Alex Reid interviewed at Figure/Ground

HERE

Eileen Joy interviewed by Andrew Hines at Figure/Ground

The tireless and insatiable Dr. Joy speaks. HERE.

[ADDENDUM: My apologies. Initially, just out of habit, I said that Laurean Ralon had conducted the interview. Laureano to let me know that it was Andrew Hines, not Laureano himself. It probably says that quite clearly on the page, too; I’m simply in travel mode again, and am sometimes reading things on devices that don’t display everything very well.]

on OOO and New Criticism

There’s an interesting critique by Daniel Green, HERE, of my recent article in New Literary History. It’s quite refreshing in the sense that I wasn’t expecting anyone to critique that article from the standpoint of New Criticsm, which many regard as old-fashioned and long since buried; what I was expecting instead was a lot of resistance from the New Historicist and Derridean camps.

There are just two passages I want to respond to:

“First of all, I do not think it is accurate to say that the New Critics conceived of the poem (the literary text) as ‘encapsulated machines cut off from all social and material context.’ It would be absurd to say that a literary work is literally ‘free’ of the social/biographical/cultural context in which it was written. The New Critics just believed that this context had little to do with the reader’s experience of the poem, and it is the experience of reading that the New Critics wanted to emphasize.”

Green’s point here is that only a fool would think that literary works could be cut off from all criticism context. The New Critics were very intelligent, not fools; of course they knew that the literary work wasn’t cut off from all context, they simply chose to “emphasize” the relative autonomy of literary texts.

I disagree with this rejoinder, for the following reasons. Yes, the world is a complicated place, and theoreticians qua human beings are rarely going to embrace extremist doctrines about anything. If you try to pin down a Derridean on “there is nothing outside the text,” then of course they’re going to concede that the world isn’t just a text, and they may even act annoyed that you would attribute such a belief to them.

But the point isn’t whether private individuals called the New Critics really believed that a work could be entirely cut off from its social/biographical context. The point is whether they sufficiently accounted for the context in their theory. This is why reductio ad absurdum proofs are possible, after all. If I say that mathematism and scientism give us no good explanation of why perfect knowledge of a tree would not itself be a tree, it is insufficent to say “but of course they know that knowledge and trees are different.” The point isn’t what they know qua humans, but what their theories lead to as logical consequences.

The New Critics don’t just “emphasize” the internal structure of the text, they make this internal structure the sole topic of discussion. Perhaps the occasional historical fact peppers the New Critical reading, but this is not just a matter of “reduced emphasis,” but of defining the very reality of the literary work as a structure that is both closed off, and –a more important point for my article– holistic. Each element of the work can only be understood in its interplay with each other element.

A similar paradox haunts the art criticism of Clement Greenberg, who has much in common with the New Critics and who belongs to the same basic current of avant-garde modernism. On the one hand, Greenberg cuts off the artwork from the biographical and social conditions of its production (despite the occasional light he might shed on a work now and then by talking about the provincial social background or conservative political opinions of a Cézanne). But on the other hand, Greenberg treats the artwork as a holistic machine in which we cannot weigh the importance of individual elements apart from considering them as a whole.

In other words, Greenberg and the New Critics are every bit as holisitic as New Historicism or socio-political interpretations of art history. But instead of a holism that places artworks alongside other things not traditionally viewed as art, it’s a holism that cuts off that outside and turns the interior of the artwork into a global holistic machine. This isn’t just a matter of “emphasis.” They are quite serious that you can’t understand individual pieces of an artwork apart from all the rest; this is what bolsters their “paradoxical” recognition that you can’t invent rules for creating great art. See for instance Greenberg’s interesting reflections in the Bennington Lectures (contained in Homemade Aesthetics) as to why you can’t say, for instance, that “brushy” art such as that of Delacroix or Rubens is inherently superior or inferior to the “smooth” finish of Ingres or Raphaël. Sometimes it works better one way, sometimes another, because the painterly brushtrokes either work or fail to work only in their systematic interconnection with the other elements.

In short, we have a genuine trench war here, but both sides accept holism at a certain point, simply differing over whether that holism is internal or external to the artwork. And that’s why, as soon as I reject the internal holism of the New Criticism, Green automatically assumes that I must be endorsing the outward-looking holism of the New Historicism (even though earlier in his remarks he acknowledges my critique of New Historicism, and even endorses it). See the conclusion of his review, when he critiques my call for a counter-factual literary criticism that would alter specific elements of literary works and see how far this process can go without changing the work in question:

“This project is not an exercise in criticism but a further experiement in object-oriented ontology, a philosophical, rather than a critical, move. Harman seems to want to prove that OOO is correct, using the literary text as vehicle. How is this different from using the text to do politics or sociology?”

This isn’t it. No literary analysis can “prove” that OOO is correct; instead, I simply think the non-relational, non-holistic methods of OOO might be usefully applied to literary analysis.

The fact that Green thinks this is no different in kind form sociological or political analysis shows his basic presupposition, which is the literary text is a holistic unit that must be taken as precisely the whole that it is– with all the exact wording that it currently has, for instance.

By contrast, I think the literary text is something deeper than its current holistic configuration in the form of how the author chose to publish it, or the best available scholarly version of a text available at any given moment, or whatever is usually taken to be the real text.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the socio-political or biographical analysis of literature, which would refuse to cut a text off from its surroundings, would insist on seeing who is empowered or belittled by any text, what the dedication page of a text says about class privilege under Louis XIV, or whatever.

Instead, it is saying that while the New Critics were right not to reduce a text to the surroundings from which it was born (and here I side with Green against the excesses of New Historicists, who qua humans also “know” that texts have an autonomous reality too), the New Critics were wrong to reduce a text to the current shape of interrelated elements that it currently happens to have.

In other words, I think I’m giving an even stronger critique of authorial intention than is usually the case. Not only do authors fail to master the infinite dissemination of their texts, they probably don’t even put the text in the right shape in the first place. Most of them should have written better texts. Just as social surroundings fail to exhaust a literary work, the exact written form of a literary work fails to exhaust the deeper spirit of that work. My article proposed the rudiments of some methods to get at that deeper spirit. In my newly published Lovecraft book I put some of those methods to work, but I’d like to do it on a larger scale at some point.

Anyway, I did enjoy Green’s post.

a couple of other methods, while I’m at it

Someone in a comments section somewhere (I think it was on Brian Leiter’s blog, which I rarely read) said this his/her favorite method is to look for places where an author says “It is obviously the case that X” and take that as a soft spot in the argument. In fact, it usually is, so that’s a good method. The supposed “obviousness” usually refers not to evidence from the natural light of reason, but to some shoddy group consensus or other. That seems like a good method of reading texts and finding the problems in them.

One of my own favorites is somewhat related… It’s when someone defends a position while using scare quotes. Usually, you can just subtract the scare quotes and find that the author is actually asserting the point being made, despite the attempted distancing from it with the quotation marks.

For example, if I’m remembering correctly, there’s a passage in Being and Time (or perhaps one of the Marburg lecture courses) when Heidegger tells us that Zuhandenheit describes the being of things “an sich.” He uses the scare quotes because, well, after all, the entire phenomenological school thinks itself “beyond” any question of the in-itself. Except that Heidegger isn’t beyond it at all, but relies on it crucially to make his entire case against Husserl, whether Heidegger likes to admit it or not.

It reminds me a lot of Žižek’s excellent point about how claiming to be somehow beyond what you’re doing or saying doesn’t mean that you’re actually beyond it. There was the wonderful (and strangely funny) example of the Neo-Nazi leader who said that he’s a Nazi because of “the breakdown of paternal authority and diminishing social mobility.” The pseudo-sociological causal explanation of his views, which might seem to give him a certain rational distance from any supposedly crude embrace of Nazi ideology, does not change the fact that he’s a Nazi. Since we’re talking about Heidegger here, reservations based on Godwin’s Law don’t even apply to this analogy! (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”)

Saying that the ready-to-hand is how things are “an sich” with the quotation marks does not stop Heidegger from replicating the conception of the in-itself (and in my estimation, the results of this are excellent, as readers of my Heidegger interpretation will recall).

There are other, more contemporary examples that shed much light on the underlying theoretical commitment of various authors.

another by Levi

I’m busy proofreading someone’s interesting manuscript tonight, and so will simply point you to Larval Subjects directly. Key paragraph:

“What OOO refuses is the thesis that we have to either hold that ‘physical beings’ are constructed by discourses (discursivism) or that we must hold that discourses are mere figments of the mind that are unreal. Both, for OOO, belong to the domain of being or existence. This is probably why OOO tends to come under so much criticism from both sides of the debate. The scientific realists are aghast that we would claim that things like myths or the discourse of creationism are real entities in the world that have real effects, and thereby take us to be undermining science and treating it as equal with creationism (we’re not). The social constructivists are aghast that we would say that rabbits, aardvarks, black holes, etc., are real material entities in the world irreducible to discursive constructionism, and take us to denying the discursive construction of things like race, gender, nationality, etc., thereby allowing a dangerous essentialism in the door (we’re not). What we’ve instead tried to do is adopt a more inclusive ontology that allows us to think the complex imbrication and interaction of a variety of entities, discursive and material, in the world.”

To repeat a point I’ve made before, it’s not necessarily a good sign when you’re attacked (bad ideas are regularly attacked), but quite often an excellent sign when you’re attacked by two opposite sides in a debate. That’s different from contrarianism, which simply likes to poke one side in the eye. To get two sides upset, you need to come up with a new option that is irreconcilable with either, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.

In fact, I might add this to my list of favorite intellectual methods.

One of those methods is “find something that bores you, and figure out a way to make it obsolete.” The point here is that there usually, at any given moment, a certain number of triumphalistic banalities that are just new enough to sound like more than banalities, even though they are already becoming hollow. Readers can easily come up with examples on their own by surveying various trends at their leisure.

This one, closely related but a bit different, might be stated as follows: for any given intellectual trench war, try to think of a position that would really bother both sides. A huge percentage of intellectual life consists of immovable trench wars, so it’s really quite valuable any time you can think of an option that is fresh and not just a standard “save the best of both sides” option, which usually ends up saving the worst of both sides.

But it’s tricky, because a huge percentage of intellectual life also consists of false claims to have overcome some existing trench war. My favorite example here is the statement from the Rorty Nachlass (I was told about it by someone who saw it) that every ten years or so someone writes a book called something like “Beyond Realism and Idealism,” yet it always turns out that idealism is what lies beyond realism and idealism.

articles available in English by Medhi Belhaj Kacem

Martin Fortier kindly draws my attention to two articles that should be of interest.

One is an English translation of Meillassoux’s lecture (from 2006?) “Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science,” under the title “Metaphysics and fiction about the worlds beyond science.” Apparently the translation is a slightly abridged version of the original lecture.

There is also a piece in the same periodical by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, which can reportedly be described as a friendly critique of Meillassoux’s thought. Kacem is worth keeping an eye on, since he has become an increasingly prominent reference throughout the summer at the various meetings I attended in a number of countries.

The periodical is the underground fashion/art periodical Purple.

The table of contents to the issue in question can be found HERE.

speaking of Pollock

You can create your own Pollock paintings, HERE. Just click on the door, and you’ll figure out how to do it.

Greenberg on Pollock

He’s a much slower talker than I ever would have guessed (though he admits as much in his Bennington Lectures), but it’s fun to watch. (Hat tip, Robert Jackson.)

Bogost weighs in

HERE.

p.s. on the previous post

Once blog exchanges reach a certain point of fruitlessness, I tend to stop reading them. Hence it came as a shock to me to learn that anyone ever made the argument that if I say that corporations are real objects, I must therefore support corporations. What the hell?

I suppose that a “charitable” reading of that claim might run as follows: Politics must be grounded in truth. A politics of truth must eliminate that which is unreal and merely ideological. A corporation is a mere ideology, nothing real. Whoever says that they are real must oppose their elimination, and must therefore support them.

At least that’s the best face I can put on the logic. But it seems to me like a bizarre ontology that gets things backwards. The reason the Syrians are trying to eliminate the Assad regime is not because it is an unreal fiction, but precisely because it is very real, and simply judged to be very bad.

Levi’s post gives the example of atomic weapons. Let’s say you believe in nuclear disarmament (not a bad thing to believe in, incidentally). Wouldn’t it be best to start by admitting that nuclear weapons exist, precisely in order to bring an end to them? It certainly seems like the obvious Step 1 to me.

What would be gained by calling nuclear weapons unreal? I assume no one would say that. So why say it about corporations? In what sense does saying “corporations exist” imply “therefore, corporations are good”?

I can’t even begin to grasp the logic at work in that reading of OOO.