This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional /
argumentative perspective, providing a semiotic and phenomenological
analysis of the scale ranging from consonant, "friendly" criticism, to
dissonant, confrontational or "unfriendly" criticism. A number of key
critical theories (by theorists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Oscar Wilde,
Jacques Lacan, Erving Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques Derrida, Stanley
Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan Sinfield, and H.
Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of
criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional
pragmatics, of the dialectics of communication, and of a semiotic theory
of truth and of consciousness.
Full text at SSRN:
Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism
Reframing, Topsight, and Critical Dialectics
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1259696
_____________________________________
Crítica Acrítica, Crítica Crítica - Replanteamientos, Perspectiva dominante, y Dialéctica de la crítica
Este artículo teoriza las
modalidades de lectura crítica desde una perspectiva
interaccional-argumentativa, proponiendo un análisis semiótico y
fenomenológico de la escala que se extiende desde la crítica consonante,
"amistosa", a la crítica disonante, confrontativa o "antipática". Se
examinan diversas teorías críticas a la luz de esta concepción,
procedentes de teorizadores como G. W. F. Hegel, Oscar Wilde, Jacques
Lacan, Erving Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish,
Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan Sinfield, y H. Porter
Abbott, y se sitúan estas teoría es el marco de la pragmática
interaccional, de la dialéctica de la comunicación, y de una teoría
semiótica de la verdad y de la consciencia. Incluimos enlaces a versiones preliminares en español.
Acritical Criticism,
Critical Criticism:
Reframing, Topsight, and Critical Dialectics
José
Angel García Landa
Universidad
de Zaragoza
www.garcialanda.net
garciala@unizar.es
2007
This paper
theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative perspective,
providing a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of the scale ranging from
consonant, “friendly” criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or “unfriendly”
criticism. A number of key critical theories (by theorists such as G. W. F.
Hegel, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Erving Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques
Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan
Sinfield, and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of
criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics, of
the dialectics of communication, and of a semiotic theory of truth and of
consciousness.
1 Pragmatics, interactionism, and
critical discourse analysis
Whenever
we say anything, our words have various levels of meaning, one of which is the
“dictionary” meaning, i.e. decontextualized meaning. Different kinds of meaning
can be distinguished in our words, and in our actions as well, at several
levels of (de)contextualization. The really interesting analysis of meaning is
the analysis of fully contextualized meaning. (Although this notion leads to
the additional problem, usually felicitously lost sight of, of reflexivity and
even infinite regress—since a fully contextualized analysis must include the
analyst himself, as well as the analytical methods and disciplinary and
contextual constraints of the analyis being carried out).
There are
consequently many types of pragmatics:
some pragmaticists work with more or less abstract (i.e. more or less
decontextualized) models of action or language. It is not a matter of
all-or-nothing, since the analysis may incorporate many contextualizing
dimensions which are nevertheless not fully concretized—for instance, the types
of speech acts classified by Austin in How
to Do Things with Words. Classical approaches to speech act theory use as a
matter of course partially contextualized examples (which are moreover
constructed by the analysts themselves). These allow them to analyze indirect
speech acts and distinguish within them the locutionary meaning from the
illocutionary force: two levels of conventionalized meaning, both of which are
in fact relatively abstract. A more contextualized approach to language
pragmatics is proposed by Jenny Thomas in Meaning
in Interaction (incidentally, she uses for the most part authentic examples
in her analyses):
In
this book I shall be working towards a definition of pragmatics as meaning in
interaction. This reflects the view that meaning is not something which is
inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone, nor by
the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic process, involving the
negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer, the context of utterance
(physical, social and linguistic) and the meaning potential of an utterance.
(Thomas 1995: 22)
This
theoretical stance is remarkably similar to the basic tenets of some versions
of Reader-Response Criticism—e.g. in Stanley Fish’s work—and, going further
back, of George Herbert Mead’s and Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism,
which transcends both linguistics and literary studies. According to the
symbolic interactionalist theory of meaning, the meaning of events, things,
actions, words, is constructed in the process of social interaction between
subjects, and it is not fixed; rather, it is constantly being modified in a
continuous process of reinterpretation. Blumer lists three types of theories of
meaning (of which the first two are inadequate):
1) For
the first theory or group of theories, meaning is intrinsic to the object. (In
the case of a text, intrinsic to the words, phrases, the textual structure,
etc. Many protocols of legal interpretation are based on this fiction, as are
those semantic theories which do not overstep the boundaries of the dictionary
meaning of words).
2)
Another theory holds that meaning is a subjective affair, created by the
interpreter. This is a more psychological theory of meaning, and close to some
subjectivist theories of reader reception which start (and sometimes end) their
reflections with the observation that “every text means something different for
each reader”.
3) The
third theory of meaning is the symbolic interactionalist theory upheld by
Blumer, similar in many respects to Thomas’s pragmatic theory of meaning quoted
above. According to it, meaning is not inherent to the object, nor is it
subjective: it is constructed, instead, through an interactive process. I quote
Blumer:
Symbolic
interactionism views meaning as having a different source than those held by
the two dominant views just considered. It does not regard meaning as emanating
from the intrinsic makeup of the thing that has meaning, nor does it see
meaning as arising through a coalescence of psychological elements in the
person. Instead, it sees meaning as arising in the process of interaction
between people. The meaning of a thing for a person grows out of the ways in
which other persons act toward the person with regard to the thing. Their
actions operate to define the thing for the person. Thus, symbolic
interactionism sees meanings as social products, as creations that are formed
in and through the defining activities of people as they interact. (1986: 4-5)
An
objection would seem to arise: in analyzing the meaning of an event, an
utterance, a text, it is quite frequently the case that analysts do not find
themselves in the original situation (in which the event took place, where the
utterance was uttered; or, the analyst is not the intended addressee of the
text). Sometimes we do interpret something as it takes place or as it is being
said; at other times interpretation takes place in a more or less different and
distant context. One must therefore take into account the distortion (through
an increment of meaning) introduced by the analytic context, which is an
interactional context in its own right, and may modify meaning in subtle ways,
invisible even, to those who are not attuned to this dimension of metadiscourse.
Once we
take this factor into account, perhaps Thomas’s notion of a contextualized and
interactive pragmalinguistic analysis might be modified from the standpoint of
symbolic interactionism. We would thus articulate a reflexive
discourse-analytical approach understood as meaning in interaction, or a fully
contextualized critical pragmatics. Adapting Thomas’s definition, we would have
that
Meaning is not something inherent to the words
only, nor is it produced only by the speaker, or by the discourse analyst. The
construction of meaning is a dynamic process, which includes the negotiation of
meaning between speaker and addressee, the context of utterance (in its
physical, social and linguistic dimensions), the potential significance of an
utterance, and the critical/analytic context in which the utterance is studied,
which includes an interactional dimension of its own between the analyst and
other subjects/analysts.
The same
definition might be extended to the critique and pragmatics of action, since
utterances are actions, and saying, and interpreting, are modes of acting.
2. The colour of the glass we look through:
Critical differences
Although
the ideas in Stanley Fish’s book Is There
a Text in This Class? (1980) evolve from the earlier to the later essays,
the work’s central and all-encompassing argument is that the meaning of texts
does not “already” exist in the texts themselves, but is instead generated by
the structures of meaning preexistent to the text in conjunction with those
projected by the reader during the reading process. The meaning is not “in” the
text itself, it is “produced” by a reading. This work is possibly the most characteristic
instance of the reader-response approach to criticism, and does not flinch when
it comes to putting forward exorbitant claims to void of meaning both the text
and its linguistic structures, so as to lay the whole load of sense-making on
the act of interpretation. One could argue that Fish was dangerously close to
Theory no. 2 in Blumer’s classification above. Twenty years ago I wrote a
rather stern critique of Fish’s theory in a paper entitled “Stanley E. Fish’s
Speech Acts.” I found especially irritating Fish’s manoeuvering to avoid all
reasoning centred on objective linguistic or semiotic structures, dissolving
all levels of sense into a primordial soup of interpretations projected by the
individual receiver. Today, however, I am more interested in the transforming
and liberating potential that Fish’s interventions undeniably have. His
critique of formalist stylistics and of transformational grammar is extremely
interesting, and very much in line with what would soon become known as integrational
linguistics, and also, in some respects, with symbolic interactionism.
Fish
holds that all sense is created not in an abstract generative frame but in a
concrete social situation—a conception which has obvious analogies to the
interactional theory we have referred to. The constraints upon sense are not to
be found, according to Fish, in grammars: “there are such constraints; they do
not, however, inhere in language but in situations, and because they inhere in
situations, the constraints we are always under are not always the same ones”
(1980: 292). Chomsky’s phrases (Note 1), whatever their utility in an abstract
model, have never existed in actual linguistic performance, and “a language is
neither known nor describable apart from the conditions that Chomsky labels
‘irrelevant’” (Fish 1980: 247). Nor can the meanings of a text be separated
from the institutional history of their interpretations—an insight which has
been much stressed by cultural materialist critics (see e.g. Dollimore and
Sinfield 1994). Criticism does not leave the text unaltered, untouched: on the
contrary, it is made and remade by interpretations; the very act of describing
a text is an act of interpretation, and actively constructs the text’s meaning.
Fish does not deny the existence of senses which are more “normal” or “usual”
than others, nor is he trying to deny their validity; but he does point out
that that normality and validity are not inherent to the object of
interpretation—they are a function of the interpreter’s perspective. If we
recognize some ascriptions of sense as more “commonsensical” or “valid” than
others, it is not because they are such apart from all interpretation, but
because we ourselves are immersed in an interpretive community and share its
interpretive protocols and schemes (such as languages, generic conventions,
etc.). There is nothing “obvious” in itself; it must be “obvious” for someone:
Whenever
a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like ‘without doubt’ or ‘there can
be no doubt’, you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the
interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.
(1980: 341)
This
phrase, by the way, is self-descriptive—actually it may be one of the self-consuming artifacts Fish is so fond
of investigating.
Fish’s
theory of the “interpretive community” collapses (“no doubt”) because of the
impossibility of delimiting or isolating any such communities, because they are
purely hypothetical mental entities, abstractions, and no better than Chomsky’s
deep structures in that sense: any actual “community” is an overlapping of
multiple communities, and a more or less clear-cut community can only be
determined on the basis of what is at issue at any given moment. Put otherwise,
it is the conflict of intentions, solidarities, interests and interpretations
in a specific situation that in practical terms determines the border between
two of those supposed “communities”—a map which changes with any shift of
attention or of argumentative priorities.
Fish’s
theory is, perhaps deliberately, not attentive to the relative priority of some
interpretations, texts, and contexts, over others. Therefore, in his account
the (relevant) text, the relevant context and the interpretation emerge
simultaneously as the products of the reading effected by the critic, and from
the very assumptions of that reading. In order to solve or indeed focus any
debate, it is necessary to have “a set of overarching principles that are not
themselves the object of dispute because they set the terms within which
disputes can occur” (Fish 1980: 294). It is at this point that a highly
suggestive conception of critical debate emerges, one based on interaction and
the questioning of assumptions and presuppositions—a model which as a matter of
fact has many elements in common with the interactive and pragmaticist theory
of truth developed by George Herbert Mead (1929, 2002). In this way Fish tries
to explain the singular (and otherwise almost comical) state of affairs in
literary studies—to wit, that after the passage of generations of interpreters,
one can still propose an interpretation of a classical text with the pretension
of unveiling some truth about the text which has remained hidden up to
now—ensconced and uncommunicated, or overlooked by all previous interpreters. A
predicament which, depending on the way it is taken, would seem to reduce to
absurdity and irrelevance not only the efforts of previous critics, but (in
advance) the claims of this new reading and in effect the critical enterprise
itself as a whole. The discovery of the ‘real point’ is always what is claimed
whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in
relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real
one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been marked out for
him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the
institution to dislodge them. (Fish 1980: 350) This is a dialogic and
interactional conception of criticism which I find congenial—I have examined
some of its aspects, for instance, in my paper on “Retroactive Thematization,
Interaction, and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to
Goffman” to which the reader may be referred as a companion piece to the
present essay.
The basic
moves in critical debate would then seem to belong to one or the other of these
two types (which in the last analysis are the same for Fish): either, within
the same interpretive assumptions, providing new data and analyses, or (more
radically or perhaps confrontationally) questioning or undermining the
interpretive assumptions themselves, the conceptual basis on which previous
readings were built. The same, in the last analysis— because this questioning,
Fish argues, will always be effected on the basis of a more general shared
space; shared, at least, for the moment and for the purposes of this
communicative move, but not inherently firmer per se. In Fish’s view, “interpretation is the only game in town”,
and it is interesting to see him pointing out that a favourite manoeuvre on the
part of critics is to hide or disguise the generative dimension of their
interpretive activity, claiming that only objective data or neutral
descriptions of the works are being offered:
by a
logic peculiar to the institution, one of the standard ways of practicing
literary criticism is to announce that you are avoiding it. This is so because
at the heart of the institution is the wish to deny that its activities have
any consequences. (1980: 355)
And, as
if he were deliberately trying to provide a practical instance of this move,
Fish argues in his last chapter that his own conception has no consequences for
the practice of criticism—that as a matter of fact he was only trying to
clarify (i.e. describe) the rules of the game played in academic criticism, and
not to change them. That critics may go on producing interpretations at their
leisure, ignoring this intervention by Fish, because nothing is the matter—his
theory allegedly has no discernible consequences. Perhaps we do understand
better the nature of the critical activity, but this activity remains
impassive, unaffected by our new perception, and single-mindedly devoted to the
production of interpretations, each one running after those truths which are
true only from the perspective in question. At most we may become aware that
nothing can be demonstrated conclusively in the field of criticism; Fish argues
that we can only persuade someone to
share our perspective (1980: 356-71).
Fish’s
thought, obviously in fieri in this
book, did not wholly extract the consequences of this “creative criticism” à la
Oscar Wilde (“The Critic as Artist”). He opposes the classical model—according
to which there would be objective data, independent from their interpreters,
which could be used to decide on the validity of an interpretation—to his own
productive and argumentative model, in which there are no objective facts to
use as an argument in demonstrations: “a model of persuasion in which the facts
that one cites are available only because an interpretation (at least in its
general and broad outlines) has already been assumed” (1980: 365). This notion
of persuasion might weaken Fish’s
argumentation (and make it less persuasive!) to the extent that not enough
emphasis is placed on the underlying reasons for the persuasion—reasons which
are to be found in the interactional and emergentist nature of critical
activity. Fish’s contribution seems nonetheless to point towards this notion.
Seen from today’s vantage point, at least, this new perspective provides an
emergentist view of the objects of critical knowledge which is close enough to
G. H. Mead’s ideas:
In
one model [i.e. the classical model Fish
rejects] change is (at least ideally) progressive, a movement toward a more
accurate account of a fixed and stable entity; in the other, change occurs when
one perspective dislodges another and brings with it entities that had not
before been available. (Fish 1980: 366)
“Entities
that had not before been available”—or did
not exist as objects of knowledge. That is, criticism generates,
retroactively, the object on which it acts, through its emphases,
intertextuality, the establishing of relationships, extraction of
presuppositions… (Note 2). One advantage, Fish notes, of this model that we
call emergentist is that it explains more adequately how it is that new
meanings keep arising in texts, without making previous critics appear myopic
as this happens. It also explains the different emphases and priorities of
other ages in literature and criticism without reducing those great men
(Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Arnold…) to poor devils who did not quite
understand what they were reading and studying. In Fish’s view, they were not
merely studying it but rather generating it, and enabling our later
perspective, different from theirs, to appear. Poststructuralists have been
sometimes accused of magnifying the role of critical activity in a
self-aggrandizing way. If that is the case, Fish offers at any rate one of the
best defenses and justifications of that creative criticism which is not afraid
to measure itself against imaginative literature in its ability to produce new
sense. (Note 3). For Fish,
No
longer is the critic the humble servant of texts whose glories exist
independently of anything he might do; it is what he does, within the
constraints embedded in the literary institution, that brings texts into being
and makes them available for analysis and appreciation. The practice of
literary criticism is not something one must apologize for: it is absolutely
essential not only to the maintenance of, but to the very production of the
objects of its attention. (1980: 368)
It is in
this sense that one should understand the suggestive paradoxes put forward by
Wilde in “The Critic as Artist,” that essay which argues that the critic is not
there to tell us what the work of art
tells (we already have the work for that), but rather what the work of art should tell once it has spoken through the
critic’s sensibility, or has been placed into a new relationship with
contemporaneity through the critic’s labour, a role which again is not mimetic
but generative, creative—emergentist, we might say. (Note 4). Criticism exerts
a retroactive influence on art: it transforms art even as it interprets it, and
makes the artwork say more clearly what it was trying to say, or makes it say
what the work did not quite (know it was trying to) say until the critic’s
arrival. All of this is done according to critical protocols: otherwise the
critic would no longer be a critic but would become (without ceasing to be an
artist) what H. Porter Abbott calls an adapter
(Abbott 2002).
Given
this emergentist nature and function of criticism, it is hard to understand why
Fish should argue that his thesis “has no consequences for practical criticism”
(1980: 371). To be sure, theorists of cultural materialism, like Jonathan
Dollimore or Alan Sinfield, draw very different consequences from a similarly
interactive and dialectic conception of criticism (see for instance the preface
to their volume Political Shakespeare).
A similar paradox is to be found in Wilde’s aesthetic reflections, which started
from the uselessness and unreality of art in “The Decay of Lying”—if art
generates our perception of reality, that is to say, reality itself, Wilde’s
argument would demonstrate the transcendental importance of art, rather than
its social uselessness. Similarly, Fish’s theory, once its practical
consequences are drawn, and its inherent emergentism emerges, cannot but
transform critical practices, their objects of attention and the kind of
attention which is devoted to them. Moreover, one should consider that the
first thing to undergo a transformation whenever we write about something is
not so much the object written about as the writer himself. If the world, and
the eye, are going to be the colour of the glass we look through, we had better
choose that glass carefully.
3. (a) critical
criticism
Rereading
my paper on rereading and repetition (2006c) and at the risk of repeating
myself, I decided to develop here one of its aspects as a separate paper,
elaborating on my dichotomy between criticism proper (critical criticism) and
acriticial criticism. Here are some relevant paragraphs from that paper on
“Rereading(,) Narrative(,) Identity(;) and Interaction”:
Narrative
is, among other things, a drama of identities, in which the author and the
reader interact in a complex way, thorugh the symbolized interaction of a
variety of textual selves: implied authors and implied readers, narrators and
narratees, characters. The reader is invited, sometimes through a complex
rhetoric of address to fictional narratees, to assume an identity proposed by
the narrative—to behave as the implied reader. The implied reader position,
then, is the provisional locus for the reader’s installation—as reader, not as a fully authorized
interactant. From the moment the reader becomes someone else, a writer, a
critic, etc. there is a choice between remaining a friendly ideal reader, or
delimiting a stance outside the text’s calculation, and becoming a resisting
reader. (Note 5). Resisting reading involves the delimitation of the subject’s
ideological positioning vis-à-vis the text. Resisting reading finds its most
congenial space in critical writing: as a matter of fact, we should speak of resisting criticism or resisting writing. Reading proper
invites participation, temporary surrender (except in the case of offensive
material); only writing after rereading
invites the subtler kind of ideological analyses.
We
may now reexamine from this perspective the concept of narrative configuration
developed by theorists such as Mink and Ricoeur. Both of them emphasized that
narrative has a retrospective or even retroactive dimension, bringing out an
interpretive pattern from the events of history or personal experience. In
Polkinghorne’s account,
The act of the plot is to
elicit a pattern from a succession, and it involves a kind of reasoning that
tacks back and forth from the events to the plot until a plot forms that both
respects the events and encompasses them in a whole. The ‘humblest’ narrative
is always more than a chronological series of events: it is a gathering
together of events into a meaningful story. (Polkinghorne 1988: 131)
The
hermeneutic approach to narrative as a distinct mode of knowledge has resulted
in a revaluation of the concept of plot. For Paul Ricoeur, “Plot can be
isolated from judgments about the reference and content of a story, and to be
viewed instead as the sense of a narrative” (Polkinghorne 1988: 131). Of
course, the plot of a narrative is ‘the’ sense proposed by the narrative itself. An unfriendly critic’s eye may
detect the violence done to the events through their configuration into a plot.
This is the thrust of those trends in narrative hermeneutics which denounce the
“hindsight bias” and the perspectivistic illusions imposed through narrative
form, such as the illusion of fatality or the artificial imposition of tragic
or comic patterns on experience (Bernstein 1994, Morson 1994). Narrative has a
retrospective configurational force which may become even a kind of
retroaction, as past events are ‘generated’ by present perspectives and given
the kind of ideal identity noted by Hume. What we should emphasize here is that
the observation or assessment of a narrative amounts to a new type of
reconfiguration, especially when the narrative is critically recontextualized.
(Note 6). A new plot is generated, one which includes the observer or reader.
One of the main tasks of criticism (of friendly hermeneutic criticism, even) is
making explicit what was implicit.
But this means also transforming, interpreting, shifting emphasis,
appropriating, giving a new configuration to events and relationships. (Note
7).
These
are, then, the polarities in the binomial of critical attitudes I oppose to one
another:
Friendly criticism - Unfriendly
criticism
—which
are rather intuitive and self-explanatory terms I commonly use, along with
their Spanish near equivalents, Crítica
simpática - Crítica antipática, and also Crítica acrítica - Crítica crítica ('acritical criticism – critical
criticism'). These terms of mine are closely related to other current concepts
in ideological critical approaches—e.g. the classical Marxist notion of the
critical unmasking of texts as instruments for the spreading of dominant
ideologies, or (in feminist criticism) Judith Fetterley’s notion of resisting reading opposed to the default
acquiescent reading presupposed by texts. In Fetterley’s account, the feminist
reader has to actively counter the patriarchal and macho assumptions of male
writers. But the same concept of ideological resistance can be applied to any
kind of divergence between the author’s and the reader’s attitudes.
A similar
polarity, formulated by Erving Goffman and later by H. Porter Abbott, opposes intentionalist or communicative readings or interpretations to symptomatic ones
(Goffman 1970; Abbott 2002). In the latter, Abbott argues, interpreters do not
restrict themselves to the reconstruction of the sense intended by the author
or tothe uptake of his communicative acts; instead, they interpret textual
elements (in conjunctions and combinations not foreseen by the author) as
symptoms of a given attitude, presupposition, ideology, etc. Thus, an
ideological and interpretive difference is opened between the project proposed
by the interpreted text and the critical stance and agenda of the critic’s
text. (Note 8).
Another
way of naming this basic polarity in critical attitudes would be:
(Ideologically)
Consonant vs. (Ideologically) Dissonant criticism, —or:
Constructive
vs. Deconstructive (or even destructive)
criticism.
—by which
I do not mean that a taste for deconstruction bespeaks a lack of a constructive
spirit. We see that terms could be multiplied. One of the most influential
formulations of this binomial is Paul Ricœur’s in De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud, where he distinguishes a
hermeneutics of the recovery of sense
as opposed to the hermeneutics of
suspicion developed during the twentieth century under the aegis of Marx,
Freud and Nietzsche (Ricœur 1970). The former is the traditional hermeneutic
stance, associated with the religious origins of this discipline in the
interpretation of sacred texts: here the text is treated reverently as the
bearer of an important message, a religious one originally, and a cultural or
aesthetic one in secularized versions of the literary process. The text is a
focus of authority and is set over the interpreter, who must approach it for
his own good and that of the community; both will benefit from the sense found
in the text. In contrast, the various hermeneutics of suspicion (whether
Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, postcolonial,
etc.) are not only suspicious, but somewhat conceited or patronizing, since in
assuming a confrontational attitude they consider the text is blind about
itself, and set themselves up as interpreters, as the bearers of truth and of
the illumination which is to unveil the shortcomings and errors and biases
about the world and about itself that the text is plagued with. In the last
analysis, Ricœur implies, the benefits of humility (friendly criticism) are
greater than the hermeneutic arrogance of unfriendly criticism. But I must here
say a word in favour of the haughtiness of the skeptical reader, in favour of
unfriendly criticism, indeed of criticism proper, as the term “criticism”
itself seems to suggest. Understanding comes first, criticism later;
hermeneutics first, and ideological critique later. It is so both in the
logical structure of the interpretive process and also from a larger historical
perspective—the positive hermeneutics applied to sacred texts is part and
parcel of traditional religious orthodoxy, while criticism is associated rather
more closely with philosophical demythologization, with the humanist
contestation of revealed truth, or with the early modern critique of the
Church’s interpretive authority. Critical thought questions any explanatory
system which offers a totalizing or excessively homogeneous, or “finished”
version of reality. A text puts forward its systema or world-model—its reading
of reality (of reality systematized), and it is the critic’s labour to test the
limits of that system or the simplifications reality has undergone in order to
reduce it to a system, or to a text. In Porter Abbott’s terms, in this
interpretive modality we no longer consider the text’s reasoning or argument as
a reasoning or argument (so carefully structured); instead, we treat it as a
symptom awaiting our diagnosis, and the supposed truth revealed by the text is
nothing but an intellectual syndrome, a delirium of reason, an ideology to be
dissected.
Rebellious,
unfriendly and dissonant criticism has an ingredient of haughtiness, insisting
as it does on the critic’s views and offering the critic’s reading of the text
instead of the generally accepted one, or, one might say, instead of the text’s
reading of itself (—I am commentating on
Shakespeare for you, since you are interested in Shakespeare, but you shouldn’t
trust Shakespeare on Shakespeare, he doesn’t know himself: I do; listen to my
text—you should be interested in my text,
don’t trust other people on Shakespeare,
don’t trust yourselves, trust me, don’t read Shakespeare, read me!). So
much by way of subtext. (Note 9).
But the
other version of criticism, reverent or consonant criticism, also has its share
of conceit—all the more insidious as it poses as humility and self-effacement.
After its
own fashion it tells us (again I caricature): There is no need to look further into truth. We already know the truth,
it has been Revealed—it is contained in this sacred text (the Bible,
Shakespeare, Derrida, etc). We can add explanatory footnotes to it, but clearly
not a commentary which contradicts its basic presuppositions. That would be the
destruction of the Holy Writ. In the last analysis, we don’t need any critics
or commentators on the Writing, as we have already got the Writing, which is self-sufficient
and reads itself in the right way—that is, in the way it has always been read.
And we are on Its side. Close your mouth, cap your pen, shut down you computer.
Critics, your so-called truths lowercase tee are not necessary, the Truth has already
been said and written, it is our humble duty to learn it, understand it and
accept it.
Now isn’t
that sinister—’umble and respectful towards the Author's Intentions as it may
sound?
Fortunately,
this difference between critical criticism and acritical criticism is, like all
absolute polarities, more ideal than real. It is not that the pure forms are
unknown: reviews on command, on the one hand, and viciously destructive reviews
on the other are quite close to chemical purity. They are, too, the least
interesting of critical modes (although destructive criticism, in particular,
has its own charms and can be extremely amusing to read and write). And both
poles fulfil, anyway, their interactional role in the society of letters. But
the proper space for reflexive and considerate criticism is to be found,
rather, in the space between them, a terrain in which criticism, without
ceasing to be critical, is also attuned to the text’s problematics or
argumentation, instead of simply rejecting them as irrelevant or wrong-headed.
The fine hues and modulations of argument are best perceived in the context of
friendly or consonant criticism; the limitations inherent to any author’s given
position require an ingredient of confrontational critique. But a wholesale
negative critique does not contribute much to the development of knowledge: it
merely rules out the author’s text and suggests that we look aside and attend
to other issues and predicaments, other ideologies and world views. A critique
which is partially in tune with the text, on the other hand, may open the way
to a synthesis between the critic’s initial position and that of the text. When
such a synthesis is effected by the critic, the critic occupies both the
positions of antithesis and of synthesis, and has brought himself to go beyond
his initial position, or at least to modify it, supplement it or to delve
further into some of its consequences.
When a
metatext’s critical attitude towards its text (I briefly use here Genette’s
term, 1979: 10) is more confrontational and does not favour a synthesis in the
metatext itself, it is not to be ruled out that the synthesis, or at any rate a
syntesis different from the one put forward by the critic, may nonetheless be
effected thanks to the antithesis provided by the metatext’s unfriendly
critique—thanks to it, though not within
it. (The dynamics of blindness and insight described by Paul de Man would
be another road to confrontational criticism and critical synthesis—often in
the shape of a confrontational criticism which doesn't know itself as such, and
whose authentic implications must be brought to light by another critic or
“reader”). The synthesis between both positions, the text’s and the critic’s,
may be effected in such cases by the reader (the reader of the critical work
and also of the original text). It is to the reader that the more elaborate
role of critic falls in this case—and the reader may choose to “criticize the
critic” by communicating this reading in a further metatext. More constructive
modes of criticism— even if they are ‘deconstructive’—must perform a
substantial part of this work of synthesis if the line of thought proposed by
the text is to be further developed and investigated, not merely suppressed or
declared irrelevant. And, at any rate, what a critical critic deserves is a
taste of his own medicine. Let his text be deconstructed, let it undergo an
unfriendly reception, with his asssumptions and conclusions deconstructed and
questioned. Or perhaps the critical critic expected to find tame and
acquiescent interlocutors? Once the consensus around Writing has been
shattered, there is no hope of its being restored. Even though new Writs, both
holy and unholy, proliferate and try to gain a hearing—”Silence once broken”,
Beckett writes in The Unnamable,
“will never again be whole”.
4. Critical interactionalism,
Expression and Symptoms
Erving
Goffman provides an extremely useful contextualization of symptomatic
interpretation within a general theory of expression and interaction—an
analysis whose relevance for textual interpretation has perhaps been
underrated. In Strategic Interaction,
Goffman theorizes the interactant’s use of expressive elements which are in
principle peripheral to overt communication, but are avidly used by observers
in order to glean additional information before they act. Besides deliberately communicated information there exist,
therefore, the expressive aspects of
interaction: gestures and non-codified information produced by the subject
under observation (in our case, the author or more generally the sender, the agent or social instance
using the author’s text in a communicative process).
It is a
central insight of Goffman's book that as a result of interaction, and of
mutual observation, these non-codified expressive gestures can, first of all,
be interpreted for meaning by an observer who goes beyond the communicative
dimension of the situation (in our case, the unfriendly critic). Secondly, once
the subject under observation knows his gestures can be interpreted, they can
be codified and produced as a constructed show of spontaneity. Thirdly, this
construction or grammaticalization may in turn be discovered by the first
observer, leading to a reassessment of the interactional situation and of the
value of those “expressive” signs. The game of encoding and decoding may
continue with further complications (for instance, establishing a second level
of communication through indirect signs, mutually understood but “unofficial”
or unacknowledged). Successive complications become both subtler and more
uncertain in contexts where the interacting subjects have a close knowledge of
each other and of the situation. The information obtained becomes more and more
fragile and chancy at the upper levels of the game.
Moreover,
meaning itself, that is, officially
communicated, intentional, verbalized linguistic sense, can also be considered
in its interactional value—as action through words, and in this sense it may
also become an occasion for strategic interaction: linguistic meanings and
speech acts also have an expressive dimension when they are interpreted
situationally. Any mode of strategic interaction may give rise to the
"expression games" Goffman refers (1970: 145). All of this leads in
actual communicative situations to a peculiar hermeneutic game, an interpretive
practice in which the linguistic, expressive, gestural and contextual
dimensions of interpretation freely interact and constitute a semiotic
continuum.
It is at
this point that Goffman refers to “symptomatic” (that is, critical or
“unfriendly”) interpretation, as a strategy of textual reading—a
confrontational reading both of the communicated content and of its
pragmastylistic periphery:
Just
as the process of communicating information itself expresses information, so
also a corpus of communicated signs has expressive aspects. Discursive
statements seem inevitably to manifest a style of some kind, and can never be
apparently free of “egocentric particulars” and other context-tied meanings.
Even a written text examined in terms of the semantic meaning of the sentences
can be examined for expression that derives from the way a given meaning is
styled and patterned, as when Izvestia
and Pravda are read by our
intelligence people “symptomatically,” for what the Russians do not know they
are exuding through the print. Indeed, the very sense of a message depends on
our telling whether it is conveyed, for example, seriously, or sarcastically or
tentatively, or as an indirect quotation, and in face-to-face communication
this “framing” information typically derives from paralinguistic cues such as
intonation, facial gestures, and the like—cues that have an expressive, not
semantic, character. (Note 10)
This
analysis can be extended to any kind of contextual information which is not
intentionally communicated. In reading the other’s text, we do not limit
ourselves to a passive reconstruction of the information it is intended to
convey: we also interpret contextual factors in order to obtain supplementary
information. Which in turn leads interactants to vie for the control this
supplementary and originally uncontrolled information—first the (potential)
observer, and then too the subject under observation (an observer of the
observer in his own right), in order to limit the observer’s scope and gain an
advantage in the interactive situation.
Just
as it can be assumed that it is in the interests of the observer to acquire
information from a subject, so it is in the interests of the subject to
appreciate that this is occurring and to control and manage the information the
observer obtains; for in this way the subject can influence in his own favor
responses to a situation which includes himself. Further, it can be assumed
that the subject can achieve this end by means of a special capacity—the
capacity to inhibit and fabricate expression. (1970: 10)
We see
that this contest or war of wits between the observer and the observed subject
leads both to become specular images (with a suggestion of potentially infinite
specularity), both assuming the overlaid roles of observer and observed. The
process of observation and of the interpretation of contextual and expressive
signs thus becomes a struggle to occupy the privileged position of topsight—the perspectival and
informational control of the interactional situation, with the most reliable
information available. And since the observer’s role is not merely passive, but
rather an active manipulation and fabrication of the reality which is to be
observed, this contest also becomes a struggle for the control of reality.
Which of the subjects knows what is real? Which of them can tell apart genuine
spontaneity from a constructed show of the same? Which one will orchestrate and
arrange an observable reality that is at once most subject to control and most
apparently spontaneous? It is almost a metaphysical competition, especially if
one considers that the Other faced by each of the subjects is rather the
Other-in-himself, the subject’s own interpretation of what the other is and of
what the other is able to interpret. The occasions for empathy grow apace with
the closeness of the competition, providing excellent material for detective
plots and stories of double agents.
It is
arguable that human subjectivity is constructed through the play of reflection
and through the internalization of communicative and interactional processes.
(Note 11). If that is the case, the close competition and reflexivity of
strategic interaction provides a first-order space for the development of
subjective experience. The dialectical dimension of experience is enhanced: any
action is already charged with an expectation of possible responses, in such a
way that human action is always already interactive: a dialectical response
which (as noted by G. H. Mead) allows for the attitudes we detect in others,
and responds in advance to their possible responses to our actions.
Of
course, a (literary) text is a peculiar kind of discourse act—one which may be
read in a context radically different from the one anticipated by the author.
In critical interaction, a new context for the reading of a text is in effect a
reframing of the text. Cultural materialist critics (such as our test cases
Alan Sinfield or Jonathan Dollimore) have been especially sensitive to these
changing dimension of the text, according to its “use” as it is reframed in a
variety of historical and cultural contexts, or critical projects. This
reframing involves not just the communicative context of the author as sender,
but also a re-sender (the agent who recycles or reuses the text) in interaction
with a new audience, within a new communicational and interactional frame. Such
reframings are conducive to an increased attention to expressive and contextual
factors on the part of attentive critics—paradoxically, the contextual
constraints on the text’s meaning become more visible now the original context
is no longer there, leaving the text so to speak resting on a void of unstated
assumptions. The nonverbalized and expressive aspects of the text are brought
into sharper relief—and besides, the text acquires in the new context of its
(re)use a new layer of expressive and nonverbalized contextual signs which can
be read for additional meaning. It is only natural that critics (even
uncritical critics) will enjoy a position of topsight in the new game the text
is being asked to play.
This
being the case, it is only to be expected that some authors will work (“always
already”) with this potential recontextualization in mind, finding ways of
orientating it, shortcircuiting it with preemptive manoeuvres, or at least
minimizing its effects. Or attempting to turn the interactive situation of
reframing and critical reading to potential strategic advantage, along the
lines analysed by Goffman. An example: Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000) includes not just
a haunted house story, but also an academic monograph with stylistic
commentaries on a film in which the protagonist depicts his experiences in the
house. The fictional monograph (“by Zampanò”) contains abundant critical
references both to actual critical essays and to fictional critical responses
to that film; there are further notes on the editing of this critical monograph
on the film, etc. The novel is thus not so much anticipating its critical
response as acknowledging the interactional context of critical discourse, and using
it as aesthetic material for creative writing. Such processes of built-in
reframing are perhaps the main semiotic foundation for literary reflexivity—a
mode of internalized interaction in its own right.
5. POEtics of topsight—and critical
negativity
I have
been re-rereading Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” and the rosary of critical
commentaries collected in The Purloined
Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (edited by John P. Muller
and Brian J. Richardson). The story itself deals with concealment, unveiling
and interpretation, and has become a test case or touchstone for interpretive
theories, especially psychoanalytic and deconstructive ones.
In the
story, a plotting minister steals from under the Queen's very eyes a
compromising letter. Both the minister and the King enter the Queen's chamber
while she was reading the letter; she puts it down without making a show of
hiding it, and then the Minister substitutes another piece of paper for the
letter on the table—a maneuver seen by the Queen but not by the King, who has
been fooled by the Queen's simulated nonchalance. The Queen had counted on
hiding the letter from the King’s attention just by leaving it in full view,
but the Minister notices it—he just picks up the letter and is now in a
position to blackmail the Queen. The Queen tries to recover the letter through
her agent the Police inspector, but it is nowhere to be found when the police conduct
a secret search of the Minister’s house. Enter Dupin, amateur
detective-gentleman, Poe’s spokesman and alter ego in the story. Reflecting on
the Minister’s methods and mode of reasoning, he soon discovers that the letter
was hidden in full view, barely folded over and passing for just another
letter. He orchestrates a diversion in the street and substitutes another piece
of paper for the letter while the Minister was looking away. In this paper, he
intimates the Minister’s impending doom, mocks his strategy, and reminds him of
a long-standing grudge, a reason for Dupin’s personal involvement—all this
through the words of a tragedy on Atreus:
—Un
dessein si funeste / S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.
Jacques
Lacan analyzes “The Purloined Letter” as a manifestation (or perhaps an
allegory) of what he calls the “itinerary of the signifier”: textual subjects,
one after another, subordinate themselves to the role they play in a
(compulsively?) repetitive structure. Thus, the story is made up of two scenes
or moments, the stealing of the letter and its recovery. In each of them, the
characters are displaced to a new position in the interpretive chain, the one
previously occupied by the victim of their plans.
In the
first scene, the king occupies the position of blindness (A); he can see
neither the letter nor the fact that the Queen plots against him and
manipulates his blindness. The Queen occupies her position (B) precisely
because she sees that the King cannot see, and she exploits her perspectival
privilege or topsight, the most encompassing view of the situation available in
the field of interaction. But the very way she has of taking advantage of the
King’s blindness (by leaving the letter in full view) makes her fall a victim
to a character with an even more encompassing vision (C): the Minister who
completes the triangle of positions: A who cannot see, B who sees that A cannot
see, and C who watches B’s strategy and turns it against him. What the Minister
sees is that the Queen becomes vulnerable from her topsight vantage point: she
believes herself invisible to a third party just because she was invisible for
the first one—or rather, she does not allow for the presence of a third party.
That is why the third party can grab the letter (the object of desire, a symbol
of the text to be appropriated through interpretation) and carries it away.
But, in
his turn, the Minister repeats in a compulsive way B’s shortsighted strategy
which he had been able to turn so skilfully to his advantage. Again he loses
the topsight, as happened to the Queen before him. His dangerous
self-confidence (and a smug admiration of his own cleverness) lead him to leave
the letter in full view, in an ironic repetition of the Queen’s initial
movement, so as to conceal it through openness. And the move does work with the
police (the Queen’s envoys, and as such blind now by definition). The Minister
believes he is still at vertex C of the first structural triangle (A: King, B:
Queen, C: Minister)—but in fact he has already moved to vertex B, the position
of those who trust their own topsight, in a new triangle: while he observes
with satisfaction the blindness of the Queen’s police (A), Dupin has set up a
new triangle from whose vertex C he observes the Minister’s manoeuvres and
strategies.
Thus
Lacan’s version of Poe’s tale. (Note 12). Jacques Derrida showed that the
analyst himself (Lacan) becomes trapped in this interpretive circuit, and in
analyzing Dupin’s moves he offers a vulnerable flank to whoever observes his
analytic operations, deconstructing this process of reading (Derrida 1988).
Dupin was himself a competent analyst, Derrida argues, and had already
announced to us that he could not escape the circuit he was analyzing—that is,
there is no possibility of a critical metalanguage uncontaminated by the
object-language it tries to analyze.
But
Barbara Johnson (1988) points out that Derrida’s analysis was already
announced, or perhaps carried out, in Lacan, if not in Poe. That deconstruction
does not add much to the story, as the story was already self-deconstructed.
Derrida is a latecomer (and Johnson too, presumably) and points belatedly to a
blindness which is not such, since Poe’s story, amplified by analysis, has
brought to light the compulsive mechanism which governs the dialectics of
concealment and unveiling. The story becomes thus a challenge for its
interpreters, who observe from a topsight position the blindness of those who
think they can encompass from their own vantage point the blindness of a third
party. It also becomes an allegory of the uselessness of trying to carry their
efforts any further: they will only repeat almost ritually a structure which is
fixed beforehand, and follow the steps already traced out by the characters in
the story, as the story goes.
The
series of mutual deconstructions might thus continue indefinitely without
throwing much further light on the story. In The Purloined Poe we find readings by Marie Bonaparte, Shoshana
Felman, Irene Harvey, Jane Gallop, Ross Chambers, Norman Holland, Liahna
Klenman Babener, François Peraldi and John Muller. And in an article on “the
hermeneutic spiral” (2004), I too added my modest constribution, interpreting
the Lacanian-deconstructive reading of this story from the standpoint of
communicative interactionalism.
My point
was that an act of interpretation pays attention to certain significative
elements of the object: its intentional aspects, and its textual aspects, as
well as some unintentional, and some contextual aspects, so as to integrate
them within an explanatory system which accounts both for the conscious plan of
the author (of the object text) and for the unconscious elements which have
been perceived by the interpreter once the text has been
recontextualized—elements which s/he interprets as symptoms, or as
non-conceptualized gestural language, and which only now, in the present
interpretation, reach an explicit linguistic formulation. Style, expressive or
“gratuitous” elements not integrated in the conscious model of the work as
constructed by the interpretation, are a kind of textual gesticulation. Any
interpretation may choose to reply only to the communicative intention
perceived in the work (or in the complex constituted by the work and a previous
interpretation). That is what we call understanding, or collaborative,
criticism. Alternatively, the critic may interpret as symptoms part of the
perceived signification which is not integrated within that communicative
whole, and see the work (or the complex formed by the work and previous
interpretations—or the work in a new context) from a topsight, i.e. from vertex
C of the triangle. That is what we have been calling critical criticism—quite
often, confrontational or unfriendly criticism.
For
instance, with a view to being unfriendly to the various interpretations of
Poe’s story offered in The Purloined Poe,
we might point out some element which disturbs the neat textual figure
constructed by the critics (in this case the double triangulation pointed out
by Lacan). We may note that the second triangle or episode of the story is not
exactly a repetition of the first. In the first scene, the Minister sees that
the Queen sees that the the Minister sees that the Queen sees that the King
does not see, and (at the same time) the Minister sees that the Queen has not
planned in advance any defensive manoeuvre against anyone who should see that,
which means that she is trapped in her own strategy. In the second scene, there
are similarities, but, in the presence of Dupin, the Minister fails to see that
Dupin is carrying the letter away. Quite possibly he does not even know that he
is fighting Dupin; moreover he doesn’t perceive at this point (as the Queen
perceives to her own mortification) that he is trapped in his own strategy.
One could
manufacture an allegorical interpretation which used these elements which are
left aside by the Lacanian interpretations. Of course Derrida had already
pointed in that general direction, although other latecomers try to criticize
him and steal the letter from him. It is easy to be (or try to be)
overingenious in trying to recycle, or allegorize, this tale— although Poe
warns us already with his first word, the pseudo-Senecan epigraph “nil
sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio” (nothing is more hateful for wisdom than an
excess of wit). According to Johnson (1988), that was the case with Derrida,
who didn’t pay enough attention to the tale. The story lets us know, between
the lines, that the protagonist Dupin does not escape this irony of fate or
compulsive repetition: in figuring himself as Atreus taking revenge from
Thyestes, in the story’s closing words, the story suggests that the curse that
befell the House of Atreus will likewise fall on the self-confident Dupin, and
that he too will become a victim of his own plotting.
Whoever
has an interpretive scheme has a plan. In my courses on narrative analysis, I
tell my students that one must always have a plan, because a plan gives you
topsight; it makes you observe from the watchtower of your superior information
all those poor individuals walking around without a plan—subordinated to your
plan. However, plans will usually fail, and possibly the most common narrative
scheme, together with the heroic quest, is the story of the failure of a plan
(García Landa 2006d). One must acknowledge of course that plans often have
their own limited or local successes. But even when they succeed, they usually
do so in unforeseen ways, a success mixed with failure and luck. These stories
can only be told from a higher viewpoint than the original planner’s—that is,
from the topsight of retrospection.
Similarly,
any interpretive strategy can be deconstructed when it is contemplated from the
vantage point of a different interpretive project. From there we see what the
former critical eye cannot see—the back of the first critic’s neck. This
vantage point is afforded more particularly by critical criticism—since
friendly criticism tends to see through the eyes of the first critic, from his
perspective or as close to it as possible; at most, it adds to that viewpoint
an optical instrument which may enhance it. Critical criticism, on the other
hand, tries to identify the blind spot in another’s reading— although it is not
immune, as a reading of Paul de Man’s Blindness
and Insight shows, to a blindness similar to the one it contemplates in the
other. (Note 13).
My
argument on Poe’s tale has some similarity, then, to Ross Chambers’, who
extracts from the story the conclusion that the meaning is not properly
speaking in the text (in the letter) but rather in the text’s situatedness in
an interpretive context, a system of relationships around that text:
for
all its insistence on textual drift and the absent signifier, “The Purloined
Letter” does not deny meaning. Rather, it situates it, not in the domain of
signs, but in the world of the relationships that signs serve to mediate. Dupin
has ‘a quarrel on hand . . . with some of the algebraists of Paris’, and his
disagreement with these specialists in signs (whose discipline depends
precisely on the equivalence and substitutibility of signs) stems from the fact
that ‘occasions may occur where x2+px is not altogether equal to q’, or, in
other words, that situations alter the value of signs and meaning is
contextual. (Chambers 1988: 303)
Chambers
admits, too, that an interpretive article like his seems to assume Dupin’s
position, but he ends up recognizing the superiority of Poe’s text, as compared
with the previous interpreters. (A conclusion which might seem to defeat his
argument… —and anyway, isn’t Poe’s story the richer because of the critical
readings it has given rise to?).
In a
similar way, Norman Holland recognizes the ingredient of vanity, of masculinist
and childish competitiveness, evident in the story’s combat of wits—a
competitiveness and vanity which is contagious for readers:
I
share the ambition Poe reveals in Dupin’s disquisition on mathematics, the
feeling that his own intellect has powers not granted to lesser beings. How
intelligent I thought myself when I was reading this story at thirteen; and I
am not entirely over that vanity yet, as you can see by my choosing to write
about a story that two major French thinkers have analyzed. They are all to be
outwitted, all these fathers like the Prefect or the Minister, or, for that
matter, Lacan or Derrida. (Holland 1988: 313)
For
Holland, Derrida’s reading stems from a need not to believe, to mistrust. (We may recall here Derrida’s role as
a major theorist of the hermeneutics of suspicion). But even that negativity
and absence becomes, paradoxically, a kind of presence, Holland says:
“Disbelief is itself a belief in disbelief” (1988: 316). Interpretations follow
a trajectory which Holland sees as a function of the interpreter’s
personality—which leads him to argue for a transactional criticism, that is, “a
criticism in which the critic works explicitly from his transaction of the
text” (1988: 316-17). The advantage of recognizing that personal transaction,
according to Holland, is that we use the differences between various readings
to enrich our mutual experience of the text. The more so, I would argue, when
through our personal transaction we are able to identify and describe elements
and processes which are necessarily present (but subconsciously so) in any
other personal transaction with the text.
The
question remains, however, of the extent to which we can absorb the negativity
of another’s reading, a reading which is not our own, in those cases in which
that reading does not focus on generally sharable elements in experience. This
is the real test for a transactional theory of reading— how to allow for, and
assimilate, a transactional experience which is fully another’s? It seems that there is an element of self-denial or
negativity in accepting this otherness, in absorbing or integrating it into the
text as we finally see it, after the Other’s reading—(perhaps the
text-as-transformed-by-Another, or the text as a potential ideological
instrument for Another).
That is
why John Muller’s Hegelian analysis of negativity in “The Purloined Letter” is
especially interesting. Interpretation appears in the guise of a Phenomenology
of Spirit, in Hegelian terms. (Hegel, incidentally, provides us with the
philosophical model for absolute topsight on the evolution of Spirit and of
understanding).
Why is
it, Muller wonders, that the subjects in Poe’s triangular A-B-C structure have
to shift place once they acquire possession of the letter? He answers through a
Hegelian interpretation of that triad in terms of thesis – antithesis –
synthesis. Consciousness progresses throught the negativity of antithesis (a
negation which both transcends and preserves) and the antithesis’ own
subsequent negation, giving rise to an interpretive synthesis.
Each
moment of this complex process is initially given as if its truth were known
with certainty; but as the assumed truth is examined, it is incommensurate with
ongoing experience, it is negated and given up in dismay, and a new perspective
takes its place. (Muller 1988: 345)
Hegel
presents this dialectical process of the overcoming of negativity (aufhebung, sublation) as a triadic
series of stages of consciousness whose positions are defined as Being “in
itself”, “for-itself” and “for us”. Naturally enough, the final structure of
consciousness which emerges as the truth of things as they are is a structure
“for us”, which according to Hegel is not known to the consciousness we are
observing. This places us in a position of topsight. There is a price to be
paid for this, Hegel notes: overcoming the resistance of ego, which tends to
become fixed in its own position and to resist change or the assimilation of
negativity. The ego prefers a familiar state of affairs rather than a change to
increased understanding—it is the narcissistic attitude of consciousness, happy
with itself and with what it possesses.
But an
increased understanding is also an increased acknowledgement of intersubjective
experience, through the assimilation of that negative moment represented by an
alien perspective. As Muller observes, it is also in intersubjectivity that
human experience is constituted for Hegel, who argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit that human
nature is actually realized only in the achievement of a community of minds.
This is an insight that we might relate to symbolic interactionalism and its
search for sense in a continual process of transaction which uses semiotic
objects (such as texts etc.), rather than search for sense in the semiotic
objects themselves; that is, the sense is not in the purloined letter but in
the use which is made of it.
This
would mean that rather than absolute truths, there are localized and contextual
truth effects produced through communicative transaction. A truth effect needs,
in order to appear to best effect, a dialectical contrast with a false account
or explanation, a false consciousness which we contemplate as overcome (aufgehoben, from a position of
topsight). Truth, insofar as it is the bringing to light of concealed
relationships, needs to be contemplated from the outside, panoramically. The
semiotic structure which generates truth effects appears fully visible when we
observe its operation for others, e.g. when we observe the generation of a
truth effect for another mind (a truth we no longer share) for someone whose
vision is limited within the semiotic system which generates the effect, while
we ourselves contemplate, from an Olympian perspective, both the system which
generates sense and the subject’s viewpoint positioned to see that truth, as
structured or generated by that system. It is this semiotically superior level
that Lacan calls “the Symbolic” (vertex C of the triangulation), while he
reserves the name of “the Imaginary” (vertex B) for the partial and
insufficient system (the one we can easily conceive of as an “effect”) which is
contained by our own system. (The “Real”, by the way, would be vertex A, a
blind or unstructured point). In Jane Gallop’s reading of Lacan (1988: 273),
“It is the imaginary as imaginary which constitutes the symbolic”—that is, the
perception of a semiotic system as the product of a positionality, a desire, an
intention—something whose consequences are only perceptible from the outside,
from a more elaborate and insightful symbolic position, a more comprehensive
interpretive frame—or from the topsight of hindsight.
The
imaginary position is narcissistic insofar as it reduces the world to the
system it perceives (or rather to the system through which the world is
perceived). It does not see how that a(n) (imaginary) system acquires a new
sense once it is recontextualized: the lynx’s eye of the first interpreter is
blind to the new context. In the last analysis, the meaning is what we have in
front of us, and it is its very immediacy and presence that prevents us from
seeing it. Muller quotes a pertinent observation to this effect from Stanley
Rosen’s book on Hegel: “The essence of visibility, the visible as visible,
hence as most fully or actually itself, is invisible” (Rosen 1974, 146).
Conversely, the emergence of sense to visibility is only the first step towards
its negation or its overcoming from a higher position of consciousness.
Since
what first appeared as the object sinks for consciousness to the level of its
way of knowing it, and since the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself, the latter is now the new
object. Herewith a new pattern of consciousness comes on the scene as well, for
which the essence is something different from what it was at the preceding
stage. It is this fact that guides the entire series of the patterns of
consciousness in their necessary sequence. (Hegel 1977, 56; quoted in Muller
1988: 353).
This
objectualization of the other’s consciousness is for Hegel analytical— we might
say critical—since it does not limit
itself to the reproduction of the structure of the first conscious gaze (B) on
the object (A), rather, it captures that perceptual relationship as a new
object, from a third conscious standpoint (C). Actually, this standpoint will
only be fully objectualized from the vantage point of a fourth position (D)—for
the time being, it is not yet an object but only the truth of the relationship A-B
as it is manifested to C’s topsight. Truth is, as we
have argued, a continual process of emergence—that Thought which in Luis
Eduardo Aute’s song “cannot take seat” (“Que el pensamiento / no puede tomar
asiento / Que el pensamiento es estar / siempre de paso / de paso, de paso, de
paso”).
Thought
may be just passing through, but we ourselves remain fixed— especially in our
texts—in one of those narcissistic, partial and reified positions, while alien
Thoughts go further on and transform us into an object of interpretation and
analysis (and laughter sometimes) for other eyes which will observe us, without
our being aware of that gaze. Such is the fate of those who are read for their
symptoms by critical critics. Of course this phenomenon is continually taking
place simultaneously in millions of local contexts—not just in the grand
Hegelian syntesis of an abstract Idea which culminates (not by chance) in Hegel
himself as the watchtower of history. One can wonder whether Hegel was not
bothered by the suspicion or fear that he might be himself a local object,
rather than the prow of Spirit opening its way into the Absolute. Today it
appears inevitable that we should take into account such a dissemination of
contexts, which leads us as well to qualify or relativize C’s superior
perspective over B and A. C sees the relationship between B and A, and what is
at issue in their relationship for C—but
may well be unaware of other things which are at issue for them, that are being
seen by B, or by A, not to mention D, another myopic (or perhaps long-sighted)
subject.
Returning
to Muller’s Hegelian interpretation, “The Purloined Letter” might be regarded
as a symptom, or an intuition, of that negativity which structures the
relationship between action and its interpretation. (One should take into
account that linguistic negativity, for Muller, as well as for Benveniste and
others, also signals and preserves what has been negated, drawing attention to
it as a reference point—besides negating it). As Muller points out, there is a
disproportionately large number of negative elements in the verbal surface of
Poe’s story, and moreover, negativity also organizes its macrostructure, the
sequence of narrated events:
When
we examine the story’s action from this perspective of negation, we find that
the story proceeds as a series of negating actions: that is, each action is a
precise negation of a previous action of another and is, in turn, negated in
the dialectical shifting of actors’ positions. But in each negation the truth
of the previous position is preserved. The Queen negates the King’s power but
preserves its role in her secretiveness as she turns the letter over and puts
it down. (Muller 1988: 364)
Muller,
too, allegorizes the letter, in line with his own interpretive context, when he
sees it in its dynamic character as a “pure signifier” of negativity, and an
emblem of the repression which preserves experience in the very act of
structuring consciousness around the absence of that repressed gap. This system
of repression is identified by him (in a Lacanian mode) with symbolic systems:
the subject finds his own limits in symbolic action, which therefore entails
this element of negativity and of delimitation with respect to another’s
consciousness.
Psychic
structure is established only through that negation to which the subject must
submit upon entering the register of the symbolic, and this fundamental
splitting of the subject into an sich
and für sich may be understood as
constituting primary repression. (Muller 1988: 366)
An
interpretive theory, too, is for Muller a system which establishes limits and
fixes senses—which constitutes a truth resistant to other systems and to the
truths they generate. Truths are for Hegel, in this interpretation which brings
him close to pragmatism, or to symbolic interactionalism, communicative effects
generated within a specific community.
For
Hegel, truth is always embedded in a community that rests on the structure of
language whose history includes ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience,
and the labour of the negative’ ([Hegel]1977, 10). (Muller 367)
This may
offer some consolation to people who are considered to be “too negative”. Poe
himself had much of the negative about him, according to Muller: “For Poe—as
for Hegel and Lacan—negation is the dynamic corollary of the ego’s self-assured
notions about reality” (1988: 367).
It is the
others—our personal unfriendly critics—who most visibly perform the negative
labour of limiting and correcting our egotistic perspectives. But this negative
dialectic can also take place within the individual subject—within the
self-interacting consciousness which according to Hegel is intrinsically
unsatisfied with its own limits. And therefore it is the path of reflection to
lay waste its own stages or to deconstruct itself, in advance of the Other’s
more radical negative labour. That is what Solger and Schlegel called romantic
irony—the relativization of the attitudes recently assumed by the poetical
subject, the continuous frame-breaking of the rules of the subject’s games,
giving rise to a dynamic self which escapes from external limitations, or
self-imposed limitations which are bound to be felt as external ones—
Shedding off
One more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead
Of the persecutor within. (Note 14)
—oOo—
NOTES
(Note 1). Fish refers here to
the classical version of generative-transformational linguistics formulated by
Noam Chomsky in works such as Syntactic
Structures and Aspects of the Theory
of Syntax. On this subject see also Jahn (2002). One should note, however,
that Fish’s statement is not entirely accurate: Chomsky’s decontextualized
phrases have appeared at least in one specific discursive context: Chomsky’s
text and linguistics studies—and this is a reasoning which cuts both ways.
(Note 2). On the role of
retrospection and retroaction in literary criticism, see my papers in Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear
Firmer Than They Are.
(Note 3). My paper
“Rereading(,) Narrative(,) Identity(,) and Interaction” provides a preliminary
approach to some of these issues.
(Note 4). For a detailed
account of the notion of emergence as a process inherent to the nature of
reality and human consciousness, and to the temporal and creative unfolding of
experience, see George Herbert Mead’s The
Philosophy of the Present. As to Oscar Wilde, my paper “Wilde y el enigma
de la esfinge” explores some striking aspects of his interpretive theory
expounded in The Critic as Artist.
See also David Walton’s paper on Wilde’s critical foresight (1996).
(Note 5). The term is Judith
Fetterley’s (1978). Cf. the “symptomatic readings” we shall be dealing with in
a minute, and also my paper on the transformations of triangular communicative
situations when they are interpreted by a third (or rather a fourth) party
(“Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation,” 2004).
(Note 6) Cf. Kerby on
self-narratives: “A split or noncoincidence in the subject is also apparent
here due to the interpretive nature of this participation. One may not, for
example, accept the expression as an adequate representative of oneself, which
may cause the cycle to continue again. This cycle of ever new signification and
appropriation is, of course, none other than the dynamic framework within which
personal develoment takes place” (1991: 108). Kerby’s account of the self’s
circular and hermeneutic predicament in achieving interpretation through
self-expression is also influenced by Taylor (1985).
(Note 7). These five
paragraphs come from my paper “Rereading(,) Narrative(,) Identity(,) and
Interaction”.
(Note 8). Porter Abbott also
distinguishes a third kind of reading, adaptive reading, which uses the text as
a starting point for creative textual developments. This is not, therefore, a
really interpretive or critical stance, although there are transitional zones
between these three kinds of reading. We will address Goffman’s conception of
symptomatic reading in Section 4.
(Note 9). This is the
perspective taken by critical egocentrism, memorably formulated by Anatole
France in the prologue to La Vie
littéraire.
(Note 10). Goffman (1970: 9).
In his notes to this passage, Goffman refers to work on conversational settings
by H. Garfinkel and H. Sacks, and to A. George’s book on propaganda analysis
(1959), as a good illustration of symptomatic textual analysis.
(Note 11). See Arbib’s paper
(2000) and my commentary (García Landa 2007).
(Note 12). But the story
remains notoriously open to further readings… A commentator in my blog (2007b),
Marcos, formulates a number of objections against the Lacanian assumption of a
“repeated trajectory”. I sum them up here:
1) The Queen’s position (in
the first triangle) and the Minister’s (in the second) cannot be equated,
because the Queen does not know that the minister may be looking for the
desired object. The Queen acts on impulse, which is all she can do, but the Minister’s
action “repeating” her gesture is strategic—perhaps inspired by a precedent,
the success of the Queen’s action. The Minister is actively trying to hide
through openness as a chosen strategy.
2) The object does not even
exist for the King. He cannot see because he doesn’t know what it is that he
should see—there is “nothing” for him to see. But the Police, the Queen’s
emissaries, know what they are looking for, they know of its existence, they
have a mission. Their position is completely dissimilar to the King’s.
3) The Minister is an
observer: he notes and analyzes other people’s moves, while Dupin does not
“observe”, he analyzes in advance, he foresees other people’s actions (which is
where the Minister lamentably fails). Therefore, if there are two triangles, they
are anything but a repetition of one another. Marcos points out that the story
could be read as the conversion of the letter from a non-object (for the King)
into an object of desire (for the Minister) because it has become an object in
the first place for another (for the Queen). It eventually becomes a scientific
object (for Dupin) after it has become an object of bureaucratic-professional
labour (for the Police, the silliest subject in this story, the only one who
looks for the object but does not find it).
Or perhaps it is a story of how the context, or its knowledge,
transforms objects and our relationships to them by developing our perception
of those objects—etc. It would seem that Poe’s story is ready now for a new
batch of readings.
(Note 13). For a reading of de
Man in this light, see García Landa (1998).
(Note 14). Bob Dylan,
“Jokerman”, from Infidels. My account
of romantic irony is indebted to Schulz (1973) and Schröder (1981).
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_____.
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2014
_____. "Acritical Criticism, Critical
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https://www.academia.edu/172177/
2014
_____. "Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism:
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