On the Interpretation of Literature

I'm not sure yet if Jonathan Gottschall is a brilliant thinker or a charlatan. Of course, charlatans are often brilliant, or at least clever, so it could be that he's both. I suppose I have to read more of his work. Thus far, I think his critique of current literary study can be summed up succinctly as a misunderstanding (deliberate or not) of what he blithely dismisses as "defunct constructivist theory." When he announces, as he does in 11 minutes and 50 seconds into this video, that "for decades people in my field have mistaken the fact that it's difficult to be objective for a license to give up trying utterly," he may be speaking of the poor practices of some in the field, but that is hardly a knock against the various poststructuralist and structuralist theories he simply tosses aside.

To put it another way, the fact that your doctor can't properly detect your lung infection using his or he stethoscope doesn't call into question the very utility of the stethoscope.

Derrida is quite clear on this point (and in several places, but this particular quote is from Of Grammatology) as he discusses "a signifying structure that critical reading should produce" [158]:

To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading [158].

This excerpt comes as part of Derrida's larger argument that "there is nothing outside the text," which poor readers take to mean that anything goes (this interpretation is by far the most popular among critics who are either too stupid or too lazy to read poststructuralist theory in general and Derrida in particular with any sort of coherence), although Derrida is actually talking about the critical duty to respect the integrity of the text. You can also get to this idea, although in a different way, through the essay "Violence and Metaphysics" contained in the collection Writing and Difference. Both explorations are deeply concerned with the impossible yet necessary approach to what Gottschall calls "objectivity."

Whether Gottschall is correct or not in dismissing without addressing poststructuralist theories, it is clear he has a marketable interpretation of literature (but I suppose to talk about the literary marketplace would mean employing one of the interpretive frames he trashes without explanation, Marxism), because it is attracting funding. The New York Times reported recently on Gottschall et al's ideas as "The Next Big Thing" in literary studies. Another like-minded critic, Lisa Zunshine, is part of a research team that will be conducting literary research via MRI -- a very cool but also very expensive idea:

Ms. Zunshine is part of a research team composed of literary scholars and cognitive psychologists who are using snapshots of the brain at work to explore the mechanics of reading. The project, funded by the Teagle Foundation and hosted by the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, is aimed at improving college-level reading skills.

“We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts,” said Michael Holquist, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale, who is leading the project.

The team spent nearly a year figuring how one might test for complexity. What they came up with was mind reading — or how well an individual is able to track multiple sources. The pilot study, which he hopes will start later this spring, will involve 12 subjects. “Each will be put into the magnet” — an M.R.I. machine — “and given a set of texts of graduated complexity depending on the difficulty of source monitoring and we’ll watch what happens in the brain,” Mr. Holquist explained.

Interesting, yes, but I find it very intriguing that the object of the project is to "improve college level reading skills." It's noble goal and I can see how they're research will work in that capacity, although I will admit to being fuzzy on the details about how knowing what part or how much of the brain is stimulated by increasing levels of complexity will translate to teaching students how to interpret better.

It very well could be "The Next Big Thing" (although to read the Times' comment section for the article is every bit as depressing as reading any other online media outlet's comments, as I've recently discussed), but it certainly can't replace other approaches to literature (and I'm not accusing Zunshine or Holquist of this aim, either). Gottschall implicitly makes this claim by arguing that literary studies has not produced knowledge that can outlast the next generation of criticism (a claim he immediately has to qualify by excepting biographical and historical criticism -- archival research in other words).

My major critique is two-fold. First, on a rather specific level he doesn't even understand the implications of "The Death of the Author" (Barthes) or "What Is an Author?" (Foucault). He takes it to mean that "authors don't matter," which is completely not what the critiques argue. Second, and more troubling, is his complete straw-man argument about social constructivist theories and how to interpret data (he more or less argues that patriarchy exists only in the Western world and that the similarity of world folktales undermines feminist arguments about patriarchy -- see about 18:00 - 20:00 of this video). Unbelievable.

Look, the jury is still out as far as I'm concerned, but I have a fairly well-developed skepticism that tends to question master narratives. Perhaps Dr. Gottschall should keep in mind Derrida's comment at the end of the "Exergue" section in Of Grammatology:

The idea of science and the idea of writing -- therefore also of the science of writing -- is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I shall call it the concept of sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have already been assigned [4].

Reading choices.

I'm currently wondering if it's worth the time to read some Heidegger. I'm mostly through the introduction to Being and Time and I'm not sure I can stand reading much more than that. It seems dense without the beauty of Derrida and very very repetitive.

Multitudes.

So Walt Whitman, toward the end of Song of Myself, writes:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Whitman has just given us an incredible portrait of an America that is and
also of an America that he wishes would be, so this admission near the poem's
completion describes both the nation and the narrative voice (which, let's face it, is Whitman, or at least his idea of himself -- the poem is also known as "Poem of Walt Whitman").

There's nonchalance in Whitman's understanding of contradiction: who cares, he says, that he may not be consistent...very little about life is. In that attitude he was joined by at least two of his contemporaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson opines that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Among other things, Emerson is arguing against those who value sticking to one's guns above re-evaluating and getting things right (like the idiot pictured on the link). Emerson and Whitman are joined by one of the foremost philosophers of the 19th century and a man hated by the far right (look up Eagle Forum and harmful books -- I don't like to link to fascists), Friedrich Nietzsche, though many attempts were made to co-opt him.

One of Nietzsche's aphorisms from Twilight of the Idols reads: "I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." The idea of a system is inextricably linked to closure: its laws must explain completely or the system is inadequate. Understood on a basic level, there are plenty of "gambling systems" available to Las Vegas aficionados, but to date, the casinos still rake in massive profits. Something obviously is escaping those systems.

So here we are on the day of election. Maybe Whitman is smiling amazed at the transformation in American society from his time to ours.

Or maybe he's simply saying it's about time.

I'd be proud to count Bill Ayers as a co-worker.

Hell, I'd even be proud to number him among my friends, if of course we had ever crossed paths or had to work together in those ways that would draw us together as friends, which we haven't. I've never met the man in real life or fake life, and even if I had in fake life, I haven't yet devalued friendship to the point that I consider something like a facebook contact or knowing someone's name equivalent to being a "friend."

Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground (aka the WUO, aka The Weathermen -- don't get on my case about the name changes and timeframe, ok), an organization that carried out symbolic bombings against property -- the key point that all reports on the WUO seem to leave out is that the WUO took great pains to ensure that their bombings did not cause physical harm to living people. In fact, the only three people to die from WUO bombs were WUO members. They were not carpetbombing civilians in Cambodia. They were not firing on unarmed college students.

What do you do to stop a war? Do you try non-violence only? Or do you go with Malcolm X's dictum of "by any means necessary"? In the face of continued oppressive violence -- when it's obvious that you are functioning within an economy of violence -- does it not make sense at some level to respond in a way that "brings the war home" as the Weathermen (and SDS) put it?

The answer, for me, is maybe. It's not an absolute; you have to contextualize, historicize. That's exactly what Thoreau did between his widely-known essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) and his lesser-known and later "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859).

In the former essay, Thoreau is committed to what we understand as traditional non-violent means:

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

In fact, he calls this resistance a "peaceable revolution." Yet as a decade rolls on and it seems that the state has no interest in stopping slavery -- as slavery seems destined to roll through the newly acquired territories -- Thoreau changes his tune. In his impassioned response to John Brown's failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, for which John Brown and his Black and white comrades were condemned to die, Thoreau makes clear that there are limits to non-violent responses:

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.

Thoreau is clearly advocating intervention "by force" on the side of abolition. Furthermore, he makes clear throughout the essay that a government that countenances the violence of slavery should be met with violent resistance. Does this make Thoreau a terrorist sympathizer? Or is Thoreau simply following true to the doctrine that some Americans subscribe to that holds that "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government."

Again, there's nothing universal about it -- it's situational (I mean the document discusses a pattern that "evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism," not the actual reduction to a state of absolute despotism -- there's plenty of room for judgement calls), and I'd argue that in the face of the overwhelming unethical violence of chemical warfare, carpet bombing, and domestic assassination, it's utterly hypocritical to judge symbolicly placed, non-injurious bombings on the level of terrorism.

That stance does not open the door to defending every newspaper kiosk thrown through a Starbucks window or the assassination of executives of companies whose hired help executes labor activists.

From Fashion to Foucault.

If I were to continue writing about fashion, I suppose I would have to bring in Roland Barthes as opposed to Michel Foucault, since Barthes' work, especially Mythologies, would be so useful. However, I'm not really following that thread, preferring right now to stumble very very slowly through Foucault's lectures from 1976, Society Must Be Defended. In his 21 January 1976 lecture, Foucault asserts that in the investigation of sovereignty he'd prefer to investigate the "operators of domination," and that

We should not, therefore, be asking subjects how, why, and by what right they can agree to being subjugated, but showing how actual relations of subjugation manufacture subjects. [45]

So his analysis of sovereignty is going to have little to do with things like compacts, charters, constitutions, etc. -- or at least as we consciously perceive them -- and more to do with the role of power relations in creating subjects. To that extent, there's a remarkable similarity to Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, though Foucault is quick to criticize the totalizing aspect of Althusser's theory ("I think we can analyze them effectively only if we do not see them as an overall unity, only if we do not try to derive them from something like the Statist unity of sovereignty" [45]. -- a pretty clear critique of the Althusserian ISA).


Working backward, we can also attribute Foucault's methodology to Marx's famous dictum from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." However, Foucault would still see the prevailing Marxist interpretations of culture as too totalizing, as he preferred the play of systems against one another and the power relations that came out of competing systems, or as by-products of those systems -- or I suppose more to the point, the interplay of forces that throught their interplay create systems. In the end, though, I don't see much difference, because his mapping out of the regimes of surveillance, from the panopticon to the clinic, could all contribute to the logic of capitalism -- as opposed to the logic of the ruling class.


Anyway, before I get too far afield, Foucault takes "sovereignty" as his ostensible topic, but the exploration of sovereignty, while interesting in itself, also moves him toward a more general goal of establishing historical discourse as a battlefield: historical interpretation, historical representation, inclusion or exclusion as "world historical" are the ground where an eternal war is fought and never completely won or lost.

Perhaps that sounds simple, and maybe it is. Nietzsche more or less argues the same thing in the 19th century, but Foucault is making a much more sustained analysis than Nietzsche ever did, and in the end his point isn't simply that historical discourse is the location of interpretive battles, but also that it can only be so. There is no fixed finality. The battle is never ever over.