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The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation
*Jeffrey T. Nealon *
/ Pennsylvania State University/
jxn8@psu.edu
(c) 2007 Jeffrey T. Nealon.
All rights reserved.
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I. Literature
1. 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?
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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."
5. 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).
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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."
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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).
18. 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.
19. 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).
20. 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-Ã -vis," always in relation to the object or the world (rather
than the ahistorical truth) as the bearer of the multiple.
21. 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-Ã -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-Ã -vis): "I would prefer not to."
22. 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 <#foot1>] 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.
23. 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-Ã -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?
24. 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 <#foot2>] 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
<#foot3>]
III. Literature and Philosophy
25. 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.
26. Against this narrowly interpretive sense of literature, I suggest
that the literary can, in a more robust sense, comprise a thinking
"vis-Ã -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.
27. Indeed, the strength of literature, contra Badiou, lies in its
constitution of a strong--infinitely molecular--brand of thinking
the vis-Ã -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.
28. 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 frÃ(r)re 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.
29. But enough mourning for Big Theory.[4 <#foot4>] 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."
30. 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).
31. 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 (Ã 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 <#ref3>. 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 <#ref4>. 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).
5 <#ref5>. Among the many proleptically insightful moments in
Culler's 1976 essay is his account of Northrop Frye's work as it
became institutionalized in the United States: "Though it began as
a plea for a systematic poetics, Frye's work has done less to
promote work in poetics than to stimulate a mode of interpretation
which has come to be known as 'myth-criticism' or archetypal
criticism. The assumption that the critic's task is to interpret
individual works remains unchanged, only now . . . the deepest
meanings of a work are to be sought in the archetypal symbols or
patterns which it deploys" (249). This seems an excellent (if
somewhat ironic) general description of what would later happen to
deconstruction, and then to new historicism in its turn.
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Bensaid, Daniel. "Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event."
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Culler, Jonathan. "Beyond Interpretation: The Prospects of
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