Academic Tagging ii

In a previous post on the practice of academic tagging, I asked someone (rhetorically): 'does Gramsci say ‘I will use Marx’s concept of class to explore how..’, no, he just uses it.’ The reason that Gramsci (for example) doesn’t say something like this isn’t just that such locutions weren’t in vogue at the time. It’s something more basic and philosophically significant – For Gramsci et al Marx had not simply coined a new concept; he had revealed the existence of class.

The current tagging practice, then, contains its own implicit epistemology. It seems to bracket off the question of whether some aspect of the world has been revealed. What we have, rather, are a stockpile of optional tools, which can be ‘used’ to produce ‘interesting’ and ‘new’ readings. These machine parts can be discarded when they cease to produce such readings.

Now, I admit that my attitude here is ambivalent. On the one hand, I of course share this practice of using whatever tools seem to yield results; moreover, I think it is important to keep visible the gap between concept and object, the maintain the provisional, hesitant relation between Idea and Thing. But this procedural hesitancy should surely be in deference to the Object itself, a reminder that the world revealed by these concepts is never exhausted by them.

My impression is that the current practice is not about such hesitancy, exactly. It is about reaffirming the vitality and preserving the glamour of the new machine parts. The Lacanian reading of Wordsworth renews Lacan more than it illuminates the poet, who is returned to Lethe when the reading is complete.