On April 7, 2003, less than three weeks into America’s invasion of Iraq, Bruno Latour worried aloud, in a lecture at Stanford, that scholars and intellectuals had themselves become too combative. Under the circumstances, he asked, did it really help to take official accounts of reality as an enemy, aiming to expose the prejudice and ideology hidden behind supposedly objective facts? “Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction?,” he wondered.
Latour’s name for this project of distrust was “critique.” Critique in his somewhat eccentric, “suspicion of everything” sense was not in fact what most progressive scholars and intellectuals thought of themselves as doing, whether in opposition to the war in Iraq or in general. When Latour’s lecture came out the following year under the title “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” it was an extremely influential bit of theater. Latour had made his career as a critic of science and purveyor of an all-purpose distrust. “I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show ‘the lack of scientific certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts,” he confessed in the essay. “Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said?” A famous intellectual revolutionary now seemed to be renouncing the revolution, and to many it seemed that the revolution itself was over. A number of other scholars came forward to testify that they too had had it up to here with critique. Postcritique was born.
Can you talk about literature without bumping into politically charged ideas?
In literary criticism, this much-discussed phenomenon has various labels: In addition to postcritique, it goes by “surface reading,” “distant reading,” “description,” and “the new formalism.” In a 2015 Chronicle Review essay, Jeffrey J. Williams summed these trends up as the field’s “new modesty.” “Literary critics have become more subdued,” Williams wrote, “adopting methods with less grand speculation, more empirical study, and more use of statistics or other data. They aim to read, describe, and mine data rather than make ‘interventions’ of world-historical importance.”
The kicker here, of course, was the phrase “‘interventions’ of world-historical importance.” What English professor could be so puffed up as to think that what she or he wrote or taught was really of world-historical importance? If you put it that way, modesty seems the only eligible option.
In my opinion, the “new modesty” is neither new nor modest, and the choice is not between a proper modesty and self-aggrandizement. There was nothing preposterous about Latour thinking, as he reflected on the nature of academic work in the spring of 2003, about the invasion of Iraq. Academic work will never be an “intervention” on that scale. But Latour’s fans should not forget that he was suggesting a linkage between these two sorts of intervention (militaristic and scholarly), and he was not wrong to do so.
Can you talk about literature and culture without bumping into politically charged ideas? Of course you can, though some agility would be required. Should you try to? Should you try not to “intervene” in our culture, even in time of war, even by means of a long series of gentle nudges? What unites the various strands of the so-called “new modesty,” it seems to me, is an impulse to do away with politics — even in that minimal, modest sense.
The sudden pervasiveness of this depoliticizing impulse came to me while teaching a graduate seminar last term on intellectuals. Two of the books I asked the students to buy, without having first done more than skim them myself (I know, I know), were David Scott’s Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke University Press) and Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press), both from 2017. Both enacted some version of “the new modesty.” And both, it turned out, depoliticized intellectuals whom I considered political heroes.
Scott aligns himself with “those like Rita Felski who urge that what has been called ‘critique’ … stands in need of a good deal of rethinking.” As if to guarantee that Stuart Hall, a founder of Cultural Studies and first editor of New Left Review, will not be stuck in passive mute acquiescence (Hall had died not long before), Scott addresses him throughout as “you.” The passage continues:
“I know you had your doubts about certain tendencies in critique, Stuart … I will offer you a contrast between a ‘critical self’ who is an agent of critique, and a ‘listening self’ who is an agent of attunement and receptivity, and suggest that you, Stuart, were as much the latter as the former, and possibly even more so the latter than the former.”
When Terry Castle wrote “Desperately Seeking Susan,” her hysterically funny first-person account of being an intermittent friend and fan of Susan Sontag (published shortly after Sontag’s death), Castle said things about Sontag that could not have been said to Sontag’s face (for instance, on Sontag’s novel In America: “Has any other major literary figure written such an excruciatingly turgid book?”). For readers like me, such harsh honesties are a genuine contribution to critical knowledge. Scott’s choice of direct address to Hall makes that kind of critical engagement impossible. Instead of engaging with the content of Hall’s writing on class politics, Scott focuses only on their “style.” So it goes with postcritique, and the project of depoliticizing Hall, a lifelong activist and one of the greatest figures of the English-speaking Left.
Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough performs a similar move in laying out, as an alternative to critique, the model of private friendship. In discussing Arendt, McCarthy, and Sontag, Nelson emphasizes their distaste for sentimentality, which Nelson then translates into a distaste for “solidarity.” These heroines may seem to be political, but what they really want, she suggests, is to be alone.
Nelson’s focus takes the anti-Zionism out of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, turns McCarthy’s commitment to the anti-Communist Left into “neutrality” (which, Nelson explains, means “going after everyone” equally), and reduces Sontag’s passionately indignant position-taking on Vietnam, Bosnia, and 9/11 to the aesthetic (as merely “the suppression or negation of emotional response”). Nelson’s revitalization of the aesthetic, here, is not a re-education of feeling, but rather an advocating of detachment from politics and from any collective belonging. Nelson’s bottom line is that we are isolated entrepreneurial individuals who share nothing with anyone. To me this sounds like neoliberalism.
Should you try not to ‘intervene’ in our culture, even in time of war?
Neoliberalism — vague and overused as the term may be, it cannot really be kept out of the conversation about the “new modesty.” The one thing on which nearly all commentators agree is that neoliberalism depoliticizes: It abandons to the silent authority of the market questions that had earlier been seen as matters requiring collective decision-making, which is to say matters of politics. The “new modesty” could never have gotten the attention it has if neoliberalism had not prepared the ground for it by undermining public funding for higher education, thereby ravaging the job market and demoralizing the job market’s youngest victims, even the many who today face their situation and its necessarily more modest expectations with a cheerful, clear-eyed fatalism.
In The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the most aggressive manifesto for postcritique, Felski entertainingly swats away the charge that she is “a pawn of neoliberal interests!” But the book’s index has no entry for neoliberalism (it has 17 for Bruno Latour), and at no point does it engage with the political context in which she is speaking. The reason “a more compelling case for why the arts and humanities are needed,” in her view, is simply that critique has been too negative, long on political name-calling and short on reverence and appreciation.
An unrelievedly negative argument for more positivity, The Limits of Critique does not want to see that reverence and appreciation are now, as they have always been, a large part of what English professors teach, and probably even the largest part. What does she imagine critics are doing, say, when they teach Jamaica Kincaid or Toni Morrison or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or for that matter Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin?
If there is one figure on whose immodesty the newly modest can agree, it is the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. (His Marxism may have something to do with why he has been singled out for censure.) But it is puzzling that Jameson has been seen as lacking in proper appreciation and reverence for literature.
His signature move is there in The Political Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1981), where he shows us how to redeem, politically, a self-declared royalist like Balzac. On the surface, Balzac’s politics are simply obsolescent. What Jameson gives you, in exposing unsuspected depths in Balzac’s fiction, is something much more admirable and persistently interesting than nostalgia for monarchy — for example, the house as “the tangible figure of a Utopian wish-fulfillment. A peace released from the competitive dynamism of Paris and of metropolitan business struggles.” Who could think of this as simply negative critique?
Or consider “the narcissism of the other,” a formula Jameson comes up with in The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013) to explain why ordinary morality doesn’t apply in Tolstoy. Some degree of pure self-interest, he notes, is and must be tolerated when we think of ourselves. After all, no one else will take responsibility for our survival, and what imperative can trump the imperative to survive? We must do what we have to in order to persist in our being even if this entails behavior that is less than ideal.
What Tolstoy does, Jameson argues, is extend this unmarked zone of amoral acceptance to other people, taking it as natural and normal that within a limited sphere they should satisfy what they take to be their desires, whatever those desires happen to be. In this brilliant way, Jameson suggests, appreciatively, Tolstoy forces us to reach for a higher ethical standard. And in bringing to light a hidden side of Tolstoy’s ethical generosity, Jameson also displays his own.
The demands, imperatives, and assertions of postcritique are not neoliberal in the most direct way. But they do, collectively, surrender the fight for public funding for public services — services that are in the collective interest of a functioning democracy, like education in matters of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Postcritique is thus neoliberal at least in the minimal sense that it decides to give up this political fight, admittedly not an easy one, and instead quietly accepts that university employment should lower its expectations in accordance with the dictates of supply and demand. The market cracks the whip, and instead of kicking up our heels, the new modesty counsels us to obey.
But there is also a stronger sense in which postcritique functions neoliberally. Academic literary studies differs from much non-academic literary writing in that it tends to be more suspicious, it’s true, whether because it examines the performance of works of literature in the domains of race, gender, sexuality, and so on, or because, like Jameson, it asks about the text’s significance when inserted into larger narratives of freedom and necessity, emancipation and enlightenment — a significance that in both cases can well be positive. Call any or all of this, if you like, “critique.” This critical dimension to academic writing — and not merely the jargon-ridden prose — distinguishes academic writing from the opinions produced by fans as well as by journalistic reviewers, belletrists, and other adjuncts to the publishing industry.
Postcritique, were it ever to be widely embraced, seems likely to produce a criticism that is closer to fandom. In lieu of critically examining literature or the culture it is part of, postcritique encourages a rhetoric of helpful and largely positive advice to the would-be consumer.
“Criticism” in The New York Times Book Review tends to look “positive,” by academic standards, not because it always says the book is good but because it offers market advice as to whether you should buy it, whether you will like it, without asking much about the market itself or about what it would mean about you or about the world if you did like it.
Opinions will differ on what are better and worse ways of bringing politics into criticism, or whether it should be done at all. Perhaps the term “politics” can be replaced by “existential commitments.” But about those, too, opinions will differ. What we can hopefully agree on is, first, the need to stand up for the profession, keeping its modest tradition of independence alive, and second, the need to make what we do as significant as we know how to make it.
Bruce Robbins is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from a paper the author presented at the 2019 Modern Language Association Conference.
