiou's account, such an over-reliance on the literary
suture can hardly be rectified by absolutizing the mathematical or scientific
suture: that "solution" seems to intensify the problem by insisting again on
the autonomy of one suture over the others. (Indeed, the problem may be
insisting that there are only four sutures, when in fact it seems that,
mathematically speaking, there would have to be "n" sutures, an infinite
number, just as there are "n" friends and "n" enemies within the political realm.[2] But in some ways Badiou remains right on
target. We do at this point need to desacrilize the interpretive, but without
handing over the whole operation to Badiou's solutions: the matheme, the
self-grounding subject, the ahistorical truth, a prescriptive "with us or
against us" politics. This kind of hesitation or critique
undoubtedly makes me a Badiouean enemy, a liberal accomodationist. So be
it. I think Foucault critiques the friend/enemy distinction best: "Who
fights against whom? We all fight each other. And there is
always within each of us something that fights something else . . . . [at the
level of] individuals, or even sub-individuals" (Power 208).[3]
III. Literature and Philosophy
-
While I subscribe fully to neither of the general accounts that I sketch above, it seems
to me that Badiou's philosophical account of the literary's demise, hybridized with
Tompkins's literary-critical one, offers us some provocative ways to think
through the
future of the literary and its possible future relations to philosophy. First, while
these two accounts diverge in significant ways, they both suggest that the hegemony of the
"literary" in recent theory is in fact better understood as the hegemony of "meaning"
(and its flipside, undecidability); likewise, both accounts agree that hermeneutics
doesn't and shouldn't saturate the category of the "literary." The first time around, in
the era of big theory, the disciplinary relationship between literature and philosophy was
pretty clear: literary studies needed interpretive paradigms, which it found in
philosophy; and philosophy needed some real-world application, a place to show examples of
what it could do, and it found this oftentimes in literature. Either way, the relation
between philosophy and literature in the era of big theory was almost wholly a narrow
hermeneutic one, having to do with the mechanics, production and (im)possibility of
meaning.
-
Against this narrowly interpretive sense of literature, I suggest that the literary can,
in a more robust sense, comprise a thinking "vis-à-vis without meaning."
While this probably sounds a little odd--what's literature without the question
of meaning?--it always seemed equally strange to me that literary studies found itself so
completely territorialized on this question of meaning, when virtually no other art form
or art criticism is as obsessed by it. "What does it mean?" seems like the wrong question
to ask, for example, about music or sculpture, not to mention performance art or
post-impressionist painting. And it's always seemed to me likewise a puzzling (and,
finally, zero-sum) question to put to Joyce's texts or to Shakespeare's.
-
Indeed, the strength of literature, contra Badiou, lies in its constitution of a
strong--infinitely molecular--brand of thinking the vis-à-vis, of
thinking about and through the world of infinite relation. The mistake or
Achilles heel of the literary suture, though, was that in the era of big
literary theory, this inherently positive, multiple, machinic, and molecular
thinking was overthrown by questions of "meaning"--which is to say, questions
about the neo-theological play of presence and absence. Such a hermeneutic
thinking of the multiple is always and necessarily tied to the lack or absence
of a kind of neo-objectivist one (multiple interpretations being thought in
hermeneutics primarily through a founding absence, the flown god or the death of
the author). The "presence" of this thing called meaning is always already made
possible by the chiasmic "absence" of some thing or things (the spectral
materiality of the signifier, the haunting of other interpretations, the
originary dispensation of being, etc). As its primary Achilles Heel, the
hermeneutic suture commits you to showing first and foremost what literature
can't do (it can't mean univocally), rather than what it can
do (a thousand other things). Such hermeneutic literary theory is inexorably a
thinking based on lack. Find the gaps, fissures, or absences, and there you'll
find either a secret trace of lost or impossible plenitude (the hidden subtext
of meaning), or a hollowing out of the text so as to render it multiply
undecidable. And, as much as it pains me to say this, it is those
strictly-speaking interpretive questions (that painstaking tracing of the
chiasmic reversals of presence and absence of meaning in a text) that are at
this point dead ends in literary research. Don't believe it? Try
deconstructing the hell out of an Emily Dickinson poem, and send the results to
PMLA--see what happens.
-
By way of a caveat or disclaimer, it seems to me that the future of the literary is not at
all a matter of finding ways simply to abandon the theoretical discussion of literature
that was inaugurated by new criticism and intensified in the era of big theory. To my
mind, that'd be a huge mistake because, after all, new critical interpretation was the
thing that took the backyard conversation that was "literature" and made it into a
research profession, for better or worse. My provocation here, if I have one at all, is
simply asking theoreticians to rethink the possible sets of relation among literature and
philosophy, other than in the key of interpretation. This is a call that has
already been well heeded by our literature department colleagues: historicists,
environmental critics, public intellectuals, and myriad others are producing vital and
interesting work in and around literature, outside the mechanics of meaning. However, the
department theorist--mon semblable, mon frère et soeur--seems these days
to be mired in a kind of funk, too many of us driven by a sense that our heyday has
passed, leaving us stuck with a hard drive full of Heideggerian readings of
The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (I actually have such an essay, should anyone care to
read it), or bereft of journals interested in our inventive uses of Agamben to interpret
The Scarlet Letter.
-
But enough mourning for Big Theory.[4] So much
does, in fact, depend on "a red wheelbarrow / glazed with rain water / beside
the white chickens"--so much more than meaning depends on the sense of
irreducibly multiple relation that is this thing called literature.
And as Badiou suggests, at this point in the history of the literary, a release
from the hermeneutic suture may in fact be what poetry "wants": its primary job
should, perhaps, no longer be to provide exemplary fodder for interpretive
methods or to offer examples of philosophical truths. I can already feel a kind
of query or invitation from the reader: "Yes, I've had it with bland
historicist job talks concerning novels written by pirates, or tracking what
Frederick Douglass did on the weekend, and would love to think theoretically
about the literary again. How about an example of the kind of reading you're
talking about--using, say, Heart of Darkness as a sample text?
Show us what your paradigm can do--take it out for a test drive on Conrad." No
dice. That whole sense of offering an example reading or a critical template
is, as I've argued above, itself a relic of the "big theory" era that I'm asking
theorists to consider fleeing. I'm not interested in founding a new
interpretive school here, nor in prescribing hot topics for critique. I'm
simply insisting that, despite claims to the contrary, the literary--and with it
literary theory--is or should be alive and well, but only if we abandon our
nostalgia for the primary suture of the interpretive
itself, and turn literature and literary theory back to the multiplicity of uses
and questions that characterize our engagements with other forms of
expression--to reinvigorate the myriad transversal theoretical connections among
literature and philosophy, outside the interpretive suture. It's already
happening in a widespread way: just look at the table of contents for any
recent "good" journal and you'll see plenty of theoretically-inflected work, but
very little of it begins or ends with the question of literary "meaning."
-
Maybe in fact the current state of affairs--the swerve around P--commits theorists to revisit the
critique of "interpretation" that got literary theory off the ground in the first place, and to
locate there a series of roads less traveled. I think here of moments like Michel Foucault's call,
at the beginning of 1969's Archaeology of Knowledge, not to treat historical monuments
and archives as documents (delving ever more into the question of the past's "meaning"), but to
treat documents and archives as monuments, to remain at the descriptive level of the document itself
rather than attempting to ventriloquize archives or render texts "meaningful" through an
interpretive method of some kind (see pp. 6-7). Or one could recall Deleuze and Guattari's
provocations in A Thousand Plateaus, where "the triumph of theory" goes by the much
less grandiose name "interpretosis . . . humankind's fundamental neurosis" (114). Their
symptomology of this malady goes like this: "every sign refers to another sign, and only to another
sign, ad infinitum . . . . The world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the
signifier is given without being known. Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this
morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a
pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks positioned on the sidewalk like the hands of a watch. They
were whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn't matter what it means,
it's still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is struck with a strange impotence and
uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier that constitutes the chain" (112). There remains, in
Deleuze and Guattari's world, much interesting that can be said about stepping in a pile of dog shit
or being summoned by the IRS; but what those events mean--inside or outside the context of
a novel--is hardly the only place to begin or end a theoretical inquiry. In the search for lines of
flight, one could even return to Culler's "Beyond Interpretation," and its proleptic response to
those who still today yearn for the "next big thing" in literary theory: "there are many tasks that
confront contemporary criticism, many things that we need if we are to advance our understanding of
literature, but if there is one thing we do not need it is more interpretations of literary works"
(246). In fact, Culler's 1976 diagnosis of "The Prospects of Contemporary Criticism" seems a fitting
(if largely unheard) caveat for the decades of literary theory that would follow: "the principle of
interpretation is so strong an unexamined postulate of American criticism that it subsumes and
neutralizes even the most forceful and intelligent acts of revolt" (253).
-
I fear that many of us in the theory world--people in
literature departments who "do theory" for a living--have been slow to engage fully with
changing research practices in literature departments. Nobody in music theory,
architecture theory, or art theory ever really asks what the work of Beethoven,
Brunelleschi, or Jackson Pollock means. These days, maybe that question doesn't
make much sense for literary theorists either.
Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
jxn8@psu.edu
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Notes
1. As Hallward writes, Badiou's "problem with Schmitt's
concept of the political, in other words, is that it is not prescriptive
enough. Politics divides, but not between friends and enemies (via the
mediation of the state). Politics divides the adherents of a prescription against its
opponents" (774). That's right, the official political theorist of the Third Reich was
too soft--"not prescriptive enough"-- in his thinking of the friend/enemy
distinction.
2. Infinity, at the end of the Badiouean day, is akin
to the il y a of Levinas, the given multiplicity of the world that we have to
"evade" if we are to be ethical subjects (see Nealon 53-72). For his part, Badiou
writes that "Most of the time, the great majority of us live outside ethics. We live in
the living multiplicity of the situation" ("Being by Numbers"). For Badiou,
as for Levinas, infinity or multiplicity is something that has to be escaped
rather than deployed otherwise (a la Deleuze) or mapped (à la Foucault): "The
set of a situation's various bodies of knowledge I call 'the encyclopedia' of the
situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically
without truth" ("Being by Numbers"). All claims to radicality notwithstanding, this is
the profoundly conservative heart of Badiou's thought: Truth either has to
be autonomous
and absolute, or there's nothing but the chaos of the bad infinite. That sentiment is,
it seems to me, the driver not of philosophy, but of philosophy's (eternal?)
enemy, dogmatism.
Unlike Levinas's, Badiou's ethics is (literally) not for everyone. In "Being by
Numbers," Badiou is asked by an interviewer about the ethics of the ordinary person,
who doesn't care much for universal "truth": "But can one seriously confide and
confine ethics to mathematicians, political activists, lovers, and artists? Is the
ordinary person, by definition, excluded from the ethical field?" He responds not in a
Foucaultian way (with the sense that we are all hailed by literal encyclopedias of
truth-procedures), but with this: "Why should we think that ethics convokes us all?
The idea of ethics' universal convocation supposes the assignment of universality. I
maintain that the only immanent universality is found in the truth procedure. We are
seized by the really ethical dimension only inside a truth procedure. Does this mean
that the encounter of ethical situations or propositions is restricted to the actors of
a truth procedure? I understand that this point is debatable" ("Being by Numbers").
It's "debatable" whether most people are capable of ethics or truth? That really
is Platonism for a new age.
It seems equally clear that Badiouian "events," those drivers of change in the
historical and political world, are exceedingly rare and addressed narrowly to certain
quite unique individuals--people like Badiou, one would assume, who are long on
smarts and short on modesty: "Actually, I would submit that my system is the most
rigorously materialist in ambition that we've seen since Lucretius" ("Being by
Numbers").
3. Badiou is, of course, no fan of Foucault,
though given sentiments like the following, it's hard to imagine he's read
Foucault closely: "Foucault is a theoretician of encyclopedias. He was never
really interested in the question of knowing whether, within situations,
anything existed that might deserve to be called a 'truth.' With his usual
corrosiveness, he would say that he didn't have to deal with this kind of thing.
He wasn't interested in the protocol of either the appearance or the
disappearance of a given epistemic organization" ("Being By Numbers"). Foucault
was of course obsessed by nothing other than the appearance and disappearance of
epistemic organizations (sovereign power, social power, discipline, biopower),
which he called "ways of speaking the truth." Though of course the only "truth"
worth the name in Badiou is ahistorical and subjective, and here Foucault can be
"corrosive" indeed: "Truth is a thing of this world: it is induced only by
virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power
. . . . The problem is not changing people's consciousness--or what's in their
heads--but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of
truth" (Power 131, 133).
4. Maybe literary theorists need to heed something
like Badiou's call to philosophers: "Philosophy has not known until quite recently how
to think in level terms with Capital, since it has left that field open, to
its most intimate point, to vain nostalgia for the sacred, to obsession with Presence,
to the obscure dominance of the poem, to doubt about its own legitimacy . . . . The
true question remains: what has happened to philosophy for it to refuse with a
shudder the liberty and strength a desacralizing epoch offered it?"
(Manifesto 58-9).
Works Cited
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268>.
---. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY P,
1999.
Bensaid, Daniel. "Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event." Think Again: Alain
Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum,
2004.
Byrne, Richard. "Being M. Badiou: The French Philosopher Brings His Ideas to America,
Creating a Buzz." Chronicle of Higher Education. 24 March 2006. Accessed
online 25 March 2006.
Culler, Jonathan. "Beyond Interpretation: The Prospects of Contemporary Criticism."
Comparative Literature 28.3 (1976): 244-56.
---. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:
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de Man, Paul. "Semiology and Rhetoric." Diacritics 3.3 (1973): 27-33.
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of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. AM Sheridan Smith.
New York: Pantheon, 1972.
---. Power/Knowledge. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New
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Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
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Hallward, Peter. "The Politics of Prescription." SAQ 104.4 (2005):
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Harari, Josue. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
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Hillis Miller, J. "The Critic as Host." Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed.
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Nealon, Jeffrey T. Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity.
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Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to
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