Negativity and the cultural legacy of the 1960s
When the publication date of my new book Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction » was announced, a number of people got in touch with me on social media and told me that what caught their interest was the word “polemical” in the subtitle. I hope they will not be disappointed by the modest degree of belligerence they will find in it. The book is also meant as an introduction to cultural theory.
(People also said they loved the cover. Thank you, David Drummond! Your brilliant design is better than the book underneath it.)
I start from the premise that fighting is already ongoing. As the US goes into the season of midterm elections, no one needs to be told that the Culture Wars of the last century are still very much alive. What is more surprising is that attacks on teachers for teaching seemingly uncontroversial matters, like the atrocity of slavery, have found an echo among literary critics themselves, some of whom accuse their colleagues of being too negative about our cultural heritage (“our” could have irritated quotation marks around it), and too negative in general.
How negative is too negative? There is a lot to fight over.
The negativity is often blamed on the heritage of the 60s movements that championed race, gender, and sexuality rights. Those movements largely demanded greater representation in the name of an expanded democracy; logically enough, they were not always respectful of a past in which they and theirs had gone unrepresented, or worse. But there is much more to say on the subject. Methodologically speaking, I would argue, the broadest and most influential legacy of the 60s was not “theory” but the imperative to put texts into their historical context, and from the perspective of those who assume that the great texts of the past are timeless, contextualization will look like negativity—like tearing those texts down, judging the past by the moral standards of the present, showing it disrespect. This is not entirely false. On the other hand, a great deal of entirely “positive” or “appreciative” criticism has been enabled and encouraged by “identity politics”—it is perhaps not seen as appreciative only because of the particular social content that is being appreciated.
More to the point, perhaps, whether or not putting texts in context will count as a put-down will depend on one’s conception of history. There is a distinctive affect of minority melancholy, which denies the progress toward greater democratic representation that women and minorities seemed to have won from 1970 on and ought to be a matter of self-congratulation. Taking some distance here from the legacy of the 60s that I am elsewhere defending, I argue that this melancholy affect is best understood as an unfortunate submission to the distinctive Benjaminian melancholy of the discipline as whole, which has seen itself as condemned to try and fail to rescue a cultural heritage that is perpetually on the brink of extinction. To acknowledge political progress would be truer to the 60s. I offer Fredric Jameson’s “single great collective story,” which makes room for progress, as an alternative answer to the question of why the great works of the past do continue to speak to us today.
What does it really mean to declare oneself apolitical, or (more likely) to be apolitical without having the courage to make any declaration on the subject?
In the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, Matthew Arnold was replaced by Michel Foucault as the single most foundational thinker for the humanities, the figure outside the discipline (outside all disciplines) who explained to many of us why we were doing what we were doing inside our disciplines. How much continuity was there between the two figures? One obvious commonality, which I take some time over, is their shared anti-progressivism. About politics, however, they seem radically opposed. I argue instead for a certain continuity. Fans of Arnold have often suggested that what he was really selling was a certain tact or poise or sensibility. His detractors have replied that this sensibility, based as it is around complexity and hesitancy, commits his disciplinary followers to political inefficacy. I discovered, thinking through the legacy of the emancipatory movements of the 60s, 1) that they too promulgated a certain tact or poise as the sum of all their lessons, 2) that their sensibility too demanded a set of hesitations, and (most surprisingly) 3) that it was these very hesitations that define what is most valuable and most lasting in their politics: intersectionality, as I understand it.
One polemical narrative that is answered here goes like this: once upon a time, criticism was central to its culture. Now, however, it gets no respect, and the reason is that it has abandoned its core principles, whatever those principles might be. Under examination, the most questionable thing about this narrative is the premise that once upon a time criticism in fact had a mission that won it respect in the eyes of those around it. If that premise is granted, however—and John Guillory makes an excellent case for it, with emphasis on criticism’s social mission of helping the 18th century middle class toward hegemony—then it follows that a very similar case can be made for the “organic” role played by criticism vis-à-vis the democracy-expanding movements of the 1960s. Aristotle’s concept of politics as the art of governing is a necessary if unexpected supplement to Foucault’s negative politics of not being governed like that. Stuart Hall, analyst and exemplar of the organic intellectual in our time, helps me tie this argument up.
is an accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism.
At the same time, Edward W. Said, another organic intellectual, brings out some unresolved ambiguities in the 60s legacy. American military intervention abroad and support for Zionism, matters, of great importance to Said, were both popular at home. Democracy as it is popularly understood, which offers no voice to those who suffer elsewhere from the consequences of decisions democratically arrived at here, is obviously inadequate. I take Said as a voice of anti-militarism, a 60s movement that was not organized around identity. On the contrary, it was unashamedly universalistic. And because it could not trust democracy, it made room for privileged knowledge and expertise, thereby mediating between the 60s and the academy
What does it really mean to declare oneself apolitical, or (more likely) to be apolitical without having the courage to make any declaration on the subject? The example of Thomas Mann before he decided he was anti-Nazi gets Criticism and Politics off to a rousingly polemical start. Aren’t there things today that are just as worth opposing? And yet what it means to be political within the boundaries of an academic discipline, and while respecting (where respect is due) the written and unwritten rules of that discipline—that’s a trickier question. Michel Foucault spoke for the anti-expertise side of the 60s movements when he suggested that disciplines, as such, practiced a logical, respectable form of insanity. If you take him at his word, you would have to conclude that when the 60s movements forced themselves into the university, they were falling into a trap from which they would never escape. I argue here, as I realize I have argued for decades, that there is no essential contradiction between professionalism and the aspirations of the 60s movements to social justice. Those aspirations, tempered and informed by a disciplinary logic about which no one need be ashamed, continue to define what criticism is for, why it’s worth doing.
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