Interrogating the Status Quo

The Limits of Critique
by Rita Felski
University of Chicago Press, 2015, 228 pages, US$22.50
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The muddy prose literary theorists employ is a surface defect pointing to deeper deficiencies in their thought processes, one of which is their remoteness from reality. All of us are immersed in life, authors recreate it in words, critics assess the authors, theorists write on the critics, and in recent decades meta-theorists have scrutinised their fellow theorists. This is critique at many removes from life; many category mistakes can intrude between the cup and the lip. It’s now become a self-sustaining enterprise—critics can conduct theory wars among themselves with minimal or no regard to literature itself. So I was pleased to read that a United States literary theorist near the top of the tree, Rita Felski, author of numerous books and editor of the journal New Literary History, had written a book The Limits of Critique, arguing that theory in its present form seemed to have run out of steam. In the UK Terry Eagleton, in the vanguard of literary theory for decades, has recently published a revisionist work along the same lines.

Rita Felski breezily takes us through her own intellectual history. She began four decades ago believing in Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, then became a devotee of the Frankfurt school, graduating to an understanding of Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, Lacan and the rest of them to becoming conversant with post-structuralism and deconstructionism, queer theory, feminism and post-colonial studies, and on to more recent gurus whose names have yet to become household words. She can expertly point out the arcane points of difference among this bewildering range of options, just as medieval theologians were adept at finding minute differences in the views of rival sects, and then anathematising them. After confidently leading the reader through this maze, she suddenly finds at the end not a minotaur but a black hole. Theory has hit the wall.

I agree with Felski’s strictures against the dominant critical mindset which she summarises as “guardedness against openness, aggression rather than submission, irony rather than reverence, exposure rather than tact”. Contemporary critics have become like detectives whose whole approach is to assume a crime has been committed. They are, Felski acknowledges, too suspicious, automatically sniffing out texts to see what heresy is lurking within them. So far from loving literature, they assume a priori it is guilty and interrogate it to wring out its guilty secrets. Reading in their view should be an act of resistance rather than one of sympathy; the critic seeks to “terrorize received ideas”.

The over-used verb interrogate reveals a mind like that of a secret policeman. Significantly, writing is referred to not as literature but by the impersonal designation “texts”, as though books are laboratory objects to be dissected, which in fact happens. The theorists assume of course that they are intellectually superior to the authors they sit in judgment on—Felski notes that “critique has become the medium of secular holiness. The halo dropped by the poet has been picked up by the critic.” Dickens and Conrad thought they were drawing attention to the defects of nineteenth-century industrial and colonial societies, but they didn’t realise, dumb as they were, they were unconsciously supporting the status quo. The theorists of course see through them.

The new critics love paradoxes and convoluted modes of thinking, as in the following Marcusian sentence quoted by Felski: “His apparent deviation from social norms merely reinforces his deep complicity with those norms.” By this method one can prove anything—the absence of evidence for something becomes the knockdown argument for its existence. As Swift put it, they have to say “a thing which is not”. This is really a form of double-think, contradictions dressed up as paradoxes. Denis Dutton, the founder of the wonderful internet site Arts and Letters Daily, is quoted pointing out that the “awkward, jargon-ridden academic prose” of the theorists betrays itself “as a kind of intellectual kitsch”. But Felski, who herself writes clearly, defends unreadable prose: “A way of writing that seems opaque or recondite to outsiders also promotes in-group belonging and socialization into a scholarly milieu.” To my mind that’s the problem. In her book she doesn’t seem to be addressing readers so much as a small coterie of her fellow theorists, who are all in on the act in a way the rest of us aren’t.

Critics become so adept at skewering perceived taboos they end up as cynics believing in nothing, for whom the designation “nihilist” would be flattering. Felski calls this “skepticism as dogma”, another contradiction parading as a paradox. Schools of theorists act like cults, led by a guru whose word is accepted uncritically, in contrast to the relentless demolition to which everything else is subjected. Felski notes “the charismatic aura bestowed on the figure of the dissident critic”. Theorists get great personal pleasure in devising ever more exquisite distinctions; they revel in the publicity that comes from making a revisionist splash.

Felski concludes that “critique finds itself caught in the logic of constant self-excoriation, reproaching itself for the shame of its own success”. In some moods Felski sees theory as faltering because of its defects, in others because of its successes. Her way out of the dilemma is not to drop it all, which would seem logical, but she can’t make the break. She doesn’t apologise for her past promoting of defects she now so clearly delineates, and which until recently she and others of her ilk would have defended to the death. This gives a clue that what is occurring is not an admission of fault, but just another more “nuanced” (horrible word) move in the game, mild self-interrogation without a full confession of complicity.

Her solution is to move to a new refined version of theory minus its previous warts, which she calls “post-critical theory”. The innocuous-sounding prefix “post” is the giveaway. New theories come and go in regular succession in a way that resembles Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution—there can be no stasis, no end game, only a continual stirring of the porridge. Tomorrow always brings a new theory, “post” the previous one. Felski is still inside her pleasurable thought bubble, with no new inputs from outside. She rightly points out that a weakness of the new critics is that they “learn to look down on empirical knowledge”, but she fails to take her own advice. Any thinker needs disparate, external bodies of knowledge as a reality check to give weight to speculations, which without them loop around (like a snake consuming its own tail) on well-worn tracks inside the mind, ultimately trying to spin something out of nothing.

We notice in Felski’s book that today’s theorists tackle mainly novels, not poetry, as they are intent on approaching literature not on its own terms but to criticise society. And they focus on the literature of the Anglosphere, because their non-literary aim is to condemn white male Western capitalist societies, not for example on those of Russia and Eastern Europe, from where some of the most impressive literature has emerged over the last half-century. Solzhenitsyn never gets a guernsey, as it would be a bit hard to claim that he was really unconsciously in favour of the communist regime he thought he was opposing. Russian society has not yet even got to its post-colonial stage, which should, to be consistent, attract the ire of those who so vigorously oppose Western imperialism.

The notion of totalitarianism, deriving from Hannah Arendt and others, is a forbidden idea on US campuses. We can see why: modern literary theory, with its Marxist and Nietzschean roots, is a closed double-think system of thinking, an attempt to change reality so that it lives up to a preconceived ideological view of it. It exhibits an obsession with power, a desire to expel dissidents, a belief in permanent revolution, and a preference for twisted arguments over commonsense explanations.

The main interest of the new critics is not in literature but in their desire to repudiate their own country; literary criticism is simply a more oblique and sophisticated way of doing this than straight political analysis. Lionel Trilling long ago defined the “adversary culture”, those whose animus is directed against their own society. The critics mentioned in Felski’s book all have this adversary stance in common, but are blind to Trilling’s analysis. They can’t bring themselves to scrutinise the obvious assumptions which underlie their worldview, which is that the society they inhabit is a malign one because it is ruled by white male capitalism. In fact they are a powerful part of the elite, which is now heavily peopled by anti-capitalist people of the Felski kind. Things are moving so fast today there is no status quo. University academics are stuck in a false consciousness of themselves as courageous dissidents, whereas their groupthink conformity beggars belief. Literary theorists can’t tackle Tom Wolfe and Saul Bellow, since their novels reveal they know what the critics are up to, which enables them to satirise fashionable theory so well. The wheel has turned full circle, with some novelists themselves now providing the best critique.