Abstract
Chapters 6 and 7 ought to be studied together since both deal with the critique of the idea of a coherent dramatic narrative. One of the most stimulating discussions in literary and cultural studies in the past years has been the one centering on the necessity of developing forms of “postcritique.” In this chapter, Schulenberg demonstrates that his discussion of the relation between Marxism and pragmatism also plays a role concerning this critique of critique. He discusses the postcritics’ analysis of Fredric Jameson’s Hegelian Marxism. Furthermore, it is argued that the works of these critics suffer from their almost complete neglect of Richard Rorty’s and Jacques Rancière’s versions of horizontal critique. Finally, Schulenberg’s overall goal in this chapter is to show that a discussion of postcritique contributes to one’s understanding of the idea of horizontal intellectual progress, and thus to one’s appreciation of the implications of the idea of a genuinely nominalist and historicist culture.
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- 1.
For stimulating discussions of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, see Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (Malden, MA: Polity, 1998), 36–69; Adam Roberts, Fredric Jameson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 73–96; Ian Buchanan, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2006), 53–77; and Robert T. Tally, Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (London: Pluto, 2014), 64–70.
- 2.
In his notoriously biased Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski critiques, among many other things, Marxism’s universalist gesture, its apodicticity, and teleology. Constantly warning against the “seductions of totalitarianism,” he points out: “The apocalyptic belief in the consummation of history, the inevitability of socialism, and the natural sequence of ‘social formations’; the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, the exaltation of violence, faith in the automatic efficacy of nationalizing industry, fantasies concerning a society without conflict and an economy without money—all these have nothing in common with the idea of democratic socialism. The latter’s purpose is to create institutions which can gradually reduce the subordination of production to profit, do away with poverty, diminish inequality, remove social barriers to educational opportunity, and minimize the threat to democratic liberties from state bureaucracy and the seductions of totalitarianism” (2005: 1210).
- 3.
In Signatures of the Visible, Jameson, using the Spinozian and Althusserian idea of an “absent cause” and the notion of a “total system,” explains the relation between postmodernism and late capitalism by once again referring to the appearance-reality distinction: “Yet it [the new reproductive technology] is felt to constitute a system, a worldwide disembodied yet increasingly total system of relationships and networks hidden beneath the appearance of daily life, whose ‘logic’ is sensed in the process of programing our outer and inner worlds, even to the point of colonizing our former ‘unconscious.’ This existential sense of a total system, unrepresentable and detectable only in its affects like an absent cause, is, of course, itself only an aesthetic intuition of the mode of organization of late capitalism itself (which is not conceptually to be reduced or assimilated to its technologies): it is, however, what feeds postmodernism itself as the latter’s fundamental situation as well as its uniquely problematical and unrepresentable content” (1992: 61–62).
- 4.
In a by-now famous passage in The Political Unconscious, Jameson defines Marxism as the “untranscendable horizon” of all interpretation. Marxism is more than a mere substitute for other theoretical approaches. In the manner of a Hegelian “Aufhebung” or sublation, it “subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them” (1989: 10).
- 5.
For a detailed discussion of Rorty’s interpretation of Romanticism, see the chapter “‘Toolmakers rather than discoverers’: Richard Rorty’s Reading of Romanticism” in Ulf Schulenberg, Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 120–133.
- 6.
Complicating my suggestion as regards Jameson’s grand theory, one has to see that there are passages in his oeuvre where he argues against the idea of a coherent system of truth, and where he also underlines the experimental nature of transcoding. In other words, in an almost pragmatist manner he directs attention to the experimental and provisional character of the attempt to mediate between various theoretical discourses. In the introductory note to the second volume of The Ideologies of Theory, for instance, he writes that the practice of transcoding is “less a question of finding a simple system of truth to convert to, than […] of speaking the various theoretical codes experimentally” (1988: ix). For a discussion of Jameson’s theoretical approach that in an interesting fashion differs from the one offered by proponents of surface reading, see the chapter “Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutics and the Need for an Adequate Epistemology” in Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), 93–115.
- 7.
Crucially, the question of Jameson’s metaphysics is completely ignored in recent monographs that discuss his work; for instance, Robert T. Tally (see Note 1); Phillip E. Wegner, Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2014); and Clint Burnham, Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 8.
In numerous pieces, Stanley Fish called attention to the paradoxical nature of the “foundational belief in antifoundationalism.” See especially his collection, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989). In this context, see the chapter “‘What You Say Is What You Get’: Stanley Fish’s Rhetoricized Antifoundationalism” in Ulf Schulenberg, Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 161–186.
- 9.
In this context, see the “Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations” (1–17), and “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency” (63–86) in Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford UP, 2005).
- 10.
In her essay “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” Heather Love summarizes Latour’s and Erving Goffman’s critique of humanism as follows: “Both Latour and Goffman argue against the ideology of humanism; in this sense, they are not all that different from many literary critics working today. What distinguishes them, though, is that they engage in analytical procedures—ANT and microsociology—that are corrosive of humanist values. Their preference for a world in which the human is not primary, and in which sacred human qualities of warmth, intention, depth, and authenticity don’t hold water, marks their difference. In their attempts to keep the social world flat, they read closely but not deeply. This approach leaves no room for the ghosts of humanism haunting contemporary practices of textual interpretation. It also leaves little room for the ethical heroism of the critic, who gives up his role of interpreting divine messages to take up a position as a humble analyst and observer” (2010: 381).
- 11.
In order to be reminded of the intensity, and the fierceness, of the “theory wars” (and this is our recent past), the inclined reader might want to consult the tome, Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), which was edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corrall. Maybe the “theory wars” have been followed by the “method wars” in literary and cultural studies, as Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski propose in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique (2017: 2). Further below in their essay, they write: “Recent efforts to rethink critique have often emphasized method: the ways in which established practices of reading limit the inquiries, experiences, and insights available to the critic. Critique, it is argued, implies a methodological orientation that encourages certain kinds of interpretation while leaving little room for others” (2017: 15). For the latest histories of theory, including its alleged demise, see Nicholas Birns, Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early Twenty-First Century (New York: Broadview, 2010); Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014); and Robert Doran, The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
- 12.
For thought-provoking discussions of the “new aestheticism” and the adventure of “reading for form,” see the following two volumes: John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, ed., The New Aestheticism (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003); and Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, ed., Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). In addition, see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–569.
- 13.
In this context, see also the chapters “Enchantment” (51–76) and “Shock” (105–131) in Felski’s Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).
- 14.
Felski mentions some important texts discussing the notion of postcritique in note 31 to chapter 5 (2015: 215). For a critique of the practice of postcritique, see the chapter “Post-Critical?” in Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (New York: Verso, 2015), 115–124.
- 15.
The Jamesian insistence on the idea of making would of course entail a discussion of whether his pragmatism as radical empiricism can be seen as still containing elements of realism. In this context, see Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism and Realism” (140–158), and Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “What the Spilled Beans Can Spell: The Difficult and Deep Realism of William James” (159–166) in Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2017). In addition, see the chapter “Interpreting the World’s Partial Stories: William James and the Worldliness of Pragmatism” in Ulf Schulenberg, Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 259–270.
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postcritique. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_7
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