TY - JOUR
AU - Jerng, Mark, C
AB - In “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Winfried Fluck helpfully questions the “value assumptions and tacit normative principles” underlying Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015). As Fluck notes, discussions of these books have mainly focused on “how convincing these approaches are as new methods of interpretation” (231). Instead, through detailing Felski’s and Levine’s investments in freeing the reader toward new attachments and affects (Felski) and foregrounding the collisions of literary and social forms (Levine), Fluck identifies a shared principle across these projects: Both want to get out of narratives of determination but for different reasons: While Felski wants to revitalize our encounter with literature by liberating it from the stranglehold of formulaic readings, Levine rejects single-factor analysis for political reasons. She wants to arrive at a better kind of politics, one that is open to pursue a range of potentialities, both in the reading of literary texts and in political action. (241) I find Fluck’s questioning of normative principles extremely important as a pause for reflection, and I continue in this vein by analyzing the implications of Felski and Levine’s shared antagonist and protagonist. If they have a shared antagonist in “narratives of determination,” as Fluck identifies, I would add that they also have a shared protagonist. Both of their correctives utilize Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT) in order to reformulate an understanding of the “social” that undergirds Levine’s “social forms” (19) and Felski’s formulation of artworks’ “sociability” (176). To synthesize my conclusions up front: one, the respective ideas of the “social” developed in Levine and Felski via Latour do not understand that being made not to act constitute social processes just as much as being made to act. I develop a linkage not made between Gabriel Tarde (whom Latour has named his predecessor) and W. E. B. Du Bois to provide an understanding of the social attentive to this dynamic and argue that we get a completely different picture of determination, action, and inaction as a result. Two, the characterization of “narratives of determination” in Fluck, Levine, and Felski as explanations based on “single-factor analysis” (Fluck 241), a “focus on ultimate causality” (Levine 17), or “trac[ing] textual meaning back to an opaque and all-determining power” is a description that disavows protocols of reading often categorized within race and ethnic literary studies that are multiply attuned to racialized and gendered realities (Felski 152). Part of the problem is the listing and compartmentalization of race, gender, class, and queer critique and the authors’ reproduction of these schemes under the umbrella of “determination” or “causality” against which they pose their models. Both Felski’s and Levine’s understandings of the “social” and of “determinisms” suffer from not taking on insights from the traditions of race and ethnic literary studies and the possibilities for thinking literary and social relations articulated there. Moreover, a critique of their understandings from this vantage point suggests the way in which their antideterministic stances feed into anticollectivist visions of social, political, and economic struggle. I turn in the end to Fluck’s central diagnosis, which argues that Felski’s and Levine’s antideterminisms depend on “[a]ssumptions about a condition of unfreedom and narratives of liberation” (244–45). But Fluck’s brief genealogy of these narratives of unfreedom does not consider the lines of thought that I locate in Du Bois and others. By considering alternate genealogies, we start from a richer understanding of determinisms and are better able to think about collectivist social struggle. One strain connecting Felski’s and Levine’s proposals for rethinking literary-critical assumptions relating literature and the social is Latour’s ANT. For Levine, Latour is crucial for anchoring her critique of causality: Networks are useful . . . because they allow us to refuse metaphysical assumptions about causality in favor of observing linkages between objects, bodies, and discourses. Latour asks us simply to notice points of contact between actors as well as the routes actors take. By tracing the actual and possible paths that forms follow, we can practice a large-scale cultural studies method that starts not by presuming causality, but rather by attending to specific patterns of contact between forms. (113) For Felski, the incorporation of Latour is positioned more centrally within her alternative mode of “postcritique”: Translated into ANT language, the reader-text connection becomes part of a network rather than a self-enclosed dyad… . Reading, in this light, is a matter of attaching, collating, negotiating, assembling—of forging links between things that were previously unconnected. (173) The use of Latour to anchor Levine’s collisions of forms and Felski’s understanding of “how literature’s singularity and its sociability are intertwined rather than opposed” mobilizes their joined efforts against critical habits of determinism that cannot, according to Felski and Levine, get out of understandings of power or force as one-way streets (176). But their uses of Latour reinscribe certain assumptions about what makes up the social. In the spirit of creating connections, I draw out interrelations among Latour, Tarde, and Du Bois to highlight how, for Du Bois in particular, associations constitute the social not just through the making of linkages, but also through the refusal of linkages. In developing his method of reassembling the social, Latour explicitly draws on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociologist, Tarde, specifically his notion of “hesitation.”1 Latour writes: It’s precisely because the social is not yet made that sociologists of associations should keep as their most cherished treasure all the traces that manifest the hesitations actors themselves feel about the ‘drives’ that make them act. . . . This is why we should paradoxically take all the uncertainties, hesitations, dislocations, and puzzlements as our foundation. (47) This “hesitation,” as Tarde puts it, “between two modes of verbal expression, two ideas, two beliefs, or two modes of action” (45), is at the center of Latour’s interest in the “not yet made” and the “under-determination of action” (Latour 45). But in order to fully reassess this understanding of the social, we need to comprehend a further linkage that has not been made. Significantly, Du Bois wrote an essay, “Sociology Hesitant” (1905), six years after Tarde published his Les lois sociales (1898), translated into English in 1899. Whether or not Du Bois was aware of Tarde, both use the peculiar status of “hesitation” in relation to action (Is hesitation an action? Is it a nonaction?) in order to critique emergent conceptions of society as a more complex whole and abstraction. Du Bois argues that Auguste Comte and others develop the foundations of sociology by constructing “society” in order to stand for “common likenesses and agreements in human thoughts and action” while being “strangely hesitant as to the real elements of Society which must sometime be studied” (“Sociology Hesitant” 38). He goes on: So Comte and his followers noted the grouping of men, the changing of government, the agreement in thought, and then, instead of a minute study of men grouping, changing and thinking, proposed to study the Group, the Change, and the Thought and call this new created Thing Society. (“Sociology Hesitant” 39, emphasis added) Arguing against the way in which the “Group” abstracts from and thereby dismisses a study of “men grouping,” Du Bois critiques sociological descriptions of general social laws drawn from abstract “agreements in thought” in favor of a more nuanced understanding that takes into account the dynamic relation between social actions like “grouping” and social units. One might look for a version of what this dynamic relation looks like for Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Describing what he calls the “white world,” Du Bois writes: A man lives today not only in his physical environment and in the social environment of ideas and customs, laws and ideals; but that total environment is subjected to a new socio-physical environment of other groups, whose social environment he shares but in part … and this greater group environment was not a matter of mere ideas and thought; it was embodied in muscles and armed men, in scowling faces, in the majesty of judges and police and in human law which became divine … I lived in an environment which I came to call the white world. . . . All this made me limited in physical movement and provincial in thought and dream. I could not stir, I could not act, I could not live, without taking into careful daily account the reaction of my white environing world. (135–36) Du Bois develops another unit of analysis, “the new socio-physical environment of other groups,” one that is neither reducible to the particular individual, the idea of the group, some higher social law, some structural force, nor to the abstract notion of “Society.” It is an aggregation of interactions, embodiments, and uncertainties where Du Bois refuses to abstract out a notion of society that acts according to general laws—whether they be physical, biological, or metaphysical. Du Bois’s idea of the “white environing world” foregrounds “environing” as surrounding, ensnaring, and enclosing. It is a word that, as Vin Nardizzi traces, carries linked meanings across (a) acts of military encircling—both for protection and for incursion; (b) acts of sensory deprivation in which various agents “press upon—and sometimes into—the human figure”; (c) a religious register in which a person is surrounded and tormented spiritually (190). In calling attention to the way in which “scowling faces” “instantiate what they abstract” (Teskey 18)2 and to an environment “embodied in muscles and armed men,” Du Bois cuts across the divide between small and large units in order to show the linkages through which acts of environing take place. The application of the noun “majesty,” associated with the title used to address sovereign authorities and royalty, to “judges and police,” and the phrase “human law which became divine,” embed an understanding of how these specific embodiments become transcendent, unquestioned, and foundational. In this sense, we get an idea of forces that are not hidden but that act in and through embodied interactions and uncertainties. Du Bois thus draws on a similar vocabulary of hesitation as Tarde (which is then picked up by Latour) to highlight the uncertain actions of grouping, not the solidity of groups. Rather than revert to overarching, larger structural forces, Du Bois emphasizes how actors are made not to act and how linkages are refused. What about the worlds elaborated via Du Bois’s hesitation of “I could not stir, I could not act, I could not live”? For Du Bois, being made not to act constitutes ongoing social processes just as much as being put into a network. For Du Bois, being made not to act constitutes ongoing social processes just as much as being put into a network. … highlight[ing] how Felski’s and Levine’s deployments of Latour reinscribe notions of the social based on only the most available givens. Du Bois’s critique of sociology highlights how Felski’s and Levine’s deployments of Latour reinscribe notions of the social based on only the most available givens. Indeed, that is the main strength for Levine in privileging “forms” as a unit of analysis over “genre”: its “portability across time and space” and that it is more “stable than genre” (12–13). This understanding of “social form” sits uneasily against Latour’s own work, which questions the use of any “pre-determined shapes” to designate the social as such (24). But Du Bois’s foregrounding of being made not to act suggests further issues here. While Levine understands forms as coercive in the sense that they order routes that actors take, she universalizes and abstracts forms’s coerciveness on all caught up in its ordering. Du Bois’s “environing” suggests a coerciveness based on being made not to act via the interaction of embodiments and conventions that constitute routes for some, but not all. In this sense, Levine’s use of Latour as “observing linkages” or “noticing the routes that actors take” foregrounds only those routes most readily taken up. If Levine’s model reinscribes the stability of the social via form, Felski’s hinges on sociability: “Art works must be sociable to survive, irrespective of their attitude to ‘society.’ An indispensable element of this sociability—whatever other factors come into play—is a work’s dexterity in soliciting and sustaining attachments”; “If they are not to fade quickly from view, they must persuade people to hang them on walls, watch them in movie theaters, purchase them on Amazon, dissect them in reviews, recommend them to their friends” (166). This notion of sociability assumes a version of the social that centers on the availability of freedom of movement as opposed to the foundational uncertainty of action in Du Bois’s “I could not live, without taking into careful daily account….” Significantly, each of Felski’s examples of “solicitation” emerge from social relations of building value within given economic relations. Both Levine’s and Felski’s models solidify those orderings of space and time via specific givens, givens that are better understood as acts of environing by Du Bois. If Du Bois provides some grounds for a discussion of the “social” in which being made not to act can be understood as richly as being made to act, it is the work articulating race and gender critique in African American and ethnic literary studies that, contrary to Levine’s and Felski’s respective characterizations of predominant tendencies in literary critique, provides models of doing literary analysis within and through “narratives of determination.” Both Levine and Felski are interested in transforming models of literary analysis. In Levine’s argument, the antagonists are ways of relating literature to politics in which “one is the ground or cause of the other” (22). In Felski’s, it is a hermeneutics of suspicion that relies on a “context-based criticism,” one in which “[c]ritics . . . find themselves zigzagging between dichotomies of text versus context, word versus world, internalist versus externalist explanations of works of art” (152–53). In characterizing what their methods are correctives of, certain ways of doing race and gender critique are exemplary for both authors. Levine writes: the field has been so concerned with breaking forms apart that we have neglected to analyze the major work that forms do in our world. We have tended to assume that political forms are powerful, all-encompassing, and usually simple in themselves: a sexist or racist regime, for example, splits the world into a crude and comprehensive binary, its stark simplicity—black and white, masculine and feminine—contributing to the regime’s painful power. (9) This association appears in Felski’s characterization of critique as emanating from below. Part of the affective disposition of critique, according to Felski, is its assumption of a progressive oppositionality and resistance: “‘critique’ is a term commonly associated with a progressively oriented politics—one allied, in some way, with the interests of traditionally subordinate groups: the working class, women, racial or sexual minorities” (140). This positioning is continued in Fluck’s essay when he characterizes the hermeneutics of suspicion in this way: “These readings focus on textual symptoms of underlying determining causes. … Such absent causes can be capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, or heteronormativity, to name only the most frequent current references” (229–30). I do not point to these lines to suggest that Felski and Levine are antagonistic to race, gender, and queer critique. On the contrary, they treat the power and continued usefulness of these lines of scholarship in nuanced ways.3 I also am not arguing for the assumptions that they are critiquing. I am no fan of presupposing that critique somehow belongs to “subordinate groups.” Nor do I find explanations that rely on capitalism, nationalism, and racism as “ultimate causality” useful or illuminating. However, Levine and Felski implicitly link these emphases of race, gender, and sexuality critique to methods of reading that fixate on a “determining context,” that position literature and politics in the single relation of ground or cause, and that are primarily concerned with “breaking forms apart.” In doing so, they impose their own assumptions about political overdetermination and “hermeneutics of suspicion,” respectively, onto this work. This identification has the unfortunate effect of positioning such work as “always behind the trend or perpetually marginalized” in relation to Levine’s and Felski’s respective versions of a more reinvigorated, legitimate literary studies moving forward.4 The rhetoric of listing—“sexist or racist regime,” “imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, heteronormativity”—does little justice to work that thinks through multiple vectors of analysis.5 In particular, it effectively disavows the many ways in which literary critics engaged in debates across race, gender, and queer critique have constructed modes of thinking literature and the social together that are not reducible to Felski’s and Levine’s characterizations and would be in productive dialogue with their models. Scholars doing this work should not accept this characterization as implicit exemplars of a literary critique premised on absent, determining causes. I focus on recharacterizing traditions of US race and ethnic literary studies because of my own familiarity, and also because these fields have had ongoing debates about political instrumentalization and formalisms.6 I choose classic, foundational examples of scholarship across African American and Asian American literary studies that work across race, gender, and labor in order to underscore how its insights have not fully been engaged within significant discussions of literary studies methods and values. From the inception of race and ethnic literary studies, the approach to texts in these fields has necessarily been less to “break forms apart” than to build forms of continuity, new interactions, and new connections in a self-reflexive way. Precisely because early work was a matter of constructing traditions otherwise devalued or rendered invisible, much of this scholarship is characterized by drawing connections and ways of reading that valorize the political, social, and literary expressive possibilities in African American, Asian American, and Chicano/a writers, to name the three most prominent forms of institutionalization in the early 1970s. This path-making was done along many lines: thematically, intertextually, through vernacular forms, and narratologically, among others. Twenty years ago, Hortense Spillers analyzed the “sermon” as both communal and literary form and rhetoric; five years before that, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong analyzed the dialectic of necessity and play to foreground the question of aesthetic labor as it encounters racialized forms of labor across Asian American fiction. In their essays, the literary and the social are inseparable and mutually inform each other in ways where one is not simply the cause of the other.7 In other words, the question of thinking through form and literary expression as indissolubly connected with the forming of social relations has played a prominent role from the beginning of this scholarship. The debates therein are not simply derivative of the larger debates within literary studies, nor are they reducible to models in which context is seen as all-determining or where the critic positions themselves as necessarily antagonistic, distanced, and suspicious. Let’s take Saidiya Hartman’s powerful reading of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), deeply embedded as it is in the structures of slave law, narratives of seduction, and the criminalization of blackness apart from yet connected to slave law, published in 1997.8 Here narratives of seduction that exist with distinct pleasures and powers in both its form as literary plot device and as legal alibi are seen to be operating; the language and rhetoric of criminality is utilized as literary expression to contain and confer humanity, while also doubling the work that such language does in the court of law in the US antebellum South. The descriptive “scene” is a technology both of witnessing and of literary distancing, playing with the spatial relations of social experience. What model of relations between literature and the social can be drawn out here? To limit a dynamic in which the slave is conferred humanity precisely through the need to criminalize and thereby ascribe intent to the slave, which is Hartman’s larger argument here, to the form of hierarchy (where Levine locates the dynamics of race) would be to lose a crucial dimension of understanding. In Hartman, contexts are not so much fixed as they are processually formed in relation to social practices such as legal rules and tropes of witnessing that are not defined in advance as following an order based in/on form. More recently, Hartman thinks with science fiction writer Octavia Butler to enable new ways of imagining and narrating historical possibility, what she calls “critical fabulation” (Hartman, “Venus” 11). In her argument, processes of narration are bound up with the ongoing rhetorical power of the historical archive in ways that are not reducible to imagining history as “a box” (Felski 154). To use a model in which historical archive determines text or text responds to some notion of fixed archive would be, as Hartman suggests, either a “death sentence” or a romantic disfigurement (“Venus” 2). Arguably, then, a significant stance toward literature and the text within race and ethnic literary studies has been not so much the suspicious gaze, but rather an openness to “thinking artworks as repertoires of alternative social and affective possibilities” (Lloyd loc 3526). This stance is carried forward not by “digging down and stepping back,” but often from a desire to think with texts and to see what imaginative possibilities can be conceived (Felski 152–84). One thinks of Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in which she says that her project potentially looks “reactionary” because unlike the predominant strand (at the time) to argue for the fluidity and instability of gender, she is trying to build a grammar that “would restore, as figurative possibility, not only power to the female (for maternity), but also power to the male (for paternity).”9 This move works toward “figurative possibility” and the building of social-symbolic positions for black kinship, not the skeptical negativity that Felski uses to characterize critique (Spillers 204). But nor is it antideterministic. Because such interpretations are forged within an understanding of the “heteronomy of the aesthetic,” a complex picture of the multiple determinations at play, and because of the desire to enable literary possibilities, there are many models here that need to be brought into the conversation (Lye 92). Engaging these interpretive modes gives us a very different picture of the main terms that Fluck identifies as underlying normative values for Levine and Felski: agency, freedom, and liberation. Fluck writes that “Felski and Levine both tell stories of liberation” and that this desire for agency and freedom takes for granted assumptions about what the “conditions of … unfreedom” are (244). He lists these assumptions about unfreedom thus: “In these narratives, literature has been said to have the potential of liberating us from experiences and conditions of fragmentation, alienation, commodification, rationalization, instrumentalization, or the relentless advance of instrumental rationality” (245). Charging Levine and Felski with never getting beyond these assumptions based as they are in philosophies of history, Fluck finds their overall projects “halfhearted” (246). But his own collection of “conditions of . . . unfreedom” follow conventional understandings of modernity that displace and disavow histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. As Lisa Lowe argues, “the history of modernity is, in one sense, a history of liberal forms monopolizing the meaning of freedom for the human” (“History Hesitant” 89). Lowe builds on Du Bois and C. L. R. James in order to critique the philosophies of history that can only understand freedom in terms of the “dialectical development through the political forms of property, family, civil society, and the state” and which relies on subsuming non-European worlds through colonial and racial capitalist appropriations (Intimacies 145). She uses Du Bois’s “hesitation” to “provide a space, a different temporality, so that we may attend to the meanings of slavery and freedom in our critical projects and reckon with the connections that could have been but were lost and are thus not yet… .” (“History Hesitant” 98). If Du Bois gives us a more complex picture of determinisms and action, then the work sketched above, among many others doing race and gender critique across African American and ethnic literary studies, understands freedom and agency beyond the “universalizing claims of political and aesthetic subjecthood” (Lloyd loc 219). Fluck’s intervention allows us to question our assumptions of unfreedom as they define “what kind of liberation literature can provide” (245). But the underlying normative terms he identifies themselves need to be thought within their colonial and racial genealogies of production. Without that, the legitimation of literary studies that Fluck is after can only be a legitimation of its past and ongoing erasures. Footnotes 1 Latour remarks in a footnote: “Hesitation is of the key element in Tarde’s sociology especially well developed in a stunning book on the anthropology of economics” (128n16). Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social,” The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (2002), edited by Patrick Joyce, pp. 117–32. 2 I borrow this phrase from Teskey’s account of the substantiality of allegorical figures. 3 Felski, for example, explicitly builds on work in queer theory including Eve Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading and José Esteban Muñoz’s work on utopia (30). 4 I borrow this phrasing from a question posed by Aku Ammah-Tagoe at a conference seminar on 18 Oct. 2018. 5 Nor should race and ethnic studies, queer, and gender studies be reduced to making only critiques of race, heteronormativity, and sexism, respectively. 6 For debates about political instrumentalisms, see Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), pp. 143–73. On formalisms and the analysis of racial politics and formations, see Lye, pp. 92–101; and Elda E. Tsou, Unquiet Tropes: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature (2002), ch. 4. For a synthesis of debates on aesthetics and formalism in the context of African American literature and poetics, see Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011), pp. 1–25. 7 See Spillers, pp. 251–77 and Wong, pp. 166–213. 8 See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, pp. 79–115. 9 Spillers writes At a time when current critical discourses appear to compel us more and more decidedly toward gender “undecidability,” it would appear reactionary, if not dumb, to insist on the integrity of female/male gender. But undressing these conflations of meaning, as they appear under the rule of dominance, would restore, as figurative possibility, not only power to the female (for maternity), but also power to the male (for paternity). (204) Works Cited Du Bois W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. 1940. Transaction Publishers, 1984 . Du Bois W. E. B. “Sociology Hesitant.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture , vol. 27, no. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 37 – 44 . Felski Rita. The Limits of Critique . U of Chicago P , 2015 . Hartman Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America . Oxford UP , 1997 . Hartman Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe , vol. 26, June 2008, pp. 1 – 14 . Latour Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory . Oxford UP , 2005 . Levine Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network . Princeton UP , 2015 . Lowe Lisa. Intimacies of Four Continents . Duke UP , 2015 . Lowe Lisa. “ History Hesitant .” Social Text , vol. 33, no. 4, 2015, pp. 85 – 107 . Lloyd David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics . Kindle edition, Fordham UP , 2019 . Lye Colleen. “ Racial Form .” Representations , vol. 104, no. 1, Fall 2008, pp. 92 – 101 . Nardizzi Vin. “Environ.” Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking , edited by Jerome Cohen Jeffrey , Duckert Lowell , U of Minnesota P , 2017 , pp. 183 – 95 . Spillers Hortense. Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture . U of Chicago P , 2003 . Tarde Gabriel. Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology . 1899 . Translated by Warren Howard C. , e-book edition, Kessinger Publishing , 2008. Teskey Gordon. Allegory and Violence . Cornell UP , 1996 . Wong Sau-Ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance . Princeton UP , 1993 . © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Race in the Crucible of Literary Debate
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajz007
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/race-in-the-crucible-of-literary-debate-L9uLt97Q7I
SP - 260
VL - 31
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -