In her recent lecture “at” “The Swedish Twitter University” Eileen poses a series of questions raising the question of what a speculative realist literary criticism might look like.
First, what happens when we consider that literary characters are not human beings, but more like mathematical compressions of the human? What happens when we see literary texts as having propulsions of their own, as actants on the same ontological footing as everything else?
Joy distinguishes this point of view from what she refers to as “humanist” literary criticism. As she remarks,
The questions matter, because much of literary criticism today is founded on humanist-ethicist principles; hermeneutics are deeply humanist.
As she continues,
We choose to seek, then, a non-projective, non-hermeneutic criticism that would multiply and thicken a text’s sentient, bottomless reality. This criticism would be better described as a commentary that seeks to open and not close a text’s possible “signatures.” Aesthetics may constitute a domain of illusions, but these illusions posses their own material reality and are co-sentient with us.
There’s a lot more in the lecture and discussion, so be sure to follow the link. Perhaps Joy’s rendering of the distinction between humanist literary criticism and object-oriented literary criticism can be rendered gnomically– as is her style in this lecture –as the distinction between styles of criticism that are “before” and “after” the text. This would correspond to the distinction Joy draws in the quote above between strategies of criticism that strive to close the text and strategies that strive to open the text. What do these metaphors imply?
The central premise of what Joy rightly calls humanist criticism– which is nearly all existing criticism today –is that texts are primarily vehicles or carriers of meaning. As a consequence, meaning is something that is before the text in either the temporal or the transcendental sense. Meaning is that which is prior to the text such that the text is but a carrier of meaning. Like a crypt that hides what lies in rest within it, the text is thus something to be decrypted, deciphered, so as to discover its meaning. If this is necessary, then it must be because there is something of a strife between the materiality of the text, its inscription in paper and other mediums, and the meaning of the text. Meaning is always withdrawn from the surface of the text on paper (and here not in OOO’s sense of withdrawal), while it is the inscription on paper, in the most literal sense, that presents itself to the reader. If there is a strife, in this framework, within the work between meaning and the text, then this is because there is always an excess of potential meaning in the text. In the analytic setting a patient relates to me a dream in which he is joyfully frolicking with a deer in his brother’s back yard. Why this dream? The analyst notes that “deer” is a homonym for “dear”. They are both pronounced ‘dir. Perhaps the patient is in love with his brother’s wife? At the textual level, the speech of the analysand allows for a variety of different interpretations. Is the dream merely about a deer or is it really about his “dear”? The question will be decided by what is before the text or dream, by the latent content behind the manifest text.
read on!
It is in this regard that humanist criticism can be seen as striving to close the text. The various strategies of humanist criticism– hermeneutic, biographical, historical, new historicist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, etc. –can all be seen as strategies for closing texts, for reducing the signal to noise ratio, by fixing meaning behind the entropic play of the text in its polysemy. What this style of criticism strives for is a crystallization of the fixation of the text.
I am not sure whether Joy would follow me in this assertion, but it seems to me that object-oriented criticism begins with a very different premise. There have been deep suspicions of humanist criticism for some time now and it seems to me that a good object-oriented criticism would both be able to integrate humanist forms of criticism (with an important twist) and would be deeply indebted to the suspicions arising out of anti-humanist criticism. Thinkers like Ong, Kittler, and McLuhan called into question the idea that the medium by which a text is conveyed (speech, writing, digital media) are irrelevant to the content. For example, in a very McLuhanian moment, the structuralist Jean-Pierre Vernant observes the writing had a decisive impact on Greek law. As the Greeks began to write their laws on the sides of buildings in the market place, this transformed both the nature of Greek society and law. Law expressed in speech is only as durable as the memories of the people that heard the speech act and is deeply subject, in the future, to the vagaries of personal idiosyncrasy. By contrast, law written on the side of a building takes on a sense of eternity and universality by virtue of enduring through time. My conception of law shifts from being conceived as being an arbitrary pronouncement of, say, a tribal leader, to being experienced as a transcendent universal to which even the leader must conform. Perhaps this is where Plato got his idea of the forms. The point is that the medium has a tremendous impact on the content. We can’t say that the content is something that is just there before such that one and the same proposition expressed in speech and writing are identical, but rather content seems to come after.
This suspicion that content or meaning comes after was further explored by the structuralists and post-structuralists. Thinkers like Lacan and Derrida both claimed that meaning is an effect of the signifier and took great pains to show how effects of meaning arise from the play of language. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari, in their famous distinction between theaters and factories in Anti-Oedipus seem to suggest something similar. Traditional humanist interpretation, they suggest, is premised on the idea of a theater where the theater depicts a meaning or past that comes before the play or what takes place on the stage. They criticize Freud– and even moreso Jung’s excreble theory of the archetypes –for treating meaning as an archetype that always comes before any production (for Freud in the form of the Oedipus and in the far more insidious way with Jung in the theory of the archetypes). They contrast the “good Freud” of the primary process in the early works, with the “bad Freud” following the “discovery” of the Oedipus complex. In the latter case, the text is always closed. All things always lead back to your family drama. In the former case, the text is always open. The primary process is an infinitely productive domain of meaning where, through all sorts of condensations and displacements, new meanings, and therefore new ways of living and desiring are perpetually being created. This is their model of the unconscious as a factory rather than a theater. In the theater all your symptoms and dreams somehow re-present your family dramas (or excreble archetypes in Jung), whereas in the factory both interpretations and formations of the unconscious produce new meanings as effects. Here the text is open because it is productive
Object-oriented criticism for its part– and it is here where I am unsure as to whether or not Joy will agree with me –begins from the premise not of the meaningfulness of the text, but of the materiality of the text. The text is something. A text is an entity that circulates throughout the world. And like all bodies or objects that circulate throughout the world, texts have the capacity to affect other bodies. Here then we get the first sense of what it might mean to say that criticism comes after the text. This thesis is not the bland truism that the text must first exist for us to “criticize” it, but rather is the thesis that criticism is a production based on the affectivity of the text. In other words, the question is no longer the question of what the text means with the aim of closing the text, but rather is the question of what the text builds. Criticism here would be aimed at what texts build and allow to be built. And since the building power of any entity is infinite, texts would be radically open.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari remark that “[a] book itself is a little machine…” (4). Given Guattari’s background in the autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela, they were, no doubt, thinking of autopoeitic machines. Autopoietic machines are machines that draw something from their environment and transform them into something else. This is how it is with texts. We are drawn into books, absorbed by books, and are produced as something else when we come out the other side. Texts create new forms of affectivity– I learn to love differently, for example, after reading Proust –they create new collectives (just think of the religions of Abraham or of the works of Marx), they create new practices (one might live their life as the Underground Man or Raskolnikov without killing anyone), they instigate revolutions, and so on.
Books do not mean something, they do something. Yet just as Spinoza, in Part III of the Ethics, said that we do not know what a body can do, we do not know the passive and active affects that populate a body, we do not know what a text can do. As a book circulates throughout the world over time, it produces all sorts of surprising results. Here, when Plato’s Phaedrus is read in terms of the Republic, we can see a bit of the rationale behind Plato’s denunciation of writing. In the Republic Plato engages in elaborate discussions of the proper size of the city. In terms of Luhmannian sociological systems theory, Plato is grappling with questions of organized complexity. In order for every element to be related to every other element in a system (another word for “object” in my onticology), that system cannot exceed a certain size. Systems reach a certain mathematical threshold where it becomes impossible for every element to connect to every other element. Plato dreams of a society of speech, which is to say a society of myth that is ahistorical or which does not become or change. To see this point, it must be recalled that, following Ong, oral societies reproduce themselves across time through myth (rendered in poetic and musical form), because the rote repetitions of myth along with the ways in which myths are conveyed through music and poetry, allow for easy transmission and recollection of cultural knowledge. Writing represents a profound threat to societies of myth because it allows for an aleatory object to enter the social order– what I call a rogue object –that allows for the return of that which is lost, modifying contemporary social relations. As Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition says of the French revolutionaries, they conceived of themselves as Romans– just read Gibbon as recounting not the history of Rome, but as articulating a perfectly contemporary text directed at producing a new form of subjectivity in the present by presenting an alternative world –thereby allowing for an escape from the eternal return of the same in myth.
Here I am reminded of debates surrounding “revisionist criticism” that took place in the 90s when I was still in High School. There the big scandal was that an English professor somewhere had argued that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was really an allegory for a socially repressed homosexual relationship between Huck and Jim. Among the humanists the sparks flew. “This could not possibly be what Twain meant! This is a travesty!” Similar things occurred with Shakespeare. Yet from the standpoint of object-oriented criticism, the question of whether Twain meant this is irrelevant. All that is relevant is that Huckleberry Finn has the power, the capacity, to construct or produce this sort of reading, allowing for the illumination of parallels between black oppression and homosexual oppression, allowing for us to broaden the notion of “queer” as representative of any anomalous or rogue part of a social situation that goes uncounted (cf. my forthcoming article “Of Parts and Politics” in Identities; it should be out online any day), allowing for the construction of heroic subjectivities such as we find in Huck and Jim. Similarly, in Jussi Parrika’s work we find the construction of a new theory of social action based on 19th century texts on insect behavior, just as in Harman we find the construction of a highly original ontology based on the work of Heidegger.
To look back to the meaning of Huckleberry Finn is to ignore that The Epic of Gilgamish still is able to affect us despite the fact that we know nothing of its author and little of its historical context. It is to ignore the productivity of texts or the manner in which they are little machines. Joy remarks:
We might also try to rethink literary criticism, not as an operation of deciphering, but of re-making, as well as of sensing.
Perhaps this is the highest honor we can bestow on a text. Rather than closing the book, we should instead explore what can be built based on the book. And here, I would modify Eileen’s reference to sensing a bit, and suggest that rather than sensing the text, we instead allow the work of art to transform how we sense. Such would be the efficacy of fictions as a path to truths.
Larval Subjects . 
December 23, 2011 at 3:01 am
Much of this sounds familiar from the last 20 years of critical theory, but interesting to think what is changed–or produced–in coming out of a very different set of concerns.
December 23, 2011 at 3:37 am
Gee thanks, Jacob. I think the last 20 years of critical theory have been obsessed with closing meaning and have, above all, ignored the text as a thing.
December 23, 2011 at 5:06 am
Oh Boy. I am reading David Bordwell’s Making Meaning at the moment, where interpretation (what is carried) can only be seriously talked about in cognitive terms. Thus a film should not be interpreted as meatphor nor allegory as a domiant mode. What would he make of this? On the other hand, if we talk about a Hitchcockian Maguffin as an object opening more signatures, all of a sudden startling conversations begin.
December 23, 2011 at 8:10 am
I appreciate an attempt to bring insights across disciplines/lines of thought, but this is frankly ridiculous misreading of what “literary criticism” has been doing for the past few decades. To claim that the prime concern is one of “closing meaning” is simply not true, even for the most banal strands of literary criticism “after deconstruction.” (Unless you want to specify a turn back against elements of deconstruction after its evident over-extension, in which a backlash sent some scurrrying back into the arms of determinate meaning.) The same goes for the concern with the “text as an object” – this is less a radical turn and more of a description of what is commonly accepted now. To take one of the “humanist” hermeneutics you mention, to speak of a Marxist criticism as somehow blind to the real material effects of texts as generative objects is just silly. Does this mean one should therefore turn away from these concerns? Obviously not. Thy are worth being extended, always. But to see it as a constitutive break or significant development simply does not obtain. I get that people are excited about putting “speculative realist” as a modifier in front of a number of nouns and seeing what cross-currents can develop. In some cases, that may well lead to some new sparks of thought. But in this case, such an attempt would be well-advised to make sure that what it describes isn’t a position shared with things it aims to target or inflect.
December 23, 2011 at 9:54 am
Tim Morton and I both have articles on object-oriented criticism forthcoming in New Literary History. That issue should be out in summer, according to the editor.
I wouldn’t agree with the materiality of the text as the focus of OOO criticism, nor that its ability to affect other things is the key. But I think this reflects a deeper difference in how we view OOO more generally.
December 23, 2011 at 11:55 am
[…] been enjoying Levi Bryant’s post about Eileen’s talk. But I disagree that the humanist tradition of textual interpretation has […]
December 23, 2011 at 11:59 am
Larval! I enjoy your site. I made some comments on this Eileen’s talk too, in case you’re interested: http://scotograph.wordpress.com/
December 23, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Awesome article, Levi! I’m so glad John B-R brought me here!
I find the ‘object-oriented’ view enticing but does, of course, have some answering to do to dyed-in-the-wool ‘humanists’ like me who can’t entirely sweep aside what comes ‘before’.
Thanks!
December 23, 2011 at 1:15 pm
Over the years various theories have located literary agency in authors, codes, readers, and yes, the texts themselves. As a practical matter, however, the profession has consistently acted as though texts were in fact factories endlessly productive of readings irrespective of the rubric governing a given reading. What the profession has not done, though, is shown much interest in describing the (material) form of the text. The Russian Formalists, for example, introduced the distinction between plot and story, which has been endlessly invoked. But there has been relatively little interest in actually mapping out, completely, the relationship between story and plot in a given text. I suspect this disinterest stems from a greediness for meaning; it’s not clear how an understanding of form would contribute to the creation of meaning, so the work is not done. Consequently we have a large body of commentary on a universe of objects whose material form is largely unknown.
December 23, 2011 at 2:57 pm
ECW,
Perhaps you didn’t read the post carefully, but deconstruction was cited as an example of a style of reading that escapes this humanist aim of closing meaning. The example of Marxist criticism as an example of humanistic reading styles was not critizing Marxism for ignoring materiality, but for anchoring meaning in a historical context. That is a form of closing meaning and halting the productive power of the text. At any rate, I see a lot of angry hand waving, name calling, and assertion in your post, but little in the way of substantial counter-argument.
December 23, 2011 at 3:51 pm
Susan Sontag in 1964: “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Swiftly followed by “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” From “Against Interpretation.”
Levi, could this opposition help clarify the aim of an OOO inspired literary criticism?
My critical sympathies run through Barthes and de Man—though the the thought of an erotic de Man, interested in making rather than derealizing the claims of experience, makes me chuckle. Sontag’s and Barthes’ efforts head towards but can’t quite meet our outstrip the expectations of OOO. They each claim to have what Barthes calls a responsibility to form, but I’m not sure it’s form as substance, form as cause. It might be. Though they both grant to artworks and literary works a strange autonomy (I’m thinking of the studium/punctum distinction in Camera Lucida as related to Harman’s duality, the sensuous phenomenal, on the one hand, and the efficacious deep and substantial, on the other) they are also relational thinkers: Culture and Society overmine objects and semiotics and grammar undermine them.
I’m looking forward to Morton and Harman on these issues too.
December 23, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I have a terribly stupid question, Levi: when you write “Books do not mean something, they do something,” why is it an either/or, rather than a both/and? I don’t see the necessity for meaning and being to hold the logical relationship of if p then not q.
I have no doubt that books do not mean something, but I have trouble doubting that the texts they embody mean a multitude of things. I have no doubt that books do things (sometimes, even, via one or more of those meanings (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Communist Manifesto, etc).
What am I missing?
December 23, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Ah, I think I get it. It’s because of what you mean by “meaning”. Which would make OOO lit crit a continuation/amalgam of the work of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and D&G. And Lauren Berlant. and Teresa Brennan. And Brian Massumi. And the later Wittgenstein. Among a number of others.
Unless I’m still missing something.
This is not at all meant to be argumentative. I’m working my way thru The Democracy of Objects, and learning something important on every page.
December 23, 2011 at 5:29 pm
I’m sympathetic to ECW’s points. Despite the newer terminology and the addition of one or two names more to the debate, the distinctions remain the same. I don’t think we can even be discussing here the nature of the literary object unless we’re in a fundamental way talking about the same thing. And we obviously are.
To apply the critical terms properly (whether ‘affect’, OOO, etc) is always to apply them to ‘things’ we’ve talked about over and over again. There’s always something about this ‘thing’ (poem, sculptor, painting) that remains the same. We’ve never really gotten beyond that.
All the Derridean and Deleuzzian talk about ‘ecriture’ & factory meanings almost seems old hat today. Ironic, eh? It’s time to make it ‘new’ and ‘old’ at the same time: revive a literary humanism that preserves but also looks to see interesting transformations in the same artifact. I’m rather partial to Hardt-Negri’s use of the term “altermodernism”, one that may have interesting literary applications. Perhaps it’s time to radically ‘globalize’ literary discussion in general.
December 23, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Conrad,
I’m not sure what you might be addressing as I defend the autonomy and independence of the work, not its erasure.
December 23, 2011 at 5:49 pm
The point is that a text is always able to transcend its origin, whether that origin be an author or historical circumstance. Maning is something that follows the text, rather than precedes the text. This is the productive power of any text. Even a Marxist or Freudian reading of a text is something built from the text by a recipient of the text, not the discovery of an origin before the text. Those readkngs are valuable, but critics such as the new historicist shouldn’t present them as discoverjng the hidden arche of the text (a posture of mastery). They’re building something.
December 23, 2011 at 6:33 pm
@Russell Manning, #3: Bordwell is an interesting case. As I remember Making Meaning (I read it a couple of years ago), he argues up front that the notion that a film has hidden meanings is incoherent or, well, meaningless. He also suggests that the practice of cranking out interpretations has become ossified and repetitive (this back in, what, 1989?). He then spends the bulk of the book in a cognitive analysis of how various types of critics create meanings for films, how, if you will, they build meanings from the texts. But he doesn’t spend much time demonstrating an alternative.
That’s the only book of his that I’ve read. But I’ve read a fair number of his blog posts over the years. And he devotes a good deal of time to what he calls the poetics of film, to analyzing and describing what happens in specific films without, however, offering deeper meanings. That is to say, he describes the physical object and how it unfolds in time. I suppose one could call on SR/OOO to authorize such a practice, but he’s obviously doing so on other grounds.
As a general comment, I note that making statements about texts and meanings and criticism is one thing. Actually commenting on specific texts and groups of texts, that is a somewhat different business. That is, basing theoretical statements in OOO is one thing; using OOO as a tool for textual commentary is something else.
December 23, 2011 at 6:49 pm
As a test case: how might we think of Duchamp’s Fountain as an autonomous work? The gambit of this piece—and of much conceptual art that follows it—is that nowhere is its “artness” in the object itself. The readymade is just a displaced, everyday object—set aside the critical accounts that make of the readymade symbols and/or part objects, broken tools, though this would be interesting. The standard account, which we’re all used to by now, locates the art of an artwork in the institutional frame, in the naming power of the artist, which comes from the position of the artist in the social field, etc., and in the expectation of the viewer, which too emerge on the basis of this and other fields of practice. Can OOO provide a successor model that credits the latter as worldly and relational but then goes on to discover what is dark, earthy, to use Heidegger’s term here, about Fountain or other readymades? I’m going to guess that a metaphysical account of artworks must touch the hyperobject that includes the ostensible work, i.e., the inverted urinal, and the artist, the viewers, the site, etc. If this is right, or on the way to being right, then I would say a book is not the literary work. A painting is not the artwork. The book is the necessary but insufficient support for the literary work. A painting, the painted thing, is necessary but insufficient support for the artwork. What then would the formal cause of the artwork be? At what scale should we expect to find it? And must this form be scaled to include the urinal as part of a whole that has its own formal integrity and thus its darkness?
December 23, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Levi,
thanks for your reply.
It’s hardly the ‘humanist’ text the Derridean, Deleuzzian is interested in preserving, eh? you’ve problematized the ‘text’ almost beyond recovery. Par for the course these days. It’s rather like Baudrillard’s “simulacrum”. Recall his definition: “The real is not only what can be reproduced”—the same as your “productive power of any text”—”but that which is always already reproduced…” It seems you’ve made your “text” along the same dimensions as the “hyperreal”. You can’t have both the text (certainly not on your “text as machine” reading) and transcendence at the same time, at least not without serious ambiguity.
For productive you’ve got endless “reproductive” textual meaning. I think the term “object-oriented text” is an equivocation for which author and text have sadly had to pay a big price.
December 23, 2011 at 7:18 pm
Conrad,
I think you need to go back and read the post more carefully. I don’t claim that Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida preserve the humanist orientation. I praise them for moving beyond the humanist orientation. As for the point about transcendence, it’s simple. Every text has the power to break with the context in which it is produced and produce new effects in the world not anticipated by the author or conceivable in the historical context in which it was produced. This transcendence of the text does not contradict its textuality, but is a direct consequence of the texts durability. That’s the whole point of the Epic of Gilgamesh example… It still has power to produce surprising effects despite the fact that we know nothing of its author or context.
December 23, 2011 at 7:23 pm
That’s a devil of an example, John! I’ve been struggling with a similar set of concerns with technology. Can a technological entity be conceived as autonomous, or must it always be thought as an element in a hyper-object? The question is difficult to decide because so much of technology (take a simple example like a bolt) only takes on its valence with respect to some other element of technology (a screw). Yet technical elements can nonetheless move past their current networks to be situated in very different networks with very different functions as in the case of the perfume arisol spray that provided the means for fuel injected engines. Perhaps it’s similar with art?
December 23, 2011 at 7:50 pm
Devil, yes. And thanks for the compliment. One obvious solution is to simply decide that Duchamp and perhaps Picasso before him and others before that simply stopped making artworks when they ceased fashioning materials and played with or worried about art as a status conferred on objects by artists and communities. It would be the artistic equivalent of correlation: artists who remain in the grips of epistemological questions cease making art.
But I’d rather not go there. Not yet. Let’s compare the bolt to Fountain. One is an art object, the other a technological object; thus each is embedded in a referential totality, a totality that could itself be understood as a hyperobject. But the bolt couldn’t do bolt-like thinks if it wasn’t hard, threaded, etc. I.e., here the object (metaphysically comprehended) more or less matches the physical object—that’s not the right way to put this, but I’m not adept at using the word “metaphysics.” The bolt either holds together the plane or it doesn’t. But the Fountain does what exactly? As a urinal, i.e., as a technological object, it has to do urinal-like things to be what it is and this power is deep and dark, part of its very form, as you, Harman, and Aristotle define form. But what does Fountain do? It refers to these urinal acts and “upends” them. But where do we locate the formal cause of Fountain, it’s substance, its reality? It is not the physical object but the metaphysical object, which here I can only think of as a hyperobject, that would have to include lots of parts that are very fragile. Apocryphally, the original Fountain was lost, possibly thrown away, so it could be destroyed simply by removing it from the plinth. Harman might like this: you can only tell when you have your hands on an object when you can understand the conditions under which it would be destroyed. And Fountain can be created or destroyed simply by moving the urinal into a certain space, oriented a certain way, etc.
December 23, 2011 at 8:04 pm
Levy writes, “Yet technical elements can nonetheless move past their current networks to be situated in very different networks with very different functions…” The networks are where some of the action is, and we should insist that the objects hold something in reserve, which then allows for new, unanticipated functions, etc. The problem for artworks and for literary works is that the parts (urinals and painted canvases and steel and gestures, on the one hand, and words and grammars, on the other) look like wholes already but shouldn’t be conceived as wholes, not if the whole you’re aiming to account for is to be an artwork or a literary work. I think Wittgenstein gets the use of words right but could never handle that use which is poetry, fiction, and by extension art, because literary works both are and are not ordinary language games. The remarks on Aesthetics are tantalizing but disappointing. I’m also thinking of Derrida’s remarks on Austin here.
In other words, we don’t how to talk about artworks that seem to be made of ordinary things (Duchamp, but also the dance of Yvonne Rainer) but are something else at the same time, but only at larger scales.
December 23, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Levi,
My invective tone aside, I am not calling names. I think we have different positions (for example, regarding the way that historical analysis “closes” a text) that probably will not be reconciled. But for the sake of a more productive argument than how I phrased it initially…
There are two different strands of thought, and accompanying claims, at work in what you wrote. The first has to do with how we might approach literature in a way that is more generative. In that case, the claim has to do with an insistence on treating critical work as building, rather than discovering a key/code or binding something inextricably to a set of authorial/historical/industrial/assumed subjective positions. The second line of thought has to do with with the history of criticism. The claim is that “nearly all existing criticism today” (which therefore involves a claim about criticism that has been working through problems for a couple thousand years) has consistently missed this opportunity.
My criticism regards the second and the way in which the framing of the question (“humanist” and “anti-humanist”) is, first, eliding a lot of work that addresses precisely the double question of building and refusal to bind to “external conditions” and, second, mischaracterizing some of its opponents. To take a concrete example, “New Criticism” (Wimsatt, Ransom, Beardsley, Tate, Brooks) and other modes of formalism. One might want to label some of the thinkers involved as “humanist,” and for good reason, but only if that reason takes humanism as an investment in certain traditions of the Western canon. In terms of the actual treatment of the texts, this enormously dominant technique of reading was precisely obsessed with asserting that “the text *is* something,” a particular object that must be read on its own terms, outside of the contexts that might otherwise be interpreted as its explanatory sources.
The point, of course, is not to say “aha! this has been done before!”. It is to say that in glossing over some of these traditions in the name of articulating something as a break or departure from it, one risks both taking up what was razor sharp about that other tradition and, more problematically, paying too little attention to the criticisms that were leveled against it. In the particular case of New Criticism, this had to do with its disciplinary function as a fundamentally conservative technique: it made it too easy to disavow the historical, racial, gender, class, etc factors that are not just “outside” the text but present within it and with which any attempt to build from it must necessarily tangle.
And as such, aside from my sense that these are a lot more embedded and embittered debates than the treatment you offered suggests, the bigger issue is what persistent issues come back to haunt the other perspective being offered. Here the crucial issue is that of “building,” to which I’m sympathetic, if not partisan. (I’ve written many times about the way in which a radical take on cinema, for instance, has far less to do with the potential allegories or echoes we find in the films and far, far more to do with the relations we build on their occasions. In particular, I wrote of this via Spengler’s notion of pseudomorphosis.) Such a building, however, never happens ex nihilo. It draws on the specificity of the text as an object, on the specificity of one as a reader (for example, the way in which one learns to love differently is a relation bound to particular objects, some of which may be lovers).
Therefore, the question remains: how is the critical project of building – which is itself always a historically particular one, even if the historical particularity is the attempt to disavow historical particularity – wounded by an attempt to say “the text is something” which also understands that such a text has a history of effects that do inflect future readings, not because “that is what it means” but because those effects have rippled out into the world? For me, it simply doesn’t obtain that one cannot be attentive to the “ahistorical” particularity of an object and the positions it has had, and has produced, historically. Because if one wants to build genuinely, the locus of this can be neither in the text as an autonomous object nor in the text as a determined vessel of meanings, but only and ever in the fraught space between those two perspectives. Only in doing so might we be able to say something relevant about either of those positions. Certainly, one should not limit that space to what occurs between the text and its material author/the time in which it was made/seemingly relevant social conditions of that time. It occurs as well, and most compellingly, between the text and the attempt to build off it in a time that may well have little to do with those preexisting conditions. But what remains is the fact that if the task is not that concerned with this idiosyncratic, contradictory, and messy relation, one seems likely, if not doomed, to fall back into a fetishism of the object or into a flat determinism. And the last thing we need is either of those.
December 23, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Levy,
again, thanks for the reply.
Just a point of clarification. I didn’t say Derrida, Deleuze intended to preserve the humanist text. Of course, they didn’t. But if they form the premise of your “object-oriented” literary criticism, and they obviously do, you can’t talk about any established text, only “after which” is it appropriate to speak of evolving literary meanings. On their premises you’re not entitled to break from anything since you haven’t properly articulated it in the first place.
It’s also interesting to see the problem of ‘origins’ or the metaphysical status of the artwork in their comments.
I see you have lots of other comments to deal with. But I’d just like to ask a small favor, if I can. Can you suggest authors and titles of works on contemporary literary criticism that are in line with yours? Particularly 000 theory.
Again, thanks for your time.
December 23, 2011 at 8:50 pm
ECW,
This is a much more productove response than your initial one, and I don’t find much to disagree with in it. This diary was about two thousand words and was not intended to be an exhaustive discussion of literary criticism but to draw some attention to some dominant trends and emphasize the reality ofntext as a material entity and it’s productive power. I’m trying to draw something of a middle position between new criticism and new historicism. New criticism nicely captures the thingliness of texts and their autonomy as independent beings, while falling prey to the problems you mention regarding the political. New historicism tends to erase the text and disrespect it by diffipusing it in its historical context, while nonetheless capturing the politicial. In emphasizing what texts do I am not trying to return to the ahistorical and apolitical stance of the new criticis, but rather am trying to allude to its power to produce. Here we also are able to get somethingg like what the new historicists do, but with anslight difference. Where the new historicists tend to treat the text as an expression of its historical field, I’m referring to the way in which texts play a role in producing a historical field. This is what I was getting at with my reference to the religions of the book– Islam, Judaism, and Christianity –where the book plays a role in constructing particular collectivities and norms.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with my work or if you’re just visiting this blog for the first time, but one of my key claims is that texts, signifiers, narratives, myths, etc, are every bit as real as other entities like aardvarks, rocks, stars, persons, and so on. I bring this up because this thesis allows me to include all those historical discourses as interactants with the text that you seem to be referring to in your most recent post. They don’t just disappear, but have a real material reality and are actants interacting with the text. However, while this is the case, a text, like any other entity in this ontolog, has the ability to break with its relations or historical horizon and produce different effects elsewhere (Derrida is good on this). A new historicist is not so much discovering the historical horizon that produced the text and thereby anchors it, but is rather building a system of meaning and subjectivity through a selective way of reading and linking the text with other texts. While obviously not a new historicist, this is what I was getting at with my reference to Gibbon.
The difference that I’m proposing here is sleight but it’s important at the level of institutional practices. Suppose you’re a grad student in a lit program that’s heavily tilted towards new historicism. We can imagine such a student being more or less terrorized, told that this is the only legitimate way of reading because it gets at the ur-meaning of the text, etc. Generally you’ll find, for example, a lot of hostility towards “theory” in these programs, as if new historicist approaches aren’t based on a theory and as if “theory” is a sort of obfuscation. Simply pointing out that historicist readings are a way of building from a text, not the discovery of the ur-text, has two pay-offs: first, it introduces reflexivity into what the critic is doing, leading them to attend a bit more consciously, a bit less positivistically and naively, to what they’re doing; second, insofar as the historicist reading is a building too that can’t exhaust the productive power of text as machine, this awareness opens tolerance towards other ways of building and reading that might not be historicist in character. What I’m suggesting is that there is often a rhetorical sleight of hand in these reading strategies. They are, in their reality, building from the text but present themselves as discovering the true text.
December 23, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Conrad,
I’m having increasing difficulty understandingnyour comments and what you’re trying to get at. I never said I am breaking with something. I said texts have the capacity to break with any context and to produce differently. Texts aren’t fixed either by an author’s intention, nor by a historical context. OOO literary criticism is still being built. Eileen Joy and Jeffery Cohen are currently writing a book on this, and Graham Harman and Tim Morton both have articles on it coming out in New Literary History. I have posts here and there on the blog discussing it.
December 23, 2011 at 8:59 pm
However, before going to that stuff you might want to first acquaint yourself with object-oriented ontology if you aren’t. Harman’s Quadruple Object is a nice, short read that’s a good place to start. My Democracy of Objects is a little longer, but hopefully good as well. Our positions differ on points, but these should give a good overview of what OOO is after.
December 23, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Levy,
I know you’re not saying “I am breaking with something.” You’ve made it clear in your blog essay. I’m saying that your Derridean/Deleuzian premises, and allegiance to a well-established poststructuralist critique, leave you with a very problematized ‘text’ beyond which it is impossible for you to make the claim that, as a material entity (whatever that means), the ‘text’ can then go on to produce “differently”. You’ve not only “broken with” but assuredly “broken” the traditional (humanist) text. Without a more satisfactory analysis of the ‘ens’ of the text you might as well include authorial intention and historical context in your analysis. You’ve really provided nothing from which to banish them except to say that the text is a material entity that interacts with the world and is productive of a myriad of interesting meanings. Which I take must be the ‘democracy’ at work in your object-oriented analysis.
Yes, I know you start with the text. But what is its status? You really do talk in a circle: just saying that by literary text I mean that material entity on which different literary meanings can be built (via its interactions with other material entities) doesn’t satisfy the very important requirement of defining just what is the text. Help me to understand. Do we learn what the text is purely by “ostension”, say? Is the text (in your employment of that term) an empirically verifiable artifact open to an examination of its significant properties? In which case we need to be picking out the same sort of ‘thing’ (the text) we mean by text everytime you and I talk about, say, “Huckleberry Finn”. So if I say “Huck” is a gay-narrative and you that it’s a race-narrative, we disagree only about these two particularly literary qualities while, of course, meaning the same thing by the ‘text’ (“Huckleberry Finn”).
And if we both mean the same ‘thing’ (as a material entity) by “Huckleberry Finn”, then the interpretations evolving out of the “Huck” text can’t be just personal projections since anyone who (like us) can perceive those same qualities and many others do also perceive the same text? Does not the “object-oriented” analysis lead us to an anchoring of the text in a set of all the significant literary qualities that can be discoverable in it? The text in an “object-oriented” analysis has to talk about discoverable qualities (interpretations) as objective properties about which there must be some agreement. So, as I said in a previous post, for discussion to take place we must be talking about the same thing.
And it’s more likely the ‘formalist’ or ‘humanist’ (in Arnoldian sense) rather than the poststructuralist who’s going to talk about a text’s perceivable continuity, because the text’s history & authorial intentions can presumably also belong to the same set of shared observable qualities. All these things we can say about the text, as converging on what we both see as the selfsame object, must necessaily include both what comes before and after it. How can it not?
December 23, 2011 at 10:03 pm
Levi, I want to build on your observation that “a new historicist is not so much discovering the historical horizon that produced the text and thereby anchors it, but is rather building a system of meaning and subjectivity through a selective way of reading and linking the text with other texts.” Yes.
While the new historicist claims to be recovering (an approximation to) the ur-meaning of a text, within the scope of late 20th century criticism the idea is to produce a new reading of the text, a new reading resting on various oddities of meaning, reference, and resonace that are lost to the contemporary reader but which can be pointed out, if not quite recovered, through reference to a broad if miscellaneous collection of contemporary, but non-literary, texts. The reader of Shakespeare simply cannot become an Elizabethan Englishman and experience those texts as such an Englishman would have. The most one can do is, through acts of secondary reconstruction, indicate regions of historical difference.
As a parallel, consider the orignal performance movement in classical music. Beethoven didn’t write his piano sonatas for a Steinway. Bosendorfer, or even a Yamaha grand piano. He wrote them for a different instrument, the forte piano, so why not perform his sonatas on that instrument? Bach did not write the “Mass in B Minor” for a large choral ensemble, so why not perform it with a smaller ensemble? And so on.
But this is not simply about instruments, but how one inteprets the score. In this case interpreting the score, reading it, is not a matter of providing a written explication, but of providing a performance. And any performance at all requires that one interpret the marks on the page. Those marks do not dictate the performance down to the most minuet level of detail. Not at all.
Further, there is the matter of dissonance and consonance, which is absolutely central to music. Whether or not a given interval, whether experienced serially (one note after another) or in parallel (two notes at once), is experienced as dissonant is subject to (culturally driven) learning. It’s not written in the auditory nervous system, though that’s where it’s experienced. Someone who grew up listening to the so-called American songbook of Tin Pan Alley pop music (think Sinatra) will be quite comfortable with sounds that would have felt quite dissonant to Mozart or Beethoven. Consequently, the tension Mozart or Beethoven created by introducing what they experienced as dissonance is going to be attenuated for such a listener. As far as I can tell, there is no way for a 20th or 21st century listener to recover an ‘innocent’ ear that hears dissonance the way it would have been experienced at the turn of the 19th century. That possibility for experience is simply gone.
And, of course, we have no recordings of what classical music sounded like in the 17th, 18th, or most of the 19th century. We can only make educated guesses at how it was performed on period instruments. In the end it seems to me rather difficult to argue that the original performance movement has, in fact, recovered early performance styles. Maybe it has, but we have no way of knowing. What it has done is create new styles of performance in the present.
December 23, 2011 at 10:29 pm
Conrad,
One of the basic claims of OOO is that objects are withdrawn such that they are never directly encountered by either other objects nor by us. As a consequence, the being of an entity can never fully be specified by any discourse. We can make all sorts of inferences about objects that latch on to them, but can’t finally exhaust any object whether that object be a frog or a text. A second key thesis is that objects are independent of their relations. This doesn’t mean that objects don’t enter into relations, but only that relations are external to objects such that objects can break with their current regime of relations and enter into new set of relations. In my framework, when objects enter into new sets of relations new qualities are produced. Forgive me if I am explaining things familiar to you, I don’t know whether you’re familiar with OOO. I won’t go through all the arguments for these claims as I’ve rehearsed them to death, but if you’re interested you can go to the link in the right-hand sidebar entitled The Speculative Turn and read my article there entitled “The Ontic Principle”. That will give you a basic outline of the ontology. If you want a more detailed and thorough argument you can read The Democracy of Objects. The long and short, however, is that if texts are objects then they are withdrawn and independent of their relations. This entails that they can fall into different relational networks that will lead to very different manifestations.
I did not set out in this post to define the literariness of literature. I would have to think about that to determine where I come down. In referring to text, however, I am not solely referring to literature. We can just as easily talk about newspaper articles, computer manuels, this blog post, etc. Above all, when I refer to text I am referring to a physical thing: that book there in front of you made of papers, a document encoded in zeros and ones, etc. This is what I mean by the materiality of the text: texts are physical things located in time and space that must circulate or be replicated to travel throughout the world. This has implications for the transmission of texts pertaining to how quickly they can travel, how they travel, how quickly they can be replicated, and how durable they are. I began from the standpoint that it is unctroversial that texts such as Huckleberry Finn or this blog post exist, that they’re inscribed in writing in some medium, that they’re material stored in paper, data banks, braons, etc, and that in order to produce effects they must circulate throughout the world. I’m not quite sure why you have difficulty seeing how a text can produce different effects in different contexts. The Epic of Gilgamesh resonates differently for the people living in the time when it was composed and people living today. The literature of Franz Kafka resonates very differently and produces very different interpretive effects dependjng on whether we read it as a tract describing religious experience or a critique of instrumental reason and bureacracy. The point is that these meanings were not already contained in the text, but are rather produced in amd through encounters with other entities. In this regard, you seem to attribute a claim to me that I’m not making when you talk about a gay Huck Finn as being a part of the text by Mark Twain entitled Huckleberry Finn. My point is that it’s not. The text Huckleberry Finn was used as material to construct another object, namely the interpretation which is a text in turn that may or may not produce effects (it won’t produce effects if no one reads it and it doesn’t physically circulate around the world). The point then is that what might be subsequently built using texts is indeterminable as these things aren’t already contained in the text.
December 23, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Kubla,
I adore the musical parallel you draw here! This gets it exactly right. I’m reminded of A Clockwork Orange and the variantions on the 9th. A good example of what I’m trying to get at with the inventive productivity of texts as they circulate throughout the world would be the way Moulin Rouge uses pop songs. The film is almost entirely dialogue composed out of pop songs. The writers of the songs did not intend them this way, nor does the meaning remain the same when this is done. Rather, a new subjectovity is invented in the film organized around a way of loving and experiencing love. We can say all sorts of things about the historical context in which the songs were written as well as the film, and while all of that will build interesting things, the fact remainsnthat the film exceeds that and will be capable of producing yet other meanings sixty years from now if it manages to endure.
December 23, 2011 at 10:48 pm
As an aside, The New York Times has an article about a new painting of Washington crossing the Delaware river that’s quite different from the iconic one by Emanuel Leutze. The point of the new one is historical plausibility—”accuracy” is perhaps too strong a word as we simply don’t know what it looked like.
December 23, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Ah, now I’ve got something to work with. Thank you for going to the trouble to outline what (as you’ve said) you’ve rehearsed many times before. I can also see (at a glance) where you and I can go on at great length about the “withdrawn” nature of objects (shades of Husserl!) and the implications for their “relational” ties to the world. Two very controversial assumptions well worth looking at.
I will, in any event, look closely at your ‘ontic principles’ because it’s obvious your ‘object-oriented thesis’ stands or falls by them. Literary criticism with ties to theories of being is right up my alley. There seems these days to be a suspicious am’t of metaphysical reasoning at work in much literary discourse (which I find very interesting in an intellectual climate averse to ‘big theories’). And I will order your book and read with interest.
Again, thank you for a very informative exchange.
December 23, 2011 at 10:57 pm
Conrad,
The Democracy of Objects is also available for free in .pdf and .html versions (I’ve really tried to publish my work in Open Access formats of late for both ecological reasons and so that it can circulate more freely). You’re right to note the shades of Husserl. Husserl and Heidegger is a tremendous influence on the work of Graham Harman. He draws his withdrawal thesis from Heidegger’s revealing/concealing in aletheia. I arrive at the concept of withdrawal through a different route, drawing heavily on Deleuze, the autopoietic theorist Niklas Luhmann, and the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. Metaphysics, for us, is not a dirty word, but a badge we wear proudly.
December 24, 2011 at 1:37 am
Levi, thank you very much for your post here and also everyone else for a very lively set of comments. Since the constraints of the Twitter Univ. lecture allowed for only 25 tweets at 140 characters each, while that certainly allowed me to crystallize some of my thinking relative to what a speculative realist literary criticism might look like [it allowed me, further, to try to develop some “axioms” for further work], it also meant that I wasn’t allowed to unpack all of the cognitive work that has gone into my own personal project of developing new reading modes influenced by certain strains of SR and OOO work [esp. that of Levi, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, and Steven Shaviro–and these are not necessarily compatible thinkers: but I like to cobble]. Also, I might change my mind at any given moment relative to one or more of my Twitter Univ. “axioms” [everything in the humanities, I would aver, is always a work in progress, and unlike — perhaps — in philosophy, I’m not personally aiming for anything systematic here so much as I am seeking to expand my toolkit for literary analysis].
I can’t speak to everything in Levi’s post [much of which I agree with] or the comments here, but here are some clarifications I would make relative to what I have read here today:
1. in my own work — and as someone who works in medieval studies, this is partly an outcome of certain historical investments I have — I am actually interested in re-fortifying humanism, but through post/humanist and object-oriented and vibrantly materialist means, in order to make that humanism less oppressive, more ethically capacious, more critically flexible [Andy Mousley and Martin Halliwell coined the term “baggy humanism” in their book “Critical Humanisms”]. I define humanism through a kind of pared-down, bare bones description: the practice of reading, reflection, and writing with the belief that texts offer critical resources for reflection and that [my/our] writing is enworlded and might have some effect on what happens in the world [here, I borrow from the late Edward Said’s idea of “worldly” criticism]. Human beings have some important work to do and the university is an important site for continuing to raise, as Bill Readings once argued [“The University in Ruins”], what the questions of “being-together” might mean, as well as to place thought beside thought, without preconceived notions of what it is “proper” to do, or not do, intellectually. This is also similar to Derrida’s “university without condition,” where we ought to have the right to say anything, and to publish it, even under the heading of fiction. I see this as important, *humanist* work., BUT:
2. It might be important at this particular juncture within the humanities — and under the aegis, perhaps, of new strains of post/humanist thought, including SR and OOO, but also network/media studies, critical animal studies, systems theory, cybernetics, avant garde poetics, and the like — to re-tool traditional humanist practices, like literary criticism, such that they might start to take account of a wider register of the enworlded enactions and effects of things like texts [and please: I know some CURRENT and OLDER reading modes have attended to this, but … keep reading]. Here I would pause for a moment to say that we should try not to get to hung up on the language of which methods [traditional or newer] of analyzing texts supposedly “close” them down or “open” them up. I myself do not want to argue that literary criticism up until now has been mainly intent on closing down texts: I think there are LOTS of ways in which traditional reading modes [whether New Critical or deconstructist or New Historicist or psychoanalytic] have *thickened* our understanding of what texts actually do in the world, as *actants* [after all, isn’t New Historicism interested in the ways in which a text dispenses and circulates certain social energies beyond the intentionalities of an author?], BUT: these critical frameworks have also often only been interested in getting us to see texts in relation to how they are supposedly produced and received by and circulate in human-centric networks/contexts of exchange, meaning, etc. Now, these human-centric networks and contexts matter a great deal, and I would never say to stop paying attention to them [that is why New Historicism, as well as symptomatic/psychoanalytic + skeptical-ideological readings have illuminated so much for us, and will continue to do so, regarding the role of literary texts in history as *actants* in the world that are importantly enmeshed with human life–political, religious, aesthetic, whathaveyou], but I think we can also add to these productive reading models other models for reading that might help us to discern better what might be called the uncanniness, or, folllowing Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book, “alien phenomenology” of literature.
Perhaps this also allows us to revisit Derek Attridge’s “Singularity of Literature,” where he asked us to think about developing a responsible-creative reading that “does not … aim only to appropriate and interpret the work, to bring it into the familiar circle, but also to register its resistance and irreducibility, and to register it in such a way as to dramatize what it is about familiar modes of understanding that make them unable to accommodate this stranger” [p. 125]. This might also be to extend Eve Sedgwick’s formulation of a practice of reparative reading that would seek to find in texts a “plenitude” that could then be bestowed on an “inchoate” reader-self [this is obviously still very human-centric].
3. We might also remind ourselves that a literary text is a special object of *mentation* that relies upon its situatedness within cognitive and other “platforms” and “systems”–human and otherwise–that help to make it intelligible. I’m personally not interested in cognitive approaches to reading literary texts [such as the evolutionary psychological approach to Jane Austen novels seen in the recent work of Joseph Carroll, although I find his project and others like it fascinating–it’s just not “my thing”], BUT, having said that, I have a sneaking suspicion that our cognition is co-extensive with literary texts and in ways we do not fully perceive at present, so I’m pretty sure we should also think about texts as autopoetic systems enmeshed somehow with human autopoeisis, and as Aranye Fradenburg once put it in a lecture on Chaucer, “how do we know where the self ends and Otherness begins”? As Judith Butler put it recently in “Giving An Account of Oneself,” it is precisely because I do not fully know myself, that ethics can begin. I would extend this to say that if I cannot fully know myself, neither can a text fully know itself [which is also like saying: the author is never in complete control of a text], and literary criticism today might work a bit harder to analyze this state of affairs, and OOO and SR are helpful because, in Harman’s theory of objects, for example, his theory of withdrawal helps us to see how everything in the world [us included] is fatally torn between its deeper, autononomous “reality” and its accidents and continually shifting, sensual facades: working/mining the rift between the two is what intrigues me, especially when I consider Harman’s comment that it may be precisely because of this rift that anything [space and time] happens at all. As a medievalist, I’m thus also interested in the temporalities [emphasis on the plural] of reading this opens up.
Well, that’s enough for now.
December 24, 2011 at 2:35 am
>Can a technological entity be conceived as autonomous, or must it always be thought as an element in a hyper-object? The question is difficult to decide because so much of technology (take a simple example like a bolt) only takes on its valence with respect to some other element of technology (a screw)<
… calls to mind the opening pages of The Savage Mind.. Levi Strauss on bricollage..
December 24, 2011 at 1:26 pm
yes bricolage and of course OncoMouse®, here he comes to save the day…
December 27, 2011 at 4:32 pm
[…] Reid’s input to the question of speculative realist lit crit sparked an idea that isn’t new to me (or probably anyone) that I thought I’d throw up here […]
December 27, 2011 at 11:40 pm
[…] surrounding Eileen Joy’s Swedish Twitter University lecture on SR literary criticism and my follow-up post. Over at Digital Digs, Alex Reid has a post building on the discussion in terms of rhetorical […]
January 5, 2012 at 10:12 am
[…] The text above is from another post on the OOO lit crit theory. […]