litter at your etc

When I suggested, in a previous post, that the anti-Theory people are often non- or anti- theoretical as such, the suggestion was pooh-poohed. It is widespread, even usual, it seems to criticise Theory for being insufficiently theoretical. How then, I wonder, does the old spectre of 'reading literature as literature' – raised by the Theory's Empire anthology – fit in here?

What might it mean, what would it look like, reading literature other than as literature ? Do you instead read it as moral lesson, as reality, as historical or biographical symptom? Does the reader misrecognise the nature of the literary object, inquiring about Hamlet's childhood or his diet, or demanding to know what happens to Bloom on June 17 th. One asks questions of literary objects that can only be asked of real objects, you make the casual category error of treating literary personae as real people with a 'psychology' and a past, discussing some specific dramatic or fictional situation as if it were a situation in real life.

But such errors are surely not that far removed from a tendency among not only university students but many traditional critics - to talk about literary creatures as if they were actual people, to overlook entirely their constructedness and the devices responsible for this construction. Yet not only does this failure to read 'literature as literature' tend not to be the bugbear of the 'literature as literature' crew, it is precisely the error that many of them commit. Literature is seen as the mere vessel wherein some ultimately non-literary value ('Life'or some such) gleams eternal and in full transparency.

More curious is that those who do attempt to isolate the specificity of the literary object (any attempt to read literature as literature presupposes such an operation) are often condemned or overlooked by those supposedly wanting literature to be read as itself and not some other thing. The preoccupation of The Russian Formalists with literariness, for example; or the efforts of Paul de Man to lay bare and name the manifold ways in which literary objects, wanting to touch reality, end up re-drawing only their own physiognomy: not only do these seem not to count, they are frequently viewed as precisely the enemy of 'literature as literature'. To make literariness too visible is to engineer its self-destruction. Literature, yes, but without literariness.

Thus on the one hand we have many para-costive critics who fail to reckon with the literariness of their objects; on the other, many Theorists who are precisely preoccupied with the isolation of literariness. It would be an idle game to draw up a list of those who do & don't treat literature as literature – where would it place Hegel, Lukacs, Mathew Arnold, F.R. Leavis?

There is, of course, no reason at all why 'L.A.L' should be the opposing term to Theory. This is mystification. Now, the reply sometimes given here is that the objection is to using literature to illustrate something else – eg Theory. Two things here: the use of literature to illustrate non-literary concepts, virtues, objects etc is by no means confined to Theory (it is everywhere visible in more traditional lit. crit.), nor does Theory invariably do this – it cannot be defined by this manoeuvre. The second point is that using literature to illustrate something else (eg using Shakespeare to illustrate something about Elizabethan society), or 'using' literature to think about Theory (or some other thing) doesn't of course necessarily involve overlooking its literariness.

If 'literature as literature' means inquiring into what's 'literary' about literary objects, isolating their specific forms and devices, then fine; although this should also involve a genealogy of the concept of the 'literary'; but the various red herrings and contradictions of those invoking this slogan indicate that it is, most often, a polemical term devoid of positive content, and that the real objection lies elsewhere.

The transformation of the public sphere

I was upbraided (see here) for not challenging someone in a cafe over an indolent accusation of imposture. Public space should involve engaging with strangers, I was told. So today, this woman was sat reading out loud from Bergson:

“We instinctively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in language. Hence we confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, with its permenant external object, and especially with the word which expresses this object…. Sensations and tastes seems to me to be objects as soon as I isolate and name them, and in the human sould there are only processes. .. the wordwith well defined outlines, the rough and ready word.. overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.

I eyed her suspiciously. she smiled and suggested that

'It's Language which ‘lends’ objects and impressions their immobility - the ‘illusion’ of immobility. In reality it's pure flux.'

I replied with:

'But isn’t this precisely what Hegel celebrates: the force of cognition to seize, immobilise and separate from the ‘mere continuum’ of pure sense (etc) the Word, the Word or Name which arrests an element of the ‘real’ and extracts its meaning?'.

she continued:

'For Bergson, the ‘articulations of the real’ never coincide with the articulations of language (the Symbolic Order) and perhaps, therefore, our inclusion within that Symbolic Order involves necessarily a severance from the organic immediacy of perception'.

To which I could only add:

'But in Hegel, the phantasmagoria of mere sensation is not the ‘most real’ level in any case. We must extract its underlying reality using the cold violence of conceptual thought'.

We agreed that I should move to another table.