While answering forgotten boy's question about the necessity of a theory of mind to literary studies, I recalled a conversation with a fellow graduate student had about a week ago:
Him: The interplay of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are an aid to serious thought. They provide a systematic way of thinking through issues that, when applied to literature, open new avenues of investigation . . .
Me: But do you believe in the processes by which the Lacanian Tripartite comes into existence?
Him: I don't have to. The system itself describes something interesting about human experience, how it's translated into literature . . .
Me: But that system has to come into existence.
Him: No it doesn't. It has to do its job and it does.
Me: Couldn't almost any system so applied do the same job? I mean, why not a vertical hydrocarbon diffusion theory of ideology?
Him: Because Lacan's talking about the mind . . .
Me: So a groundless, bullshit theory of human cognition tops a sound, scientific theory when applied to literature? I mean, if its origins really don't matter, why does bullshit cognitive theory trump solid chemical theory?
Him: I see where you're headed with this, but Freud and Lacan were describing human relations, so their theories . . .
Me: Their bullshit theories . . .
Him: Their theories of human cognition are more likely to correspond to the kind of things you find in literature.
Me: Do you mind if I make you like an idiot when I post this?
Him: Only if you make yourself look like a hectoring asshole.
Me: Done.
Notice how my interlocutor granted me the argumentative edge—Freud and Lacan are pseudoscience—but then tried to sneak it in the backdoor by claiming that, removed of its baggage, psychoanalysis can still produce interesting readings of literature. I could almost find the strong form of that particular argument convincing: i.e. that since Freud explicated works of literature and Lacan translated those explications into structural linguistics, the insights generated by psychoanalytic theory are fundamentally literary. Had that argument surfaced, I would have had problems side-stepping it (for reasons I'll return to shortly).
My friend's initial concession denuded psychoanalytic theory of its inherent explanatory power. No longer could the truth-claims of psychoanalytic theory justify the interpretative moves made through it. The justification becomes something more literary—something like "generative of interesting readings"—but it also lost its purchase, in that it is no longer descriptive of a cognitive process. At this point, you can't argue that a vertical hydrocarbon diffusion theory of literary interpretation is inherently irrelevant, only that it's bad. If the psychoanalytic model works even if stripped of its cognitive content, then other models, ones which contain no cognitive content, could generate equally pregnant analogies applied alongside literary texts.
The common response—"Then why aren't there any out already?"—I can answer by appealing to the argument my friend doesn't want to make. Namely, that there is something ludicrous about scouring the sciences for theories adaptable to the study of literature, a point which returns us directly to the defense of psychoanalysis. Freud struggled to understand the workings of the human mind, and he did so largely through the production of narratives and their influence on our mental lives. (Even the interpretation of dreams falls into this category, with the emphasis on secondary and tertiary elaborations.) He produced a powerful system of interpretation because he made more hay than anyone previously of the materials at hand.
So I thought before reading his letters. Think I'm a hectoring asshole above? Imagine I'm your therapist:
Every session I tell you same story I had heard as a child – the one about the woodsman treed by a pack of wolves – and ask whether your mother told it to you too. You always respond that she told you nothing of the sort. I always respond by becoming visibly frustrated and unresponsive. Maybe my frustration worries you—you're vulnerable in the therapeutic environment, and you have come seeking help—so you let me hypnotize you.
While in this highly suggestible state, I repeat the story about the woodsman and the wolves and ask whether your mother told it to you. You deny for the first couple of sessions. But eventually, while hypnotized, you admit that she did. You don't remember doing so, but I assure you that you did and you believe me. Why?
I'm your doctor. I wouldn't lie.
You're thrilled that doing so has allowed me to discover the cause of your distress. That dream you told me months ago—the one about the white wolves outside your window—clicks into place. Now I can interpret it. Now you can find peace. (Or light the torches 'longside the road to mental health.) You have made us both happy.
Oh, didn't you know, I have something to gain from this too. I'm building this whole conceptual ideas around developmental traumas. Discovering yours helps me immensely. Thank you. I couldn't have done it without you. I'm lucky—that's what I'll write to my friends—I'm lucky that your experience fit into the general pattern I've established. If it hadn't, I would've had to rethink some of my operational premises. So thanks, Wolfmann, for saving me the embarrassment.
Do I need to rehearse the literary equivalent of Freud's "interpretive" method up there? Do I need to force upon some unsuspecting text an inflexible analytic designed to yield a response whose discovery I will then turn around and claim is fortuitous? Who wants to see that? No one. And you know who knows that better than you or I?
Dr. Freud. That's why the narratives of his sessions studiously avoid mention of his badgering. Why would he admit that his discoveries were the psychological analogue of setting up a mining equipment store, planting gold nuggets in some thick quartz veins, then claiming to have hit the mother-lode? The analogy works better than you might assume: he frequently hypnotized or drugged patients into highly suggestible states and asked leading questions. Over the course of additional sessions, they would then "discover" the very thing Freud had planted, thus providing more "evidence" for the validity of psychoanalytic theory. While I doubt Freud did this intentionally—the mechanics of suggestion were well-known, as many of his contemporary mesmerists would attest, but poorly understood—he certainly did it, and repeatedly, and for decades as he constructed his theory of cognition.
I write at length because this particular fraud deflates arguments about the genius of Freud's interpretations. He wrote about them magnificently, that remains, but the notion that their brilliance as interpretations earns them a place in the literary-theoretical toolbox is highly questionable. I could say more—much, much more—but if I stuff a week's worth of thinking into a single post, what will I write about tomorrow?
forgotten boy: You could address the question I asked instead of dancing around it.
Me: I certainly could. But I not "dancing around" so much as "circling in." Give me a couple of days. I'll get there. For now, we can discuss the merits of studying sketchy analytics after its shady past has been revealed.
My knee-jerk response here? I'm staring down at 'em and they appear 100% jerkless. I understand that I'm sailing crowded seas in criticizing psychoanalysis, but I don't think I'm doing so unthinkingly. I don't think psychoanalysis "actively destructive," as I take pains to note that there are wide swaths of literary history about which it's highly instructive. Granted, I don't think it universally instructive, which one complaint I make here; namely, that some critics universalize it by downlplaying or denuding it of its uniquely psychoanalytic valences, and that others do so under the assumption that its claims are universally applicable. In short, then, I don't think my complaints have tapping "the Derrida two-step" (although I can see how they appear, superficially, to conform to those categories).
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 04:33 PM
I'm not referring to your argument as a whole -- only to your response to CR's remark about the relatively innocuous character of the Lacanian triad, which you said that you could not resist making and which you admitted was counterproductive. And I quote:
"(Nevermind this point, however, as it's counterproductive. Just couldn't let it slip. Reflex, you know?)"
What is "knee-jerk" but a metaphor for "reflexive"?
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 05:00 PM
Yeah, based on your relatings of what the letters contain, he's going to fail this test, but maybe he's still valuable. You wouldn't call it responsible, but maybe Freud was reading something other than the Wolfman when he cooked up the theories he harassed the Wolfman into supporting? Why was he cooking it up? Why was he so invested in it? It doesn't seem to me totally outlandish to suggest that Freud sometimes expressed something with some sort of truth value. I find a lot of the detailed scenarios in Freud ludicrous, but never the less believe that he was on to something, at least with respect to how unaware a person can be of what he or she is feeling and how much we can lie about it in words. I feel the same way about my loose wanderings into early Lacan (I definitely never got near the bells and whistles mentioned above). It was a mistake for both men, I think, to twist their ideas into a grotesque semblance of scientific discourse, which, with its parsimony and the pace at which it confirms or discredits hypotheses, just couldn't accomodate all that they wanted to say. What do I think they wanted to say? Well, I fear I'm about to embarass myself, but my impressions of Lacan's ideas about how human beings imagine themselves square reasonably well with my day-to-day experience. I see many strains of cultural conservatism as the result of a fear of relying on anything but the most linguistically stable and determined visions of the universe.
I am totally ignorant about the historical context of Freud and Lacan's theorizing (the state of the art of psychology in Vienna and Paris, etc) and about elite thought, but it seems to me that the observations Freud and Lacan thrust into the conversation human beings have about themselves are novel (by dint of having the original been forgotten or misrepresented) and worthwhile in the context of contemporary popular culture, even if their explanations for those observations don't hold water. In that context, there's certainly no explicit and regular commentary on the unexpressed role sexual psychology, for example, plays in all kinds of decision making.
Posted by: Timothy Francis Sullivan | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 07:29 PM
I think that Freud was probably very valuable to science, warts and all. It's just that we aren't used to seeing the first people in a field in the 20th century. If you were reading about one of the early, famous alchemists, or even Newton (who did a lot of what we'd consider to be occult studies), you wouldn't expect scientific modernity. Of course Freud's work now appears to be mostly wrong, but that happens to all scientists.
The problem is in holding on to the work in the very different context of literary studies. It's so ... conservative.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 06 July 2006 at 08:04 PM
Touché, Adam. (But you'll note that I didn't make that argument, only forwarded a conditional I didn't think to be the case. Now can I have some cookies?)
Timothy:
Their theories weren't novel, nor were their concerns. Freud's debt to Nietzsche is deep and well-documented. Ronald Lehrer's Nietzsche's Presence in Freud's Life and Thought (1995) is the first book that springs to mind, but others abound. That said, there's a difference between the way Nietzschean thought has influenced literary study and the way that psychoanalytic has, e.g. people make Nietzschean moves, but they don't defend his assumptions as Scripture the way many psychoanalytic thinkers do. Which makes sense, after all, since psychoanalysis needs the unconscious—be it described in a Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian &c. manner—in way that someone who professes to be a Nietzschean doesn't. I think this is because psychoanalysis is structured like a science—I like that, has a familiar ring to it—whereas Nietzschean thought works like philosophy. Its faulty foundations would invalidate its observations in a way that, say, Kant or Hegel's wouldn't. (Marx falls under the same stricture as Freud in this respect, I think.)
Rich:
Play nice, now.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Friday, 07 July 2006 at 04:02 PM
On literature and truth: well I don't read literature for 'truth'. It's because I've despaired of ever finding truth in literature (and theory for that matter) that I've turned to philosophy. Thing is, I'm not even convinced there's truth in philosophy. I think there's only truth in mathematics and logic, and that only because 'truth' is arbitrarily defined in such a way that if you reject the definition, you reject the whole system (the sciences partake of truth to the extent they can be reduced to mathematics).
Then again, I don't like to equivocate about truth -- that is, I think that often people confound 'ethical', 'metaphysical', and 'logical' truth into one big bundle -- which is very convenient if you want to morally condemn a philosophy or theory you dislike (it isn't true? Well then it must be evil too! Because false and evil are really synonyms! -- that ol' evil as the absence of God, i.e. of truth that we took from our friend Augustine). But here I am airing opinions like so much dirty laundry...
I guess if I read literature, it's (1) for aesthetic pleasure (in the Kantian sense -- i.e. something that has nothing to do with 'concepts') and (2) for cultural capital that I can use in writing my own literature (if I ever get around to it) and to impress enemies and friends.
Finally for empirical work in literature -- I agree that literary studies are empirical -- in a sense! But I think that literature isn't quite empirical in the way that a datum is empirical -- it strides the boundary between the "ding an sich" and the phenomenal world -- and I think that's why there's so much argument about literature. Because there are some who want to apply a philosophical method (i.e. conceptual analysis) to literary studies and there are others who want to apply an empirical method to them. Both are valid, I think, but both have their limits. I'm just saying that Freud can reveal something about our concepts to us even if he failed to prove empirical claims. I'm thinking of Freud as philosopher (and he was apparently well versed).
And I would by no means outlaw criticism of Freud, but I think that it's important for that criticism to be conceptually as well as empirically engaged. The thing I don't like about empiricism is that it tends to grind thought to a halt. You can know someone's wrong and still misunderstand him to an incredible degree. I'm more interested in knowing what a thought means than whether or not it is true.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Friday, 07 July 2006 at 05:25 PM
I don't for a second contest the idea that a lot of psychoanalytic theory is awful, or orthodox, or crazy.
As an undergrad, I remember being perplexed by the idea of psychoanalyzing characters in books, which seemed to be what we were expected to do, or to explain that the personality of a given novel--always novels, never poems--was perverse despite being, on the surface, aesthetically and morally admirable when, regardless of whether or not psychoanalysis is valid, we were students, not psychoanalysts. (And this is to say nothing of my peers, who threw around terms and phrases like "the unconscious is structured like a language," pretty much indiscriminately, like young children playing dress-up.)
But at the same time, when I encounter a bookish friend who says she loves her stepmother, then proceeds to complain, heatedly, for twenty minutes about how her stepmother always buys books and never reads them, I think something like, "hmmm, she's expressing something she's not aware that she feels. Or maybe I think, "she's aware of the fact that her stepmother bugs her, but can't bring herself to verbalize it (even if she knows I know what's going on and feels ashamed of the fact that she can't verbalize it)." Maybe this kind of narrativizing of a person's psychology is incorrect, but it can be useful in some sort of practical way, ie I might not bring up how much I like to buy books at a dinner at which my friend and her step-mother and her father are present.
Again, I wouldn't dream of "diagnosing" a novel, but isn't this just the sort of intuition we apply when we're reading something, rigorously and non-rigorously alike. And isn't there some sort of overlap between my understanding of my friend's psychology and a Freudian one (I'd have to think of a different example for Lacan)? Or is this an ordinary, just-plain-old non-freudian kind of thinking that I'm, due to Freud's vernacular significance, conflating with his much more arbitrary, ideosyncratic, foolishly elaborate system of ideas?
By the way, I'm not asking these questions to be annoying. I'm working through them pretty earnestly and very much appreciate this whole thread.
Posted by: Timothy Francis Sullivan | Friday, 07 July 2006 at 05:45 PM
It's definitely fun to show up as a character in a post, particularly when the character is so accurate that he says exactly what I would have said. So let me start by seconding everything "forgotten boy" says up top in the actual posting.
I question whether or not an archaeological approach actually suffices to remove the writer from the text. After all, a purely intertextual approach, devoid of historical understanding, would be prone to terrible errors. To use your example, such a critic might conclude that "gay" meant "homosexual" in 1831. Even a historically informed approach seeking to abolish the author would have to make tedious qualifications: do we really need to put "James Joyce" in quotes if we're referring to Nora's presence in the later novels, and want to muster biographical information in support?
By positing the author, it becomes possible to assert interrelations between her published fictions, her personal writings, the facts of her life, the contents of her library, the issues of her day, and so on. These relations are the tissue of good criticism. In cases where a purely archaeological approach has been tried, the result has been a false compilation of apparently unmotivated differences between texts, leading to a reductive account of writing as the production of difference (Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida). Sylvia Plath certainly wanted to be different from Marianne Moore, but she had many other influences on her work besides the desire to be singular.
Positing an author does not mean positing conscious intentionality. Naturally, a writer may not know how a particular detail fits into an overall scheme. The problem with "conscious intent" is that the only signs we can have of it depend on an author saying something like "What I meant by Raskolnikov's horse dream was...", and doing so in another text which is far enough "outside" the original to be authoritative.
So, assuming we don't want to limit ourselves to readings proposed by the author, but do want to retain the author as a thinking being existing at the intersection of various discourses, we have to explain why it is legitimate to bring certain details of the text together as a reading. Freud's model of the unconscious is useful because it explains how there can be an "author without an author" -- that is, how an author can be saying something in a given novel, while heatedly denying in other texts (letters, speeches, interviews, etc.) that she believes anything of the kind.
It would be wonderful if history alone could substitute for a theory of mind. For a given critic, it probably can -- witness Foucault on Velazquez, Durer, Artaud, etc. But for criticism as a whole, it cannot, since history in general misses the specificity of Molly Bloom and ALP, who are based on the real Nora Barnacle.
So we are back to the original problem, which is explaining without Freud how producing an interpretation of a book is different from producing an interpretation of tea leaves or ox entrails...while at the same time refusing to grant Heidegger his intentional, conscious claim that his book (Being and Time) proves Hitler is the authentic instantiation of German Da-sein.
Posted by: forgottenboy | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 12:55 PM
I see no reason why one is ever obligated to "posit an author" -- especially because an 'author' so often ends up being a particular idea about the meaning of a text (the raging debates on Virgil for the past 50 years). Further, I'm not convinced that we shouldn't interpret the word "gay" in a 19th c. novel as "homosexual" -- why, for the sake of historical accuracy? So I should submit myself to the perceived context of a work of literature in order to "understand it"? Are we reading the same "text" today (Borges -- even if it was meant in satire)? I've never been very fond of history, I don't find it particularly interesting, perhaps not even necessary (suppose I'm doomed to repeat myself) -- and above all, I can indeed "read" something incorrectly. You can't stop me, you shouldn't try to stop me, and there is no logical inconsistency, provided one consistently misinterprets. God save us from the legions that are *really* interested in Charles Dickens: I put myself before any authority, living or dead.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 01:11 PM
FB: I agree with your assessment of the necessity of psychology to analysis, but it's unclear why one needs psychoanalytic theory specifically to conduct such analysis, especially since it seems possible to find authorial intent (or probable intent) without relying on overt statements by the author. After all, in the example you give, I don't think anyone says that Joyce was unconscious of Nora's presence in Ulysses or the Wake. To find her influence, we use a combination of personal/biographical details and details from the texts themselves. Of course, determining what's intentional and what's not is not always clear-cut, and you're right that we can't limit ourselves in trying to determine meaning. Certainly Freud changed the way we conduct such analysis--indeed, we may have him to thank for most of it--but that seems different from the question of whether psychoanalytic theory itself is valid.
Alex: Hey, man, you can do whatever you want to do. But what are we talking about? Are we talking about you alone in your room being wrong on your own (consistently, of course), or about you being a teacher and scholar whose opinions and readings--in class and lecture, but also in published works that people might use to form their own opinions--influence others' readings and thinking? I hope it's the former, because in the latter case there is a clear (to me) obligation to teach students how to understand and think about history, context, and preconceptions. You can look at it as an economic ethics question--these students or their parents are paying for your class, you owe them something intellectually rigorous--or as an intellectual ethics question--students should be taught critical thinking, not the rote reapplication of modern standards and thoughts to past texts. Misreading is easy; reading is hard.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, there's a joke on the phrase "call a spade a spade." There's a misconception nowadays that that phrase is based on the derogatory use of "spade" to mean "black person." A friend of mine thought that this was Wilde's meaning; I found evidence to the contrary, and she changed her opinion. Had she been cannier, she would have refused to acknowledge the relevance of this evidence--what difference could historical context make on the reading I have already decided to form? Now, Oscar Wilde is not only a damn racist, he's a racist jokester--much more interesting! Earlier, Rich (rightly) called a certain scholarly practice "not intellectually serious." That's true here too, and I'd go farther--putting forward such a misreading, without taking any interest in what the text is intended to mean, is intellectually unethical.
Posted by: Tom Hitchner | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 04:05 PM
Anger meets anger. Well let me see how I am to understand your argument: as a private scholar, working off of my own resources, I can of course advance whatever sorts of arguments I please, but as a publicly funded scholar being paid by the parents of our nation's children (precious resource!) and the State I am to produce only rigorous arguments, man of science that I am.
Not only am I commanded to do so by the authority of the State, but it is my own ethical obligation to *think correctly*. As an aside I must admit I am very confused about "correct thinking" -- the laws of logic are, after all, the laws of thought? Now a 'law' like gravity -- well I can't break that, even if I try (nonetheless I might say that I want to break it. This is where invention comes in -- the airplane and the spaceship circumvent its authority -- in authoritative fashion!) -- but logical laws? I can break logical laws: watch me break them: "P and not-P". There. I have just contradicted a logical law.
Now of course we might ask whether or not this contradiction makes any sense -- perhaps not (but it depends on who you ask!). But I can write it down. I can produce a faulty analysis of a piece of literature. Etc. But since there is no law preventing me from doing so, we have to invent ethical laws that claim it is my responsibility not to do so. All well and good -- but then we also might have disagreements about such laws. Some of us might think there are good reasons to follow a law, others not. Does this mean there are no "valid laws"? No -- it means that what I can get away with, I can do.
Do I have an 'ethical responsibility' to follow these laws in any event? No. I have an ethical responsibility only to what I conceive of as the ethical law. Now this process of "oonception" might be very complex, might indeed refer to things like "human nature" and "reason". So be it -- but I have recognized them as authorities first. I recognize no other authority than myself -- AS FAR AS FORMULATING WHAT'S RIGHT.
However, in terms of what I can do -- well if I disagree with one of your ethical laws, if I think it is unethical, if I want to break it -- then I needn't, as you enjoin, retreat into my corner and work only on my own funds (yes, while I'm workng at Starbucks, I suppose -- scholar on the side, eh? Of course it's nice to have all that university stimulation, to have *help*, etc. But we only grant help to those we agree with, to those we like...and 40 hrs. a week doesn't take anything out of you, no sir; I'm surprised there aren't more Joe Theories out there!...): what I need do is find someone who does agree with my principles and is willing to support me.
I think this position is not relativistic. Someone DOES GET PUNISHED, in the end. Or he is fugitive. I will say this: I used to get F's on class assignments when my high-school teachers thought I was "stretching the text". I will always resent that. I will always defend the right (this is MY ethical law) of others to publish and think whatever they want, no matter how loony or misconceived). Further, I will defend their right to funding. I don't think anyone should be condemned to the 40 hr. grind if he can commit himself to something he finds more meaningful -- and if it means espousing postmodernist absurdities, so be it! What is essential is not the quality of one's work, but the devotion of engagement with that work. It is a vulgarity of our age that we view scholars as simply a means to their manuscripts. What is important after all is not the theory, but the theorist!
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 05:26 PM
Now I would just like to add:
1) Of course one is always experimenting! But what is a scientific experiment? Hypothesis -- Observation -- Conclusion? What a horrible formality. What is the difference between the hypothesis and the conclusion, first of all? The conclusion either affirms or denies the hypothesis, and one goes in *looking for the hypothesis*. That's the problem right there. I think we ought to abolish the thesis statement! The thesis statement has great evils to answer for! When I speak of a textual experiment, I mean this -- try mangling the text, distorting it, reading it in odd ways -- and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. It is the sum total of readings and not any one reading that contributes to our knowledge, that in some sense IS our knowledge. I urge any method whatsoever, any substitution of meaning no matter how ludicrous, because WE HAVE NO GUARANTEE THAT OUR CONCLUSIONS WILL ACCORD WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS. Sometimes it is through a spectacularly false doctrine, it is in the analysis of such a doctrine, that we make real progress. We are confronted with a work that all at once reveals something essential about what is right precisely because it is so wrong.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 05:40 PM
FB:
As Tom says, why exactly do you need Freud for this? I understand that you need some version of non-conscious connection, but why the Freudian model? Is it because, as CR intimated, that it's the most literary one available? Also, I don't think those who support the Freudian model punt its explanatory power the way you do here; by which I mean, the word "desire" crops up in their work, so their arguments entail a larger psychoanalytic apparatus than you think necessary for literary critics.
In short, I don't think literary critics think that a basic, psychoanalytic assumption is a means to connect disparate texts without reference to an author. The reason? Because, to take your example, you use this posited unconscious to imply the existence of the repression of a certain set of concepts or convictions. Repression is convenient, in that it allows us to write into a work the anxieties we believe it betrays; but that's not a theory of mind, that's theory of the novel-as-mind, one which works in accordance with psychoanalytic dymanics. Now, you could run an odd, but possibly valid idea out there:
That psychoanalysis fails as a theory of human cognition, but successfully explains "how novels think." Only at this point, the idea of a textul unconscious seems a feint to avoid claims of authorial intent. But maybe it's a successful one?
Also, a better way to think about what I proposed in the post itself would be that I favor a descriptive literary criticism, as opposed to an explanatory one, i.e. one in which the identification of a significant absence stops before addressing how that absence was produced. (Because, if we're talking about a textual unconscious, it wasn't produced, strictly speaking. A textual unconscious would be a static entity, incapable of further "development.")
Or--and this addresses Alex's point too--I could say "What Tom said." He said it well, whereas I'm this close to whipping out The Political Unconscious and hashing through some thick thought.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 05:47 PM
I suppose I just think that we aren't tolerant enough of error. Error -- heaps and heaps of it -- is a necessary part of science. I think the urge to eliminate the absurd from all action and thought -- to procede 'rationally' -- is unhealthy. It separates out science, mathematics, and philosophy from literature and then commits us to extraordinary mental gymnastics in order to guarantee literature a place in the realm of Knowledge.
Really I think some of the instincts people display in the face of science are quite healthy: the instinct, for instance, to prefer Freud over modern psychology, because *he makes more sense of the world*. Suppose that you're a pragmatist: you hold that what's true is what is useful. That means: if I can use something and if I feel that this use confers upon me (my thought or day to day life) a benefit, then I should use it. Science has conferred many benefits, but Freud perhaps confers others.
People argue, "Well if you don't like science, then stop takng antibiotics" -- but perhaps the type of benefits that science confers in terms of health are not commensurable with the type of benefits that 'psychology' confers upon the spirit.
Really, as I've stressed, I know very little about Freud -- but I don't think that "falsifiability" is the end of knowledge (in both senses of the term). I think that this kind of a view of science impoverishes us, makes life unbearable and unbearably absurd. And I find myself again and again in the awkward position of knowing that 'science' and 'method' are well respected and that one must be 'methodical' if he wants respect, but on the other hand disliking science and feeling rather freakish for being the only one not to readily bask in its splendour.
I just think -- and perhaps I would agree with Feyerabend on this -- that method stifles as much as it stimulates. Those who are methodical maybe publish what they like -- but if I had to follow a method, I would surely perish. And perhaps there are others like me. Who still deserve a place in the academy and who deserve more than a grudging recognition from the biologists.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 06:05 PM
[X-commented with Alex. Will answer his post-Tom comments now.]
I think you're overextending for the sake of argument here, Alex. We can all produce a slew of hypothetical readings which, were they forwarded, no one would want to defend on accounts of their lunacy and/or offensiveness. That said, I do think there's an inherent responsibility to both our fellow scholars and our students. For example, if you cite me, you have to cite my words, not a version redacted to what you think I mean by them. (If you think I betray a racist streak but I say "I'm not a racist," you can't cite "I'm...a racist" as evidence that I am.)
No matter what you believe about me, you still have to address the words I've put on paper. Same holds, I'd say, for more illustrious authors. If you come to a text and impose a theory upon it, you do violence to its internal logic. People always nod to the truism that Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses are novels which teach you how to read them. I'll do so here, but expand it to say that all novels teach you how to read them, if you do so honestly. Pick up a Dickens novel: if you know what to look for, you can see the seams. The pressure of serialization is burned into it, be it in the form of conventional short-cuts, typically Dickensian work-arounds, &c. Now you can respect those formal properties, or you can posit entirely different explanations for them: a repressed desire to diminish the Other, say. Nothing wrong with that.
However, if you do that, you have to be honest that what you've done isn't literary criticism, relly, but a kind of psychological speculation which sometimes uses the tools of literary criticsm, but isn't exactly literary criticism. Now, we see that speculation in literature departments, and that's fine. I do it myself, and all the time. Practically live outside the text, I do. But I do so responsibly, in a manner devoted to explicating the text before me, not asseverating on the finer points of developmental psychology.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 06:14 PM
Alex, let me assure you that I don't think that any scientist really cares whether you use Freud to read or misread or whatever. And no one cares whether you have a method or not -- many scientists don't.
Speaking for myself, what I'm talking about are social roles. If you want to be an academic, part of that role is intellectual seriousness. If you want to be a theorist without intellectual seriousness, you're being a bad academic. I could get into a long, involved argument about why this makes prescriptive sense, but it's simpler just to view it as descriptive.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 07:36 PM
I would agree with you that I have a responsibility towards my students and interlocutors and that that responsibility is in some sense one for "truth", I mean in Heidegger's sense of "letting Beings be". But likewise I have a responsibility to myself. I think that if one can violate the text, one can also slavishly submit himself to its authority. Yes -- texts *do* ask that we read them in a certain way, I will agree with that (but we need to clarify this point -- a whole science in and of itself!) but sometimes we have an ethical obligation *to ourselves* not to read them as they demand. Take for example the Odyssey:
At the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus, after having killed all the suitors and slayed the chambermaids, sends off one the bards to 'tell others the good news'. I think this passage opens up the possibility that Odysseus is not a hero at all, that he has somehow appropriated Homer's text for his own ends, and that we as readers have an obligation to recover something -- a different text -- the 'real' Odyssey. In other words, the ending of the Odyssey undermines its own authority as a text. In cases like this, we have to rewrite a text rather than just expound it ("literary criticism" indeed).
Further, I've always found the Jewish tradition of interpreting texts (Midrashic, Talmudic) rather inspiring. 'The Bible' becomes the center of all sorts of language games and sly manipulations and in this way it is no longer a text at all but a discourse in which the community legislates and recognizes itself. 'Higher Criticism' stifles this kind of a discourse, in some sense disposses 'traditional' communities. Texts in short are meant to be used, first and foremost, are constantly being rewritten and reinterpreted. The reason I think we can interpret "gay" in a 19th century novel as "homosexual" is that the text itself changes with the language. Yes, we can always 'recover' some 'original meaning' -- but that recovery itself is a revision. I believe in the historical method, but I don't see why I should consent to an ontology that includes 'history' (i.e. 'history' consists just in co-ordinating 'historical data').
I don't think finally that these positions are incoherent. They amount to a skeptical epistemology and ontology supplemented with a bit of pragmatism. My main problem with history is that we tend to totalize it, which begs certain important questions (of contingency and freedom).
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 07:49 PM
Rich --
I think constant engagement is absolutely necessary -- one must devote one's life to study and thought. But even stating this is going a bit to far, because I don't want to favor any one kind of engagement over another. There are different kinds of engagement -- Derrida, for instance, I think of as being extremely engaged, and Quine or Russell as well -- but of course, for each of them "engagement" would mean something very different. I think all of them deserved pay for what they did -- but I don't think there's anything common to their methods that would serve as a 'standard of engagement'. On the other hand, I will consent that it's the community who decides on the standard and not the individual (and this is just the way it goes). But if an individual can convince a community he is engaged and deserves pay -- well that's sufficient.
And I keep repeating this, but I don't think that this is 'relativism'. Each community of course will have to decide for itself what counts as 'engagement', but its views will continually evolve according to certain rules ('axioms of engagement') -- and it may even add or drop an axiom. I simply insist that no one community has all the possible axioms, that perhaps there is an infinite set of non-contradictory axioms, and that ultimately what favors one axiom over another is the requirements of a given community at a given time. We are always within such an axiomatic system, so we literally cannot step out and decide upon "what all communities should do" -- because when we do so, we are just engaged in revising our own system.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 07:57 PM
"Well let me see how I am to understand your argument: as a private scholar, working off of my own resources, I can of course advance whatever sorts of arguments I please, but as a publicly funded scholar being paid by the parents of our nation's children (precious resource!) and the State I am to produce only rigorous arguments, man of science that I am."
Is it inadequate to respond with, "Pretty much, yeah"? On the off-chance that it is...
First of all, yes, I believe there is an ethical obligation to do a job you're paid to do; if you believe otherwise, you won't be getting a call from me when I need someone to help me move out of my apartment. This is not a matter of abstract sanctimony or short-sighted capitalism when you consider that the money it costs the university to pay you each year could be used for scholarships for disadvantaged students.
But there's also a principle that's completely outside of money, which is that I believe we (meaning all of us, not just scholars) are obligated to use our talents and knowledge in a worthwhile fashion. Simply wanting to escape the grind is not enough. The "ethical law" you're asserting sounds to me like, "Hey, it beats working," which is problematic since the path of academia is not open to everybody. Getting a job teaching at a university is to a large extent predicated on a number of societal privileges (just look at that 95% white program we have!), and while being a professor is by no means a cushy job, compared to how most people in the world have to make their living it's paradise. On that basis, a belief in the right to permanent employment to tinker around for one's own amusement is not particularly sympathetic. I'm not saying we all have to get jobs in the foundry, but we could at least make sure that what we're doing is socially beneficial.
And let's not mince words: misreading is harmful. Misreadings are why books are banned in school and public libraries all over the country; people refuse, or don't know how, to read Huckleberry Finn on its own terms. Misreading is what the Bush administration did with intelligence reports from Iraq and is doing with global warming, and plenty of people were and are deceived into making the same misreadings. I don't mean to tar you with that brush, but it seems to me that teaching students to read carefully and accurately is our highest obligation, and has real social and political importance. (Your mocking reference to our children being a "precious resource" confuses me--are you saying that any given generation of human beings is disposable? Or that teaching them is a joke?)
Now, it may sound like I'm saying there's a single right way to read a given text. Not at all; we're all coming at this from different angles, and the inherent subjectivity in literature, art, and history forms the boundary of my empiricism. Perhaps at MLA I'll hear you read a paper on the use of "gay" in 19th century fiction; as long as you present good reasons, that won't bother me. I would hope, though, that if someone presented evidence that seemed to contradict your claims, you would modify or retract the claim, point out flaws in the evidence, or find new evidence of your own, rather than simply saying, "Well, that's interesting but irrelevant; now you go your way and I'll go mine." To do the latter is not to liberate yourself from the empirical stranglehold; it is to disavow intellectual discussion altogether.
Posted by: Tom Hitchner | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 08:08 PM
I continue to think that my first responsibilities are to myself and that I only have responsibilities towards others to the extent that my responsibilities to myself entail my responsibilities towards others. A society that condemns anyone to meaningless labour is atrocious to me, but it would be all the more atrocious if I condemned myself to such a life as well.
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 09 July 2006 at 09:02 PM