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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1259696
Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism:
Reframing, Topsight and Critical Dialectics
José Angel García Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza
www.garcialanda.net
garciala@unizar.es
2008
This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative
perspective, providing a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of the
scale ranging from consonant, “friendly” criticism, to dissonant,
confrontational or “unfriendly” criticism. A number of key critical theories
(by theorists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Erving
Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur,
Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan Sinfield, and H. Porter Abbott) are
examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and situated within the
framework of interactional pragmatics, of the dialectics of communication,
and of a semiotic theory of truth and of consciousness.
1. Pragmatics, interactionism, and critical discourse analysis
Whenever we say anything, our words have various levels of meaning, one
of which is the “dictionary” meaning, i.e. decontextualized meaning.
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1259696
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 2
Different kinds of meaning can be distinguished in our words, and in our
actions as well, at several levels of (de)contextualization. The really
interesting analysis of meaning is the analysis of fully contextualized
meaning. (Although this notion leads to the additional problem, usually
best lost sight of, of reflexivity and even infinite regress—since a fully
contextualized analysis must include the analyst himself, as well as the
analytical methods and disciplinary and contextual constraints of the
analyis being carried out).
There are consequently many types of pragmatics: some pragmaticists
work with more or less abstract (i.e. more or less decontextualized) models
of action or language. It is not a matter of all-or-nothing, since the analysis
may incorporate many contextualizing dimensions which are nevertheless
not fully concretized—for instance, the types of speech acts classified by
Austin in How to Do Things with Words. Classical approaches to speech
act theory use as a matter of course partially contextualized examples
(which are moreover constructed by the analyists themselves). These allow
them to analyze indirect speech acts and distinguish within them the
locutionary meaning from the illocutionary force: two levels of
conventionalized meaning, both of which are in fact relatively abstract.
A more contextualized approach to language pragmatics is proposed by
Jenny Thomas in Meaning in Interaction (Thomas, incidentally, uses for
the most part authentic examples in her analyses):
In this book I shall be working towards a definition of pragmatics as
meaning in interaction. This reflects the view that meaning is not
something which is inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by
the speaker alone, nor by the hearer alone. Making meaning is a
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 3
dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between
speakera and hearer, the context of utterance (physical, social and
linguistic) and the meaning potential of an utterance. (Thomas 1995:
22)
This theoretical stance is remarkably similar to the basic tenets of some
versions of Reader-Response Criticism—e.g. in Stanley Fish’s work—and,
going further back, of George Herbert Mead’s and Herbert Blumer’s
symbolic interactionism, which transcends both linguistics and literary
studies. According to the symbolic interactionalist theory of meaning, the
meaning of events, things, actions, words, is constructed in the process in
social interaction between subjects, and it is not fixed; rather, it is
constantly being modified in a continuous process of reinterpretation.
Blumer lists three types of theories of meaning (of which the first two are
inadequate):
1) For the first theory or group of theories, meaning is intrinsic to the
object. (In the case of a text, intrinsic to the words, phrases, the textual
structure, etc. Many protocols of legal interpretation are based on this
fiction, as are those semantic theories which do not overstep the boundaries
of the dictionary meaning of words).
2) Another theory holds that meaning is a subjective affair, created by the
interpreter. This is a more psychological theory of meaning, and close to
some subjectivist theories of reader reception which start (and sometimes
end) their reflections with the observation that “every text means
something different for each reader”.
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 4
3) The third theory of meaning is the symbolic interactionalist theory
upheld by Blumer, similar in many respects to Thomas’s pragmatic theory
of meaning quoted above. According to it, meaning is not inherent to the
object, nor is it subjective: it is constructed, instead, through an interactive
process. I quote Blumer:
Symbolic interactionism views meaning as having a different source
than those held by the two dominant views just considered. It does
not regard meaning as emanating from the intrinsic makeup of the
thing that has meaning, nor does it see meaning as arising through a
coalescence of psychological elements in the person. Instead, it sees
meaning as arising in the process of interaction between people. The
meaning of a thing for a peron grows out of the ways in which other
persons act toward the person with regard to the thing. Their actions
operate to define the thing for the person. Thus, symbolic
interactionism sees meanings as social products, as creations that are
formed in and through the defining activities of people as they
interact. (1986: 4-5)
An objection would seem to arise: in analyzing the meaning of an event, an
utterance, a text, it is quite frequently the case that analysts do not find
themselves in the original situation (in which the event took place, where
the utterance was uttered; or, the analyst is not the intended addressee of
the text). Sometimes we do interpret something as it takes place or as it is
being said; other times interpretation takes place in a more or less different
and distant context. One must therefore take into account the distortion
(through an increment of meaning) introduced by the analytic context,
which is an interactional context in its own right, and may modify meaning
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 5
in subtle ways, invisible even, to those who are not attuned to this
dimension of metadiscourse.
Once we take this factor into account, perhaps Thomas’s notion of a
contextualized and interactive pragmalinguistic analysis might be modified
from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism. We would thus articulate a
reflexive discourse-analytical approach understood as meaning in
interaction, or a fully contextualized critical pragmatics. Adapting
Thomas’s definition, we would have that
Meaning is not something inherent to the words only, nor is it produced
only by the speaker, or by the discourse analyst. The construction of
meaning is a dynamic process, which includes the negotiation of meaning
between speaker and addressee, the context of utterance (in its physical,
social and linguistic dimensions), the potential significance of an utterance,
and the critical/analytic context in which the utterance is studied, which
includes an interactional dimension of its own between the analyst and
other subjects/analysts.
The same definition might be extended to the critique and pragmatics of
action, since utterances are actions, and saying, and interpreting, are modes
of acting.
2. The colour of the glass we look through: Critical differences
Although the ideas in Stanley Fish’s book Is There a Text in This Class
(1980) evolve from the earlier to the later essays, the work’s central and
all-encompassing argument is that the meaning of texts does not “already”
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 6
exist in the texts themselves, but is instead generated by the structures of
meaning preexistent to the text in conjunction with those projected by the
reader during the reading process. The meaning is not “in” the text itself, it
is “produced” by a reading. This work is possibly the most characteristic
instance of the reader-response approach to criticism, and does not flinch
when it comes to putting forward exorbitant claims to void of meaning both
the text and its linguistic structures, so as to lay the whole load of sense-
making on the act of interpretation. One could argue that Fish was
dangerously close to Theory no. 2 in Blumer’s classification above. Twenty
years ago I wrote a rather stern critique of Fish’s theory in a paper entitled
“Stanley E. Fish’s Speech Acts.” I found especially irritating Fish’s
manoeuvering to avoid all reasoning centred on objective linguistic or
semiotic structures, dissolving all levels of sense into a primordial soup of
interpretations projected by the individual receiver. Today, however, I am
more interested in the transforming and liberating potential one should not
deny to Fish’s interventions. His critique of formalist stylistics and of
transformational grammar is highly interesting, and much in line with what
would soon would become known as integrational linguistics, and also, in
some respects, with symbolic interactionism.
Fish holds that all sense is created not in an abstract generative frame but in
a concrete social situation—a conception which has obvious analogies to
the interactional theory we have referred to. The constraints upon sense are
not to be found, according to Fish, in grammars: “there are such
constraints; they do not, however, inhere in language but in situations, and
because they inhere in situations, the constraints we are always under are
not always the same ones” (1980: 292). Chomsky’s phrases (Note 1),
whatever their utility in an abstract model, have never existed in actual
linguistic performance, and “a language is neither known nor describable
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 7
apart from the conditions that Chomsky labels ‘irrelevant’” (Fish 1980:
247). Nor can the meanings of a text be separated from the institutional
history of their interpretations—an insight which has been much stressed
by cultural materialist critics (see e.g. Dollimore and Sinfield 1994).
Criticism does not leave the text unaltered, untouched: on the contrary, it is
made and remade by interpretations; the very act of describing a text is an
act of interpretation, and actively constructs the text’s meaning. Fish does
not deny the existence of senses which are more “normal” or “usual” than
others, nor is he trying to deny their validity; but he does point out that that
normality and validity are not inherent to the object of interpretation—they
are a function of the interpreter’s perspective. If we recognize some
ascriptions of sense as more “commonsensical” or “valid” than others, it is
not because they are such apart from all interpretation, but because we
ourselves are immersed in an interpretive community and share its
interpretive protocols and schemes (such as languages, generic
conventions, etc.). There is nothing “obvious” in itself; it must be
“obvious” for someone:
Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like ‘without
doubt’ or ‘there can be no doubt’, you can be sure that you are within
hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts
that he presents as obvious. (1980: 341)
— a phrase which is self-descriptive, perhaps even one of the self-
consuming artifacts Fish is so fond of investigating.
Fish’s theory of the “interpretive community” collapses (“no doubt”)
because of the impossibility to delimit or isolate any such communities,
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 8
because they are purely hypothetical mental entities, abstractions, and no
better than Chomsky’s deep structures in that sense: any actual
“community” is an overlapping of multiple communities, and a more or
less clear-cut community can only be determined on the basis of what is at
issue at any given moment. That is, it is the conflict of intentions,
solidarities, interests and interpretations in a specific situation which in
practical terms determines the border between two of those supposed
“communities”—a map which changes with any shift of attention or of
argumentative priorities.
Fish’s theory is, perhaps deliberately, not attentive to the relative priority of
some interpretations, texts, and contexts, over others. Therefore, in his
account the (relevant) text, the relevant context and the interpretation
emerge simultaneously as the products of the reading effected by the critic,
and from the very assumptions of that reading. In order to solve or indeed
focus any debate, it is necessary to have “a set of overarching principles
that are not themselves the object of dispute because they set the terms
within which disputes can occur” (Fish 1980: 294). It is at this point that a
highly suggestive conception of critical debate emerges, one based on
interaction and the questioning of assumptions and presuppositions—a
model which as a matter of fact has many common elements with the
interactive and pragmaticist theory of truth developed by George Herbert
Mead (1929, 2002). In this way Fish tries to explain the singular (and
otherwise almost comical) state of affairs in literary studies—to wit, that
after the passage of generations of interpreters, one can still propose an
interpretation of a classical text with the pretension of unveiling some truth
about the text which has remained hidden up to now—ensconced and
uncommunicated, or overlooked by all previous interpreters. A
predicament which, depending on the way it is taken, would seem to reduce
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 9
to absurdity and irrelevance not only the efforts of previous critics, but (in
advance) the claims of this new reading and as a matter of fact the critical
enterprise itself as a whole.
The discovery of the ‘real point’ is always what is claimed whenever
a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in
relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the
real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been
marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by
the conventions of the institution to dislodge them. (Fish 1980: 350)
This is a dialogic and interactional conception of criticism which I find
congenial—I have examined some of its aspects, for instance, in my paper
on “Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation: The
Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman” to which the reader
may be referred as a companion piece to the present essay.
The basic moves in critical debate would then seem to belong to one or the
other of these two types (which in the last analysis are the same for Fish):
either, within the same interpretive assumptions, providing new data and
analyses, or (more radically or perhaps confrontationally) questioning or
undermining the interpretive assumptions themselves, the conceptual basis
on which previous readings were built. The same, in the last analysis—
because this questioning, Fish argues, will always be effected on the basis
of a more general shared space; shared, at least, for the moment and for the
purposes of this communicative move, but not inherently firmer per se.
In Fish’s view, “interpretation is the only game in town”, and it is
interesting to see him pointing out that a favourite manoeuvre on the part of
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 10
critics is to hide or disguise the generative dimension of their interpretive
activity, claiming that only objective data or neutral descriptions of the
works are being offered:
by a logic peculiar to the institution, one of the standard ways of
practicing literary criticism is to announce that you are avoiding it.
This is so because at the heart of the institution is the wish to deny
that its activities have any consequences. (1980: 355)
And, as if he were deliberately trying to provide a practical instance of this
move, Fish argues in his last chapter that his own conception has no
consequences for the practice of criticism—that as a matter of fact he was
only trying to clarify (i.e. describe) the rules of the game played in
academic criticism, and not to change them. That critics may go on
producing interpretations at their leisure, ignoring this intervention by Fish,
because nothing is the matter, it has no discernible consequences. Perhaps
we do understand better the nature of the critical activity, but this activity
remains impassive, unaffected by our new perception, and single-mindedly
devoted to the production of interpretations, each one running after those
truths which are true only from the perspective in question. At most we
may become aware that nothing can be demonstrated conclusively in the
field of criticism; we can only persuade someone to share our perspective
(1980: 356-71).
Fish’s thought, obviously in fieri in this book, did not wholly extract the
consequences of this “creative criticism” à la Oscar Wilde (“The Critic as
Artist”). He opposes the classical model—according to which there would
be objective data, independent from their interpreters, which could be used
to decide on the validity of an interpretation—to his own productive and
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 11
argumentative model, in which there are no objective facts to use as an
argument in demonstrations: “a model of persuasion in which the facts that
one cites are available only because an interpretation (at least in its general
and broad outlines) has already been assumed” (1980: 365). This notion of
persuasion might weaken Fish’s argumentation (and make it less
persuasive!) to the extent that not enough emphasis is placed on the
underlying reasons for the persuasion—reasons which are to be found in
the interactional and emergentist nature of critical activity. Fish’s
contribution seems nonetheless to point towards this notion. Seen from
today’s vantage point, at least, this new perspective provides an
emergentist view of the objects of critical knowledge which is close enough
to G. H. Mead’s ideas:
In one model [i.e. the classical model Fish rejects] change is (at least
ideally) progressive, a movement toward a more accurate account of a
fixed and stable entity; in the other, change occurs when one
perspective dislodges another and brings with it entities that had not
before been available. (Fish 1980: 366)
“Entities that had not before been available”—or did not exist as objects of
knowledge. That is, criticism generates, retroactively, the object on which it
acts, through its emphases, intertextuality, the establishing of relationships,
extraction of presuppositions… (Note 2). One advantage, Fish notes, of this
model that we call emergentist is that it explains more adequately how it is
that new meanings keep arising in texts, without making previous critics
appear myopic as this happens. It also explains the different emphases and
priorities of other ages in literature and criticism without reducing those
great men (Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Arnold…) to poor devils who
did not quite understand what they were reading and studying. In Fish’s
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 12
view, they were not merely studying it but rather generating it, and
allowing our later perspective, different from theirs, to appear.
Poststructuralists have been sometimes accused of magnifying the role of
critical activity in a self-aggrandizing way. If that is the case, Fish offers at
any rate one of the best defenses and justifications of that creative criticism
which is not afraid to measure itself to imaginative literature in its ability to
produce new sense. (Note 3). For Fish,
No longer is the critic the humble servant of texts whose glories exist
independently of anything he might do; it is what he does, within the
constraints embedded in the literary institution, that brings texts into
being and makes them available for analysis and appreciation. The
practice of literary criticism is not something one must apologize for:
it is absolutely essential not only to the maintenance of, but to the
very production of the objects of its attention. (1980: 368)
It is in this sense that one should understand the suggestive paradoxes put
forward by Wilde in “The Critic as Artist,” that essay which argues that the
critic is not there to tell us what the work of art tells (we already have the
work for that), but rather what the work of art should tell once it has spoken
through the critic’s sensibility, or has been placed into a new relationship
with contemporaneity through the critic’s labour, a role which again is not
mimetic but generative, creative—emergentist, we might say. (Note 4).
Criticism exerts a retroactive influence on art: it transforms art even as it
interprets it, and makes the artwork say more clearly what it tried to say, or
makes it say what the work did not quite (know it was trying to) say until
the critic’s arrival. All of this is done according to critical protocols:
otherwise the critic would no longer be a critic but would become (without
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 13
ceasing to be an artist) what H. Porter Abbott calls an adapter (Abbott
2002).
Given this emergentist nature and function of criticism, it is hard to
understand why Fish should argue that his thesis “has no consequences for
practical criticism” (1980: 371). To be sure, theorists of cultural
materialism, like Jonathan Dollimore or Alan Sinfield, draw very different
consequences from a similarly interactive and dialectic conception of
criticism (see for instance the preface to their volume Political
Shakespeare). A similar paradox is to be found in Wilde’s aesthetic
reflections, which started from the uselessness and unreality of art in “The
Decay of Lying”—if art generates our perception of reality, that is to say,
reality itself, Wilde’s argument would demonstrate the transcendental
importance of art, rather than its social uselessness. Similarly, Fish’s
theory, once its practical consequences are drawn, and its inherent
emergentism emerges, cannot but transform critical practices, their objects
of attention and the kind of attention which is devoted to them. Moreover,
one should consider that the first thing which undergoes a transformation
whenever we write about something is not so much the object written about
as the writer himself. If the world, and the eye, are going to be the colour of
the glass we look through, we had better choose that glass carefully.
3. (A)CRITICAL CRITICISM
Rereading my paper on rereading and repetition (2006c) and at the risk of
repeating myself, I decided to develop here one of its aspects as a separate
paper, elaborating on my dichotomy between criticism proper (critical
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 14
criticism) and acriticial criticism. Here are some relevant paragraphs from
that paper on “Rereading(,) Narrative(,) Identity(;) and Interaction”:
Narrative is, among other things, a drama of identities, in which the
author and the reader interact in a complex way, thorugh the
symbolized interaction of a variety of textual selves: implied authors
and implied readers, narrators and narratees, characters. The reader is
invited, sometimes through a complex rhetoric of address to fictional
narratees, to assume an identity proposed by the narrative—to
behave as the implied reader. The implied reader position, then, is
the provisional locus for the reader’s installation—as reader, not as a
fully authorized interactant. From the moment the reader becomes
someone else, a writer, a critic, etc. there is a choice between
remaining a friendly ideal reader, or delimiting a stance outside the
text’s calculation, becoming a resisting reader. (Note 5). Resisting
reading involves the delimitation of the subject’s ideological
positioning vis à vis the text. Resisting reading finds its most
congenial space in critical writing: we should speak of resisting
criticism or resisting writing, actually. Reading proper invites
participation, temporary surrender (except in the case of offensive
material); only writing after rereading invites the subtler kind of
ideological analyses.
We may now reexamine from this perspective the concept of
narrative configuration developed by theorists such as Mink and
Ricoeur. Both of them emphasized that narrative has a retrospective
or even retroactive dimension, bringing out an interpretive pattern
from the events of history or personal experience. In Polkinghorne’s
account,
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 15
The act of the plot is to elicit a pattern from a succession, and it involves
a kind of reasoning that tacks back and forth from the events to the plot
until a plot forms that both respects the events and encompasses them in
a whole. The ‘humblest’ narrative is always more than a chronological
series of events: it is a gathering together of events into a meaningful
story. (Polkinghorne 1988: 131)
The hermeneutic approach to narrative as a distinct mode of
knowledge has resulted in a revaluation of the concept of plot. For
Paul Ricoeur, “Plot can be isolated from judgments about the
reference and content of a story, and to be viewed instead as the
sense of a narrative” (Polkinghorne 1988: 131). Of course, the plot of
a narrative is ‘the’ sense proposed by the narrative itself. An
unfriendly critic’s eye may detect the violence done to the events
through their configuration into a plot. This is the thrust of those
trends in narrative hermeneutics which denounce the “hindsight bias”
and the perspectivistic illusions imposed through narrative form,
such as the illusion of fatality or the artificial imposition of tragic or
comic patterns on experience (Bernstein 1994, Morson 1994).
Narrative has a retrospective configurational force which may
become even a kind of retroaction, as past events are ‘generated’ by
present perspectives and given the kind of ideal identity noted by
Hume. What we should emphasize here is that the observation or
assessment of a narrative amounts to a new type of reconfiguration,
especially when the narrative is critically recontextualized. A new
plot is generated, one which includes the observer or reader. One of
the main tasks of criticism (of friendly hermeneutic criticism, even)
is making explicit what was implicit. But this means also
transforming, interpreting, shifting emphasis, appropriating, giving a
new configuration to events and relationships. (Note 7).
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 16
These are, then, the polarities in the binomial of critical attitudes I oppose
to each other:
Friendly criticism - Unfriendly criticism
—which are rather intuitive and self-explanatory terms I commonly use,
along with their Spanish near equivalents, Crítica simpática - Crítica
antipática, and also Crítica acrítica - Crítica crítica (critical criticism –
acritical criticism). These terms of mine are closely related to other current
concepts in ideological critical approaches—e.g. the classical Marxist
notion of the critcal unmasking of texts as instruments for the spreading of
dominant ideologies, or (in feminist criticism) Judith Fetterley’s notion of
resisting reading opposed to an the default acquiescent reading
presupposed by texts. In Fetterley’s account, the feminist reader has to
actively counter the patriarchal and macho assumptions of male writers.
But the same concept of ideological resistance can be applied to any kind
of divergence between the author’s and the reader’s attitudes.
A similar polarity, formulated by Erving Goffman and later by H. Porter
Abbott, opposes intentionalist or communicative readings or interpretations
to symptomatic ones (Goffman 1970; Abbott 2002). In the latter, Abbot
argues, interpreters do not restrict themselves to the reconstruction of the
sense intended by the author or the uptake of his communicative acts;
instead, they interpret textual elements (in conjunctions and combinations
not foreseen by the author) as symptoms of a given attitude, presupposition,
ideology, etc. Thus, an ideological and interpretive difference is opened
between the project proposed by the interpreted text and the critical stance
and agenda of the critic’s text. (Note 8).
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 17
Another way of naming this basic polarity in critical attitudes would be:
(Ideologically) Consonant vs. (Ideologically) Dissonant criticism, —or:
Constructive vs. Deconstructive (or even destructive) criticism.
—by which I do not mean that a taste for deconstruction bespeaks a lack of
a constructive spirit. We see that terms could be multiplied. One of the
most influential formulations of this binomial is Paul Ricœur’s in De
l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud, where distinguishes a hermeneutics of
the recovery of sense is opposed to the hermeneutics of suspicion
developed during the twentieth century under the aegis of Marx, Freud and
Nietzsche (Ricœur 1970). The former is the traditional hermeneutic stance,
associated to the religious origins of this discipline in the interpretation of
sacred texts: here the text is treated reverently as the bearer of an important
message, a religious one originally, and a cultural or aesthetic one in
secularized versions of the literary process. The text is a focus of authority
and is set over the interpreter, who must approach it for his own good and
that of the community; both will benefit from the sense found in the text. In
contrast, the various hermeneutics of suspicion (whether Marxist,
structuralist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, postcolonial, etc.)
are not only suspicious, but somewhat conceited or patronizing, since in
assuming a confrontational attitude they consider the text is blind about
itself, and erect themselves as interpreters, as the bearers of truth and of the
illumination which is to unveil the shortcomings and errors and biases
about the world and about itself that the text is plagued with.
In the last analysis, Ricœur implies, the benefits of humility (friendly
criticism) are greater than the hermeneutic arrogance of unfriendly
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 18
criticism. But I must here step out in favour of the haughtiness of the
skeptical reader, in favour of unfriendly criticism, indeed of criticism
proper, as the term “criticism” itself seems to suggest. Understanding
comes first, criticism later; hermeneutics first, and ideological critique
later. It is so both in the logical structure of the interpretive process and
also from a larger historical perspective—the positive hermeneutics applied
to sacred texts is part and parcel of traditional religious orthodoxy, while
criticism is associated rather more closely to philosophical
demythologization, to the humanist contestation of revealed truth, or to the
early modern critique of the Church’s interpretive authority. Critical
thought questions any explanatory system which offers a totalizing or
excessively homogeneous, or “finished” version of reality. A text puts
forward its systema or world-model—its reading of reality (of reality
systematized), and it is the critic’s labout to test the limits of that system or
the simplifications reality has undergone in order to reduce it to a system,
or to a text. In Porter Abbott’s terms, in this interpretive modality we no
longer consider the text’s reasoning or argument as a reasoning or
argument (so carefully structured); instead, we treat it as a symptom
awaiting our diagnosis, and the supposed truth revealed by the text is
nothing but an intellectual syndrome, a delirium of reason, an ideology to
be dissected.
Rebellious, unfriendly and dissonant criticism has an ingredient of
haughtiness, insisting as it does on the critic’s views and offering the
critic’s reading of the text instead of the generally accepted one, or, one
might say, of instead of the text’s reading of itself (—I am commenting
Shakespeare for you, since you are interested in Shakespeare, but you
shouldn’t trust Shakespeare on Shakespeare, he doesn’t know himself, but I
do, listen to my text—you should be interested in my text, ¡don’t trust other
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 19
people on Shakespeare, don’t trust yourselves, trust me, don’t read
Shakespeare, read me!). So much by way of subtext. (Note 9).
But the other version of criticism, reverent or consonant criticism, also has
its share of conceit—the more insidious as it poses as humility and self-
effacement. After its own way it tells us (again I caricature): There is no
need to look further into truth. We already know the truth, it has been
Revealed—it is contained in this sacred text (the Bible, Shakespeare,
Derrida, etc.). We can add explanatory footnotes to it, but clearly not a
commentary which contradicts its basic presuppositions. That would be the
destruction of the Writ. In the last analysis, we don’t need any critics or
commentators of the Writing, as we have already got the Writing, which is
self-sufficient and reads itself in the right way—that is, in the way it has
always been read. And we are on Its side. Close your mouth, cap your pen,
shut down you computer. Critics, your so-called truths lowercase tee are
not necessary, the Truth has already been said and written, it is our humble
duty to learn it, understand it and accept it.
Now isn’t that sinister—’umble and respectful towards the Author as it
may sound?
Fortunately, this difference between critical criticism and acritical criticism
is, like all absolute polarities, more ideal than real. It is not that the pure
forms are unknown: commandeered reviews on the one hand, and viciously
destructive reviews, on the other, are quite close to chemical purity. They
are, too, the least interesting of critical modes (although destructive
criticism, in particular, has its own charms and can be extremely amusing
to read and write). And both poles fulfil, anyway, their interactional role in
the society of letters. But the proper space for reflexive and considerate
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 20
criticism is to be found, rather, in the land between them, a terrain in which
criticism, without ceasing to be critical, is also attuned to the text’s
problematics or argumentation, instead of simply rejecting them as
irrelevant or wrong-headed. The fine hues and modulations of argument are
best perceived in the context of friendly or consonant criticism; the
limitations inherent to any author’s given position require an ingredient of
confrontational critique. But a wholesale negative critique does not
contribute much to the development of knowledge: it merely rules out the
author’s text and suggests that we look aside and attend to other issues and
predicaments, other ideologies and world views.. A critique which is
partially in tune with the text, on the other hand, may open the way to a
synthesis between the critic’s initial position and that of the text. When
such a synthesis is effected by the critic, the critic occupies both the
positions of antithesis and of synthesis, and has brought himself to
overcome his initial position, or at least to modify it, supplement it or to
delve further into some of its consequences.
When a metatext’s critical attitude towards its text (I briefly use here
Genette’s term, 1979: 10) is more confrontational and does not favour a
synthesis in the metatext itself, it is not to be ruled out that the synthesis, or
at any rate a syntesis different from the one put forward by the critic, may
nonetheless be effected thanks to the antithesis provided by the metatext’s
unfriendly critique—thanks to it, though not within it. The synthesis
between both positions, the text’s and the critic’s, may be effected in this
case by the reader (the reader of the critical work and also of the original
text). It is on the reader that the more elaborate critical role befalls in this
case—and the reader may choose to “criticize the critic” by communicating
this reading in a further metatext. More constructive modes of criticism—
even if they are ‘deconstructive’—must perform a substantial part of this
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 21
work of synthesis if the line of thought proposed by the text is to be further
developed and investigated, not merely suppressed or declared irrelevant.
And, at any rate, what a critical critic deserves is a taste of his own
medicine. Let his text be deconstructed, let it undergo an unfriendly
reception, with his asssumptions and conclusions deconstructed and
questioned. Or perhaps the critical critic expected to find tame and
acquiescent interlocutors? Once the consensus around Writing has been
shattered, there is no hope of its being restored. Even though new Writs,
both holy and unholy, proliferate and try to gain a hearing—”Silence once
broken”, Beckett writes in The Unnamable, “will never again be whole”.
4. Critical interactionalism, Expression and Symptoms
Erving Goffman provides an extremely useful contextualization of
symptomatic interpretation within a general theory of expression and
interaction—an analysis whose relevance for textual interpretation has
perhaps been underrated. In Strategic Interaction, Goffman theorizes the
interactant’s use of expressive elements which are in principle peripheral to
overt communication, but are avidly used by observers in order to glean
additional information before they act. Besides deliberately communicated
information there exist, therefore, the expressive aspects of interaction:
gestures and non-codified information produced by the subject under
observation (in our case, the author or more generally the sender, the agent
or social instance using the author’s text in a communicative process).
The central insight of Goffman’s book is that as a result of interaction, and
of mutual observation, these non-codified expressive gestures can be, first
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 22
of all, interpreted for meaning by an observer who goes beyond the
communicative dimension of the situation (in our case, the unfriendly
critic). Secondly, once the subject under observation knows his gestures
can be interpreted, they can be codified and produced as a constructed
show of spontaneity. Thirdly, this construction or grammaticalization may
in turn be discovered by the first observer, leading to a reassessment of the
interactional situation and of the value of those “expressive” signs. The
game of coding and uncoding may continue with further complications (for
instance, establishing a second level of communication through indirect
signs, mutually understood but “unofficial” or unacknowledged).
Successive complications become both subtler and more uncertain in
contexts where the interacting subjects have a close knowledge of each
other and of the situation. The information obtained becomes more and
more fragile and chancy in the upper levels of the game.
It is at this point that Goffman refers to “symptomatic” (that is, critical or
“unfriendly”) interpretation, as a strategy of textual reading—a
confrontational reading both of the communicated content and of its
pragmastylistic periphery:
Just as the process of communicating information itself expresses
information, so also a corpus of communicated signs has expressive
aspects. Discursive statements seem inevitably to manifest a style of
some kind, and can never be apparently free of “egocentric
particulars” and other context-tied meanings. Even a written text
examined in terms of the semantic meaning of the sentences can be
examined for expression that derives from the way a given meaning
is styled and patterned, as when Izvestia and Pravda are read by our
intelligence people “symptomatically,” for what the Russians do not
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 23
know they are exuding thorough the print. Indeed, the very sense of a
message depends on our telling whether it is conveyed, for example,
seriously, or sarcastically or tentatively, or as an indirect quotation,
and in face-to-face communication this “framing” information
typically derives from paralinguistic cues such as intonation, facial
gestures, and the like—cues that have an expressive, not semantic,
character. (Note 10)
This analysis can be extended to any kind of contextual information which
is not intentionally communicated. In reading the other’s text, we do not
limit ourselves to a passive reconstruction of the information it is intended
to convey: we also interpret contextual factors in order to obtain
supplementary information. Which in turn leads interactants to vie for the
control this supplementary and originally uncontrolled information—first
the (potential) observer, and then too the subject under observation (an
observer of the observer in his own right), in order to limit the observer’s
ability and gain an advantage in the interactive situation.
Just as it can be assumed that it is in the interests of the observer to
acquire information from a subject, so it is in the interests of the
subject to appreciate that this is occurring and to control and manage
the information the observer obtains; for in this way the subject can
influence in his own favor responses to a situation which includes
himself. Further, it can be assumed that the subject can achieve this
end by means of a special capacity—the capacity to inhibit and
fabricate expression. (1970: 10)
We see that this contest or war of wits between the observer and the
observed subject leads both to become specular images (with a suggestion
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 24
of potentially infinite specularity), both assuming the overlaid roles of
observer and observed. The process of observation and of the interpretation
of contextual and expressive signs becomes thus a fight to occupy the
privileged position of topsight—the perspectival and informational control
of the interactional situation, with the most reliable information available.
And since the observer’s labour is not merely passive, but rather an active
manipulation and fabrication of the reality which is to be observed, this
contest becomes as well a fight for the control of reality. Which of the
subjects knows what is real? Which of them can tell apart genuine
spontaneity from a constructed show of the same? Which one will
orchestrate and arrange an observable reality that is at once most subject to
control and most apparently spontaneous? It is almost a metaphysical
competition, especially if one considers that the Other faced by each of the
subjects is rather the Other-in-himself, the subject’s own interpretation of
what the other is and of what the other is able to interpret. The occasions
for empathy grow at a pace with the closeness of the competition,
providing excellent material for detective plots and stories of double
agents.
It is arguable that human subjectivity is constructed through the play of
reflection and through the internalization of communicative and
interactional processes. (Note 11). If that is the case, the close competition
and reflexivivity of strategic interaction provides a first-order space for the
development of subjective experience. The dialectical dimension of
experience is enhanced: any action is already charged with an expectation
of possible responses, in such a way that human action is always already
interactive: a dialectical response which allows for the attitudes we detect
in others, and for their possible responses to our actions.
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 25
Of course, a (literary) text is a peculiar kind of discourse act—one which
may be read in a context radically different from the one anticipated by the
author. In critical interaction, a new context for the reading of a text is in
effect a reframing of the text. Cultural materialist critics (such as our test
cases Alan Sinfield or Jonathan Dollimore) have been especially sensitive
to these changing dimension of the text, according to its “use” as it is
reframed in a variety of historical and cultural contexts, or critical projects.
This reframing involves not just the communicative context of the author as
sender, but also a re-sender (the agent who recycles or reuses the text) in
interaction with a new audience, within a new communicational and
interactional frame. Such reframings are conducive to an increased
attention to expressive and contextual factors on the part of attentive
critics—paradoxically, the contextual constraints on the text’s meaning
become more visible now the original context is no longer there, leaving
the text so to speak resting on a void of unstated assumptions. The
nonverbalized and expressive aspects of the text are brought into sharper
relief—and besides, the text acquires in the new context of its (re)use a new
layer of expressive and nonverbalized contextual signs which can be read
for additional meaning. It is only natural that critics (even uncritical critics)
will enjoy a position of topsight in the new game the text is being asked to
play.
This being the case, it is only to be expected that some authors will work
(“always already”) with this potential recontextualization in mind, finding
ways of orientating it, shortcircuiting it with preemptive manoeuvres, or at
least minimizing its effects. Or attempting to turn the interactive situation
of reframing and critical reading to potential strategic advantage, along the
lines analysed by Goffman. An example: Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel
House of Leaves (2000) includes not just a haunted house story, but also an
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 26
academic monograph with stylistic commentaries on a film in which the
protagonist depicts his experiences in the house. The fictional monograph
(“by Zampanò”) contains abundant critical references both to actual
critical essays and to fictional critical responses to that film; there are
further notes on the editing of this critical monograph on the film, etc. The
novel is thus not so much anticipating its critical response as
acknowledging the interactional context of critical discourse, and using it
as aesthetic material for creative writing. Such processes of built-in
reframing are perhaps the main semiotic foundation for literary
reflexivity—a mode of internalized interaction in its own right.
5. POEtics of topsight—and critical negativity
I’ve been re-rereading Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” and the rosary of
critical commentaries collected in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and
Psychoanalytic Reading (edited by John P. Muller and Brian J.
Richardson). The story itself deals with concealment, unveiling and
interpretation, and has become a test case or touchstone for interpretive
theories, especially psychoanalytic and deconstructive ones.
In the story, a plotting minister steals from the Queen a compromising
letter before her very eyes: he substitutes another piece of paper on the
table in the presence of both the Queen and King, when both men enter her
chamber and catch her unawares reading the letter. The Queen had counted
on hiding the letter from the King’s attention just by leaving it in plain
sight, but the Minister notices, he just picks up the letter and is now in a
position to blackmail the Queen. The Queen tries to recover the letter
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 27
through her agent the Police inspector, but it is nowhere to be found when
the police conduct a secret search of the Minister’s house. Enter Dupin,
amateur detective-gentleman, Poe’s spokesman and alter ego in the story.
Reflecting on the Minister’s methods and mode of reasoning, he soon
discovers that the letter was hidden in plain sight, barely folded upon itself
and passing as another letter. He orchestrates a diversion in the street and
substitutes another paper for the letter while the Minister was looking
away. In this paper, he intimates the Minister’s impending doom, mocks
his strategy, and reminds him of a long past grudge, a reason for Dupin’s
personal involvement—all this through the words of a tragedy on Atreus:
—Un dessein si funeste
S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.
Jacques Lacan analyzes “The Purloined Letter” as a manifestation (or
perhaps an allegory) of what he calls the “itinerary of the signifier”: textual
subjects, one after another, subordinate themselves to the role they play in a
(compulsively?) repetitive structure. Thus, the story is made up of two
scenes or moments, the stealing of the letter and its recovery. In each of
them, the characters are displaced to a new position in the interpretive
chain, the one previously occupied by the victim of their plans.
In the first scene, the king occupies the position of blindness (A); he can
see neither the letter nor the fact that the Queen plots against him or
manipulates his blindness. The Queen occupies her position (B) precisely
because she sees that the King cannot see, and she exploits her perspectival
privilege or topsight, the most encompassing view of the situation available
in the field of interaction. But the very way she has of taking advantage of
the King’s blindness (by leaving the letter in plain sight) makes her fall a
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 28
victim to a character with an even more encompassing vision (C): the
Minister who completes the triangle of positions: A who cannot see, B who
sees that A cannot see, and C who watches B’s strategy and turns it against
himself. What the Minister sees is that the Queen becomes vulnerable from
her topsight vantage point: she believes herself invisible to a third party just
because she was invisible for the first one—or rather, she does not allow
for the presence of a third party. That is why the third party can grab the
letter (the object of desire, a symbol of the text to be appropriated through
interpretation) and carries it away.
But, in his turn, the Minister repeats in a compulsive way B’s shortsighted
strategy which he had been able to turn so skilfully to his advantage. Again
he loses the topsight, as happened to the Queen before him. His dangerous
self-confidence (and a smug admiration of his own cleverness) lead him to
leave the letter in plain sight, in an ironic repetition of the Queen’s initial
movement, so as to conceal it through openness. And the move does work
with the police (the Queen’s envoys, and as such blind now by definition).
The Minister believes he is still at vertex C of the first structural triangle
(A: King, B: Queen, C: Minister)—but in fact he has already moved to
vertex B, the position of those who trust their own topsight, in a new
triangle: while he observes with satisfaction the blindness of the Queen’s
police (A), Dupin has set up a new triangle from whose vertex C he
observes the Minister’s manoeuvres and strategies.
Thus Lacan’s version of Poe’s tale. (Note 12). Jacques Derrida showed that
the analyst himself (Lacan) becomes trapped in this interpretive circuit, and
in analyzing Dupin’s moves he offers a vulnerable flank to whoever
observes his analytic operations, deconstructing this process of reading
(Derrida 1988). Dupin was himself a competent analyst, Derrida argues,
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 29
and had already announced to us that he could not escape the circuit he was
analyzing—that is, there is no possibility of a critical metalanguage
uncontaminated by the object-language it tries to analyze.
But Barbara Johnson (1988) points out that Derrida’s analysis was already
announced, or perhaps carried out, in Lacan, if not in Poe. That
deconstruction does not add much to the story, as the story was already
self-deconstructed. Derrida is a latecomer (and Johnson too, presumably)
and points belatedly to a blindness which is not such, since Poe’s story,
amplified by analyiss, has brought to light the compulsive mechanism
which governs the dialectics of of concealment and unveiling.
The story becomes thus a challenge for its interpreters, who observe from a
topsight position the blindness of those who think they can encompass from
their own vantage point the blindness of a third party. It also becomes an
allegory of the uselessness of trying to carry their efforts any further: they
will only repeat almost ritually a structure which is fixed beforehand, and
follow the steps already traced out by the characters in the story. Or so the
story goes.
The series of mutual deconstructions might thus continue indefinitely
without throwing much further light on the story. In The Purloined Poe we
find readings by Marie Bonaparte, Shoshana Felman, Irene Harvey, Jane
Gallop, Ross Chambers, Norman Holland, Liana Klenman Babener,
François Peraldi and John Muller. And in an article on “the hermeneutic
spiral” (2004), I too added my grain of sand, interpreting the Lacanian-
deconstructive reading of this story from the standpoint of communicative
interactionalism.
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 30
My point was that an act of interpretation pays attention to certain
significative elements of the object: its intentional aspects, and its textual
aspects, as well as some unintentional, and some contextual aspects, so as
to integrate them within an explanatory system which accounts both for the
conscious plan of the author (of the object text) and for the unconscious
elements which have been perceived by the interpreter once the text has
been recontextualized—elements which s/he interprets as symptoms, or as
non-conceptualized gestural language, and which only now, in the present
interpretation, reach an explicit linguistic formulation Style, expressive or
“gratuitous” elements not integrated in the conscious model of the work as
constructed by the interpretation, are a kind of textual gesticulation. Any
interpretation may choose to reply only to the communicative intention
perceived in the work (or in the complex constitued by the work and a
previous interpretation). That is what we call understanding, or
collaborative, criticism. Alternatively, the critic may interpret as symptoms
part of the perceived signification which is not integrated within that
communicative whole, and see the work (or the complex formed by the
work and previous interpretations—or the work in a new context) from a
topsight, i.e. from vertex C of the triangle. That is what we have been
calling critical criticism—quite often, confrontational or unfriendly
criticism.
For instance, in order to be unfriendly to the various interpretations of
Poe’s story offered in The Purloined Poe, we might point out some element
which disturbs the neat textual figure constructed by the critics (in this case
the double triangulation pointed out by Lacan). We may note that the
second triangle or episode of the story is not exactly a repetition of the first.
In the first scene, the Minister sees that the Queen sees that the the Minister
sees that the Queen sees that the King does not see, and (at the same time)
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 31
the Minister sees that the Queen has not planned in advance any defensive
manoeuvre against anyone who should see that, which means that she is
trapped in her own strategy. In the second scene, there are similarities, but,
facing Dupin, the Minister cannot see that Dupin is carrying the letter
away. Quite possibly he does not even know that he is fighting Dupin;
moreover he doesn’t perceive at this point (as the Queen perceives to her
own mortification) that he is trapped in his own strategy.
One could manufacture an allegorical interpretation which used these
elements which are left aside by the Lacanian interpretations. Of course
Derrida had already pointed out in that general direction, although other
latecomers try to criticize him and steal the letter from him. It is easy to be
(or try to be) overingenious in trying to recycle, or allegorize, this tale—
although Poe warns us already with his first word, the pseudo-Senecan
epigraph “nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio” (nothing is more hateful
for wisdom than an excess of wit). According to Johnson (1988), that was
the case with Derrida, who didn’t pay enough attention to the tale. The
story lets us know, between the lines, that the protagonist Dupin does not
escape this irony of fate or compulsive repetition: in figuring himself as
Atreus taking revenge from Thyestes, in the story’s closing words, the story
suggests that the curse that befell the House of Atreus will likewise fall on
the self-confident Dupin, and that he too will become a victim of his own
plotting.
Whoever has an interpretive scheme has a plan. In my courses on narrative
analysis, I tell my students that one must always have a plan, because a
plan gives you topsight; it makes you observe from the watchtower of your
superior information all those poor individuals walking around without a
plan—subordinated to your plan. However, plans will usually fail, and
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 32
possibly the most common narrative scheme, together with the heroic
quest, is the story of the failure of a plan (García Landa 2006d). One must
acknowledge of course that plans often have their own limited or local
successes. But even when they succeed, they usually do so in unforeseen
ways, a success mixed with failure and luck. These stories can only be told
from a higher viewpoint than the original planner’s—that is, from the
topsight of retrospection.
Similarly, any interpretive strategy can be deconstructed when it is
contemplated from the vantage point of a different interpretive project.
From there we see what the former critical eye cannot see—the back of the
first critic’s neck. This vantage point is afforded more particularly by
critical criticism—since friendly criticism tends to look with the first critic,
from his perspective or as close to it as possible; at most, it adds to that
viewpoint an optical instrument which may enhance it. Critical criticism,
on the other hand, tries to identify the blind spot in another’s reading—
although it is not immune, as a reading of Paul de Man’s Blindness and
Insight shows, to a blindness similar to the one it contemplates in the other.
(Note 13).
My argument on Poe’s tale has some similarity, then, to Ross Chambers’s,
who extracts from the story the conclusion that the meaning is not properly
speaking in the text (in the letter) but rather in the text’s situatedness in an
interpretive context, a system of relationships around that text:
for all its insistence on textual drift and the absent signifier, “The
Purloined Letter” does not deny meaning. Rather, it situates it, not in
the domain of signs, but in the world of the relationships that signs
serve to mediate. Dupin has ‘a quarrel on hand . . . with some of the
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 33
algebraists of Paris’, and his disagreement with these specialists in
signs (whose discipline depends precisely on the equivalence and
substitutibility of signs) stems from the fact that ‘occasions may
occur where x2+px is not altogether equal to q’, or, in other words,
that situations alter the value of signs and meaning is contextual.
(Chambers 1988: 303)
Chambers admits, too, that an interpretive article like his seems to assume
Dupin’s position, but he ends up recognizing the superiority of Poe’s text,
beyond the previous interpreters. (A conclusion which might seem to defeat
his argument… and anyway, isn’t Poe’s story the richer because of the
critical readings it has given rise to?).
In a similar way, Norman Holland recognizes the ingredient of vanity, of
masculinist and childish competitiveness, evident in the story’s combat of
wits—a competitiveness and vanity which is contagious for readers:
I share the ambition Poe reveals in Dupin’s disquisition on
mathematics, the feeling that his own intellect has powers not
granted to lesser beings. How intelligent I thought myself when I was
reading this story at thirteen; and I am not entirely over that vanity
yet, as you can see by my choosing to write about a story that two
major French thinkers have analyzed. They are all to be outwitted, all
these fathers like the Prefect or the Minister, or, for that matter,
Lacan or Derrida. (Holland 1988: 313)
For Holland, Derrida’s reading stems out of a need not to believe, to
mistrust. (We may recall here Derrida’s role as a major theorist of the
hermeneutics of suspicion). But even that negativity and absence becomes
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 34
pradoxically a kind of presence, he says: “Disbelief is itself a belief in
disbelief” (Holland 1988: 316). Interpretations follow a traject which
Holland sees as a function of the interpreter’s personality—which leads
him to argue for a transactional criticism, that is, “a criticism in which the
critic works explicitly from his transaction of the text” (1988: 316-17). The
advantage of recognizing that personal transaction, according to Holland, is
that we use the differences between various readings to enrich our mutual
experience of the text. The more so, I would argue, when through our
personal transaction we are able to identify and describe elements and
processes which are necessarily present (but subconsciously so) in any
other personal transaction with the text.
The question remains, however, to which extent can we absorb the
negativity of another’s reading, a reading which is not our own, in those
cases in which that reading does not focus on generally sharable elements
in experience. This is the real test for a transactional theory of reading—
how to allow for, and assimilate, a transactional experience which is fully
another’s? It seems that there is an element of self-denial or negativity in
accepting this otherness, in absorbing or integrating it into the text as we
finally see it, after the Other’s reading—(perhaps the text-as-transformed-
by-Another).
That is why John Muller’s Hegelian analysis of negativity in “The
Purloined Letter” is especially interesting. Interpretation appears in the
guise of a Phenomenology of Spirit, in Hegelian terms. (Hegel,
incidentally, provides us with the philosophical model for absolute topsight
on the evolution of Spirit and of understanding).
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 35
Why is it, Muller wonders, that the subjects in Poe’s triangular A-B-C
structure have to shift place once they acquire possession of the letter? He
answers through an Hegelian interpretation of that triad in terms of thesis –
antithesis – synthesis. Consciousness progresses throught the negativity of
antithesis (a negation which both transcends and preserves) and the
antithesis’ own subsequent negation, giving rise to an interpretive
synthesis.
Each moment of this complex process is initially given as if its truth
were known with certainty; but as the assumed truth is examined, it
is incommensurate with ongoing experience, it is negated and given
up in dismay, and a new perspective takes its place. (Muller 1988:
345).
Hegel presents this dialectical process of the overcoming of negativity
(aufhebung, sublation) as a triadic series of stages of consciousness whose
positions are defined as Being “in itself”, “for-itself” and “for us”.
Naturally enough, the final structure of consciousness which emerges as the
truth of things as they are is a structure “for us”, which according to Hegel
is not known to the consciousness we are observing. This places us in a
position of topsight. There is a price to be paid for this, Hegel notes—
overcoming the resistance of ego, which tends to become fixed in its own
position and to resist change or the assimilation of negativity. The ego
prefers a familiar state of affairs rather than a change to increased
understanding—it is the narcissistic attitude of consciousness, happy with
itself and with what it possesses.
But an increased understanding is also an increased acknowledgement of
intersubjective experience, through the assimilation of that negative
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 36
moment represented by an alien perspective. As Muller observes, it is also
in intersubjectivity that human experience is constituted for Hegel, who
argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit that human nature is actually
realized only in the achievement of a community of minds. This is an
insight that we might relate to symbolic interactionalism and its search for
sense in a continual process of transaction which uses semiotic objects
(such as texts etc.), rather than searching for sense than in the semiotic
objects themselves; that is, the sense is not in the purloined letter but in the
use which is made of it.
This would mean that rather than absolute truths, there are localized and
contextual truth effects produced through communicative transaction. A
truth effect needs, in order to appear to best effect, a dialectical contrast
with a false account or explanation, a false consciousness which we
contemplate as overcome (aufgehoben, from a position of topsight). Truth,
insofar as it is the bringing to light of concealed relationships, needs to be
contemplated from the outside, panoramically. The semiotic structure
which generates truth effects appears fully visible when we observe its
operation for others, e.g. when we observe the generation of a truth effect
for another mind (a truth we no longer share) for someone whose vision is
limited within the semiotic system which generates the effect, while we
ourselves contemplate, from an Olympian perspective, both the system
which generates sense and the subject’s viewpoint positioned to see that
truth, as structured or generated by that system. It is this semiotically
superior level that Lacan calls “the Symbolic” (vertex C of the
triangulation), while he reserves the name of “the Imaginary” (vertex B) for
the partial and insufficient system (the one we can easily conceive of as an
“effect”) which is contained by our own system. (The “Real”, by the way,
would be vertex A, a blind or unstructured point). In Jane Gallop’s reading
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 37
of Lacan (1988: 273), “It is the imaginary as imaginary which constitutes
the symbolic”—that is, the perception of a semiotic system as the product
of a positionality, a desire, an intention—something whose consequences
are only perceptible from the outside, from a more elaborate and insightful
symbolic position, a more comprehensive interpretive frame—or from the
topsight of hindsight.
The imaginary position is narcissistic insofar as it reduces the world to the
system it perceives (or rather to the system through which the world is
perceived). It does not see how that (imaginary) system acquires a new
sense once it is recontextualized: the lynx’s eye of the first interpreter is
blind to the new context. In the last analysis, the meaning is what we have
in front of us, and it is its very immediacy and presence that prevents us
from seeing it. Muller quotes a pertinent observation to this effect from
Stanley Rosen’s book on Hegel: “The essence of visibility, the visible as
visible, hence as most fully or actually itself, is invisible” (Rosen 1974,
146). Conversely, the emergence of sense to visibility is only the first step
towards its negation or its overcoming from a higher position of
consciousness.
Since what first appeared as the object sinks for consciousness to the
level of its way of knowing it, and since the in-itself becomes a
being-for-consciousness of the in-itself, the latter is now the new
object. Herewith a new pattern of consciousness comes on the scene
as well, for which the essence is something different from what it
was at the preceding stage. It is this fact that guides the entire series
of the patterns of consciousness in their necessary sequence. (Hegel
1977, 56; quoted in Muller 1988: 353).
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 38
This objectualization of the other’s consciousness is for Hegel analytical—
we might say critical—since it does not limit itself to the reproduction of
the structure of the first conscious gaze (B) on the object (A), rather, it
captures that perceptual relationship as a new object, from a third conscious
standpoint (C). Actually, this standpoint will only be fully objectualized
from the vantage point of a fourth position (D)—for the time being, it is not
yet an object but only the truth of the relationship A-B as it is manifested to
C’s topsight. Truth is, as we have argued, a continual process of
emergence—that Thought which in Luis Eduardo Aute’s song “cannot take
seat” (“Que el pensamiento / no puede tomar asiento / Que el pensamiento
es estar / siempre de paso / de paso, de paso, de paso”).
Thought may be just passing through, but we ourselves remain fixed—
especially in our texts—in one of those narcissistic, partial and reified
positions, while alien Thoughts go further on and transform us into an
object of interpretation and analysis (and laughter sometimes) for other
eyes which will observe us, without our being aware of that gaze. Such is
the fate of those who are read for their symptoms by critical critics.
Of course this phenomenon is continually taking place simultaneously in
millions of local contexts—not just in the grand Hegelian syntesis of an
abstract Idea which culminates (not by chance) in Hegel himself as the
watchtower of history. One can wonder whether Hegel was not bothered
by the suspicion or fear that he might be himself a local object, rather than
the prow of Spirit opening its way into the Absolute. Today it appears
inevitable to take into account such a dissemination of contexts, which
leads us as well to qualify or relativize C’s superior perspective over B and
A. C sees the relationship between B and A, and what is at issue in their
relationship for C—but may well be unaware of other things which are at
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 39
issue for them, that are being seen by B, or by A, not to mention D, another
myopic or long-sighted subject.
Returning to Muller’s Hegelian interpretation, “The Purloined Letter”
might be regarded as a symptom, or an intuition, of that negativity which
structures the relationship between action and its interpretation. (One
should take into account that linguistic negativity, for Müller, as well as for
Benveniste and others, also signals and preserves what has been negated,
drawing attention to it as a reference point—besides negating it). As Muller
points out, there is a disproportionate amount of negative elements in the
verbal surface of Poe’s story, and moreover, negativity also organizes its
macrostructure, the sequence of narrated events:
When we examine the story’s action from this perspective of
negation, we find that the story proceeds as a series of negating
actions: that is, each action is a precise negation of a previous action
of another and is, in turn, negated in the dialectical shifting of actors’
positions. But in each negation the truth of the previous position is
preserved. The Queen negates the King’s power but preserves its role
in her secretiveness as she turns the letter over and puts it down.
(Muller 1988: 364)
Muller, too, allegorizes the letter, in line with his own interpretive context,
when he sees it in its dynamic character as a “pure signifier” of negativity,
and an emblem of the repression which preserves experience in the very act
of structuring consciousness around the absence of that repressed gap. This
system of repression is identified by him (in a Lacanian mode) with
symbolic systems: the subject finds his own limits in symbolic action,
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 40
which therefore entails this element of negativity and of delimitation with
respect to another’s consciousness.
Psychic structure is established only through that negation to which
the subject must submit upon entering the register of the symbolic,
and this fundamental splitting of the subject into an sich and für sich
may be understood as constituting primary repression. (Muller 1988:
366)
An interpretive theory, too, is for Muller a system which establishes limits
and fixes senses—which constitutes a truth resistant to other systems and to
the truths they generate. Truths are for Hegel, in this interpretation which
brings him close to pragmatism, or to symbolic interactionalism,
communicative effects generated within a specific community.
For Hegel, truth is always embedded in a community that rests on the
structure of language whose history includes ‘the seriousness, the
suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative’ ([Hegel]1977,
10). (Muller 367)
This may offer some consolation to people who are considered to be “too
negative”. Poe himself had much of the negative about him, according to
Muller: “For Poe—as for Hegel and Lacan—negation is the dynamic
corollary of the ego’s self-assured notions about reality” (367).
It is the others—our personal unfriendly critics—who most visibly perform
the negative labour of limiting and correcting our egotistic perspectives.
But this negative dialectic can also take place within the individual
subject—within the self-interacting consciousness which according to
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 41
Hegel is intrinsically unsatisfied with its own limits. And therefore it is the
path of reflection to burn its own stages or to deconstruct itself, in advance
of the Other’s more radical negative labour. That is what Solger and
Schlegel called romantic irony—the relativization of the attitudes recently
assumed by the poetical subject, the continuous frame-breaking of the rules
of the subject’s games, giving rise to a dynamic self which escapes from
external limitations, or self-imposed limitations which are bound to be felt
as external ones—
Shedding off one more layer of skin /
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within. (Note 14)
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 42
NOTES
(Note 1). Fish refers here to the classical version of generative-transformational
linguistics formulated by Noam Chomsky in works such as Syntactic Structures and
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. On this subject see also Jahn (2002). One should note,
however, that Fish’s statement is not entirely accurate: Chomsky’s decontextualized
phrases have appeared at least in one specific context, Chomsky’s text—and this is a
reasoning which cuts both ways.
(Note 2). On the role of retrospection and retroaction in literary criticism, see my papers
in Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Firmer Than They Are.
(Note 3). My paper “Rereading(,) Narrative(,) Identity(,) and Interaction” provides a
preliminary approach to some of these issues.
(Note 4). For a detailed account of the notion of emergence as a process inherent to the
nature of reality and human consciousness, and to the temporal and creative unfolding
of experience, see George Herbert Mead’s The Philosophy of the Present. As to Oscar
Wilde, my paper “Wilde y el enigma de la esfinge” explores some striking aspects of his
interpretive theory expounded in The Critic as Artist. See also David Walton’s paper on
Wilde’s critical foresight (1996).
(Note 5). The term is Judith Fetterley’s (1978). Cf. the “symptomatic readings” we’ll
deal with in a minute, and my paper on the transformations of triangular communicative
situations when they are interpreted by a third (or rather a fourth) party (“Retroactive
Thematization, Interaction ,and Interpretation,” 2004).
(Note 6) Cf. Kerby on self-narratives: “A split or noncoincidence in the subject is also
apparent here due to the interpretive nature of this participation. One may not, for
example, accept the expression as an adequate representative of oneself, which may
cause the cycle to continue again. This cycle of ever new signification and appropriation
is, of course, none other than the dynamic framework within which personal
develoment takes place” (1991: 108). Kerby’s account of the self’s circular and
hermeneutic predicament in achieving interpretation through self-expression is also
influenced by Taylor (1985).
(Note 7). These five paragraphs come from my paper “Rereading(,) Narrative(,)
Identitty(,) and Interaction”.
(Note 8). Porter Abbott also distinguishes a third kind of reading, adaptive reading,
which uses the text as a starting point for creative textual developments. This is not,
therefore, a really interpretive or critical stance, although there are transitional zones
between these three kinds of reading. We will address Goffman’s conception of
symptomatic reading in section 4.
(Note 9). This is the perspective taken by critical egocentrism, memorably formulated
by Anatole France in the prologue to La Vie littéraire.
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 43
(Note 10). Goffman (1970: 9). In his notes to this passage, Goffman refers to work on
conversational settings by H. Garfinkel and H. Sacks, and to A. George’s book on
propaganda analysis (1959), as a good illustration of symptomatic textual analysis.
(Note 11). See Arbib’s paper (2000) and my commentary (García Landa 2007).
(Note 12). But the story remains notoriously open to further readings… A commentator
in my blog (2007b), Marcos, formulates a number of objections against the Lacanian
assumption of a “repeated trajectory”. I sum them up here:
1) the Queen’s position (in the first triangle) and the Minister’s (in the second)
cannot be equated, because the Queen ignores that the minister may be looking for
the desired object. The Queen acts on impulse, which is all she can do, but the
Minister’s action is “repeating” her gesture is strategic—perhaps inspired by a
precedent, the success of the Queen’s action. The Minister is actively trying to
hide through openness as a chosen strategy.
2) The object does not even exist for the King. He cannot see because he doesn’t
know what it is that he should see—there is “nothing” for him to see. But the
Police, the Queen’s emissaries, know what they are looking for, they know its
existence, they have a mission. Their position is completely dissimilar from the
King’s.
3) The Minister is an observer: he notes and analyzes other people’s moves, while
Dupin does not “observe”, he analyzes in advance, he foresees other people’s
actions (which is where the Minister fails lamentably).
Therefore, if there are two triangles, they are anything but a repetition of one
another.
Marcos points out that the story could be read as the conversion of the letter from
a non-object (for the King) into an object of desire (for the Minister) because it
has become an object in the first place for another (for the Queen). It eventually
becomes a scientific object (for Dupin) after it has become an object of
bureaucratic-professional labour (for the Police, the silliest subject in this story,
the only one who looks for the object but does not find it). Or perhaps a story of
how the context, or its knowledge, transforms objects and our relationships to
them by developing our perception of those objects.
It would seem that Poe’s story is ready now for a new batch of readings.
(Note 13). For a reading of de Man in this light, see García Landa (1998).
(Note 14). Bob Dylan, “Jokerman”, from Infidels. My account of romantic irony is
indebted to Schulz (1973) and Schröder (1981).
García Landa, “Acritical criticism, critical criticism” 44
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