"Yes: everything could be this way or that. The point of doing research is the pleasure of using the indicative."

— Franco Moretti, "Relatively Blunt" in Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2009), 173

Harder Better Faster Stronger

Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant gives an excellent gloss on Latour's notion of "trials of strength." He says, sensibly enough, that a scientific theory is akin to a bridge built over a creek: what gives it reality is its ability to withstand pressure over the course of time, to maintain its structure when other similar objects around it are being destroyed. "Reality, for Latour … consists of gradients of resistance. Some things have a high degree of resistance, some do not and are easily toppled or shattered."

He then concludes the post by extending the claim to literature, which obviously made my ears perk up:

Finally the case is similar in literature. The thesis that the best selling novel is the best novel fails to attend to the manner in which endurance is one of the crucial dimensions of reality or strength. To be sure, most people prefer Dean R. Kuntz [sic] to Joyce… However, the comparative popularity of Dean R. Kuntz compared to Finnegan’s Wake is not what establishes the reality of the object. Kuntz’s novel Intensity, while perhaps enjoyable, has very little staying power and very easily passes out of existence. However, when speaking of works like Homer’s Illiad, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, we are talking of works that are like a well built bridge, somehow clearly carrying traces of the historical setting out of which they emerged but also having the capacity to transcend that historical setting, to resonate like two strings of a guitar against one another producing differences in other historical settings, never, somehow, becoming cliches in the way that Kuntz’s mustached Scotch drinking heroes seem to immediately embody the cliche of the Reagan era, faux-sophisticate 80s man that loses our interest when this time passes. There is something here about how the language holds together, the thought holds together, the themes hold together, that give these works high gradients of resistance to dissolution. Indeed, it is the resistance we encounter in reading the work, the difficulty of navigating them, the richness of their multi-stratified and resonating diverse meanings that functions as an index of their strength or their ability to resonate in multiple changing historical settings like the cone of Bergson’s memory without losing their originality. They are like the art of pantomime, in a strange way, where the good pantomime manages to extract the pure event of a particular action from its causal context such that it becomes capable of appearing in any context as a singularity. The greatness of these works, their strength, does not lie in the attitudes people have towards it – like coffee one has to learn how to read Joyce and at first it is painful – but rather in the sturdiness of the construction that allows it to endure.

Hmmmmm. While the extension of the analogy is tempting, I'm not sure that Bryant is able to solve the overwhelming question of cultural value so fast. I'll leave aside the usual queries about class and subjectivity and who gets to decide what "resonates," both because they're too easy and also because they're not really in the spirit of Bryant's speculation. Instead I'll just ask: what would a total failure of a trial of strength look like for a literary text? Less like a negative evaluation by posterity, as Bryant imagines, and more like simple illegibility: a text in a dead language, or one of which no copies have been preserved, is the weakest possible text, in Latour's sense. So while in one sense, Bryant is right, Finnegans Wake probably has a much better chance of resonating fifty years from now than Koontz's Intensity, in another sense it is a much weaker, more fragile assemblage, one that, without the Skeleton Key and our biographies of Joyce and an enormous (but finite) amount of other paraphernalia, would be within spitting distance of illegible. Whereas Intensity, I'm guessing, will be roughly readable as long as current vernacular English remains in a recognizable state. So which text is stronger?

But what I like about Bryant's formulation, in spite of everything, is that it makes the social use value of literature the criterion for textual strength without immediately conflating use and exchange value (as materialist approaches to literary sociology, like Franco Moretti's, often risk doing). On this view, a writer like Joyce is not just his fluctuating reputation, or his sales figures: he is also, as the card-carrying New Critic would insist, his texts, which can stand up as well as anybody's to trials of strength. And his texts are stronger than Koontz's, because they are more likely to satisfy examiners in a number of different social contexts, over a longer period of historical time, than Koontz's are, which will some day probably only be read by people who have a thing for late-twentieth-century period horror fiction.

But of course Joyce — any author, but particularly Joyce — is not just his texts either; he's also, as the card-carrying poststructuralist would insist, his paratexts, not only all of those he refers to in his work but also all of those books and articles that have been written on it, and all the other works that have been inspired by it. So it seems to me that Bryant is being unnecessarily formalist when he says that "[t]here is something here about how the language holds together, the thought holds together, the themes hold together, that give these works high gradients of resistance to dissolution." It's taking the metaphor of "construction" too literally: any given Joyce text is indeed a very sturdy construction, or assemblage, but it's one assembled not only by Joyce himself. It's in this sense that Joyce's texts, like any writer's, are social: that is, they require many actors and actants working together to give them their full strength, value, or "meaning."

But still. Doesn't this privilege the particular constructions of literary critics, academic scholars, and "highbrow" readers above the millions who are certainly experiencing some reality when they read a Koontz book (whatever else you say, you can't take that away from them)? Could we say, then, that Koontz may be real to more people, but Joyce is real in more ways?

Geoffrey Hartman, Geoffrey Hartman

Many weird moments of recognition today, reading around in Geoffrey Hartman's Beyond Formalism. This is what inevitably happens when you take a look at work by any prestigious and influential academic or intellectual of the past: you start to see where certain ideas, attitudes, turns of phrase originated, or at least became codified (perhaps not for the first time), to survive in other scholars' essays, lectures, marginal notes, classroom banter or department small talk. The university system is an echo chamber, and words uttered as loudly and persuasively as Hartman's ultimately travel all over.

Anyway, there's a lot I could pick up on, but I'll focus on one thing, which kind of builds off Mike's recent post about a kind of return to structuralism that may or may not be happening in the American academy today. A running theme in the book is Hartman's anxiousness to avoid charges of elitism which I guess were being leveled at English academics — particularly formalists — around that time, and to develop a rationale for the teaching of literature that pays equal attention to both form and history while avoiding mystification. (Sound familiar? If not I guess we're not having the same nightmares.) This desire — to reach more ordinary citizens while holding on to literary and academic respectability — somehow got bound up with the project of structuralism, as embodied in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. From the first essay, "Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure," one can scent the pre-Althusserian humanist hopefulness in the air: "The aim of myth criticism … is to save the common nature of man — despite fragmentation, specialization, and ideological wars" (9); and, even more touchingly: "[c]ulture aims to do away with classes, as Matthew Arnold says; we are all spiritual Marxists" (11).

The best hope Hartman sees for this on the American scene is Northrop Frye, who, as Mike points out, Hartman saw as a North American analogue to the kind of structuralist myth criticism Lévi-Strauss was doing. In the second essay, "Ghostlier Demarcations: The Sweet Science of Northrop Frye," Hartman sees Frye as making a further advance on the democratizing impulse of the New Criticism, "the attempt to open literature to the direct understanding of students of any background." This is a way of seeing the New Criticism that we sometimes lose: not a power grab by prestige-hungry literary scholars, nor an attempt to banish history by ideologically motivated aesthetes, but a concerted effort to distribute cultural capital to the dispossessed: in other words, an American Leavisism. The scientistic trappings of the New Criticism, which Frye took even further, is seen not as a pretension but as a genuine attempt to make literary knowledge more accessible to students: "To systematize criticism is to universalize it, to put its intellectual or spiritual techniques into the hands of every intelligent person, even every child" (25).

But Hartman also charges Frye with "fus[ing], or confus[ing] … two notions of universality": the "scientific" and the "evangelical." The "scientific" notion insists on the subject's learnability, the establishment of "elementary principles explainable to everyone" — thus, as in the sciences, requiring a caste of literary scientists who decide the rules, and explain the principles, and keep things from getting too muddled. The second, on the other hand, "holds that critics have stood like priests between literature and those desiring to participate in it" — it thus opposes the critic's claim to a special status vis-à-vis the child/student.

Hartman very shrewdly zeroes in on this tension within universality. As I see it, the two notions are not really incompatible — we may need scientist/priests to teach students the rules of literature, as we do the rules of math, but then want them to step aside and let each reader perform the operations as they will — but the emphases are different, and the difference has large consequences for how we view literary criticism and professorship. The scientific notion continues to value the critic/professor, but just makes her role a lot more specific and specialized; the evangelical notion devalues her, by insisting that her job is to do no more than provide an elementary introduction, and then step aside.

My problem with Frye's "evangelical" position, as Hartman represents it, is that it works well only if we view all of literature as a set of static categories. That is, if we think that, once a student has mastered a typology of literary genres, periods, forms and authors, they will have a practical mastery over the field of literature. This (very weak) version of structuralism lacks any sense of agency, of the ways by which this diachronic structure (The History of Literature) is affected by a new synchronic arrangement (Literature Today). (Hartman himself makes a similar complaint about Frye's methods, on the level of the individual work, when he says that "Frye's concept of literary structure is consciously spatial. It depends on a disjunction between our immediate experience of literature, which is guided by the tempo of the work, and criticism, which lays out the completed pattern spatially," 33.) In other words, one of the most significant properties of literature as a social practice is that it is susceptible — one might even say especially susceptible — to undergoing revolutions and revaluations. These happen, in fact, much more frequently than Kuhnian "scientific revolutions" or Foucaultian epistemic breaks: they are happening almost all the time, as styles and texts and authors become de- and revalued by various agents at various levels of the structure. So that one of the most important parts of understanding literature is understanding how literature continually reshapes itself, as a structure.

So, my argument runs, we need professors and critics not only to judge literature, but also to understand intuitively how literature functions, in something like the way that first-order practitioners (authors, publishers, informed readers, etc.) understand it. This view is something like Frye or Lévi-Strauss' synoptic vision, but it includes within it the principle of change, of agency (and this necessarily includes a sense of the limitations on change and agency that the literary field imposes).

But, a further question: could one teach this principle of change? Is there something operating here besides intuition, and a good working knowledge of the structures literature has formed in the past? And, further yet, would it be a useful skill to impart? Could understanding how a loosely held-together structure like literature adapts itself to cultural change help students seize something of the logic of cultural change around them? I think it might, but one has to avoid the short-circuit, the scholastic fallacy that to understand is to master. One would have to emphasize that understanding literature as a structure or system improves your chances of affecting it, or even participating in it to the extent of reading at the level of its first-order practitioners, but that "figuring it out" is not the same as "seeing through it" (as some versions of Marxist theory, grounded in ideology critique, still suggest). The advantage of an approach like Franco Moretti's is that it's bringing back the sense of literature as a contingent structure; but what it doesn't offer is any idea of how one might impose oneself into that structure: how to contribute to it or, if you prefer, fight against it or change it. Similarly, Frye's schema would teach students how to classify the literature of the past, but not necessarily how to look at two literary works of the same period — as one does, for instance, in a contemporary literary magazine — and relate them to each other, and to the structure of society. And this is what people do all the time with literature (and other forms of art): it's ordinary. Which is exactly why we should be teaching people to do it better.

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 8

(Here’s another picture of Wolfgang, in a nice Christmas sweater.)

We are now getting to the "science" part promised by Panofsky's subtitle ("Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art"): “Insofar as art history as a pure science of things wants to understand the style of a work of art in stylistic analyses and even in pictorial descriptions it must assume a basis in the fundamental and individual artistic problems. Therefore the fundamental and individual art-theoretical problems are assumed to be already established, even in cases where the practicing scholar could not give an account of these problems and concepts themselves and might even deny their existence.” In other words, the fundamental conceptual problems are what the empirical, practicing scholar is responding to in the work of art, whether she knows it or not. In this respect, it’s like natural science: one geologist who looks at a rock with a certain set of concepts and another geologist who has another set are looking at the same rock, with the same properties, they’re just describing it differently.

“But as art history is only a pure science of things up to the point where it navigates on the basis of the problems as ascertained art theoretically and not when it reflects on them. In instances when this should happen, when the results of art-theoretical investigation do not govern the choice of observation and the construction of concepts within research from the outside but rather directly infiltrate art-historical thinking, art history would move from denoting and interpreting a set of facts in the material world to denoting and interpreting an abstract relation between the formulation of a problem and its solution. At this point art history would cease to be a pure science of things and a restricted historical discipline and would change into what might be described as a transcendental art-theoretical discipline or, more modestly and perhaps more accurately, as a fully interpretive enterprise” (63)

The distinction here is not between a good and a bad kind of art history (which, for Panofsky, would be an art history with and an art history without theoretical guidance, respectively). It’s between two modes of the good kind of art history: on the one hand, empirical observation informed by theory, which EP calls a “pure science of things”; and on the other, a kind of metadiscourse undertaken by theorists (or by the researcher wearing her theorist hat) which, while staying with the object, shuffles the middle-range (not the fundamental) concepts around, and is thus “fully interpretive.” (Interesting how Panofsky makes the big Kantian claim — to be “transcendental,” to be trafficking in the realm of pure metaphysical ideas rather than physical objects — and then backs away from it at once. Lorenz and Elsner, in their introduction, note that this essay is heavily Kantian in a way that Panofsky’s later, American work is not. So maybe that’s what’s going on here.)

This latter, interpretive theorizing is what Panofsky wants to have the right to do, but he, crucially, doesn’t think that everyone should have the right to do it.

“Researchers need not accept this change of states as long as they are content with a solely stylistic morphology, but they must be ready for it the moment they want to move from an understanding of stylistic symptoms (of style in its external sense) to an understanding of the stylistic nature of art — that is, an understanding of style in the internal sense or Kunstwollen” (63). Staying in the first mode, then, of the “pure science of things,” researchers can do plenty of things with artworks: they can do the kind of morphology, for instance, that was getting underway in Russia around that time and culminated in the work of Vladimir Propp (and is currently being revived by Franco Moretti): they can see what looks like what, and how a certain form might transform into another. But, invoking a comparison with medicine, Panofsky insists that these forms are only “symptoms.” (Among the many, many tempting detours I’m avoiding going down here is this pre-Lacanian/Althusserian/Žižekian use of “symptom.” Partly because I’m not convinced that I’d ever come back.) They are the outward signs of the will to make art, the Kunstwollen, but no matter how closely we examine them we aren’t going to fully understand why or how the artist did what she did.

“Because the principles of design in a work of art are nothing other than the artist’s comments, executed in this way or that, on the fundamental and individual artistic problems and because the underlying stylistic principle is nothing but the artist’s comment, executed in this way or that, on the artistic ur-problem, the principles of design and the underlying stylistic principle itself can only be understood if the understanding is based on an explicit confrontation with the problems” (63-64). So this is a funny kind of biographical criticism: one that wants to know what the artist thinks she’s doing, her intention, but that also views everything she does as nothing more than “comments” on pre-existing artistic problems, both fundamental (haptic vs. optic) and individual (how do I differentiate this column from the wall, or whatever). (“Comment” is a very weird word; I wonder what the German is.) But Panofsky’s opponent here is not Romantic, producer-centered theories of artistic creation (as Barthes’ and Foucault’s would later be) but hardcore empiricist art historians who think all one needs to do is collect objects and describe them: his point is you need to know the basic problems, which have been answered (or “commented on”) throughout art history, in order to know what the artist thinks she’s doing.

“Therefore art history as a pure science of things, because it only navigates according to the artistic problems but does not reflect on them, is capable of understanding stylistic criteria and their aggregates but not principles of design and their unity.” This is clear enough: art history without theory (or even a-h that excepts fundamental theoretical concepts, but doesn’t work with a theorist to refine and relate the second-order concepts to research findings) can draw up “criteria,” say what counts as art based on all previous known examples, but they can’t get a handle on the “principles of design” that determine artworks (principles which exist in the minds of artists). (Cf. Wittgenstein/Austin/Cavell on criteria. Or don’t.)

“This deeper understanding is reserved only for that form of study that is familiar with those problems that art history in the strict sense only assumes as known and that, by reflecting on them with the help of an art-theoretically constructed fundamental and specialist conceptual system, is capable of systematically dissecting the relations between the formulation of a problem and the solution of a problem.” The repeated key word here is “reflection,” an activity that follows upon fundamental theory and practical empirical research and reconciles them. (It seems to me that Panofsky owes more of a description of what reflection would actually look like, aside from some super-smart theorist ringing changes on a data set. But maybe it can be reconstructed from an account of his actual practice. I guess this would be a good first place to look.)

Then Panofsky does some algebra — which I hope I will be forgiven for leaving out because I don’t think it’ll make things any clearer (at least, for me) — the gist of which is: “In this way and only in this way can scientific study grasp style in its internal sense or Kunstwollen, which can be understood neither as the sum of sensible qualities nor as an aggregate of stylistic criteria but exclusively as unity within and above the principles of design, which not only requires a tacit relation to the results of art theory but a direct collaboration” (64-65). Collaboration between research and theory alone has a hope of getting a handle on Kunstwollen — that is, achieving a rough scholarly approximation of what it’s actually like to make art. (Value judgment mine.)

Panofsky’s final move, in section B, is a really interesting, ambitious one. It’s one that opens up the heretofore uncharted territory of comparativism, or the relation of the findings of art historical research (once it has passed through the refining process of theoretical reflection) to other disciplines within the faculty of the humanities: “If this Kunstwollen can reveal the immanent sense of the manifestation in question then there is no barrier to comparing this sense as articulated in visual-artistic phenomena with the sense of musical, poetic, and even extra-artistic phenomena. Absolutely all philosophical and religious doctrines as well as juridical statues and linguistic systems must be understood as solutions of philosophical, religious, juridical, and linguistic problems.” After having carefully limited himself to the discipline of art history throughout, Panofsky is all of a sudden advocating the application of his “fundamental problem” approach to the humanities as a whole. But even this is not all. “This is why all humanities disciplines are related to a science of art. Just as a science of art attests that within a certain artistic manifestation all artistic problems are solved in one and the same way, so the humanities in general can attempt to show that within a certain culture (which must itself be determined as regards epoch, region, and the persons involved) all intellectual problems, including the artistic, are solved in one and the same sense.”

Wait a second… “all intellectual problems … are solved in one and the same sense”? What would that even mean, practically? Also, how are we to define “a certain culture” — where does one stop and the next begin? (Cf. Wittgenstein on towns and concepts, or don’t.) It seems as though Panofsky’s made a quick turn from neo-Kantian to way way Hegelian, from Kunstwollen to Kulturwollen, a jump that seems to make EP himself a little nervous — witness the very tentative end of the paragraph: “Though one cannot ignore the dangers inherent in the practical application of this process of comparison, today perhaps practiced all too often (the will to unveil analogies can easily lead to interpreting the phenomenon in question in capricious and even brutal ways), one cannot deny on purely theoretical grounds that it is undoubtedly possible and justifiable” (65). I think he’s almost definitely gesturing at Marxism here, and perhaps other hasty totalizations of the social world — but here Panofsky seems to think that the risk of such theoretical abuses is a small price to pay for the promise of such a grand rationale for the humanities.

Franco Moretti on Joyce

"Ulysses is indeed static, and in its world nothing — absolutely nothing — is great. But this is not due to any technical or ideal shortcoming on Joyce's part, but rather to his subjection to English* society; for Joyce, it is certainly the only society imaginable, although he just as certainly condemns it, through a hyperbolic presentation of its worst features, to a future of paralysed mediocrity (a future that Joyce, with a stroke of genius, places in the past, as if to underline his consummate skepticism: one can always hope never to reach the negative utopias of science fiction, but if a negative utopia came into being twenty years ago, and no one realized it, then the die is truly cast…)" (Signs Taken For Wonders, p. 189)

I don't agree with this as an interpretation of Ulysses, but it's brilliantly formulated.

* Weirdly Moretti insists on reading Joyce as an English, rather than an Irish, writer.

Notes on Twee #3

This is from Franco Moretti's article "Planet Hollywood," about the global diffusion of film genres. He's trying to explain the fact that, in the US, one in four box-office hits are children's films:

"'Children's films' is a sloppy definition, of course: it points to the audience, not the film — and to an audience which is moreover quite problematic. Children, after all, don't usually go to the movies by themselves and, as adults must take them, a little generic paradox ensues: whom should the film be for — the adult, or the child? Faced with this problem, the fifties offered either straightforward fairy tales (for the child: Cinderella, Snow White, even Fantasia), or those Jules Verne novels I mentioned earlier (which were much more successful than the fairy tales: another sign of a market directed at the adult). But today the two forms have converged, blending into a hybrid which appeals to children and adults alike: E.T., Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, the various Star Wars and Indiana Jones — these are stories designed for a new human species of savvy children and silly grown-ups (Homo puerilis). Their god is Steven Spielberg (and Benigni is his prophet: Life is Beautiful — what a childish adult wants a child to know about Auschwitz.).

"In one film after another (Jaws, Close Encounters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Jurassic Park; even the uncanny detail of the girl in red, in Schindler's List), Spielberg has not only chosen stories in which children and adults are somehow involved together, but where the ambiguities so typical of (adult) life are defused by the (child's) desire for polarization so well described by Bruno Bettelheim. The best example is Schindler himself; this Third Reich shark turned benefactor, who offered an incredible chance to study the contradictions of historical existence. But Spielberg is not interested in understanding complicated things, and in his hands this figure out of Dostoevsky, or Brecht becomes — nothing."

Graphs, Maps, Trees

Graphs: Yeah!
Maps: Maybe.
Trees: Um…

I make that choice

So I braved the rain and made it to the Charisma conference at Columbia yesterday, and I'm very glad I did. I only saw two of the six papers, but both were pretty great. The first was Mary Poovey on "Charisma and Responsibility in the University Setting." Most of her talk was essentially rehearsing and commenting on work by two historians: William Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University and Ian Hunter's "Learning the Literature Lesson: The Limits of the Aesthetic Personality." The basic questions in play in Poovey's talk were these: (a) what separates the kind of knowledge gained from humanistic studies from that gained in studying the sciences; and (b) how much does teaching in the humanities depend on charisma, either of the instructor or, by virtue of affective transfer, of the author or text? She pointed out that the basic practice of English teachers is to get students to pay as close attention to a text as they would to a beloved, charismatic, but slightly inscrutable teacher, thus prolonging the magical teacher/student relationship over the course of the student's entire life. Her basic idea was that English departments are devoted to producing a "self-divided, self-defining subject" (I think this may be a quote from Hunter actually), thus "normalizing a model of subjectivity that requires endless cultivation," which is a little stark and Foucauldian for my taste but I definitely take her point. At the end of her talk she gave a couple of possible alternatives to this charisma-based pedagogical practice, but she didn't seem too excited about any of them (getting in a couple of jabs at Franco Moretti in passing), and finally broke off by saying, "I had to stop writing my paper here because it just started to seem too depressing." Maybe so, but also potentially really productive, I think: I'm going to try and see if I can think about some of these issues more with regard to my own teaching.

Also fascinating was Michael Warner's "Preachers and Publics," which put forward an argument that evangelical Christianity was one of the earliest and most successful forms of mass communication under modern public sphere conditions. The fact that evangelicals could assemble a congregation anywhere at any time, not just in a church or other consecrated space, was what allowed them to spread so effectively (and, later, to globalize). Leaving aside the content, I was super-impressed by Warner's rhetorical style and ability to present a complex argument clearly and effectively, making use of both historical evidence (including this totally amazing clip of the preacher Kathryn Kuhlman) and Habermasian critical theory, lightly worn but thoroughly absorbed and understood. He was also really poised and articulate during the Q&A session, which (typically for Columbia, it seems to me) got a little more pointed than is the norm at our genteel alma mater.

Well, anyway, you shoulda been there. (And I shoulda stayed for Eli Zaretsky and Andreas Kalyvas, probably, but I was getting hungry and was already intellectually overstimulated.) But thanks to the familiar miracle of the public blogosphere it's almost like you were there, experiencing all that academic charisma yourself, isn't it? I bet you can almost taste the free coffee.

P.S. Despite the snazzy poster image, Bill Clinton was never invoked, though there was a pretty interesting discussion in the Q&A about the quasi-evangelical rhetorical style of Barack Obama, and how it makes certain Democrats uncomfortable. Warner made the point that the element of danger — the idea that the speaker is out on the edge, saying something potentially wrong or disruptive — is a key element of the evangelist appeal, and that Obama has that right now (referencing the recent New York Times article about fears that he'll be assassinated). Surprising how rare it is for realpolitik of any kind to pop up in an academic literature conference (again, at least at Princeton). Just one more reason to wax Michael Warner's car.