Feeling Critical Literary Practices of P PDF

FEELING CRITICAL:
LITERARY PRACTICES OF POSTWAR CRITIQUE
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DALGLISH CHEW
JUNE 2017
© 2017 by Dalglish Xuan Rui Chew. All Rights Reserved.
Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/nr633gn9498
ii
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate
in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Sianne Ngai, Co-Adviser
Ramon Saldivar, Co-Adviser
Mark McGurl
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in
electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in
University Archives.
iii
Abstract
Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of

contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical
objections to critique’s chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance
on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has
less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our
intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective
force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why
critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th
century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than
a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the
affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights,
each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our
interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique’s
political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing,
demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable
readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature’s social relevance, to experience ambient
political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate
normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In
tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of
epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained
frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism’s
erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.
iv
Acknowledgments
This dissertation could not have been written without the support and guidance
of my dissertation committee: Sianne Ngai, Ramón Saldívar, and Mark McGurl. I am
grateful to them for believing in this unconventional project, and for trusting me to
undertake it. Their enthusiasm for my ideas and their confidence in my abilities
sustained me through many a dark period in which these feelings were in short supply.
Thank you, also, to all the faculty members at Stanford I have had the privilege of
learning from: John Bender, Roland Greene, Gavin Jones, Saikat Majumdar, Franco
Moretti, Paula Moya, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Alex Woloch. Thank you to all past
and present department administrators I have had the pleasure of meeting, especially
the indomitable Judy Candell, who is hopefully enjoying a well-deserved retirement
after years of spoiling all of us graduate students silly. It has been an honor to work
alongside such an exceptional cohort of classmates: Morgan Frank, Erik Johnson,
Derek Mong, J.D. Porter, Vanessa Seals, and Hannah Walser. I look forward to
following their future accomplishments from afar. Thank you, most of all, to Mark
Taylor, without whose unfailing support my life would be so much the poorer. More
than the PhD, the gift of his friendship has been the happiest consequence of my time
at Stanford. I thank the Mellon Foundation for generously funding the fellowship that
made possible the seventh year in which this dissertation was completed.
I would never have made it to Stanford without the early mentorship and
encouragement of my undergraduate teachers at the University of Pennsylvania: Rita
Barnard, Rita Copeland, Heather Love, and Paul Saint-Amour. I first learned what it
means to be a thinker and scholar from their example, and I hope they will find
something in the work I have done since leaving Penn that will make them proud.
Before I arrived at Penn, it was Geoffrey Purvis who first taught me how to read
closely, and how to let myself be taught by what I read – nothing has ever been the
v
same since. I don’t know what he would think of this dissertation, but I wouldn’t trade
those early lessons in kindness and humility for all the critical theory in the world.
Over the course of this dissertation, I have had the great fortune of sharing my
work and writing with many talented colleagues outside of Stanford. I am especially
grateful to Rita Felski for convening the New Literary History seminar on post-critical
interpretation at the University of Virginia in 2014, where I first met Tyler Bradway,
Patrick Fessenbecker, Matt Flaherty, Nathan K. Hensley, Sarah Tindall Kareem,
Kinohi Nishikawa, Julie Orlemanski, Rebekah Sheldon, and Stephen Squibb. Their
input and feedback on “Feeling Utopian” proved immensely helpful, and it was during
the seminar that the stakes of the project as a whole first snapped into focus for me.
Our collaboration resulted in the Arcade colloquy “We, Reading, Now,” which
remains one of the proudest moments of my brief academic career. I would also like
to thank the organizers and participants of the Post45 graduate conference at UNC
Chapel Hill in 2016 for their insightful responses to “Feeling Relevant”: Travis
Alexander, Sam Bednarchik, Laura Broom, Michael Gaffney, Aaron Goldsman, Laura
Kuhlman, Andrew Lanham, Justin Mitchell, Ben Murphy, Lee Norton, Daniel Valella,
Jacob Watson, Kim White, and Cameron Williams. I’m sad to say it’s the end of the
road for me, but I wish them all every scholarly success in graduate school and
beyond.
I wouldn’t have made it through the last seven years without the love and
friendship of my chosen family: Thank you Sam Yeo, Kenneth Sim, Justin Low,
Clarence Lee, and AJ Khoo for always being there for me – it’s been over a decade
since we all lived in the same country, but it never fails to cheer me up when I see my
phone light up with their chatter. Much gratitude also to Chermain Wong and Gillian
Cheong for sustaining me with their friendship from afar, even though we only get to
catch up twice a year. Thank you Toby Ratana, Matt Phillips, and the entire Thursday
vi
night gang for sustenance and good cheer, and for including me in your lives. Thank
you Nadia Anggraini, Zack Jenkins, Stefanie Lau, Tim Sasaki, John Won, Logan
Falk-Woodruff, and Clement Xue for making California feel like home. Thank you to
the Sangha at Land of Medicine Buddha and Vajrapani Institute for providing much-
needed spaces for rest, healing, and growth. I am grateful to the vast wisdom and
compassion of my teachers: Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Ven. Robina Courtin, and Ven
Tenzin Chögkyi. Thank you, finally, to my actual family – especially my parents
Ghim Bok Chew and Phyllis Wong, who were there at the beginning, reading to me
every night before I could read for myself. In this and so many other things, theirs has
been a kindness profound and difficult to repay.
This dissertation is dedicated to all who encounter it. May it be of benefit.
vii
Table of Contents
Abstract iv
Acknowledgments v
Feeling Critical: An Introduction 1
Feeling Relevant: Contextualization and the Vocation of Reading 45
Feeling Utopian: Demystification and the Management of Disappointment 128
Feeling Normative: Problematization and the Desire for Intimate Attunement 174
Works Cited 288
viii
Feeling Critical: An Introduction
For phenomenology is precisely the attempt to tell not what a thought

is, so much as what it feels like [….] Its mode of proof, for the reader,
consists not in logical argumentation, but rather in the shock, or the
failure, of recognition.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form1
A Feel for the Method: The Desire Called Critique
There is one particular moment in Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out
of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” that I have come to think of as
this project’s primal scene. Mapping out the contradictions of what he calls “critical
barbarity,” which consists in the debunking of others’ object attachments as naive
fetishes and the reducing of their behaviors to effects of powerful causalities, Latour
asks: “Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this
most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are
always right! [….] Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to
study critique?”2 I understand perfectly that Latour’s rhetorical questions aren’t
actually being offered up for my serious consideration, and that he doesn’t really
intend to cause me angst about how I’ve chosen to spend the last seven years, but all
the same it has been difficult to know what to do with this feeling of being hailed as a
graduate student shamed by his teacher for the naiveté of his youthful aspirations.3 It
doesn’t help that Latour compounds this distressing interpellation in Reassembling the
1
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 307.
2
Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,"
Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 238-9.
3
Perhaps my fellow graduate students might take some solace in Eric Hayot’s suggestion to his
contemporaries that “scholars who find themselves, in midlife, disappointed by the empty promises of
the methods and ideas that so inspired them as young people ought to be profoundly suspicious of
1
Social, where he stages a Socratic dialogue in which a hapless graduate student gets
ventriloquized into giving voice to everything that we are meant to consider mistaken
about critical theory and its desire for political relevance.4 The irony, of course, is that
the potshots Latour takes at graduate students and whatever pleasures we have been
able to eke out from doing critique are themselves a kind of “critical barbarity.” How
else to describe this contempt, if not precisely as a “salvo of antifetishism” aimed at us
“naive believers clinging forcefully to [our] objects”?5 I don’t know if Latour ever
considered that critique might number among those “cherished objects” that people get
attached to, and which he now wants us to treat with respect rather than barbarity. But
that’s where this project begins – I believed in critique, it did give me great pleasure,
and I came to graduate school to study it. Having clung so forcefully to critique, I have
found it difficult to let go of my attachments to it. What follows, in each of the coming
chapters on the practices of contextualization, demystification, and problematization,
is an effort to figure out why that is – and a record of that letting go. If there is one
practice that guides this inquiry into critical practices, it would most closely resemble
what Robyn Wiegman calls "inhabitation,” and it seeks to understand what attaches us
to these practices of critique “by attending to the promises they make and the wishes
and prohibitions that sustain them."6
This project does not offer a defense of critique. Despite my reservations about
some of Latour’s rhetorical flourishes, I concur with his overall thesis that critique has,
themselves.” "Then and Now," in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 286.
4
I return to this dialogue at length in the next chapter, “Feeling Relevant.” Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 141-56.
5
"Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," 239.
6
Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 343.
2
if not “run out of steam,” then at least run into a certain impasse. Nevertheless, I
hesitate to identify this project as a postcritical work, because its foundational intuition
concerns precisely the difficulties involved in claiming any posteriority to one’s
attachments to critique. Its temporal structuration, if it has one, is characterized less by
the rhythm of methodological innovations and theoretical turns than the non-linear,
fitful itinerary of detaching from a loved object. To be truly postcritical in the sense I
imagine, one would need to be able to inhabit a feeling of being over critique, which I
take as different in a non-trivial way from simply knowing that it no longer serves us.
Although I agree with general tenor of Latour’s postcritical intervention and those that
have followed in its wake, therefore, this project is less invested in demonstrating
critique’s deficiencies or extolling the merits of its alternatives, than in understanding
how we came to be so enamored with critique in the first place. If this project shares
the postcritical commitment to loosening critique’s grip on literary studies, it
nevertheless demurs from mounting a frontal assault, preferring to account instead for
the desires, longings, and aspirations that critique magnetizes as something other than
a discredit to its political commitments or a cause for professional embarrassment. As
we will observe in my discussion of critique’s motives further on, Latour is hardly
alone in his reflexive contempt for the satisfactions that critique engenders in excess of
is epistemological functions – even, or indeed especially, when those satisfactions
were until very recently one’s own. This is not to say that every postcritical
intervention avails itself of the performative purgations afforded by indignant shame.
This project is deeply informed by Rita Felski’s observation, for instance, that
practices of critique “would not ‘take’ – would not entwine themselves so deeply into
3
our repertoires of thought – if they did not also succeed in generating attachments.”7
Felski thus describes the “pleasures” and the “ludic delight” that critique generates,
observing that its payoff lies not only in giving us “more critical knowledge,” but in its
being “a form of addictive and gratifying play.”
Extending Felski’s phenomenological approach to critique’s affective and
aesthetic dimensions, my accounts of contextualization, demystification, and
problematization aim not only to describe the felt gratifications they engender, but
also to demonstrate the centrality of the affective scenes these practices of critique
enact to the political uses to which their interpretive knowledges are put. In thus
interlacing critique’s epistemology and affects, I establish the latter as standing in a
foundational, rather than a merely ancillary or contradictory relationship to the former,
and thus also enable a more expansive sense of the affective experiences that count as
gratifying. As Felski defines it, “critique is negative” – in the pages that follow I will
describe how contextualization propagates feelings of persecution and victimization
by large forces, while demystification engenders a forbidding mistrust of pleasure,
even as problematization musters righteous indignation in reaction to perceived
transgressions.8 Absent an effort to trace the mutual imbrications of knowledge and
feeling, it is difficult to understand what could be gratifying about these “ugly”
feelings, to borrow Sianne Ngai’s turn of phrase, and even more challenging to own
up to them as descriptive of our own experiences of doing critique.9 Just as no one
would want to be caught dead enjoying the “potent euphoric drug” of “critical
7
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 109.
8
Ibid., 127.
9
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
4
barbarity,” who would be willing to admit to finding these feelings “addictive or
gratifying”? There is indeed something to Latour’s and Felski’s observations about the
addictiveness of the feelings that critical practices enable us to experience, but this
project’s guiding intuition is that we come to these compulsions honestly. By retracing
the crucial work that these affective scenarios perform to remediate the feelings
surrounding the political quandaries to which critique responds, this project elucidates
how such apparently unseemly feelings come to be experienced as the objects of an
addictive gratification. As I argue in the chapters to come, contextualization’s
predilection for feelings of persecution at once evokes and assuages anxieties about
the social relevance of reading and literature, demystification’s austere distrust of
pleasure works to keep alive the sense of as-yet unrealized utopian possibility, while
the righteous anger of the problematizing killjoy represents an effort to negotiate
normative disorder by seeking the attunement of feeling that undergirds the subjective
universality of aesthetic judgment.
Given that this project aims specifically to address critical practices rather than
methods or theories, I wish to more explicitly delineate the implications of this choice.
My employment of the term in reference to critique is not entirely unprecedented –
indeed, the postcritical turn has seen a subtle shift into an idiom of practice, albeit one
that seems to have occurred almost by accident and without any deliberate effort to
specify its conceptual entailments. Felski thus points repeatedly, for instance, to “the
practice of suspicious reading,” “practices of critique,” and the “practice of
symptomatic interpretation.”10 This last reference echoes Stephen Best and Sharon
10
Felski, 3, 52, 54.
5
Marcus’s own introduction to “surface reading,” in which they take aim at the
“practice of symptomatic reading,” even as they propose the alternative of an
“attention to surface as a practice of critical description.”11 Timothy Bewes, in
“Reading with the Grain,” likewise discusses the spatiality of what he calls “current
practices of critical interpretation.”12 This pivot into a vocabulary of practice can be
traced back to Eve Sedgwick’s landmark essay on paranoid reading, which declared its
intention to discuss “paranoid and reparative critical practices, not as theoretical
ideologies […] but as changing and heterogeneous relational stances.”13 I will return
to Sedgwick's treatment of practice further on in this introduction, but as her
clarification makes clear, the term “practice” is not simply synonymous or
interchangeable with other terms like method, theory, technique, style, strategy, and so
forth. The most obvious benefit accruing to the postcritical pivot into a practice idiom
no doubt derives from the way it enables us to shift our analytic scale. To call
symptomatic reading a practice rather than a theory or method, for instance, is to
circumscribe an object that is at once more general than a single theorist or theoretical
school (say, Fredric Jameson or Marxist criticism), but also more specific than Theory
or Critique. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, this project profits from
the practice idiom’s scalar recalibration, tracking contextualization, demystification,
and problematization across the careers of different theorists and the itineraries of
diverse methodological movements. Indeed, to the extent that it understands critical
11
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, "Surface Reading: An Introduction," Representations 108, no. 1
(2009): 1, 11.
12
Timothy Bewes, "Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism," differences 21, no. 3
(2010): 1.
6
practices as the mobilization of affective scenes for the aesthetic remediation of
political feeling, in building an archive of these scenes it traverses not only the
boundaries between different domains of critical theory, but that which separates
literary interpretation and literary production as well.
Practice doesn’t just circumscribe critique at a different scale, however, but also
defines it as entirely different analytic object. In critical theory, the canonical topos for
issues of practice concerns the distinction between theoria and praxis that we inherit
from Aristotle, and which finds its most intense articulation in efforts by Marxist
criticism and the Frankfurt School to reconcile theoretical inquiry and transformative
praxis. My use of the term “critical practice,” however, does not take this
rapprochement as its goal, and thus does not offer any account of critical theory’s
revolutionary agency. Rather, I insist on the idiom of practice because it opens up the
domain of an entirely different phenomenology that otherwise goes unremarked in
accounts of critical “theory” or “method.” The most intuitive way to grasp this
difference is to think of way the colloquial formulation “in theory … but in practice”
evokes a genre of situation in which knowledges that are otherwise unobjectionable
and coherent in theory are subject to unpredictable contingencies and produce
unintended consequences in practice. The crucial distinction here concerns less the
canonical antinomy of passive theoria and revolutionary praxis than the
phenomenological difference between experiencing critique as a set of things to know
and as a set of practices to do. As I will elucidate at length in the remainder of this
13
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You
Probably Think This Essay Is About You," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
7
introduction, the most salient features of critique that a phenomenology of practice
makes available for investigation are its non-epistemological motives, temporality,
and performativity. Indeed, some of these phenomenological intuitions have already
begun to emerge sporadically in postcritical discourse in connection with the
vocabulary of practice. When Felski points out, for instance, that as a “repeated
practice,” suspicious reading “eases into a state of second nature” and becomes “an
internalized, habitual, and self-evident aspect of one’s identity as a reader,” she
foregrounds the recursive temporality and performative effects of critique that can
only be grasped when it is understood as a set of practices rather than knowledges.14
Similarly, when Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best write that they turn
to description “not … out of a desire to launch a new theory or discover the next new
thing, but rather from a sense that an enduring practice may be a sign of an enduring
project,” they reach for a practice-oriented vocabulary of motives and effects not
otherwise supplied by the discourses of theory and method.15 In the rest of this
introduction, I develop a fuller account of these features by returning to Sedgwick’s
“Paranoid Reading” which, I argue, is deeply informed by a nascent phenomenology
of practice that germinated late in her career at the intersections of her Buddhist
practice and interest in affect. Rather than provide a chapter-by-chapter summary, I
interpolate my discussion of the phenomenology of practice with prefigurations of
how its attentiveness to the motives, temporality, and performativity of critique shape
the arguments to come.
14
Felski, 21.
15
Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, "Building a Better Description," Representations
135, no. 1 (2016): 3-4, original emphasis.
8
The Phenomenology of Practice: Motive, Temporality, Performativity
In Marie Howe’s “The Last Time,” one of several poems in What the Living Do
dedicated to her late brother John, the poet recalls a moment during their last dinner at
a restaurant together prior to his death from AIDS. Taking her hands in his, John says:
“I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.”16 Believing that she has understood
what her brother wants her to know, Howe acknowledges this declaration of his
impending death, only to realize that she does not, in fact, “know that”:
And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t.
And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.
And he said, No, I mean know that you are.
(Howe, “The Last Time”)17
With each iteration of the anaphoric “and,” the deixis of John’s “that” becomes
increasingly uncertain. After the initial omission of the relative clause that would
indicate what there is to know (“I think I do know”), the verb “know” itself
subsequently disappears into the auxiliary use of “do” (“you don’t,” “I do”). This
formulation then gets further compressed into an interrogative “What?” whose
spareness belies both the pronominal ambiguities it condenses and the multiple
16
Marie Howe, What the Living Do (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 50.
9
referential contexts it holds in suspension. The poem’s devastating pathos owes to the
way the final line reshuffles the deck and reveals John’s “that” to have referred not to
the imminent death of the terminally ill John, but the mortality of the poet who, along
with her readers, comprise the eponymous “living” of What the Living Do.
The force of this revelation lies not in its being previously unknown, but more
specifically in our bewilderment that the banal fact of our mortality should have come
to us as a surprise at all. Despite the epistemological frame provided by the fourfold
repetition of “know,” that is, what the poem’s final line stages is not a shift from non-
knowledge to knowledge, as if one had not known that one was going to die, and had
been apprised of that fact for the first time. If there is any pedagogical advance on
offer in this poem, it is thus the paradoxical one of learning the fact of one’s mortality
that one already knows. Akin to the “this” of the collection’s titular poem (“This is
what the living do”), which is embedded in a cleft formulation whose syntactical
recombination (it cleaves the sentence “The living do this”) assumes our prior
familiarity with the referent of its demonstrative pronoun, the “that” of “The Last
Time” turns out to be a “that” that is already known.18 Precisely when “The Last
Time” seems to reattach “that” to its referent, then, what knowledge of “that” the
poem proffers us turns out not to lie in its final line at all, but instead overflows its
discursive statement (“that you are [going to die]”) as a non-verbal, felt sense of
recognition that is immanent to the poem but irreducible to its propositional contents.
17
Ibid.
18
Compare this also to Howe’s use of the deictic “this” in “The Gate”: “And he’d say, This, sort of
looking around.” Ibid., 89-90, 58. I am grateful to Ben Bagocius for introducing me to Howe’s work.
10
In thus rendering aesthetic the experience of learning what one already knows,
Howe’s poem enacts the pedagogical scene whose tautological character preoccupies
Eve Sedgwick in “Pedagogy of Buddhism.” In her essay, Sedgwick reflects on the
circularity of her own encounter with the Buddhist teachings, in which the experience
of learning feels like “an exchange … of surprising recognition,” as if “the template of
truth is already there inside the listener, its own lineaments clarified by the encounter
with a teaching that it can then apprehend as ‘true.’”19 When viewed from the
perspective of critical scholarship in Buddhist studies, Sedgwick acknowledges, this
lay, non-academic experience of learning what one already knows can easily be
discredited as an orientalist distortion, the “projection of Western commonplaces, our
already-known, onto the glamorizing screen of a fantasied Orient.”20 The critical
operationalization of this hermeneutic circularity as a “fulcrum of delegitimization” is,
moreover, a commonplace not only in academic Buddhist studies but in the
interpretive humanities as well, where it takes the familiar form of the “Heidegerrian
paradox/impasse/scandal of being able to learn only versions of what you already
know or find only what you have already learned to look for.”21 As Sedgwick points
out, however, such a critique of the lay Western practitioner’s tautological
misrecognition would itself amount to a species of misunderstanding, insofar as it
relies on an “eerily thin Western phenomenology of learning” in which learning
toggles the digital threshold between knowing and not-knowing, and neglects the
extent to which “learning what you already know” functions as a “deliberate and
19
Sedgwick, "Pedagogy of Buddhism," 165.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
11
defining practice” in Buddhist pedagogical thought.22 Over against this once-and-for-
all model of learning, she gleans from Buddhist pedagogy the alternative topos of
“recognition/realization.”23 That is, to the extent that “to go from knowing something
to realizing it” amounts to a “densely processual undertaking that require years or
lifetimes,” the tautology of reencountering of the already-known loses its scandalous
aspect and becomes legible instead as a means of crossing the gap between knowledge
and recognition/realization.24
Deeply informed by Sedgwick’s own diagnosis of terminal cancer in 1998,
“Pedagogy of Buddhism” wryly thematizes this gap with the observation that “nothing
dramatizes the distance between knowledge and realization as efficiently as diagnosis
with a fatal disease.”25 Therein also lies the profound resonance between Sedgwick’s
essay and Howe’s poem, for the shift that “The Last Time” stages with its final line is
precisely, as the former describes it in her essay, one that spans “the distance between
knowing one will die and realizing it.”26 This conjuncture might well seem an odd
place to launch this project’s investigation into critical practices in literary studies –
of the essays collected in Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, “Paranoid Reading and
Reparative Reading” would surely have been the more obvious choice. Having
appeared in its earliest incarnation as an introduction to a 1996 special issue of Studies
in the Novel, “Paranoid Reading” has been canonized as a prescient forerunner to
more recent methodological efforts to dislodge the critical imperative in literary
22
Ibid., 166-7, 68.
23
Ibid., 156.
24
"Reality and Realization," in The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011), 209; "Pedagogy of Buddhism," 167.
25
"Pedagogy of Buddhism," 173.
26
Ibid., 174.
12
interpretation.27 Even for those seeking in Sedgwick’s oeuvre a more circumspect
view of paranoid reading, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes” has
proven a more viable companion to that earlier essay, for it contains her admission to
having previously “overlooked” the origins of paranoia’s centrality to queer theory in
the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s and early ‘90s.28 In contrast, “Pedagogy of Buddhism” has
received scant attention, and it is doubtful if the essay that both neighbors “Paranoid
Reading” in Touching Feeling and closes the collection is often read at all – a fate no
doubt linked to its rather esoteric preoccupations with Western Buddhism, conscious
dying, and the pedagogical implications thereof.29
Beyond its unconventional subject matter, however, I want to suggest that
“Pedagogy of Buddhism” warrants further attention because there exists a suggestive
resonance between Sedgwick’s reflections on her Buddhist practice and her
methodological account of paranoid reading.30 I am referring, specifically, to the fact
that like “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” “Paranoid Reading” opens precisely with the
tautological conundrum of learning what one already knows – as Sedgwick observes,
in recollecting a conversation with Cindy Patton about paranoid speculations
concerning the origins of HIV: “what would we know then that we don’t already
27
Wiegman has rightly insisted on the importance of this publication history, because it helps us to date
Sedgwick’s intervention to the very inception of queer studies in the mid-‘90s, rather than the post-9/11
context of 2003’s Touching Feeling. See "The Times We're In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the
Reparative 'Turn'," Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2014): 12.
28
"Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes," South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 638.
For a reading of the two essays alongside each other, see Heather Love, "Truth and Consequences: On
Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010).
29
A notable exception to this rule is Carolyn Lesjak, who recruits Sedgwick’s reflections on Buddhist
pedagogy for a Marxist dialectical reading capable of coordinating lived experience and structure.
"Reading Dialectically," ibid.55 (2013).
30
In fact, Sedgwick explicitly foregrounds the affinity between the two essays in her introduction to
Touching Feeling, where she describes how “encounters … with mortality and with Buddhism … shape
the last two chapters.” Sedgwick, "Introduction," 2.
13
know?”31 If Sedgwick sought in “Pedagogy of Buddhism” to recuperate hermeneutic
circularity as a phenomenologically rich scene of learning rather than a discreditable
methodological impasse, in “Paranoid Reading” it is paranoid knowing’s tendency
towards tautology that she seems to mobilize, at least rhetorically, as a warrant for
undermining its stronghold over critical theory. She thus describes paranoia’s
anticipatory temporality as enacting the requirement “that bad news be always already
known,” while its status as a strong theory of negative affect leads to a “selective
scanning and amplification” that “risks being strongly tautological,” in that it “can’t
help or can’t stop or can’t do anything other than prove the very same assumptions
with which it began.”32 In reading the two essays alongside each other, one is
confronted by two structurally homologous instances of learning what one already
knows – but why is tautology recuperated one in instance and deprecated in the other?
In a paper posthumously published as “Reality and Realization,” Sedgwick
gestured towards a future project, unrealized at the time of her death, that would
explore the conjuncture “Critical Theory, Buddhist Practice.”33 Part of what captivated
Sedgwick about the encounter between these two seemingly unrelated domains is the
fact, as she writes, that “the distinctive bonds between Buddhism and the question of
reality seem to cluster tellingly around the issue of practice rather than
epistemology.”34 For Sedgwick, the juxtaposition of Buddhism and critical theory
offered the particular promise that the former’s practice orientation might loosen what
31
"Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay
Is About You," 123.
32
Ibid., 130, 35, original emphasis.
33
"Reality and Realization," 206.
34
Ibid., 207.
14
she called the latter’s “epistemological fixation.”35 As I will go on to demonstrate, the
juxtaposition between “Paranoid Reading” and “Pedagogy of Buddhism” invites us to
rehearse precisely such an encounter between theory and practice, providing us with
an opening to tease out the implicit phenomenology of practice that would help us
differentiate the two scenes of hermeneutic circularity, and also nuance our
understanding of the methodological entailments of Sedgwick’s description of
paranoid reading. Indeed, there would seem to be a good warrant for reading the two
essays together in this manner, for Sedgwick’s efforts to recover the pedagogical
usefulness of hermeneutic tautology echoes her unfinished project in its observation
that a reencounter with the already-known produces different effects depending on
whether one’s preoccupations are of an epistemological character, as exemplified by
academic scholars of Buddhist studies, or if one takes a practitioner’s approach to
those same teachings. For non-academic readers of the Buddhist teachings, as
Sedgwick points out, “The question Is this (account) accurate or misleading? may give
way […] to the question Will this (practice) work or won’t it.”36
Schematically, the phenomenology of practice Sedgwick develops in her
meditations on Buddhist thought can be described as entailing (1) an opening towards
motives for encountering knowledge that are other than epistemological, (2) the
enactment of a recursive temporal duration sustained by repetitive, habitual
reencounters with familiar understandings, which (3) effectuate the performative
constitution of reality-as-realization. I will go on to elaborate each of these features at
length, but for now we may see them at work in the example Sedgwick offers in
35
Ibid., 213.
15
“Pedagogy of Buddhism” of a practictioner’s encounter with the Buddhist teachings
on rebirth. Setting aside the “very painful epistemological/psychological knots”
presented by the question of whether she believes in Buddhist propositions concerning
the bardo and rebirth, Sedgwick finds that “simply to be with this teaching makes far
more difference than would either believing or disbelieving it.”37 As Sedgwick
describes it, to “practice Buddhism … is to spend all the time you can in the attempt to
realize a set of understandings whose propositional contents are familiar to you from
the beginning of your practice.”38 The Buddhist psychology of learning that Sedgwick
associates with the topos of realization and recognition consists exactly in the practice
of reencountering of what one already knows, in that realization is understood to be
actualized “in terms of practices, practices that take place over time.”39 To take the
teachings on rebirth as an object of recursive practice rather than a set of things to
know produces, moreover, a variety of pedagogical effects that Sedgwick describes in
the following terms: the “relative untetheredness to self” that comes from meditations
on “picturing your life … otherwise than it is,” the opening up of “companionable
space,” in which different questions become “askable to the depth of a life history and
beyond,” and so forth.40 Sedgwick suggests that we understand these effects of her
practice as advancing a process of realization, in the sense of practice’s performative
constitution of a reality understood “not as what’s true, but as what’s realized, what is
or has become real.”41 To return to the difference between knowing one will die and
36
37
Ibid., 178, 79.
38
39
Ibid.
40
"Pedagogy of Buddhism," 179, 80.
41
16
realizing it, the effects of a practiced familiarity with one’s mortality, for instance,
would consist in the movement from “knowing it to be true” to “taking it as real.”42
Distinct from the epistemological consequences attendant upon the effort to know a
set of propositional knowledges, the effectuality of practices lie instead in a realization
of those knowledges via a repetitive habituation of particular ways of being and, in the
specific instance of the practice of conscious dying, of “being and learning to unbe a
self.”43
With this phenomenology of practice in mind, I want to suggest how “Paranoid
Reading” equally lends itself to be read as a practitioner’s, rather than a knower’s,
account of critical theory. Indeed, the idiom of practice is everywhere inscribed in the
essay, even if it is not explicitly conceptualized as such – thus Sedgwick repeatedly
refers to paranoid and reparative “practices,” carefully clarifies that she intends to
discuss “paranoid and reparative critical practice” rather than “theoretical ideologies,”
offers her sketch of paranoid reading as “a tool for better seeing differentials of
practice,” and so forth.44 Moreover, the conversation with Cindy Patton that spurs
Sedgwick’s inquiry into paranoid reading provokes the same shift in emphasis from
epistemic certainty to performative effect undertaken in “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” in
that Patton’s remarks open up a “space for moving form the rather fixated question Is
a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions:
What does knowledge do – the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the
42
Ibid.
43
44
Is About You," 128, 30.
17
receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?”45 Sedgwick’s frames the
displacement of epistemology here in the idiom of performativity (“How, in short, is
knowledge performative”), but the resonant congruity between the two essays should
clue us in to the ways in which the question of performative effect is bound up with
practice – an issue I will return to below in a discussion of the performative realization
of practice.46
To read Sedgwick’s account of paranoid reading as a phenomenological record
of practice, I argue, gives us better traction on the methodological intervention the
essay performs. Although “Paranoid Reading” has been assimilated into our current
methodological debates as a prescient critique of critique or a manifesto for reparative
alternatives, Sedgwick’s insight into the motives, temporality, and performative
realizations of critique qua practice remain to be operationalized in a meaningful way.
In a recent essay, for instance, Nirvana Tanouhki points out that Sedgwick’s “tethering
[of] surprise to reparative reading” has led to the essay’s subsumption under
postcritical agendas that valorize the affect of surprise as a methodological
desideratum.47 As Tanoukhi observes, this privileging of surprise has a formalistic
aspect, in that demands that “we move past critical interpretation because criticism ‘no
longer surprises us’” fail to name a coherent motive for the valorization of surprise,
such that it seems to be held up as an intrinsic methodological good in the absence of
any specific content.48 I will return later to how Sedgwick’s phenomenology of
practice helps us to avoid privileging of surprise for its own sake, but for now I wish
45
Ibid., 124.
46
Ibid., 124, original emphasis.
47
Nirvana Tanoukhi, "Surprise Me If You Can," PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1430.
18
to underscore how easy it is to miss the fact that “Paranoid Reading” offers us
precisely the account of motive Tanoukhi seeks. That Tanoukhi considers Sedgwick’s
essay “a notable exception to the suspension of motive in recent debates about
reading” given its “preoccupation with the motives for reading,” yet finds it leaves her
“nowhere” in her search for an account of critique’s motivations, has to do with her
assumption that motives must be epistemological.49 Her main gripe with the
postcritical discourse she calls the “new objectivity,” after all, is that “there is no
evident epistemological framework to ground these methodological injunctions, or to
justify the ethical charge attached to them.”50 That Tanoukhi finds her question –
“What do we want? Why do we want it?” – unanswered has less to do with the failure
of the postcritical “new objectivists” to respond adequately, than the fact that she
neglects to consider that the “why” motivating the practice of an interpretive method
may not lend itself to an epistemological formulation at all.51 This is what animates
Sedgwick’s surprising claim, not often remarked by her readers, that we don’t really
read literary criticism for its truth claims – “But who reads The Novel and the Police
48
Ibid., 1429.
49
Ibid., 1429, 33.
50
Ibid., 1426.
51
As Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian have written in support of pluralism when it comes to
definitions of “form”: “Explanations are bound to questions, questions are bound to disciplines, and
disciplines are bound to the rules they make for themselves – nothing more” Jonathan Kramnick and
Anahid Nersessian, "Form and Explanation," Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3 (2017): 669. To be sure, their
argument doesn’t explicitly address motive, but if “questions drive the work that we do, and
explanatory terms follow in their train,” then it necessarily follows that one must allow for a pluralism
of questions formulated according to a pluralism of motives exterior to the explanations being provided.
Indeed, the exteriority of motive to epistemology would explain why Kramnick and Nersessian slide
into a quasi-affective idiom in describing what they call the “disciplinary law of desire”: “We desire
information about the subject matter that concerns us, and we judge ourselves to be using the right
language to describe that subject matter whenever it gives us access to the information we desire in
such a way that is recognized by the consensus judgment of the discipline” ibid., 667, my emphasis.
19
to find out whether its main argument is true?”52 – and also explains why she sets
aside the question of paranoia’s epistemological validity, arguing instead that “the
main reasons for questioning paranoid practices are other than the possibility that their
suspicions can be delusional or simply wrong.53
The suggestion that our reasons for doing critique may have little to do with
knowledge per se may seem unseemly, especially given our professional roles as
academic knowledge workers who think for a living. Yet postcritical discourse is rife
with precisely such speculations, and although Tanoukhi worries that the new
methodological turn lacks a coherent account of motive, we could point to a similar
confusion as to the precise motivations underwriting our erstwhile enthrallment with
criticality. Best and Marcus suggest, for instance, that we “became attached to the
power [symptomatic reading] gave to the act of interpreting,” and that Jameson’s
ideology critique exerted an “enormous influence” in the United states “perhaps
because it presented professional literary criticism as a strenuous and heroic endeavor,
one more akin to activism and labor than to leisure, and therefore fully deserving of
remuneration.”54 As I observed earlier, Bruno Latour compares critique to a “potent
euphoric drug” that “feels so good” because it enables one to be “always right,” while
Heather Love echoes the conjecture that critical methods have been pursued for the
self-confirming feelings they enable rather than the knowledge they produce when she
warns that in the turn away from depth hermeneutics, critics will have to relinquish
“ethical heroism” and “give up [their] role of interpreting divine messages to take up a
52
Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think
This Essay Is About You," 135.
53
Ibid., 130.
20
position as a humble analyst and observer.”55 In a less chastising register, Felski asks
us to consider how the hermeneutics of suspicion “is not just political but also
aesthetic: it offers not only a kind of knowledge but also a form of pleasure,” although
she likewise lights on the professionalizing impetus in positing that the
“pervasiveness” of suspicion “testifies to the increasing pressures of
professionalization and the scramble to shore up academic authority.”56 The intuition
that critical practices have been driven by motives that are other than epistemological
would thus seem fairly widespread. With the exception of Felski’s attention to the
pleasures of suspicion, however, a distinct tone of reproach attaches to these
observations that critique magnetizes motives that have little to do with knowledge per
se – or indeed, it is a tone of self-reproach, if we read them in the genre of a
performative repudiation of embarrassing motives that one recognizes as having been
one’s own. Quite apart from whether we are convinced by these speculations about
our and our colleagues’ motives for practicing critique, this impulse to narrate the
necessity for methodological change as a story of relinquishing one’s misguided
attachments seem heavily freighted with shame – as if the desires to be powerful,
better remunerated, heroic, correct, and authoritative were so self-evidently
embarrassing when attached to critique that the mere naming of these wishes should
mortify us into giving them (and critique) up.
54
Best and Marcus, 1, 6.
55
Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," 238-9;
Heather Love, "Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn," New Literary History
41, no. 2 (2010): 381.
56
Rita Felski, "Suspicious Minds," Poetics Today 32, no. 2 (2011): 218.
21
As is well known, Sedgwick’s description of paranoid reading’s motives get
routed through Silvan Tomkins’ account of affect, hinging especially on the
suggestion that for the latter there is “no ontological difference” between the
“theorizing that scientists and philosophers do around affects,” and the “largely tacit
theorizing all people do in experiencing and trying to deal with their own and others’
affects.”57 What is less obvious, however, is that the analogy between affect theory
and critical theory doesn’t simply ask us to consider that critique involves the taking
up of affective positions or postures, but also enables a radically novel view of the
latter’s motives. Specifically, Sedgwick’s mobilization of Tomkins underwrites an
inquiry into motive that is limned by the displacement of epistemology which
inaugurates her phenomenology of practice – one that takes seriously, without
shaming, the pragmatic motives that we have for perseverating in methods of knowing
that only tell us what we already know. To wit, in Tomkins’s view “the affect system
provides the primary motives of human beings,” and indeed he considers affects as
motives: “affect we conceive of as a motive, by which we mean immediately
rewarding or punishing experience mediated by receptors activated by the individual’s
own responses.”58 Tomkins elaborates the gap between an affect’s immediate motive
force and the mediations of an individual’s responses to that force as a “sharp
distinction between affects as the primary motives and the ‘aims’ of the feedback
system,” which leads him to propose the concept of the “Image,” a “blueprint” for a
57
This Essay Is About You," 133, 34.
58
Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995), 34, 45.
22
desired end state that is “purposive and directive” for an individual’s behavior.59
Although affects motivate the development of purposive Images, there remains a
“high degree of phenomenological independence between what is intended [in an
Image] and the preceding, accompanying, and consequent affect,” such that purposes
can be motivated by the imperatives of affect management without being recognized
as such.60 This gap between our affective motives and the goal-oriented Images they
inform renders us susceptible to “motivational error, i.e., being wrong about [our] own
wishes, their causes, and outcomes.”61
Crucially, Tomkins does not consider our vulnerability to motivational error a
flaw, but the “necessary price which must be paid” for our ability to “lear[n] by
making errors.”62 As Sedgwick describes it, “it is the inefficiency of the fit between
the affect system and the cognitive system – and between either of these and the drive
system – that enables learning, development, continuity, differentiation.”63 This
sanguine view of error makes possible an understanding of the way myriad motives
interdigitate in critical theory, without the compulsion to parse these desires as good or
bad, permissible or discreditable. What would it mean, for instance, to understand the
caesura between paranoid reading’s political goal of resisting homophobic violence
and its affective motives of minimizing painful surprises as an opportunity to learn,
rather than as evidence of bad faith or self-deception? To be fair, although I believe
59
Ibid., 44, 45. For a concise summary of how this distinction plays out in a characteristically scholarly
milieu, see Adam Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson, "Like-Minded," Critical Inquiry 38, no. 4 (2012):
876-7.
60
Tomkins, 45.
61
Ibid., 39.
62
Ibid., 38-9.
23
Sedgwick intends to de-shame critique for having affective motives, it must be
acknowledged that in “Paranoid Reading” she does accuse paranoid reading of
“disavowing its affective motive and force and masquerading as the very stuff of
truth.”64 Sedgwick’s aggressiveness here is unmistakable, and I will suggest further on
how grasping the temporality of practice helps us to understand this disavowal as a
consequence of habituation and forgetting, rather than a nefarious dissembling. For
now, however, I would point out that in “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect
Makes,” Sedgwick returns to her earlier characterization of paranoia and takes pains to
describe the “intense dread, both focused and diffuse” that characterized the AIDS
crisis, explaining how it is “no wonder” that “the need of mobilizing powerful
resources of resistance in the face” of the “punishing stress of such dread” imprinted a
“paranoid structuration onto the theory and activism of that period.”65 Sedgwick’s
tonal shift from angry exposure to compassionate understanding (“no wonder”)
underscores how a practice of paranoid knowing motivated by the desire to avoid the
surprise of bad news appears eminently functional in an affective milieu saturated by a
dreadful sense of “not knowing what kind of response to AIDS might crystallize”
from a public sphere dominated by sanctioned homophobia.66 The ability to take this
capacious view of critical theory’s non-epistemological motives is all the more
important when we consider the way critique has been underwritten, as Robyn
Wiegman describes it, by the “self-authorizing thesis that has given political motive to
63
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,"
in Shame and Its Sisters, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995), 14.
64
65
"Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes," 639.
24
decades of scholarly work: that knowing is the means for knowing what to do.”67
Given this tendency to view critical theory in terms of an epistemology whose
continuity with political action is taken as self-evident, the connections Sedgwick
draws between affect and the phenomenology of practice help us to discern the
interlacing of critique’s Images and affective motives – that is, its acknowledged goals
of producing knowledge oriented towards political ends, and its less obvious, but no
less pragmatic functions as a strategy of managing affect.
The mutual imbrications of politically committed knowledges and strategies of
affect management help explain why each chapter in this project has been organized
around goals that are not ordinarily thought of as grounded in feeling. At first glance,
indeed, readers may well find counterintuitive the notion that practices of
contextualization, demystification, and problematization respectively involve “feeling
relevant,” “feeling utopian,” and “feeling normative.” I have employed these
formulations deliberately, however, not only because relevance, utopianism, and
normativity accurately describe the political and epistemological “Images” structuring
these critical practices, but also because they index pragmatic strategies for managing
the affects pertinent to these goals. While it is acknowledged that contextualization
aims to produce interpretive knowledge about the connections between individual
readings of literature and broader socio-political concerns, it is less obvious how its
practice simultaneously evokes and mitigates anxieties about literature and criticism’s
relevance to society. Mobilizing the paranoid aesthetic to generate feelings of being
personally victimized by large and anonymous social forces, practices of
66
Ibid., 638, 39.
25
contextualization enact an affective scene of prosopopoeic repair in which the act of
reading feels socially relevant in a self-confirming way, even if that connection is
experienced as persecutory. Similarly, while demystification grounds itself in a
science of ideology that exposes the compromised nature of existing aesthetic
pleasures in order to keep alive the truly utopian possibility of radical social
transformation, this utopian "Image" entails a correlative strategy of affect
management that recodes political disappointment into felt evidence of revolutionary
vitality. If problematization pursues social justice for racial and sexual minorities by
bringing to bear the knowledge of structural oppression on the contestation of
discriminatory social norms, the phenomenology of its practice reveals how it
concomitantly vehiculates a desire for an intimate, intersubjective attunement of
aesthetic feeling as the basis for its negotiation of normative disorder. In each case, the
affective scenes that critical practices enact perform the pragmatic function of
mediating, by way of aesthetic feeling, the political and epistemological "Images" of
relevance, utopianism, and normativity.
As I have been arguing thus far, Sedgwick’s account of the means and ends of
paranoid reading relies on an incipient phenomenology of practice, whose elaboration
helps us to flesh out her nascent inquiry into how the pedagogy of Buddhism might
help loosen the “epistemological fixation” in critical theory. What I now turn our
attention to is the way Sedgwick’s displacement of epistemological motives for
affective ones derives specifically from a sensitivity to practice’s temporality. As I
demonstrated above, the question Sedgwick formulates in connection with the
67
Wiegman, "The Times We're In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative 'Turn'," 7.
26
pedagogy of Buddhism – why would one wish to keep reencountering knowledge that
one already knows? – helpfully skews our understanding of motive when it is asked of
critical theories that proceed on the assumption of a continuity between knowledge
and political effectuality. Drawing out the implications of tautology’s circular tempo,
the phenomenology of practice invites us to consider the often-unacknowledged way
in which our uses of critical theory take place in time as a recursive, repetitive practice
that enacts knowledges that are already somewhat familiar. We can register the extent
to which the implications of this temporality constitutes a blind spot in our
understanding of critical method by returning to the valorization of surprise that
Tanoukhi observes in the postcritical uptake of Sedgwick’s essay. To be sure, the
contrast Sedgwick draws between reparation’s openness to surprise to paranoia’s
aversion to it can lead to the impression that the defect of paranoid reading consists
simply in the fact of its having become habitual, routine, conventional – in a word,
unsurprising, or boring.68 Just as Tanoukhi reminds us that “surprise has no content,”
the complaint of boredom (she cites Felski’s remark that criticism “no longer surprises
us”) is itself devoid of content to the extent that experience of boredom alone fails to
either recommend or discredit a given method of reading.
At the very least, Sedgwick’s reflections on her Buddhist practice should remind
us that “surprise” is hardly the sole province of new knowledge, for what we already
know – say, the fact of our mortality – can still come to us as news. More pointedly,
68
There is an odd performative irony here as well, in that their presumption that what’s truly new about
Sedgwick’s methodological intervention rests primarily in its prescription of surprise, readers miss the
extent to which “Paranoid Reading” works precisely to render surprising the hermeneutics of suspicion
that we think we know so well. Clearly, surprise is a contextual affect rather than not an effect
invariably produced by a particular methodological practice.
27
the parallelism between the hermeneutic circularities of Buddhist and critical practices
clarifies that Sedgwick’s description of paranoia’s tautology is not meant to denigrate
the repetitive tempo of hermeneutic circularity as such, but rather, to engender a new
understanding of critique as a set of practices repeated over time instead of a
collection of things to be known.69 It is in this spirit, I think, that Sedgwick invites us
to read her account of paranoid reading as a “tool for better seeing differentials of
practice.”70 According to such a reading of Sedgwick’s essay, the “surprise” of
reparation would be understood not as opposed to routinization and circularity per se,
but as itself a contingent effect produced by practices equally characterized by
circularity and susceptible to routinization. Indeed, Tanoukhi remarks that the
tendency to assimilate Sedgwick’s essay as an injunction to seek out surprise
reinstates a tautology of its own: “What do we want? Surprise. Why do we want it?
Because we want to be surprised.”71 One need not be psychic to see where a
formalistic valorization of “surprise” leads in practice – the moment surprise becomes
routinized and thus ceases to be surprising, we would find ourselves seeking out ever
more estranging scenes to eke out a surprise convincing enough in its effects to count
as evidence of critical advance – we would, in effect, have replaced one tautology
(“you can never be paranoid enough”) with another (“you can never be surprised
69
Sedgwick makes this distinction in reference to the way psychoanalysis has been assimilated to
critical theory as knowledge rather than as practice: “the popularity of psychoanalysis within critical
theory as a system or a language always tends toward short-circuiting its realization as practice; so its
insights get added in turn to the list of things to know rather than becoming manifest as a way of
knowing, never mind of doing or of being.” "Reality and Realization," 209.
70
71
Tanoukhi, 1430, 29.
28
enough”).72 Attending to the phenomenology of practice not only helps us to avoid
valorizing surprise for its own sake, but also underscores how circularity and
repetition aren’t discrediting features characteristic of only poorly conceived or self-
defeating critical methods – but of all methods, to the extent that we practice them. We
can intuit this notion in institutional terms to the extent that, for scholars hoping to
exert an influence on the discipline, any methodological innovation that aims to
become the dominant paradigm must also accept the consequences of its eventual
routinization and banalization.73 In addition, we can also understand it as a structural
feature of interpretation in general, pace Hans-Georg Gadamer, to the extent that all
methods of reading can be expected to be characterized by some version of the
hermeneutic circle in which they find what they set out to find – whether that happens
to be a feeling of surprise or further evidence of a paranoid conspiracy.74 If
Sedgwick’s phenomenology of practice thus renders visible the pragmatic (as distinct
from the epistemic) horizon of critical theory in general, it also asks us to consider the
way practice’s temporality reconfigures the terms by which we evaluate critique in our
current methodological debates. If the practice of critique unfurls in time as a stylized,
72
On this, see Steven Goldsmith, Blake's Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2013), 272-3.
73
Viewed this way, surprise would simply mark the difference between the emergent and the dominant
as structural positions in methodological discourses of our discipline, such that there is nothing
intrinsically surprising about the reparative position, except that its appearance against the horizon of
expectation set up by paranoia’s defensive requirement that “bad news be always already known”
renders it a surprise. For that matter, there is nothing intrinsically unsurprising about the tautologies of
paranoid knowing either, for Sedgwick also makes the point that the “news” of a hermeneutic suspicion
used to be surprising, but is no longer new, because it is “a far different act from what such exposures
would have been in the 1960s.” "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid,
You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," 143.
74
Consider, indeed, how the postcritical alternative of “description” proposed by Sharon Marcus,
Stephen Best, and Heather Love finds itself put on the defensive by accusations that it is “tautological,
because it simply repeats what anyone can see or hear.” "Building a Better Description," in
29
habitual reenactment of particular scenes of reading, the question would no longer be
the “epistemologically fixated” one of whether it gives us something new to know, but
rather: with what motives do we choose to enact scenes of the already-known, and
with what performative consequences?
Just as the phenomenology of practice informs Sedgwick’s deployment of
Tomkins’s affect theory to account for critique’s motives, its recursive, habitual
temporality equally informs her evaluation of critique’s ramifications. After all, if for
Tomkins the possibility of motivational error also underwrites the possibility of
learning, the source of this pedagogical potential lies in error’s role in the iterative
development of affect theories as schematizations of experience that are learned by
repetition.75 As Tomkins writes, “it is the repeated and apparently uncontrollable
spread of negative affect which prompts the increasing strength of the ideo-affective
organization which we have called a strong affect theory.”76 This “ideo-affective
organization” involves, first, the development of a “cognitive antenna” that examines
“all incoming information for its relevance to a particular affect,” and second, “a set of
strategies for coping with a variety of shame and contempt contingencies, to avoid
shame if possible or to attenuate its impact if it cannot be avoided.”77 Sedgwick’s
account deploys exactly this understanding of affect theory, in that she describes how
paranoid reading synthesizes a variety of interpretive experiences into patterned
repetitions of a core scene in which the paranoid reader preemptively assumes the
"Description Across Disciplines," special issue, Representations 135, no. 1 (2016): 4. See also their
suggestion that literary scholars “adjus[t] our attitude toward literalism and tautology” (9).
75
It is worth remembering that Tomkins’s theorization of the affect system takes as its central thought
experiment the problem of designing a human-like automaton capable of learning from experience , 40-
3.
76
Ibid., 169, my emphasis.
30
experience of negative affect as way to avert its arrival as a surprise.78 The self-
confirming dysfunction on display here should not obscure the fact that, as an affect
theory, paranoia is nevertheless a consequence of learning, and indeed for Tomkins
what we call “our habits” are essentially “the residues of past human learning.”79
Viewed in this light, the recursive temporality that Sedgwick observed in Buddhist
pedagogy thus turns out to equally characterize the pedagogy of critical practices as
well. In this understanding of paranoid reading as an affect theory learnt through
practice, the feedback loop of sensitization and interpretation, by repeatedly enacting
the scene in which the surprise of negative affect is preemptively squelched by the
means of anticipatory knowing, functions to habituate the subject to this strategy of
affect management and render it automatic. Put simply, when it comes to an affect
theory’s scanning, interpretation, and schematization of experience, as the adage goes
– practice makes perfect. Moreover, if the risk of error underwrites the possibility of
learning, then together they equally entail the unhappy prospect of perfecting the
wrong lesson: “just as the freedom to learn involves freedom for cognitive and
motivational error, so the ability to develop new neurological programs […] involves
the ability to automatize and make unavailable to consciousness, both errors and
contingencies which were once appropriate but which are no longer appropriate.”80
In the same way that Sedgwick offers her reflections on the pedagogy of
Buddhist practice as “part of a continuing […] meditation on how means relate to
77
Ibid., 166.
78
See also Tomkins’s discussion of script theory, where “scripts” appear to take the place of what were
earlier called affect theories ibid., 179-95.
79
Ibid., 39.
80
Ibid.
31
ends,” the conceptual usefulness of the phenomenology of practice lies its making
available to us a way of apprehending how the means and ends of a critical method
can come apart over the course of practice’s repetitive temporality.81 To understand a
given critical method as a strategy of affect management learnt in response to specific
situations, and practiced to perfection over time, engenders a subtle but important shift
in evaluative emphasis. Specifically, a sense of practice’s temporality invites us to
consider how a critical theory’s nexus of affects, goals, and strategies were “once
appropriate” but are “no longer,” rather than to try to detect hypocrisy in the gap
between its political goals and affective motives, or fatuity in the perseveration in
methods that have not helped to actualize those goals. Critique, in this view, does not
aim to be duplicitous or stupid – but is simply apt to misrecognize the relationship
between its means and ends due to the habituation characteristic of practice’s
repetitive tempo. In the case of paranoid reading, as Sedgwick describes it, the
affective strategy of anticipating surprise was “once appropriate” as a means for
managing the overwhelming dread saturating the AIDS emergency, but is “no longer”
so when it becomes a self-confirming habit characterized by an “accelerating failure to
anticipate change” even when the circumstances informing its development have
shifted.82 This sense of an inappropriate fit between means and ends that arises over
the protracted time of practice, I argue, underwrites Sedgwick’s suggestion that “it
would make sense – if one had the choice – not to cultivate the necessity of a
systematic, self-accelerating split between what one is doing and the reasons one does
81
Sedgwick, "Pedagogy of Buddhism," 176.
82
Is About You," 142.
32
it.”83 To discern the discrepancies between critique’s affects, goals, and strategies as
issuing from a temporal disjunction between practices and circumstances is to
understand that, in any evaluation of the appropriateness of a given critical practice’s
motives, the correctness of its political goals, or the effectuality of its epistemological
methods is necessarily contingent rather than absolute. Paranoid reading’s wish to
avoid painful surprises and its goal of amassing evidence of panoptic power can
function as a “resoundingly vigorous resource of thought and action” at one time, but
become an “accelerating failure to anticipate change” in another.”84 What I find
helpful about Sedgwick’s attentiveness to practice is the capaciousness it develops for
comprehending this split, one that recalls the “companionable space” opened up by her
Buddhist practice, in which different questions become askable in a context that is
neither “of blame or self-blame, nor of will or resolve.”85
In my accounts of contextualization, demystification, and problematization, I
have been guided by Sedgwick's sensitivity to the temporal contingencies that
structure the relations between critique's means and ends. If, as I outlined earlier, each
of the three critical practices I examine functions as a mechanism of affect
management structured by the imperatives and demands of a particular political
problem, I have also sought to indicate why and how these mechanisms might come
apart over time. In the case of contextualization, while the mobilization of a paranoid
aesthetic does effectively enact a felt sense of relevance between the reading of
literature and broader socio-political concerns, its reliance on the rhetorical figure of
83
Ibid., 145.
84
"Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes," 639; "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,
or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," 147.
33
prosopopoeia to effectuate this repair renders it chronically ambivalent. That is, even
as contextualization's prosopopoeia of the social evokes a feeling of connection
between individual encounters of reading and society at large, it cannot shake off the
vocative figure's founding artifice, in which the latter is known to be absent. If the
practice of contextualization enables us to feel relevant, we nevertheless return
compulsively to the scene of its prosopopoeic repair because this feeling necessarily
fails to be fully convincing. Likewise, the affective bargain that demystification
strikes, in which political disappointments get remediated into experiences of utopian
hope, cannot persist in perpetuity because its effectiveness is limited to a temporal
span in which total social transformation still appears to be imminent. Once we enter a
period of an extended political impasse, however, in which the possibility of political
revolution has almost completely receded, to persist in the same strategy of recoding
of failure as the promise of a success that is just around the corner is apt to provoke
cynicism rather than hope. Finally, if problematization disrupts others' pleasures as a
means of provoking an attunement of feeling that would provide the basis of a
renegotiation of contested norms, the time in which this intimate accord remains
possible is circumscribed by the provisionality of a problematizing judgment's
suspension of conceptual determination. Put simply, if what we judge as problematic
has not yet been definitively evaluated as racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and so
forth, the gap in which this benefit of the doubt has been extended is necessarily
ephemeral. If, over time, the practice of problematization fails to induce its
interlocutors to undertake the desired attunement of feeling, any further provocation
85
"Pedagogy of Buddhism," 180, 79.
34
via the disruption of others' pleasures is apt to polarize normative conflict rather than
lead to its resolution, as problematizers and problematized alike double down on
conflicting normative positions, rendering the prospect of any accord of aesthetic
feeling even more unlikely.
Throughout the foregoing account of the phenomenology of practice I have had
recourse to the vocabulary of the “scene,” especially when referring to the stylized,
affectively saturated interpretive encounters that critical practices repeatedly enact.
Having shown how Sedgwick’s meditations on her Buddhist practice renew our
understanding of critique’s motives and temporality, I wish to propose the “scene” as
another name for the interpretive outcomes that critical methods produce, one that
helps us to discern how the work of interpretation sustains our self-confirming
attachments to a given critical practice even when its means and ends no longer
converge. My use of the term draws from a number of different theoretical projects,
prime among them Lauren Berlant’s elucidation of optimistic attachment as involving
a “sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect
that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in
just the right way.”86 In Berlant’s usage, the scene of fantasy to which we repeatedly
return names an overdetermined tableau of objects and affects that keeps us in its
thrall by keeping alive the felt sense that some desired outcome remains possible – it
functions as “a cluster of promises magnetized by a thing that appears as an object but
is really a scene in the psychoanalytic sense.”87 Berlant’s project focuses specifically
on relations of cruel optimism, where the “object/scene that ignites a sense of
86
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
35
possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for
which a person or a people risks striving.”88 Cruel attachments not only work against
the fulfillment of the promises they magnetize and sustain, but are also characterized
by a self-validating formalism, in that the “pleasures of being inside a relation have
become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a
world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time,
profoundly confirming.”89
In proposing that we consider critical interpretations as “scenes” in Berlant’s
sense, I have in mind three specific ways that this vocabulary helps us to describe the
performative effectuality of our critical practices.90 First, as an object of attachment
that sustains its affective promises via the rhythms established by recursive return
(“this time”), the Berlantian scene lends itself to be operationalized as an accessory to
practice, whose temporality I have similarly described as characterized by habitual
repetition. As I will demonstrate in connection with Tomkins’s use of the term, the
fact that the “scene” names an affect-laden tableau of objects staged by the work of
interpretation recommends it as the privileged object of any analysis aiming to
understand why critique seem compelled to return repeatedly to the site of knowledges
that have become deeply familiar. Second, the distinction Berlant makes between
scenes and the promises they magnetize helps us to parse any desire for an
87
Ibid., 16.
88
Ibid., 2.
89
Ibid.
90
See also Berlant’s analysis of what she calls “the encounter of unconscious fantasy with the theatrical
or scenic structure of normative fantasy.” To undertake a scene-oriented reading of fantasy, as Berlant
does, is to understand it as a “space of desire” populated by “scenes, tableaux, episodes, and events,” a
“place where the subject encounters herself already negotiating the social.” Desire/Love (Brooklyn:
Punctum Books, 2012), 69, 75.
36
object/scene as transitive, in that the latter (“this thing”) has been fantasmatically
constituted as a medium through which a desired outcome can be attained (“different
in just the right way”). To return repeatedly to a scene, then, is always to sustain at
least two mutually reinforcing attachments – to the scene itself, and to the something
whose promise it sustains. Although in Cruel Optimism Berlant deploys the term to
indicate an object of analysis, the scene’s duplexity can equally be used to describe the
relations between critics, their political commitments, and their textual objects of
study, in that critical practices stage scenes/interpretations that mediate between critics
and the political desires invested therein.91 Confirming the viability of this line of
thinking in her writing after Cruel Optimism, Berlant has continued to elaborate the
scenic relation as descriptive of criticism’s orientation to its objects. Inviting us to “see
that an aesthetic encounter is a training in converting objects to scenes,’ Berlant
introduces a productive ambiguity into the term, where scenes are both immanent to
the aesthetic object (to the extent that we allow ourselves to be trained) and produced
by the critic (to the extent that we have been well-trained).92 If Berlant understands
criticism as the scenification of an aesthetic object such that it “organizes concepts,
becomes a pulsating question that produces speculation, historical narratives,
explanations, and more questions,” then her scenic idiom thus both accurately
characterizes critique’s ambitions, and helps us grasp interpretation as a vehicle of
fantasmatic investment: “We pretend that our objects have the qualities we see in
91
Robyn Wiegman describes the morphology of critical practices of identity knowledges in a similar
manner with her term “object relations,” which tracks “two levels of interdependence: between the
knower and the object of study s/he critically constitutes and investigates, and between the knower and
the political investment the critical pursuit is meant to sustain and confirm.” "The Times We're In:
Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative 'Turn'," 336.
37
them.”93 Last but not least, Berlant’s explication of cruel optimism’s formalism
(“sustaining regardless of the content of the relation”) employs the concept of the
psychoanalytic scene in a manner consonant with Sedgwick’s intuition concerning the
way in which the affect theories informing our critical practices can entrench us in
self-defeating feedback loops. In their heightened sensitivity to the affective formalism
of self-defeat, Berlant and Sedgwick read the pleasures of attachment and the
misrecognitions of fantasy as pragmatically motivated, rather than simply misguided.
As Berlant describes it, optimism “doesn’t just manifest an aim to become stupid or
simple – often the risk of attachment taken in its throes manifests an intelligence
beyond rational calculation.”94 Thus taken as part of a project to “deshame fantasmatic
attachment so as to encounter its operations as knowledge,” Berlant’s vocabulary of
the scene enables us to determine how the interpretations/scenes enacted by critical
practices sustain fantasmatic attachment, insofar as they stage tableaux of affects and
objects that we can parse for the promises they magnetize and the self-confirming
pleasures they enable.95
To be sure, the concept of scenification that Berlant mobilizes in Cruel
Optimism should be considered immanent to Sedgwick’s deployment of Tomkins’s
affect theory as well. Indeed, a vocabulary of the scene can be found in Tomkins’s
script theory, portions of which Sedgwick excerpts in the reader Shame and its Sisters.
Appearing in the third volume of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness nearly three decades
92
"Cruel Optimism, Becoming Event: A Response," http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/public-feelings-
salon-with-lauren-berlant.
93
Ibid., 3, 4.
94
Cruel Optimism, 2.
95
The phrase is Berlant’s, and occurs in the context of her description of Sedgwick’s mode of reading.
The essay was originally written for a festscrhift for Sedgwick. Ibid., 122.
38
after the publication of the first two volumes, Tomkins’s script theory “define[s] the
scene as the basic element of life as it is lived,” one that “includes at least one affect
and at least one object of that affect.”96 As the “basic unit of analysis,” scenes provide
the material from which individuals form “scripts,” which Tomkins theorizes as “sets
of ordering rules for the interpretation, evaluation, prediction, production, or control
of scenes.”97 Developed as a way to explain how cognition “connect[s] affective
moments with each other and thereby increase[s] the duration, coherence, and
continuity of affective experience,” Tomkins’s script theory bears a strong
resemblance to his earlier account of affect theory as an “ideo-affective organization”
comprising both a “cognitive antenna” for amplifying the components of an
experience relevant to a particular affect, as well as a ‘set of strategies” for managing
that affect.98 Although Tomkins does not make the connection explicit, it seems
certain that script theory updates the earlier theory of affect, updating it with a
vocabulary of scenes and scripts that names the analytic objects of which ideo-
affective organizations are comprised. Indeed, just as Tomkins’s earlier description of
affect theory took shame-humiliation as paradigmatic insofar as a monopolistic shame
theory grows stronger through repeated failures to prevent the experience of shame, in
his later script theory it is also the experience of repeated humiliation that he offers as
an instance in which a “negative affect nuclear script” gets produced out of a “long
history of failures to deal effectively with negative affect scenes.”99 Apart from the
rechristening of affect theories as affect scripts, this shift in terminology also marks an
96
Tomkins, 179.
97
Ibid., 180.
98
Ibid., 179, 66.
39
analytic advance, insofar as the term “scene” henceforth names an affect-laden
interpretation of an experience that has been restructured according to the parameters
furnished by an affect script.
To the extent that for Tomkins “scenes” thus name tableaux of objects and
affects that have been reassembled by interpretation, his use of the term converges
with Berlant’s understanding of the “scenification” criticism undertakes to restage the
objects of its aesthetic encounters. Moreover, in its tracking of the way an affect script
mobilizes the objects at hand to convene an interpretation/scene of a specific affective
experience, Tomkins’s script theory recalls his earlier theorization of “affect-object
reciprocity,” where the reciprocal interdependency of affects and objects produces a
“subjective restructuring of the object so that it possesses the imputed characteristic
which is capable of evoking that affect.”100 In the same way that Berlant understands
scenification as animated by a fantasmatic belief that objects possess the qualities we
invest in them, Tomkins describes how an affect script’s selective scanning and
interpretation “guarantees that objects are found or constructed.”101 Moreover, if
Berlant clarifies that “to misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto
something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities,”
Tomkins equally maintains that affect-object reciprocity “does not necessarily create
error,” but amplifies the affect-relevant dimensions of an experience by interpreting it
in a particular way: “There are many ways of ‘knowing’ anything.”102 Taken together,
Berlant’s and Tomkins’s vocabularies of the “scene” help us to describe the
99
Ibid., 187.
100
Ibid., 55.
101
Ibid.
40
interpretive “knowing” enacted by critical practices as the work of cultivating and
sustaining fantasmatic attachments. To describe critical interpretation as the
production of scenes of fantasy rather than objects of knowledge is thus to understand
how critical practices perform dramas of attachment, the allure of whose pleasures and
promises persist even when those attachments are demonstrably “cruel” in the
Berlantian sense of self-defeat.
“How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among
its causes and effects?”103 The detour I have charted through Berlant’s and Tomkins’s
theorizations of the scene represents an attempt to formalize an object of analysis – the
interpretation/scene that bears the freight of critique’s affective surplus over and
beyond the knowledge it claims to provide – that would enable us to answer Sedgwick
question and to track the performative effectuality of critical practice. Recalling the
topos of realization that Sedgwick gleans from her Buddhist practice, I propose that
the vocabulary of the scene I have assembled above gives us traction on her enigmatic
proposal for a realism grounded in the phenomenology of practice and affect rather
than in epistemic certainty. As Sedgwick remarks, to perceive the gap between
knowing and realizing is to project a different notion of the real: “reality not as what’s
true, but as what’s realized, what is or what has become real.”104 The connection
between this non-epistemic variant of realism and the phenomenology of practice can
be located, furthermore, in Sedgwick’s insight into the way Buddhist pedagogy
102
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 122; Tomkins, 55.
103
104
41
understands realization as a process involving “practices that take place over time.”105
Drawing together the different conceptual strands of performativity, practice, and
realization in Sedgwick’s writing, I argue that the interpretive “scene” constitutes the
medium of critique’s realization through practice. Indeed, the French verb “réaliser”
gives us an intuitive grasp of the conceptual affinity between realization and
performance, in that it traverses the semantic range of both the English sense of
“making real” as well as the domains of theatre and film, where it points to the
different order of reality actualized in a mise-en-scène.
Put another way, my suggestion is that by formalizing the interpretive “scene” to
which a given method of critique returns repeatedly, we can begin to discern the
performative effects that are progressively realized through its practice. Indeed, I posit
that this conceptual continuity between practice, performativity, and realization has
been immanent to Sedgwick’s thinking from the start, even though it was never
explicitly theorized as such. After all, if for Judith Butler the performativity of gender
“is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual,” and if “the substantive effect of
gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of
gender coherence,” then the discourses of practice and performativity have been
always been mutually imbricated, especially in the queer and deconstructive uses to
which Sedgwick was especially attuned.106 If the notion that gender’s substantiality
derives from the repetition of regulatory practices has become a critical commonplace,
105
Ibid., 209.
106
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1999), xv, 33, my emphasis. In his key contribution to practice theory, Theodore Schatzki cites Butler’s
notion of performativity as warrant for his conception of personhood as “an effect of social practices.”
See Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35, 46-7. 83-86.
42
then my suggestion that a phenomenological and affective substantiality characterizes
the interpretive scenes enacted through the regularity of critical practice should be
fairly uncontroversial as well. From contextualization's prosopopoeic repair to
demystification's messianic deferral and problematization's high-stakes plea for
intimate attunement – if critical practices seem difficult to let go of, it is because we
come to feel that there is so much more riding on the scenes they realize than the
knowledges they produce.
43
44
Feeling Relevant: Contextualization and the Vocation of Reading
For would I be interested in the object, could I stress concern for the
object, through the consideration of cause, genesis, or function, if I did
not expect, from within understanding, this something to “address”
itself to me? Is not the expectation of being spoken to what motivates
the concern for the object?
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy1
1. Context and the Desire for Relevance
In a fictional dialogue sandwiched between the two parts of Bruno Latour’s
Reassembling the Social, a professor of science studies attempts to disabuse a graduate
student of his belief in the methodological necessity of contextualization. As he does
elsewhere in this treatise on social theory, Latour undertakes here a polemic against
the default assumption that social scientists should aim to generate contextual
explanations for their observations, proposing instead an alternative he calls Actor
Network Theory (ANT), whose “main tenet is that actors themselves make everything,
including their own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own
metaphysics, even their own ontologies.”2 As Latour’s fictional proxy tells his hapless
graduate student, where social theorists who resort to contextual explanations end up
“saying that things are acting whose existence you can’t prove” and “confus[ing]
social theory with conspiracy theory,” ANT aims instead to describe social
assemblages with an empiricism that fully accounts for the diversity of actants
1
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1970), 29.
2
Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 147.
45
involved in their composition: “Deploy the content with all its connections and you
will have the context in addition.”3
What interests me about this exchange isn’t the methodological debate it stages,
which has in any case been rigged to guide readers to a foregone conclusion in which
ANT prevails. Rather, I begin with Latour’s dialogue because his fictional graduate
student’s bumbling rehearsal of contextualization’s shibboleths helps raise a
constellation of questions about method, affect, and the academic vocation that I wish
to explore here. Although the dialogue’s quasi-Socratic form frames the graduate
student’s habit of seeking contextual explanations as a misguided intellectual position
that need only be logically dismantled to make way for insight, it also points to a
kernel of extra-rational motives that animate his attachments to contextualizing
practices.4 More than just one methodological option among many, contextualization
names an array of practices that enable the student to inhabit a sense of vocation:
“That’s why I’m here at the school: to criticize the ideology of management, to
debunk the many myths of information technology, to gain a critical edge over all the
technical hype, the ideology of the market.”5 The sense of vocation that the practice of
contextualization actualizes for him indexes an affective motivation we can identify,
by recourse to a phrase that Latour eventually uses to describe the student, with the
wish to “make a difference” to society.6
3
Ibid., 150, 47.
4
I have written elsewhere about Latour’s fictional dialogue in connection with how generational
differences inflect our attachments to critique. See "We Have Never Been Critical," ARCADE |
Literature, the Humanities, & the World, http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/we-have-never-been-
critical.
5
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 51.
6
In his conclusion to Reassembling the Social, Latour writes: “The LSE student that was so puzzled by
ANT in the Interlude was right to strive for political relevance; so are all the young fellows who enter
46
In foregrounding this surplus of feeling that attaches to contextualization, my
intention isn’t to question its motives or to denigrate the desire for a “critical edge”
that it vehiculates. Rather, I wish to underscore how, in practice, methods of
contextualization do more than they say they do, magnetizing ambitions, desires, and
fantasies only incompletely assimilated to the explicit contents of scholarly argument.
Without directly engaging with questions concerning emotion or affect, Latour’s
dialogue nevertheless foregrounds how contextualizing practices feel in ways
irreducible to what they claim to know. This distinction, in turn, helps us to understand
how the desire for a sense of vocation, here bound up with a wish to make a difference
to society, can keep someone tethered to methodological practices that might actually
prove unhelpful for the actualization of these aims.7 That the feeling of difference-
making engendered by contextualizing practices can come unmoored from evidence of
the actual difference they do make is, I take it, part of Latour’s rhetorical aim in
having his fictional professor perform a pugnacious, hard-nosed realism about social
theory’s impact on the world: “Two hundred pages of interviews, observations, etc.
will not make any difference whatsoever. To be relevant requires another set of
extraordinary circumstances.”8
into departments of political science, science studies, women studies, and cultural studies to gain a
critical edge, to ‘make a difference’, and to render the world more livable” (259).
7
Latour is no affect theorist, but feelings and sensations do nevertheless crop up in Reassembling the
Social as barometers for distinguishing ANT from critical sociology, and for characterizing the
intellectual disposition appropriate to the former. Take for instance the phenomenological diction
Latour employs to recuperate constructivism for ANT: “Even more important, when you are guided to
any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be
different, or at least that they could still fail — a feeling never so deep when faced with the final
product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be” (89). See also Latour’s discussion of “the
sense of the social” and the “feeling for social connections” (159).
8
47
As the friction generated in the dialogue around the term “relevance” suggests,
the stakes of Latour’s methodological polemic are ultimately relational rather than
purely epistemological, having to do with the precise means by which the work done
by academic sociologists comes to be considered useful or valuable to society at large.
Relevance, by the professor’s standards, will require that his student “prove that your
description of what people do, when it comes back to them, does make a difference to
the way they were doing things.”9 The conception of relevance advanced here rests on
an empiricist realism – “just plain realism,” in the words of Latour’s fictional avatar –
where the relevance of a sociological account simply measures the concrete, traceable,
and thus “real” differences that it makes when it is added to the assemblage whose
network of connections it has sought to trace.10 For the fictional graduate student, in
contrast, relevance would entail “finding the hidden structure that explains the
behavior of those agents you thought were doing something but in fact are simply
placeholders for something else,” in order to “provide some reflexive understanding”
to people “too busy to think” and who “have no time to see” it.11 Because
contextualization posits virtual agencies whose causal relationship to other actors
cannot be empirically established, its version of relevance lacks reality, relying only a
fantasy in which society confirms the sociology’s relevance by gratefully acquiescing
to be enlightened by it. The student practitioner of contextualization may believe that
9
Ibid., 154.
10
Ibid., 148.
11
Ibid., 153, 52.
48
people “become more enlightened [….] thanks to me,” but as his professor points out,
in contextual explanations “actors […] make no difference whatsoever.”12
Despite the fictional professor’s forceful demonstration of the unreality of his
graduate student’s claims to relevance, however, his argument finally makes little
difference to the latter’s methodological habits. By the end of the conversation, his
student remains unwilling to relinquish contextual methods in favor of ANT: “I simply
can’t follow your advice too far.”13 Quite apart from Latour’s takedown of
contextualization’s relevance, the question his fictional conversation raises is the
following: how is it that someone can continue to experience contextualizing practices
as confirming his sense of sociology’s relevance in the face of empirical evidence to
the contrary? The fictional interlude at the heart of Latour’s methodological treatise
points to a certain affective reality, one impervious to arguments on the basis of
epistemic invalidity, that grounds the experience of “relevance” engendered by
practices of contextualization. Specifically, the graduate student’s intransigence
suggests how ANT’s empirical realism fails to overpower the subjectively felt
experience of relevance engendered by contextualizing practices – that is, the
profound sense they produce in their practitioner that there exists a connection
between sociology and society, even if it cannot be empirically traced. Even though an
actor-network account proves “really” relevant by the fictional professor’s definition,
for his student the practice of contextualization nevertheless continues to feel more
relevant.
12
Ibid., 154, 53.
13
Ibid., 156.
49
Inadvertently or not, the mise-en-scène of Latour’s dialogue ends up telling us
more about contextualization than Reassembling the Social explicitly addresses.
Indeed, there turns out to be a satisfying aptness to Latour’s theatrical staging of a
methodological debate, for it helps us perceive how specific enactments of a
methodological position—say, the quasi-Socratic ventriloquizing of a graduate
student—throw in relief the affectively-charged fantasies that it magnetizes. Even
more significantly, the staginess of Latour’s rhetorical gambit lends itself all the more
readily to confirming the inherently scenic effects of contextualizing practices. After
all, Latour pointedly describes context as a “panorama,” a “Big Picture” which is “just
that: a picture,” and which simply “show[s] an image painted (or projected) on the tiny
wall of a room fully closed to the outside.”14 Consider, too, the unmistakably theatrical
resonances in Latour’s declaration that when sociologists “pronounce the words
‘society,’ ‘power,’ ‘structure,’ and ‘context,’ they often jump straight to connect vast
arrays of life and history, to mobilize gigantic forces, to detect dramatic patterns
emerging out of confusing interactions, to see everywhere in the cases at hand yet
more examples of well-known types, to reveal behind the scenes some dark powers
pulling the strings.”15
Latour’s fictional dialogue helps set the stage for this chapter’s own effort to
describe the affective scene enacted by contextualizing practices in literary criticism –
that is, a reading of contexts as both the methodological instruments by which critics
set up the “Big Picture” that frames their readings of literary texts, and as a series of
tableaux whose affective structuration will help us to understand the attractions that
14
Ibid., 187.
50
contextual methods exert on literary critics. As my reading of Latour has already
begun to do, this chapter proposes to analyze contextualization’s scene as the place
where methodological practice meets affect, joining recent efforts by critics like Eve
Sedgwick and Rita Felski to generate vocabularies for describing the affective
phenomenology of our methods of reading. "To acknowledge the affective dimensions
of argument," as Felski recently pointed out, is "merely to acknowledge the obvious
[…] yet the role of such factors in the shaping of contemporary scholarship is rarely
acknowledged."16 Felski’s own accounts of the entanglement of method and mood
echo Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's description of paranoid reading and her efforts to
account for the performative effects of such interpretive practices by describing them
as strong theories of negative affects.17
Given that context can seem to refer to anything from a historical period to a
national tradition, a hermeneutical method or a branch of epistemology, Latour’s
centrality to this chapter’s understanding of contextualization also helps clarify the
scope of my argument. Although Bruce Holsinger suggests that "historical context as
an argument and a hermeneutical position has been with us for several millennia,”
this chapter focuses specifically on contextual methods that arose in the late 20th
century as a means to negotiate literature’s relationship to society.18 To be precise, the
distinction between context in the sense I intend here and the generally historicist
orientation Holsinger describes lies in the former’s preoccupation with theorizing the
15
Ibid., 32.
16
Felski, "Suspicious Minds," 219.
17
18
""Historical Context" in Historical Context: Surface, Depth, and the Making of the Text," New
Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 594, original emphasis.
51
causal agencies that determine the production and reception of literary texts.19 By
Latour’s account, what provokes us into seeking contextual explanations is the
intuition that “any given interaction seems to overflow with elements […] generated
by some other agency,” which leads us to posit “some virtual, total and always
preexisting entity” that shores up the contextual explanation.20 As the many virtual
agencies (power, ideology, language, etc.) that have populated literary criticism in
recent decades will readily attest, our contextualizing practices spring from a similar
intuition, conducing to the same theoretical impasses that Latour observes in social
theory. Therefore, although other methods like philology or traditional historicism
might be considered “contextualisms” in today’s parlance, their relative disinterest in
positing an abstract, virtual cause as a way to grapple with the overflow of agencies
leaves them outside the purview of this chapter’s account of contextualization.21
This chapter isolates contextualization from the overall constellation of critical
practices that together constitute late 20th century “reading” as such, in order to better
highlight how contextualizing practices triangulate a reader’s felt relationship to
society through the medium of literature. In later chapters I will attend in greater detail
to other critical practices consequent upon initial protocols of contextualization, but
19
As Felski writes in her contribution to a special issue of New Literary History devoted to the problem
of contextualization, the difficulty of context doesn’t just have to do with its historicist bias, but lies in
“tacit beliefs about agency, causality, and control” that ultimately “inveigl[e] us into endless reiterations
of the same dichotomies: text versus context, word versus world, literature versus society and history,
internalist versus externalist explanations of works of art. "Context Stinks!," ibid.: 582, 76.
20
21
It is also worth noting here the relative novelty of our contemporary understanding of “context.”
Consider, for instance, that well into the mid 1970s literary scholars understood the word as referring to
the closed totality of the autonomous literary object, and “contextualism" named the method of
hermetic formalism associated with the New Critics. As late as 1975, Edward Wasiolek described, in
“Wanted: A New Contextualism,” the New Critics as practicing a "differentiating contextualism [that]
always moved in the direction of excluding more and more on the grounds of some irrelevance to an
52
here I focus exclusively on the latter because they tell us how literary critics grasp,
theoretically but also affectively and imaginatively, the relationship between the
literary field and society as a whole. Without wishing to perpetuate a conception of
“society” that Latour would consider a “premature assemblage” whose associations
have not been traced, I use the terms “society” and “social” in this chapter
descriptively rather than prescriptively.22 That is, I employ them of necessity to track
how contextualization’s premature, virtual unification of an abstract society functions
not only to reduce the complexity of its causal account of literary phenomena, but also
to negotiate the familiar problem of relevance: the gap between word and world, the
question of what literary and literary criticism “do,” and why they matter. To the
extent that the other critical practices I take up in this dissertation adumbrate different
claims for literature’s social importance, contextualization refers to the practice by
which readers “feel out” the relationship between literature and the “Big Picture” of
society in the first place. This supplies an additional justification for my employment
of Latour’s discussions of social theory as a touchstone for debates in literary
criticism, in that our contextualizing practices might be thought of as constituting the
preeminently socio-theoretical component of literary studies.23
unattainable purity of poetic structure” "Wanted: A New Contextualism," Critical Inquiry 1, no. 3
(1975): 627.
22
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 171.
23
I am not the first to make the connection between literary criticism and Latour’s polemic against
contextualization in social theory: see Felski, "Context Stinks!.". In addition, although Latour’s primary
concern is with social theory, in Reassembling the Social literature informs his understanding of
sociological method in interesting ways. On this, see Sianne Ngai, "Network Aesthetics: Julaina Spahr's
the Transformation and Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social " in American Literature's Aesthetic
Dimensions, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012).
53
Building on Sedgwick’s and Felski’s ground-clearing efforts to describe how
methods feel, this chapter argues that contextualizing practices deploy a paranoid
aesthetic in order to stabilize a relational structure of relevance. My suggestion that
contextualization relies on the aesthetic effects of paranoia will perhaps comes as no
surprise, given not only Sedgwick’s influential account of paranoid reading, but also
the fact that Latour repeatedly compares contextual explanations to conspiracy
theories.24 I further contend, however, that to name contextualization’s paranoid
aesthetic is only to tell a partial story, for it would not yet fully account for the
performativity of the feelings (fear, anxiety, victimization, and so forth) it engenders.
In order to describe what contextualizing practices achieve by the habitual, routinized
evocation of such negative feelings, this chapter describes how contextualization
enacts affective scenes of “prosopopoeic repair,” where paranoid feelings of social
victimization come to be experienced by readers as a pleasurable, self-confirming
sensation of being called on by society to take up the vocation of reading. Although
paradoxical at first glance, this argument shows how the affective scene staged by the
paranoid aesthetic, by allowing readers to inhabit a sense of “being part of something
bigger,” in fact satisfies our desire for an experience of literature’s singular importance
and connectedness to society. Indeed, if acts of interpretation presuppose an
expectation of our being spoken to by our objects, as my epigraph from Paul Ricoeur
suggests, then this chapter argues that contextualizing practices articulate an even
more ambitious desire to be personally addressed by society as such. From the New
Historicism’s desire to speak with the dead to the Althusserian scene of interpellation
24
See Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 49n47, 53, 150.
54
central to Marxist ideology critique, I show how the fictions of address that undergird
these contextualizing practices enact scenes of prospopoeic repair that engender a felt
sense of literature’s relevance to society.
Although the account I develop in this chapter cuts across diverse strains of late
20th century literary interpretation, to avoid getting mired in theoretical hair splitting I
will focus here on just two cases that will prove exemplary: Roland Barthes's
Mythologies and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism. First published in 1957, Barthes's
theorization of myth may seem a peculiar choice, given that it doesn’t fit neatly into
any one genealogy of the major schools of literary interpretation consolidated from the
1970s onwards. Although Mythologies predates these later developments, however, I
suggest that it also uncannily prefigures them. Barthes's theorization of the
mythologist’s interpretive task develops methodological features that would become
characteristic of later critical traditions – the critique of bourgeois ideology central to
Marxist criticism, the wide-ranging engagement with non-literary and non-canonical
cultural objects that took pride of place in Cultural Studies and the New Historicism,
as well as the structuralist semiotics that Deconstruction would later extend and
complicate. As a hybrid precursor to the dominant methods literary criticism in the
latter half of the 20th century, Mythologies provides us with an opportunity to examine
contextualization’s structures of fantasy at a moment just prior to their consolidation
into normative practice.
Where Barthes's Mythologies explicitly foregrounds the prosopopoeic desire that
fuels its paranoid contextual method, Postmodernism provides this chapter’s second
and usefully counter-intuitive case study. Counter-intuitive, because Postmodernism
55
advances a sophisticated reading of paranoia as disclosing the impossibility of
totalization under the conditions of postmodernity – “totality” functioning here as a
philosophically-freighted term for the über-contextualization native to Jameson’s
Marxist dialectical method.25 By diagnosing the cultural ubiquity of paranoia as a
symptom of our epistemological inability to grasp the totality of global capitalism,
Jameson’s account may seem at first to oppose paranoia to contextualization and thus
preclude my efforts to demonstrate their mutual imbrication. However, my reading of
Postmodernism argues that the aesthetic of cognitive mapping Jameson proposes as an
alternative doesn’t so much negate paranoia as perfect its ambitions, dialectically
overcoming his own thesis of postmodernity’s constitutive imperviousness to
totalizing contextualization. Moreover, because Jameson’s routes his account of our
incapacity for totalizing knowledge of the system of global capitalism through the
Kantian analytic of the sublime, my reading of his debt to the Critique of Judgment
will foreground how Kant’s notion of purposiveness informs the prosopopoeic fantasy
at the heart of the former’s own contextualizing practices. In its apparent dismissal of
paranoia and its conviction in the impossibility of contextualization, Jameson’s
25
Jameson’s notion of totality refers to the vantage point from which the contingent experiences of
individual subjects can be understood as parts of a total process, or, as he writes in The Political
Unconscious, “grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot” that is the History (with a
capital H) of class struggle. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 20. See also Jameson’s discussion, in Marxism and Form, of Lukács’s
History and Class Consciousness, where totalizing knowledge is that by which “the subjectivity of men
can now be seen as the product of the same social forces that create commodities and ultimately the
entire reality of the world in which men live. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical
Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 188. Although Jameson employs a
number of different totalizing terms throughout his vast oeuvre (History, Capital, Class Consciousness),
there can be no doubt that his dialectical method amounts to a contextualizing practice of the most
rigorous sort, intended to subsume all other (individual, literary, social) contexts under its own
totalizing banner. Describing the epistemological shock produced by Marxist literary criticism, he
writes: “such a shock is constitutive of and inseparable from dialectical thinking, as the mark of an
abrupt shift to higher level of consciousness, to a larger context of being.” Ibid., 375, my emphasis.
56
Postmodernism represents a limit case in the testing of my hypotheses about the
relational experience of relevance enabled by the scenes of prosopopoeic repair
enacted via contextualization’s paranoid aesthetic.
In both instances, my engagements with Barthes and Jameson demonstrate how
the paranoid feelings produced and circulated by their contextualizing practices
stabilize a prosopopoeic fantasy in which society calls out to be read. Drawing out the
etymological roots of vocation in vocative address, I take up the implied connection
between contextual methods and the sense of vocation at which Latour’s fictional
dialogue hinted but did not elucidate, and propose that the distinct attractiveness of
contextualizing practices lies in their evocation of prosopopoeic calling. The
explanation I offer for the compelling hold that contextualization has hitherto exerted
on literary criticism looks beyond the knowledge claims it underwrites, focusing
instead on how the scenes of vocative address they enact enable us to experience the
reading of literature as a vocation – that is, as a socially-mandated calling. Given that
this experience of reading’s social relevance is a pleasurable, positive, and thus
sought-after one, despite its rootedness in the negative feelings generated by the
paranoid aesthetic, my efforts to describe the emotional habitus of contextualization
proposes a very different explanation of paranoia’s motives than that found in
Sedgwick’s essay.
Employing Silvan Tomkins’ account of affect theory, Sedgwick intuits that
paranoid reading seeks to forestall pain, in that it presumptively assumes the
victimhood that it fears in order not to experience this latter as a surprise. Where
Sedgwick explicates paranoia’s affective instrumentality in terms of its aversions, I
57
redirect our attention instead to an examination of its attachments.26 That is, despite
the truth to Sedgwick’s suggestion that paranoid reading’s stranglehold on literary
criticism has something to do with its tautological strategy of avoiding negative affect
by anticipating it, I would argue that any insight into our attachments to an interpretive
practice should also require an understanding of such practices as vehicles of
attachment. What I propose here is more than a semantic reformulation of Sedgwick’s
thesis, where one simply reframes the aversion to pain as something like an
attachment to being pain-free. Instead, I consider paranoia as a vital clue to
contextualization’s aesthetic gratifications, rather in the same way Felski describes the
pleasures associated with the hermeneutics of suspicion by comparing its protocols to
the narratology of the traditional detective novel.27
Following Felski’s lead, I propose in this chapter a reading of Thomas
Pynchon’s famously paranoid narrative The Crying of Lot 49 as especially
demonstrative of the unique pleasures enabled by such an aesthetic. That Pynchon has
consistently mined the aesthetics of paranoia throughout his literary career from V to
Inherent Vice needs no further elaboration. I have specifically selected Lot 49 as a
centerpiece to this chapter’s description of contextualization, however, because the
novel dramatizes paranoia as a set of feelings preeminently associated with reading.
To be sure, the massive cast of characters in Pynchon’s oeuvre includes other paranoid
readers like V’s Herbert Stencil or Gravity’s Rainbow’s Oberst Enzian, but it is Oedipa
26
This Essay Is About You," 132. The vocabulary of attachment I employ here borrows from Lauren
Berlant's understanding of the term as a "structure of relationality," to which varied affects and
emotions adhere depending on the specific situations in which this structure emerges. Cruel Optimism,
13.
27
Felski, "Suspicious Minds."
58
Maas who, having graduated as an English major from Cornell at roughly the same
time as her creator, uniquely captures paranoia’s significance for the practices of
reading routinized in the academic study of literature.28 As Mark McGurl has pointed
out in The Program Era, moreover, Lot 49’s powerful reflexivity owes not only to its
famed metafictionality, but also to its institutionalization as Pynchon’s most
frequently taught novel.29 If Lot 49 qualifies to serve as this chapter’s privileged
literary case study for illuminating the forms and pleasures of contextualization’s
paranoid aesthetic, it is because of the central role this novel has played in yoking
together the contemporary experience of reading literature with paranoid affect in the
imaginations of generations of college undergraduates.
Although critics have tended to interpret Oedipa’s quest for the Tristero in
epistemological or ontological terms, emphasizing her inability to either ascertain the
its existence or to base such a determination on any firm cognitive ground, it is
paranoia’s relational dimension that my reading of Lot 49 emphasizes. I propose, in
effect, readers of Lot 49 who fixate on Oedipa’s paranoid thesis about the empirical
existence or non-existence of a Tristero conspiracy commit the same mistake that
28
At least since Frank Kermode’s early observation that Oedipa’s efforts to make sense of the Tristero
are “very like reading a book,” it has become a commonplace to read her investigations as a
metafictional allegory of the reading experience that the novel itself provides. "Decoding the Trystero,"
in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1978), 163. For other interpretations of the novel that engage with Oedipa’s role as a reader, see Chris
Hall, "“Behind the Hieroglyphic Streets”: Pynchon's Oedipa Maas and the Dialectics of Reading,"
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33, no. 1 (1991); Edward Mendelson, "The Sacred, the
Profane, and the Crying of Lot 49," in Pynchon : A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward
Mendelson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978); Kristin L. Matthews, "Reading America Reading
in Thomas Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49," Arizona Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2012).
29
McGurl writes: “Strictly regulating the commerce between the reader and the third person narrator
who might (in theory) have solved the mystery of the Tristero rather than letting it ride, Pynchon
aligned the experience of untold thousands of college students who have tried to understand The Crying
of Lot 49 with an English major protagonist who is doing much the same thing” The Program Era:
Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 191.
59
Latour’s fictional professor makes in his efforts to undermine his student’s contextual
explanations, neglecting to consider how the reality of the affective experience
enabled by a virtual agency exceeds questions of the latter’s reality or unreality. As a
university-trained English major who finds that her literary education has become
wildly irrelevant to the politically tumultuous 1960s, Oedipa clings to the raft of her
paranoia, in my reading, because it enables her to experience the activity of reading as
a medium through which she receives society’s secret and privileged communications.
Refracting Pynchon’s narrative through Lauren Berlant’s recent account of novelistic
historicism as affective epistemology, my reading of Lot 49 demonstrates that its
paranoid aesthetic performs a prosopopoeia of the social in the same way that it does
in Barthes's and Jameson’s contextual methods. Where my treatment of these critical
texts focuses on how context gets theorized, my analysis of Lot 49 sheds light on the
narratology and poetics of context, showing how the novel’s thematization of entropy,
communication, and its moments of second-person address together provoke in
readers a pleasurably self-confirming feeling of being personally addressed by society.
In light of this chapter’s account of context, my engagement with Lot 49 also has a
demonstrative aspect – suspending the impulse to contextualize Pynchon’s novel, I
show instead how the narrative is itself preoccupied with literature’s contexts and
relevance to society.
2. “In Feeling if Not in Method”: Reading and the Prosopopoeia of the Social
"I began with the desire to speak with the dead" – thus reads the famous opening
line of Shakespearean Negotiations, in which Stephen Greenblatt professed the
60
ambition that would come to define the New Historicism.30 Even though Greenblatt
"knew that the dead could not speak," even when he "came to understand that in [his]
most intense moments of straining to listen all [he] could hear was [his] own voice,"
he nevertheless maintains that the "textual traces" of the dead "make themselves heard
in the voices of the living." In its staging of an echo that returns the critic’s own voice
as the voice of the dead, the imaginary dialogue that inaugurates Greenblatt’s
interpretive method rests on the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia – a self-consciously
fictional enactment of vocative address in which the long-dead past appears to speak
to the New Historicist reader. Far from invalidating the New Historicism's purchase on
literary interpretation, for Greenblatt this enabling prosopopoeic fiction in fact
underscores all the more the method’s affinity to literature, whose characteristic
“formal, self-conscious miming of life" reflects and validates the critic's own
"tend[ency] to find more intensity in simulations."31
Greenblatt is hardly the only scholar in the recent history of literary criticism to
inaugurate his interpretive method with a prosopopoeic simulation. Consider, for
instance, Fredric Jameson’s no less necromantic vision in his introduction to The
Political Unconscious, where the Odysseus-like Marxist literary critic reanimates a
cultural past that, "like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and
warmth and allowed once more to speak."32 Less concerned with listening to the dead
speak than with evoking the omnipresent injunctions of social discipline, Greenblatt's
30
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 1.
31
Ibid.
32
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 19.
61
fellow New Historicist D. A. Miller opens The Novel and the Police with ”But
Officer…,” a preface whose performance of calculated reticence frames his readings
of Victorian novels as canny alibis elicited under interrogation by an agent of
disciplinary power.33 Moreover, although Miller looks to the work of Michel Foucault
for his theoretical bearings, the arresting interpellation that occasions his preface
recalls that other influential hailing ("Hey, you there!") in Louis Althusser’s essay
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," the self-described piece of “little
theoretical theater” whose monumental importance for literary studies comes down to
us through Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey.34
That so many of the most influential literary critics of the late 20th century
should have set the stage for their readings with prosopopoeia is perhaps not entirely
surprising, given Paul de Man's description of the trope as not only "the master trope
of poetic discourse" but also "the very figure of the reader and reading."35 Dilating on
the etymology of prosopopoeia ("prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face"), de
Man reveals the inescapably tropological process by which all readings confer a mask,
face, and voice to an otherwise mute linguistic system that represents, but does not
coincide, with things themselves.36 On the face of it, de Man's deconstruction of
reading's inevitable prosopopoeia may seem to undercut the personifiying vocatives
with which other critics figure their interpretive methods. Given that the hallmark of
33
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), vi.
34
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other
Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), 162-3, 74. For Terry Eagleton’s assimilation of Althusser to
literary theory, see Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd Edition ed. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 148-5.
35
Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading," Diacritics 11, no.
4 (1981): 33, 31.
62
deconstruction was to demonstrate how texts inevitably fail to practice what they
preach, however, I think it rather affirms de Man’s argument to point out that, in
exposing reading’s inescapably tropological constitution of voice, he cannot help but
give voice to the mute and impersonal linguistic system as well37. Referring
ominously to “the coercions of this system,” de Man endows it with an oppressively
agential, if not entirely human form, warning that “we reenter a system of tropes at the
very moment we claim to escape from it."38 Far from undermining his New Historicist
and Marxist colleagues' competing invocations of Power, Ideology, and History,
therefore, de Man's rhetorical criticism throws Language into the ring.39
Staging a dialogic encounter between a reader and the virtual, abstract agency
that literature will then, in the final instance, be demonstrated to be about, these
prosopopoeias figure the contextualizing practice unique to each critic’s interpretive
method. In comparing these scenes of contextualization, I don’t mean to imply that
36
"Autobiography as De-Facement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), 76.
37
In de Man’s deconstruction of human voice into inhuman trope, it is tropology all the way down. The
deconstructive critic himself can never speak of voice at the zero degree of tropology – that is, without
being reassumed into the tropological system: “The term voice, even when used in a grammatical
terminology as when we speak of the passive or interrogative voice, is, of course, a metaphor inferring
by analogy the intent of the subject from the structure of the predicate.” Allegories of Reading: Figural
Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 18.
38
"Autobiography as De-Facement," 71, 72. De Man elsewhere writes of the “figurative power of
language” and the “powerfully coercive” figure of metaphor.” "The Epistemology of Metaphor,"
Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 15, 19. Amy Hungerford has also observed that deconstruction’s (de
Man’s, J. Hillis Miller’s, and Jacques Derrida’s) “ways of characterizing literary language have invited
readers to understand language as itself personified to the degree that it is endowed with autonomy,
consciousness, and mortality.” Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and
Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 65.
39
That de Man’s antihumanist preoccupation with mechanical structures of language lends itself to the
reconfiguration, rather than exclusion, of “humanist” social and political concerns can be seen from the
way the vocative relation between self and Other has enabled his students’ feminist and postcolonial
projects. I am thinking here, amongst other examples, of the work of Barbara Johnson and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. See Barbara Johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," Diacritics 16, no. 1
(1986); Persons and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gayatri Chakravorty
63
scholars working in different theoretical traditions necessarily shared a common
definition of context. Indeed, one of the major fault-lines in literary criticism of the
latter half of the twentieth century runs precisely through fraught disagreements about
context’s totalizing or non-totalizing character, its essential textuality or ontological
reality hors-texte, its immanence or externality to the literary text, and so on.
Nevertheless, these prosopopoeias that crop up repeatedly across different critics’
contextualizing practices invite us to consider what they do share, which is a
preoccupation with establishing the relationship between the act of reading and the
world that lies outside the literary text. As recent reflections on our methods of
reading have been wont to emphasize, the affective range of these relations has been
overwhelmingly negative.40 This would seem to be an inevitable outcome of
contextualizing practices founded on paranoid evocations of hostile and threatening
social forces: if the aim of reading were in fact to bring us to an awareness that we
truly inhabit a panoptic, carceral society or an asphyxiating world capitalist system,
then it seems to go without saying that our feelings about society would be fearful,
angry, defensive, aggressive, and so on.
Yet as Greenblatt’s prosopopoeic gambit renders especially explicit, these
contextualizing practices don’t just theorize the social world beyond literature, but
also voice a desire for it. At first blush, it may seem incongruous to speak of literary
criticism’s desire for society: critics may wish to understand, intervene in, act on, and
above all critique social structures in liberatory and utopian ways through our reading
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
64
practices, but it seems unthinkable that we would treat society as an object of
attachment, much less wish to be desired by it. However, the possibility that the
negative feelings propagated by some of our reading practices might lead us to
misrecognize relational desire has in fact been immanent to Sedgwick’s account of
paranoid reading all along, given her enigmatic suggestion that "paranoia is of all
forms of love … the most ascetic, the love that demands least from its object."41
Indeed, the intuition that paranoia might be rooted in love harks back to Sigmund
Freud, whose account of its symptom formation through projection showed how the
paranoid’s experience of external persecution vehiculates his unacknowledged desires,
which undergo a "transformation of affect" such that "what should have been felt
internally as love is perceived externally as hate."42
By foregrounding the prosopopoeic effects consequent upon the paranoid
aesthetic, I intend to show how contextualizing practices express a hitherto
misrecognized wish for literature and the reading of literature to be intimately
connected to, part of, and thus relevant to society. Such a hypothesis naturally raises
questions about the conditions that prevent this desire from speaking its name, and I
will return to these inquiries at the end of this section. For now, though, I turn my
attention to a reading of Mythologies, where I demonstrate how Barthes's
contextualizing practice enacts a prosopopoeia of the social, imaginatively sustaining
the mythologist’s sense of vocation by stabilizing a fantasy in which bourgeois society
40
In addition to Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid reading, see also Best and Marcus; Felski, "Suspicious
Minds."
41
42
Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, 1st Touchstone
Paperback ed. (New York: Touchstone, 2008), 19.
65
calls out to be read specifically by him. As will become clear, Barthes's deployment of
bourgeois ideology as a social context bears out Sedgwick’s intuition that paranoia
harbors an ascetic love for its object, enacting a fantasy of persecution that
paradoxically secures the intimacy of that relation. The scene of context, I argue, turns
out to be a scene of unrequited love. My reading of Barthes will also suggest how
contextualization’s impoverished expression of love sheds new light on a longstanding
problem in late 20th century critical theory, namely: how do we advance a critique of
that of which we still wish to be a part of, and connected to? From Althusser to
Butler, theorists of ideological subjection have recommended the sacrifice of such
desires to the imperatives of critical distance and autonomy, but, as the example of
Mythologies will help illuminate, such desires remain embedded in the rhetoric of
contextualizing practices, which persistently attempts to effect a prosopopoeic repair
of the rift between society and the reading subject.
In Mythologies, Roland Barthes advances a method of interpretation organized
around the concept of “myth.” Borrowing from the semiology delineated in Ferdinand
de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, Barthes theorizes myth as a second-order
semiological system that appropriates the complex and contingent history of other
signs in order to naturalize ideological concepts. Most famously in the essay “Myth
Today,” Barthes demonstrates how by force of myth, the ideology of French
imperialism hijacks a picture of a young Negro in a French uniform saluting the
tricolor on the cover of Paris-Match. Alongside the picture’s first-order meaning (“a
black soldier is giving the French salute”) there exists a “greater semiological system”
that issues a naturalized apologia for the racist and colonial ideology of French
66
imperialism.43 Feeding parasitically on the obviousness of the picture’s literal
meaning, myth turns the first-order sign into a second-order signifier for the concept
of French imperialism, “the motivation which causes the myth to be uttered.”44 In
Barthes's account, myth “transforms history into nature” by deliberately “glossing
over” an “intentional concept” like French imperialism, naturalizes what was in fact
historical and determined, and thus enables it to look innocent of the nefarious
ideological motivations it actually harbors.45
Given that Barthes's account of the mythologist’s task posits myth as the
omnipresent medium through which bourgeois ideology speaks, Mythologies
undertakes a contextualizing practice in precisely the sense I track in this chapter.
Myth, for Barthes, names the substance of an “anonymous ideology” in which
everything is “steeped,” and thus posits that ideology as the all-encompassing context
of cultural interpretation in which the Barthesian mythologist operates.46 The
semiology of myth, as Barthes asserts, “is exactly that of bourgeois ideology,” and if
“society is objectively the privileged field of mythical significations, it is because
formally myth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which
defines this society.”47As the readable substrate of an ideological system that saturates
every aspect of social life, myth props up Barthes's deployment of bourgeois ideology
as the primary explanatory context for a diverse array of cultural phenomena. Such a
contextualizing practice enables virtuosic readings in which the mythologist reveals a
43
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 116.
44
Ibid., 118.
45
Ibid., 129.
46
Ibid., 140.
47
Ibid., 142.
67
social field completely determined by bourgeois ideology, where every aspect of our
lives turns out to be “dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and
makes us have of the relations between man and the world.”48
In its preoccupation with revealing the naturalization of bourgeois class interests
and with uncovering the nefarious motivations glossed over by mythic signification,
Barthes's contextualizing practice owes much of its persuasive force to the aesthetics
of paranoia. Indeed, the affective response provoked by Barthes's mythological
readings resemble the sensorial environment associated with the “body snatcher” trope
beloved of the horror genre, where we are induced to suspect that the objects
populating our environment have all been replaced by vampiric, zombie-making, alien
duplicates: Myth not only “invade[s]” meaning, but also “goes around it, and carries it
away bodily;” it is a “language which does not want to die: it wrests from the
meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in
them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking
corpses.”49 Although Barthes's mythology aims to strip away the bourgeoisie’s
ideological representations of its own interests, his account of reality takes on the no-
less representational aesthetic of paranoia that paints the social field as saturated by
bourgeois ideology’s hostile intentions.
A defensive, paranoid reader confronting a dangerous social field monopolized
by the bourgeoisie’s hostile intentions: the mythologist’s relationship to the society
appears far too obvious for us to need to probe any further. Yet a different
understanding of what Barthes's contextual method feels like in practice begins to
48
Ibid., 140.
68
emerge when foreground the prosopopoeic effects of its paranoid aesthetic. The
relationship between paranoia and prosopopoeia should hardly be considered
incidental or unique to Mythologies, and the analogy I have already drawn between
Barthes’ diction and the perceptual effects of the “body snatcher” trope will further
establish that connection.50 Consider, for instance, the striking resemblance between
the language Barthes uses to describe myth and the premise of Philip K. Dick’s short
story “Colony,” where the Terran colonists on Planet Blue confront an insidious alien
life form whose propensity for inspiring terror lies in its ability to perfectly imitate
inorganic objects in order to then attack and devour its unsuspecting human victims.51
As the colonists discover to their horror that microscopes, floor mats, gloves, and
finally an entire spacecraft turn out to be man-eating alien duplicates, the paranoid
feelings evoked by the narrative set up an intensely proposopopoeic environment, in
which the aliens’ mimicry forces both colonists and readers alike to vest every
inanimate object in the narrative world with potentially murderous intentions.
Keeping in mind the paranoid aesthetic’s prosopopoeic performativity that
Dick’s “Colony” helps us to register, I want to suggest how a similar rhetorical effect
proves crucially important to the contextualization that Mythologies puts in practice.
49
Ibid., 133.
50
Beyond the resonances supplied by Dick’s story, we can also trace the connections between paranoia
and prosopopoeia through other routes. Indeed, Culler’s perceptive analysis of the vocative figure
intuits how prosopopoeia is always already at the brink of paranoia, in that its efforts to “establish
relations between the self and the other can […] be read as an act of radical interiorization and
solipsism,” for it either “parcels out the self to fill the world, peopling the universe with fragments of
self [….] or else it internalizes what might have been thought external. To the extent that paranoia
contains a “subjective/objective oscillation in its basic structure,” as Sianne Ngai puts it, it is easy to
see how prosopopoeia amplifies the paranoid subject’s feelings of undecidability between
hallucinations and true knowledge of the object world: “Is the enemy out there or in me?” Jonathan
Culler, "Apostrophe," in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Cornell: Cornell
University Press, 2002), 146; Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 19.
51
Philip K. Dick, "Colony," Galaxy Science Fiction 6, no. 3 (1953).
69
In a particularly evocative moment in “Myth Today,” Barthes imagines taking a stroll
through the streets of Paris, during which he catches a glimpse of a home decked with
architectural accents and features suggestive of the style native to the Basque country
in Spain. Confronted with this seemingly innocuous building, “a natty white chalet
with red tiles, dark brown half-timbering, an asymmetrical roof and a wattle-and-daub
front,” Barthes describes his reaction thus:
I feel as if I were personally receiving an imperious injunction to name this
object a Basque chalet: or even better, to see it as the very essence of basquity.
This is because the concept appears to me in all its appropriative nature: it comes
and seeks me out in order to oblige me to acknowledge the body of intentions
which have motivated it and arranged it there as the signal of an individual
history, as a confidence and a complicity: it is a real call, which the owners of
the chalet send out to me.52
Consonant with his readings elsewhere in Mythologies, Barthes's critique of the
Basque chalet concerns the way myth appropriates a first-order meaning in order to
naturalize bourgeois ideology: here, “the Basque house as a definite ethnic product”
with “a very wide history” gets emptied of its historical specificity in order to function
as a naturalized, second-order sign for the bourgeois taste for “basquity.”53 This
unlikely vision of a bullying architectural oddity chasing one down Rue Jean-Jaurès,
insisting on being obliged and acknowledged, would fit right into Dick’s cast of man-
eating alien life forms on Planet Blue, had Barthes not specified that “the essential
52
Barthes, 124-5.
53
Ibid., 124.
70
enemy” in this case bears the name of bourgeois ideology.54 In an uncanny
prefiguration of the scene of ideological interpellation that Louis Althusser would
describe nearly a decade and a half later, Barthes describes his experience of ideology
as an “interpellant speech” that is also “a kind of arrest” – except that this speech has
been addressed to him in the prosopopoeic mode by an anthropomorphized chalet
rather than a policeman.55
Barthes's word for the experience of being personally hailed by bourgeois
ideology through the vehicle of an inanimate building is “adhomination.” At first
glance, adhomination appears to name an affective sensation that doesn’t ground any
epistemological determination of its object, and which in fact permits only a
subjective, aesthetic judgment: “I feel as if.”56 Yet it is on this sensation of
adhomination – of being imperiously and personally enjoined, obliged, called out to,
sought out – that Barthes predicates the mythologist’s project of ideology critique,
since it functions as his surest litmus test for detecting the presence of myth. For the
purposes of contrast, when confronted with the absence of myth in a Basque house
located in its native setting, Barthes “do[es] not feel personally concerned, nor, so to
speak, attacked by this unitary style [….] it does not call out to me, it does not provoke
me into naming it.”57 “Myth,” Barthes insists, “has an imperative, buttonholing
character […] it is I whom it has come to seek. It is turned towards me, I am subjected
to its intentional force, it summons me to receive its expansive ambiguity.”58 Before
54
Ibid., 9.
55
Ibid., 125.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid., 124.
58
Ibid.
71
the mythologist’s ideological critique can get off the ground, he only intuits that he is
in the presence of myth by sensing the force of its personal summons. No feeling, no
mythology.
Although the mythologist’s experience of adhomination initially rests only on a
prosopopoeic “as if,” his readings eventually seek to prove the actual presence of a
hostile and threatening agency that issues this arresting interpellation. In Barthes's
account, “all the materials of myth […] presuppose a signifying consciousness,” and
the “concept” that parasitically absorbs the signs it mobilizes for its purposes
“reconstitutes a chain of causes and effects, motives, and intentions.”59 Confronting
myths in which “things appear to mean something by themselves,” the mythologist
exposes what is “contingent, historical” – the “body of intentions” that engineers the
mythic signification.60 For Barthes, “motivation is necessary to the very duplicity of
myth […] there is no myth without motivated form.”61 The prosopopoeia that induces
the mythologist’s feelings of being personally targeted and addressed, as when Barthes
writes of an “adhomination […] so frank” that he “feel[s] this chalet has just been
created on the spot, for me,” thus prefigures the ideological intentions whose existence
the mythologist will later confirm in his reading.62
That Barthes's ideology critique finally collapses the difference between the
thesis of ideological subordination and the fiction of an “as if” not only foregrounds
the former’s contingent basis in the felt experience of adhomination, but also reveals
the structure of fantasy at work in the prosopopoeia that inaugurates the mythologist’s
59
Ibid., 110, 19.
60
Ibid., 143.
61
Ibid., 126.
72
interpretive task. Taking up Barbara Johnson’s reading of apostrophe, Lauren Berlant
has revealed how the trope represents “an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but
phenomenologically vitalizing movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects
to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic
space of others, the objects of desire who make you possible.”63 To parse Berlant’s
complex formulation for our purposes here, what apostrophe’s rhetorical performance
of vocative address enacts is an affectively felt (“phenomenologically vitalizing”)
relationship between desiring subject and desired object, the subjective experience of
which overrides the empirical absence (“physically impossible”) of that object.
Moreover, Berlant astutely underscores the doubly constitutive effects of the vocative
trope, in that a subject’s apostrophic fantasy not only animates absent “objects of
desire” but also functions, in enabling the felt experience of an attachment to these
objects, to constitute her as a particular kind of subjectivity (“who make you
possible”).
When viewed in this light, the prosopopoeia at the heart of Barthes’ contextual
method – a fantasy not of addressing, but of being addressed – becomes legible as a
mirror image of apostrophe, where the attachment it enacts is one in which the
mythologist’s experience of bourgeois society’s adhomination vitalizes a sense of his
vocation as a reader who has been personally summoned to take up the mythologist’s
task. Indeed, prosopopoeia’s role in shoring up a readerly sense of vocation directly
inverts the effect of apostrophe which, as Jonathan Culler argues, constitutes the
apostrophizing poet as a poetic subject. For Culler, apostrophe is a “device which the
62
Ibid., 125.
73
poetic voice uses to establishes with an object a relationship which helps constitute
him. The object is treated as a subject, an I which implies a certain type of you in its
turn.”64 Culler’s example is that of the romantic poet who, in apostrophizing nature,
establishes himself as a visionary poet with whom nature consents to enter into
dialogue: thus Shelley’s apostrophe of the West Wind “poses the problem of the poetic
subject as a problem of the wind’s relation to him.”65 Barthes’ prosopopoeia, then,
reverses apostrophe’s “pure embodiment of poetic pretension,” rhetorically animating
a bourgeois society whose adhomination calls into existence, in its turn, a certain type
of perspicacious readerly subject we know as the mythologist.66
Dilating on Culler’s pithy declaration that “invocation is a figure of vocation,”
we can thus understand how Barthes’ contextualizing practice, by prosopopoeically
inducing a sensation of adhomination rooted in paranoid feelings, generates for the
mythologist an experience of his readerly vocation – a word whose etymological
origins in vocatio (calling) arguably align it even more closely to prosopopoeia’s
fantasy of being addressed than to apostrophe’s wish to name an addressee.67
Moreover, Culler’s astute analysis of apostrophe’s “poetic pretension” also suggests
how the prosopopoeic constitution of a readerly subject always already amounts to an
enactment of prosopopoeic repair. As he observes, even as apostrophic poems seek to
overcome the alienation of poetic subject from object by performing the encounter
between them as a harmonious vocative relationship, in enacting this reconciliation by
63
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 26.
64
Culler, 142.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 143.
67
Ibid.
74
an “act of will” that has to be “accomplished poetically,” these poems cannot help but
“display in various ways awareness of the difficulties of what they purport to seek.”68
In other words, in seeking to establish a connection between subject and object,
vocative figures like apostrophe and prosopopoeia express anxieties about the rift that
they simultaneously seek to repair. If the apostrophic mode of Romantic poetry can be
said to worry the poetic subject’s alienation from Nature, then, a similar conclusion
can be drawn about how the prosopopoeic effects of Barthes’ contextualizing practice
telegraph fears about the mythologist’s alienation from bourgeois society.
An awareness of prosopopoeia’s complex performative consequences leaves us
with a different picture of what Barthes’ contextual method feels like. Although the
practice of contextualization directly engenders paranoid feelings, these latter also
indirectly effectuate a prosopopoeic repair of the relationship between the mythologist
and bourgeois society. Context, in this view, constitutes the mythologist as a readerly
subject who experiences paranoid feelings as part of a pleasurable sensation of self-
confirmation, where he feels called upon by society to take up the vocation of reading.
The admittedly paradoxical notion that paranoid feelings could contribute to a sense of
self-confirmation come to us readily, in fact, from Sedgwick’s account of paranoid
reading and “the mushrooming, self-confirming strength of [its] monopolistic strategy
of anticipating negative affect.”69 To be sure, where the self-confirmation that
Sedgwick observes accrues to the paranoid thesis, whose premises result in a
tautology where “an insistence that everything means one thing somehow permits a
68
Ibid.
69
75
sharpened sense of all the ways there are of meaning it,” I am asking here that we shift
our attention instead to the self-confirmation experienced by the paranoid reader.70
The necessity for such self-confirmation can be gleaned early from Barthes’s
preface to Mythologies, where he tellingly attempts to warrant the interpretive claim
his essays stake on “phenomena” that, as he readily allows, are “apparently most
unlike literature (a wrestling-match, an elaborate dish, a plastics exhibition).”71
Apologizing that his essays have seized upon objects that “may well appear
heterogeneous (a newspaper article, a photograph in a weekly, a film, a show, an
exhibition),” even “very arbitrary,” Barthes expresses qualms here about the deficit of
justification for his marshaling of literary analysis in the interpretation of such diverse
non-literary phenomena.72 The justification Barthes finally provides rests on the
understanding that “myth is a language,” which in turn underwrites his study of the
“literary aspect” of the bourgeois world.73 What justifies the literary critic’s extension
of his analytic field to the entire social world, however, is not the mere copula that
equates myth with language, but the prosopopoeias repeatedly evoked by
Mythologies’s paranoid aesthetic. Indeed, it becomes crucial for Barthes’s purposes
that myth isn’t just a language, but that it manifest, more significantly, as a spoken
language (“myth is a type of speech”) continually addressed to the singularly
perceptive mythologist.74 Put simply, it is the prosopopoeic effects of his
contextualizing practice that finally assure us that wrestling-matches, dishes, plastics
70
Ibid.
71
Barthes, 11.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., 109.
76
exhibitions, etc., do in fact call the uniquely qualified mythologist to his vocation,
asking to be read by him.
Such a redescription of Barthes also serves to complicate Sedgwick’s description
of paranoid reading as an affective strategy that privileges the aim of “forestalling
pain” at the expense of the “seeking of pleasure.”75 For Sedgwick, paranoid reading
amounts to a strong theory of negative affects that fails in a rather spectacular fashion
– in that its strategy for forestalling pain, “self-reinforcing because self-defeating,”
consists in seeking out pain in order not to be surprised by it.76 Despite its
considerable subtlety, Sedgwick’s characterization still neglects to consider how the
self-reinforcing propagation of paranoid feelings can in fact be experienced by the
paranoid reader as pleasurable. Indeed, my reading of Barthes has shown that the self-
reinforcement of the mythologist’s paranoid thesis, which insists that everything
means myth (“In fact, nothing can be safe from myth”), possesses performative
consequences other than those of forestalling the pain of being assailed by bourgeois
ideology.77 Where Sedgwick’s account would suggest that the mythologist sees myth
everywhere in order to forestall the pain caused by bourgeois ideology, I would attend
instead to the considerable pleasure he experiences in the expansion of his interpretive
powers to encompass the social world beyond the literary objects to which he is
accustomed. “[T]he sharpened sense of all the ways there are of meaning” associated
with paranoia thus functions simultaneously as a gratifying sensation of self-
75
76
Ibid.
77
Barthes, 131. Even the extreme case of meaningless disorder cannot escape the vampiric parasitism
of myth, because this latter “can give a signification to the absurd, make the absurd itself a myth” – thus
“the absence of motivation” itself “become[s] a second-order motivation” (126).
77
confirmation concerning his vocation for reading, an experience of encountering
society as intensely prosopopoeic – as an eminently meaningful, readable environment
in which everything calls out to be read by him.78
Such a redescription also invites us to consider how the feelings of fear and
victimization engendered by a paranoid aesthetic comes to be experienced, in
Berlant’s turn of phrase, as “phenomenologically vitalizing,” enabling, and
pleasurable. Imagine, to begin, the emotional inflections one could give to Barthes’
perception of the Basque chalet – “created on the spot, for me” – that have nothing to
do with victimization or suspicion, from megalomaniacal self-confirmation (for me!)
to grateful surprise (for me?) and so on. The profoundly mixed pleasures of the
experience I sketch here can be difficult to grasp precisely, but we might think of its
resonance with the odd question that Juliana Spahr asks in Response: “what does it
mean to believe oneself as attractive to an alien race?”79 The paranoid feelings
experienced by the alien abductees whose testimonies Spahr cites in her poem are no
doubt the very ones inspired by Barthes's mythologist in his efforts to unmask the
multifarious instantiations of bourgeois ideology. Without negating the overwhelming
negativity of these feelings, however, Spahr perceptively detects a sense of self-
satisfaction emerging from the scene of paranoia, showing us how feelings of
persecution can shore up an experience of being singularly attractive, above all others,
to that persecutory agency. Transposing this intuition to our reading of Mythologies,
we can grasp how a contextualizing practice predicated on paranoid aesthetics can
78
This Essay Is About You," 136, my emphasis.
78
mediate a reader’s relationship to society in ways characterized by both attraction and
repulsion, desire and fear. Alongside the mythologist’s deep antipathy for and wish to
criticize bourgeois society, he simultaneously feels deeply attached to, and fantasizes
about being desired by it.
If it sounds too far-fetched to suggest that the mythologist doesn’t just fear
bourgeois society but desires to be desired by it, consider the despondent note that
Barthes strikes at the end of Mythologies, in which he worries that this desire will not
be reciprocated. At the conclusion of “Myth Today,” Barthes “predict[s] for the
mythologist, if there is ever one, a few difficulties, in feeling if not in method.”80 With
no intention of backtracking on the method of interpretation he sets out in
Mythologies, Barthes nevertheless expresses reservations about what this method will
feel like in practice. Even if mythology qua method constitutes a “political act,”
“postulates the freedom of [language],” and thereby “harmonizes with the world, not
as it is, but as it wants to create itself,” this is how Barthes describes its emotional
residue:
This harmony justifies the mythologist but does not fulfill him: his status still
remains basically one of being excluded. Justified by the political dimension, the
mythologist is still at a distance from it. His speech is a metalanguage, it ‘acts’
nothing; at the most, it unveils – or does it? To whom?81
Harmonized with the world in its desire to recreate it, justified in its ability to re-
politicize bourgeois society, mythology nevertheless leaves its practitioner feeling
79
Juliana Spahr, Response, 1st ed., New American Poetry Series (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1996), 25.
80
Barthes, 156.
79
unfulfilled, excluded, and estranged. Indeed, even if the mythologist succeeds in
unveiling social reality, Barthes doubts that anyone will attend this performance (“To
whom?”). Barthes exhibits here a painful awareness that his critique of the everyday
pleasures enjoyed by his peers is unlikely to be well-received, or even received at all,
anticipating Latour’s skepticism in Reassembling the Social about the negligible
difference that contextual methods actually make to the people whose behavior they
claim to explain and change for the better. Moreover, the mythologist’s alienation
from society goes even further than the risk of irrelevance. Having argued that
everything can be myth, Barthes realizes that “the mythologist must become estranged
if he wants to liberate myth.”82 To decipher phenomena like the Tour de France or
French Wine, as Barthes does in Mythologies, “is to cut oneself off from those who are
entertained or warmed up by them."83 The mythologist’s trenchant ideological
critiques, intended to attain social reality, comes at the emotional cost of his
relationship to society.
At the heart of Barthes's impasse lies the unthinkability of ambivalence: in
relation to bourgeois society the mythologist can feel love or hate, desire or fear, but
never both at the same time. The precise difficulty, as Barthes intimates with such
candor, lies in the felt impossibility of experiencing one’s love for and desire to be
included by society as anything other than consent to the injustice of political
domination. For Barthes, this double bind seems insurmountable, for as he writes: “I
do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand […]
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid., 157.
83
Ibid.
80
the search for the inalienable meaning of things).”84 Barthes's decision to use “poetry”
as an index for inalienable reality is a telling one, for it specifically refracts the double
bind of desire and consent through the reading of literature. What he calls “the split in
the social world” leaves “poetry” and those committed to reading it alienated because
they must stand at a critical distance from, and can thus find no reconciliation with, a
society steeped in ideology.85 Although Barthes stands by his interpretive method,
what he evokes with such pathos at the end of Mythologies is a critic’s unrequited
desire, incompletely assimilated to the imperatives of ideology critique, for the social
relevance that would repair the rift between poetry and ideology.
My reading of Barthes's contextual method has sought to recuperate this desire
for social relevance that persists beyond the constraints of political necessity, and to
thus recover a feel for the ascetic love that saturates our contextualizing practices.
Barthes's predication of critique on the mythologist’s embrace of social estrangement
has undoubtedly persisted in contemporary scholarship, receiving its most influential
formulation in Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power. Taking on both Foucauldian
and Althusserian theories of subjection, Butler argues that “the attachment to
subjection is produced through the workings of power, and that part of the operation of
power is made clear in this psychic effect, one of the most insidious of its
productions.”86 Despite Butler’s willingness to allow for the mutual imbrication of
desire and resistance, she finally sacrifices this capaciousness in favor of “an agency
that outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence,” offering us the choice of “a
84
Ibid., 159.
85
Ibid.
81
willingness not to be – a critical desubjectivation – in order to expose the law as less
powerful than it seems.”87 Butler’s recommendation that agency achieve critical
distance by outrunning desire (“a willingness not”) recapitulates Barthes's ascetic love,
advocating for the relinquishment of a desire for sociality as the only properly political
foundation for a critique of society.
If Barthes retained enough of his qualms to observe that the mythologist “must
become estranged” from the “entire community […] if he wants to liberate myth,” the
deftness with which Butler dissolves the critic’s bonds of social attachment by
insisting on their severance runs roughshod over such equivocations.88 Over against
Butler’s confidence in our ability to sublimate the desire to be a subject in society to
the aims of political resistance, my reading of Barthes has sought to demonstrate how
the mixed feelings that make up the emotional habitus of his contextualizing practice
cuts through the theoretical Gordian knot he formulates at the end of Mythologies. To
be specific, given that Barthes's contextualizing practices engender both fear and love
for society, and circulate feelings of defensiveness against it and solicitude for its
attentions, the fully registered experience of this ambivalence necessarily unravels, at
the level of affective practice (“in feeling if not in method”), the appearance of a
theoretical double bind. Although Barthes recommends that political necessity
requires critics to renounce their desire to be connected to society, the very practice of
his contextual method shows us how difficult, and finally unsuccessful, that ascesis
proves to be.
86
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 6.
87
Ibid., 130.
82
As it turns out, the paranoid story that our contextualizing practices tell about
reading’s relationship to society – the David and Goliath narrative of a defensive truth-
sayer assailed on all sides by hostile and threatening forces – misrecognizes the way
such practices also articulate criticism’s desire for sense of its own readerly vocation,
a wish to experience the feeling of reading’s desirability to society. “To
misrecognize,” as Berlant writes,” “is not to err, but to project qualities onto
something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities –
which it might or might not have.”89 If fantasy isn’t simply wrong but “manages the
ambivalence and itinerancy of attachment” such that “the subject is not defeated by
it,” then my aim here isn’t to be paranoid about social contextualization’s paranoia,
but to flesh out a phenomenology of its mixed pleasures in order to understand just
what we mean when we talk about context.90 If Barthes's Mythologies can be taken as
any indicator, it remains a lot easier for literary critics to talk about our knowing and
acting on society in politically utopian ways than about our desire to be desired by
society, easier for readers to feel fearful and defensive than to fully encounter our
profound wishes for social relevance.
3. Paranoia, Relevance, and Communication in The Crying of Lot 49
Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the
orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there was either some
Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America
88
Barthes, 157.
89
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 122.
90
Ibid.
83
and if there was just America, then it seemed the only way she could continue,
and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full
circle into some paranoia.91
Such is the cul-de-sac in which Oedipa Maas finds herself in the concluding
pages of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, faced with the insurmountable
impasse of mutually-exclusive "zeroes and ones" that caps her investigations into the
mysterious Tristero system.92 At first glance, the dilemma engendered by the paranoid
thesis of a Tristero system appears to be of an ontological and epistemological nature:
does the Tristero exist or not exist, and how would one know for sure? However,
Pynchon's description of paranoia's role in Oedipa’s predicament indicates that the
stakes here are finally neither ontological nor epistemological, but relational. In the
absence of both “true paranoia” a “real Tristero,” what remains is “just America” with
its “obvious” meanings, a situation in which Oedipa chooses to be “assumed full circle
into some paranoia” because that remains “the only way she could continue, and
manage to be at all relevant to it."93 The conditional “if … then” formulation of
Pynchon’s description confirms that Oedipa’s concerns lie less with the truth of the
Tristero’s existence and her knowledge of it, than with her ability in either case to
experience her “relevance” to America.
In essence, Lot 49 imagines Oedipa’s preference for being “assumed full circle
into some paranoia” not as pathological delusion, but as a consciously adopted posture
that somehow secures for her a feeling of her relevance to America. In order to
91
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 150-1.
92
Ibid., 150.
93
84
understand why Oedipa might feel a deficit of relevance, we need to return to another
moment in the novel where that particular anxiety crops up. Earlier in Lot 49, Oedipa
travels to UC Berkeley in search of Emory Bortz, an English professor she hopes will
help illuminate some curious connections she has discovered between the Tristero, her
late lover’s estate, and the fictional Jacobean play “The Courier’s Tragedy.” Oedipa
arrives on a campus buzzing with the activity of the 1960s student movements,
through which she moves “carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting
to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would
take.”94 Finding her way through the various student groups amassed on Berkeley’s
campus, Oedipa’s feelings of irrelevance have arisen from her uncomfortable
suspicion that the literary education she (like Pynchon) received as an English major
at Cornell during the late ‘50s has turned her into a “rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps
for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts.”95
Given that a university should in fact be the last place that Oedipa should doubt
the relevance of her bookishness, the location of this scene only more pointedly
underscores the felt incongruity between her training in literary interpretation and a
university campus thronging with the political activity of the ‘60s student movements,
“the sort that bring governments down.”96 To use a term whose resonances I have
tracked across Latour’s fictional dialogue and Barthes's Mythologies, we might
describe Oedipa’s feelings of irrelevance in the company of the student activists on
Sproul Plaza as an anxiety about the vocation of reading. Harboring the same wish to
94
95
Ibid., 83.
96
Ibid.
85
make a difference to society that so preoccupied Latour’s fictional student, Oedipa
feels estranged from the student movements because there appears to be no obvious
social significance attached to her skills of pursuing strange words in texts. Read
alongside the final moments of the novel adduced above, Oedipa’s sojourn through the
Berkeley campus intimates a connection between her paranoid choice and her doubts
about the social relevance of reading. Oedipa’s predicament suggests, in effect, that
electing a paranoid posture somehow assuages her anxieties about the vocation of
reading by engendering a sense of its relevance – but how?
“To be relevant requires another set of extraordinary circumstances. It’s a rare
event. It requires an incredibly imaginative protocol” – had Oedipa somehow found
her way to Latour’s office instead of Emory Bortz’s, such is the sage but somewhat
cryptic response she would have received.97 Indeed, Latour’s recommendation that his
fictional graduate student give up the methodological habits of contextualization came
with the instruction to relinquish the “political relevance” afforded by contextual
explanations.98 Even granting the disciplinary and geographical differences between
Oedipa and this imaginary graduate student, not to mention the half-century separating
them, there remains something consonant about their respective fictional plights. Like
Oedipa, Latour’s student wishes to make a difference to society by means of his
intellectual labor or, as he puts it, “to criticize the ideology of management, to debunk
the many myths of information technology, to gain a critical edge over all the
technical hype, the ideology of the market.”99 Like Oedipa, he too despairs of ever
97
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid., 151.
86
making a substantive difference by means of the modest medium of his intervention:
“a bundle of a few hundred pages,” a “tiny little text.”100
Although I have thus far sought to describe the emotional habitus of
contextualization by focusing on how it gets theorized as a critical practice, my
engagement with Lot 49 endeavors to outline what we might call the narratology of
context. In order to do so, I suggest how the connection between Oedipa’s paranoid
choice and her anxieties about reading’s irrelevance can best be clarified by
considering Georg Lukács’s account of how narratives evoke a “historical
characterization of time and place” by showing how “certain crises in the personal
destinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the
determining context of an historical crisis.”101 In The Historical Novel, Lukács
famously held up Walter Scott as an exemplary novelist who “portray[s] the struggles
and antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and
destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces.”102 For writers like Scott,
Lukács argues, “the historical ‘here and now’ is something much deeper” than the
mere “accumulation” of “picturesque, descriptive elements,” for it means that what
appears “accidental, episodic and unimportant” gets assimilated to a “particular, all-
round context.”103 Although the notion of contextualization owes most of its legibility
in literary studies to questions of interpretive method, Lukács’s account of the
100
Ibid., 154, 55.
101
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 41, my emphasis.
102
Ibid., 34.
103
Ibid., 41, 143.
87
novelistic rendering of determining, all-round contexts helps us to understand it as a
product of narrative practice as well.
To read Oedipa’s paranoid choice in the light of Lukács’s narratology of context
does not, however, imply that Lot 49 hews to the generic definition of the historical
novel. Indeed, Lukács readily allows that when considering the oeuvre of the authors
he engages with, “there is not a single, fundamental problem of structure,
characterization etc. in their historical novels which is lacking in their other novels,
and vice versa.104 Lukács’s theorization of the historical novel’s historicism thus
extrapolates to the novel’s contextualism more generally, for “the ultimate principles
are in either case the same […] they flow from a similar aim: the portrayal of a total
context of social life, be it present or past, in narrative form.”105 Indeed, for Lukács the
rendering of a total context functions as a meta-narratological imperative that guides
novelists in decisions about character, plot, setting, and so forth. In weighing different
forms of characterization and emplotment, for instance, Lukács praises Tolstoy’s
“genius” for selecting episodes “of particular importance and significance for the
human development of his main characters […] so that the entire mood of the Russian
army and through them of the Russian people gains vivid expression.106 In contrast,
the failure to evoke a proper historical sense as “mood” results in the “episodic”
quality of novels like Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas, which Lukács judges unfavorably for
104
Ibid., 242.
105
Ibid.
106
Ibid., 43.
88
“treating the historical basis merely as a pretext for expressing purely personal,
subjective experiences.”107
As the terms of Lukács’s evaluations suggest, the determining, all-round,
contexts evoked by exemplary historical narratives need above all to possess an
objectively necessary character. This privileging of objectivity and necessity over
subjectivity and contingency does not belong to The Historical Novel alone, recalling
oppositions that also play a significant role in The Theory of the Novel and the essay
“Narrate and Describe.” Just as Lukács theorized the novel form as an expression of
the irreconcilable schism between subject and object that he famously called
“transcendental homelessness,” in praising Scott’s historical novels he emphasizes
their “broad, objective, epic form” while condemning the “moralizing subjectivism”
exhibited by his peers.108 Similarly, Lukács’s criticism of Flaubert’s “external,
decorative, picturesque” depictions as lacking the “severe, implacable” kind of
“historical necessity” found in Scott’s novels repeats a similar indictment of that same
author in “Narrate and Describe” for his “comprehensive exposition of the social
milieu” that never rise above the level of the “incidental,” “accidental” to attain
“social monumentality.”
If for Lukács the successful narrative rendering of context rises above subjective
psychologizing to represent objective social forces, and if it moreover endows
contingent events with an aura of necessity, then against the backdrop of these
oppositions Lot 49 ’s paranoid aesthetic becomes legible as a reflexive staging of the
107
Ibid., 68.
108
Ibid., 32, 77; The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic
Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 41.
89
narratology of context. That is, given that paranoia manifests as “a mechanism that
rearranges […] the contingent into the determined,” as Patrick O’Donnell writes, and
harbors the “subjective/objective oscillation” Ngai observed in its “basic structure,”
paranoia describes perfectly the emotional experience of vacillating between Lukács’s
binary terms.109 Indeed, this is why Oedipa, when confronted with the mutually
exclusive options of a real Tristero or a real Paranoia, finds herself “waiting above all
[…] for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew,” fully aware that “excluded
middles” are “bad shit, to be avoided.”110 In its refusal, or indeed inability, to rest on
either pole of the oppositions that structure the narratology of context (subject/object,
contingent/necessary), Oedipa’s paranoia functions as Lot 49’s reflexive interrogation
of narrative contextualism, an expression of Pynchon’s self-consciousness concerning
the narrative production of context.
If Lot 49’s paranoid aesthetic figures the novel’s interrogation of narrative
contextualism, however, it also foregrounds how these contexts has always been
rendered as affect. Indeed, Lauren Berlant has recently argued that in The Historical
Novel, Lukács casts narrative historicism as “the aesthetic expression of an affective
epistemology, an encounter with the historical present via intensities of its tone.”111 By
Berlant’s estimation, Lukács reads the historical novel for “the sense of the historical
they provide: history is neither in footnotes nor in the representation of historical
figures or events, nor in style as such […] but in atmospheres (an aesthetic genre)."112
109
Patrick O'Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000), 11; Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 19.
110
Pynchon, 151.
111
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 64-5.
112
Ibid., 66.
90
Berlant’s observation helps us to understand how Lot 49 ’s paranoid aesthetic self-
consciously probes the affects that surround the narrative production of context. The
paranoid feelings that saturate Lot 49, in this view, don’t merely constitute an instance
of atmospheric context, but creates an atmosphere that is explicitly about readers’
expectations that narrative fiction should provide them with a sense of a historical
context. Indeed, if Jameson correctly describes Lot 49 as seeking to “contaminate its
readers and beyond them to endow the present age itself with an impalpable but
omnipresent culture of paranoia,” then the uncomfortable reflexivity that Lot 49
inspires in readers has to do with our sensed hyperawareness of our readerly
expectations that there should exist a necessary connection between the aesthetics of
narrative atmospheres and the epistemological grasp of social context.113
It is worth noting that Jameson advances a similar argument about paranoia’s
reflexive relationship to social context, where “conspiracy theory” represents a
“degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world
system.”114 I engage with Jameson’s contextual method at length further on in this
chapter, but for now I wish to prefigure the differences in our approaches to reading
paranoia. Jameson’s negative evaluation of paranoia rests on an essentially Lukácsian
foundation, in that he judges a particular narrative practice to have failed in the task of
representing a social totality whose fundamental characteristics have always already
precluded the success of such an endeavor in the first place. To be specific, Jameson’s
critique of paranoid themes as a failed attempt to represent the constitutively
113
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992), 17.
91
unrepresentable, sublime totality of the postmodern world system recapitulates the
foregone conclusion of Lukács’s dictum that, strictly speaking, the historical novel
ceases to be a viable genre after 1848, for when “History as a total process disappears”
and becomes “a chaos to be ordered as one likes [….] What then can art take from a
past conceived this way?”115 Indeed, Jameson explicitly invokes Lukács in his own
description of the postmodern waning of historicity, the former’s description of
History as “a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum”
serving to update for postmodernity the latter’s account of History’s disintegration
into a “gigantic iridescent chaos” after 1848.116
As I will demonstrate further on, the Lukácsian logic of Jameson’s evaluation of
the paranoid aesthetic is essentially circular, because it takes its own foregone
conclusion as a premise and thus contextualizes postmodern society as constitutively
uncontextualizable on the basis of narrative’s failure to represent this context. More
significantly, Jameson’s efforts to usher in his own contextualization of postmodern
experience through the backdoor shares Lukács’s unquestioned assumption that there
exists a necessary connection between narrative contextualism and social context. That
is, in diagnosing narrative’s failures to evoke the total context of social forces
impinging on a given moment, both Jameson and Lukács take for granted reading’s
social relevance, assuming that the reading of literature occupies a privileged
epistemological role in providing us with a grasp of our social situation. As my
114
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991),
38.
115
Lukács, The Historical Novel, 181-2.
116
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 18; Lukács, The Historical
Novel, 182.
92
reading of Oedipa’s feelings of irrelevance as an English major sought to suggest,
however, the question that preoccupies Lot 49 is no longer one of narrative fiction’s
ability to represent the social, but the relevance of reading to society at large. Where
Jameson and Lukács worry about narrative fiction’s failure to fulfill the function of
rendering social forces as narrative context, Lot 49 doubts the existence of such a
meta-narratological imperative. Over against Jameson’s critique of paranoia’s
epistemological deficit, therefore, I shift the grounds of interpretation instead to
consider the deficit of reading’s relevance that Pynchon’s novel stages. It should be
clear that the question of relevance takes priority over that of epistemological
sufficiency for, absent a foundational assumption of reading’s social relevance, it
would not make sense to pose questions about ability of narrative fiction to provide
valid knowledge about society in the first place.
This subtle but important shift in focus allows us to read Oedipa’s paranoia in a
different light. Take, for instance, the oft-remarked moment in which she looks over
the city of San Narciso from a hilltop, suspecting that “on some other frequency, or
out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the
centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.”117 The view from the slope
reminds her of a circuit card, because “there were to both outward patterns a
hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”118 For critics
like Peter Cooper, who take “epistemological problems” as “the cachet of [Pynchon’s]
work” as well as “his rationale and aesthetic for fiction,” Oedipa’s paranoid vision of
117
Thomas Pynchon, V., Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1986),
14.
118
Ibid.
93
San Narciso dramatizes the irreducibly subjective role of perspective in the
constitution of reality.119 According to such a view, Oedipa’s paranoia represents an
attempt to “synthesize [objects] into a coherent picture […] driven by the gap between
the possibility of order and the actuality of chaos.”120 When read according to these
oppositions of chaos to order, coherent meaning to a “grotesque jumble of immediate
events,” however, Oedipa’s experience gets assimilated to the conundrums of post-
Einsteinian epistemology without specific consideration of her role as a reader trained
in literary interpretation.121
If we set aside these well-worn dilemmas about meaning and non-meaning, what
emerges instead is the communicative relation that Oedipa’s paranoid fantasy
establishes between herself and San Narciso. In her wish to be reconciled with the city
in the mode of an intersubjective communication, Oedipa resembles Barthes's
mythologist, whose prosopopoeic affective scenes secured for him a sense of his
vocation for reading the messages issued to him by bourgeois society. Indeed, it is this
specifically prosopopoeic quality of Oedipa’s paranoid fantasy that the usual
dilemmas of meaning and coherence fail to capture: the fact that the revelation she
expects from San Narciso takes the form of “words […] being spoken,” and that the
concealed meaning whose presence she suspects harbors “an intent to
119
Peter L. Cooper, Signs and Symptoms : Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 131.
120
Ibid., 144.
121
Even critics who extend such epistemological questions to Lot 49’s reflexive staging of reading end
up recapitulating the same shibboleths, arguing that “the futility of Oedipa’s interpretive task is shared
by the reader who, in confronting Pynchon’s fiction, feels compelled to impose patterns of allegory on
symbolism on the ‘bits’ of confusing data Pynchon gives us.” John P. Leland, "Pynchon's Linguistic
Demon: The Crying of Lot 49," Critique 16, no. 2 (1974): 53.
94
communicate.”122 What motivates Oedipa’s choice to remain paranoid, then, isn’t the
wish to know San Narciso’s true meaning, but a prosopopoeic fantasy of being
communicated to by the city. “Communication is the key,” as John Nesfastis tells
Oedipa in a scene that I will shortly address at length, and I suggest that the same
applies to her fantasy of San Narciso’s desire to address her.123 Just as the
prosopopoeic paranoia of Barthes's mythological method sought to overcome the
alienation of the literary critic from society, Oedipa’s paranoia enacts a fantasmatic
relationship with San Narciso that constitutes her as a privileged recipient of its secret
communications. Indeed, the very naming of San Narciso foregrounds Pynchon’s
awareness of the tendency toward solipsism that inheres in the vocative figure, and
thus also underscores prosopopoeia’s role in aggravating Oedipa’s inability to confirm
if San Narciso is really speaking to her.
It is thus Oedipa’s fear of an indifferent, uncommunicative world, rather than a
merely disordered or unknowable one, that prompts her to embrace paranoia’s
fantasies. This is easily confirmed by her reactions to entropic disorder, as staged in
Pynchon’s famous litanies of random objects. Take, for instance, what Oedipa
confronts when she descends from her slope into San Narciso: “beige, prefab,
cinderblock office machine distributors, sealant makers, bottled gas works, fastener
factories, warehouses, and whatever.”124 Cooper reads such instances of “entropic
sprawl” as “reveal[ing] the workings of inexorable, irresistible entropy,” where
“randomly, arranged, shapeless assemblages recur [….] as a structural – or anti-
122
Pynchon, V., 14.
123
Ibid., 84.
124
The Crying of Lot 49, 15.
95
structural – principle, often described in catalogues that seem likewise unorderable
and potentially indefinite.”125 Read this way, Oedipa’s paranoia looks like a bulwark
against the inexorable tendency of the physical world towards dissipation. However, I
argue that the key to understanding her journey through San Narciso’s disorder lies
elsewhere, in her imaginative anthropomorphization of the Southern Californian
landscape: “What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle,
inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner
L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city,
for pain.”126 Driving through San Narciso on her way to Los Angeles, Oedipa tellingly
responds to disorder not by imputing order, but by personifying it in a way that
confirms her relevance to it. As is the case with her paranoia in general, however, such
a fantasy remains constitutively unstable, and never completely assuages her anxieties
about the world’s indifference to her: “But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of
urban horse, L.A. really, would be no less turned on for her absence.”127
To read Oedipa’s paranoia as expressing a prosopopoeic desire for a
communicative relation rather than a quest for coherent meaning also entails a
reconsideration of Lot 49’s oft-remarked thematization of entropy. Critics have
traditionally interpreted the novel’s preoccupation with entropy in terms of the second
law of thermodynamics, which posits the inevitable heat death of closed systems. Cast
in this pessimistic register, the thermodynamic definition of entropy as a “movement
125
Cooper, 56. Cooper’s Signs and Symptoms might be taken as the strongest formulation of
“epistemological” readings of Pynchon’s fiction: “Pynchon builds his works around epistemological
dilemmas” (130).
126
Pynchon, V., 15.
127
Ibid.
96
[…] toward disorganization, sameness, and death” comes to be read as a metaphor for
an entire society or culture, “an image of [Pynchon’s] civilization [and] the
epistemological perspective of his novel.”128 As Oedipa learns in her meeting with the
madcap inventor John Nefastis, however, there exist two different kinds of entropy:
“One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication.”129
“Entropy,” as Nefastis tells Oedipa, serves as a “metaphor” that “connects the world of
thermodynamics to the world of information flow.”130 On the premise that the fictional
demon in James Clark Maxwell’s thought experiment actually exists, Nefastis has
invented a machine that he claims will prove the metaphor linking thermodynamic and
informational entropy is “not only verbally graceful but also objectively true.”131 N.
Katherine Hayles, who has done more than any other literary critic to elucidate the
scientific discourses that inform not only Pynchon’s fiction but contemporary
literature more generally, reads the Nefastis machine as staging the “differential
between the metaphorical and the literal” that fuels Pynchon’s novel.132 Although I
take Hayles’ view of the Nefastis machine as emblematic of the novel, I contend that
its significance lies not in the distinction between metaphorical and literal language,
but in the way it runs on the fuel of prosopopoeia. To be sure, the Nefastis machine
does indeed aim to literalize a metaphorical connection between informational and
128
Thomas H. Schaub, Pynchon, the Voice of Ambiguity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981),
29; Leland, 46.
129
Pynchon, V., 84. For a concise summary of the science behind Nefastis’ hokey machine, see N.
Katherine Hayles, ""A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts": The Engine That Drives the Crying
of Lot 49 " in New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49 ed. Patrick O'Donnell (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992). Hayles also writes at length about the role of metaphor in the history of
scientific debates about entropy in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and
Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
130
Pynchon, V., 84.
131
Ibid., 85.
97
thermodynamic entropy, but it only functions to the extent that its operator enacts a
prosopopoeic fantasy that anthropomorphizes the fictional demon from Maxwell’s
thought experiment.
To wit, in order to function, the Nefastis machine requires Oedipa to
prosopopoeially animate the fictional Demon in order to constitute herself as a truly
perceptive subject capable of receiving its telepathic messages. As Stanley Koteks
warns Oedipa in Yoyodyne, “not everybody can work it […] Only people with the
gift. ‘Sensitives,’ John calls them.”133 Oedipa desperately wishes to inhabit the
position of the Demon’s privileged auditor, and even goes so far as to play along with
Nefastis’ pseudoscientific theory and “share in the man’s hallucinations,” wishing for
the prosopopoeic fantasy of an actual Demon to be objectively true.134 As with
Oedipa’s decision to be assumed full circle into some paranoia, the question this raises
is why she should prove so willing to participate in Nefastis’ fantasy. As Oedipa
gathers from Nefastis’ explanations, the “two fields” of information theory and
thermodynamics are “entirely connected, except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon,”
which means that the successful operation of Nefastis’ machine not only conflates
metaphorical and literal language, as Hayles argues, but also informational and
thermodynamic entropy.135 Oedipa wants the Nefastis machine to work so badly, then,
because a real Maxwell’s Demon would objectively equate the thermodynamic
132
Hayles, ""A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts": The Engine That Drives the Crying of Lot
49 " 112.
133
Pynchon, V., 69.
134
Ibid., 86.
135
Ibid., 84.
98
tendency of an entropic universe towards disorder with the disorder that information
theory conceptualizes as a potential communication.
As Hayles explains in her comprehensive history of the entropy concept in
Chaos Bound, Shannon’s decision to give the name “entropy” to the quantity of
information calculated in his probability function “led to the (metaphoric) knotting
together of concepts that are partly similar and partly dissimilar.”136 Although
commentators have since drawn out the suggestive connections that Shannon’s choice
made available, there remain fundamental differences between disorder as understood
in thermodynamics and information theory.137 For our purposes, the relevant
distinction between thermodynamic and informational entropy lies in the fact that the
latter assumes that disorder results from someone’s intentions – probability
distributions in information theory “derive from choice rather than ignorance; they
reflect how probable it is that we would choose one message element rather than
another, given a known ensemble (for example, the alphabet).”138 Even though there
exists a similar probability function in thermodynamics, it “reflects ignorance of
microstates, not ignorance of our choices in assembling a series of such states.”139 “As
an employee of AT&T,” Hayles writes, “Shannon was interested in transmitting
messages as accurately as possible.”140 The signal contribution of information theory
to the conceptualization of entropy lies in Shannon’s schematic of the
“communication situation,” which involves “a sender, an encoder, a channel, a
136
Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, 50.
137
As Hayles argues, by opening the way for randomness to be understood as a complexity rich in
information, Shannon’s choice laid the foundations for the field of Chaos Theory. See ibid., 50-2.
138
Ibid., 54.
139
Ibid.
140
Ibid., 56.
99
decoder, and a receiver.”141 This circuit of communication doesn’t apply to
thermodynamic entropy, because probabilistic calculations about the physical world
don’t assume that its randomness results from the communicative intentions of any
particular entity.
There is a moment in another of Pynchon’s novels that perfectly captures the
ludicrous, even comic consequences of confusing thermodynamic randomness with
the informational disorder that inheres in a consciously intended communication. In V,
Kurt Mondaugen sets up a station in German South-West Africa for recording
“sferics,” or “atmospheric radio disturbances.”142 The cause of these random sounds –
“clicks, hooks, risers, nosewhistlers and one like a warbling of birds called by the
dawn chorus” – remain unknown, their variability thus characterized by entropy of the
thermodynamic variety: “Some said sunspots, others lightning bursts; but everyone
agreed that in there someplace was the earth’s magnetic field.”143 After moving his
equipment to Herr Foppl’s villa, Mondaugen becomes gripped by the possibility that
the sferics contain a decodable message from the universe, and sets up an oscillograph
for converting the signals into text. It is finally the archetypically paranoid Lieutenant
Weissman who, suspecting that Mondaugen’s sferic experiment secretly functions as
the latter’s line of communication with English operatives, works obsessively to
decode the oscillograph rolls. By arbitrarily “remov[ing] every third letter,” Weissman
141
Ibid., 55.
142
Pynchon, V., 248.
143
Ibid.
100
believes that he has derived anagrams of Kurt Mondaugen’s name along with the first
line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in German.144
Similar to Oedipa’s fantasy of communication on the hilltop overlooking San
Narciso, Weissman’s paranoid finagling stages a prosopopoeia of an otherwise
uncommunicative and indifferent universe. That Oedipa harbors the same
prosopopoeic fantasy is confirmed by the fact that San Narciso reminds her of a circuit
card in a transistor radio, a device whose function is to mediate a communication
situation. Just as Oedipa imagines the city as an interlocutor on the other side of a
transistor radio, Weissman confuses sferics for coded messages from the universe.
Both deliberately conflate informational and thermodynamic entropy, assimilating the
indifferent impersonality of a random physical world to the more comforting paradigm
of a communication situation. Returning to the Nefastis machine in Lot 49, this detour
helps us to understand how Oedipa’s willingness to share in the hallucination of a real
Maxwell’s demon literalizes the prosopopoeic wish at the heart of her reluctance to
relinquish paranoid fantasy. If Oedipa could truly establish a communicative relation
with the imaginary Demon, then the connection between informational and
thermodynamic entropy would be “objectively true” rather than “verbally graceful.”
This, in turn, would equate random sferics and the detritus of San Narciso with
messages lying in wait for a perspicacious reader. Fueled by prosopopoeic fantasy, the
Nefastis machine dramatizes in microcosm the motives driving Oedipa’s paranoia,
foregrounding her tendency to personify the physical world as a way to sustain her
relation to it.
144
Ibid., 302.
101
In dramatizing how Oedipa’s paranoid choice originates in relational desire, Lot
49 helps us to understand the scene of context as a scene of unrequited love. Indeed,
Oedipa’s urgent need to relate to the world around her gets literalized in her numerous
but ultimately unfulfilling sexual encounters in Lot 49. As Oedipa pursues the trail of
clues hinting at the existence of the Tristero, her encounters with the novel’s motley
crew of characters carries with them a persistent undercurrent of sexual frustration.
Coming off her already tenuous marriage with Mucho Maas, Oedipa gets sexually
propositioned by the lead singer of the Paranoids, Metzger, Randolph Driblette, Mike
Fallopian, John Nefastis, and in the first instance actually acquiesces. Failing the
possibility of a sexual relation, as turns out to be the case when her investigations lead
her to a gay bar in San Francisco, “despair came over her, as it will when nobody
around has any sexual relevance to you.”145 The reappearance of the word “relevance”
here connects her experience of loneliness to her anxieties about reading’s relevance,
suggesting how the former allegorizes the latter’s social marginality. Indeed, Oedipa’s
relational desire doesn’t just end with the characters she meets, but crops up
repeatedly in her investigations into the Tristero, where the fantasy takes on the
specific shape of a communication situation.
In fact, the trope of prosopopoeia has already been with us from the opening
pages of the novel, where Oedipa admonishes herself and imagines her room agreeing
with her: “You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.”146 More
significantly, after seeing the Tristero’s posthorn scrawled in pencil on the wall in a
bathroom, when Oedipa visits another ladies’ room and finds that the walls are blank,
145
102
such is her telling response: “She could not say why, exactly, but she felt threatened
by this absence of even the marginal try at communication latrines are known for.”147
Exemplifying Ricoeur’s intuition (quoted in my epigraph) that interpretation assumes
address, what Oedipa confronts here is a situation that patently does not address itself
to her, and thus proves indifferent to her readerly solicitude. This also explains why
Oedipa repeatedly imagines the Tristero not as a sprawling system, but personifies it
as a speaking interlocutor. Imagining the revelation of the Tristero as a striptease, for
example, Oedipa fantasizes that perhaps the Tristero would eventually “be revealed in
its terrible nakedness,” “smile, then, be coy,” or “begin to speak words she never
wanted to hear.”148
By the end of the novel it becomes clear how Oedipa’s investigations into the
Tristero have never left the communication situation of the phone call she receives
from Inverarity a year before his death. Reflecting on the “secular miracle of
communication” and the “thousands of unheard messages” carried by telephone wires,
Oedipa realizes that her quest for the Tristero has left her awaiting “that magical Other
who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth,
fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the
unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.”149 Indeed, to the extent that the task of
executing Inverarity’s estate triggers Oedipa’s investigations into the Tristero, Lot
49’s entire premise could be described as a prosopopoeia of the absent deceased.
Although Oedipa compares her task to that of Driblette putting on a production of The
146
Ibid., 2.
147
The Crying of Lot 49, 53.
148
V., 40.
103
Courier’s Tragedy, describing it in terms of “bring[ing] the estate into pulsing
stelliferous Meaning,” the emphasis here rests not on her recovery of Meaning in an
abstract, epistemological sense, but on her ability to prosopopoeically revive the
intentional consciousness from which it arises, to “bestow life on what had persisted”
after his “annihiliation.”150 Even Oedipa’s fantasizing about San Narciso’s secret
communications turns out to be modeled on her relationship to the deceased
Inverarity: because the city “had been Pierce’s domicile, and headquarters,” she
supposed that this would “set the spot apart, give it an aura.”151 As Oedipa
acknowledges, however, the city itself only amounts to a virtual entity, “less an
identifiable city than a grouping of concepts,” which is why her prosopopoeia of the
dead man exceeds her romantic history with him, and the magical Other whose words
she wishes to hear comes to encompass an entire nation: “San Narciso had no
boundaries [….] She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what
Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.”152
Read in light of my hypothesis that Lot 49’s paranoid aesthetic exhibits the
novel’s reflexive hyperawareness of the relationship between narrative atmosphere
and social context, the prosopopoeic wish at the heart of Oedipa’s paranoia
simultaneously registers the tenuousness of this relation and seeks to restore it. In
other words, having discovered on Sproul Plaza that the social relevance of her skills
at chasing strange words in texts can no longer be taken for granted, Oedipa embraces
her paranoia because its prosopopoeic tropology fantasmatically reestablishes
149
Ibid., 149.
150
Ibid., 64.
151
Ibid., 13.
104
reading’s relationship to society. The paranoia that, as Jameson suggested, seeks to
contaminate those who read Lot 49 thus recruits us into sharing this prosopopoeic
fantasy as well.
Paranoia’s contagion gets transmitted to readers of Lot 49 through Pynchon’s
notable employment of second-pronouns, whose ubiquity Brian McHale has written
about extensively. McHale takes Gravity’s Rainbow as his primary case, observing the
way second-person narrative address “engages our paranoid tendencies as readers […]
by making us the target of [Pynchon’s] direct, menacing appeal,” and I would suggest
that Lot 49 harbors a similar tendency in embryo.153 McHale provides a
comprehensive taxonomy of the different varieties of second person address, but for
our purposes it is the employment of “you” as an impersonal pronoun that crops up
most frequently in Lot 49. A non-exhaustive list would include, amongst others: the
description of used cars that Mucho Maas sells, in which “you had to look at the actual
residue of their lives,” Oedipa’s suspicion that there was something in the Pacific
Ocean “you could not hear or even smell,” the commentary on her investigations
which compares her to an “optimistic baby […] believing all you needed was grit,
resourcefulness […] to solve any great mystery,” and the comparison of Berkeley to
“those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about.”154
In each case, “you” could be replaced with the impersonal “one” without any
loss of meaning but, as McHale points out, because “You is a sign of dialogue,
conveying some vocative appeal, some sense of address, even in its most ‘innocent,’
152
Ibid., 147.
153
Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), 113.
154
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 5, 41, 103, 83, my emphasis.
105
impersonal instances, we cannot help but respond dialogically to it in some
measure.”155 When read in connection with the prosopopoeic tropology that, as I have
demonstrated, undergirds Lot 49’s paranoid aesthetic, these seemingly innocuous,
replaceable second person pronouns become legible as the narrative means by which
the novel invites the reader to participate in a prosopopoeia of the social. The second
person pronoun, as McHale writes, “always implies an act of communication,” and
“compels the reader, by its very presence a text, to hypothesize a circuit of
communication joining an addressor and an addressee.”156 The second person
pronouns that crop up over the course of Lot 49 thus draw its readers into a circuit of
communication in which we occupy the position of an addressee receiving a
communication from an addressor who cannot definitively be specified as a
intradiegetic character, an extradiegetic narrator, nor Pynchon himself. Moreover,
given the critical commonplace that observes the resemblance between Oedipa’s
investigations and the task of literary interpretation, it also becomes clear how these
second person pronouns replicate, at the level of narrative voice, Lot 49’s solicitation
to the reader to identify with her predicament.
A reader contaminated by Lot 49’s paranoid atmosphere thus comes to inhabit
the exact position that Oedipa occupies in the novel. Her anxieties about reading’s
irrelevance, and the prosopopoeic fantasy of communication that paranoia enacts
between a readerly “you” and a social “They,” thus become our own as well.
Simultaneously exhibiting an awareness of the estrangement between reading and
society, and attempting to overcome that alienation, Lot 49’s paranoid aesthetic
155
McHale, 112.
106
reflexively interrogates the narratological production of context as a way to express
doubts about reading’s vocation. The fundamental anxiety that paranoia both evokes
and attempts to assuage, then, isn’t whether the eponymous crying of Lot 49
constitutes a subjective delusion or an objective conspiracy, but whether this cry can
be finally apprehended as a communication addressed to the types of readers trained to
seek out strange words in texts.
4. “We Have to Name the System”: Cognitive Mapping and Sublime
Purposiveness
In Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson describes one of the constitutive features of
the postmodern as “a whole new type of emotional ground tone […] which can best be
grasped by a return to the older theories of the sublime."157 Given Jameson’s more
famous assertion concerning the postmodern “waning of affect,” the importance of his
return to the emotionality of the sublime doesn’t become clear until he points out that,
after Kant, “the object of sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power and of the
physical incommensurability of the human organism with Nature but also of the limits
of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation of such
enormous forces.”158 The moment of postmodernity, as Jameson writes, is one of “a
radical eclipse of Nature itself,” where the “other of our society is in that sense no
longer Nature at all,” but rather what he calls the “whole new decentered global
network of the third stage of capital itself,” which is “difficult for our minds and
156
Ibid., 89.
157
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 6.
158
Ibid., 11, 34.
107
imaginations to grasp.”159 What Jameson calls the “postmodern sublime” thus names
an “enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic
and social institutions.”160 By analogy to the Kantian subject’s experience of his
imagination’s failure to present overwhelmingly powerful phenomena in Nature,
Jameson’s return to the sublime underwrites his thesis of the postmodern capitalist
system’s constitutive unrepresentability.
In the face of this representational failure, “conspiracy theory” represents, for
Jameson, a “degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary
world system.”161 Observing the “omnipresence of the theme of paranoia as it
expresses itself in a seemingly inexhaustible production of conspiracy plots of the
most elaborate kinds,”162 Jameson suggested in an address to the Marxist Literary
Group in 1983 that conspiracy is “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the
postmodern age […] a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate
attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into
sheer theme and content.”163 By cognitive mapping, Jameson refers to an as-yet
unrealized aesthetic that he imagined would allow us to “grasp our positioning as
individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at
present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”164 Put simply,
159
Ibid., 38.
160
Ibid.
161
Ibid.
162
"Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 356.
163
Ibid.
164
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 54. Jameson’s conception of the cognitive
map extrapolated Kevin Lynch’s spatial analyses in The Image of the City to the totality of global
capitalism, combining it with Althusser’s definition of ideology as the representation of the subject’s
imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence. In the same way that we need an adequate
108
Jameson’s vision for an aesthetic of cognitive mapping essentially projects an
overcoming of postmodern capital’s sublime unrepresentability, that limit on
figuration on which the paranoid aesthetic’s conspiratorial forms cannot help but
founder.
Although Jameson appears to disparage the paranoid aesthetic and opposes it to
the aesthetic of cognitive mapping, by force of dialectical sublation, the former’s
failure to represent the social totality of late capitalism comes to serve a paradoxically
crucial role in underwriting the latter’s possibility. In Jameson’s reading, the paranoid
aesthetic’s cultural ubiquity functions as a symptom of the insurmountable failure of
postmodern subjects to situate their individual existences in a knowable social totality.
Even as a failed attempt to map postmodernity cognitively, however, the paranoid
aesthetic’s degraded character nevertheless harbors what Jameson calls “the desire
called cognitive mapping,” whose value lies not in any particular conspiratorial
hypothesis, but in its very representational ambition to figure the world system165. Put
otherwise, for Jameson it is precisely to the extent that the paranoid aesthetic fails to
bridge the gap between individual and society, and thus exacerbates the
representational dilemmas unique to postmodernity, that it conveys to us the truth of
postmodern society: “the thing being done, as it were, by showing it cannot be done in
the first place.”166
mental map of our lived environments in order to overcome the alienating rift between our experience
and cognition of urban spaces, Jameson argues that a postmodern political culture modeled on cognitive
mapping would enrich political experience by enabling “situational representation[s] on the part of the
individual subject to that vaster and more properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of
society’s structures as a whole” (51).
165
The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, 3.
166
Ibid., 56.
109
A cognitive mapping of postmodernity being done, by showing it cannot be
done: What Jameson accomplishes here is the marshaling of the impossibility of
representing a social system as an incontrovertible presentation of that very system. It
should surprise no one to learn that the tautological form of this argument is itself
paranoid, for Jameson’s proposal for an the aesthetic of cognitive mapping isn’t non-
paranoid, but paranoia perfected. After all, like garden-variety conspiracy theory,
Postmodernism’s hypothesis of an “enormous and threatening, yet only dimly
perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” also posits our
victimization by an massively powerful forces – the difference between them lies only
in former’s conviction that those forces are more powerful than we could possibly
represent.167 According to this tautology, every negative judgment of representational
failure serves as a paradoxically unimpeachable form of presentation: “some
(unrepresentable, imaginary) global totality” functions precisely to evoke a global
totality in which totalities are unrepresentable and unimaginable, while the fact of
Capital that “no one has ever seen or met the thing itself” proves all the more its
unrelenting, invisible grip on all sectors of existence.168 In his foreword to
Postmodernism, Jameson describes his theory of postmodernity as “the effort to take
the temperature of an age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not
even sure there is so coherent a thing as an ‘age,’ or ‘zeitgeist,’ or ‘system’ or ‘current
situation’ any longer.”169 By insisting on the importance of presenting our social
context at a time when that context has (according to Jameson) become
167
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 38.
168
"Cognitive Mapping," 347.
169
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, xi.
110
unrepresentable, Postmodernism makes of this dilemma the supreme context of
postmodernity – that is, it theorizes the social context of postmodernism as the
impossibility of social context under postmodernity.
In thus redescribing Jameson’s account of postmodernity, my aim isn’t to deny
the existence of capitalism or to suggest that it amounts to a paranoid delusion.
Without contesting that late capitalism does in fact name our dominant mode of
production, what I wish to pursue here are the performative consequences of
Jameson’s sublimation of “capitalism” as an unrepresentable but all-powerful context
for culture and cultural criticism. As Latour points out, “capitalism […] may be an
intractable entity endowed with a ‘spirit,’ but a Wall Street trading room does connect
to the ‘whole world’ through the tiny but expenditious conduits of millions of bits of
information per second.”170 Latour’s observation helps us to relativize Jameson’s
taken-for-granted presentation of capitalism’s constitutive unrepresentability, for as
the former points out, we “have a choice between two routes”: we can either “believe
that capitalism acts surreptitiously as the ‘infrastructure’ of all the world’s
transactions” and thus posit “some mysterious structure” at the stratosphere of
“context,” or we can “continue doing the footwork” by investigating “fully visible and
empirically traceable sites.”171 Seen in the light of Latour’s choices, Jameson’s
sublimation of capitalism as context becomes legible as one option among many of
presenting postmodernity, albeit one couched in terms of its unrepresentability. What,
the question then emerges, is to be gained from Jameson’s decision to ground his
170
171
Ibid., 178-9.
111
contextualizing practice in this renunciation of representational power on the part of
the cultural critic, one that moreover cedes to capitalism its overwhelming power?
Dialectically sublating the paranoid aesthetic, Jameson posits that postmodern
society is in fact unimaginably more powerful than the form of any conspiracy theory
could possibly grasp. The performative consequences of this ceding of power can only
be traced, however, if we notice that this self-effacement in an encounter with a
massively powerful system constitutes only one moment in the more complex
affective phenomenology of the sublime. If, that is, Jameson argues that the advent of
postmodernity calls into being “a whole new type of emotional ground tone […]
which can best be grasped by a return to the older theories of the sublime,” then it
seems particularly telling that the cautionary tale Postmodernism tells about the
fearsome power of postmodern capital should omit any mention of sublimity’s
pleasures.172 The omission becomes even more striking when we consider, as Thomas
Huhn points out, that it is precisely the moment in which we “distance ourselves from
the pain which attends the fear of an overwhelming nature” and “thereby experience
the pleasure of the sublime” that constitutes “the true moment of the sublime,”
because “it is the moment of pleasure (in other words: the aesthetic moment).”173
Taking up this thread, I will demonstrate via a detour through Kant’s third critique
how Jameson’s contextualizing practice amplifies the paranoid aesthetic’s production
of fear in the face of massively powerful social systems in order to engender for the
cultural critic a pleasurable experience of his social relevance.
172
173
Thomas Huhn, "The Kantian Sublime and the Nostalgia for Violence," The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 53, no. 3 (1995).
112
My reading of the third critique will propose that Kant employs the analytic of
the sublime to secure for the subject an unassailable feeling of nature’s purposiveness
– that is, the subjective feeling that nature has been created as if objectively
predetermined for our faculties of cognition. In its recuperation of the painful feelings
we experience in confrontation with natural phenomena whose magnitude (the
mathematical sublime) and sheer power (the dynamical sublime) overwhelm our
imagination, Kant’s analytic of the sublime employs these phenomena as limit cases in
order to prove that everything in nature can be cognized as if it were tailored to our
mental faculties. What the analytic of the sublime secures for the Kantian subject, in
other words, is an insuperable sense of his vocation for cognizing nature. Just as
Barthes's mythology staged the “as if” scene of adhomination that provided the literary
critic with a sense of his vocation for reading diverse non-literary phenomena, in the
analytic of the sublime Kant secures proof of the transcendental necessity of our
subjective fiction that nature has been staged as if for our pleasure and cognition.
In his third critique, Kant famously described beauty as “the form of the
purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an
end.”174 Often remembered and translated as “purposiveness without purposiveness”
or “purposiveness without end,” Kant’s definition of the beautiful zeroes in on our
perception of what he calls a “certain purposiveness,” a “purposiveness of form,” or
“the form of purposiveness of an object.”175 Kant defines an end as “the object of a
concept insofar as the latter is regarded as the cause of the former,” and purposiveness
174
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, The
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
120.
113
as “the causality of a concept with regard to its object.”176 Put together, the apparently
paradoxical “purposiveness without purpose” we perceive in an object we call
beautiful indicates that its form appears to us as purposive – that is, as caused by a
“will” in accordance with intentional ends, even though this causal intention can only
be assumed subjectively. This is because our perception of the object’s purposive form
is strictly “without end,” for our faculty of understanding lacks a concept for such a
causality. In this way, “a flower […] is held to be beautiful because a certain
purposiveness is encountered in our perception of it which, as we judge it, is not
related to any end at all.”177 To us, the form of the beautiful flower looks as if it has
been caused by an intentional will, and indeed can only be cognized as such, even
though we don’t possess any concept for this causality.
The judgment of beauty is for Kant subjective and aesthetic: Subjective, in that
the judgment of purposiveness is not grounded in concepts of an end and thus
determines nothing about the object (“not a property of the object itself”) but only our
perception of it.178 Aesthetic, in that its “determining ground” is a “feeling (of inner
sense), a “pleasure” that is simply the “consciousness of the merely formal
purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers.”179 By the play of our mental
powers, Kant refers to the mediating function played by the faculty of judgment,
which ordinarily subsumes representations (proper to the faculty of imagination) under
concepts (proper to the faculty of understanding) in order to generate a cognition of an
175
Ibid., 120, 48.
176
Ibid., 105.
177
Ibid., 120.
178
Ibid., 75.
179
Ibid., 75, 113.
114
object. The aesthetic judgment of beauty thus constitutes a special case in the general
functioning of the power of judgment, a kind of cognitive sweet spot activated by
objects for which we possess no concept of an end. In the experience of beauty the
perception of purposiveness feels pleasurable because we sense our faculty of
judgment at work.
Moreover, by a process of subreption, where “the subjective purposiveness is
attributed to the thing and to nature itself,” the mere form of purposiveness we sense
in an object we call beautiful is perceived as a purposiveness for us, or more
specifically, a purposiveness “for the reflecting power of judgment by itself.”180 The
pleasure we experience when we judge a beautiful flower consists not only in the
harmonious disposition of our cognitive faculties at work, but in the feeling as if this
harmony were in fact the purpose of the flower’s form: the object “seems as it were to
be predetermined for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes an object of
satisfaction in itself.”181 In other words, the category of purposiveness that proves so
central to Kant’s analytic of the beautiful, and the pleasurable sensations that ground
our judgments of beauty, together comprise a phenomenology of how we feel and
experience objects as if they were especially designed for our faculties of cognition.
The importance of this phenomenology of purposiveness only becomes evident
in Kant’s analytic of the teleological power of judgment, where it emerges that the
judgment of beauty functions as kind of boot-up disk for judgments of nature in
general. The entire analytic of the teleological power of judgment is taken up with the
conflict between, on the one hand, the necessity for human cognition of nature to posit
180
Ibid., 49.
115
an objective purposiveness of nature, a concept of its intelligent design and intentional
ends, and on the other hand, our lack of such a concept. As Kant readily
acknowledges, “we have no basis at all for presuming a priori that ends that are not
our own, and which also cannot pertain to nature (which we cannot assume as an
intelligent being), nevertheless can or should constitute a special kind of causality.”182
However, as Kant points out in his introduction, “such a unity [of nature] must still
necessarily be presupposed and assumed, for otherwise no thoroughgoing
interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take
place.”183 Even though we do not have any objective concept of nature’s final causes,
we must nevertheless subjectively assume such a concept exists because it is necessary
for us to have any cognitions of nature at all. Kant’s analytic of the teleological power
of judgment thus resolves the impossibility of positing an objective concept of nature’s
purposiveness by insisting on its universally subjective necessity. Although “we
cannot make any objective judgment at all […] about the proposition that there is an
intentionally acting being as a world-cause (hence as an actor),” knowledge of nature
for us would be impossible without such a concept, thus it must constitute “a ground
which is subjective but ineradicably attached to the human race.”184
The ground of this teleological judgment of nature’s purposiveness has of course
been laid by analogy in the analytic of the sublime: the experience of the beautiful
flower’s purposiveness without end prepares us to accept the notion of all of nature’s
purposiveness without end. Our pleasure in “beautiful forms” gives us a notion of “a
181
182
Ibid., 233.
183
Ibid., 70.
116
subjective purposiveness of nature […] for comprehensibility for the human power of
judgment,” and thus prepares us to think of the entirety of nature in the same way,
“just as if [nature’s products] had actually been designed for our power of judgment,
contain a form so specifically suited for it that […] they serve as it were to strengthen
and entertain the mental powers.”185 Indeed, returning to the analytic of the beautiful
in the analytic of the power of teleological judgment, Kant folds natural beauty’s
purposiveness without purpose back into the subjective concept of nature’s
purposiveness as a system: “We may consider it as a favor that nature has done for us
that in addition to usefulness it has so richly distributed beauty and charms […] just as
if nature had erected and decorated its magnificent stage precisely with this
intention.”186
With this double “as if” in mind, we are now better placed to understand the
importance of the analytic of the sublime in the schema of Kant’s third critique.
Because Kant secures the subjective necessity of a concept of nature’s purposiveness
in part by means of the pleasurable feelings we experience in judging beautiful forms
in nature, he inevitably raises the question of what happens to this concept when we
confront phenomena that provoke in us displeasurable feelings and thus seem
contrapurporsive to our faculties of cognition. As Kant writes, where a beautiful
object gives rise to a representation of “a purposiveness of nature in regard to the
subject,” an object we call sublime is first perceived to “have nothing at all purposive
184
Ibid., 271.
185
186
117
for reflection.”187 Indeed, that which initially “excites in us the feeling of the sublime”
is an object that first “appear[s] in its form to be contrapurposive for our power of
judgment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to
our imagination, but is nevertheless judged all the more sublime for that.”188 We feel
pleasure in the perception of a beautiful flower’s apparent purposiveness for our
judgment, but displeasure in the perception of contrapurposiveness in a massive
mountain range (the mathematical sublime) or an erupting volcano (the dynamical
sublime).
In encountering what exceeds our imagination’s representational capacities or
seems overwhelming in its destructive power, our experience of fear rather than
pleasure renders it impossible to maintain our fiction of nature’s “as if” purposiveness
for us. There appears to be no way to experience these massively powerful phenomena
as arrayed on a “magnificent stage” for our pleasure and edification, because they
seem so patently unsuited to our mental faculties. The singular importance of Kant’s
analytic of the sublime, then, lies in its recuperation of this initial, fearful feeling of
nature’s contrapurposiveness. By Kant’s account, our feelings about objects we judge
sublime turn out to be not wholly negative, but ambivalent: the mind is “not merely
attracted by the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it,” and finds a
satisfaction in such objects that “deserves to be called negative pleasure.”189 Our
experience of the sublime consists neither in displeasure nor displeasure alone, but a
“vibration” between both poles, “a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to
187
Ibid., 49.
188
Ibid., 129.
189
Ibid.
118
one and the same object.”190 This bipolarity of the sublime owes to its affective
dynamism: an object judged sublime may initially seem contrapurposive for our
imagination, but this very judgment (grounded in feelings of fear and repulsion)
“becomes purposive for reason, as the source of ideas [….] the object is taken up as
sublime with a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure.”191
Confronted with the limit case of natural phenomena that threaten to shatter our
cherished fiction that the natural world constitutes a system designed “as if”
predetermined for our cognition, Kant recuperates the displeasurable feelings of the
sublime’s contrapurposiveness for our imagination as part of an experience of nature’s
purposiveness for our reason. In other words, even the constraints of our imagination
and the resulting displeasure we feel in confrontation with objects judged sublime turn
out to have a purpose after all – as the occasion for “mak[ing] palpable to [the mind]
the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.”192 Although the objects we judge
sublime surpass the constraints of sensibility, “even being able to think of [infinity] as
a whole indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense.”193 In
the analytic of the sublime, Kant effectively turns the subject’s pain into pleasure, his
imaginative inadequacy into the infinitude of his reason, his conflict with nature into
harmony with it – in the experience of sublimity, “imagination and reason produce
subjectiveness through their conflict: namely, a feeling that we have pure self-
sufficient reason.”194 What the Kantian analytic of the sublime describes, then, is the
190
Ibid., 141.
191
Ibid., 143.
192
Ibid., 145.
193
Ibid., 138.
194
Ibid., 142.
119
becoming-purposive of that which we had initially perceived as fearful,
overwhelming, and thus contrapurposive for our cognition. By a process of subreption,
what threatened to undercut our fantasy of being an audience to a performance put on
especially for us on nature’s magnificent stage turns out to further reinforce it: “the
very same violence that is inflicted on the subject by the imagination is judged as
purposive for the whole vocation of the mind.”195
With Kant’s conclusion that “the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for
our own vocation,” we find ourselves circling back to the preoccupation with vocation
that this chapter has been tracking.196 Indeed, my reading of Kant’s third critique has
sought to outline the structure of an affective scene whose lineaments, I argue, can be
detected in the contextualizing practices of the other authors I’ve considered in this
chapter. By this transformation of feeling, one attains a pleasurable experience of
vocation via a displeasurable experience of fear, in that a first moment of negative
feeling serves as a necessary switch-point for effecting a second moment characterized
by a self-confirming sensation of one’s vocation: the sublime provides access to “a
pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure,” a pleasure by which the
mind “make[s] palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.197
Reading Barthes’s Mythologies alongside Kant’s analytic of the sublime, we are able
to observe that in both cases an initial presentation of an object as fear-inducing and
overwhelmingly powerful (Nature, Society) functions to call forth a particular form of
subjectivity (the moral subject, the mythologist) constituted in and through the
195
Ibid.
196
Ibid., 141. The German word Kant uses is Bestimmung, which other translators have also rendered as
“calling” or “determination.”
120
pleasure of palpating the superior power of his own reading practices (Barthes) or
reason (Kant). Put otherwise, the affective scene shared by Mythologies and Kant’s
analytic of the sublime underwrites a reflexive preoccupation, not with the
presentation of a massively powerful object, but with the particular kind of subject
such a presentation conjures forth.
Given that Kant repeatedly emphasizes the rootedness of all aesthetic judgments
in subjectivity, the reflexivity of the sublime comes as no surprise. Indeed, describing
how the sublime “prolongs and problematizes the project of generating a self-
subsistent, whole, and harmonious subject,” Huhn has already observed how the
exterior drama of the Kantian subject’s encounter with nature in fact poses the interior
question of the subject’s self-constitution, for it stages “the problematic of a
subjectivity not just unable to make a presentation to itself, but more importantly,
unable to present itself at all.”198 As Huhn describes it, “the sublime is the realization
of our dominance, our power over the supposed power of nature,” yet such a
realization rests precisely our insistence on nature’s fearful power – “in repeatedly
staging [nature’s] redoubtable character we repeatedly stage our dominance.”199 Even
more significantly, by foregrounding the ultimately self-confirming effects of the
subject’s initial gesture of self-effacement, what we finally uncover is the
prosopopoeic logic at the heart of Kant’s analytic of the sublime. Indeed, in an
allusion to Longinus’ famous description of sublimity as the “echo of a noble mind,”
Huhn describes the self-constituting effect of the sublime as an “echo directed inward,
197
Ibid., 143, 45.
198
Huhn, 269, 70.
199
Ibid., 272.
121
for when we realize that we have been overwhelmed, what we also thereby realize is
ourselves.”200 Tracing how a subject constitutes his own dominance through the
presentation of an overwhelmingly powerful object, we can discern in this dynamic
how the subject’s prosopopoeia projectively constitutes that powerful object in order
to receive back from it, in the resulting sensation of being powerfully overwhelmed, a
self-confirming echo of the sublimity of his vocation “even over” that object.
Having reconstructed the dynamic affective scene of the Kantian sublime, which
Jameson invokes for his description of postmodernity “emotional ground tone” but
which he only engages in passing, we are now poised to understand his
contextualizing practice and its presentation of the postmodern sublime. Specifically,
when considered in the light of the Kantian sublime’s prosopopoeic structure, the
peculiar ceding of representational power staged in Jameson’s decision to present
postmodern capital as unimaginably powerful can finally be understood as a
roundabout constitution of a subject’s own critical power. I am not, indeed, the first to
notice the profound reflexivity of Jameson’s Postmodernism regarding the subject of
the critic, for as Orrin Wang observes, “insofar as [the] postmodern space of
dissolving distances and perspectives is the habitat of the postmodern critic, Jameson’s
project is one in which theoretical reflection is a self-reflection coinciding with the
question of modernity.”201 Although Wang makes no reference here to the sublime, he
characterizes Postmodernism’s project in terms that uncannily reproduce its
200
Aristotle, Longinus, and Demetrius, Poetics. Longinus: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, trans.
Stephen Halliwell, W. Hamilton Fyfe, and Doreen Innes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995),
195; Huhn, 272.
201
Orrin N. C. Wang, Fantastic Modernity : Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 17.
122
prosopopoeic, self-confirming performativity, observing that Jameson’s “very
apprehension of postmodernism sets into motion a critical subject trying to understand
a critical object that is that very same subject.”202 Building on the strength of Wang’s
observation, I argue that the ultimate consequences of Jameson’s particular
apprehension of postmodernism – the staging of its unimaginable power – lie not in
the epistemic validity of its thesis on postmodernity as such, but in its performative
constitution of the readerly subject as a sublimely powerful critic.
Jameson’s account of postmodernity redoubles the paranoid aesthetic’s
production of fear and powerlessness as a way, then, to stage and assuage anxieties
about the contemporary relevance of culture and cultural criticism. The negative
feelings engendered by his invocation of “this whole extraordinarily demoralizing and
depressing new global space” comprise an affective scene that enacts the ultimately
gratifying experience we can understand by analogy to the second moment of the
sublime – the pleasurable sensation where the cultural critic’s attribution of power to
the global system of capital rebounds in an experience of his own sublime vocation for
reading this system.203 On the face of it, my suggestion that the author of
Postmodernism could require any confirmation at all of the social relevance of cultural
interpretation might seem ludicrous, for what critic still living could be more
convinced of literary culture and cultural criticism’s social vocation than Fredric
Jameson?
202
Ibid., 18.
203
123
Yet at the end of his essay it is precisely the “genuine issue of the fate of culture
generally, and of the function of culture specifically,” that Jameson worries about.204
Moreover, Jameson suggests that “the position of the cultural critic” might have
already undergone a fundamental mutation, for we have become “so deeply suffused
and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned
ideology critique […] becomes unavailable.”205 What I wish to highlight here is how
Jameson routes his interrogation of culture and cultural criticism’s social position
through his sublime presentation of an unimaginably and overwhelmingly powerful
system of late capitalism. Identifying a “fundamental mutation of the sphere of culture
in the world of late capitalism,” Jameson observes that this has led to a “momentous
modification of its social function.”206 The mutation Jameson refers to postmodern
capital’s destruction of culture’s semiautonomy, which abolishes the critical distance
that it held from society, and thus leaves culture without the possibility of “the
positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to
assault this last.”207
At first, it seems incongruous that Jameson should posit the reabsorption of
culture and criticism into the edifice of postmodern capital, not only because of the
rapidity with which he cedes the position of critical distance to the thesis of the
postmodern sublime, but also because it inevitably poses the question of the
impossible position from which such pronouncements on late capitalism could be
posed in the first place. Relinquishing the already tenuous position of critical
204
Ibid., 47.
205
Ibid., 46.
206
Ibid., 46-7.
124
exteriority prized in models of ideology critique like that proposed in Barthes’s
Mythologies, Jameson paradoxically embraces a thesis of postmodernity that perfects
late capitalism’s assimilation of culture and criticism. It is on the basis of this initial
self-effacement, however, that Jameson will then advance the “sublime” recuperation
of postmodern capital’s apparent contrapurposiveness for culture and its critics.
Indeed, Jameson qualifies his account of culture’s loss of semiautonomy: “to argue
that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed
[…] is not necessarily to imply its disappearance.”208 In fact, Jameson suggests that
the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of
an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the
point at which everything in our social life […] can be said to have become ‘cultural’
in some original and yet untheorized sense.”209
A dissolution that is also an explosion: only at this paradoxical point do we
realize that Jameson has been speaking, all along, from the subject position constituted
out of his sublime presentation of postmodernity’s overwhelming power. It is only by
ceding the exterior distance of relative autonomy, in fact, that Jameson accedes to the
subject position of an insuperable critical power constituted by the sublime’s
prosopopoeic logic. Postmodernism’s evocation of a “whole extraordinarily
demoralizing and depressing new global space” insists on an intensification of
negative feeling precisely, I argue, as a way for the cultural critic to receive, as an
echo of his own attribution of unimaginable power to postmodern capital, his own
207
Ibid., 48.
208
Ibid.
209
Ibid.
125
insuperable vocation even over this unrepresentable global space. In precisely the
same way that Barthes and Pynchon operationalized the aesthetics of paranoia in order
to animate an eminently readable world that prosopopoeically calls on us to assume
the vocation of reading the social, Jameson performs the sacrifice of representational
power and critical distance to a supra-paranoid presentation of late capitalism’s
overwhelming power in order to secure for the cultural critic the sense that
“everything in our social life […] can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some
original and yet untheorized sense.”210 To constitute the critic’s vocation for reading as
an echo of his own ceding of power to overwhelmingly powerful social systems – this,
then, is the ultimate performative consequence of Jameson’s contextualizing practice.
As the final line of his seminal essay declares: “The political form of postmodernism
if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global
cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale.”211
210
Ibid.
211
126
127
Feeling Utopian: Demystification and the Management of Disappointment
Some, and I do not exclude myself, will find this despairing

“messianism” has a curious taste, a taste of death. It is true that this
taste is above all a taste, a foretaste, and in essence it is curious.
Curious of the very thing that it conjures – and that leaves something to
be desired.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx1
1. Demystification and Utopian Futurity
Although literary critics have rarely come to an agreement on how to read since
the splintering of the New Critical consensus into a variety of theoretical schools and
paradigms, this methodological diversity has nevertheless been subtended by a distinct
utopian sensibility. In the words of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “a variety of
critical styles in the second half of the 20th century were marked by a utopian strain
and a striving for redemption.”2 From Edward Said’s conviction that “the very act of
criticism entails a commitment to the future” to Catherine Gallagher and Stephen
Greenblatt’s proposal for a New Historicist project of pursuing “counterhistories”
whose “destinations were as yet undetermined and [whose] trajectories lay athwart the
best traveled routes,” this utopian strain can be observed in the temporal structuration
of our most influential critical methods, which deploy literary interpretation to secure
a future in which society might be otherwise than it is.3 In a discipline thus populated
A version of this essay is forthcoming in Cultural Critique 97 (2017) under the title “Feeling Utopian:
Demystification and the Management of Affect.”
1
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 212.
2
Best and Marcus, 16.
3
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 167; Edward W. Said, "The Future of Criticism," in Reflections on Exile and
Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 152. The notable exception here is Lee
Edelman’s No Future, whose refusal of a politics that “operat[es] in the name and in the direction of a
constantly anticipated future reality” nevertheless confirms the manner in which the “paramount value
128
with a multitude of interpretive approaches grounded in a renunciation of the here and
now in order to train readers’ eyes on a time to come in which the desired social
transformation will be realized, the work of Fredric Jameson stands out not only for its
totalizing assimilation of these numerous currents of contemporary literary theory to a
dialectical method of Marxist interpretation, but also for its insistent utopian demand
for a radically different social future. From The Political Unconscious’s formulation
of a hermeneutic aimed at “the decipherment of the Utopian impulses of […]
ideological cultural texts” to Postmodernism’s insistence on “the necessity of the
reinvention of the Utopian vision in any contemporary politics,” Jameson’s oeuvre
represents a career-spanning meditation on the possibility of mobilizing cultural
analysis in the service of social transformation.4
If Jameson’s work thus emblematizes a certain utopian desire subtending literary
criticism in the late 20th century, this investment in political futurity has also come to
be bound up with protocols of demystification that some among us would now like to
leave behind. Proposing that critics “relinquis[h] the freedom dream that accompanies
the work of demystification,” which they believe to have become “superfluous,” Best
and Marcus have sought to inaugurate a new methodological turn in literary studies
called “surface reading,” which would be characterized precisely by its repudiation of
demystification and the “utopian strain” it vehiculates.5 Their essay, which introduces
a special issue of Representations (“The Way We Read Now”) that grew out of a
of futurity” structures politically committed literary criticism. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory
and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 8, 6.
4
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 296; Postmodernism, or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 159.
5
Best and Marcus, 17.
129
conference convened in 2006 to mark the 25th anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s The
Political Unconscious, credits the book with “populariz[ing] symptomatic reading
among U.S. critics.”6 Although Best and Marcus describe the interpretive method
developed in The Political Unconscious as a practice of “symptomatic reading,” I have
chosen to foreground the critical idiom of “demystification” instead, not only because
of its central role in Jameson’s own conception of his work (his dialectic of utopia and
ideology assimilates the “proper uses of such critical gestures as demystification”), but
also because its semantic history more accurately registers the term’s emergence out
of Marxist ideology critique and subsequent influence on other methodological
formations in literary studies.7 That is, if Best and Marcus mean to foreground the
influence of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious’s on U.S. literary criticism, it would
make more sense to track the dissemination of practices of demystification rather than
of symptomatic reading, given the way the former grows out of Marx’s critique of the
“mystical character of commodities” and his upending of the Hegelian dialectic to
“discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell,” and is eventually assimilated
by other politically committed critical approaches that depart from Marxist ideology
critique.8 Gallagher and Greenblatt thus describe New Historicist readings, for
instance, as “skeptical, wary, demystifying, critical,” while Jacques Derrida notably
6
Ibid., 3.
7
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 12. For an example of
demystification’s centrality to Jameson’s career, see also "Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology
of Modernism," The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 8, no. 1 (1975).
8
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols., vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1990), 164, 03.
130
identified deconstruction with, among other things, “the demystification […] of the
autonomic hegemony of language.”9
By casting Jameson’s The Political Unconscious as the matrix from which
literary criticism’s utopian strivings and proclivities for demystification arose, Best
and Marcus imply that an analysis of the former’s interpretive method would help
explain the causes of demystification’s immense influence in the latter half of the 20th
century, and perhaps supply reasons for its apparent exhaustion in recent years as well.
As an account of The Political Unconscious, however, Best and Marcus’s essay
remains far too unsystematic to be helpful in this matter, suggesting as it does that the
reasons for giving up the demystifying method Jameson developed have to do with its
being compromised by his cynical careerism or his delusions of political grandeur.
Indeed, speculating that the enormous influence of Jameson’s method owed to the way
it “makes the critic a hero who performs interpretive feats of demystification,” Best
and Marcus hazard that it “presented professional literary criticism as a strenuous and
heroic endeavor, one more akin to activism and labor than to leisure, and therefore
fully deserving of remuneration.”10 As I suggested in my introduction, Best and
Marcus are hardly alone among ascribing bad faith motives to practitioners of critique
as a way to advocate for their favored methodological alternatives. Indeed, their essay
advances a critique of symptomatic reading/demystification that reproduces, albeit in a
9
Gallagher and Greenblatt, 9; Derrida, 115. Indeed, these critics explicitly acknowledge the Marxist
provenance of their own practices of demystification. Gallagher and Greenblatt note that the New
Historicism’s demystifying stance is reinforced by “the ideology critique that played a central role in
Marxist theories in which we were steeped,” while Derrida writes that deconstruction “would have been
impossible and unthinkable in a pre-Marxist space” (9; 115).
10
Best and Marcus, 3, 13, 5. Best and Marcus’ manifesto has by now inspired responses too diverse in
their positions to either summarize in detail or list exhaustively, but for a sense of its initial reception
131
far more desultory manner, the basic morphology of earlier arguments mounted by
other scholars against critique’s negative affects and political overreach. Even as the
contrast Best and Marcus set up between the “receptiveness and fidelity” of surface
reading and the “suspicious and aggressive attacks” of demystification sounds a faint
echo of Felski’s account of suspicious reading or Sedgwick’s distinction between
paranoia and reparation, however, their account of the affective structuration of
Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutic raises more questions than answers.11 In contrast to
Felski’s attentiveness to the “substantive pleasures” of suspicion or Sedgwick’s
nuanced account of paranoia as a strong theory of negative affect, the explanation that
Best and Marcus venture for the outsized influence that demystification’s suspicious
and aggressive tonality exerted on literary criticism rests on an uncharitable allegation
that it served to prop up the megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement of its practitioners.12
This, after all, is the sense in which they fault Jameson for daringly “associating the
power of the critic with that of the God of biblical hermeneutics, who can transcend
the blinkered point of view of humankind,” and for “posit[ing] the Marxist critic as
heroic in his or her own right, wrestling to free the truth hidden in the depths of the
text.”13 Rather than undertaking to explain why the methodological dyad of utopian
striving and demystification proved so compelling for a generation of literary critics,
Best and Marcus opt instead to cast it as a nearly two-and-a-half decade long power
trip from which we are only now beginning to sober up.
see Bewes; Ellen Rooney, "Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,"
ibid. (2012).
11
Best and Marcus, 10-11.
12
Felski, "Suspicious Minds," 228; Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're
So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You."
13
Best and Marcus, 14-15.
132
This chapter’s account of demystification begins by refusing the accusation of
bad faith that Best and Marcus launch against it. By describing demystification as
something that other critics do for discreditable motives that the titular “we” of “The
Way We Read Now” would never wish to own in ourselves, Best and Marcus give up
any chance of supplying a coherent account of why “we” nevertheless were enthralled
by demystifying practices for nearly three decades. Accordingly, this chapter aims to
take seriously the intuition that demystification secures affective satisfactions for its
practitioners that are other than epistemological, and to explain why its negative
emotional tonality no longer seems commensurate to its politically utopian
commitments. Although I agree that demystification’s affective structuration has led
to our present cul-de-sac of critical exhaustion, my aim is to explain how an
implacable negativity towards objects of study, which has now begun to seem
unnecessarily “aggressive and suspicious,” came to be embraced by a generation of
scholars as a politically utopian gesture.
Given The Political Unconscious’s role as a touchstone in the recent referendum
on critical demystification, I propose a rereading of Jameson’s interpretive method
that traces the theoretical maneuvers by which he remediates the negative feelings
engendered by demystification as an experience of utopian desire. Indeed, my account
of The Political Unconscious aims to give us traction on the seeming paradox that an
optimistic orientation towards political futurity should somehow be secured by an
interpretive practice committed to enacting scenes of intense negative affect. “Utopia’s
deepest subject,” writes Jameson, “is precisely our inability to conceive it, our
incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure
133
that, as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us
alone with this history.”14 Inability, incapacity, failure: it is difficult to describe the
feeling tone here as anything but the dreary melancholy of a killjoy who won’t allow
us to enjoy the pyrotechnics for fear that it might lead us to forget the history to which
we must inevitably return. “Always historicize!” and “History is what hurts” – if these
two oft-quoted slogans from The Political Unconscious have come to represent
Jameson’s most influential injunctions to literary critics, their combination yields the
prospect that, in an era that has forgotten how to think historically, the possibility of
utopia somehow rests on our willingness to always feel hurt when we read.15
Although there has emerged a growing consensus that something has gone awry
in the demystifying modes of criticism that Jameson’s method is felt to emblematize,
the intuition that this glitch somehow concerns its affective negativity has not yet led
to a specification of either the lineaments or the implications of such an assessment. If
indeed the reasons for our present eagerness to jettison Jameson’s method originate in
a diagnosis of the way the practice of demystification feels, then what would account
for the immense influence and attraction exerted by this very same negativity when it
appeared on the critical scene a mere three decades ago? Part of the answer to this
question lies, I believe, in the fact that negativity was always only half the story of
Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutic.16 Existing accounts of literary criticism’s negativity
apply only imperfectly to Jameson’s interpretive system, because the dialectic of
14
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
(London: Verso, 2007), 412-3.
15
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 9, 102.
16
This is the observation Carolyn Lesjak makes of Jameson’s twofold hermeneutic: “the unmasking of
determinant social relations is only half the story, the other half, of course, being the articulation of the
positive Utopian impulses that lie along negative critique” 246.
134
utopia and ideology systematized in The Political Unconscious and extended over the
course of his career tends to complicate any simple ascription of positive or negative
affect.17 Indeed, the centrality of dialectical reversal to Jameson’s thinking, “that
paradoxical turning around of a phenomenon into its opposite” and “the
transformation from negative to positive and from positive to negative,” virtually
guarantees that any effort to describe something as nebulous as the “feeling” of
Jameson’s method will only arrest this dialectical movement and miss its mark.18
Consequently, efforts to reassess Jameson’s interpretive system need not only to
describe the indubitably negative affects it generates in its demystification of
literature’s ideological failures but, more crucially, to close the dialectical circle by
also accounting for the paradoxical instrumentality of this negativity in sustaining the
gratifying affective scene he terms “the desire called Utopia.”19
Paying close attention to the method of reading that Jameson first theorizes in
The Political Unconscious, this chapter argues that it generates negative feelings by
demystifying literature’s ideological failures as a way to cope with ambient political
frustration and to fuel its generation of utopian affect.20 By mediating historically
17
The difficulty associated with describing Jameson’s interpretive sensibilities, pace Sedgwick or
Felski, as either paranoid or suspicious lies in the fact that his dialectic of utopia and ideology
necessarily actuates both paranoid and reparative motives, and adopts both suspicious and generous
dispositions. After all, seen through Jameson’s dialectical lens, a literary object will simultaneously
confirm, on the one hand, the paranoid or suspicious conviction that it is complicit with class
domination and “stained with the guilt […] of History itself as one long nightmare,” and, on the other,
present us with a reparative opportunity to generously reassemble it as a resource for maintaining
utopian affect via the “decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these still ideological cultural texts”
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 299, 96.
18
Marxism and Form, 309.
19
The phrase comes from the subtitle (and also names the first section of) Jameson’s Archaeologies of
the Future.
20
I have chosen to focus primarily on The Political Unconscious not only because it remains the only
text in Jameson’s voluminous critical output that lays out in full a method of reading, but also because it
has come to be considered a kind of ur-text for a variety of demystifying practices in American literary
135
specific experiences of revolutionary failure through interpretive enactments of
literature’s unconscious ideological capture, such demystifying practices habituated
readers’ affective sensoria to apprehend their political frustration and disappointment
as incitements to entrench themselves ever more firmly in an anticipatory attachment
to utopian futurity. Forged in the wake of the politically tumultuous 1960s and the
collapse of those heightened utopian aspirations over the next two decades, Jameson’s
interpretive method needs to be understood not only as literary theory, but as a set of
practices designed to mediate negative political affects in a form amenable to
management by the instruments of literary analysis. As a determinate response to a
history of hurt, Jamesonian demystification owes its influence on literary criticism in
the late 20th century to its interpretive reappraisals of political disappointment, which
enabled a generation of left-leaning critics who lived through the neo-conservative
retrenchment of the welfare state under Reagan and Thatcher to experience their
frustration with the capitalist status quo as utopian desire – that is, as openness and
receptivity to the possibility of future social transformation.21 The current decline of
demystification, often among the very same critics who had previously found
Jameson’s work so energizing, signals in turn the surfacing of problems immanent to
criticism. According to Best and Marcus, the influence of The Political Unconscious, “can be felt in the
centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet
(1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring
role of race in American literature” 6.
21
It should be clear from this account that I make no claims regarding the reception of Jameson’s
interpretive method among critics unsympathetic to his political commitments. Critics who experienced
the ‘70s and ‘80s as anything but politically frustrating and disappointing are not likely to have found
Jameson’s methodological presuppositions convincing. I am grateful to Sarah Tindal Kareem for
helping me make the connection between The Political Unconscious’s reception and the Reaganism and
Thatcherism of the 1980s.
136
its strategies for dealing with the affective intensities of political failure, which have
grown rather than abated since the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1980.
To help theorize the consequences of demystification’s management of political
disappointment, I supplement my consideration of Jameson’s dialectic of utopia and
ideology with a reading of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, an
author whose career-spanning preoccupations with utopia uniquely qualify him to
stage in fiction the affective complexities on which the former’s demystifying practice
snags. Like Jameson, Chabon is no stranger to failed utopias, and has often referred in
interviews to his childhood in Columbia, Maryland, which he describes as a planned
“utopian community” that later “faded” when it “los[t] its utopian ideals.”22 By
Chabon’s account, this formative experience left him with utopian sensibilities no less
melancholic than Jameson’s own: “When utopia isn’t in the past, it is always
something threatened, on the verge of slipping away, because that is what utopia does.
It is unattainable by definition.”23 Even if, as Chabon puts it in a couple of memorable
aphorisms, “elegy is an inevitable outcome of utopia” and “it is in the nature of Utopia
to go out of business,” this melancholy has spurred, rather than hindered, the
productivity of his fictional engagements with utopian thematics.24 Chabon finds
himself, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union, and most recently in Telegraph Avenue, “obliged, and eager, to recreate
through fiction, through storytelling and prose, the lost utopia that never quite
22
Michael Chabon, "An Interview with Michael Chabon," Prism Magazine, November 12 2012.
23
Ibid.
24
"Michael Chabon: 'I Think Elegy Is an Inevitable Outcome of Utopia',"
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/09/michael-chabon-i-think-elegy-inevitable-
outcome-utopia; "O.J. Simpson, Racial Utopia, and the Moment That Inspired My Novel," New York
Times, September 12 2012.
137
happened […] that I have never since forgotten and that I have been losing, and
longing for, all my life.”25
In reading Chabon alongside Jameson, my aim has not been to recommend the
former as an author steeped in Marxist or dialectical thought, but rather to foreground
their shared commitment to exploring narrative’s role in enabling us to remain open to
the possibility of utopia in the face of overwhelming disappointment and failure. In
other words, this essay rests not on the presupposition that Chabon hews to the same
philosophical tradition that informs Jameson’s conception of utopia, but rather that his
fiction actuates the same basic impulse that animates the latter’s interpretive method.
That being said, it is not my intention to treat The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The
Political Unconscious as two discursive treatments of the same idea, as if novels and
literary criticism did not obey different criteria of coherence. Indeed, it is precisely the
productivity of these differences that justifies their present conjunction: where
Jameson fuels utopian affect with negative feelings provoked by the interpretive
enactment of narrative’s ideological failures, Chabon’s novel stages the crucial role of
narrative’s smaller-scale gratifications and pleasures in sustaining readers’ affective
relations to utopia. If Jameson sought to manage negative political affects by
mediating and recoding them as experiences of utopian anticipation, the experience of
literature as disappointing and frustrating, which powered the dialectical torsions of
his method of reading, could itself never be permitted to turn into one of pleasure or
satisfaction. It is precisely as an author of narrative fiction rather than a literary
theorist that Chabon, who could hardly have recourse to coping mechanisms that
25
"O.J. Simpson, Racial Utopia, and the Moment That Inspired My Novel."
138
foreclose literature’s aesthetic gratifications, thus developed affective strategies that
could only have been articulated in his chosen genre. Consequently, even though the
utopian problematic that both Chabon and Jameson share implies that each harbors a
conception of the role narrative plays in sustaining utopian desire over a temporal
duration characterized by utopia’s indefinite deferral, the different textual genres in
which they take up this task naturally lead them to vastly different conclusions. What
finally proves most instructive about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is not that it out-
theorizes Jameson but, as I will demonstrate, that it narrates the desire for utopia in
ways that the latter’s method of reading cannot help but misconstrue.
2. Fredric Jameson and the Remediation of Political Failure
So it is that a Marxist hermeneutic […] must come to terms with the certainty
that all the works of class history […] are all in one way or another
profoundly ideological, have all had a vested interest in and a functional
relationship to social formations based on violence and exploitation; and that,
finally, the restoration of the meaning of the greatest cultural monuments
cannot be separated from a passionate and partisan assessment of everything
that is oppressive in them and that knows complicity with privilege and class
domination, stained with the guilt not merely of culture in particular but of
History itself as one long nightmare.26
Coming at the end of The Political Unconscious, the foregoing passage concludes
Jameson’s elucidation of his interpretive method on a decidedly somber note. Having
26
139
roused critics to a sense of the subterranean utopian desires lying dormant in
ideological cultural texts, Jameson nevertheless draws his text to a close by reminding
us that since there remains no possibility of waking from the nightmare of History,
any utopian mode of reading worth its salt must subsist on the bitter certainty of
culture’s violence, exploitation, complicity, domination, and guilt. How are we to sort
through the jumble of affects – paranoid and suspicious, but also passionately,
fervently utopian – that permeate Jameson’s method of reading? To be sure, interest in
such questions predates the recent affective turn in the humanities, but it has mostly
been couched as commentary on his “style” – which has been called anything from
“mishmashing” (Jeffrey Nealon) to “absurdly rich” (Clint Burnham) and “difficult”
(just about everyone) – rather than as investigations into the affective dimensions of
his thought.27 Although such interrogations touch only obliquely on the affects of
Jameson’s methodological propositions, efforts by his more astute commentators to
grapple with the paradoxical feelings they engender will help us to delineate the
problem space in which our present inquiry takes place. Terry Eagleton, for instance,
describes Jameson’s style as a “compensat[ion] for and adumbrat[ion of] pleasures
historically postponed, goals as yet politically unrealizable.”28 Eagleton identifies in
Jameson’s analytic the need for an emotional quantum capable of counterbalancing the
pervasive sense of dissatisfaction generated by its deferral of utopia – a need fulfilled,
he claims, by the latter’s style, “the excess or self-delight […] which slips through the
27
Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), 23; Clint Burnham, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist
Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 73.
28
Terry Eagleton, "Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style," Diacritics 12, no. 3 (1982): 15.
140
very dialectical forms it so persuasively delineates.”29 In a similar vein, for Steven
Helmling, if Jameson’s prose strikes us as “pained,” “stoic,” or “tragic” it is because
the imperative of “inevitable failure” constitutes the “constant burden or refrain” of his
thought, functioning as a “prophylactic against premature utopianisms” and a
“chastening reminder of the limits of critique.”30 However, as Helmling observes in
his reading of The Political Unconscious, there exists an “anomaly” in the
contradictory affects engendered by Jameson’s writing: actuated by “inevitable
failure,” it nevertheless “exhilarates,” “inspirits,” and “conjures a sense of new
possibility and power for critical or interpretive effort even as it stipulates a ‘vision of
inevitable failure’ as the condition of these things […] as if it makes of its own
projection of that ‘vision of failure’ an excitingly potent success.”31
Both Eagleton and Helmling consider Jameson’s style central to the same
conundrum: such a demystifying method, taking as axiomatic both the inevitability of
ideological closure and the impossibility of imagining utopia from within it, must
surely conduce to disappointment and frustration – why then did it generate among
literary critics the excitement and exhilaration that it did? The answers that both critics
provide are compelling on their own terms, but lack a concept of the literary object’s
function in all of the dialectical complexity that they find enacted therein. “If realist
29
Ibid.
30
Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the
Dialectic of Critique (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 93, 142. In an account faithful to the dialectical
quality of Jameson’s critical method, Helmling describes how, “in the agitated medium of [Jameson’s]
prose, the motif of ‘failure’ exfoliates with Protean prolixity, in manifold guises and variations, always
encoding in one form or another the promises and the perils of critical ambition itself” (5). Helmling
astutely observes that while the evocation of failure constitutes the “sine qua non which the writing of
critique must achieve,” it is finally a motivation “whose potency might be overstressed – too
‘successfully’ evoked – and thus […] foreclose not merely the value of past revolutionary successes,
141
fiction ‘fails,’” writes Helmling, “critical theory at least sounds, in the pages devoted
to it […] like a field of endeavor in which successes […] remain a real possibility.”32
The notion that literary interpretation could be predicated on demonstrating the failure
of its object has, to be sure, only recently lost the patina of self-evidence, but the
necessity of fiction’s failure evidently troubled Helmling much less than did the odd
“linguistic optimism” of Jameson’s “textual effects.”33 As much as “failure” occupies
center stage in Helmling’s analysis, the failure of fiction, which critique must perform,
tends to get conflated with that of critique itself, “the impossibility of [its] tasks, and
the anguish of its failures.”34 The two are obviously distinct, and the question of why
Jameson only succeeds in generating utopian affect to the extent that he insists on our
“painful recollection of the dark underside of even the most seemingly innocent and
‘life-enhancing’ masterpieces of the canon” is precisely the one we need to address.35
With nearly a decade of ground clearing work by cultural critics working on
affect behind us, we now have the theoretical means with which to pursue such
inquiries. Nevertheless, disagreements over terminology in the field of affect studies
broadly construed have become sufficiently complicated as to require a clarification as
to my choice of vocabulary. Although Deleuzian critics like Brian Massumi and
Lawrence Grossberg understand affect as an objective, non-signifying intensity and
but the success of future revolutionary struggle as well” (101). See also "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson
and Eagleton," Postmodern Culture 3, no. 3 (1993).
31
The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique, 97.
32
Ibid., 98.
33
Ibid. Indeed, Helmling’s own observation about the reception of The Political Unconscious helps us
to mark the periodicity of this change in critical attitudes: “It is worth remembering that the audience
that found so much excitement in the book was interested more in critical theory than in Balzac,
Gissing, or Conrad” (98).
34
Ibid., 100.
35
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 299, my emphasis.
142
thus distinguish it from emotion along the lines of the latter’s subjective containment
and narrative structuration, I use “affect” in this essay as a generic term encompassing,
rather than opposed to, emotion.36 Moreover, where I have employed the term
“feeling,” I mean to highlight the experiential qualities of a particular affective state,
rather than to designate a formally or qualitatively distinct object. As will become
clearer as I proceed, the distinctions that matter in this essay are not the ones that
typically occupy those seeking to distinguish affect from emotion. Rather, in order to
foreground how demystification serves as an instrument for the management of affect,
I have sought to distinguish, first, the literary from the political as two different
affective scenarios between which Jameson’s method of reading must mediate, and
second, the reflexive affect of utopianism (and its opposite number, defeatism) from
the more primary affects of disappointment and frustration to which it gives structure
(and their opposites, satisfaction and pleasure).37
In the first instance, the difference between the literary and the political matters
because Jameson’s otherwise unerringly dialectical analytic runs into a cul-de-sac of
36
On the distinction between emotion and affect, see Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect,"
Cultural Criitique no. 31 (1995): 88-9; Lawrence Grossberg, "Mapping Popular Culture," in We Gotta
Get out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992),
79-81. For a discussion of the affect/emotion distinction that considers it untenable, see Ruth Leys,
"The Turn to Affect: A Critique," Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011). In addition, I have chosen to use
“affect” consistently throughout this essay rather than employ it interchangeably with “emotion,” not to
mark the significance to my argument of some formal difference between the two, but simply to avoid
confusion.
37
To the extent that Jameson’s utopianism interprets, narrativizes, and sociolinguistically fixes
sensations of frustration and disappointment, critics who hew to distinction between emotion and affect
in the way Massumi and Grossberg define it might wish to term the former an emotion, and the latter
affects. However, this would not only seem semantically counter-intuitive, but would also fail to
capture the feedback loop that I believe Jameson’s interpretive method creates. Indeed, utopianism
structures frustration and disappointment but thus also seeks to reproduce such sensations of frustration
and disappointment to maintain the continuity of its affective relation to futurity. For this reason, it
becomes difficult to maintain the affect/emotion distinction when discussing the feeling states with
which this essay is concerned.
143
negativity precisely at the point where it mediates between these two scenes of affect.
Although the “have it both ways” quality of Jameson’s political dialectic of utopia and
ideology gives his method the appearance of shuttling effortlessly between positive
and negative dispositions, the engine of this dialectical movement invariably runs on
the negative feelings that it repeatedly produces in its demystification of literature’s
unconscious ideological complicities. Second, what will enable us to explain
Jameson’s need to engender negative affect by recreating scenes of literature’s failures
is the fact that utopianism functions in his political imagination as an affect about
other affects, or better, as an affect that structures other affects. Put simply, for
Jameson, utopianism names a positive relation to futurity characterized by openness
and receptivity to political transformation, an affective disposition cultivated by
deliberately reappraising the prior affective materials that characterize our historical
experiences (and which need not themselves be positive).38 In this, Jameson’s
utopianism resembles a restricted case of what Lauren Berlant terms optimism, “the
force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the
satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a
person, way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.”39 The usefulness of
Berlant’s description lies in the distinction she draws between the object to which we
become optimistically attached and the “satisfying something” that we expect will
materialize as a result of our proximity to that object. Because optimism may structure
our attachment to a variety of different objects, as Berlant points out, “optimism might
38
By his own account, Jameson conceives of utopian desire along the lines of Ernst Bloch's conception
of hope as an “expectation affec[t],” which “aim[s] less at some specific object as the fetish of [its]
desire, than at the very configuration of the world in general” Marxism and Form, 127.
144
not feel optimistic [….] at any moment it might feel like anything, including nothing:
dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity, the whole gamut from the sly neutrality of browsing
the aisles to excitement at the prospect of ‘the change that’s gonna come.’”40 By
bringing our attention to the way a positive affect may be experienced in and through
negative feelings (and vice versa), Berlant helps foreground the reflexivity of
Jameson’s utopianism which, like optimism, involves a reappraisal of other affects
that enables them to be apprehended as sensations of openness and receptivity to the
future. Berlant’s reflexive model of affect thus enables us to understand the otherwise
paradoxical affective dynamics of Jameson’s utopianism, whose maintenance of a
positive attachment to social transformation rests on its reproduction and recoding of
negative feelings.
With this in mind, Jameson’s proclivity for recreating interpretive scenes of
literature’s failure becomes legible as a means of mediating and managing the
affective pressures exerted by a specific historical situation. As Perry Anderson
observes in The Origins of Postmodernity, Jameson’s work represents both a
culmination and recapitulation of Western Marxism’s preoccupation with political
defeat: “Arising once again from an experience of political defeat – the quelling of the
turmoil of the sixties,” Jameson’s work has “answered to the same basic coordinates
of the classic texts of the past.”41 Formed in the crucible of the failure of all 20th
39
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1-2.
40
Ibid., 2.
41
Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Veso, 1998), 71. The tradition of “Western
Marxism” roughly corresponds to the theoretical current that runs through the work of, amongst others:
Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and Louis Althusser. The term was introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Adventures of the
Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Subsequently, the term
was popularized by Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979). By
145
century revolutionary movements to fulfill their utopian ambitions, Jameson’s
interpretive method aimed to develop approaches to reading adapted to a political
climate in which change had begun to seem unimaginable.42 To this end, Jameson’s
dialectic of utopia and ideology charts a middle way between skeptical defeatism and
ideological fantasy by proposing that “the effectively ideological is also, at the same
time, necessarily Utopian.”43 Just as the specter of ideology haunts every corrupt
utopian fantasy with the inevitability of its own ideological contamination, ideology
must of necessity be compromised from within because it can only function by
activating “the oldest Utopian longings of humankind,” thus even the forms of
solidarity expressed by the ruling classes “expresses the unity of a collectivity.”44 It is
in this sense that Jameson argues: “all class consciousness – or, in other words, all
ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class
consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes – is in its very
nature Utopian.”45
Anderson’s account, because Western Marxism was “born of political defeat – the crushing of
proletarian insurgencies in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy,” its overriding preoccupations with
questions of aesthetics need to be understood as a response to “the absence of a popular revolutionary
practice” and the “wan[ing]” of “political strategy for the overthrow of capital” The Origins of
Postmodernity, 69.
42
In thus historicizing Jameson’s interpretive method I take my lead from Christopher Nealon, who has
described The Political Unconscious as a text that “seems to suit perfectly an era of defeats for the Left”
because it seeks to “offer critics a reading practice that makes sense of defeat.” "Reading on the Left,"
Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 32-6. Nealon demonstrates how we might read The Political
Unconscious as an attempt to “incorporat[e] revolutionary failure into his system of interpretation,” one
that made it possible for literary critics in an unrevolutionary age to “think about the relationships
among forms of historical causality, types of literary activity, and modes of critical reading” (25).
43
44
Ibid., 289.
45
Ibid., 299. Jameson clearly intended for the dialectic of utopia and ideology to characterize not only
the 19th century novels he reads in The Political Unconscious, but also contemporary culture writ large.
In an essay published before The Political Unconscious, Jameson argued that works of mass culture like
Jaws and The Godfather, “even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order […] cannot
do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and
146
To have deployed the dialectic in order to refigure a political landscape
characterized by failure as one furrowed with rich veins of utopian desire awaiting
excavation by demystifying critics: it is surely for this achievement that Anderson
credits Jameson with the “magical” ability to “conjure into being what might be
thought impossible – a lucid enchantment of the world.”46 Confronted with a political
impasse that threatens to obviate the possibility of social transformation, Jameson
wards off the dangers of defeatism by assuring us that, even at its worst, ideological
mystification necessarily contains a kernel of utopian desire awaiting fulfillment.
Observe, however, the persistence of negative feeling in this dialectical reversal from
defeatism to utopianism: in Jameson’s hands, disappointment and frustration get
affectively restructured as a utopian sense of openness and receptivity to future social
transformation, but nevertheless retain their essentially negative feeling tone. As
Jameson puts it, the “painful ‘decentering’ of consciousness” involved in dialectical
reversal and the “exasperation” of its “unpleasant reflexivity” have to be tolerated,
there being “no way out” of this “labor and suffering of the negative.”47 The
reflexivity of utopian affect averts political defeatism not by staving off negative
feelings, but by repurposing them as the fuel of an anticipatory attachment to a utopia
deferred. In the absence of such an anticipatory structure, disappointment and
frustration might have calcified into political defeatism and led social revolutionaries
to give up the struggle entirely. Structured by the dialectic of utopia and ideology,
however, negative feelings become doubly useful: not only do they serve the hortatory
fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found
to have given voice.” "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text, no. 1 (1979): 144.
46
Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 76.
147
function of spurring our struggle against ideological mystification, they
simultaneously inoculate us against the risk of giving in to premature fantasies that
utopian satisfaction might actually exist under capitalism. Since the temporality of
utopian affect is characterized by a sense that its desire for transformation has not yet
been fulfilled, the intensity of one’s negative feelings becomes politically useful in the
meantime as indicators of revolutionary vitality, since satisfaction or pleasure would
merely signal our capitulation to the affective bribes of ideological fantasy.48
One may by now have come up with a number of objections to Jameson’s
dialectical approach to maintaining utopian affect, but our concerns as literary critics
lie further afield, since the dialectic of ideology and utopia says nothing on its own
about how critics should read or relate to literary texts. Whatever we may think of the
centrality of negative feelings to Jameson’s dialectic, the crux of their methodological
implications lies in the way the latter gets operationalized as literary theory. Indeed, it
is only when the dialectic gets combined with a psychoanalytically inflected
conception of the literary work's unconscious that Jameson begins to generate the
critical procedures and methodological presuppositions that we now associate with
demystification. The conception of narrative form as the unconscious “inventing [of]
imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions”: nothing in the
47
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 283, 84.
48
Jameson explicitly took on the question of ideology critique’s relationship to pleasure in “Pleasure: A
Political Issue,” where he maintained that “the proper political use of pleasure must always be
allegorical,” in that the thematizing of particular pleasures find their true political and historical
significance only as “figure[s] for Utopia in general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation
of society as a whole” The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 384. Despite Jameson’s evident
attempt at making space for pleasure in Marxist ideology critique, his insistence on the allegory as the
only function that pleasure can serve if it is to avoid descending into complacent hedonism remains too
limiting. Rather than serve as empty ciphers for allegories of Utopia, pleasure and satisfaction
148
dialectic of ideology or utopia would seem to lead inexorably to this view of novelistic
fiction, yet it constitutes nothing less than the axle on which the machinery of
Jamesonian demystification turns.49 When we begin to reconstruct the path that
Jameson took in the construction of his interpretive system, it becomes clearer that this
conception of narrative’s political unconscious arose as a means of reproducing the
feelings of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration that sustain the dialectic of
utopia and ideology, rather than from any methodological necessity immanent to a
theory of narrative form as such.
As Jameson explains it, his conception of the novel’s political unconscious
draws on the model of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology.50 Specifically,
Jameson adopts the premises of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the Caduveo Indians’ face
paintings, where one’s “discovery of a text’s symbolic efficacity” would be “oriented
by a formal description which seeks to grasp it as a determinate structure of still
properly formal contradictions.”51 The Lévi-Straussian provenance of an axiom so
central to Jameson’s method raises more questions than it provides answers. In the
first instance, the example of the Caduveo can serve only as an analogy rather than as
proof that such a symbolic function inheres in the nature of narrative fiction. Well
aware of this, Jameson doesn’t expect us to accept Lévi-Strauss’s proposition at his
word alone, but will only say that this hypothesis deserves “serious exploration and
(especially of the narrative variety) can, as this essay argues, function in and of themselves to sustain
utopian affect.
49
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 79.
50
Slavoj Žižek complicates Jameson’s reading of Lévi-Strauss by pointing out that the fantasy
embodied in Caduveo facial art articulates “not […] a longing for real equality, but with the longing for
a proper appearance.” Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2013), 255. It should be noted,
however, that despite this modification of Jameson’s reading, Žižek essentially accepts his elaboration
of a political unconscious on the basis of Lévi-Strauss’s account.
149
systematic experimental verification.”52 Moreover, the appropriation of Lévi-Strauss’s
thesis that the Caduveo “project[ed] decorative or mythic resolutions of issues that
they are unable to articulate conceptually” exposes Jameson to the (by now) well-
worn critiques of anthropology’s claims to epistemological privilege, which would
contest his assumption as a critic that novelists, like the Caduveo Indians, are always
less capable of thinking critically about ideology than he is.53 Such a proposition
would seem thoroughly untenable for Jameson, given that the version of totality
thinking that he formulates in The Political Unconscious does not proceed from an
extra-ideological epistemological position, but locates both the text and the critic on
the same side of the ideological horizon.54
In consigning narrative fiction to the unconscious mimesis of real social
contradictions, Jameson would seem to be channeling not Lévi-Strauss, but Georg
Lukács, whose bleak account of the novel's hapless attempts to overcome the loss of
immanent totality in The Theory of the Novel recommends it as the primary antecedent
of Jameson’s belief in the novel’s political pensée sauvage. According to Lukács,
while the genre of the epic embodied totality as “meta-subjective, transcendent, […] a
revelation and a grace,” the novel is the genre of an age where “totality that can be
simply accepted is no longer given to the forms of art.”55 Absent this pre-given
totality, Lukács argues, the novel suffers from what we might call an unconscious
epic-envy, which dooms it to a “desperate, purely artistic attempt to create, with the
51
52
Ibid., 80.
53
54
Jameson declares in that there exist no extra-ideological positions for critics to occupy, a rule from
which he does not exempt himself, calling a “mirage” and a “myth” the notion that anyone might
“square the circle of ideological conditioning by sheer lucidity and the taking of thought.” Ibid.
150
means of composition, structuring and organization, a unity that is no longer
organically given: a desperate attempt and a heroic failure.”56 Just as Jameson assumes
that novels inevitably and unconsciously generate aesthetic solutions to real
contradictions that they could not possibly hope to solve, Lukács takes as axiomatic
that they should harbor epic ambitions despite the impossibility of ever realizing them:
“The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer
directly given […] yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”57
If indeed Jameson's doctrine of the novel's political unconscious draws its
lineage from Lukács, it may be instructive for our purposes to realize that there is
nothing necessary or inevitable about the novel’s epic ambitions, despite the latter’s
insistence.58 Lukács’s theory of the novel’s epic ambitions is best understood as the
projection of a fundamental metaphysical dissonance into the form of the novel, where
the latter comes to bear the burden of a more general existential desire to overcome the
subject-object rift characteristic of Kantian epistemology.59 A similar logic, I would
argue, underwrites Jameson’s assertion of the novel’s unconscious ideological
complicity. Just as the novel must aspire to an impossible epic totality in order to
corroborate Lukács’s own sense of metaphysical dissonance in the wake of the First
55
Ibid., 283.
56
Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic
Literature, 50, 39.
57
Ibid., 55.
58
Lukács writes: “[Art forms] have to produce out of themselves all that was once simply accepted as
given [….] they must create by their own power […] an object and its environment [….] they must
either narrow down and volatilize whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass
it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object and the inner
nullity of their own means.” Ibid., 56.
59
As J. M. Bernstein observes, “Lukács conceives of the novel in fundamentally Kantian terms, that is,
he conceives of the practice of novel writing as working within the Kantian analysis of the relation
between man and world. The novel, we might say, is written against a background of Kantian
assumptions, and these assumptions are constitutive of the form of the novel.” Ibid., 39, my emphasis.
151
World War, it must also unconsciously seek aesthetic solutions to real contradictions
in order to confirm Jameson’s historical experience of revolutionary failure – which
helpfully, for his purposes, sets in motion yet another cycle of dialectical reversals
culminating in an even more intensely utopian attachment to an as-yet unrealized
future.
Identifying the Lukácsian inheritance in Jameson’s method will also help us to
specify how the dialectic of utopia and ideology gets mediated as a method of literary
interpretation. To recall, Jameson’s dialectical conception of utopia advances neither a
substantive political program nor a blueprint for socialism, but consists in sustaining
our anticipation of a collective form of social life that has not yet been actualized. In
effect, Jameson's utopianism places utopia sous rature, retaining the term as an empty
but necessary placeholder for the future possibility of total social transformation. As
Jameson writes in the preface to The Political Unconscious, the book promises neither
an “exploratory projection of what a vital and emergent political culture should be and
do,” nor does it “propose a political or revolutionary aesthetic.”60 Instead, he gestures
at “new forms of collective thinking and collective culture which lie beyond the
boundaries of our world,” characterizing his utopianism as an “empty chair reserved
for some as yet unrealized, collective, and decentered cultural production of the
future.”61 As a means of operationalizing this intransitive, anticipatory affect in his
60
J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form
(Minneapolis: Univesity of Minnesota Press), xiii.
61
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 10, 11. The closest
Jameson has ever come to concretizing utopia has been to claim that the most radically utopian demand
one could make on our present capitalist system would be “the demand for full employment, universal
full employment around the globe.” Ibid., 11. It may seem that Jameson proposes here a “positive” and
therefore ideologically contaminated utopian vision, yet careful attention to his demand would reveal
that it constitutes not a utopian program as such, but plays a “diagnostic and critical-substantive role”
152
method of narrative analysis, Jameson repurposes the concept of totality advanced in
Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which he reads as neither “some positive
vision of the end of history” nor “some dogmatic or 'positive' conception of Marxism
as a system,” but a “methodological standard” and “an imperative to totalize.”62 What
I want to underscore here is that in Jameson's hands, Lukácsian totality turns out to be
remarkably similar to utopia – a non-representational surplus that serves as a negative
ideal against which ideologies can be unmasked as “strategies of containment.”63
It is this convenient conceptual similarity between totality and utopia that
suggests to Jameson how the political dialectic of utopia and ideology might be
translated into an instrument of narrative analysis. Employing the concept of totality in
ways that Lukács himself did not foresee, Jameson equates narrative closure with
ideological closure, pitting Lukács’s negative ideal of totality against “narrative
frames or containment strategies which seek to endow their objects of representation
with formal unity,” and which come to serve as narrative correlates of political
ideologies.64 By deploying Lukácsian totality as a means both to negate narrative
closure and to unmask it as a symptom of ideological fantasy, Jameson effectively
because full employment cannot be realized without “usher[ing] in a society structurally distinct from
this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the
political” (Ibid). Even at its most concrete, the substantive moment of Jameson's utopianism resides not
in the fantasy of full employment proper, but in its negative ability to return our attention to “concrete
circumstances and situations [so as] to read their dark spots and pathological dimensions as so many
symptoms and effects of unemployment” (Ibid).
62
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 147.
63
64
Ibid., 53. Jameson's employment of Lukácsian totality for narrative analysis gets schematized in his
bricolage of A. J. Greimas’ semiotic square – resulting in the now iconic diagrams that populate the
pages of The Political Unconscious. Originally intended for the analysis of the semantic oppositions at
the heart of narrative progression, the enclosure delineated by the vertices of the semiotic square comes
to emblematize Jameson's conviction that narrative closure necessarily amounts to ideological closure,
since it “maps the limits of a specific ideological consciousness and marks the conceptual points beyond
which that consciousness cannot go, and between which it is condemned to oscillate” (47).
153
invents a methodological instrument that performs the narrative equivalent of utopia's
negation of the political status quo. To return to a distinction I made earlier, this
remarkable correspondence that Jameson’s appropriation of Lukács has produced
serves as the hinge that mediates between political and literary scenes of affect.
Specifically, the suggestive conceptual affinities between totality and utopia enable
Jameson to imply that by unconsciously generating aesthetic solutions to real
contradictions, novels not only produce false ideological totalities (“strategies of
containment”) that can be negated by Lukács’s methodological ideal of immanent
totality, they also produce false utopias that the demystifying critic needs to negate in
favor of a purely anticipatory concept of utopia. Henceforth, the feelings of
disappointment, frustration, and dissatisfaction with literature that a demystifying
critic encourages us to experience become conceptually equivalent to politically
salutary feelings of discontent with the capitalist status quo and experiential
confirmation that one has resisted the affective bribes of ideological fantasy.
Just as an ideological strategy of containment “seem[s] internally coherent in its
own terms, while repressing the unthinkable […] which lies beyond its boundaries,”
the novel's formal coherence and unity come to represent a naïve, wish-fulfilling
fantasy of utopia that implies, but represses, the possibility of a more authentic utopia
that lies just beyond the perceptual limits of our ideologically-bound horizon.65 Via
this conceptual metonymy, Jameson transcodes Lukács’s political understanding of
ideological totality into a formal concept of narrative unity, then endows both versions
of totality with utopian resonances. Jameson's doctrine of the political unconscious
65
Ibid., 54.
154
proposes to combine, on the one hand, Lukács’s axiom in The Theory of the Novel that
the novel's formal unity amounts to the production of false totalities, and on the other,
the proposal in History and Class Consciousness that ideological strategies of
containment can be unmasked “by confrontation with the ideal of totality which they
at once imply and repress.”66 By using Lukácsian totality to bridge narrative analysis
and the dialectic of utopia and ideology, Jameson’s theory of narrative fiction’s
unconscious ideological complicities provides him with a potentially endless source of
negative feelings with which to fuel his interpretive machine. It is precisely in this
manner that the dialectical reversal of defeatism into utopianism in the political sense
relies on a thoroughly undialectical fixation on negative feelings in the scene of
literary interpretation.
3. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: Eschatological Time and Messianic Deferral
By reproducing and mediating historical experiences of political disappointment
in its demystifications of narrative fiction’s ideological complicities, The Political
Unconscious instructed critics in the affective restructuration of revolutionary failure
such that it could be experienced as utopian anticipation. Given that alternatives to
capitalism are perhaps even less imaginable today than they were in the original
contexts of The Political Unconscious’s publication, why wouldn’t the latter’s ability
to reappraise political disappointment as utopian anticipation prove even more
pertinent in our present situation? If my redescription of Jameson’s critical method has
tended to give it the appearance of a kind of perpetual motion engine powered by
66
Ibid., 53.
155
negative feelings, I now wish to suggest why this demystifying machine has recently
begun to grind to a halt.
In enabling critics to recode negative political affect as utopian anticipation,
Jameson’s interpretive method hewed to an essentially eschatological temporality in
recommending a principled refusal of present gratifications in favor of a deferred,
fully realized utopian fulfillment. At first glance, it appears that such an affective
gambit should be able to sustain itself over the duration of an indefinitely prolonged
present, but its effectiveness in fact obtains only insofar as the world remains one in
which total social transformation can still be imagined as an imminent possibility. It is
precisely this condition that no longer holds, because in the 30 years since the
publication of The Political Unconscious, the quantitative accumulation of political
disappointment has conduced to a qualitatively different experience that Anne
Cvetkovich, following the academics, artists, and activists of Feel Tank Chicago, has
termed “political depression.”67 In this era of political depression, whose “genre of
historical duration” Lauren Berlant has characterized as one of “impasse,” we can no
longer imagine ourselves living on the cusp of radical social transformation.68 With its
“spatial connotations of being at a ‘dead end’ or ‘no exit,’” as Cvetkovich describes it,
“impasse” not only “describe[s] moments […] when it is impossible to imagine how
to get to a better future,” but also signals “intellectual blockages, such as those
67
Ibid.
68
Ann Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 460. As Mark
McGurl observes, if there exists in our contemporary moment a “sense of imminent change in the
sociopolitical structures and environmental conditions of the world as we know it,” it is a change that is
“typically envisioned as harmful, and as proceeding without guidance from a revolutionary avant-
garde.” Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4.
156
produced by forms of critique that get stuck in the formulaic repetition of the failure of
cultural texts to be progressive.”69
Confronted with the rapidly growing pileup of political disappointment that
greets us at the turn of the century, it is precisely this formulaic (albeit dialectically
recuperated) repetition of narrative fiction’s failure that Jamesonian demystification
produces. Performing ever more feverishly the interpretive two-step of reproducing
bleak scenes of literature’s inevitable capture by ideology, it then invites us to
experience them as utopian anticipation precisely at a time when such an affective
reappraisal has become increasingly implausible. Literary critics might have consented
to the construal of negative political affect as an experience of utopian desire when
social transformation still seemed like a credible prospect, but when the anticipatory
structure of utopian desire has been undercut by the experience of impasse that
Cvetkovich and others have so perspicaciously diagnosed, disappointment and
dissatisfaction can only feel, well, disappointing and dissatisfying. Although
Jameson’s interpretive method initially permitted us to experience our frustration with
the capitalist status quo as signaling the vitality of our utopian desire, as the possibility
of its fulfillment has receded further and further from view, the consequent
accumulation and buildup of negative affect fractures the anticipatory temporality of
this affective strategy, overloading the circuits of its interpretive machinery and
undoing the dialectic of utopia and ideology from within.
In order to theorize this eventuality, I turn to a reading of The Yiddish
Policemens’ Union, which narrativizes a problematic that it shares with Jameson’s
69
"Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present," New Literary History 41, no. 2
157
work: namely, the role that narrative plays in enabling us to sustain utopian affect.
Informed by his own experience of failed utopian experiments, Chabon thematizes the
same dangers of defeatism and ideological fantasy that Jameson sought to avert, but
imagines ways in which utopian affect might be sustained by the pleasures and
satisfactions of narrative, rather than its disappointments and failures.
As Michael Chabon explains in an interview, the premise of The Yiddish
Policemen's Union emerged from his encounter with Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's
Say It In Yiddish, a phrasebook for travelers that Chabon described as “probably the
saddest book [he] own[ed].”70 What he found so heartbreaking about this otherwise
unremarkable book was the implication of its earnest belief in the existence of a
Yiddish-speaking nation that has not existed anywhere in the world since the
Holocaust. Animated by the “what if” that actuates the Weinreichs' painstakingly
thorough phrasebook for travelers to a non-existent country, Chabon attempted to
imagine a referent for their efforts – an “Yisroel” founded in Alaska during World
War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe, a “cold northern land of furs,
paprika, samovars, and one long, glorious day of summer.”71 Far from alleviating the
sadness brought on by Yiddishkeit’s homelessness, however, Chabon found that the
fiction of “Yisroel” only underscored all the more poignantly its absence. For Chabon,
the utopia to which the Weinreichs' phrasebook gestured seemed “in the nature of a
wistful toy theater, with miniature sets and furnishings to arrange and rearrange, all
their grief concealed behind the scrim, hidden in the machinery of the loft, sealed up
(2010): 342-3.
70
Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 20, 21.
71
Michael Chabon, "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts," Civilization1997, 67.
158
beneath the trapdoors in the floorboards.”72 Indeed, the Weinreichs' wishful attempts
to conceal their grief behind a counterfactual “what if” struck Chabon as “a gesture
[…] of a utopian impulse turned cruel and ironic.”73
Chabon was to give “Yisroel” its full elaboration ten years later in The Yiddish
Policemen's Union, a novel set in an alternate history in which the Nazis won World
War II, the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin, and the death of the Alaskan delegate
to Congress in a car accident led to the creation of a temporary Jewish settlement in
Sitka, Alaska in 1948. The novel opens just months away from the dreaded
“Reversion” of the District's interim status, with homicide detective Meyer
Landsman's discovery that Mendel Shpilman, a heroin addict rumored to have been
the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the once-per-generation Messiah, has turned up dead in the run-
down Hotel Zamenhof. Having failed to secure separate statehood for themselves,
upon Reversion the Jews will find themselves homeless for the fourth time in their
collective memory. That Chabon locates his fictional settlement on a “crooked
parenthesis of rocky shoreline” recalling Thomas More's crescent-shaped island of
Utopia thus seems like a cruel joke, one compounded by the fact that if the “frozen
Chosen” are all “utopians,” it only meant “they saw imperfection everywhere they
looked.”74 Chabon rarely misses an opportunity to drive home the abyssal gap
between his characters’ utopian aspirations and their actual experiences: in grade
school, every inhabitant of Sitka is taught the song “Nokh Amol” (“Once Again”), but
months away from Reversion, they are apt to hear in the tune “the ironic edge that was
72
Ibid., 68.
73
Ibid., 69.
74
Ibid.
159
there all along,” rather than the promise of new beginnings.75 Moreover, the District is
lined with streets bearing names like Tikvah (“Hope”) Street, but as detective
Landsman observes, “on this grim afternoon at the end of time” it seems to connote
“seventeen flavors of irony.”76
As a number of the novel’s characters remark, these are “strange times to be a
Jew”: with the impending Reversion casting a pall of uncertainty over the fate of
Sitka’s inhabitants, rumors have begun to circulate about various omens proclaiming
the imminent advent of the Messiah.77 The strangeness of the temporality that
characterizes Chabon’s novel recalls Walter Benjamin’s addendum to his “Theses on
the Philosophy on History,” in which he observes that although “the Jews were
prohibited from investigating the future,” this did not mean that “the future turned into
homogeneous empty time,” for “every second of time was the strait gate through
which the Messiah might enter.”78 In these few aphorisms, Benjamin condenses for us
the essence of the Jewish injunction to regard the present as pregnant with the promise
of a utopian future whose contents lie beyond the horizon of intelligibility.79
Understood as a figure for this temporal structure, the Messianic thematics in
Chabon’s novel function in much the same way that Jameson’s “empty chair” serves
75
The Yiddish Policemen's Union (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 7, 238, 31.
76
Ibid., 4.
77
Ibid., 198.
78
Ibid., 13.
79
That Benjamin’s writing has often been characterized, like the image of the angel of history with
which he has become indissociable, as nostalgic and backward-looking has not prevented Jameson from
recuperating him as a utopian thinker: “There is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid
and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot
furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of Benjamin is there to prove it”
ibid., 264.
160
as a placeholder for utopian fulfillment.80 According to this view, the proper task of
Judaism’s adherents, like that of Jameson’s socialist revolutionaries, would be to
avoid merely fantastical speculation on the contents of the future while remaining
faithfully utopian about the imminent fulfillment of their hopes and desires.
Accordingly, as the proliferation of ironies in Chabon’s novel amply
demonstrates, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union renounces Say It In Yiddish’s implied
claim that counterfactual speculations about an “Yisroel” could somehow make up for
the abyssal gap between the Messianic promise of an Israeli homeland and the reality
of the Holocaust. Indeed, having observed in the Weinreichs’ phrasebook how the
production of consolatory fictions risked embittering and turning one’s utopian
impulses cruel and ironic, Chabon demonstrates in his novel a keen awareness of the
danger that ideological fantasy poses to utopian affect. After all, the Jews of Sitka
have had their utopian desires “fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational
brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior,” but have arrived
in Alaska only to have these dreams “snuffed on arrival.”81 Taking its distance from
such ideologically degraded “movies” and “light fiction,” Chabon’s novel harbors a
reality principle that persistently marks the difference between its characters’ utopian
hopes and their reality. All too familiar with disappointment, the Sitka Jews have
come to adopt a demystified view of “the world” as a “shortfall,” the “awful place, this
sea, this gulf between the Intention and the Act,” and believe that only with the arrival
80
The religious resonances of Jameson’s utopianism should come as no surprise to us, considering both
The Political Unconscious’s adaptation of scriptural hermeneutics and his suggestion that “Christian
historicism and the ‘concept’ of providence’” be understood as “anticipatory foreshadowings of
historical materialism within precapitalist social formations in which scientific thinking is unavailable
as such.” Marxism and Form, 82.
81
161
of the Messiah would “the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and
distinctions collapsed.”82
With an instinct for demystification no less relentless than Jameson’s, we might
suppose that the Sitka Jews’ clear-eyed dissatisfaction with the status quo and lucid
skepticism about the ideological bribes offered to them would conduce to an enduring
utopianism about the imminence of Messiah’s arrival, even if they might not feel very
positive. Contrary to the affective gambit at the heart of Jamesonian demystification,
however, even though there exists among the Sitka Jews a genuine feeling of
frustration and disappointment with their situation, the askesis of negative affect turns
out to hinder rather than help Sitka’s inhabitants to remain receptive to the future.
Exhausted by an interminable wait for a utopia that no one can even imagine any
longer, and for a Messiah who may or may not have just become the District’s latest
murder victim, whatever passes for utopianism among the Sitka Jews feels a lot less
like joyful anticipation than cynical resignation. Asked whether he really feels like
he’s waiting for Messiah, detective Landsman’s partner Berko Shemets shrugs
uninterestedly and responds: “It’s Messiah […] What else can you do but wait?”83
Landsman has himself fallen into a state of feigned apathy after the loss of his unborn
child and the resulting separation from his wife Bina, and has been left “cling[ing] to
the ballast of his cynicism,” “spiting himself, spiting others, spiting the world”
because such, he has come to believe, is the “only patrimony” of his people.84 Worn
out by a utopianism that generates greater intensities of dissatisfaction over time,
82
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, 264.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
162
Landsman has cultivated a posture of cynical defeatism, fed on alcohol that “helps him
not to care,” and based on “hard-earned illusions about the tendency of life to get
things wrong.”85 Landsman’s disposition marks the dissolution of utopianism’s
restructuration of negative political affects that, loosed from the former’s anticipatory
structure, return with a vengeance as the strong wish not to wish for anything at all, a
“struggle not to care about anything,” if only just not to be disappointed any further.86
It is in this context of overwhelming disappointment and failure that The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union stages, in a detective plot that results in the discovery of a terrorist
conspiracy, the confrontation between two narrative modes of maintaining utopian
affect. The novel’s major antagonists are the Verbovers, members of a fictional
Hasidic sect who have conspired with the U.S. government and an opportunistic ex-
soldier named Alter Litvak to breed pure red heifers, blow up the mosque on the
Dome of the Rock, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. They intend, in other words,
to forcibly realize the prophecies of the Old Testament and hasten the arrival of the
Messiah. As the novel tells us in no uncertain terms, the Verbovers’ plot amounts to a
violence exacted not only on their victims, but on utopian desire itself: Chabon
describes their plan for the Third Temple as a “fata morgana,” a meteorological
phenomenon in which a mirage is produced out of the optical distortion of another
object.87 When Landsman chances upon the field where the eugenically selected
heifers have been left to graze, he sees a “mirage of the old optimism, the hope for the
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid. What Sara Ahmed has written about pessimism in another context helps us to specify
Landsman’s affective state: “pessimism, by anticipating that what follows is nothing, conceals the
something that is at stake in this desire for there to be nothing” ibid.
87
The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 179.
163
future on which he was raised.”88 Having grown tired of waiting for a Messiah to lead
them to the Promised Land, the Verbovers’ faith in the imminent realization of their
utopian hopes has come to resemble a paradoxical faithlessness. They have, after all,
decided to conspire with Litvak, an unprincipled anti-utopian who “has no belief,” “no
convictions,” and whose sole demand of them is that “he never be expected to believe
the nonsense that they believed.”89 The Verbovers’ willingness to substitute an empty
utopian formalism for concrete utopian content leaves them vulnerable to the
ideological narratives fed to them by their opportunistic co-conspirators. Indeed, the
justification that the federal agent Cashdollar supplies for his aiding and abetting the
Verbovers’ attack on the Temple Mount is that it is merely the regrettable side-effect
of their attempts to fulfill “what is written,” because “that’s what it says in the
Book.”90 Such metanarrative gestures invite us to think of Cashdollar’s plot as both a
political conspiracy and as an exercise in narrative emplotment – as his predecessor
instructs him: “Tell them a story [….] That’s what all the poor suckers want.”91
Cashdollar's own variation on these instructions, his claim that “the story […] is
telling us […] just like it has done from the beginning,” obscures his own complicity
in the act of terrorism, but maintains intact the essentially narrative quality of his
involvement in the Verbovers’ terrorism (2008, 364–5). By means of the Verbovers’
conspiracy, the novel thus narrativizes the paradoxical outcome produced when
utopian political affect is fueled only by negative feelings: where feelings of
discontent may seem at first to sustain one’s anticipatory relation to deferred utopian
88
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, 264.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
164
futurity, past a certain level of quantitative accumulation it undergoes a qualitative
change into its dialectical opposite, turning into a terroristic willingness to actualize
one’s utopian desires even at the cost of employing means that negate its content.
If terrorism names the ideologically compromised form that the narrative
imagination assumes in its attempt to stay proximal to utopian futurity, detection
constitutes the novel’s counternarrative to this eventuality, one that reworks the
genre’s preoccupation with the recovery of foregone conclusions into a constructive,
open-ended process of meaning-making. This counternarrative gets elaborated in the
work of Landsman and his fellow detectives, who “shape [the things they know] into
narratives that hold together and make sense.”92 As Landsman reflects, “there is
something in the death of Mendel Shpilman, a story to grab hold of,” one that replaces
his “ballast of cynicism” and, more importantly, possesses the power to rewrite the
abject “story that has been telling him for the past three years.”93 Initially skeptical
about Landsman’s interest in Mendel’s case, his ex-wife Bina, who “does not solve
cases so much as tell the stories of them,” finds as her involvement increases that the
clues are “starting to mean something to her […] as part of the story of a crime.”94
Even though Chabon’s detectives know that “a story is never going to make a
damn bit of difference to the dead,” it is precisely the narrative work performed over
the course of detection, that of telling the story about Mendel’s death, which enables
Landsman to shore up sufficient affective resources to begin to loosen the grip of his
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.
94
Ibid.
165
cynical, defeatist sensibilities.95 We can trace the impact of this narrative production
on Landsman’s affective state by observing the gradual dissolution of his defeatist
“faith in Nothing,” which gradually evolves into a willingness to be receptive to a
“something” that has not yet presented itself.96 When Landsman first begins to
investigate Mendel’s (who was then going under the assumed name of Emanuel
Lasker) death, he searches the Hotel Zamenhof and declares that he has found
“nothing,” which he takes as a “prediction of what his investigation into the murder of
Emanuel Lasker lived for and died for, a realization of what will remain, after
Reversion, of Landsman’s hometown.”97 Yet over the course of the investigation, it is
his detective’s conviction that “nothing means nothing” – in other words, a belief in
narrative’s ability to give meaning to events – that enables him to cobble together a
utopian attachment to a future something whose precise lineaments have not yet come
into view.98
Unlike the Verbovers, the “something” to which Landsman’s nascent utopian
affect attaches is not the empty utopian formalism abetted by agents with no interest in
utopia. The utopianism that Landsman narratively assembles reflexively takes as its
object of attachment the work of narrative itself, even if its future remains
indeterminate: “something is actually happening in Sitka District. What that
something will turn out to be, not even the most learned of the sidewalk rebbes has the
faintest idea.”99 Nowhere is Landsman’s faith in the meaningfulness of narrative as
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid.
166
both process and object more evident than at the close of the novel, where he and
Bina, having been offered the security of their jobs and the chance of remaining in
Sitka in exchange for their silence, decide to give it all up to tell the truth of what they
know about the Verbovers’ conspiracy. In the final pages of the novel, Landsman
declares that even though “there is no Messiah of Sitka,” and he has “no home, no
future, no fate,” what he does have is Bina, the “land […] bounded only by the fringes
of their wedding canopy,” and their membership in an “international fraternity whose
members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.”100
Choosing to give up the job and home with which the conspirators sought to buy his
silence, Landsman opts instead to narrate the “world” on the tip of his tongue, calling
up a reporter to utter the final words of the novel: “I have a story for you.”101
In a recent reading of the novel’s ending, Theodore Martin dismisses
Landsman’s reconciliation with Bina as a disappointing “generic incongruity” because
it violates the laws of detective fiction in order to provide its protagonist with a happy
ending more appropriate to the genre of the romance.102 To dismiss Landsman’s love
for Bina as a “shield” against “the apocalyptic uncertainty of the future,” to lament
that the “gesture toward a broader sense of collective ethnic identity only emerges out
of Landsman’s and Bina’s marriage,” to disdain the “unsatisfying” and “vulgar”
happiness of the ending to a “stand-in for the disappointment of all endings” – given
Martin’s opposition to the hermeneutic habits of demystification and unveiling, it
seems especially peculiar that he should recapitulate its repudiation of narrative
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.
167
resolutions that offer its readers pleasure and satisfaction.103 The demystification of
the romance was after all one of the hallmarks of The Political Unconscious, which
credited the genre with the ability to “conceal a perception of class realities behind the
phantasmagoria of Schein and Spiel,” and described it as one in which “historical
reality” would be “disguised and defused by the sense of moonlit revels dissolving
into thin air.”104
While it would be all too easy to read the conjugal space that Landsman and
Bina occupy, “bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy,” as a flimsy
ideological compensation for the concrete problem of the Jewish diaspora’s
statelessness, I argue that Chabon invites us to think of this boundary as marking a
relation, rather than a discontinuity, between positive feelings and a utopian
disposition towards the future. We need only think back to the novel’s troping on the
Jewish practice of constructing eruvs, provisional boundaries fashioned out of poles
and strings that enable the residents of Sitka to “pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv
you’ve drawn […] is your house.”105 For Itzik Zimbalist, “boundary maven” of the
district of Sitka, “topography, geography, geodesy, geometry, trigonometry” are all
“reflex[es],” for he constructs, maintains, and modifies the thousands of maps that
instruct the Jews on the boundaries of the space they call home, and indeed is said to
possess “a string map for every city where ten Jewish men ever bumped noses […]
clear on back to Jericho.”106 We would thus be mistaken in dismissing the satisfactions
103
Theodore Martin, "The Long Wait: Timely Secrets of the Contemporary Detective Novel," NOVEL:
A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 2 (2012): 175.
104
Ibid., 174, 75.
105
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 149, 50.
106
Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, 264.
168
of Landsman’s and Bina’s wedding for their meagerness, because they mark nothing
less than the beginning of an eruv whose shifting boundaries locate them in, and are
thus continuous with, the broader utopian aspirations of the Jewish diaspora. In other
words, feeling happy and satisfied does not, as Jameson fears, immediately mean that
one has complacently relinquished the struggle for total social transformation by
submitting to the lures of merely ideological bribes. In fact, I would argue that it is
precisely the affective sustenance that their satisfactions and pleasures provide them
that enable them to continue to tell the story of what they know about the Verbovers’
political conspiracy, rather than accept an ethically questionable compromise that
would buy their silence with guarantees of personal security. In this view, the positive
feelings generated by Landsman and Bina’s relationship, while not in and of
themselves equivalent to total utopian fulfillment, become the precondition for their
continued participation in the struggle for utopian futurity rather than its ideologically
degraded substitute.
---
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s premise of frustrated utopian aspirations, and
the two narrative strategies that its characters evolve as means of remaining open to
the possibility of utopia, map out a problem space remarkably similar to that
delineated in Jameson’s interpretive method. Terrorism and detection both arise as
responses to the exigencies of a situation in which feelings of discontent have
intensified to an extent that they have ceased being politically useful incitements to
utopian affect, and have in fact begun to erode its very conditions of possibility.
Where the former responds to the intolerable intensities of frustration and
169
disappointment by prematurely capitulating to an empty utopian formalism that leaves
it vulnerable to cooptation by ideological fantasy, the latter gathers to itself the
smaller-scale pleasures and satisfactions of narrative meaning-making, generating the
positive feelings that sustain utopian affect long after mere discontent would have
eaten it up from the inside.
That the sustenance of utopian affect might require more than the meager
nourishment provided by disappointment and frustration with the political status quo
might seem, in retrospect, startlingly obvious. Indeed, there have been signs that
Jameson himself had begun to worry about precisely this dimension of his method: in
an essay collected in the more recently published Archaeologies of the Future, he
reads Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven as evidence of the possibility that science
fiction could self-consciously reflect on its own impossibility – that is to say, on the
impossibility of imagining utopia.107 As Jameson writes, in Le Guin’s novel “the
Utopian wish is authentically registered and set down” by “reflexively chart[ing] the
impossibility of [utopian] achievement and the ways in which the wish outtrumps
itself.”108 What I find especially striking about this recent essay, however, is that
although Jameson applauds Le Guin’s novel for its authentic representation of our
incapacity to imagine utopia, it also leads him to worry that “we must imagine some
form of gratification inherent in this very confrontation with pessimism and the
impossible,” if it is to have any chance of being “concrete and ongoing without being
107
Jameson has this to say about Le Guin’s novel: “More transparently than much other SF, this book is
‘about’ its own process of production, which is recognized as impossible: George Orr cannot dream
Utopia; yet in the very process of exploring the contradictions of that production, the narrative gets
written, and ‘Utopia’ is ‘produced’ in the very movement by which we are shown that an ‘achieved’
Utopia – a full representation – is a contradiction in terms.” Ibid.
108
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 294.
170
defeatist or incapacitating.”109 “We need,” as Jameson writes, “a nobler word than
frustration to evoke the dimension of Utopian desire which remains unsatisfied, and
which cannot be felt to have been fulfilled without falling into the world, and
becoming another degraded act of consumption.”110
Although Jameson declines to supply us with that sought-after word, and never
broaches these questions again elsewhere, his uncharacteristic gesture of equivocation
suggests that he had become aware of the problem, immanent to his interpretive
method, that I have sought to identify in this essay: the inability of negative feelings
like frustration and dissatisfaction to sustain, in the long run, the necessary
ongoingness of utopian affect. If the affective negativity at the heart of Jameson’s
demystifying method was intended both as an incitement to continue struggling
against ideological capture as well as a prophylaxis against the affective bribes of
ideological fantasy, this means that over the long run, discontent not only provides no
imaginable gratifications, but refuses all gratifications offered to it for fear of
succumbing to ideological lures. The affective equilibrium of such an arrangement
could have subsisted over shorter periods of time, but over the course of repeated
postponements and deferrals of utopian fulfillment, pressure would have inevitably
accumulated from the build up of discontent generated by the dialectical reversals of
Jameson’s interpretive method. It was precisely this need for an affective escape valve
that Eagleton and Helmling diagnosed in their analyses of Jameson’s style, since such
an ascetic renunciation of pleasure and satisfaction created a void for which the latter’s
prose had to compensate by the force of its own rhetorical acrobatics.
109
Ibid., 84.
171
Like those species of flora that have evolved a host of physiological adaptations
which enable them to flourish in a desert, Jameson’s system of literary interpretation
evolved mechanisms aimed at mobilizing the negative affects associated with political
defeat – frustration, disappointment, disillusionment – in the service of remaining
open and receptive to the possibility of a utopian future. It goes without saying,
however, that an organism’s adaptations may either help or hinder depending on the
situation in which it finds itself. On its own, the ability of Jameson’s dialectic of
utopia and ideology to survive the initial onset of political failure seems fairly
unobjectionable, but in a situation of persistent political impasse with no end in sight,
demystification’s core of negativity itself becomes a liability when it begins to
demand the desertification of the cultural landscape as a condition of its survival.
110
Ibid.
172
173
Feeling Normative: Problematization and the Desire for Intimate Attunement
Is this art … which I make part of my existence, a part I wish to

demand that others recognize to be part of theirs, to be something from
which we stand to derive the pleasure of what is beautiful, hence …
something to be loved – is this rightly ours to declare?
Stanley Cavell, Philosophy The Day After Tomorrow1
Was it good for you, too?
Dan Greenburg, Oh! Calcutta!2
1. Problematization, Shame, and the Vulnerability of Desire
In “Feminist Killjoys,” Sara Ahmed narrates her feminist origin story by
recounting a childhood memory of being seated around the table with her family:
“Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain
things can be brought up.”3 The undercurrent of tension lurking beneath this otherwise
mundane scene of domestic conviviality eventually comes to a head: “someone says
something you consider problematic.”4 As it turns out, the importance of this mise-en-
scène for the awakening of Ahmed’s feminist consciousness lies less in the offending
utterance per se, which she leaves both unspecified and unattributed, than in the
affective aftermath of her problematizing of it. Painfully aware that in calling out the
errant family member she has ruined the pleasures of the domestic scene by failing to
“reflect the image of the happy family back to itself,” Ahmed experiences a cascade of
1
Ibid.
2
“Was it Good For You, Too” is the title of a sketch written by Dan Greenburg for Oh! Calcutta!, a
broadway revue that ran from 1969-71, and then again from 1976-1989.
3
Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 82.
There are two different versions of Ahmed’s essay, both published in 2010. In these footnotes I indicate
which version (the essay in The Scholar & Feminist Online, or the chapter in The Promise of
Happiness) I refer to in any specific instance.
174
negative feelings that she describes thus: “tense,” “wound up,” then “frustration” at
being wound up, and finally an “alienation” that “shatter[s] a world,” which she
specifies as an “alienation from happiness.”5 This encounter with the “problematic”
becomes ground zero for Ahmed’s understanding of “feminist consciousness as a form
of unhappiness,” its structure of feeling shaping her conception of “the word
feminism” as itself “saturated with unhappiness.”6 Although it is the killing of joy
rather than problematization per se that comes to embody Ahmed’s scholarly project,
her origin story foregrounds the crucial importance, for her self-understanding as a
feminist killjoy, of this formative problematization. Indeed, in Ahmed’s work the
practice of killing joy could be considered synonymous with that of problematization,
for in the introduction to The Promise of Happiness she describes the book’s project as
one of “presenting happiness as a problem,” and construes its intended effects thus: “If
this book kills joy, then it does what it says we should do.”7 Moreover, Ahmed’s
efforts to rehabilitate the killjoy (to “give the killjoy back her voice”), and to push
back on the misattribution of negativity to feminists rather than the problematic
objects of feminist critique, emerge out of the conflicts internal to the scene of
problematization she recalls from her childhood.8 As she writes, the fact “that you
have described what was said by another as a problem means you have created a
problem. You become the problem you create.”9 To kill joy thus amounts to a
4
Sara Ahmed, "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)," S&F Online (Scholar and Feminist
Online) 8, no. 3 (2010).
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
The Promise of Happiness, 53, 65.
8
Ibid., 20.
9
"Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)."
175
willingness to critique what one considers problematic, even if it means being
construed by others as the problem for having ruined and spoiled their happiness.
In deploying “problematic” as a term of political critique for objects and scenes
that bring others pleasure, Ahmed’s feminist killjoy performs a gesture by now
ubiquitous both in and out of academic departments of literary and cultural studies.
Indeed, the second decade of the 21st century has witnessed a proliferation of blogs
(“Deeply Problematic”), Tumblrs (“Your Fave is Problematic”), Twitter feeds
(“@99Problematics”), and “think pieces” devoted to the cataloguing and analysis of
problematic pleasures in popular culture from HBO’s Game of Thrones to the rapper
Iggy Azalea.10 So intense has this cultural mania for calling out the problematic
become that it has even spawned a number of parodies, as witness the Tumblr “Is This
Feminist?,” whose jocular, tongue-in-cheek labeling of everything from “women
drinking alone” to “Sylvia Plath” as “PROBLEMATIC” enacts, in a mimicry of the
academic idiom it mocks, the reductio ad absurdum of such critiques.11 That this mass
cultural phenomenon owes its provenance to academic habits of critique can hardly be
doubted: as one commentator from the women’s blog Jezebel put it, the comedic
effect of “Is This Feminist?” owes to its poking fun at “the feeling you got on the first
day of your first ever Women’s Studies class.”12 The feminist killjoy’s problematizing
critique, having graduated beyond the walls of the university classroom, can now be
found everywhere from the family table to the blogosphere.
10
Ibid.
11
"Your Fave Is Problematic," http://yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr.com; Rachel McCarthy James,
"Deeply Problematic," http://www.deeplyproblematic.com; @99Problematics, "Everythingsaproblem,"
https://twitter.com/99problematics.
12
"Is This Feminist?," http://isthisfeminist.tumblr.com.
176
This rapid popularization of “problematic” as a critical term of judgment no
doubt bears a connection to the roughly coterminous uptick in uses of the verb
“problematize,” whose ubiquity in writing from the last decade of the 20th century
onwards is matched only by the loathing it tends to provoke. As was the case with its
adjectival form, responsibility for “problematize” has fallen squarely on the academic
humanities. To wit, the entry for “problematize” in the Oxford American Writer’s
Thesaurus contains this sardonic note from the writer Jean Strouse: “The blame for
this awful neologism lies with academia, where the word serves no apparent purpose
except to demonstrate one’s mastery of obscurantist jargon.”13 Such cynicism about
the verb’s rhetorical effects is hardly limited to non-academic writers – “problematize”
also earns a long rant in Mark Bauerlein’s Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, where it
gets described as follows: “We all know what ‘problematize’ means: to make
something taken for granted, a putative given, a cozily familiar object, or an
unconscious assumption problematic [….] In maintaining the problematizing
perspective, critics enjoy the comforts of negativity, for in problematizing all things
they need affirm nothing.”14 An artifact of the culture wars of the 1990s, Bauerlein’s
rant mocks the critical habits of his peers by rehearsing a by-then commonplace
problematization of the traditional literary canon: “The line of response to the
‘problematizing’ of ‘classic’ might run: a ‘classic’ is an institutional construct
developed by an educated class, an idea presupposing mutually supportive concepts of
13
Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, 2nd ed., s. v. “problematize”
14
Erin Gloria Ryan, "'Is This Feminist?' Blog Hilariously Declares Everything Problematic,"
http://jezebel.com/5911253/is-this-feminist-blog-hilariously-declares-everything-problematic.
177
art, genius, and nationality, used strategically in places where the educated class
reproduces itself.”15
What neither Strouse nor Bauerlein note is that uses of the verb “problematize”
in the academic humanities owe their origins to Michel Foucault who, in an interview
conducted in 1981, somewhat presciently conceded that it also seemed to him a
“barbarous word.”16 Beginning with the three volumes of The History of Sexuality,
and with increasing frequency in the final years of his life, Foucault came to
understand problematization as central to his oeuvre, going so far as to proclaim that
“the notion common to all the work I have done since Histoire de la Folie is that of
problematization.”17 To be sure, there remains a considerable gulf between Foucault’s
development of problematization as theoretical idiom in the early 1980s and the
subsequent propagation of the verb throughout academic English and onwards into its
contemporary uses in the politically committed analysis of popular culture.
Confirming Bauerlein’s précis of the defamiliarizing and denaturalizing senses in
which literary critics have come to use the verb, Michael Warner observes (though
with considerably less snark) that the term has “become rather confused by its use
among post-Foucauldian academics, for whom it means nothing more than taking
15
Mark Bauerlein, Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1997), 109, 13.
16
Ibid., 111. There does exist an alternate intellectual lineage for the verb “problematize,” although one
far less likely to have exerted the same magnitude of influence that Foucault did on the academic
humanities – Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. See Michel Foucault, "What Our Present Is," in The
Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 141.
17
Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, trans. Donaldo Macedo
(Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1985), 13, 22, 40, 52-59. The word “problematic” appears in Foucault’s
work earlier, in Discipline and Punish, and The Birth of the Clinic, but only appears in its verbal form
in the first volume of The History of Sexuality.
178
something to be problematic. To problematize, in this usage, means to complicate.”18
For Foucault, as Warner clarifies, problematization should rather be understood to
“stan[d] for both the conditions that make thinking possible and for the way thinking,
under certain circumstances, can reflect back on its own conditions.”19
Although the different incarnations of problematization from Foucault to the
Tumblrs of contemporary culture seem to have little in common with each other, this
chapter’s account of problematization develops two themes that will help us to grasp
the throughline undergirding the disparate instantiations of this critical practice. First,
this chapter argues that problematization’s tendentiousness with regards to others’
pleasures – whether lauded, as in Ahmed’s profile of the feminist killjoy, or censured,
as in Bauerlein’s take on the canon wars – constitutes only one aspect of
problematizing critique’s more complex structure of feeling. Although
problematization does in fact provoke the immediate consequence of killing the joy of
those whose pleasures have come under critique, the spoiling of others’ happiness
itself produces important perlocutionary effects on – that is, it affects – those others in
ways that remain undertheorized. Over against the embrace of problematization’s
ruinous effects on joy as the self-confirming, if also somewhat sadistic, corroboration
of the problematizing critic’s self-understanding, I demonstrate how this spoiling of
pleasure advances a demand for the intersubjective attunement of intimate feeling as a
prolegomenon to the negotiation of normative disorder. By precipitating conflict over
whether an object or scene (say, Ahmed’s “happy objects”) should or should not be
18
Michel Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), ed. Sylvère
Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 296.
19
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 154.
179
experienced as pleasurable, problematization seeks affective accord (“was it good for
you, too?”), and thus mediates disorder in the domain of socio-political norms as
aesthetic disagreement. This, in turn, leads me to this chapter’s second intuition
concerning the centrality of aesthetic disagreement to problematization’s critical
function. Indeed, that Bauerlein cites the “classic” as an exemplary target of
problematization in his diatribe underscores the ways in which this particular critical
practice has, in the cultural imagination, come to be wedded to late 20th century
disagreements about aesthetic value. If such is the enduring lesson that a generation of
students have drawn, if somewhat confusedly, from “the feeling you got on the first
day of your first ever Women’s Studies class,” then the canon wars of the ‘90s could
be taken as something of an archetype for the contemporary spate of problematizations
both in and of popular culture. Taking as my launching point the fact that
problematization operates primarily to interrogate the validity of positive feelings that
others invest in a particular object or scene, I will establish its conceptual isomorphism
to the deduction of aesthetic normativity that Kant lays out in the Critique of
Judgment. By demonstrating how Kant’s deduction of taste discerns the normativity of
aesthetic judgments as a conceptually ungrounded but viscerally felt sensation, I
provide a theoretical account of how problematization functions to negotiate
normative disorder via the attunement of intimate feeling. Problematization’s debt to
Kantian aesthetics, I contend, helps us to understand the negative feelings that saturate
this critical practice, both in its origins and its effects, not as signs of a tendentious or
irrational moralism, but as expressions of a wish for affective accord.
180
Problematization’s rootedness in questions of aesthetics extends to Foucault as
well, for indeed the term receives its first coherent exposition in The Use of Pleasure,
where he turns his attention specifically to what he termed the “aesthetics of
existence.”20 Commonly described as his "ethical turn," the shift in Foucault’s project
inaugurated by the second volume of his History of Sexuality was marked by his
addition of a third and complementary axis to those of power and knowledge
elaborated, respectively, in Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization. That
is, having investigated the domains of pouvoir (“power relations and their
technologies […] as open strategies”), and savoir (“the formation of disciplines” via
the analysis of discursive practices), it is for the domain of plaisir that Foucault first
develops problematization as an theoretical optic, a way to trace the practices by
which subjects “seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular
being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and
meets certain stylistic criteria.”21 The importance of problematization for Foucault
finally extends, moreover, beyond the three volumes of History of Sexuality, coming
to serve as the watchword for his critical method as such. By inquiring into the arts of
existence, Foucault avers that he “seem[s] to have gained a better perspective on the
way [he] worked [….] It was a matter of analyzing […] problematizations through
which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought – and the practices on the basis of
which these problematizations are formed.”22 Most significantly for our purposes,
20
Ibid.
21
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 11.
On this, see also ibid., 4-5, 10-11.
22
Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, 2
vols., vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28.
181
Foucault’s aesthetics of existence comes to inform his self-understanding as a social
critic, in that he conceives critique as an art of self-formation, an “exercise of oneself
in the activity of thought” that is also an “endeavor to know how and to what extent it
might be possible to think differently.”23 In light of problematization’s theoretical
origins in Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence, no other author could prove
more suitable for rounding off this chapter’s account of problematizing critique than
James Baldwin, of whom Robert Penn Warren once wrote that “what Baldwin has
most powerfully created is a self. That is his rare and difficult work of art.24 I read
Baldwin’s Another Country as a novel fundamentally about problematization, even
though it predates the term’s appearance on the scene of American literary culture,
because it takes as its narrative premise the persistent complication of the pleasures of
its protagonists’ intimate relationships. Reading Another Country’s reimagining of
American race relations as a scene of relational intimacy alongside Baldwin’s famed
commitment to an ethic of love, I demonstrate how the former helps us to grasp the
intimate attunement of feeling as central to problematization’s critique of racial
injustice. As a counterpoint to Ahmed’s embrace of problematization’s killing of joy
as critique’s raison d’être, Baldwin’s novel suggests how it is problematization’s goal
of achieving intersubjective attunement with, rather than a ruining of, others’ pleasures
that underwrites its critical force
Returning to Ahmed’s family scene, I begin this chapter with her evocative
vignette not only because it foregrounds the feelings circulating in the scene of
problematization, but also because it highlights how this critical practice enacts a
23
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 11.
182
fraught relational tension in which both the problematizer and the problematized find
themselves enmeshed. In thus narrating the coming-into-being of her feminist
consciousness, Ahmed helps us to understand how the affective genealogy of a critical
practice, the way “feminism becomes an object of feeling, as something we invest in,
as a way of relating to the world,” comes to be bound up with a critic’s
problematization of objects that others have invested with their promises of
happiness.25 As will become clearer as I proceed, a rich account of problematization’s
perlocutionary designs on those others will prove essential to our understanding of the
political performativity of this critical practice. I contend that attending not only to
how problematization feels, but how it intends to make others feel, will help us grasp
its critique of normativity as undergirded by the model of conceptually ungrounded
universality and intersubjective agreement originating in Kantian aesthetic theory.
Although I take Ahmed’s narrative as my point of departure, however, my account
proposes a less polarized description of problematization’s structure than her
distinction between happiness and unhappiness provides. Ahmed’s fidelity to this
polarity owes primarily to the polemic force it lends to her efforts to stand the
dismissal of unhappy feminists on its head (or, as she puts it, to reclaim the “agency
that this dismissal rather ironically reveals”).26 In my view, however, the rhetorical
payoff of Ahmed’s chiasmus comes at too high a cost, because the polarity of
happiness and unhappiness severely underdescribes the feelings that circulate in the
feminist killjoy’s origin story. Indeed, Ahmed employs happiness and unhappiness not
24
Ibid., 9.
25
Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 297.
26
Ahmed, "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)."
183
primarily as rich descriptors of feeling, but as shorthand for structures of social
normativity. Employed in this fashion, happiness indexes less a feeling than a set of
oppressively normative ideas about happiness. In this vein, Ahmed writes of a
“happiness commandment,” of “happiness scripts,” at points describing happiness
“quite simply as convention,” or as “a technology or instrument” for reorienting
subjects towards norms.27 Set against this equation of happiness to ideological ruse,
Ahmed’s vision of feminism as “saturated with unhappiness” becomes less a
phenomenological specification of what problematization feels like for both the killjoy
and the recipients of her critique, than a call for resistance to normative fantasies of
happiness as such.28 Reduced to a calculus that pits resistance against normativity, the
vocabulary of happiness and unhappiness produces an oddly impoverished, unfeeling
description of problematization’s affects.
That the vocabulary of happiness and unhappiness only poorly captures the feel
of problematization can be observed, moreover, in Ahmed’s own feminist story. Her
effort to reclaim the killjoy construes problematization’s irruption into a family
gathering as one of unhappiness into an ostensibly happy atmosphere, but this
description is just as notable for the affect it contains but doesn’t explicitly name.
Specifically, Ahmed’s mise-en-scène unmistakably registers an experience of ruptured
attachment that, following the work of Silvan Tomkins that has been recovered for
literary and cultural critics by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, we can describe as
connected to shame: guilt at having to cause unhappiness to people she cares about,
embarrassment at eliciting their disapproval, disappointment at her failure to convince
27
Ibid.
184
them of the appropriateness of her sense of injustice, and humiliation at having broken
her composure and betrayed her negative affect. This is to say nothing, moreover, of
what we can imagine of her family’s response to witnessing her shame, which could
equally run the gamut from confusion to compunction, irritation to mortification, or
even empathic shame.29 Indeed, the rubric of shame also clues us in to the symmetry
between problematization’s affective origins in the killjoy to its effects on her
addressees, in that a problematizing critique originating in a minority subject’s
experience of shame could also be understood as seeking to engender shame in others
for the pleasure they take in objects the former considers problematic. It was, indeed,
shame’s tendency to proliferate mimetically in this fashion that prompted Sedgwick to
suggest that our best hope of “figur[ing] out what happened around political
correctness” rests on our seeing it as “a highly politicized chain reaction of shame
dynamics.”30 The absence of shame’s idiom from Ahmed’s description of her
childhood memory is thus surprising, all the more so when we consider her prior
employment of Tomkins’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, where she
described shame as “both a domesticating feeling and a feeling of domestication,” in
that “family love may be conditional upon how one lives one’s life in relation to social
ideals.”31 In a foreshadowing of the feminist killjoy’s origin story, Ahmed observed
there how, via the family, shame punishes queer subjects who fail to conform to its
oppressive norms, and who are made vulnerable to shame because of their
28
The Promise of Happiness, 58, 59, 64.
29
Familial relations are for Tomkins the originary scene of shame dynamics, as evinced in his frequent
recourse to examples involving the rupturing of the parent-child circuit of attachment. See ibid., 65.
30
"Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust," in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 153-4, 63-4, 75-8.
185
identification with a family that repudiates them: “Shame secures the form of the
family by assigning to those who have failed its form the origin of bad feeling.”32
Consequently, although Ahmed narrates the feminist killjoy’s origin story in the
idiom of happiness and unhappiness, I would suggest that the affective infrastructure
of this foundational scene continues to be one better described by the vocabulary of
shame dynamics. I should clarify at the outset that the aim of such a redescription is
not to force Ahmed confess to an occulted shame. Given how much of the activist
work aimed at empowering systematically oppressed minorities has involved the de-
shaming of stigmatized identities, still less is my intention to suggest that anyone
“should” feel ashamed. I acknowledge, indeed, that Ahmed’s recuperation of the term
“killjoy” from its pejorative uses does amount to an effort to de-shame the minority
subject’s problematizing critique. Nevertheless, I insist on shame’s usefulness as a
vocabulary for describing problematization, because it helps us to understand the latter
as expressing not only intense negative feelings, but also an impulse to repair what
Lauren Berlant describes as a “‘broken circuit’ of attachment and desire.”33 The
vocabulary of shame helps, in other words, to pivot us from what Sedgwick would
describe as a digital, binaristic analytic model that pits happiness against unhappiness,
into a more analog, textured view in which expressions of unhappiness, and a
willingness to cause unhappiness in others, can be understood to commingle with a
31
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling : Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), 64.
32
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 107.
33
Ibid. Berlant’s gloss also suggests how the deployment of shame’s vocabulary can function as
something other than a re-shaming of stigmatized identities, for she reminds us that in both Sedgwick’s
and Tomkins’ work the “structure of shame […] isn’t necessarily aligned with the experience of
shame.” As Berlant writes, the “broken circuit” might be experienced not as the conventional emotion
186
reparative desire to be reattached to those others whose unhappiness one cannot not
cause.34 Indeed, the desire that gets lost in Ahmed’s portrait of the feminist killjoy
isn’t even lost on her, for in The Cultural Politics of Emotion she correctly intuited
shame’s inextricability from love: “What is exposed in shame is the failure of love, as
a failure that in turn exposes or shows our love.”35 Echoing Tomkins’s account of
shame as “the negative affect linked with love and identification,” Ahmed
acknowledged that the “intimacy of love and shame is indeed powerful,” in that
“shame both confirms and negates the love that sticks us together.”36 The subsequent
elision of shame from Ahmed’s later account of the feminist killjoy thus amounts to a
correlative elision of love’s stickiness from the scene of problematization – but to
what end?
In his work, Tomkins predicates shame on the preexistence and persistence of
positive affect, in that it “operates ordinarily only after interest or enjoyment has been
activated” and is characterized by “the incomplete reduction of interest or joy.”37 His
account foregrounds the way shame takes place against the backdrop of our intimate
attachments to loved people, objects, parts of ourselves, or scenes – this is one sense in
which shame both confirms and negates the love that sticks us together, as Ahmed
of shame but rather as “anger, numbness, hunger, a desire to self-stimulate, a compulsion to repeat, the
pleasure of a recognition, grief, and/or curiosity.”
34
Significantly, it is Sedgwick’s encounter with Tomkins’ affect theory of shame in particular that clues
her in to the conceptual value of the latter’s “habit of layering digital (on/off) with analog (graduated
and/or multiply differentiated) representational models.” Lauren Berlant, Sina Najafi, and David Serlin,
"The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Lauren Berlant," Cabinet, no. 31 (2008).
35
in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank
36
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 106.
37
Ibid., 107. In fact, this incomplete reduction of positive affect leads Tomkins to describe the shame
response as “deeply ambivalent,” as evident when “the child who covers his face in the presence of the
stranger, but who also peeks through his fingers so that he may look without being seen” (137).
187
observed. Although these attachments render us vulnerable to shame, the experience
of shame also at the same time signals our unwillingness to give them up. As
Sedgwick writes, “shame is characterized by its failure to renounce its object cathexis,
its relation to the desire for pleasure as well as the need to avoid pain.”38 Shame
disappears from Ahmed’s account of the feminist killjoy, in my view, because her
polarization of resistance and normativity leads her to read the intimacy of love and
shame as a barometer for our identification with oppressive social norms. It becomes
dangerous to love, put simply, because we risk desiring the means of our own
oppression. As Ahmed writes: “If we feel shame, we feel shame because we have
failed to approximate ‘an ideal’ that has been given to us through the practices of
love.”39 According to this view, if the practices of love that attach us to the world also
bind us to oppressive norms, then shame would be considered politically unhelpful
because its incomplete renunciation of love could only index our vulnerability to
oppressive normativity. It is this wary suspicion of the vulnerability to which love
exposes the shamed subject, I suggest, that motivates Ahmed’s decision to relinquish
shame’s ambivalent attachments in favor of the more unambiguous idiom of happiness
and unhappiness. Consequently, the twinned dualisms of happiness/unhappiness and
normativity/resistance militate against any account of how shame’s ambivalence
characterizes problematizing critique, because the renunciation of equivocal feelings
takes on the salutary aspect of the sloughing off of political vulnerability, where the
shame that structures one’s problematization of the happiness of others becomes a
38
Tomkins, "Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust," 134.
39
ibid., 23.
188
residue of ideological weakness that good feminists learn to “get over” in order to
attain the promised joys of killing joy.40 The scrupulosity with which Ahmed sanitizes
problematizing critique of these mixed feelings takes on the form, in her essay, of a
rhetoric of refusal: the feminist killjoy “refus[es] to make others happy,” “refuses to
convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness,” “refus[es] to go along with it,”
“refus[es] to go along with things by showing signs of getting along,” “must refuse to
be sympathetic,” “refus[es] to be well-adjusted,” and so forth.41
To be sure, Ahmed is not incorrect to highlight shame’s participation in the
enforcement of normativity. As Tomkins writes, shame “provides a mechanism for the
preservation of social norms […] inasmuch as the evocation of shame of the other and
its evocation of the shame of the self provide powerful negative sanctions against the
transgression of shared social norms.”42 Unlike Ahmed, however, Tomkins welcomes
feelings of shame, a somewhat counter-intuitive attitude that rests on the distinction he
makes between shame, which “does not renounce the object permanently,” and
“contempt-disgust,” which does.43 The distinction is an admittedly fragile one, for
when “shame proves too painful to be tolerated” and “the shamed one despairs of ever
achieving communion again,” shame’s unwillingness to give up the loved object can
easily slip into the complete renunciation characteristic of contempt.44 That we
experience shame when we rub against the normative grain, rather than contempt for
those whose negative reactions have engendered our shame, is for Tomkins a salutary
40
There is some irony here, for to “get over” the bad feelings that accompany problematizing critique
also comes to be attached to a commitment not to ‘get over” the insults of oppression.
41
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 106, original emphasis.
42
The Promise of Happiness, 65, 60, 69, 78, 79.
43
44
Ibid., 139.
189
sign that we have not completely renounced our wish for mutuality and reciprocity
from others45: “When one is ashamed of the other, that other is not only forced into
shame but he is also reminded that the other is sufficiently concerned positively as
well as negatively to feel ashamed of and for the other.”46 Another way to intuit the
affinity between problematization and shame’s ambivalent concern for the other is to
observe that the term “problematic” functions as a placeholder for a yet-to-be-
determined judgment. As I will elaborate further on in this chapter, the “problematic”
names that which one has not yet categorically evaluated as misogynistic, racist,
homophobic, and so forth. In this gap, where some transgression has been affectively
registered, but whose precise nature has not yet been ascertained, problematization
exhibits shame’s simultaneously positive and negative regard for other in its wish to
both criticize but also extend the benefit of doubt. Seen this way, the vulnerability
associated with shame’s sticky, incompletely renounced love for the other, which for
Ahmed seemed to ideologically compromise the critique of social normativity, should
rather be viewed as a positive (if precarious) sign that social bonds have not been
completely broken, and that a “sufficient concern” for repair and reattachment persists.
Thus far, I have focused on how shame’s ambivalent mix of forceful criticism
and vulnerable desire for repair gives us a more textured sense of the feel of
problematizing critique than the dichotomy of happiness and unhappiness allows.
Although problematizing critique is often rooted in the tension, frustration, and
alienation experienced and expressed by the minority subject in confrontation with the
social norms enforced by others, it is also simultaneously characterized by an
45
Ibid., 140.
190
incompletely renounced love for those others, and a desire to repair the broken circuit
of attachment. Shame’s defining structure of ruptured attachment also presents,
however, another important implication for our present account of problematization.
As I will demonstrate, Ahmed’s ideological hygienism eventually undermines the
political performativity of the killjoy’s problematizing critique, because the
conceptual segregation of happiness and unhappiness finally entails a social
separatism between problematizer from problematized, such that this practice of
critique finally relinquishes, along with the vulnerability it sought to avoid, any
perlocutionary designs on its addressees. The evacuation of shame’s complexities and
for the purity of happiness and unhappiness, I argue, amounts to a forgetting of the
problematizer’s interestedness in, and desire for, the problematized. If at base we
consider problematizing critique not merely an internal style of thought but, as
Ahmed’s scene suggests, an expressive communication of value addressed to those
whose normative conventions cause us pain, then the calling out of others’ pleasures
as “problematic” would correctly be understood as aiming to produce some
transformative effect on those others. Read in the light of Tomkins’ account of shame,
problematization’s desire becomes legible as a manifestation of shame’s incompletely
renounced cathexis – in that the problematizer’s desire for reciprocity from the
problematized other evinces that she remains “sufficiently concerned both positively
and negatively” for those whose objects of happiness she problematizes.
That such mixed feelings characterize problematizing critique can already be
sensed in Ahmed’s choice of a family gathering for the narrative of her feminist
46
Ibid., 139.
191
awakening, which pointedly locates problematization at the heart of a domestic scene
characterized by both intense normative constraint and intense attachment.47 Despite
her litany of refusals, it seems unlikely that the feminist killjoy would have bothered
to problematize the normative objects of her family’s happiness if she didn’t wish to
be made happy by them in return. That Ahmed’s critique is in fact animated not by a
refusal of, but a desire for reciprocity from, the family member whose offending
utterance she problematizes is indicated in the fact that, in her own story, she cares
enough to “explain why [she] think[s] what they have said is problematic,” to feel “cut
… up” and cut … out” when this effort meets with “shared disapproval.”48 As Ahmed
herself stages it, problematization takes place against the backdrop of a desire for
reciprocity from those it addresses because the pleasure they take in a variety of
objects we consider problematic have the power to cause us pain. Far from something
to be avoided out of ideological scrupulosity, one’s vulnerability to those others whose
pleasures one criticizes turns out to be fundamental to the motives, means, and
function of problematizing critique. As Tomkins writes, “unless there has been interest
in or enjoyment of the other person, or the anticipation of such positive feelings about
the other,” these others would activate in us the affects of surprise, fear, or anger, but
47
The cultural archive that Ahmed assembles in her essay would seem to confirm the centrality of the
familial relationships to her conception of the feminist killjoy: Sophy’s duty to her parents in Roussau’s
Émile, Maggie Tulliver’s difficult relationship with her brother and parents in George Eliot’s The Mill
on the Floss, and Laura Brown’s abandonment of her husband and son in Michael Cunningham’s The
Hours.
48
Tomkins, "Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust," 157. It is worth noting here that Sedgwick
and Frank’s efforts to recover Tomkins’s theorization of shame for cultural criticism were motivated in
large part by their conviction that it would offer a way of circumventing such dualistic habits of mind,
the “impoverishing reliance on a bipolar analytic framework that can all too adequately be summarized
as ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic.’” Ahmed, "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)."
192
not shame.49 Despite the evacuation of shame’s idiom from Ahmed’s origin story,
there is finally no getting away from love’s vulnerabilities, for to problematize is
necessarily to reveal the places where we have cared enough to expect better from
others, and to thus expose ourselves to the potential of disappointment if our desires
for repair get rebuffed.
By foregrounding how shame’s ambivalent love adheres to Ahmed’s feminist
origin story, we can also examine how the revelation of problematization’s
fundamental vulnerability helps ventilate her account of the “sociality of happiness”
and understand how this practice of critique, far from insisting that we refuse “the love
that sticks us together,” achieves its political effectivity only in and through that
stickiness.50 What Ahmed calls the “sociality of happiness” takes shape when “one
person’s happiness is made conditional on another person’s happiness,” such that “the
other person’s happiness comes first” and thus “becomes a shared object.”51 That the
happiness of others can become an object of our happiness becomes a problem, for
Ahmed, when the object (call it “x”) that makes others happy does not make us happy:
“In such cases, conditional happiness would require that I take up what makes you
happy as what makes me happy, which may involve compromising my own idea of
happiness (so I will go along with x in order to make you happy even if x does not
‘really’ make me happy).”52 For Ahmed, in situations of conditional happiness, “some
subjects are required to take up the happiness causes of others,” because of an
asymmetry in this conditionality: “If certain people come first […] then their
49
"Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins," 5.
50
Silvan Tomkins, "Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust," ibid., 138.
51
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 56.
193
happiness comes first. For those who are positioned as coming after, happiness means
following somebody else’s goods.”53 This asymmetry makes Ahmed skeptical about
the potential for reciprocity under the conditions of conditional happiness, because
those who come after inherit, as a “happiness commandment” or as a “happiness
script,” the goods of “those who are already in place.”54 I suggested earlier that
attending to the feelings circulating in problematization’s scene would eventually
reveal its political performativity as rooted in aesthetic disagreement. Here, I suggest
that what Ahmed calls the “sociality of happiness,” as a model of social relationships
anchored on agreements about objects of shared happiness, invokes questions about
the normativity of judgment that recapitulate the central Fragestellung of aesthetic
theory that we inherit from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Indeed, in Kant’s
view, Ahmed’s description of the conditionality of happiness – the compromising of
one’s own feelings of unhappiness about an object out of adherence to conventions of
happiness – would amount to an inadmissible ceding of autonomy. In his deduction of
pure aesthetic judgments, after all, Kant insisted that the subject must “judge for
himself, without having to grope about by means of experience among the judgments
of others and first inform himself about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the same
object.”55 If we allow for a congruence between the happy objects in Ahmed’s account
and the aesthetic objects of Kant’s Critique, then one surprising implication of a
feminism that understands itself as a willingness to challenge the conventional
association of certain objects with happy feelings – that is, the call for a feminist to
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
194
“be willful at the point that her will does not coincide with that of others, those whose
will is reified as the general or social will” – is its resemblance to the exercise of taste
by the model Kantian subject who “pronounce[s] his judgment not as imitation […]
but a priori.”56 Formulated in Kantian terms, then, the anti-normative critique of the
feminist killjoy who refuses to “convene” over others’ happiness could profitably be
understood as a rejection of the heteronomy of social convention, and an assertion of
the autonomy of her own taste.
On the face of it, it may seem perverse to suggest any conceptual affiliation
between the feminist critique of problematic pleasures and Kantian aesthetic theory,
especially when considered in the light of the established strain of aesthetic-ideology
critique that, as Robert Kaufman puts it, sees the demand for universality in Kantian
aesthetic judgment as “a coercive mandate of cultural-political conformity made not
only by an empirical, bourgeois subject, but also, at least allegorically, by the super-
subject: the bourgeois state.”57 Viewed in this way, Ahmed’s resistance to normative
conventions of happiness can seem to have a more natural affinity with Marxist
critiques of the specious universalism attributed to aesthetic ideology than with
Kantian notions of the autonomy of taste. Nevertheless, I propose that tracing the
resonances between the feminist killjoy’s critique and Kant’s account of aesthetic
judgment will help us to resolve key questions about problematization’s political
performativity that Ahmed raises but does not answer. The questions I have in mind
55
Ibid.
56
Kant, 163.
57
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 64; Kant, 163. For two of the most significant works in this
tradition of aesthetic-ideology critique that Kaufman identifies here, both published in the 1990s and
strongly affiliated to the Marxist tradition, see: Robert Kaufman, "Red Kant, or the Persistence of the
Third "Critique" in Adorno and Jameson," Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 713.
195
arise from several ambiguities surrounding, first, the exact nature of the problem
presented by the “sociality of happiness,” and second, problematization’s objectives
vis-à-vis the addressees of its critique. For Ahmed, the problem with the sociality of
happiness, in which subjects experience their happiness in objects as contingent on the
happiness of others, lies in the constraints that this conditionality places on subjects
whose desires go against the normative grain. The implication here is that the problem
with problematic objects lies not in the falseness of the happiness they may engender –
Ahmed clarifies that the killjoy “would not be saying ‘you are wrong you are not
happy, you just think you are as you have a false belief” – but in their tendency to
crowd out the possibility of other object choices58. In contrast to the “public
investment in happiness” which underwrites “a very particular and narrow model of
the good,” Ahmed thus envisions the killjoy’s critique as aiming to expand the range
of possible goods, which is also why she describes feminism as “participating in the
widening of horizons in which it is possible to find things.”59 The vagueness of
Ahmed’s conception of alternative things and models of the good suggests that her
interest lies more in the formalism of expanded possibility than in any specific
content. Indeed, this commitment to what we might call a pluralism of possibility
leads Ahmed to couch the killjoy’s critique as making available “possibilities for
finding excitement, of being excited,” or “becom[ing] alive to possibility” such that
“the concept of aliveness is held up as an alternative social value to happiness.”60
58
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1996); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
59
60
Ibid., 70.
196
On its own, Ahmed’s pluralistic vision for possibilities of aliveness and
excitement beyond normative conventions of happiness seems unobjectionable.
However, I contend that a call for a pluralism of possibility is not, in fact, the way
anyone who undertakes problematizing critique actually experiences it. Rather, I
suggest that Ahmed’s commitment to pluralism misconstrues the fundamentally
universalist ambitions of the feminist killjoy’s critique of others’ problematic objects
of happiness —that, indeed, it has far more in common than is immediately apparent
with Kant’s insistence that we not accommodate our tastes to public consensus out of
a desire for approval, but instead voice our aesthetic judgments “not as imitation […]
but a priori.”61 This misconstrual is rooted in what I described earlier as Ahmed’s
forgetting of shame and its ambivalent structure of vulnerable attachment, where
problematization vehiculates an incompletely renounced desire for those others whose
pleasures we criticize as problematic. The importance of grasping this structure of
attachment lies in its helpfulness in foregrounding problematization’s anticipation of
positive feelings from those addressed by this critique – that is, it gives us a richer
sense of its perlocutionary aims. It should be clear, then, that my intention is thus not
to mount a critique of pluralism as such, but to insist that the term incorrectly
describes problematization’s means and ends. Specifically, the crucial difference
between a pluralistic and universalistic conception of problematizing critique consists
in this: that while the former leaves others and their problematic pleasures intact while
seeking merely to broaden the horizon of possible object choices, the latter, vulnerable
61
Ibid., 70, 78-9.
197
and desiring reattachment to those others, aims to engender a transformation in their
affective relations to the problematic object.
As becomes apparent when the stakes are thus formulated, the assumption of
pluralist motives makes nonsense of problematization, for the killing of joy and
causing of unhappiness would seem unnecessary, even inexplicably sadistic, if they
were understood to harbor no designs on its addressees, but instead only functioned to
expand the addressor’s own sense of possibility. Yet it is precisely this radically
foreclosed sense of problematization’s political performativity that Ahmed advances
in her invocation of a collective “we” that closes her essay. Having declared that
“becoming conscious […] is a form of political struggle,” Ahmed proposes that this
“process of consciousness raising involves not simply becoming conscious of
unhappiness but also achieving (with others) better ways of understanding
unhappiness.”62 Although we might expect that the “others” Ahmed has in mind for
the collective work of consciousness-raising includes those to whom the killjoy
addresses her problematizing critique, the “we” she invokes gives up this universal
aspiration:
We can recognize that unhappiness is structured, and that what happens to us
might be connected in some way to what happens to others. We can recognize
not only that we are not the cause of the unhappiness that has been attributed to
us but also the effects of being attributed as the cause. We can talk about being
angry black women or feminist killjoys; we can claim those figures back; we can
talk about those conversations we have had at dinner tables or in seminars or
62
Kant, 163.
198
meetings; we can laugh in recognition of the familiarity of inhabiting that place.
There is solidarity in recognizing our alienation from happiness, even if we do
not inhabit the same place (as we do not). There can even be joy in killing joy.
And kill joy, we must and we do.63
In the collective “we” that Ahmed projects, “others” turn out to be a lot like “us,” in
that the solidarity she envisions encompasses a closed loop of those who can “laugh in
the recognition of the familiarity of inhabiting” the place of the killjoy. Notably absent
from this public, which Ahmed pointedly calls the “sociality of unhappiness,” are
those who more properly belong to the “sociality of happiness,” and whose joy one
has killed – those, one would have thought, most in need of a consciousness of
unhappiness and of better ways of understanding happiness.64 Far be it from me to
undermine the work of forming local, identity-based collectives by measuring them
against some universalizing imperative! My reading of Ahmed is not intended as a
critique of these solidarities as such. Rather, my argument is that the enacting of
solidarity between those who problematize does not begin to account for
problematization’s political performativity, which can only be properly compassed
when completed by the account of its perlocutionary designs on those problematized.
2. Another Country and the Narrative of Problematization
Nowhere in James Baldwin’s Another Country do “problematization” or its
cognate terms actually appear; however, in this section I contend that the signature of
this critical practice is everywhere inscribed in the novel. I read Baldwin’s novel as a
63
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 84, 87.
199
narrative of problematizing critique, avant la lettre, because the term accurately
describes Another Country’s narrative premise – its exploration of the manner in
which its protagonists encounter, in their intimate relationships with one another, the
persistent complication of their pleasures in tension with the social norms of their
milieu. As Vivaldo Moore, one of the novel’s protagonists, discovers: "Pleasure, as it
turned out, was not simple.”65 Vivaldo is hardly alone in this, for Baldwin’s other
characters are similarly afflicted by pleasures turned problematic. As Lionel Trilling
observed in an early review of Another Country, the novel chronicles “the difficulty,
or the impossibility, in this country and at this time, of people having satisfying and
significant relations with each other.”66 That the leitmotif of relational intimacy
constitutes the staging ground for Baldwin’s complication of his characters’ pleasures
furnishes, moreover, a further warrant for my reading of his novel as a narrative of
problematization. Specifically, my engagement with Another Country’s multiple love
plots will extend the intuition I developed earlier via Ahmed’s family scene, which
describes problematization as a critical practice that, in the unhappiness-causing, joy-
killing complicating of others’ pleasures, vehiculates a desire for intimate reciprocity
from those others. Indeed, what renders pleasure problematic for the novel’s
characters arises from the way their intimacies with each other get stymied by frictions
arising from what Ahmed would call their “consciousness of unhappiness.”67 While
walking through the East Village with his girlfriend Leona early in the novel, for
64
Ibid., 87.
65
Ibid., 79.
66
James Baldwin, Another Country, First Vintage International ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993),
132, hereafter cited in-text as AC.
200
instance, Rufus Scott senses the hostility of those who disapprove of their interracial
coupling: “Villagers […] looked around them over as though where they stood were
an auction block or a stud farm.68 Leona, in contrast, “seemed to be oblivious of
everything and everyone but him,” which compounds Rufus’s anger with estranging
self-doubt: “[I]f she noticed nothing, what was the matter with him? Maybe he was
making it all up, maybe nobody gave a damn.”69 In the same way that the feminist
killjoy’s problematizing of familial conviviality estranges her from its conventions of
happiness, pleasure becomes problematic for Rufus who, tormenting Leona with his
suspicions and picking fights with strangers who “didn’t like the idea of [their] being
together,” causes her unhappiness and becomes alienated from the experience of their
relationship as happy.70 Similar scenes saturate Baldwin’s novel – from Ida’s offense
at Vivaldo’s racially insensitive allusion to her blackness in remarking that her visit to
his family “might do them some good” (“You meant exactly what I thought you meant
[….] Can’t none of you white boys help it”), to Vivaldo’s realization that his
friendship with Rufus had not in fact been “beyond the reach of […] color,” but that
this belief had merely covered over what was problematic about it: “Somewhere in his
heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white. Somewhere in his heart
Vivaldo had feared and hated Rufus because he was black.”71
Baldwin’s problematization of his protagonists’ pleasures via a narrative
exploration of their intimate relationships recommends the novel as emblematic of
67
Lionel Trilling, "James Baldwin," in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden,
Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs, ed.
Arthur Krystal (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 156.
68
69
Baldwin, 30.
70
Ibid., 58.
201
what I described earlier as the centrality of love to problematization’s political
performativity. Indeed, since Granville Hicks described Baldwin’s novel as one in
which “the complexities of love have seldom been explored more subtly or at greater
depth,” it has become a commonplace to observe love’s thematic importance to
Another Country’s construction.72 What remains unclear in the extant criticism,
however, is just what function love performs in the novel’s critique of American racial
politics. Beginning with Eldridge Cleaver’s condemnation of Another Country as a
novel “void of political, economic, or even social reference,” whose characters “all
seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum,” there has existed a tendency to read
Baldwin’s preoccupation with love and intimacy as an abdication of racial politics in
favor of sexual utopianism.73 The distinction Cleaver makes between “social
reference” and “fucking and sucking” is, of course, a gendered one. It emerges in the
same essay in which Cleaver denounces Baldwin’s homosexuality as a “racial death-
wish,” and characterizes his critique of Richard Wright as rooted in a despising of the
latter’s “masculinity” – which, we are given to understand, refers to the latter’s “forte
[…] in reflecting the intricate mechanisms of a social organization.”74 Despite its overt
misogyny and homophobia, the morphology of Cleaver’s critique persists in more
recent criticism of the novel, as witness William A. Cohen’s skepticism concerning
Baldwin’s commitment to (note the scare quotes) “the ‘liberating’ possibilities of
71
Ibid., 278, 79, 133, 34.
72
Ibid., 29.
73
Granville Hicks, "Outcasts in a Caldron of Hate," Saturday Review 45 (1962). For a notable
exception to this tendency, see Eldridge Cleaver, "Notes on a Native Son," in Soul on Ice (New York:
Delta, 1968; reprint, 1999), 134, 35.
74
Susan Feldman, "Another Look at Another Country: Reconciling Baldwin's Racial and Sexual
Politics," in Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2000).
202
‘love,’” which in the former’s view leads the author to “convey this sentiment, not
directly in terms of race, but deflected onto the more readily privatized terms of
sexuality.”75 Also echoing Cleaver, Terry Rowden dismisses Another Country as the
“depiction of the goings-on among a self-consciously experimental group of sexual
radicals,” and castigates Baldwin for scapegoating Rufus Scott, his sole black male
character protagonist, to uphold a “utopianized image of homosexuality” that is “for
whites only.”76
As I will demonstrate in my reading of Another Country, the novel bears out
neither the charge of naive sexual utopianism nor the assertion that Baldwin
instrumentalizes the domain of sexuality as a retreat from the social reality of racial
politics. I wish to underscore, moreover, the tendency, in such critiques of Baldwin’s
preoccupation with intimacy, to conflate love with sexual liberalism tout court. As
Carlo Freeburg suggests, Baldwin’s interpreters “tend to avoid the subject of love”
because “its representation reinforces the idea that professing love for an individual is
good enough as a commitment to social change.”77 The stain of private and apolitical
individualism attached to the discourse of love would, as the protracted half-life of
Cleaver’s attack on Baldwin attests, seem fairly indelible. Even for scholars who wish
to make love conceptually available for politics, moreover, there remains the problem
of its slipperiness – as Keguro Macharia describes it, “love remains a leaky concept
[…] stubbornly promiscuous, acting like sticky tape that amasses objects and
75
Cleaver, 129, 35.
76
William A. Cohen, "Liberalism, Libido, Liberation: Baldwin's Another Country," in The Queer
Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 212, 16.
77
Terry Rowden, "A Play of Abstractions: Race, Sexuality, and Community in James Baldwin's
Another Country," The Southern Review 29, no. 1 (1993): 44.
203
situations and relationships.”78 Even Freeburg’s essay, the most sustained engagement
with Baldwin’s preoccupation with love to date, does not escape this leakiness, for it
continues to suffer from a maddening vagueness as to the critical freight that love
bears in the author’s work.79 In proposing to show how Another Country reveals
love’s centrality to problematizing critique, I intend for the term to index less a utopia
built on sexual liberalism or loving feelings, than a structure of attachment in which
those we subject to critique are simultaneously cathected as our objects of desire. This
is, indeed, sense in which Baldwin himself understands the term, for he writes thus in
The Fire Next Time: “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as
a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made
happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”80 In these
remarks, written after his meeting with the leader of the black separatist movement
Nation of Islam, Baldwin imagines love as a relational structure in which the fates of
black and white Americans are mutually imbricated. Their boundedness to one another
is characterized by a striving, not for good feelings (“being made happy”), but for
collective transformation. Baldwin’s use of love’s idiom is significantly patterned
rather than merely incidental here, for in “Encounter on the Seine,” he had likewise
78
Christopher Freeburg, "Baldwin and the Ocassion of Love," in The Cambridge Companion to James
Baldwin, ed. Michele Elam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 181.
79
Freeburg’s interpretation of love’s importance to Baldwin traffics in abstractions too nebulous to be
of any conceptual usefulness, by turns describing it as “an infinite category of human possibility” and a
“way of exploring Baldwin’s engagement with humanity’s ongoing spiritual conflict and encompasses
how this is expressed historically as well as personally.” Keguro Macharia, "Love," Critical Ethnic
Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 68-9.
80
191. In his famous critique of sentimentality in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin wrote:
“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty,
the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life,
his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of
cruelty.” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, First Vintage International ed. (New York: Vintage,
1993), 95.
204
written of the relationship between white and black Americans: “bone of their bone,
flesh of flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his
blood is their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced.”81
Baldwin’s consistent troping on marriage and conjugality foregrounds the intimately
relational dimensions of American race relations, which he described in “Many
Thousands Gone” as “literally and morally, a blood relationship” that “contains the
force and anguish and terror of love.”82 That what Baldwin calls “love” could be
experienced as anguish and terror should make clear how little the “state of being” it
names has to do with feelings of loving or being loved.
Moreover, having once avowed that “I love America more than any other
country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insight to criticize her perpetually,”
Baldwin understood love not as an enfeeblement of critique, but its necessary
precondition.83 Returning to Baldwin’s repudiation in The Fire Next Time of the
separatism espoused by some of his contemporaries, it becomes clear that he
considered love fundamental to his critique of American race relations. In terms that
prefigure the killjoy’s problematizing of happiness, Baldwin described the Negro as
“barring [the] door to [America’s] spiritual and social ease,” an act he considered “the
most important thing one human being can do for another,” one that involves “torment
and necessity of love.”84 Read alongside Ahmed’s origin story, Baldwin’s project of
unsettling white America’s sense of ease doubtlessly belongs in the genealogy of the
killjoy’s “willing[ness] to cause disturbance,” but it is his distinct and singular effort
81
Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 14.
82
Ibid., 125.
83
205
to braid this critique with love whose implications I wish to elucidate here.85 In the
same way that the vocabulary of shame helped us to describe the commingling of
forceful critique and vulnerable desire at the heart of the killjoy’s problematization of
happiness, I argue that Baldwin’s braiding of love and critique is anchored in the way
he imagines American race relations as structured by the vulnerability of shame’s
incompletely renounced desire for communion. The “vast amount of energy that goes
into what we call the Negro problem,” Baldwin writes in this vein, “is produced by the
white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be
seen as he is,” yet “at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the
white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny
of his mirror.”86
“In shame,” as Tomkins describes it, “I wish to continue to look and be looked
at, but I also do not wish to do so” – in Baldwin’s account of the white man’s
simultaneous desire to be seen and not seen for who he is, an ambivalent scene where
“love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided,” we discover a
psychogenetic account of systemic racism as rooted in white shame and its projection
onto black Americans.87 It is Baldwin’s intuition of these shame dynamics that
underwrites his insistence on love’s inextricability from critique, for his unrelenting
censure of racial oppression – “the crime of which,” as he writes, “I accuse my
country and my countrymen, for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive
them” – is anchored in a belief that a desire for repair persists, however fraught and
84
Ibid., 9.
85
The Fire Next Time, 85-6.
86
206
attenuated, between black Americans and their white countrymen.88 Without this
interest in mutuality and reciprocity, which persists wherever shame is operative,
critique would simply entrench the cycle of contempt and counter-contempt that, as
Tomkins writes, “strengthens the boundaries and barriers between individuals and
groups and is the instrument par excellence for the preservation of hierarchical, caste,
and class relationships.”89 Far from “sticking” us to oppression and thus vitiating our
critique of it, as Ahmed worried, shame’s coefficient of love intensifies Baldwin’s
determination to hold white Americans responsible for the devastating consequences
of racial injustice (“they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of
lives and do not know it and do not want to know it”).90 There is surely no less a sense
of the j’accuse in Baldwin’s critique than in the killjoy’s, for he maintains that “it is
not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the
innocence which constitutes the crime.”91 The difference love makes, however,
consists in the relational entailments of Baldwin’s critique, which brooks no
separatism but rather insists on “integration,” by which he means, as he writes in an
impassioned letter to his nephew, “that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see
themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”92 In this
vein, Baldwin closes The Fire Next Time with a plea to a collective “we” to take up
critique in the aspect of love – a “we” whose referent is significantly more capacious
than the one Ahmed invokes:
87
Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 95.
88
Tomkins, "Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust," 138; Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 95.
89
The Fire Next Time, 5.
90
91
Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 5.
92
Ibid., 5-6.
207
If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively
conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of
the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are,
to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of
the world.93
In contrast to the separate socialities of happiness and unhappiness that Ahmed
envisioned would arise from the killjoy’s problematizing critique, Baldwin insists on a
“we” built not on shared familiarity with a certain genre of minority experience but on
a common project of bringing all “others” to a consciousness of the “racial nightmare”
and of the means to end it: “we, the black and the white, deeply need each other if we
are really to become a nation.”94 Love’s centrality to Baldwin’s critical practice, then,
owes to his conviction that it alone contains the force and desire necessary to disabuse
those who “do not know” and “do not want to know” their own culpability for racial
injustice of their illusions of innocence, and thus convey to them a knowledge of
reality. In Baldwin’s project of unsettling of white America’s ease, his relieving of its
innocence – his problematization, in the terms of this chapter, of its pleasures – love
names a desire for, and thus necessarily also an open vulnerability to, critique’s others.
Baldwin’s conception of love as a simultaneously erotic and epistemological
drive, one that lends the critique of racial oppression its effectivity on those “fleeing
from reality,” provides us with the key to understanding love’s critical function in
Another Country. As Trilling and Hicks recognized, readers of Another Country
cannot fail to remark the extent to which its engagement with racial politics is
93
Ibid., 10.
208
animated by its characters’ profound need to make sense of their love for one another.
As Rufus asks Vivaldo in the first section of the novel, shortly before taking his fatal
leap off the Brooklyn Bridge: "What do two people want from each other […] when
they get together? Do you know?"95 Cass, a married woman in the midst of a short-
lived affair with a gay man, finds herself similarly perplexed by "love, and wondered
if anyone really knew anything about it."96 Similarly afflicted by love's inaccessibility
and inscrutability, Vivaldo couches his bewilderment concerning his relationship with
Ida in a pointedly eponymous idiom: "Perhaps she loved him, perhaps she did: but if
she did, how was it, then, that they remained so locked away from one another? […]
Love was a country he knew nothing about."97 Moreover, Another Country imagines
love as an epistemological incitement not only because it constitutes an enigma for
knowledge, but also because it imagines love as an especially profound modality of
knowing. For Ida, after all, it is Vivaldo's lack of knowledge that causes her to doubt
his love for her: "What I don't understand […] is how you can talk about love when
you don't want to know what's happening [….] How can you love somebody you don't
know anything about? You don't know where I've been. You don't know what life is
like for me."98 As Ida's line of questioning makes evident, the protagonists of
Baldwin's novel struggle not only to know about love, but to actualize love as a mode
of knowing. The novel makes clear that the unknowingness which afflicts Vivaldo,
and which in Ida's view undercuts his professions of love, extends beyond their
94
Ibid., 105.
95
Ibid., 97.
96
Another Country, 168.
97
Ibid., 288.
98
Ibid., 296.
209
romantic relationship. Early in the novel, we are given to understand that Vivaldo is a
man "who knew so little about his countrymen," and whose misguided sense of
belonging in Harlem rests on the sort of obliviousness of which Ida accuses him: “He
knew that Harlem was a battlefield and what a war was being waged there day and
night – but of the war aims he knew nothing.99 Like the white Americans who “do not
know” and “do not want to know” their culpability for structural racism, Vivaldo’s
ignorance insulates him from the uncomfortable realities of racist oppression,
including those that impinge upon his friendship with Rufus: "He had refused to see it,
for he had insisted that he and Rufus were equals [….] And yet, how much, as it
turned out, had each kept hidden in his heart from the other!”100
Similar refusals of knowledge prove endemic to the various ill-fated
relationships charted in Another Country, each time foregrounding the novel’s
equation of a failure to know with a failure to love. The tragic consequences of Rufus's
affair with Leona, for instance, can be traced to his sense of the distorted knowledge
she has of him. When told that Leona loves him, Rufus responds by “put[ting] his
hand on his sex, brutally, as though he would tear it out," and asking: "You know all
that chick knows about me? The only thing she knows?”101 In the same way that
Leona’s unknowingness undermines the love she bears Rufus, in a flashback to Eric's
apparently innocent flirtation with a black man named LeRoy during his younger
years in Alabama, we are told that the former "did not know, or perhaps he did not
want to know, that he made LeRoy's life more difficult and increased the danger in
99
Ibid., 325.
100
Ibid., 35, 133.
101
Ibid., 133.
210
which LeRoy walked."102 At the limit, the racially-inflected unknowingness that
plagues the novel’s characters in their intimate relationships finds a correlative in their
broader misrecognition of social reality as such. This explains why, when Vivaldo
asks Ida why she won't trust him if she loves him, she mocks his ignorance of life
more fundamentally: "Oh. You think life is so simple [….] I always think of you as
being a very nice boy who doesn't know what the score is, who'll maybe never find
out."103 She intends her assessment of Vivaldo’s want of knowledge, moreover, as an
indictment of the novel’s entire cast of characters for their ignorant complicity in her
brothers’ death: "None of you, anyway, knew anything about him, you didn't know
how [….] How could you – how can you? – dreaming the way you dream? You
people think you're free."104
Considered in the light of its preoccupation with the mutual imbrication of
loving and knowing, Another Country lends itself to be read as a narrative meditation
on what we might describe as the epistemology of love, in the fullest sense of the
double genitive. That is, the novel not only inquires into the epistemology of love,
reflecting on how one may come to know what intimate love consists in, but in thus
imagining love as an enigma for knowledge, also poses the question of love's
epistemology, limning how loving vehiculates a modality of knowing aimed at
achieving an accurate cognition of social reality. With this formulation, we find
ourselves firmly in the region of Baldwin’s insight concerning love’s centrality to the
critique of racial oppression. In order to specify how the novel imagines love’s critical
102
Ibid., 68.
103
Ibid., 202.
104
Ibid., 412.
211
function, I return to the discovery Vivaldo makes while mulling on the frustrations of
his intimate relationships: "Pleasure, as it turned out, was not simple."105 Vivaldo's
insight not only pointedly prefigures the dismissal of simplicity in Ida’s admonition of
his naive unknowingness concerning the reality of American race relations at the close
of the novel (“You think life is so simple”), but also formulates the novel’s inquiry
into the epistemology of love as operative in the medium of pleasures.106 More
significantly, Vivaldo’s remark offers a problematizing critique, or indeed a diacritic,
of pleasure that proposes to distinguish between, on the one hand, false pleasures that
seem simple but are not really pleasurable, and on the other, real pleasures whose
authenticity has been predicated on some quality antithetical to the “simple.” I will
return, further on, to the basis of Vivaldo’s diacritic of pleasure, and elucidate
Baldwin’s conception of what “real” pleasure consists in. For the moment, we may
simply observe that Vivaldo’s critique is freighted with especial metanarrative
significance because it emerges in a scene in which Baldwin has cast his character as
an author struggling to finish his first novel. As it so happens, Vivaldo’s
problematization of pleasure arrives on the heels of two explicitly metanarrative
moments in the novel that helpfully exemplify the double sense in which the
epistemology of love (knowing about loving, loving as knowing) undergirds Another
Country’s narrative logic. In the first moment, Vivaldo reflects on his abortive attempt
to write a chapter of his unfinished novel, and in the second, having given up on that
frustrated narrative labor, he stands by his window and vividly imagines a sexual
dalliance transpiring in an apartment across the street. To begin with the latter
105
Ibid., 413.
212
instance, Vivaldo espies his neighbor flirting with "yet another boneless young man"
she has brought back home with her, and subsequently begins to narrate for us "the
scene which would now be occurring between the boy and the girl in the room."107
Rendered in the conditional tense, which foregrounds the speculative lens through
which Vivaldo focalizes this fantasy scene (“The girl would have taken off her shoes
…. He would be sitting on the bed … And the silence, beneath the music, would be
tremendous with their fear …”), his account imagines their coupling in dense erotic
detail, but is backlit by his problematizing critique of their failure to achieve real
pleasure.108 For instance, although Vivaldo clearly relishes imagining the girl's
"sighing and halting" movements, he also pointedly reads them as signs of ”need" and
"hostility," in the same way that the “sound of her gasps” serve to “foreshado[w] his
failure, and her partner's "feathery kisses, meant to be burning" only mime
ineffectually what "he had seen in the movies."109
As a problematization of his neighbor’s pleasure, Vivaldo’s fly-on-the-wall
fantasy not only telegraphs a diacritical discernment of “real” from “false” pleasure,
but also foregrounds the ambivalent structure that underwrites this problematizing
critique, which harbors at one and the same time a censorious repudiation of, and an
empathetic, even erotic identification with its object. The effect of this ambivalence is
to render Vivaldo’s fantasy both erotic and estranging, desirous and critical, his
description simultaneously investing the scene with an erotic interest and disaffecting
us from the event it imagines. Focalized through Vivaldo’s problematization, the
106
Ibid., 132.
107
Ibid., 412.
108
Ibid., 131, 32.
213
couple’s encounter would seem pleasurable, but we are also given to understand that it
really isn’t. Vivaldo’s narrative invites us to partake in both the identificatory pleasure
he experiences in fantasizing his neighbor’s sexual encounter and the displeasure he
telegraphs in his critique of that pleasure. Although this commingling of desirous
identification and critical estrangement might seem paradoxical, the harshness with
which Vivaldo indicts his neighbor has in fact been rooted in his own attachments to
her from the first, for he reveals that “the girl who lived across the street, whose name,
he knew, was Nancy […] reminded him of Jane,” the name of his own on-again, off-
again romantic partner.110 The push-pull dynamic of Vivaldo’s concurrently
identificatory and estranging cathexis to the imaginary scene also reproduces itself as
a simultaneous dilation and contraction of his perspectival distance. At first glance, it
may seem that his problematization of his neighbors’ pleasures rests on the (physical
and narrative) distance that his vantage point affords: spied from across the street,
their pleasure can be problematized because it has been dislocated from their first-
person perspective and imaginatively rendered in the detached, critical tonality of his
third-person conditional. However, just as Vivaldo’s fantasy commingles critical
estrangement with erotic identification, we find a correlative oscillation between
proximity and distance in the positioning of his narrative perspective, for the initially
distantiated scene of his neighbors’ erotic encounter turns out to harbor a familiarity
that locates him “there” with them: "How could they endure it? Well, he had been
there. How had he endured it?"111 Indeed, the severe judgments to which Vivaldo
109
Ibid., 130-1.
110
Ibid., 131.
111
Ibid., 129.
214
subjects the hapless couple across the street manifestly pertain to his own sexual
history as well, for he admits that “he had been there: chafing and pushing and
pounding, trying to awaken a frozen girl.”112
In its oscillation between erotic identification and defamiliarizing estrangement,
critical distance and intimate proximity, Vivaldo’s imaginary fantasy neatly stages
what I elucidated earlier as problematization’s affective scene – its commingling of a
forceful critique of others’ pleasures with a positive investment of affect in those
others. The tension between Vivaldo’s erotic attachment to his neighbor and his
critique of her pleasure turns out to underwrite, indeed, his experience of an affect
whose profound connections to problematization I have already adumbrated: “The
tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew
commented on all they did.”113 The conflicted itinerary of Vivaldo’s vicarious,
empathetic experience of shame in imaginarily witnessing his neighbors’ sexual
encounter can be tracked in a pronominal shift similar to the example we observed
earlier (from “How could they endure it?” to “How had he endured it?”). To wit,
Baldwin deliberately leaves ambiguous the antecedent of the pronominal “them” to
which shame clutches in the sentence I quoted above: the paragraph in which the
pronoun occurs begins with Vivaldo and his anonymous lover as its subject and object
(“he had been there […] trying to awaken a frozen girl”), which subsequently get
replaced by indefinite and reciprocal pronouns (“Both clung to a fantasy rather than to
each other”).114 However, when we get to the sentence in which we encounter the
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid., 131.
114
215
shamed “them,” multiple repetitions of the third person plural pronoun (“at them,”
“they turned,” “they knew, “they did”) have the effect of externalizing and
disidentifying the pronoun’s referent from Vivaldo’s narrative perspective, such that
he seems to be describing an experience of shame in which he both does and does not
participate.115 Read as a microcosm of Another Country’s staging of problematization,
Vivaldo’s fantasmatic meditation on his neighbor’s pleasures suggests how Baldwin’s
commitment to an ethic of love underwrites a style of problematizing critique rooted
in an empathetic attachment to its addressees. One way to understand the singular
inflection that love puts on critique is to observe how criticality, as an epistemological
drive towards the reality of its object, enacts a kind of eros. Nowhere is this more
manifest than in Vivaldo’s observation, as he watches his lover Ida sleep, that her face
“would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any
stranger.”116 Baldwin explains his pairing of love and knowledge in the following
way: “Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them
with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so
much of oneself.117 By force of love, Baldwin suggests, a lover becomes more
mysterious to us than a stranger, because our attachments to a lover are what eroticize
him or her as an object of our knowledge or ignorance in the first place. Unlike our
lovers, the mass of unloved strangers who never enter our sphere of concern could
never be properly mysterious – could never be properly “unknown” to us, given our
lack of interest in knowing them at all. For Baldwin, as it is for Vivaldo,
115
Ibid., 131.
116
Ibid., 132.
117
Ibid., 171-2.
216
problematization entails a critical practice whose force derives not from denunciation
tout court, but from love – an eroticized, epistemological concern for its object, that
manifests in a willingness to compass the tension between identification and
estrangement, negative affect and positive concern.
That Baldwin considered Vivaldo’s imaginary scene exemplary for Another
Country’s narrative logic more generally can hardly be doubted, for what prompted
his protagonist’s reverie by the window in the first place was his frustrated effort to
complete a chapter of his unfinished novel. In a moment that Baldwin freights with
metanarrative significance, Vivaldo’s writer’s block concerns his inability to know his
characters, the difficulty of which gets couched in the idiom of frustrated sexual
pleasure: “He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did
not seem to trust him [….] With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted
to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender
up to him their privacy.”118 Alluding here to the biblical euphemism linking
knowledge and sex, Baldwin identifies the challenges of writing with thwarted love,
gesturing toward the resonances between Vivaldo’s unfinished chapter and the
imaginary scene he later conjures of his neighbors’ sexual encounter. This connection
between intimate pleasure and narrativization also explains why, for instance,
Vivaldo’s wish for his fictional characters to “surrender up to him their privacy”
echoes his description of the coupling across the street: “Both clung to a fantasy rather
than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than
118
Ibid., 172.
217
surrender the secrets of the body.”119 In light of the euphemistic connection between
knowledge and sex, Baldwin’s description of Vivaldo’s writer’s block can be read as
offering the pleasures of intimacy (“the secrets of the body”) as a figure for the
narrative achievement of realism, here opposed to the mere “fantasy” to which his
neighbors cling. The association between realism and intimacy recapitulates in
narrative form Baldwin’s conception of love, which we observed earlier in connection
to his essays, as an erotic and epistemological drive towards social reality. This is the
key significance of Vivaldo’s sense that until he succeeds in properly seducing his
characters, he remains unable to improve on the unsatisfactory artifice of “put[ting]
words in their mouth which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced.”120 Until then,
demurring Vivaldo’s entreaties, they refuse to become anything more than
unconvincing contrivances: “He could move them about but they themselves did not
move.”121 When considered along with the nesting of diegetic frames – failing to
seduce his own fictional characters (hypodiegesis), Vivaldo narrates instead an
imaginary scene involving his “real” neighbors (homodiegesis), while he and they
alike serve as fictional characters in the Another Country (extradiegesis) – it becomes
clear that Baldwin elaborates here an understanding of love’s epistemological
entailments for the actualization of narrative realism. Indeed, the image of Vivaldo’s
characters “clustering, really, around the desired and unknown Ida,” his fellow
119
Ibid., 127.
120
Ibid., 127, 31. In relating to the fictional characters in his novel like real people, Vivaldo echoes
Baldwin’s own habit – in an interview with the Paris Review, the latter had this to say about his
fictional characters, and Ida in particular: "Actually, what has happened is that the character has
tyrannized you for however long it took, and when the novel is over he or she says Ciao, thanks a lot.
Pointe finale. Before Another Country, Ida talked to me for years. We get on very well now." ibid., 127.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/james-baldwin-the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin.
218
character in Another Country, both confirms Baldwin’s vision of love as the motor of
critique’s epistemological drive towards the reality of its objects, and generalizes it
across the diegetic boundaries between Vivaldo’s and Baldwin’s fictional and non-
fictional worlds.122
So far, I have focused on demonstrating how Another Country stages
problematization as a critical practice rooted in love, one whose intimate identification
with and forceful critique of others’ pleasures orients us towards a knowledge of the
“real.” The question this formulation raises, to which I now turn, is the mediation by
which the problematizing critique of pleasure claims a purchase on social reality writ
large. In my reading, the novel reveals how a critical engagement with the pleasures of
what Cleaver impugned as mere “sucking and fucking” mediates the “intricate
mechanisms of social organization” that he found so lacking in Baldwin’s prose.
Earlier, I suggested how Vivaldo’s fantasy of his neighbors’ sexual encounter
proposed a critique of “false” pleasures, underwritten by a diacritic for discerning
what “real” pleasure would consist in. Here, I wish to foreground the social,
intersubjective dimension to the practice of problematization, in that its discernment of
pleasure’s reality crucially rests on an attunement to what brings others pleasure. As
Vivaldo observes, what frustrates him about his relationship with Ida isn’t a lack of
pleasure on his part per se, but his inability to engender her pleasure: “However she
might wish to delight him, she seemed principally to wish to exhaust him; and to
remain, above all, herself on the banks of pleasure the while she labored mightily to
121
Jordan Elgraby and James Baldwin, "James Baldwin, the Art of Fiction No. 78," Paris Review, no.
91 (1984).
122
Baldwin, Another Country, 127.
219
drown him in the tide.”123 In a reflexive iteration of his previous diacritic of pleasure,
Vivaldo distinguishes here between two different kinds of pleasure: the “delight” that
one might take in another person, and a more genuine pleasure that comes only from
an identification with that other’s pleasure: “His pleasure was enough for her, she
seemed to say, his pleasure was hers. But he wanted her pleasure to be his, for them to
drown in the tide together.”124 In contrast to the unfortunate lovers who “clung to a
fantasy rather than to each other,” and who “tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of
the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body,” for Vivaldo real pleasure
turns out to be “not simple” because it is interdependently contingent on the pleasure
of others – the experience of “real” pleasure, put simply, consists in one’s ability to
attune to, accord with, and thus take pleasure in what also gives others pleasure.125
In fact, Vivaldo’s reflections on his attunement to Ida’s pleasures finally reveal
that, by force of his love for her, his own pleasure has been braided interdependently
not only with her pleasures, but with those of many others as well. To be specific,
Vivaldo realizes that love entails the triangulation of his pleasure, willy-nilly, with the
pleasures of a multitude of unknown others who henceforth constitute a determinate
third point of contingency in the pleasures of the couple form: “his mind was troubled
with questions which he had not before permitted to enter but whose hour, now, had
struck. He wondered who had been with her before him; how many, how often, how
long; what he, or they before him, had meant to her.”126 As the novel makes clear,
moreover, it is not only Ida’s proximal ex-lovers who impinge upon the pleasures
123
Ibid., 128.
124
Ibid., 172.
125
Ibid.
220
Vivaldo takes in their relationship, but a whole host of distant, anonymous others as
well. This is nowhere more evident than in Baldwin’s rendering of an earlier moment
in their relationship, where Vivaldo walks uptown with Ida at his arm and finds
himself “delighted all over again by her beauty,” because it was “as though she were
wearing it especially for him.”127 The pristine privacy of the pleasure (“especially for
him”) Vivaldo takes in Ida’s beauty quickly gets disrupted, however, by the intrusive
judgments of the strangers they pass on the street: the eyes of other women confer on
Ida “the status of a thief,” while white men “looked at her as though she were no
better, though more lascivious and rare, than a whore. And then the eyes of the men
sought his, inviting a wet complicity.”128
For Baldwin, then, intimate relationships like Vivaldo and Ida’s are always
already love triangles, at least when it pertains to the social interdependencies that
love introduces into the experience of intimate pleasure. As Vivaldo discovers, the
unavoidable fact of Ida’s vulnerability to the judgments of other people cannot but
impose itself upon whatever simple delight he takes in her beauty, shattering his
impression that it could possibly have been worn “especially for him” and him alone:
“her vanity and her contempt were being swollen by the glances which rested on her
as briefly and unforgettably as the touch of a whip.”129 In the same way that their
passage uptown “raised small clouds of male and female hostility which blew into
their faces like dust,” throughout Another Country the presence of the nameless
multitude looms large as the intrusive but inescapable third party to Vivaldo’s
126
Ibid., 131.
127
Ibid., 172.
128
Ibid., 143.
221
relationship with Ida.130 In the tiny apartment that they share in Greenwich Village, for
instance, they find themselves similarly unable to insulate themselves from the city’s
encroachments. During the summer, people would use their open door “as an
incitement – to stop, to listen, to stare, to knock,” including one boy who “stood in the
hot shadow of the landing, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on Ida.”131 After that
they “kept the doors not only closed but locked,” but still found that “the entire
shapeless, unspeakable city seemed to be in the room with them, some summer
nights.”132
This claustrophobic image of an entire city pressing in on Vivaldo’s relationship
with Ida also figures the ways in which even their arguments, finally, always involve
more than just the two of them. When Ida takes offense at the racial implications of
Vivaldo’s willingness to toy with the possibility of shocking his family by bringing
her to a gathering, she rejects his apology by insisting: “Can’t none of you white boys
help it [….] You are a fucked up group of people. You hear me? A fucked-up group of
people.”133 Dissolving her lover’s singularity into the sociality of an entire “fucked-up
group of people,” Ida doubtlessly means to invoke here both the histories of
oppression suffered by countless black women like herself at the hands of just as many
white men. But the terms of her accusation do more than that – they also reinstate
Another Country’s central insight that pleasure fails to be simple because of the way,
perforce, erotic attachments enmesh one’s pleasures with those of unknown others. As
129
Ibid., 144.
130
Ibid., 145.
131
Ibid., 144.
132
Ibid., 318-9.
133
Ibid., 319.
222
Vivaldo puts it: “There sure are a fucked-up group of people in this house, they won’t
even let you make love in peace.”134 In the same way that the “entire shapeless,
unspeakable city” intruded into their apartment, the pleasure that Ida and Vivaldo take
in loving each other can never solely remain a private affair between them, but must
be negotiated via the pleasures of a “fucked-up group” of others who are never far
from the scene. This discovery of the ineluctable sociality of pleasure marks Another
Country’s other ill-fated relationships as well – just as Ida and Vivaldo struggle with
the uncomfortable sense of having the entire city in bed with them, Rufus reflects that
his love for Leona “somehow” plugs him, willy-nilly, into a relationship with
countless others as well: “to remember Leona was also – somehow – to remember the
eyes of his mother, the rage of his father, the beauty of his sister. It was to remember
the streets of Harlem, the boys on the stoops, the girls behind the stairs and on the
roofs, the white policeman who had taught him how to hate the stickball games in the
streets, the women leaning out of the windows and the numbers they played daily,
hoping for the hit his father never made.”135 In the same way that the gazes of passers-
by uptown colored Vivaldo’s pleasure in Ida’s company, Rufus and Leona
“encountered the big world when they went out into the Sunday streets,” finding that
“it stared unsympathetically out at them from the eyes of the passing people.”136
In its staging the reality of pleasure’s irreducible sociality, Another Country
comes very close to approximating Ahmed’s conception of the sociality of happiness.
For most of the novel, Baldwin’s protagonists encounter the contingencies that others
134
Ibid., 280.
135
Ibid., 281.
136
Ibid., 6.
223
impose on their own experiences of pleasure as intrusive and interfering, with one
significant exception that I will return to at the end of this section. In much the same
fashion that Ahmed objects to the subjection of minorities to the “sociality of
happiness,” in which “one person’s happiness is made conditional on another person’s
happiness,” Baldwin’s various protagonists could be said to encounter the same
vexing susceptibility of their intimate pleasures to interference from the norms and
conventions upheld by the anonymous multitudes who comprise the “entire shapeless,
unspeakable city” and the “big world.”137 Ahmed’s project of killing joy, as we
observed earlier, aimed to clear ground for a “sociality of unhappiness,” one separate
from the “sociality of happiness” and thus free of the latter’s oppressive conventions
and the asymmetrical conditions it imposes on happiness. I contend, however, that
Baldwin’s insight into the interdependencies of his protagonists’ pleasures underwrites
a different vision. As Baldwin suggests in his rendering of Vivaldo and Ida’s
predicament, even the locked doors of their apartment fail to provide any reprieve
from the encroachment of the social multitude on their private and intimate pleasures.
The fact that Vivaldo’s love for Ida embeds him in a network of interdependencies
that renders his pleasure vulnerable to the impingement of social contingency is to be
embraced as the enabling condition of Another Country’s problematizing critique,
rather than a constraint to be evaded.
For Baldwin, the only way out of the intrusive social contingencies revealed by
the critical problematization of pleasure is through. Over against Cleaver’s accusation
that Baldwin’s preoccupation with the merely private and individual intimacies of his
137
Ibid., 27.
224
protagonists never amounts to a critique of racial politics at the social scale, I contend
that Another Country remediates its vision of pleasure’s interdependencies into social
critique via the model of aesthetic experience. The mediation of the novel’s critique by
way of aesthetics should come as no surprise given that what all of its protagonists
share is, first, that they are all artists of some variety (musicians, writers, and actors),
and second, that they are all described, by either the narrator or each other, as
beautiful.138 That the artistic preoccupations of Baldwin’s protagonists enact his
exploration of the importance of aesthetic pleasure to the social critique of racial
politics can be confirmed in his choice of a couplet from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet LXV”
for the epigraph to the third book of Another Country: “How with this rage shall
beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” The answer to the
question of beauty’s “action,” I suggest, lies in the manner in which Baldwin’s
protagonists both identify as artists and thus experience their intimate pleasures as
eroticized aesthesis. This aestheticization of intimacy foregrounds the isomorphism
between the novel’s problematization of pleasure – its revelation of pleasure’s
sociality – and aesthetic experience. The most emblematic way in which this shows up
in then novel is the friction created by its characters’ disagreements about the quality
of Richard’s recently published novel. In a description of Richard’s face focalized
through Vivaldo, which happens to occur at a party celebrating the publication of the
former’s novel, we read that “Vivaldo had loved it for a long time. Yet, the face lacked
138
The words “beauty” and “beautiful” appear 41 times in the novel, many as descriptions of its
characters: Rufus (“he was a very beautiful boy,” “he was beautiful”) (415, 121); Ida (“She’s beautiful,”
“He was delighted all over again by her beauty,” “she was very very dark she was beautiful,” “What a
beautiful girl you are,” “I thought you were one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen,” (139, 143,
144, 98); Vivaldo (“he was reduced to his beauty and elegance”) (109); Eric (“His reality shocked her,
225
something, he could not have said what the something was, and he knew his helpless
judgment was unjust.”139 The attenuation of Vivaldo’s friendship with Richard rests, it
emerges, on the former’s negative aesthetic judgment of the latter’s novel. In the
paragraph immediately following, we find out that “[Vivaldo] had not liked the book.
He could not take it seriously. It was an able, intelligent, mildly perceptive tour de
force and it would never mean anything to anyone.”140 Perhaps even more
characteristic of Baldwin’s fusing of aesthetic judgment with the affective investments
of intimate relationships is the fact that the leading indicator of the dissolution of
Richard’s marriage to his wife Cass is the latter’s emerging disdain for his writing. In
the very same breath in which she tells Vivaldo that “there doesn’t seem to be
anything between [her and Richard] any more,” she confesses: “I don’t think
Richard’s work is any good any more and he can’t forgive me for that.141 Cass’s
judgment for her husband is identified with and inextricable from her aesthetic
judgment of his writing, for in suggesting to Vivaldo that Richard is jealous of him
because he “may become a real writer,” she also declares that her husband “will never
be. And he knows it. And that’s the whole trouble.”142
Baldwin’s aestheticization of intimacy provides us with the key to understanding
how Another Country’s problematization of its protagonists’ pleasures reimagines
social reality. In a passage describing Ida’s performance at a jazz bar, with both Eric
and Vivaldo in attendance, Baldwin describes the latter as “desperately […] in love”
and so did his beauty,” “You’re very beautiful”) (285, 291); Cass and Richard (“She had been the most
beautiful, the most golden girl on earth. And Richard had been the greatest, most beautiful man”) (268).
139
140
Baldwin, Another Country, 157.
141
Ibid.
142
Ibid., 271, 74.
226
and watching with a “passionate face” as Ida sings, but soon realizes that he isn’t the
only one watching her: “Eric became aware of a shift in Vivaldo’s attention. He
looked at Vivaldo’s face, which was stormier than ever, and followed his eyes.
Vivaldo was looking at a short square man with curly hair and a boyish face who was
standing at the end of the bar, looking at Ida.”143 The daisy chain of focalizations that
Baldwin traces here, where Eric watches Vivaldo, who in turn watches Steve Ellis
watching Ida, figures a web of social contingencies similar to the one that impinges on
Ida and Vivaldo’s relationship. The crucial difference here, however, is that the
pleasure circulating in the scene of Ida’s performance is not only erotic, but aesthetic
as well, suggesting how the aestheticization of intimacy mediates Baldwin’s vision of
the sociality of pleasure. Specifically, when considered in the light of Baldwin’s
commingling of erotic and artistic pleasure under the banner of aesthetic experience,
the manner in which the social multitude encroaches on the pleasures of Another
Country’s protagonists’ intimate relationships becomes legible as a narrativization of
normative conflicts arising from disagreements about aesthetic judgment. As I
adumbrated earlier in drawing out the resonances between Ahmed’s feminist critique
of problematic pleasures and Kantian aesthetic theory, conflicts over norms of
happiness can productively be understood as aesthetic disagreement, where the killjoy
rejects the heteronomy of social convention in favor of a subjective faculty of taste
that, nevertheless, insists on the aesthetic universality of its judgments. In the case of
Baldwin’s novel, then, if the protagonists of Another Country find their pleasures
susceptible to interference from a multitude of social others, it is because aesthetic
143
Ibid., 275.
227
disagreements unsettle the implicit claim to universal validity and normativity
attached to their judgments of their loved objects. If pleasure fails to be simple for
Vivaldo, it is precisely because the normative conflicts engendered by others who
judge Ida a “whore” or a “thief” undermine the pleasure that Vivaldo takes in his
judgment of her beauty, even as the discovery of this social contingency disabuses him
of the notion that her beauty exists “especially for him.”144
By understanding how Baldwin’s narrativization of the social contingencies of
his characters’ pleasures reimagines racial conflict as aesthetic disagreement, we can
in turn grasp the critical implications of the problematization it stages. The schema of
aesthetic disagreement extends the Another Country’s basic insight – that “real”
pleasure requires love’s willingness to attune to and take pleasure in what also gives
other pleasure – to encompass not only relationships characterized by the intimate
privacy of the couple form, but the broader social conflicts of American race relations
writ large. As an elaboration of Baldwin’s recurrent troping, in his essays, on the
conjugal mood of American race relations, the social contingencies that the
problematization of pleasure reveals to us undergird Baldwin’s commitment to the
ethic of love. Although such contingencies can (as the novel repeatedly thematizes) be
experienced as the impingement of the social multitude on individual pleasures,
Baldwin suggests how the fact of the interdependence of our pleasures can animate a
desire for intersubjective attunement oriented towards the ideal of universal agreement
about does or does not engender pleasure, rather than a separatist pluralism where
normative conflict is not so much resolved as merely defused and spaced out. To
144
Ibid., 255.
228
conclude this section, I wish to read a moment of the novel in which, by enacting just
such an attunement to the pleasure of others, Vivaldo offers readers a glimpse into the
aesthetic universality lying beyond the injustice wrought on the basis of “the value
placed on the color of the skin,” which Baldwin described at the close of The Fire
Next Time as “always and everywhere and forever a delusion.”145 In the moment in
question, Vivaldo nurses a drink in a jazz bar, eyeing a blonde girl about whom he
begins to entertain sexual fantasies:
He wondered about her odor, her juices, sounds; for a night, only for a night;
then abruptly, with no warning, he found himself wondering how Rufus would
have looked at this girl, and an odd thing happened: all desire left him, he turned
absolutely cold, and then desire came roaring back, with legions [….] And
something in him was breaking; he was, briefly and horribly, in a region where
there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male and female.146
Baldwin’s cryptic diction tends to compound the enigmatic register of this scene, but
what I wish to underscore here is the way in which Vivaldo’s momentary glimpse of a
region beyond the categories of race and gender originates in the expansion of his
perspective to accommodate the pleasure of an absent Rufus. Vivaldo’s gesture of
attunement boomerangs his desire and returns it to him transfigured: “all desire left
him […] and then desire came roaring back, with legions.” Baldwin’s choice of
“legions” here not only signals the multiplicative effect that an attunement with
another’s pleasures has on Vivaldo’s own experience of desire, but also recalls, with a
different inflection this time, the anonymous multitudes that impinge on the pleasures
145
Ibid., 143-4.
229
of his relationship with Ida. That Vivaldo’s desire comes roaring back “with legions”
indicates that the expansion of his private erotic fantasy in order to imaginatively
accommodate Rufus’s pleasure leads not to a metaphoric substitution of his own
experience for the latter’s, but a metonymic concatenation of his anticipatory pleasures
with those of numerous others as well. Vivaldo’s identification with the perspective of
the “legions” projects an experience of pleasure whose social interdependencies are
encountered not, as in the case of his relationship with Ida, as the intrusive
interference of the multitude, but as multiplicative in their intersubjective attunement.
The projective ideal of aesthetic agreement here is not a naively utopian one, for
Baldwin in no way believes the attunement of pleasures to be a simple affair. Indeed,
the terms in which Baldwin couches Vivaldo’s experience describe a far more difficult
process in which individual pleasure is not so much dissolved into universal accord,
but held in dialectical tension with it:
There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender. And
the terror: which all seemed to begin and end and begin again – forever – in a
cavern behind his eye. And whatever stalked there saw, and spread the news of
what it saw throughout the entire kingdom of whomever, though the eye itself
might perish. What order could prevail against so grim a privacy? And yet,
without order, of what value was the mystery? Order. Order. Set thine house in
order.147
Rather than offering up a fantasy of a race- and gender-less utopia, what Baldwin’s
description of Vivaldo’s terror in confronting the attunement of his pleasure with that
146
The Fire Next Time, 104.
230
of “legions” delineates is the onerous task that such an accommodation involves , by
calling forth a series of oppositions between privacy and publicity that prove difficult
to reconcile. To wit, although the pleasure that Vivaldo imagines in his erotic fantasy
is initially anchored in his private, subjective perspective (“in a cavern behind his
eye”), it is nevertheless compelled to find expression in a form (“spread the news”)
communicable to a public of others (“the entire kingdom of whomever”). What
Vivaldo’s terror reveals about his ephemeral experience of attunement is that the ideal
of aesthetic universality rests on the difficult task of finding a discursive “order” in
which the “grim […] privacy” of individual, subjective experience can be given
communicative form. Indeed, the biblical allusion to Isaiah’s injunction to Hezekiah to
“set thine house in order,” which likewise contrasts the private and domestic to the
public and the political, confirms that Baldwin employs “order” to index a switchpoint
between those poles.148 Although the interrogative form in which Baldwin couches
these difficulties makes it seem unlikely that an “order” can be found that can
“prevail” against the grim privacies of subjectively experienced pleasures, he
simultaneously indicates that the “value” of these pleasures rests entirely on their
communicability to others who make up the “kingdom of whomever.” Critics have
read these baffling pronouncements on “mystery” and “form” to diverse ends –
Ernesto Martínez reads the opposition, for instance, as evidence of Baldwin’s
commitment to “the importance of risking alternative ways of life, of risking the
147
Another Country, 301-2.
148
David Leeming records in his biography of Baldwin that Isaiah 38:1 was his stepfather’s favorite
text, and that Baldwin chose it for the topic of his last sermon as a youth preacher. See ibid., 302. The
verse also appears elsewhere in Baldwin’s oeuvre – in Go Tell it on the Mountain, as the favorite
sermon of John Grimes’ fanatically religious step-father Gabriel, and in The Amen Corner, quoted in
231
disorder necessary to sustain social orders,” while James Dievler conflates “mystery”
with Vivaldo’s experience of a race- and gender-lessness.149 This mystery of the
“mystery” can best be cleared up, I propose, by remembering that Baldwin uses the
word repeatedly in Another Country to signify the enigma of a lover’s subjectivity, as
recall Vivaldo’s reflection that “the face of a lover […] is a mystery, containing, like
all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”150 It is only when the loved subject is
cathected with desire that he or she becomes a mystery, as Vivaldo describes: “He felt
that, for the first time, his body presented itself to her as a mystery and that,
immediately, therefore, he, Vivaldo, became totally mysterious in her eyes.”151
What Vivaldo rediscovers in this glimpse into a region with no discriminations of race
and gender, then, is what the novel’s problematization of pleasure has consistently
revealed – that real pleasure consists in the attunement with the pleasures of others.
3. Foucault, Problematization, and the Aesthetics of Existence
When Mark Bauerlein begins his diatribe against problematization by asserting
that “everyone knows what ‘problematize’ means,” he appeals less to the authority of
an established semantic history than to the fact that, by the late ‘90s, the verb had
Act I by Sister Margaret Alexander. See James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1994), 31.
149
The Amen Corner: A Play (New York: Vintage, 1998); Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York:
Bantam Dell, 2005), 26, 61.
150
Ernesto Javier Martínez, "Dying to Know: Identity and Self-Knowledge in Baldwin’s Another
Country," PMLA 124, no. 3 (2009): 791; James A. Dievler, "Sexual Exiles: James Baldwin and Another
Country," in James Baldwin Now, ed. Dwight A. McBridge (New York: New York University Press,
1999), 164.
151
Baldwin, Another Country, 172. Compare this also with Vivaldo’s reflections on the aftermath of his
first same-sex encounter with Eric: “The male body was not mysterious, he had never thought about it
at all, but it was the most impenetrable of mysteries now; and this wonder made him think of his own
body, of its own possibilities and its imminent and absolute decay, in a way that he had never thought of
it before” (385).
232
come to mean simply the defamiliarization of conventions: “To problematize x is to
take an entity that has conventional status […] and uncover problems that lurk in its
genesis or its effects.”152 Ironically, despite his churlish takedown of
problematization’s usefulness, in which he dismisses it as “by now a humdrum
argument in scholarship” that “takes little critical intelligence,” his polemic can in fact
be read as compelling evidence for the continuing relevance of what he calls “the
problematizing perspective” – given that the one convention whose genesis Bauerlein
neglects to investigate is precisely the equation of problematization with
defamiliarization.153 As Michael Warner suggests in a passage I quoted earlier, this
conflation owes to the confused uses to which post-Foucauldian critics have put the
vocabulary of problematization. Confirming Warner’s hypothesis, Colin Koopman
sounds a more critical note when he takes to task those readers of Foucault who
perpetuate “that vast lobby of American Foucaultianism,” which not only “distorts our
image of his thought but – even worse, serves to appropriate it for intellectual pursuits
that Foucault himself gave us good reasons to be wary of.” Although Koopman
disdains such distortions as “no closer to [Foucault’s] genealogies than is old-
fashioned ideological unmasking,” however, he nonetheless allows that they “bea[r]
obvious conceptual relations to Foucault’s work.” The question that Bauerlein doesn’t
think to ask, then, is the following: How did problematization come unmoored from
its specific uses in Foucault’s oeuvre and proceed to acquire the meaning of
defamiliarization?
152
Ibid., 176.
153
Bauerlein, 109.
233
Beyond the coefficient of defamiliarization that contemporary problematizing
critiques share with Foucault’s operationalization of the term, in what follows I
elaborate the other "conceptual relations" between them that impinge on our
understanding of how problematization functions as a critical practice. As I will go on
to demonstrate, post-Foucauldian instances of problematization also present us with
two features whose critical entailments, I argue, can best be clarified by a
reexamination of Foucault’s oeuvre: the first concerns what we might call
problematization's appearance of "normativity without norm," and the second, related
feature involves its structural isomorphism to the Kantian account of feeling-based,
concept-free aesthetic judgment. In foregrounding problematization's normless
normativity, I refer to the manner in which the rhetoric of problematizing critique
engenders the persistent impression that it advance strong normative commitments,
despite the fact that it specifies no evaluative norms. As Bauerlein insinuates, after all,
critics who maintain the problematizing perspective “enjoy the comforts of negativity,
for in problematizing all things they need affirm nothing.”154 Bauerlein is hardly alone
in condemning problematization’s propositional evasiveness – more recently, the
philosopher Peter Levine has similarly taken aim at the “pervasive rhetorical style” in
the humanities associated with “problematize.” Characterizing this problematizing
style as a “vague question-raising” that “implies that you’re smart and sophisticated
because you see problems with other people’s deep commitments,” Levine complains
that it exempts critics from having to “put alternative opinions on the table.”155
Registering, moreover, his frustration with the way problematizing critique enables
154
Ibid., 112, 13.
234
academics to complicate others’ commitments without staking any of their own,
Levine describes it as a “questioning style [that] reflects deep skepticism about
normative judgments.”156
Peculiarly enough, running alongside the commonplace notion held by
problematization’s detractors that it remains too non-committal in its reluctance to
stake out normative claims, there exists an equally prevalent sense that the problem
with problematization is precisely that it is too strident in its normative commitments.
Indeed, from the canon debates that Bauerlein lampoons to the proliferation of
problematizing judgments in popular culture, recent instantiations of this critical
practice would seem eminently normative in their polemical thrust. After all, if in fact
the bloggers at Jezebel correctly trace the comedic effects of the Tumblr “Is This
Feminist?” to its caricatures of the critical habits practiced in Women’s Studies
classes, then problematizing critiques would seem to have a reputation for the fanatical
enforcement of normative codes, if they are believed to engender “that feeling that
you’ve been blithely living your entire life to this point like some out-of-touch
misogynist barging around accidentally reinforcing the patriarchy.” Problematization’s
paradoxical reputation for being at one and the same time insufficiently propositional
and excessively oppositional in its normative commitments becomes even more
fraught when we consider how often detractors construe identity-based cultural
critique as moralistic and censorious. The list of derisive tropes associated with
problematizing critique range from Ahmed’s feminist killjoy to her predecessor the
155
Ibid., 113.
156
Peter Levine, "Stop Problematizing -- Say Something,"
http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2010/02/stop-problemati.html.
235
“angry black woman” (reclaimed by Audre Lorde), and her most recent incarnation,
the “social justice warrior,” a term employed to ridicule feminist critics on the Internet
by branding them with an all-too-familiar stereotype: “the feminist as unreasonable,
sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing.”157
We have good reasons to be skeptical about such efforts to delegitimize identity-
based critiques by construing them as expressions of negative, irrational affect. All the
same, the fact that problematization so easily magnetizes the perception that it is both
insufficiently and excessively normative raises the question of how this “normativity
without norm” actually functions qua critique. That we often feel like
problematization involves the enforcement of norms even though it doesn’t propose
any leads us, in turn, to a second peculiar feature of contemporary problematizing
critique: the fundamentally aesthetic (I use the term in its Kantian sense) manner in
which it functions as a feeling-based, concept-free ascription of value to an object. The
labelling of x as problematic, after all, amounts to a conspicuous effort to delay
committing oneself to a more determinate evaluation of x as racist, sexist, ableist,
homo/transphobic, and so forth. At the same time, however, such problematizing
judgments are nevertheless accompanied by intense, often negative feelings (irritation,
anger, frustration, outrage, etc.) that would appear to signal that a particualr normative
boundary has been transgressed. As Ahmed’s narrativization of the scene around her
family table attests, strong feelings circulate in the act of judging x as problematic,
even as the use of that term exhibits a tentative aspect in its reluctance to pronounce a
more definitively norm-grounded judgment of its object. Problematization thus
157
Ibid.
236
combines affective intensity with conceptual indeterminacy, in that the object judged
problematic has not yet been conclusively evaluated, according to a specific norm, as
racist, sexist, or whatever, but has nevertheless provoked the negative feelings usually
tied to the transgression of social norms involving race, gender, and so forth.
Consider the viability of this account of problematizing in helping us to
understand, for instance, the recent kerfuffle over the University of New Hampshire’s
“Bias-Free Language Guide,” a document widely derided in the media for judging as
“problematic” a swathe of terms (including, most notably, the label “American”).158
Authored by a group of university students and staff in 2013 before being picked up
by conservative news site Campus Reform in 2015, the document offered a glossary of
identifiers associated with age, class, size, disability status, race, ethnicity, culture,
sexual and gender identity. This glossary categorized certain terms as “problematic”
and offered “preferred” alternatives in their stead, with distinctions ranging from the
obvious (“Asian American individuals” preferred, “Orientals” problematic) to the
somewhat questionable (“U.S. citizen” preferred, “American” problematic because the
latter “fails to recognize South America” and “assumes the U.S. is the only country
inside these two continents”).159 As the experience of Ahmed’s feminist killjoy would
lead us to expect, the guide provoked vociferous criticism that cast its problematizing
critique as the source of the problem. Outraged by the guide’s “language policing,” for
example, Republican state senator Jeb Bradley lambasted the document’s authors for
“taking political correctness to farcical levels” and threatened to curtail state funding
158
Scott Selisker, "The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks," New Literary
History 46, no. 3 (2015): 518.
237
to the University.160 Called on to respond to the growing controversy, University
president Mark Huddleston disavowed the document, which was later removed from
the university’s website entirely, and also noted that “it is ironic that what was
probably a well-meaning effort to be ‘sensitive’ proves offensive to many people,
myself included,” affirming that “speech guides or codes have no place at any
American university.”161
Calling to mind the prevalent delegitimization of identity-based cultural
critiques as a species of censorious and unreasonable moralism, the rhetorics of
“language policing” and “political correctness” indict problematization for the
excessiveness (“farcical levels”) of its normative commitments. Yet what disappeared
from view in the the bluster of alarmist headlines declaring that political correctness
had run amok in the University of Hampshire was, in fact, the thoroughly dialogic
attitude adopted by the guide’s authors in their categorizations of “problematic” and
“preferred” terms. Consider, for instance, that in a section of the guide’s introduction
notably entitled “Starting a Conversation about Word Choice,” the authors framed the
document in the following way:
The following bias-free language guide is meant to serve as a starting point [for
conversations] about terms related to age, race, class, ethnicity, nationality,
gender, ability, sexual orientation and more. It is not meant to represent absolute
requirements of language use but, rather, offer a way to encourage us to think
159
"Bias-Free Language Guide," University of New Hampshire, https://www.girardatlarge.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/Bias-Free-Language-Guide-Inclusive-Excellence-073015.pdf.
160
Ibid.
161
Quoted in David Davenport, "Language Police at University of New Hampshire: Saying 'American'
Is Now Politically Incorrect," http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2015/07/30/proud-to-be-an-
american-do-not-say-so-at-the-university-of-new-hampshire/.
238
critically and reflectively about the terms and phrases that many people use
regularly in conversation and writing.162
Far from invoking already-existing norms with which to “police” language use and
evaluate its “political correctness,” the guide’s authors in fact explicitly foreground the
absence of such norms as the motive for their problematizing critiques in the first
place. The guide, they write, was intended “not [as] a means to censor but rather to
create dialogues of inclusion where all of us feel comfortable and welcomed.”163 That
the guide’s authors employ the barometer of affect as an indicator of their objectives
also clues us in to the rootedness of problematizing judgments in feeling – in that very
same introduction, the guide suggests how particular uses of language “fee[l] like a
form of violence.”164 Even though the terms judged problematic feel like violence and
are for that reason offered up for dialogic reassessment, this in no way indicates that
the guide’s problematizing critique intends to enforce any stabilized and explicit code
of language norms. Take, for instance, the guide’s suggestion that “people of size”
would be preferable to the problematic “overweight,” a judgment accompanied by a
conscientious note to the effect that the term “fat,” while a “historically derogatory
term, is increasingly being reclaimed by people of size and their allies, yet for some, it
is a term that comes from pain.”165 Put otherwise, “fat” may be problematic or
preferred, cause pain, or not – the point of the guide was not to invoke any norm that
would suffice for the definitive judgment of all possible cases. Contrary to fears about
162
Gabrielle Cintorino, "University President Offended by ‘Bias-Free Language Guide’ That Deems
‘American’ Offensive," http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gabrielle-cintorino/university-president-
offended-bias-free-language-guide-deems.
163
"Bias-Free Language Guide".
164
Ibid., my emphasis
165
Ibid.
239
language policing and speech guides, the guide’s problematizing critique refers to no
codified law by which a so-called “language police” could prosecute transgression,
nor does it advance a moral code according to which the “correctness” of one’s
“politics” could be determined.
That problematizing critique turns out to rest on feeling rather than determinate
concepts suggests that its judgments should more properly be considered aesthetic,
rather than legal and forensic. This resemblance can be productively understood by
analogy to the aesthetic category of the “interesting” which, as Sianne Ngai describes
it, “ascrib[es] value to that which seems to differ, in a yet-to-be-conceptualized way,
from a general expectation or norm whose exact concept may itself be missing at the
moment of judgment.”166 In much the same way, I argue, problematization can also be
understood as harboring a “semantic indefiniteness,” as evinced by the fact that very
choice of the term “problematic” exhibits a deliberate reluctance to specify a norm that
would render the judgment conceptually determinate, rather than aesthetic and
reflective.167 As I observed earlier on, that we call an object “problematic” rather than
simply “racist,” even if the critique we advance rests on our suspicions about its racial
politics, plainly indexes our uncertainty as to whether the expectations and norms
associated with “racist” as an evaluative concept will finally apply in this case.
Moreover, the analogy to the aesthetic category of the interesting, which in Ngai’s
account functions as “a kind of zero-degree aesthetic judgment that perhaps provides
the best model for thinking about in general” because it “gets at the imbrication of the
166
Ibid.
167
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 112.
240
affective and conceptual that underlies all judgment,” also helps us to grasp the way in
which problematization relates feeling to evaluation, judgment to justification.168 That
is, problematization resembles judgments of the interesting to the extent that the
former also “performatively elides judgment and justification,” in the way it diverts
attention from the moment of subjective feeling to the task of concept-based
evaluation – as witness both how the escalating tension at the family table impels the
feminist killjoy to “say why you think what they have said is problematic,” and the
fact that the authors of the “Bias-Free Language Guide” append their glossary of terms
classed “problematic” with explanations for their judgments.169
Even more illuminating, for our purposes, than the similarities that emerge in
comparing problematization to the aesthetic category of the interesting are the
significant differences between them. Where the judgment of the interesting is
“underpinned by a calm, if not weak, affective intensity whose minimalism is
somehow understood to secure its link to ratiocinative cognition and to lubricate the
formation of social ties,” problematizing critique is, in contrast, rooted in strong
negative feelings that tend, unhappily, to undermine both the critic’s appearance of
having a ratiocinative justification for her negative judgment as well as the social ties
that would allow for such justifications to be considered in the first place.170 When
contrasted to the reactions that problematizations like the “Bias-Free Language Guide”
provoke, what becomes clear is the extent to which what Ngai describes as the
interesting’s “forensic and dialogic properties” rest vitally on the enabling foundations
168
Ibid., 169.
169
Ibid., 132.
170
"Bias-Free Language Guide"; Ahmed, "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)."
241
of its calm affective intensity.171 As it turns out, the interesting’s calm affective basis
is what crucially shores up both its connections to the discursive justification of
aesthetic judgments, as well as its ability, by “extending the period of the act of
aesthetic evaluation,” to epitomize aesthetic judgment’s “intersubjective and dialogic
possibilities.”172 By virtue of its affective calm, the judgment of the interesting ensures
that its intersubjective appeal to keep talking about an object will go over well with
others, while in contrast, the negative feelings that underwrite problematization
engender the opposite effect. As Ahmed observes, the feminist killjoy’s
problematizing critique so often gets delegitimized by detractors who merely have to
invoke the conventional association between strong negative emotion and irrationality:
“Reasonable thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course empties
anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes
read as the confirmation of evidence that you are not only but also unreasonable!”173
Even when animated by explicitly dialogic motives, as we observed in the case of the
“Bias-Free Language Guide,” the fact that problematization originates in the
experience of negative feelings that telegraph the transgression of norms tends to
engender atmospheres of recrimination and defensiveness rather than the sought-for
conversation. In its impulse to spark a conversation in which evidentiary justification
for its feeling-based judgment can be provided, problematization is at base no less
“forensic and dialogic” than the judgment of the interesting. However, the affective
intensities associated with problematizing critique inflect its “forensic” quality with a
171
Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 113.
172
Ibid., 171.
173
Ibid., 170-1.
242
valence more akin to the prosecution of guilt than the discursive dialogue of a public
forum, while the strong negative feelings in which it is grounded appear to work at
cross purposes with its dialogic motives.
The observation of problematization’s structural resemblance to aesthetic
judgment brings to awareness the two knotty questions whose answers would supply
us with the key to its critical function. In the first instance, problematization’s blend of
affective intensity and conceptual indeterminacy creates the impression, so often noted
by its detractors, of a contradiction between its oppositional critique of socio-political
norms on the one hand, and its lack of normative foundations on the other.
Problematization’s detractors correctly observe, in other words, that it feels like an
assault on existing norms that is itself lacking in normative foundations. What they
consider a logical contradiction (problematization’s feeling-based, conceptually
indeterminate normativity), however, should more properly be understood as an
aesthetic structure of judgment on the model of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The first
question our account of problematization must answer, then, is how it is that a
fundamentally aesthetic critical practice grounded in subjective feelings rather than
normative concepts can presume to propose a critique of social norms. After all, the
identification of problematization’s aesthetic structure alone fails to clarify its critical
function, but instead only engenders a second set of questions. To wit, where the
judgment of the interesting weds affective calm and discursive evaluation in a
harmonious relationship of mutual reinforcement, problematization sets up a negative
feedback loop of intensifying dissonance between judgment and evaluation, where
strong negative feelings and a lack of calm undermine the conditions of dialogue from
243
the outset, while any subsequent efforts at discursive debate merely amplify those
feelings and thus further erode the possibility of agreement. Here, again, Ahmed
captures the immense frustration provoked by this seemingly ineluctable dynamic,
where a problematizing "you" finds itself mired in polarizing opposition to a defensive
"they," rather than being drawn into a dialogic "we": “Your anger is a judgment that
something is wrong. But in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by
anger [….] You become angry at the injustice at being heard as motivated by anger,
which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You become
entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have
entangled you in your anger.”174 Given this account of problematization, indeed, one
could be forgiven for wondering why anyone would problematize at all. After all, if
the structure of problematizing critique mimics that of feeling-based aesthetic
judgments, and if its feelings moreover conduce to a self-amplifying spiral that
militates against the dialogue it seeks to foster, then problematization would simply
appear to be self-defeating. The second question we must answer about
problematization’s critical function, then, is the following: what are the objectives of
its expression of intense negative feeling, if not to foster discursive debate?
In what follows, I attempt to unravel this apparent paradox by reading
contemporary practices of problematization alongside Foucault’s account of the term.
In an effort to specify the “obvious conceptual relations” that connect Foucauldian and
post-Foucauldian senses of problematization, the comparative reading I pursue here
traces the latter's features – its defamiliarizing effects, its appearance of “normativity
174
244
without norm,” and its rootedness in aesthetic judgment – to their correlates in
Foucault's work. Although my analysis offers some speculations on why certain
features of Foucault’s thinking have endured in contemporary incarnations of
problematization while others have been eclipsed, my aim is less to establish a causal
historical narrative of the term’s semantic evolution than to profit from the mutually
illuminating light that a comparative approach sheds on underdescribed aspects of
both versions of problematization. The account I provide of problematization cuts
across its Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian instantiations in order to identify their
common conceptual and affective structure. My guiding contention, as will become
clear, is that problematization expresses a plea for an intimate negotiation of feeling at
the site of normative disorder. Problematizing critique feels like enforcement of
“normativity without norm,” in my view, because it animates an experience of
normative transgression that has been judged aesthetically (in feeling, without
recourse to a concept). The source of negative feeling in problematizing critique, the
seemingly ineluctable short-circuit of offense and defensiveness, thus originates in this
aesthetic experience of transgression, which resembles that of a “line” being crossed
(“your anger is a judgment that something is wrong”), even as the line remains
difficult to locate with determinate specificity. Moreover, although these feelings seem
to impair the conditions of discursive evaluation rather than promote it, I argue that
problematization targets a prior, and more fundamental attunement of intersubjective
feeling (“do you feel as I do?”) that underwrites the forum in which the debate (“do
you cognize as I do?”) can occur in the first place. Without presuming the existence of
a ready-made forum whose values have already been established, problematization’s
245
desideratum is to negotiate the intersubjective communication of intimate feeling as a
necessary precondition to, rather than an active hindering of, the discursive evaluation
of social norms.
The longitudinal analysis of problematization I am proposing here requires that
we recover Foucault’s notion of the term, a task considerably complicated by the fact
that he never provided a definitive exposition of it, but instead elaborated his
understanding of its methodological usefulness in passages scattered throughout his
late work: in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, in the concluding remarks to his
lectures at Berkeley later published as Fearless Speech, and in a number of other
lectures and interviews given in the years leading up to his death in 1984. Moreover,
despite the relatively belated emergence of problematization’s idiom in Foucault’s
intellectual career, the difficulties of isolating its conceptual specificity are further
compounded by the fact that he would later retrospectively assimilate his entire oeuvre
to the rubric of problematization, declaring in his final year that “the notion common
to all the work I have done since Histoire de la folie is that of problematization.”175
The closest thing we have to a programmatic statement from Foucault regarding, on
the one hand, problematization’s relations to the archaeological and genealogical
historiography he pursued prior to The History of Sexuality and, on the other, the style
of critique that the term entailed and which he would come to identify as his own, lies
in a pair of companion essays: the first, a lecture given in 1978 and later published as
“What is Critique,” and second, the essay “What is Enlightenment,” which Foucault
prepared in 1984 for a seminar that never took place due to his death in June that year.
175
Ibid.
246
In these essays Foucault develops, via an engagement with Kant’s “Was ist
Auklärung,” a description of the “critical attitude” that motivates his own practices of
critique.176
The usefulness of these two essays for our present purposes is threefold: First, in
them Foucault provides a synoptic overview, sketched against the backdrop of the
Kantian tradition of critique, of the archaeological and genealogical dimensions of his
work up to that point. Second, the interval of time bracketed by these two essays
roughly marks the initial emergence of problematization as the vocabulary of
Foucault’s methodological self-understanding. To wit, the term appears not at all in
the 1978 lecture, but several times in the essay of 1984, in one of two ways: as a verb
specifying the mode of critique Foucault inherits from the Enlightenment (“one that
simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of
being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject”), and as the nominal
object of inquiry proper to his critical project (“the study of [modes of]
problematization”).177 By comparing these companion essays, then, we are able to
isolate with relative specificity the difference that the vocabulary of problematization
makes to Foucault’s conceptualization of critique. Third, in these essays Foucault
doesn’t just elucidate his critical method, but also makes a concerted effort to specify
what it is not – perhaps because he possessed by this point in some sense of the
reception of his work. As I will go on to show, Foucault’s remarks on this count prove
especially helpful in evaluating subsequent appropriations of “problematization” as a
critical idiom.
176
Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," 257.
247
In the first of these two essays (“What is Critique?”), Foucault sketches a history
of the “critical attitude” specific to modern civilization onwards from the 15th century,
which he characterizes as a “certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain
relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to
society, to culture and also a relationship to others” that would be intimately bound up
with the “veritable explosion of the arts of governing men.”178 On the basis of this
historical narrative, Foucault understands the modern critical attitude as coextensive
with what he calls “governmentalization,” in that the arts of governing develop in
parallel with a correlative form of critique that functions as the “art of not being
governed quite so much.”179 Foucault, reconsidering the history of Western culture
from ecclesiastical rule to natural law through the optic of the “interplay of
governmentalization and critique,” demonstrates how these two terms braid together
“the bundle of relationships that are tied […] one to the two others, power, truth, and
the subject.”180 Where governmentalization consists in the “movement through which
individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of
power that adhere to a truth,” critique operates in the opposite direction as “the
movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects
of power and question power on its discourses of truth.”181 The homology of these
three dimensions (power, truth, and the subject) to the overall structure of Foucault’s
oeuvre is unmistakable – the terms governmentalization and critique index,
177
"What Is Critique?," 43; "What Is Enlightenment?," 115.
178
"What Is Enlightenment?," 108, 19.
179
"What Is Critique?," 42-3.
180
Ibid., 45.
181
Ibid., 47.
248
respectively, the vectors of subjugation and desubjugation operating at the subject’s
point of entry into the power-knowledge grids described in his work up to and
including Discipline and Punish.
It is within this view of critique as co-emergent with governmentalization that
Foucault situates the definition of Enlightenment elaborated by Kant in the essay “Was
ist Aufklärung.” Foucault describes the Aufklärung, to which Kant gave the motto
sapere aude [dare to know], as an anchoring point in the history of reason’s
deployment n in the critique of governmentality, thus casting the latter’s critical
project (elaborated in the Critiques) as a reflexive investigation into legitimate uses of
reason. Henceforth, critique acquires its specifically Kantian coloration as the
responsibility to “know knowledge,” to pursue desubjugation in the context of power
and truth by adjudicating knowledge’s legitimacy.182 Over against this Kantian
formulation of critique, Foucault underscores the specificity of his own critical
practice. Where Kant pursued the desubjugation of the subject from power and truth
via the question of knowledge’s legitimation, Foucault suggests a different procedure:
an examination of what he calls “eventalization,” which combines in one neologism
(he apologizes for “this horrible word”) the archeological and genealogical methods
elaborated, respectively, in his work prior and up to History of Madness, and in
Discipline and Punish.183 Bracketing the questions of legitimation posed by Kantian
critique, the Foucauldian procedure of eventalization would instead be archeological
in “grasp[ing] what constitutes the acceptability of a system” and describing it as a
182
Ibid.
183
Ibid., 50.
249
“nexus of knowledge-power.”184 In addition, Foucault adopts a genealogical model of
causality, which aims to “restore the conditions for the appearance of a singularity
born out of multiple determining elements of which it is […] the effect,” rather than
seeking out causes of a unitary origin.185
Against the backdrop of Foucault’s methodological exposition in “What is
Critique,” we can grasp, in relief, the novelty of problematization when it appears in
“What is Enlightenment.” Where the former essay proposes “eventalization” as the
watchword for Foucauldian critique, in the latter it is the conceptualization of critique
as attitude that takes centerstage. Already in 1978 Foucault had concluded his essay
with the suggestion that we consider the art of not being governed “a question of
attitude,” but it was only in revisiting Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?” for a seminar in
1984 that he would elucidate the significance of this attitudinal formulation of
critique. In his later text, Foucault recapitulates his earlier description of Kantian
critique as aiming to adjudicate legitimate uses of reason, but foregrounds this time the
novelty of Kant’s self-understanding of his critical project: “it is the first time that a
philosopher has connected […] the significance of his work with respect to
knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at
which he is writing and because of which he is writing.”186 Specifically, Foucault’s
interest lies with the manner in which Kant situates critique at the triple intersection of
knowledge, history, and his own contemporaneity, which provides in the former’s
view a template for his own critical attitude, “the outline of what we might call the
184
Ibid., 59.
185
Ibid., 61.
186
Ibid., 64.
250
attitude of modernity.”187 By “attitude,” Foucault further specifies, he means to refer
to something akin to “what the Greeks called an ethos” – a “mode of relating to
contemporary reality” that is also a way of “thinking and feeling,” “acting and
behaving.”188
Foucault’s shift to an attitudinal conceptualization of critique goes on to acquires
a distinctly aesthetic significance when his essay turns its attention to Baudelaire. In
the same way that Foucault foregrounds the relationship to contemporaneity
inaugurated by Kantian critique, he reads Baudelairean modernity as “the will to
‘heroize’ the present” and to “transform it […] by grasping it in what it is.”189 More
significantly, in his view the importance of Baudelaire’s attitude of modernity lies in
the fact that it not only instantiates a relationship to the present, but also functions as
“a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself.”190 The critical ethos
whose line of development Foucault traces between Kant and Baudelaire takes on here
an enigmatically introverted aspect, which he describes as an effort to “take oneself as
object of a complex and difficult elaboration,” a practice exemplified by “the
asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and
passions, his very existence, a work of art.” Further emphasizing the subjective and
aesthetic implications of Baudelairean modernity, Foucault specifies that the
elaboration of the self will take place not in society or politics, but “in another, a
different place,” the domain “which Baudelaire calls art.” Foucauldian critique, which
had seemed (in “What is Critique?”) focused on determining the acceptability of social
187
"What Is Enlightenment?," 104-5.
188
Ibid., 105.
189
Ibid.
251
systems, henceforth (in “What is Enlightenment?”) takes the self as the locus of an
analysis “oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward
what is not or no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous
subjects.”191 The conceptual advance marked by the difference between Foucault’s
two essays concerns less a change in his method than the medium in which critique
operates.192 Although Foucault’s aim remains that of weakening the grip of necessity
by describing possibilities for the transformation of social systems, it is the self, as the
point at which the vectors of power and knowledge intersect, that comes into focus as
the medium of an aesthetic self-elaboration he calls a “permanent critique of
ourselves.”193
Considered in this light, it becomes clear that problematization appears on the
scene of Foucault’s work in connection with his foregrounding of his critique’s
aesthetic foundations. In the through-line he traces from Kantian critique to
Baudelairean modernity, Foucault discovers a model for his own critical project, “one
that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode
of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject.”194 By tracing the
evolution of Foucault’s methodological self-understanding from “What is Critique” to
“What is Enlightenment,” we can thus specify problematization as a conceptual
190
Ibid., 106.
191
Ibid., 108.
192
Foucault’s methodological procedures don’t undergo any significant change in this shift to the
vocabulary of problematization, for he describes them in exactly the same terms he used in his earlier
essay when they were associated with “eventalization,” to wit: “this criticism [proper to
problematization] is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.” What does change in
Foucault’s passage from one neologism to the other is his specification of the “ontology of ourselves”
as the medium in which critique works, in that it amounts to “work carried out by ourselves upon
ourselves as free beings.” Ibid., 110.
193
Ibid., 113, 15.
252
correlative to his formulation of critique as an aesthetic practice of reflexive self-
formation. I will elucidate at length further on in this section the implications of this
account of Foucauldian problematization. For now, however, I focus our attention on
how it helps us to clarify the coefficient of defamiliarization that it shares with
contemporary practices of problematizing critique. As it turns out, in “What is
Critique?” Foucault exhibited a clear-eyed awareness that his critical procedures did in
fact produce defamiliarizing effects. The social systems which his critique describes
according to the analytic grid of the power-knowledge, Foucault avers, “are not at all
obvious in the sense that whatever habits or routines may have made them familiar to
us […] were not made acceptable by any originally existing right.”195 Repeating this
formulation several times, Foucault emphasizes how the analysis of a system’s
acceptability necessarily entails the effects of defamiliarization, since “what must be
extracted in order to fathom what could have made them acceptable is precisely that
they were not at all obvious.”196 In an evocatively anaphoric passage, Foucault goes
on to describe how his analyses of mental health, prisons, and sexuality defamiliarize
the “obvious” and the “given”:
It was not at all obvious that madness and mental illness were superimposed in
the institutional and scientific system of psychiatry. It was not a given either that
punishment, imprisonment and penitentiary discipline had come to be articulated
in the penal system. It was also not a given that desire, concupiscence and
194
Ibid., 110.
195
196
"What Is Critique?," 62, my emphasis.
253
individuals’ sexual behavior had to actually be articulated one upon the other in
a system of knowledge and normality called sexuality.197
Confirming that Foucault understood defamiliarization as an inevitable effect of
his critical method, he elsewhere explains that the penal practices analyzed in
Discipline and Punish, which had come to “seem altogether natural” and “self-
evident,” required an investigation into its eventalization that involved “a matter of
shaking this false self-evidence, of demonstrating its precariousness, of making visible
not its arbitrariness, but its complex interconnections with a multiplicity of historical
processes, many of them of recent date.”198 Given that eventalization represents a
precursor to the idiom of problematization, Foucault’s description of the former’s
effects as a “breach of self-evidence” helps us locate the coefficient of
defamiliarization that inheres in his account of problematizing critique.199 Indeed, seen
in this light, it becomes understandable why readers like Bauerlein assume that “we all
know” that to problematize simply means to render “putative given[s]” problematic.
What may not be immediately apparent in this account, however, is the fact that
Foucault understood defamiliarization as incidental to the study of problematizations.
In fact, the anaphoric passage from “What is Critique” cited above is actually framed
by Foucault’s warning that the defamiliarizing effects of his critique constitute one of
197
Ibid. Interestingly enough, Foucault uses the same device of anaphora in describing the
defamiliarizing effects of Discipline and Punish by employing the same rhetorical structure: “It wasn’t
as a matter of course that mad people came o be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t self-evident that the
only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock him up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness
were to be sought through the individual examination of bodies; and so on.” Ibid., 62.
198
"Questions of Method," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell,
Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76.
199
Ibid. One could point to other instances where Foucault recapitulates this description of
problematization’s denaturalizing effects: in an interview with Didier Erihon, for instance, Foucault
responds to the commonplace skepticism concerning critique’s political effectuality by clarifying that
254
“several dangers which cannot fail to appear as its negative and costly
consequences.”200 Far from proposing defamiliarization as the active ingredient of his
critique then, Foucault cautiously marks it out as necessary artifice that just happens to
be indissociable from the analysis of social systems: “The identification of the
acceptability of a system cannot be dissociated from identifying what made it difficult
to accept [….] Hence it is necessary to take responsibility for this structure in order to
better account for its artifices.”201 On its own, Foucault’s apology for the artifice of
defamiliarization can seem puzzling or enigmatic, especially when considered in the
retrospective light of the broadly defamiliarizing meaning that problematization has
come to acquire. The caution with which Foucault frames the defamiliarizing artifice
of his method is best understood as part of an effort to distinguish his critical practice
from Kantian critique. Over against Kant’s formulation of critique as an investigation
into knowledge’s legitimacy, Foucault asserts that his own critical practice makes “no
case […] for the attribution of legitimacy, no assigning points of error and illusion.”202
Because Foucault’s operationalization of critique dispenses with the Kantian
preoccupation with legitimacy, the question it poses is “no longer through what error,
illusion, oversight, or illegitimacy has knowledge come to induce effects of
domination,” but rather a matter of describing power-knowledge systems as
“domain[s] of possibility” in order to make them available for “possible reversal.”203 It
thus makes eminent sense that Foucault would accord defamiliarization only a
critique “consists in […] showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that
what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted.” Ibid., 75-6.
200
"So Is It Important to Think?," in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas S. Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), 172.
201
"What Is Critique?," 62, my emphasis.
202
Ibid., 62.
255
marginal importance in his practice of critique, since the mere defamiliarizing of x
advances no claims about x’s legitimacy (or lack thereof), but functions solely as a
prelude to the opening up of possibilities for x’s transformation. Foucault is thus at
pains to emphasize that critique’s transformative value lies not in its defamiliarizing
effects, but in what defamiliarization makes possible. As prolegomena to critique
rather than its substance, defamiliarization is for Foucault devoid of specific
propositional content. As Foucault writes elsewhere, “a critique does not consist in
saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on what […]
unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based.”204
That problematization has come to be identified with defamiliarization despite
Foucault’s manifest caution thus amounts to a confusion between his premises and his
claims – the breaching of a social system’s self-evidence, which was to have enabled
the substantively problematizing task of aesthetic self-elaboration, comes to be
mistaken for an end in itself. As Clive Barnett explains in his reading of Foucault’s
remarks on problematization, this confusion has much to do with the tendency in
social theory “to presume that the demonstration of the contingency of a state of
affairs must derive its value from puncturing the appearance of naturalness or
inevitability.”205 Where the conventional paradigm that social life is reproduced
through naturalization “place[s] a premium on debunking the appearance of
ontological fixity upon which the reproduction of social relations is assumed to
depend,” more recent work in pragmatist social theory holds instead that “the
203
Ibid., 60.
204
Ibid., 66.
205
"So Is It Important to Think?," 172. http://nonsite.org/article/on-problematization.
256
discordances and contingencies of social life are not something that need to be
naturalized at all, but are the very mediums through which social life is routinely
coordinated and ordinarily transformed.”206 Read in the light of this latter view, the
defamiliarizing effects of Foucault’s critique become legible as a consequence of his
descriptive realism, which functions to foreground the constitutive contingency of a
particular social system, rather than as a method of delegitimizing it. That Barnett’s
clarification rests on recent shifts in social theory also helps us to appreciate the
difficulties surrounding Foucault’s reception. Indeed, it now seems plausible that one
of the reasons Foucault's readers seized upon problematization’s more marginal
defamiliarizing effects rather than its substantive proposal for an aesthetic, critical
ontology of the self concerns the fact that, given the ambient doxas of social theory
surrounding the publication of Foucault’s work, his observations of contingency were
received as an unorthodox claim rather than a premise rooted in the axiomatics of
social theory. Not only, then, did problematization’s peripheral effects of
defamiliarization come to be mistakenly understood as its critical core, but this shift
also entailed two interrelated consequences: first, the attribution to problematization of
a debunking, evaluative function that it does not in fact perform, and second, the
eclipsing of Foucault’s vision of a critique rooted in aesthetics.
My account of problematizing critique claims that its misconstrual as a
defamiliarizing move is concomitant with a misrecognition of how Foucault’s
formulation of problematization as an aesthetic practice of self-formation functions as
a critique of social norms. The effects of these misunderstandings are nowhere as
206
Clive Barnett, "On Problematization: Elaborations on a Theme in 'Late Foucault'," nonsite.org, no.
257
evident as in the oft-heard complaints from readers concerning the difficulties
involved in identifying the normative foundations of Foucault’s critique. Jürgen
Habermas, no doubt the most strident of Foucault’s critics, thus castigated the latter’s
work for “the arbitrary partisanship of a criticism that cannot account for its
normative foundations.”207 Although Foucault “understands himself as a dissident who
offers resistance to modern thought and humanistically disguised disciplinary power,”
Habermas writes, the “strictly descriptive attitude” of the former’s genealogical
historiography fails to provide normative justifications for resistance against the forms
of power it describes.208 In a similar vein, Nancy Fraser describes Foucault’s work as
“normatively confused,” pointing to how his descriptions of power-knowledge
systems belie, if only at the level of diction (she cites the “ominous overtones” of his
“normative-sounding terminology”), value-laded political engagements that contradict
his bracketing of questions concerning the legitimacy of those systems.209 Likewise
responding to Foucault's refusal to evaluate the systems of power described in
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Charles Taylor is thus moved to
declare: "Ultimately, as is well known, [Foucault] wants to take a stance of
neutrality."210 Just as Fraser and Habermas accuse Foucault of “normative confusion”
and "cryptonormativity," Taylor considers the latter to have contradicted himself in
proposing a critique of power without grounding the possibility of resistance or
16 (2015).
207
Ibid.
208
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
Lawrence, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 276,
original emphasis.
209
Ibid., 282.
210
Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 31, 28-29.
258
subversion in any normative concept of "truth" and "liberation": “To speak of power
and to want to deny a place to liberation and truth as well as the link between them is
to speak incoherently."211 The common refrain in these assessments holds, simply, that
there exists an insuperable contradiction (a “near-schizophrenic splitting of roles,” in
Christopher Norris’s turn of phrase) between the manifestly activist, oppositional aims
of Foucault’s critical work and his stance of evaluative neutrality.212
This thesis of a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Foucault’s work is
further wedded, in the critical imagination, to the latter’s enigmatic formulation of
critique in the idiom of aesthetics. As I observed earlier, problematization emerged as
Foucault's favored term of methodological self-understanding in connection with his
formulation of critique as an aesthetic attitude, one whose historical anchoring points
include the Greek notion of ethos and the dandyisme of Baudelairean modernity.
Commonly remembered as Foucault’s “ethical turn” late in his career, this
preoccupation with the aesthetic emerges, from The Use of Pleasure onwards, from
his investigations into the "arts of existence" as they evolved from Greek Antiquity to
Christianity: "those intentional and voluntary actions by which men […] seek to
transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their
life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic
criteria."213 The arts of existence comprised not only Foucault’s object of
211
Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Political Theory 12, no. 2 (1984): 156. In the
original 1984 essay published in Political Theory, the sentence inexplicably ends with the word
“coherently,” but this gets corrected in the essay’s republication, in 1986, as part of Hoy’s Foucault, a
Critical Reader.
212
"Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Foucault, a Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986).
213
Christopher Norris, "'What Is Enlightenment?': Kant According to Foucault," in The Cambridge
Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge Uiversity Press, 1994), 177. It was
259
investigation, but also functioned as a self-description of his own critical project: “For
me,” he writes, “intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism,
meaning transforming yourself [….] This transformation of one’s self by one’s own
knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience.”214
For Foucault’s critics, this “aestheticization” of ethics and politics served only to
discredit his critical method. For some, Foucault’s recourse to aesthetics signaled his
retreat from the domain of truth claims into subjective relativism.215 To this effect,
Norris points to what he considers an untenable disjunction and “lack of theoretical
fit” between, on the one hand, “Foucault the ‘public’ intellectual, thinking and writing
on behalf of those subjects oppressed by the discourses of instituted
power/knowledge,” and on the other, “Foucault the avowed esthete […] who espouses
an ethos of private self-fashioning and an attitude of sovereign disdain toward the
principles and values of enlightened critique.” For other critics, Foucault’s
preoccupations with aesthetics functioned as the occulted source of his critical
not, as Foucault clarified, that he sought in Greek ethics a viable alternative to modes of contemporary
politics: “You can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another
moment by other people.” Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 10-1. Rather, Foucault situates his analysis of
Greek ethics as one part of a genealogy of morals aimed at enabling the formulation of an ethics beyond
codified morality: “From Antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the
search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in
Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of
rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must
correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence.” "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of
Work in Progress," 104.
214
"An Aesthetics of Existence," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-
1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (1990), 49.
215
The view that Foucault’s preoccupations with aesthetics entailed a wholesale renunciation of any
claims to normative validity beyond the individual, subjective sphere were further compounded even by
approving (mis)readers like Richard Rorty, who unhelpfully sought to enlist the former for the skeptical
project of postmodern neo-pragmatism. Rorty writes approvingly of what he considers Foucault’s
epistemological and ethical skepticism for anything beyond merely individual validity: “Foucault, like
Nietzsche, was a philosopher who claimed a poet’s privileges. One of these privileges is to rejoin ‘What
has universal validity to do with me?’ I think that philosophers are as entitled to this privilege as poets,
260
method’s activist appeal, a way to advance a norm-based oppositional critique under
the cover of evaluative neutrality. It is in this vein, indeed, that Habermas goes so far
as to assert that “Foucault’s dramatic influence and his iconoclastic reputation could
hardly be explained if the cool facade of radical historicism did not simply hide the
passions of aesthetic modernism.”216 Whether they construe Foucault’s “aestheticism”
as a retreat from normative commitments or, paradoxically enough, a vehicle for them,
what underwrites these paradoxical assertions is the unquestioned belief that the
“aesthetic” as such could only constitute a discrediting scandal for the practice of
critique rather than, as Foucault himself seemed to believe, its explicitly enabling
condition.
I stage at length these criticisms of Foucault because of the way they give us
traction on the structural resemblances between Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian
problematizing critique. To be specific, the feeling among Foucault’s readers that his
critical method gives the appearance of advancing normative claims (Fraser’s remarks
about his “normative-sounding terminology” and Habermas’s comment that
“engagement marks [Foucault’s] learned essays right down to the style and choice of
words”) without actually proposing any specific norms prefigures the manner in which
problematization continues to be criticized today, even when latter-day uses of the
term (e.g. Bauerlein’s and Levine’s) make no mention whatsoever of its Foucauldian
provenance.217 That is, in much the same manner that post-Focauldian practices of
so I think this rejoinder is sufficient.” "The Minimalist Self," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture:
Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (1990), 14.
216
"Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault," in Essays on Heidegger and Others,
Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 198.
217
Habermas, 275.
261
problematization magnetize the paradoxical perception that it is simultaneously
insufficiently and excessively normative, Foucault's critics express bafflement at the
apparent contradiction between his avowed neutrality and his manifest political
engagement. If I am correct in suggesting that both instances of problematization share
this "normativity without norm,” then we arrive at the possibility that the key to
Foucault’s critical method turns out to lie precisely in his much denigrated
preoccupation with aesthetics. As was the case with contemporary instances of
problematizing critique, I argue, the appearance of a contradiction in Foucault’s
practice of critique can likewise be dissolved by distinguishing between aesthetic
judgment and concept-based evaluation. According to this hypothesis, we can credit
Foucault's critics for correctly discerning the implications of his evaluative neutrality,
wherein he avoids proposing normative grounds for liberation from power. Their
inability to reconcile this evaluative neutrality with Foucault's avowed commitment to
liberty, however, owes to their refusal to allow for the possibility that such political
commitments can be grounded in a feeling-based and concept-free judgment of the
systems of power, subjugation, and domination that he analyzes.
When we consider this resemblance between Foucauldian critique and aesthetic
judgment, it becomes possible to understand that there is no contradiction: his
problematizing critical practice vehiculates intense feelings about the dangers of
subjugation and the importance of liberty, even as its evaluative neutrality refuses to
prescribe conceptual norms that would definitively render this feeling-based judgment
determinate. It should be said, moreover, that Foucault’s aesthetic “passions” are
262
nowhere as occulted as Habermas insinuates.218 In the essay “Lives of Infamous
Men,” which was intended as an introduction to an anthology of the prison archives of
the Hôpital général and the Bastille, Foucault lays bare his unequivocally aesthetic
relationship to the archive of power, opening his essay with the following declaration:
“The selection here was guided by nothing more substantial than my taste, my
pleasure, an emotion, laughter, surprise, a certain dread, or some other feeling whose
intensity I might have trouble justifying, now that the first moment of discovery has
passed.”219 Repeatedly emphasizing the aesthetic quality of his encounter with the
anthologized textual fragments, Foucault calls them “short stories,” “strange poems”
or “poem-lives” that “stirred more fibers within [him] than what is ordinarily called
literature.”220 In thus describing the texts comprising the archive for what became
History of Madness, Foucault not only foregrounds the foundational importance of his
affective responses to this textual material, but also underscores the conceptual
indefiniteness that separates the moment of his aesthetic judgment (“my taste, my
pleasure”) from that of its discursive justification (“intensity I might have trouble
justifying”). Indeed, this gap between judgment and justification proves to be a source
of productive tension for Foucault’s critical project. Affirming that he was moved to
“ma[ke] use of documents like these for a book” because of the “resonance” he
experiences in encountering them, Foucault also describes History of Madness as an
only incompletely successful product of a dream to “restore their intensity in an
218
As Heather Love observes, “Foucault’s approach to history is indelibly though often invisibly
marked by desire, and […] specifically queer experiences, rhetorics, and longings. Foucault’s own
account of his famously ascetic historical practice appears to be anything but devoid of desire.” Fraser,
28; Habermas, 282.
219
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 46.
263
analysis.”221 After Foucault finds that the “intensities that had motivated [him]
remained excluded” from the analysis undertaken in History of Madness, because his
“discourse was incapable of conveying them in the necessary way,” he compiles the
anthology as a way to “leave them in the very form that had caused [him] first to feel
them.”222
Foucault’s anthology of prison documents, this “herbarium” of “strange poems”
which he readily admits has the character of a “mood-based and purely subjective
book,” can thus be read as the aesthetic double of his critical project, an effort to
reproduce the felt intensities of the aesthetic encounters that first animated his
critique.223 Unlikely as it may seem to readers like Habermas, who see in the aesthetic
concerns of Foucault’s work only a scandal of clandestine “passions,” in “Lives of
Infamous Men” the latter readily exhibits the manner in which the intensities, moods,
feelings, and tastes proper to aesthetic experience provide the motive force for his
critical practice. For Habermas, the fact that Foucault’s theorization of power
“preserves a literally aesthetic relation to the perception of the body, to the painful
experience of the mistreated body” can only function to undercut the viability of his
critique.224 Due to Foucault’s aesthetic conceptualization of power, in Habermas’s
view, “resistance can draw its motivation, if not its justification, only from the signals
of body language, from that nonverbalizable language of the body on which pain has
been inflicted, which refuses to be sublated into discourse.”225 Yet it turns out that it is
220
Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," 279.
221
Ibid., 279, 81, 80.
222
Ibid., 280.
223
Ibid.
224
Ibid., 279, 81.
225
Habermas, 285.
264
precisely Foucault’s aesthetic encounter with his archival materials, an experience he
describes as eminently about this difficulty of sublating the nonverbalizable intensities
of the body into discourse, that vitally animates his critical project. What Habermas
characterizes as a methodological deficiency, Foucault instead considers an enabling
condition: registering how the “first intensities that motivated [him]” to undertake
critique, Foucault readily narrates the difficulties he faces in putting in a discursive
form these sensations that he can only describe as “impressions […] called ‘physical,’
as if there could be any other kind.” “It would be hard to say exactly what I felt,”
“without my being able to say now,” “my discourse was incapable of conveying them
in the necessary way” – replete with thematizations of the difficulties involved in
verbalizing the nonverbalizable, “Lives of Infamous Men” stages the gestation of
Foucault’s critique out of the difficulties involved in communicating the feelings
sparked by his aesthetic encounter with power in the prison archives.226
Foucault’s meditations on the productive difficulties involved in conveying the
felt “resonances” he experiences in confronting the prison archives brings us to the
final claim of this chapter’s account of problematization – that the critical function of
problematizing critique lies its negotiation of normative disorder by foregrounding the
intersubjective communication of innermost feeling. By way of a detour through
Kant’s account of sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment, I show how
problematizing critique registers a felt disorder of norms in a particular social or
political domain, and renders their reassessment the basis of an intimate claim to the
intersubjective validity of the negative feelings it expresses and provokes.
226
Ibid.
265
4. Kant, Sensus Communis, and the Communicability of Feeling
In the “Second Moment” (§6-9) of the judgment of taste, Kant defines the
beautiful as “that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal
satisfaction.”227 For Kant, the claim to universal agreement asserted in judgments of
the beautiful strikes the transcendental philosopher as “something remarkable […] the
discovery of the origin of which calls for no little effort on his part.”228 In the process
of this discovery, Kant distinguishes the beautiful from judgments of the agreeable,
the latter of which rest on “the taste of the senses” and thus bear no expectation of
universal assent, given that they “mak[e] merely private judgments about an
object.”229 Even if there can be unanimity in our judgments of the agreeable, the
grounds for it would be empirical rather than universal, thus with respect to the
agreeable Kant holds that “everyone is intrinsically so modest as not even to ascribe
this assent to others.”230 Furthermore, Kant goes on to contrast the aesthetic
universality asserted in reflective judgments of taste from the logical universality
characteristic of determinative judgments made in accordance with concepts. In
contrast to the logical universality of a determinative judgment, which secures its
validity for everyone else by appealing to empirical, objective concepts, the aesthetic
universality of a reflective judgment of taste is of a “special kind, since the predicate
of beauty is not connected with the concept of the object considered in its entire
227
Ibid., 280.
228
Kant, 97, original emphasis.
229
Ibid., 99.
230
Ibid.
266
logical sphere, and yet it extends it over the whole sphere of those who judge.”231 In
this section, I retrace Kant’s account of how feeling-based, conceptually indeterminate
judgments of taste extend over “the whole sphere of those who judge,” in order to
suggest how it gives us traction on the paradox of problematizing critique I have
described as its “normativity without norm.” As we saw earlier, both Foucauldian and
post-Foucauldian instantiations of problematization resemble Kantian aesthetic
judgment in that they exert a normative force grounded in feelings, and in the absence
of determinate norms. The question that Kant’s analytic of the beautiful will help us
answer is the following: what is the function of a critical practice that engenders
feelings of normativity that are ungrounded in concepts? Drawing out the theoretical
implications of Kant’s preoccupation with the conceptually ungrounded, but
irrepressibly felt normativity that aesthetic judgments exert, and his emphasis on
intersubjective communication as the medium in which the demanded agreement gets
brokered, I contend that the isomorphism of problematization to the Kantian schema
will help us to describe the former as an intimate negotiation of feeling’s
communicability at the site of normative disorder.
For readers of the third critique, the normative force exerted by an aesthetic
judgment’s subjective, conceptually ungrounded demand for universal agreement is
both unmistakable and, as Kant himself seems to allude, remarkably immodest.
Indeed, Kant holds that when one judges an object beautiful, one does not merely
“count on the agreement of others,” but “rather demands it from them,” even “rebukes
231
Ibid.
267
them if they judge otherwise, and denies that they have taste.”232 In the “Fourth
Moment” (§18-22) Kant likewise describes judgments of taste as “ascrib[ing] assent to
everyone, and whoever declares something to be beautiful wishes that everyone
should approve of the object in question and similarly declare it to be beautiful.”233
Kant posits that such judgments “contain a ‘should’” (in that “everyone ‘should’ agree
with it”) that “allow[s] no one to be of a different opinion.”234 For Kant, this necessity
that others “should” share the satisfaction we experience in an object we judge
beautiful “can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a
judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot
produce.”235 As Alessandro Ferrara observes, this Kantian notion of an exemplary
necessity projects “a universalism without a law, a principle, or a norm," an
“exemplary universalism” whose validity is grounded in the “normativity of the
example.”236 Ferrara’s insight into the distinctiveness of the normative force exerted
by aesthetic judgments suggests how Kant’s account, in which a judgment of taste
arrogates a claim to universality on the basis of a singular example, without being able
to produce a general rule, provides us with the basic coordinates for the paradoxical
feature of problematizing critique that I have called its “normativity without norm.”
Kant’s promise to discover the “origins” of the demand for universal assent may
seem to suggest that the analytic of the beautiful will finally seek to legitimize the
aesthetic judgment’s outlandish claim to categorical validity. However, I argue that
232
Ibid., 100.
233
234
Ibid., 121.
235
Ibid., 121, 23.
236
268
Kant’s aim lies not in justification, but in demonstrating how such claims, in their
remarkably immodest normativity, underwrite the model of cognition he develops in
the Critique. To be sure, Kant notes in §13 (“On the Method of the Deduction of
Judgments of Taste”) that because aesthetic judgments advance claims to universal
necessity, it behooves him to provide a deduction, by which he means “the
justification of the claim of such a judgment to universally necessary validity.”237 As
Kant formulates the problem, such a deduction would need to isolate the principle that
permits a judgment, “merely from one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object,
independent of its concept,” to presuppose this pleasure in “every other subject, a
priori, i.e., without having to wait for the assent of others.”238 The logic of Kant’s
justification, however, eventually proves circular.239 Although he introduces the idea
of a common sense as “the condition of the necessity that is alleged by a judgment of
taste,” and thus appears to be adducing it as the a priori principle legitimating the
universality asserted in aesthetic judgments, the argument presented in the deduction
actually develops the opposite assertion.240 I will elucidate the method of Kant’s
deduction at length further on, but for now we may simply remark that he warrants the
presupposition of a sensus communis by asserting the requirement that the pleasure
attached to a judgment of beauty “must necessarily rest on the same conditions in
everyone,” for the reason that its correlative mental state – the free play of the
237
Alessandro Ferrara, "Does Kant Share Sancho's Dream? Judgment and Sensus Communis,"
Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 1-2 (2008): 67, original emphasis.
238
Kant, 161.
239
Addressing Kant’s account of the claims to categorical validity advanced in judgments of taste,
Anthony Cascardi observes that “their proof requires reference to a notion of ‘community sense’
(sensus communis) which must itself be established by such claims. For this reason, Kant's theory of
aesthetic judgment appears to be profoundly circular.” Ibid., 169.
240
Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 101.
269
imagination and understanding – constitutes the “subjective conditions of the
possibility of a cognition in general.”241 The circularity of the Kantian deduction
consists in precisely this, that the idea of a common sense is supposed to provide the a
priori legitimation of an aesthetic judgment’s claim to universal validity, yet the
validity of the idea of a common sense is itself predicated on the unwarranted
requirement that the subjective conditions of cognition be common to everyone.
Tracing this circularity as it persists in aesthetic theory onwards from Kant,
Anthony Cascardi has observed that “it may be the case that [it] is basic to any form of
judgment that recognizes the priority of the particular over the universal.”242 In
Cascardi’s view, this mise-en-abyme of feelings that cannot themselves be anchored in
deeper conceptual bedrock suggests how “the notion of aesthetic reflective judgment
is not a ‘theory’ at all, but an expression of the impossible desire for an independent
grounding of the circle.”243 Although I share Cascardi’s view that the analytic of
beauty functions less as aesthetic theory than as the expression of a desire whose
fulfillment seems beyond reach, I would argue that the object of this desire is not to
secure the conceptual grounds for the validity of aesthetic judgments, but rather, to
discern the cognitive faculty whose existence would permit the apparent paradox of a
subjectively felt universality to be operative as such. To be specific, I am arguing that
the logical peculiarities of the aesthetic judgment’s feeling-based, conceptually
indeterminate demands for universal assent serve Kant as a theoretical contrivance for
deducing the existence of a sensus communis. I am not the first to note that the
241
, 122.
242
Ibid., 172-3.
243
, 102.
270
theoretical productivity of the Kantian demand for universality consists precisely in its
circularity. Robert Kaufman, for instance, remarks that the success of the third
Critique owes much to its “dynamic paradox of judgment” – dynamic, in his view,
because the self-consciously aporetic structure of the demand for universal agreement
“weirdly projects the possibility of uncoerced social construction from the very
absence of an object, general rule, norm, or standard of taste that would determine the
process called the judgment of beauty.”244 In Kaufman’s view, the “self-divided
phenomenological structure” of aesthetic judgment, where a subject “feels as if” there
are grounds for universal agreement despite knowledge that such presumption cannot
be met in empirical fact, functions as “a ground and springboard for a rational,
noninstrumentalized, noncoercive constructionism.”245 Taking Kaufman’s lead, I read
Kant’s deduction of judgments of taste not as a dissatisfyingly circular effort to
legitimate their claims to categorical validity, but as a deliberate marshaling of the
logical impasses generated by such claims as a “ground and springboard” for deducing
the necessity of a sensus communis as such. On the face of it, it may seem odd to
suggest that the third critique is not finally about aesthetic theory, so much as it is a
staging of aesthetic theorizing that performatively discerns the existence of a common
sense. Yet we must remember that it is precisely the usefulness of judgments of taste
in helping us grasp our sensus communis, and not the reverse, that Kant promised to
demonstrate early on in the analytic of the beautiful, when he writes that the
“discovery of the origin” of the universality asserted in aesthetic judgments would
244
Ibid., 104.
245
Kaufman, 712, 13.
271
ultimately “revea[l] a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis
would have remained unknown.”246
This hitherto unknown faculty, which Kant begins by calling sensus communis,
will later (in §40, “On Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis”) simply be identified
with “taste.” I contend that Kant, in the analytic of the beautiful, never aimed to
legitimate the claims to universality arrogated in judgments of taste – that is, to
domesticate the paradox presented by their felt expectations of normativity by
revealing that such feelings are, after all, grounded in concepts. Rather, Kant insists on
the logical peculiarities characteristic of aesthetic judgments and their claims to
universality in order to reveal how they testify (taste being “a condition alleged by
such judgments) to the existence of the faculty of taste. If I am correct that Kant’s
deduction works to discern the faculty of taste rather than to legitimate the validity of
judgments of taste, then the question is why such a faculty should prove so vital to the
Critique of Judgment in the first place. Its vital importance can be grasped, I propose,
by attending to the communicative dimension of Kant’s definition of taste as “the
faculty for judging a priori the communicability of the feelings that are combined with
a given representation (without the mediation of a concept).”247 Indeed, as Kant’s
description of the agreeing, demanding, rebuking, and declaring that surrounds
judgments of taste would seem to indicate, the expectation that others should agree
with our judgments presupposes a medium of communication in which this universal
assent will be expressively brokered. Put simply, judgments of taste enjoin us to talk
about our feelings (that we experience in making them). This is the vein in which I
246
Ibid., 713.
272
understand Kant’s claim that “in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated except
such a universal voice with regard to satisfaction without the mediation of
concepts.”248 Kant’s use of the vocative trope here puts a communicative inflection on
the demand for universal assent, in that judgments of taste come not only with an
expectation that others will agree, but also contain an injunction to voice the feelings
underlying this demand and seek agreement in intersubjective discourse. The
communicative implications of Kant’s notion of a universal voice emerge most fully
in §9, where he states that “it is the universal capacity for the communication of the
state of mind in the given representation which […] must serve as [the judgment of
taste’s] ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence.”249
Read alongside Kant’s definition of taste as the faculty for judging the
communicability of our feelings, the postulate of a “universal voice” becomes legible
as a phenomenological specification of what we actually experience in making a
judgment of beauty. Specifically, Kant’s vocative gloss indicates that the pleasure we
experience in judging an object beautiful will, if we have fulfilled the conditions
required for a true judgment of taste, be accompanied by a perception that we should
be able to voice our feelings about it with an expectation of their universal
communicability. The felt experience of a judgment of beauty thus turns out to be not
only pleasure tout court, but a feeling multiply conditioned by other feelings. Mixed in
with the pleasure we feel in judging the beautiful are other feelings reflexively about
that initial pleasure – the feeling of that pleasure’s validity for everyone else, and by
247
Kant, 99.
248
Ibid., 176.
249
273
virtue of the postulate of a “universal voice,” a correlative perception of that
pleasure’s universal communicability. Kant alludes to the affective reflexivity that
characterizes aesthetic judgments in §36 (“On the Problem for a Deduction of
Judgments of Taste”), where he again distinguishes aesthetic judgments as those in
which our perceptions are “immediately combined with a feeling of pleasure (or
displeasure)” without any concept of the object.”250 (CJ 168). As a consequence,
because the power of judgment in aesthetic judgments does not subsume under
concepts of the understanding, “it is itself, subjectively, both object as well as law”
(CJ 168). In the absence of a concept that would ground the “lawfulness” of an
aesthetic judgment, that is, the feeling of pleasure combined with our perceptions of
the beautiful is taken simultaneously as a subjective predicate of the object we
perceive, and as exemplary of the law that should govern all perceptions of that object:
“it is not the pleasure but the universal validity of this pleasure perceived in the mind
as connected with the mere judging of an object that is represented in a judgment of
taste as a universal rule for the power of judgment, valid for everyone” (CJ 168).
In distinguishing “the pleasure” from “the universal validity of this pleasure
perceived in the mind,” Kant clearly separates feelings of satisfaction from other
reflexive feelings about satisfaction that both inhere in the judgment of beauty. The
former, a feeling of “one’s own pleasure that is combined with the representation”
constitutes the judgment’s subjective basis, while the latter, a perception of that
feeling’s universal communicability, confers on aesthetic judgments their a priori
status through the very “expressions of their claims” to normativity (CJ 169). In her
250
Ibid., 102.
274
subtle reading of Kant, Hannah Ginsborg argues that his account of cognition
confronts us with “a kind of normativity involved in perceptual experience which […]
does not derive from the normativity associated with truth.”251 Ginsborg characterizes
this perceptual normativity, which she carefully distinguishes from a concept-based
sense of normativity “associated with veridicality,” as “primitive,” in that “we are
simply aware that we are perceiving as we ought, without that awareness depending
on the appreciation of anything either about our way of perceiving or about the
object.”252 The non-conceptual, primitive awareness of normativity that Ginsborg
ascribes to Kant comes closest to the feeling I understand him to be foregrounding
when he identifies, apart from the pleasure we experience in judging the beautiful, a
sense of “the universal validity of this pleasure perceived in the mind.”253
To put it summarily, the pleasure we experience in judgments of the beautiful
could be said to feel normative, if we understand “normativity” here to index a set of
felt expectations that are reflexively about our pleasure, its validity, and its
communicability. What distinguishes the pleasure we feel in judging the beautiful
from other kinds of pleasure, put simply, is the distinct feeling tone of normativity that
colors it. This may seem an obtuse way of describing what an aesthetic judgment feels
like, given that “normativity,” “validity” and “communicability,” are more commonly
understood as pertaining to processes of social rationalization rather than as terms of
feeling per se. However, I contend that Kant’s efforts to carve out a theoretical locus
for aesthetic judgments, one conspicuously scrubbed of rules, norms, and concepts,
251
Ibid., 168.
252
Hannah Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 173.
275
work precisely to isolate their normativity qua feeling – whose phenomenological
specificity it would not have been otherwise possible to discern. In addition to my
foregoing elucidation of the analytic of the beautiful, the warrant for this reading of
Kant can be grounded in the observation that he finally maintains that there is nothing
all that special about the feeling of normativity underlying aesthetic judgments, given
that they attach not only to judgments of tastes, but to all cognitions in general. After
all, the fact that we lack a concept for the objects we judge beautiful, yet demand that
others agree with our judgments of taste and expect them to be universally
communicable, leads Kant to conclude that what must be universally communicable is
“nothing other than the state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the
understanding (so far as they agree with each other as is requisite for a cognition in
general).”254 In subsequent sections devoted to the deduction of aesthetic judgments,
Kant again insists that the procedure undertaken by the faculty of judgment in making
judgments of taste is one “it must also exercise for the sake of the most common
experience.”255 By generalizing the mental disposition underlying aesthetic judgments
to the procedures of our cognitive faculties in general, Kant indicates how the feeling
of normativity that attaches to our judgments of the beautiful properly characterizes all
of our cognitions, even if the universal validity of the concept-based judgments we
make don’t appear to be associated with any specific feelings on our part.
As matter of theoretical method, however, Kant must attend specifically to
judgments of taste in order to isolate this feeling, because only in a pure aesthetic
253
Ibid., 185.
254
Kant, 168.
255
Ibid., 102.
276
judgment can the unity of the imagination and understanding underlying all cognitions
be palpably felt without the aid of intellectual cognition, “through sensation of the
effect that consists in the facilitated play of both powers of the mind […] enlivened
through mutual agreement.”256 (CJ 104). Although similar sensations can also be
expected to accompany non-aesthetic cognitions as well (the “well-proportioned
disposition” of the faculties is something “we require for all cognition”), judgments of
taste provide us with the sole theoretical apparatus for distilling the purest
phenomenological testimony, in a pristine experience of pleasurable sensation
uncontaminated by the concepts attendant upon other cognitions, of the harmonizing
of our imagination and understanding.257 Having laid bare this irreducibly affective,
non-conceptual feeling of normativity underlying our cognitions in general, Kant
deploys it as evidentiary grounds for the deduction of our faculty of taste. Given that
aesthetic judgments assert normative force (in their claim to universal
communicability and validity) on the basis of subjective feeling, and in the absence of
objective concepts, Kant draws the following conclusion: “since the universal
communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense, the latter must be able to
be assumed with good reason […] as the necessary condition of the universal
communicability of our cognition, which is assumed in every logic and every principle
of cognitions that is not skeptical.”258 Indeed, Kant explicitly underscores the
evidentiary function performed by his account of aesthetic judgments in proving the
faculty of taste, or sensus communis, when he writes that the “indeterminate norm of a
256
Ibid., 172.
257
Ibid., 104.
258
Ibid.
277
common sense is really presupposed by us: our presumption in making judgments of
taste proves that.”259
The upshot of my foregoing reading of Kant’s analytic of the beautiful is
threefold: First, to the extent that the unity of the imagination and understanding is
“requisite for cognition in general,” Kant’s discernment of the feelings associated with
judgments of beauty proposes a phenomenology of human cognition where the
normativity of our cognition of an object is first and foremost registered as felt
sensation, and only secondarily (in the usual case of non-aesthetic determinative
judgments) grounded in concepts. Second, Kant underscores the vital function of such
feelings of normativity, and the faculty of taste whose existence they project, as a
bulwark against philosophical skepticism. Kant argues, in this vein, that “cognitions
and judgments must, together with the conviction that accompanies them, be able to
be universally communicated, for otherwise […] they would all be a merely subjective
play of the power of representation, just as skepticism insists.”260 Taken together, Kant
indicates that in each of our aesthetic and non-aesthetic cognitions, there is at base a
conceptually ungrounded feeling of normativity that leads us to expect that others are
cognizing what we cognize. Third, and most significantly, this feeling of normativity
and the faculty of taste it calls into being, on which Kant rests the considerable stakes
of the possibility of a shared, intersubjectively cognizable world, have been discerned
only via an analysis of aesthetic judgment. The function of an aesthetic judgment’s
immodest expectations of universality, in other words, is to reveal to us that every
instance of the question “do you cognize as I cognize?” fundamentally recalls a prior
259
Ibid., 123.
278
question – “do you feel as I feel?” When viewed in this light, it becomes clear how the
ungrounded feeling of normativity we experience in making aesthetic judgments
implicates us in an intimate negotiation of affective attunement in relation to others
who may or may not agree with us – which is to say that they may or may not feel as
we do. Moreover, the phenomenology of cognition that Kant develops via the
deduction of judgments of taste precipitously escalates the stakes attached to this
attunement that we cannot not seek. In voicing our feeling-based aesthetic judgments
and opening ourselves to rebuke from others who feel otherwise, what we we risk is
the discovery that we lack taste, which would cleave us from a cognizable universe
held in common, and leave us sequestered in an isolating skepticism.
On the face of it, the prospect that a judgment of taste may be tasked to bear the
weight of such immense stakes may appear to contradict Kant’ s insistence that
aesthetic judgments remain disinterested in order to be considered as such. Yet Kant
sees fit to specify that requirement of disinterest is formal rather than empirical: “That
the judgment of taste […] must have no interest in its determining ground has been
adequately demonstrated [in the “Deduction of Judgments of Taste”]. But from that it
does not follow that after it has been given as a pure aesthetic judgment no interest can
be combined with it.”261 As it so happens, the empirical interest whose possibility
Kant wishes to make available is the “inclination to society” he calls “sociability,” a
natural human tendency that moves us to seek in others a communal validation of the
feelings we experience in our judgments of taste.262 Observing that a human being
260
Ibid., 124.
261
Ibid., 122.
262
Ibid., 176.
279
stranded alone on a desert island would not think to adorn or decorate himself, Kant
affirms that it is “only in society” that one would seek to be a “refined human being” –
that is, one who “is inclined to communicate his pleasure to others and is skilled at it,
and who is not content with an object if he cannot feel his satisfaction in it in
community with others.”263 What I have identified above as the plea for an
intersubjective attunement of feeling articulated in aesthetic judgments thus conforms
to the empirical interest in sociability that Kant projects, for indeed he imagines that at
the highest level of human refinement “sensations [will] have value only to the extent
that they may be universally communicated.”264 By inflecting his transcendental
account of aesthetic judgments with the interest in sociability that he considers
intrinsic to human nature, Kant not only positions taste as “a faculty for judging
everything by means of which one can communicate even his feeling to everyone
else,” but also underscores the function it performs in “promoting what is demanded
[that is, sociability] by an inclination natural to everyone.”265 The exercise of one’s
faculty of taste in the making of an aesthetic judgment, put simply, is by definition an
expression of interestedness in establishing the communality of one’s feelings with
those of social others.
Perhaps no other philosopher has brought out more clearly the interestedness of
Kantian aesthetic judgments in sociability than Stanley Cavell, whose work often
centers on the ability to praise as both “an essential topic of the examination of our
acknowledgment of the existence of others” and as a “guar[d] against the threat of
263
Ibid., 177, 76.
264
Ibid., 177.
265
Ibid.
280
skepticism.”266 In an effort to augment J. L. Austin’s sparse theorization of
perlocutionary effects in his theory of performative speech acts, Cavell proposes a
model of what he calls “passionate utterance,” chief amongst whose features is the
absence of the “conventional procedure[s]” that usually govern the accomplishment
(or, the “felicity”) of a performative utterance’s ends: “Call this absence of convention
the first condition of passionate utterance.”267 That passionate utterances should be
characterized primarily by the lack of rules surrounding their effectivity is no
coincidence, for Cavell’s account is explicitly modeled on Kant’s account of
judgments of taste. Riffing on the taxonomical characteristics of passionate utterances,
Cavell reformulates Kantian aesthetic judgment in the following terms: “One person,
risking exposure to rebuff, singles out another, through the expression of an emotion
and a claim to value, to respond in kind, that is, with appropriate emotion and action
(if mainly of speech), here and now.”268 Seen through the Cavellian paradigm of
passionate utterances, what becomes clear is how much one exposes oneself to
intersubjective vulnerability in the making of aesthetic judgments. For Cavell, the
possibility that one’s value-laden expressions of emotion may fail to move others to
respond with their agreement amounts to something far more momentous than mere
disagreement: as a “kind of compulsion to share pleasure,” one’s aesthetic judgments
are “tinged with an anxiety that the claim stands to be rebuked.”269 Cavell’s sensitivity
to the intimate relational dynamic staged in the voicing of aesthetic judgments is
unmistakable, for he considers a passionate utterance one in which, “by
266
Ibid., 176.
267
Cavell, 3.
268
Ibid., 18.
281
acknowledging my desire in confronting you, I declare my standing with you and
single you out, demanding a response in kind from you, and a response now, so
making myself vulnerable to your rebuke, thus staking our future.”270
To risk rebuke in making an aesthetic judgment is thus not merely to open
oneself up to the possibility of disagreement, but to have confessed a relational
passion for others that might meet rebuff. For, as Cavell describes it, our aesthetic
judgments are subject to a sort of failure that “puts the future of our relationship, as
part of my sense of my identity, or of my existence, more radically at stake,” because
“the ‘you’ singled out comes into play in relation to the declaration of the ‘I’ who
hereby takes upon itself a definition of itself, in, as it may prove, a casual or fateful
form.”271 I take Cavell to be suggesting that, in voicing my aesthetic judgment, “I”
declare my desire for “you” to participate in an intersubjective relation of affective
attunement, your repudiation of which would put the very form of my self-definition
at risk. That passionate utterances cannot, as is true of performative utterances, seek to
guarantee the success of their perlocutionary aims by appealing to norms and
conventions, also means that the aesthetic judgment’s characteristic “anxiety” – that
the passionate desire we declare in making an aesthetic judgment might be rebuffed –
cannot be surmounted: “A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the
disorders of desire.”272 Despite the risks of having one’s passions rebuffed, however,
Cavell nevertheless considers the desire for attunement irrepressible. Indeed, this
compulsion animates his essay “Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise,” where
269
Ibid., 26.
270
Ibid., 9.
271
Ibid., 185.
282
Cavell stages a defense against what we might consider a problematization mounted
by Michael Rogin, who reads Astaire’s dance routines in The Band Wagon as species
of white misappropriation (and thus domination) of black culture. Although Rogin
does not employ the term “problematize,” its basic morphology – the complicating of
others’ aesthetic pleasures – can clearly be discerned here. I cite this confrontation less
out of interest in Cavell’s argument with Rogin than for the former’s reflections on the
reasons and stakes of his compulsion to disagree. As Cavell remarks, such a
disagreement may seem unnecessary: “But why impose this problem? Why praise
Astaire? Why not chalk up the experience of pleasure and value to an idiosyncrasy of
my own, and of whomever happens to share it?”273 Cavell suggests, however, that a
failure to justify his pleasure in Astaire would amount an intolerable ceding of self-
possession: “If I am to possess my own experience, I cannot afford to cede it to my
culture as that culture stands. I must find ways to insist upon it, if I find it unheard,
ways to let the culture confront itself in me, driving me some distance to
distraction.”274 Cavell’s intuitions concerning the manner in which disagreements
about aesthetic judgments hazard the dispossession of our experience deftly arrives at
what I sought, in my more labored reading of Kant’s analytic of beauty, to reveal as
the stakes attached to the feelings of normativity we experience in making judgments
of taste. Cavell’s sense that the integrity of our experience rests on our compulsion to
voice, as passionate utterance, our desire for others to feel as we do about an aesthetic
object finds theoretical support in the analytic of beauty, for Kant predicates the very
272
Ibid.
273
Ibid.
274
Ibid., 82.
283
possibility of a non-skeptical account of human cognition on the common sense
projected by our faculty of taste. For Cavell to relinquish the wish that others feel as
he does about Astaire, then, would permit idiosyncrasy to undercut not merely his
experience of Astaire, but his purchase on a shared, intersubjectively cognizable
world.
In the light shed by the feeling of normativity discerned in Kant’s analytic of
beauty, a different vision of problematization’s “normativity without norm” emerges.
Far from a self-defeating form of social justice critique whose emotional intensity and
conceptual indeterminacy undermine the normative reevaluation it seeks, or a merely
“aestheticist” style of critique that dissimulates its normative commitments and
capitulates to wanton subjectivism, the normative feel of problematizing critique
articulates a plea for affective attunement (“do you feel as I feel?”) as a precondition
for, rather than a hindrance to, the conceptual reevaluation of social norms (“do you
cognize as I cognize?”). From the feminist killjoy’s expression of anger, the language
guide’s plea for dialogue on the basis of affectively registered violence, to the
gestation of Foucault’s critique out of an aesthetic response to the prison archives,
problematization mounts a critique of norms that, registering the breakdown of the
“common” as a felt disruption to the sensus communis, insists on the priority of an
intersubjective attunement of feeling as a necessary precondition to conceptual
justification and evaluation. It is precisely this refusal to presume the existence of a
commons that Foucault, in the interview in which he contrasts problematization to
polemic, expresses when he points out that his analyses “do not appeal to any ‘we’ –
to any of those ‘wes’ whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the
284
framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated.” This
insistence that the “we” and the values, principles, and norms it embodies cannot be
prior to critique, but must result from the questioning form of problematizing critique,
lies at the heart of Foucault’s view of problematization as staking a “morality that
concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.” In this vein, Foucault
describes The History of Madness not as appealing to a “preexisting and receptive
‘we,’” but rather an effort to “se[e] if it were a possible to establish a ‘we’ on the basis
of the work that had been done, a ‘we’ that would also be likely to form a community
of action.” When read alongside Foucault’s avowal in “Lives of Infamous Men” that
the The History of Madness emerged as an effort to verbalize the “mood-based” and
“purely subjective” intensities he experienced in encountering the prison archives, it
becomes manifestly clear how problematization’s feeling-based “normativity without
norm” both registers and seeks to restore a breakdown in common feeling at the site of
normative disorder. That I have sought to foreground the relational, indeed passional
character of problematizing critique as an appeal for the intimate negotiation of feeling
is, moreover, no accident. Returning to the Critique of Judgment, we observe that
Kant in §40 (“On the Methodology of Taste”):
The propaedeutic for all beautiful art […] seems to lie not in precepts, but in the
culture of the mental powers through those prior forms of knowledge that are
called humaniora presumably because humanity means on the one hand the
universal feeling of participation and on the other hand the capacity for being
285
able to communicate one’s inmost self universally, which properties taken
together constitute the sociability that is appropriate to humankind.275
It has been this chapter’s guiding contention that the practice of problematization,
whose structural isomorphism to the aesthetic judging of objects without precepts I
have sought to demonstrate, participates in Kant’s vision of humanity as the perfected
ability to “communicate one’s inmost self universally [sich innigst und allgemein
mitteilen].” What is perhaps not obvious in the translation of innigst as “inmost” is the
fact that the former’s semantic range more closely corresponds to “heartfelt,”
“profound,” and indeed, “most intimate” – that, in other words, Kant considered the
propaedeutic for beautiful art to lie in the humanistic cultivation of our capacity for the
intersubjective communication of our most intimate feelings.
275
Ibid.
286
287
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FEELING CRITICAL:

LITERARY PRACTICES OF POSTWAR CRITIQUE

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/nr633gn9498

Sianne Ngai, Co-Adviser

Ramon Saldivar, Co-Adviser

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of

This dissertation is dedicated to all who encounter it. May it be of benefit.

Feeling Critical: An Introduction 1

Feeling Relevant: Contextualization and the Vocation of Reading 45

Feeling Utopian: Demystification and the Management of Disappointment 128

Works Cited 288

For phenomenology is precisely the attempt to tell not what a thought

Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form1

A Feel for the Method: The Desire Called Critique

barbarity,” which consists in the debunking of others’ object attachments as naive

study critique?”2 I understand perfectly that Latour’s rhetorical questions aren’t

else to describe this contempt, if not precisely as a “salvo of antifetishism” aimed at us

chapters on the practices of contextualization, demystification, and problematization,

and prohibitions that sustain them."6

concerns precisely the difficulties involved in claiming any posteriority to one’s

attachments to critique. Its temporal structuration, if it has one, is characterized less by

critique’s deficiencies or extolling the merits of its alternatives, than in understanding

the postcritical commitment to loosening critique’s grip on literary studies, it

a discredit to its political commitments or a cause for professional embarrassment. As

we will observe in my discussion of critique’s motives further on, Latour is hardly

is epistemological functions – even, or indeed especially, when those satisfactions

intervention avails itself of the performative purgations afforded by indignant shame.

being “a form of addictive and gratifying play.”

Extending Felski’s phenomenological approach to critique’s affective and

aesthetic dimensions, my accounts of contextualization, demystification, and

interlacing critique’s epistemology and affects, I establish the latter as standing in a

foundational, rather than a merely ancillary or contradictory relationship to the former,

describe how contextualization propagates feelings of persecution and victimization

by large forces, while demystification engenders a forbidding mistrust of pleasure,

even as problematization musters righteous indignation in reaction to perceived

transgressions.8 Absent an effort to trace the mutual imbrications of knowledge and

feeling, it is difficult to understand what could be gratifying about these “ugly”

up to them as descriptive of our own experiences of doing critique.9 Just as no one

project’s guiding intuition is that we come to these compulsions honestly. By retracing

how such apparently unseemly feelings come to be experienced as the objects of an

addictive gratification. As I argue in the chapters to come, contextualization’s

the social relevance of reading and literature, demystification’s austere distrust of

the righteous anger of the problematizing killjoy represents an effort to negotiate

universality of aesthetic judgment.

My employment of the term in reference to critique is not entirely unprecedented –

practice of suspicious reading,” “practices of critique,” and the “practice of

“practice of symptomatic reading,” even as they propose the alternative of an

“attention to surface as a practice of critical description.”11 Timothy Bewes, in

practices of critical interpretation.”12 This pivot into a vocabulary of practice can be

intention to discuss “paranoid and reparative critical practices, not as theoretical

to Sedgwick's treatment of practice further on in this introduction, but as her

clarification makes clear, the term “practice” is not simply synonymous or

symptomatic reading a practice rather than a theory or method, for instance, is to

the practice idiom’s scalar recalibration, tracking contextualization, demystification,

diverse methodological movements. Indeed, to the extent that it understands critical

literary interpretation and literary production as well.

domain of an entirely different phenomenology that otherwise goes unremarked in

evokes a genre of situation in which knowledges that are otherwise unobjectionable

and coherent in theory are subject to unpredictable contingencies and produce

canonical antinomy of passive theoria and revolutionary praxis than the

phenomenological difference between experiencing critique as a set of things to know