The Future of Criticism

Author(s): Edward W. Said

Source: MLN, Vol. 99, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1984), pp. 951-958
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905511
Accessed: 29-06-2017 20:02 UTC

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 The Future of Criticism

Edward W. Said

There is a particularly desolate, perhaps even inappropriate

quality to a topic like "the future of criticism" when proposed for
the occasion commemorating Eugenio Donato's sad death. Criti-
cism exists only because critics practice it. It is neither an institution
nor, strictly speaking a discipline. In the case of its exceptional
practitioners like Donato, there is an urgent and irreducible bond
between what critics do and who they are, and this bond cannot
otherwise be reproduced, codified, or transmitted as "criticism"
tout court. But because one acutely feels the loss of a critical style
or voice as distinctive as Donato's-particularly given that his
major theme was the irrecoverability of history and the melancholy
inevitability of representation as memory, literature, and
prophecy-there is justification for representing criticism as
having a future, as much because Donato's work will have an im-
portant place in it, as because, writing against the grain of what he
discovered and the fact of his death, critics need to affirm the
future as something more than the continuity of a profession.
The activity of doing or practicing criticism can be said to have
a future in two senses. First, there is the future of a particular kind
of criticism, a future intrinsic to that kind of work as opposed to
all other varieties, in which certain problems are posited and then
tackled by the critic with the aim-in the future-of arriving at a
certain set of goals. To take a pair of classic cases, we can say that
John Livingstone Lowes set out to read Coleridge in such a way as
finally to be able to know everything significant there was to be
known about the sources and the meanings of the poet's richest

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952 EDWARD W. SAID

verse; similarly, F. R. Leavis read English fiction in order to be

able to discover within it a dominatingly great, as opposed to a
minor or simply noteworthy, tradition. Such critical activities not
only set discrete and finite goals that can be accomplished within
one or two works of criticism, they also set larger goals that may
include the production of many more works of that particular type
and the transformation of idle readers into active believers in,
practitioners of, a certain kind of criticism.
Now the second sense in which criticism has a future is social
and contextual, that is, a future whose form and setting are ex-
trinsic to the practice of criticism considered as activity having in-
ternal norms. We must assume, first of all, that critics always exist
and function in some place, even when they work in a fundamen-
tally solitary and intransigent mode. Theodor Adorno and R. P.
Blackmur-to take two of the most individualistic and recalcitrant
critics of this century-can be and indeed have been characterized
as doing their work within various contexts and settings despite
their self-consciously stubborn distance from anything limiting the
autonomy of their work. It is worth remembering Adorno's rule
of thumb that in the contemporary world cultural forms that ap-
pear most distant from society-for example, the lyric, and do-
decaphonic music-are the best places to see the imprint as well
as the distortions of society upon the subject, "convex to concave,"
Fredric Jameson has perceptively said. Thus, both in its extro-
verted and introverted forms, criticism is a social activity occurring
in several either very well-defined or less defined places. As ex-
amples of the former there are the classroom, the newspaper re-
view, the scholarly and professional society; as examples of the
latter there are such things as the mind of the age, its taste, political
ideologies, national or class structures. Most, but by no means all,
criticism cannot easily be confined to one place, just as it is also
true that some forms of criticism are more prominent than others
at the same time. The worldly aspects of criticism aspire, I think
more or less uniformly, to hegemony in Gramsci's sense of the
word, and if it is also true to say that not every critic is as ambitious
as, say, Matthew Arnold or T. S. Eliot in their openly proselytizing
moments, the very act of doing criticism entails a commitment to
the future, more particularly, a commitment to appearing in,
making a contribution to, or in various other ways forming and
affecting the future.
Although I have separated them analytically, these intrinsic and

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 MLN 953

extrinsic aspects of criticism's future are dialectically interwoven,

and together they regulate, even if they do not absolutely com-
mand, the field of activity to which critics look forward generally
in the course of doing their work. Having said that, I think it is
useful to suggest another pair of characterizations according to
which we can further refine our expectations of the future. (I
realize, by the way, that the history of criticism is dotted with char-
acterizations and typologies of the sort I am about to offer: the
habit of classification itself seems inherent in the very structure of
critical self-consciousness.) My immediate source is a longish para-
graph in Walter Benjamin's beautiful essay "The Image of Proust"
(Illuminations). In discussing Proust's radical self-absorption, Ben-
jamin describes the man's tremendous loneliness and his conse-
quent dislike of friendship. Yet the persistence of Proust's un-
quenchable desire for conversation is still to be explained, since
this desire in fact co-exists quite noticeably with Proust's solitary
egoism. Benjamin's speculation is that Proust wished company, but
no physical contact; he pointed at things, but wanted no touching.
Benjamin's typology here is attractive. Literature, he says, is of
two types-the directive (die weisende) and the touching (die ber-
iuhrende). Proust's writing is an instance of the first, Peguy's of the
second; whereas Proust points to, explains, analyzes things, he does
so, according to Ramon Fernandez, with "depth, or, rather, inten-
sity ... always on his side, never on that of his partner." Writers
like Peguy on the other hand are interested in moving closer to
their readers, getting together, converting or collaborating with
readers.
If these terms are shifted to the domain of criticism, it might be
possible to say that the aim of some forms of criticism is to ex-
emplify, do, embody a certain kind of activity without in the least
attempting to produce effects of disciplehood or doctrine in the
reader. Quite clearly Adorno's work is the most extreme form of
this combination of distance and performance that we have; like
Proust he points to things, but he does so in the modes afforded
him by negative dialectics, obsessively and, it seems, untiringly. Yet
he cannot be paraphrased nor, in a sense, can he be transmitted:
the notion of an Adornofils is quite laughable. This then is essay-
istic and algorithmic criticism, and insofar as its future effects are
concerned, they are what can be called oppositional and secular.
The second type of criticism is the equivalent of Peguy's touching
mode: criticism that openly seeks the assent and identification with

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954 EDWARD W. SAID

it of its readers. Most of the great critical systematizers are

touchers; they want you to take what they have to offer and use it
elsewhere, over and over again preferably. Their work is codifiable
and detachable; it travels in place and time gaining or losing in
strength and effectiveness according to situation, period, prac-
titioner. This is systematic criticism. If the form of the first kind is
the essay, the form of this is the doctrine out of which books are
made.
The permutations of the four terms I've just described-in-
trinsic and extrinsic goals, essayistic and systematic modes of crit-
ical work-are invitingly numerous, although there isn't much
point in working out all the combinations. So let us proceed im-
mediately to concrete circumstances in order to see what the actual
future terrain for criticism is. Perhaps it is worth saying first that
the domain of mass culture is likely to enlarge, almost definitely
at the expense of what criticism has traditionally been associated
with: the domain of elite culture. A corollary is the dramatic down-
ward shift in literacy or, if you prefer, a dramatic alteration in the
standards defining levels of accepted literacy. The trend has been
in unmistakable evidence since the early years of this century, with
the consequence, I believe, of rendering marginal what most aca-
demic critics do, at least so far as expanding their audience is
concerned. On the other hand, even though a considerable retreat
from the theoretical enthusiasm of the early nineteen-sixties has
taken place, it is certainly true that literary criticism itself is much
less insular than it ever has been. Thanks to the efforts of pioneers
like Eugenio Donato, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, so-
ciology and anthropology are in fruitful dialogue with the her-
meneutic and philological practice of interpreting literary texts, so
much so that most people aspiring to the condition of critics are
directly exposed to the winds of interdisciplinary thought. Nev-
ertheless-and here the socio-institutional realities assert them-
selves-new, and I would argue, extremely assertive divisions of
labor have come down between critics. These, I think, are limiting
if one believes, as I do, that critical energies are optimally realized
not in systematic or doctrinal modes which tend to solidify the
status of criticism as a packaged commodity, but in the salutary
intransigence of oppositional criticism whose function is radically
secular, investigative, and relentlessly mobile. Donato's work, I
think, was essentially of the latter sort. And the force of the kind
of criticism he practiced has been registered elsewhere in powerful

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 M L N 955

ways, nowhere more usefully than in the continuing pressures ex-

erted against privileges or authority granted to aesthetic and cul-
tural texts on the basis of class, race, or gender. The Eurocentric
vision of culture has been somewhat eroded; the claims of fem-
inism, of Europe's Others, of subaltern cultures, of theoretical cur-
rents running counter to the rule of affirmatively dominant prag-
matism and empiricism have been felt and will not be ignored.
From these circumstances certain conclusions can be drawn. If
criticism is principally an intellectual and rational activity, situated
in the world, it must obviously find its home somewhere. Is that
locale the literary department? To some degree, literary depart-
ments play a necessary conservative or curatorial role since they
maintain, elucidate and modify canons, although even this for-
merly neutral function is now a highly contested issue. But the
liberating intercourse between fields of which I spoke a moment
ago suggests an opening out from a preservative horizon to an
investigative one. If so, then criticism is a response at least as much
to the discrepancies and dissonances of human experiences, as it
is to its routinely compartmentalized stabilities. As inscribed in var-
ious discourses and disciplines, these discrepancies comprise the
material competing with the texts whose cultural authority and
interpretive richness have traditionally constituted the main focus
of literary scholarship: the problem for criticism is what to do about
this potentially disorienting confrontation.
Let me describe this problematic in less abstract and even more
limited terms. The intellectual correlative of political upheaval
during the late sixties was the shaking-up of traditional humanism
that was given by what were considered outre theoretical ap-
proaches making their claims felt; thus what semiotics and struc-
turalism achieved was radical revision in, for example, the notion
of how a text works, how its author's function was conceived, how
it could-or could not-be read. Such changes, no one needs to
be told, occurred right across the board but, I should like to add,
they were assimilated too readily on the one hand, and spurned
too categorically by defenders of traditional humanism on the
other. I don't think it is too much to say that the domestication of
critical theory, as much as resistance to it, was undertaken in modes
stunningly compliant with the commodity fetishism and market
consumerism everyone was at pains to disown. The result has been
curious.
If we leave aside those who feel simply that all change is bad,

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956 EDWARD W. SAID

we see the field of criticism divided into many camps-labelled

with the names of various critical schools-whose roots are struck
in relatively superficial and restricted academic soil, and not in the
deeper social and ideological matter that may originally have nur-
tured them. Now I would certainly not want to say that the
academy ought to become a sort of brief abstract or immediate
microcosm of society. But there is a difference, I believe, between
an academic attention that flattens, cosmetizes, and blandly assim-
ilates social experience, and an attention no less academic that
preserves, heightens, and interprets the great dissonances and dis-
crepancies informing social, historical, and aesthetic forms. In
America, the relative absence of either an indigenous socialist or
a traditional philological culture has minimized interest in social
discrepancy, while promoting models of effective power taken
from managerial experience.
And so the gates are now open, and the barriers between dis-
ciplines, rhetorically and actually, are down. The future of criticism
or the critical function is, I believe, to be exercised in the traffic
between cultures, discourses and disciplines, rather than in the
appropriation, systematization, management, and professional-
ization of any one domain. This statement of what the future is of
course indicates a preference for the essayistic over the systematic
and doctrinal, but more important is the certainty that criticism
based on the impulse to dominate and hold previously gained po-
sitions is, no matter the ingenuity and energy of elaboration, much
less likely to be responsive to the future than to variously orna-
mented extensions of the past and present.
This brings me to my other main idea about the future of crit-
icism, this one emanating from the intrinsic pressures I mentioned
at the outset. Every act of criticism is always literally tied to a set
of social and historical circumstances; the problem is in specifying
or characterizing the relationship, not merely in asserting that it
exists; then the critic goes on actively to choose between competing
social tendencies. All criticism is postulated and performed on the
assumption that it is to have a future; ideally then, intrinsic goals,
such as more complete interpretations of X or Y genre or author,
might be connected to such extrinsic aims as a change in or en-
hancement of society. Rarely, however, are connections of such
scope and range made.
Very well then-who is to do the specifying, characterizing and
choosing if not the critic? No matter how rarified the type of crit-

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 MLN 957

icism, it seems to me incumbent on critics not to lose or efface but

to clarify and reflect upon the social traces of their work. This is
so in the end because as a social and rational intellectual activity
criticism is, properly speaking, an interventionary and, in Gram-
sci's phrase, a potentially directive phenomenon. This is today more
rather than less true, for reasons that have become explicitly self-
evident whether one inhabits metropolitan (post-industrial, late-
capitalist) regions, states of the socialist bloc, or peripheral (third-
world, post-colonial) territories. In all these polities, it is the critical
consciousness that is threatened by the institutions of a mass society
whose aim is nothing less than a political quiescence assuring the
citizenry's "governability" (to use the current word). Yet, as I said,
there is a marked reticence about extending intrinsic critical goals
out towards the social polity enfolding and to some degree en-
abling critical practice as a form of resistance. To conceive of crit-
icism as first and last playing a service or management role in the
culture industry is therefore to diminish its potential as well as
actual importance too drastically. Yet to think of criticism princi-
pally as a competitor within that industry of the so-called creative
arts, is both to reify and mystify precisely those distinctions be-
tween art and criticism being called into question by the elevation
of criticism to priority. In any event, controversy over the status
of criticism tends in a backward-looking way to occlude and post-
pone the equally relevant question of its destiny or future.
There are few exceptions to this habit of not thinking about the
future in recent theoretical writing about the function of criticism.
One noteworthy exception is Adorno writing in his last publication
that "the relationship of subject and object would lie in the real-
ization of peace among men as well as between men and their
Other. Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with
the distinct participating in each other." Another instance is Ray-
mond Williams writing in "The Tenses of the Imagination," that
''we usually still hesitate between tenses: between knowing in new
ways the structures of feeling that have directed and now hold us,
and finding in new ways the shape of an alternative, a future, that
can be genuinely imagined and hopefully lived."
What connects these two passages about the future to each other
is not simply the common accent on hopeful alternatives and the
human distinction and concreteness dialectically preserved, rather
than blotted out, in the future. It is the emphasis on non-domi-
native and non-coercive modes of life and knowledge as essential

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958 EDWARD W. SAID

components of the desired future. Note that Adorno and Williams

signal no nostalgic return to some original and unmediated state
of plenitude. That both men as critics tie this particular image of
the future to critical praxis suggests a choice that many may find
uncongenial, as well as too utopian, or too presumptuous, although
any reader of Donato's astringent critiques of romantic disillusion-
ment may see the choice offered as logically entailed by those very
same critiques. My own notion is that both the image and its direct
relationship to criticism are fundamentally implicit in all but the
most cynical readings of recent critical and intellectual history.
And, I would add, as much as our images of our discipline's past,
images of the future, abductible (in Peirce's sense of the word) or
inferrable from the present-however much these images are left
unarticulated or implicit-shape what we do in the present.

Columbia University

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