What can be done with aporetic structure–what Derrida, in one essay, calls the “aporetic paralysis”? It certainly makes for a nice riddle. In fact, I spent much of the morning attempting to write a dialogue between two whores on the very concept. I didn’t get far. The whores–and their author–didn’t know how to make use of the aporetic structure. I will nuance what I mean by use: is there a politics, a plan for action, a set decision, that we can clearly deduce (as if by rational logic) from the structure of the aporia? There are a few ways that I can see to think of it:

(1) No: the aporetic structure is useless. It leads to no politics, no plan, no future action. It spurs confusion. It forces us to think of (ridiculous, still more useless) ideas like the “topos,” like the “atope” on which a sexual difference that is “sexual otherwise” may be placed–categories which puzzle the mind, which works pretty well without all of this deconstructivist influence. So why nuance the gap? Why emphasize that Zarathustra slept through the great noon in a dream of wild animals? What could we possibly gain by frustrating our assumptions to this degree? What could this sort of confusion possibly save? This view might conclude, by logic of its own frustration, nothing. Derrida’s aporetic structures are not only useless; they are downright deleterious. Annoying, and wrong.

(2) Yes. The aporetic structure is a saving power–like the koan, thinking the aporia forces the reader to radically renegotiate the structural assumptions that ground thoughts of difference. “Understanding” the impossibility of the gift is like a negative theologian’s meditation on God–confronting the impossible imparts a certain dexterity of mind, a certain extreme form of Keatsian “negative capability,” that imparts all sorts of moral boons for participation not just in academia life, but in everyday political life in Western democracies: patience, fortitude, an appreciation for difficulties, a suspension of the old Hegelian will to sublatiom and Aufhebung, an ability to sit with contradiction. These skills are more like moral skills. We pick them up from reading Derrida–they are the “effects” of the sort of aporetic systems that Derrida demands we confront, even though they are also the characterological tools that we (as readers) require to confront Derrida’s impossibilities.

I am scouring the internet for traces of how the most “practical” (of academics–listen, I’ve got to bracket off these searchings somewhere) have dealt with this problem–insofar as it is a problem. (We should we reminded of something that Derrida said last week: “having a problematic” is not the same as “being problematic.”) Naturally, we turn to teachers, and it’s only a stone’s throw to a fairly significant battle that’s been raging in academia, oh, since the coal fires started in Centralia: teaching deconstruction.

So what’s the big deal about frustration? We get through it, we get over it, and in getting over it–presuming, of course, (though this is rarely ever interrogated), that we get through it in the right way–we learn and even embody practical skills that we’ll take up again in other situations. These “other situations” may be specific repetitions of the original. In other words, working through the frustration of reading “Otobiographies” won’t just help me if I finally decide to take on “White Metaphor”–the experience may help me to more carefully read Joyce, to pay attention to a cello suite that I’d normally ignore, or to listen to the complicated stories of British Union politics that my lawyer-friend likes to tell me. 

Again, it’s assumed that most of this is an internal process–it works well, or it doesn’t. But what about moderating between the two? What about border cases? And by this, I mean something quite concrete: what about those readers who (think they) “almost” get it, or who go mad in the clutches of Derrida, or who fall into a rage and abandon philosophy, or their families, or something worse? Who is it who deals with these constituents of Derrida?

The teachers, of course. So, the next question in pursuit of the value of Derrida’s frustation (the frustrating-effect of Derrida? Perhaps Derrida just frustrates me…) an interesting one: how is it that teachers teach deconstruction? And why is it that some (many) so vehemently abhor the idea, and refuse to “teach” it at all? 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566421?seq=10&Search=yes&term=otobiographies&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dotobiographies%26x%3D0%26y%3D0%26wc%3Don&item=6&ttl=52&returnArticleService=showArticle&resultsServiceName=doBasicResultsFromArticle

There is, apparently, also a book out (cited in the footnotes to the article above) by Gregory Ulmer, called Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Besides the provocative inclusion of rabbit-toting Beuys as pedagogue (I suppose that this makes a certain amount of sense–a whole lot of sense, insofar as anything makes sense in the arms of these postmodern considerations!), the book is interesting because it foregrounds something I can’t really shake: the idea that Derrida’s writings about X,Y, and Z cannot be separated from an active pedagogy. When we read Derrida, we are learning how we might read differently.

JLRH

PA–So you may want to rewrite your paper now. In light of what we’ve said. Since it seems we’ve come to some new understandings–you might be able to clarify, you know, and work towards that mastery.

JLRH–Actually I like this just fine I mean this was a conversation between you and me we had it, we were here–we know that–

PA–I mean, you never know–

JLRH–What is so important about the model of writing as mastery?

PA–It is so incomprehensible that you would say this–so entirely out of sync with everything else you’ve just said–that I would have to start and the beginning and repeat everything I’ve said all over again to demonstrate its importance to you– and with that, I leave you.

Get that smile off yr face.

JLRH

How I once described how I would like to be reading. Living, really. Living, because: not separate from seeing. All a matter of attention. Not all, reductive. But all–whatever’s not an ear is just pretending. 

But what of the problem of methodological supersaturation? Political theory: I can deal in this; philosophy–I am driven to it from the outside. Words, music, the unlike parts of stone, the path beneath me, the flowers that I ignore, the dust I kick beneath me. Critical animal studies: Lord, child, now you have to pay attention to them too. 

And I’ll be the one standing outside with my bird notebook at 6am tomorrow, rain and barely sunrise, attempting to see a problem, to define a situation. And how is it I could see what I don’t see yet? How is that I use the birds to wrangle (back?) my fore-sight? 

There are ways of “experiencing,” it would seem, that are not really experiencing. Things in themselves? Idealities? Have I just brought those back? Let’s live in it for a moment: how do I really see that waterfall, which one has fallen farthest from the garden path–theoria, perception? And that’s assuming some pure sight! Derrida on perception: “there never was any such thing.”

I can’t look at a waterfall not because I don’t know what to do with it, because I don’t know what to do with my not knowing what to do with it. And because I don’t want to do with it. So: I want the thing? Myth of unity, waterfall in every drop and roar at every source (multiple)? No, I think. I want some ways of seeing that see against that claim. Like, you put your back against mine, and three steps, draw. 

Or, the most mature thing to do is to accept that strange contigency. To acknowledge it–to sing to it, almost. Singing is thus not a fiction–not a believing (I say: “I see that waterfall”; I see it all) but a note upon the gate: Hey I saw some parts of you, I don’t even know which or how I measured, thank you for your grace, such a short season–

JLRH

Come now. I’d take White over Nussbaum anyday. 

… which, I suppose, brings me to another problem. That I’ve been three years now, post-initial violation, picking battles. Cf.: I almost cited a review by Professor TK, which directly criticized old Nussbaum’s approach (while affirming her general orientation towards the public humanities–O! We adore you still, even though your face is a little cracked, The Public Humanities!), for a paper for Professor AK, even when I know that one asked the other to teach it in his class, and the other refused.

(The other is always refusing.)

How to be generous to the people one reads. As people. As… people? It’s hard enough to open an ear to the text, to pay attention for the time that is required in a way that is required. Some texts require more. From me. Less from you. Etc. Honestly, though: I feel that I was bad to Martha Nussbaum. I feel that I owe Martha Nussbaum an open apology. What am I really trying to do here? Get literature out of the law schools? Turn the whole world into Peter Stallybrass, if not kazoo-blowing members of the “Pete” Stallybrass Fan Club? No, no. There’s some good in what she’s doing. She likes books. I mean, what can be wrong with it? It can be bad–boring, unliterary, in fact (which just might be the problem–I’m much more attuned, especially this semester, to receive Heidegger in one ear and almost automatically given the critic who breathed it my other cheek; kiss it or slap it–): still, though, as Bob Dylan once said: 

It’s got to be good for somebody. I know it’s good for somebody.

So what’s my business knocking her down with my small qualms? I know that I’m not on board with Nussbaum’s project. And, to confess a bit more (this is not, you may have noted by now, a literary review), I started reading less and less carefully the more it became apparent to me that disproving utilitarianism was not a particularly urgent (or interesting) question for me. I just became more and more miffed that literature was the rear-guard soldier-hero pulled out to do the trick, who triumphed by way of omniscient courage and the hand-me-down blanket of the bold knights of realism. Yes, Martha, you’ve sold me now. You’re in my metaphors. You’re all over my High Victorian: literature, dear readers, is a person. 

(Or better yet, a picnic–a whole park of people for you to meet and greet! To learn moral lessons from! Make sure to try the chicken salad bake! Don’t eat that mayonnaise that’s been too long out in the sun!)

Forgive me: I am still not being generous. What I meant to say, I suppose, was that I think I pinned Nussbaum’s work as not only bad but really quite immoral–a transgression against the literariness of the literature! A violence against the irreducibility of style! You passed it by like it was a cloud of gnats, a diaphonous veil, Martha! Don’t let Charles trick you, Martha! This house of pure presence, Martha! We built it just for you! 

…and I did this, largely, as a sort of messy Pollock projection of my own readerly immorality. Bad reading makes for angry criticism. (I’ll reiterate that below.)

And: // I am not even sure that I want to be forgiven.

Conclusions, moral and otherwise:

1. Listening is difficult, always and anyway.
2. There is an immoral sort of listening–one that fakes interest, even when one isn’t interested. I think each reader knows–and, I hope, knows how to moderate–her own closedness to the text. (I hope, too, that this is a lesson that we might work here in conjunction to non-literary life. Let’s all get open.)
3. Immoral listening is slippery–like différance, it moves around. It gets in your stuff. For example, your critical reviews. It makes you angry and ungenerous. It turns your expansive scholarly motivations into: destroy.
4. I’m honest, brutal and afraid of you-ou.
5. There’s too much love to go around these days.

Time for a baptism and some clarificatory prose; real reviews will follow. Look for a man descending from the sky with bright red Ray-Bans. 

JLR

From what I’ve read, Allon White (longtime pal of Peter Stallybrass–they read Bakhtin and Rabelais together in a white house one summer, and that’s all you need to know. Well, there are other parts to the story, all wonderful and fascinating, but one must save something as remainder. The North American inland oceans didn’t do that–and now look where we’ve found ourselves!) has brilliantly arranged a variety of hermeneutic styles to address an old favorite problem of literary modernism: obscurity; ie., my new housepet–the difficulty of the text.

White’s area of focus is the early modern–in the sense of fin-de-siècle modernism. He reads, if I remember correctly, James, Conrad, and Meredith. All are, he argues, variously intractable. Here, he seems to be referring to what the critics of the time said, and reception sense: although White finds these guys difficult, it’s clearly (well–there’s another word that’s off-limits from now on) adventuresome enough for him to develop a way to hold them all in a bear-hug at arms’ length… ever respectful of difference.

Methods! White’s methods are particularly exciting–he likes folks like Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and seems to pull his formation of the ‘problem’ and possibilities of literary obscurity directly from the debates over private language and the grounds of public meaning in continental language philosophy. Here are some things that White likes–which I find funny, or compelling (even when I haven’t tried very hard; I promise to try harder in the future to-come):

1. the demise of realism
2. symptomatic reading
3. the “smell of treachery” (attendant to the demise of realism)
4. double treachery (modification of 3; cf. 1)
5. the “dark motive of a statement’s utterance”
6. the “Faustian price” of a hermeneutics of suspicion
7. Eagleton-bashing/ anti- ideology critique
8. secrecy
9. vulnerability of the author to the public gaze
10. obscurity as purity; virginity; privacy

Lovely quotes, please print them onto posters:

The single most arduous task of the present work has been the attempt to preserve the insight of symptomatic reading without reducing and degrading the specific value of the literary text. It is insufficient for a critic simply to penetrate the phenomenal form of a work in order to reveal its psychological and ideological generative matrix. This is a crucial aspect of critical labor, but it is what Hegel would call ‘a one-sided abstraction.’ It falls prey to the old idealist notion that the ‘form of appearance’ (in this case, the literary work itself) is an inessential husk to be discarded once we penetrate beneath it (7). 

What seems to be a part of the ‘code of the real’ in a single work may well become a ‘symptom’ when seen repeated in different works… (4). 

Moreover, White seems cripplingly fair–he’s quite alright with the symptomatic readers, and places symptomatic nicely in its ‘necessary’ place alongside the emergence of sneaky late realism/early modernism, without the demeaning pat and repressed anger of many cultural materialists. (I suppose, though, situating a sort of ‘situational reading’ historically is among the nastier little brother tricks in a critic’s book.) But White’s okay. Really. He even starts out with a cute comment about not wanting to “succumb to a myth of origins.” And this, in the 1980s! All in all, seems like a pretty nice guy. I am excited for the rest of the book.

…Husserl in any event may betray a certain uneasiness… (107)

I’m chiefly interested in how (and why–but I know right now that I can’t reach that) it is that Derrida pays attention to Husserl’s intentionality, and to the coherence of his system, in his “deconstruction” (and play with) Husserl’s texts in Speech and Phenomena. The book is both a unique critical declaration of Derrida’s style of philosophizing–indeed, it contains many of the chief moves of Of Grammatology–but is also irreducible spoken through and on the site of the specific words of Edmund Husserl.

Derrida is especially careful to note instances when Husserl seems “confused” or “frustrated” by his own metaphors for presence. Derrida sees an aporia in the whole system of transcendental phenomenology, but he doesn’t seem to be committed to knocking down Husserl or building him up–as systematizer, or as anything else. But Husserl isn’t just the scratched stratum on which Derrida makes further marks. Derrida takes seriously, and generously, the possibility of Husserl’s non-intentional utterances and his confusions–so much so that these moments of Derrida’s are difficult to process: it is almost as if we are facing a textual psychoanalysis of the writer as reader that always threatens to spill over into a psychoanalysis of the speaking subject as thinker. In short, Husserl’s confusion over metaphors is the displacement and myth of origin that Husserl cannot think through. These confusions–terrifying, because they threaten the very basis of Husserl’s projects–don’t appear until Husserl begins to make metaphor. (In fact, perhaps metaphoricity–its differing, referential structure–is the very ground of différance‘s emergence?) 

Again, D. doesn’t just point out that H. contradicts himself, or that the text gets seamy. Rather, he lovingly finesses these moments in which confusion irrupts into the text. In fact, D. seems to make no order-distinction between H.’s intended utterances and these much more highly interpretive–and indeed, unusually subjective-psychoanalytic–gestures directed at H.’s presumed interstitial experience in writing his treatises. D. says, not a few times, that what he is attempting, after all, sits between a futile and misguided stab at a purely present translation of H. (which, says D., should be reserved for translations across languages, for folks who cannot speak them) and interpretation. 

However, in some cases, this “loving attention” and patience to withstand the encroachment of philosophy (and philosophical language’s) will to simplify–it just becomes a very strange and almost presumptuous setting-forth of the absent Husserl, who is not contained (at least not wholly) in the tomb of his textuality. Here, D. remarks on a “secret” move of H.’s:

…although he had not made a theme of ‘articulation’ and ‘diacritical’ work of difference in the constitution of sense and signs, he at bottom recognized its necessity (101).

What is going on here?

We will have to work hard to mark the exclusions that D.’s careful language undertakes. He is not telling us that H. failed to thematized these movements of différance. He is telling us that H. recognized these movements as necessary. But more importantly, Jacques Derrida is telling us (without really telling us anything else, only by, as it were, the naked act of his telling) that Edmund Husserl, in this particular instant, adhered to a structure of secrecy.

D. presumes that he knows what’s going on: either he has been reading the traces, or some personal communication with H. has sparked this admission, or– D. is taking a rather substantial leap of faith or walk of danger. He is speaking for Husserl. What right does one man have to tell another’s secrets? Especially when they are presumed? Especially when the supposed secret being uprooted is itself the silence of a pact of secrecy between the author and his words? 

If I follow through with it, there will, eventually, be three parts to this inquiry:

1. Thematization

2. The Author

3. Recognition

… could the (dead) author need the critic like Being needs (the watch)man?

… unheard of thoughts are required, sought for across the memory of old signs.. (102)

Hermeneutic fidelity: could we imagine such a thing? Should we?

Bad Utilitarianism: does criticism every violate the uniqueness of persons? What does it matter that we (Derrida) break(s) down the boundaries of an argument as it has been presented, the lines of a book as they have been presented. D. takes, for example, almost all of the books and written thoughts of Husserl, and plays over them, out of their différance. This différance must also be specifically, subjectively embodied: it is the différance of Husserl (not only as thinker, but as mind–man) with himself. Thus, the limits that D. points out aren’t just (t/d)ra(u)matic for the project of transcendental phenomenology–they bear down specifically on the coherence and project of a single author-subject-thinker.

Is this a tragic thing?

Is this in keeping with D.’s reduction of phenomenology to the irreducible movement of différance out from the “origins” of language? (That there is no self-present expression, no Absolute Now; and thus, no self-present, coherent, immediate consciousness–no subject). Must D. destroy the person Husserl in order to, because he, plays in the (always already) ruins of the solitary voice, of the internal monologic? 

Why do I get the strange sense that Derrida, in recycling, is stretching his limbs out through the holes in Husserl’s bodies, those are pearls that were his eyes?

(Can’t we let him die, Husserl? What does this say about D.’s politics re: what it means to enter into projects of authorship, to make oneself graphe in the public sphere? If writing is the tomb that iterates already against the possibility of my own death, in the forgetting of my death, how can we dig up death and articulate it? Does it look like zombies, or resurrection?)

Nussbaum’s treatment, then, calls back into question every English Department’s golden Verboten: an ethical approach to literature. She almost goes so far as to align herself with some of the contemporary struggle over ‘symptomatic reading’ and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’–almost, but not quite. And this not going far enough becomes a “too far” that I just can’t overlook. How’s this? Well: Nussbaum sets out to read literature–Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, specifically, and, later on, in her “Poets as Judges” chapter, key passages from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass–without the apparatus and (one might presume) baggage of critical vocabularies. She achieves this, to some extent, and gives us a few fine lines that would set her on the old Quaker benches with the fading order of critics and philosophers who call themselves “aesthetic” readers. In other words, she reads for affect. Nussbaum is not afraid to tell us that books move her–nor is she timid about extending that me to an “us.” And–more importantly for her work–nor is she terribly concerned about getting behind the how and why of it.

Thus, Nussbaum takes a turn that few readers of “affect” or critics of cultural materialist approaches would follow–instead of delving into the “richness of meaning,” the numinous quality of textual detail and formal element that produces the arresting aesthetic (and even moral) effect that literature wroughts us with, Nussbaum turns straight to the meaning. You’ve got it: she’s concerned with morals, with endings and lessons, with applications and the the specificity of the character. And assumes a sort of transparent banking model of the depositing of meaning: you drive through, you say the names of all of the characters that you meet, you “get” what’s happened to them, and how you should do or not do the same or different things in the same or different situations, and you drive off, deeply enriched. 

Nussbaum gets two things wrong here: first, reading doesn’t work like that. Even if one is a very good reader, and comes away with a bundle of morals, who’s to say that these “morals” work on the level of categoricals and moral principles? It seems much more likely that literary “morals” (insofar as we must buy in to a sort of metaphysics of presence of clear and transparent moral lessons to meet Nussbaum at this crossing) work in a far less clear and tractable manner. Some literary experiences may shake us–as per Abraham’s moment of religious conversion in Kierkegaard’s Fear in Trembling (or Johannes de Silentio, rather, since FT itself was intended as a work of literature)–and render us dumb; others may trouble us or awaken in us strange wills and passions that we must either confront as wily and insidious beyond the bounds of good-natured principles, or as the dark twin of literary “morality.” One only has to think of Dorian Gray’s terrible–but ultimately futile–desire to look away from the little yellow book (Huysman’s Au Rebours) in Wilde’s Picture, or the rash of “fashionable” suicides that seized Europe after the publication of Goethe’s Werther to see that, insofar as literature affects us, Nussbaum’s definition does not suffice. Either we need to expand the notion of literary “morals”–so much so that we include questionably rule-governed affective experiences like quaking, vomiting, or, in the case of Updike’s Rabbit series, sudden obsessive interests in Mr. Goodbar candy (at which point the thing definied threatens to become insolvent); or, we must submit ourselves (and the books that teach us) to a far more rigorous investigation of exactly how it is that books teach us stuff.

Nussbaum isn’t without her overtures to this later method. She’s no dummy about literature’s affective quality, and nor does she ignore the imaginative power of metaphor or the Bakhtinian play of authorial intention over and against the voices of characters (she doesn’t site Bakhtin, of course–but, after all, this is Law School). However, Nussbaum is guilty of what I will call a supervenient not-taking-seriously of the literariness of literature.  I say that Nussbaum is guilty of a “not-taking-seriously” precisely because I do not wish to say the other things: that Nussbaum does not or fails to take the literariness of texts seriously; nor do I wish to imply that she is ignorant us literary specificity or the fullness of literary meaning, or that she cannot see it. I give Nussbaum the benefit of this vat of doubt: it really just seems like she isn’t interested in that sack of potatoes. After all, the debate about literary specificity (whatever that means!) is already raging in the field, and Nussbaum, as she told us at the beginning, is interested in doing interdisciplinary work: namely, in teaching lawyers, moral philosophers, and other maenads of John Rawls that literature is sort of like a form of reasoning, too. But that initial appeal to a specific, limited audience, no matter how much it fulfills Kenneth Burke’s insistence that we get beyond the myth of the universal audience, doesn’t get Nussbaum off the big hook she thinks she’s swerving left of. Eating bones outside of the doghouse doesn’t make them cake. 

We need to begin with an understanding of where and how Nussbaum goes wrong. In the same sort of move that Derrida finds happening all over the history of metaphysics, Nussbaum makes a fundamental assumption in her reading of literature as moral repository, and stays silent about it. This assumption is not so much a big, bold statement as it is a failure to distinguish carefully. To distinguish what? Character from literary effect, phrase from action, Gradgrind against Grandgrind’s language. Nussbaum does treat literary effect–the fact that what’s going on is actually occuring in a book, that was published, that we are holding before us now, dancing on the grave of Charles Darwin, who moderated his own frequent declarations of “I am” in face of the effacement of his literary death–some. Her most moving remembrance of the power of effect–and especially, of the cross-cutting effect of language against portrayed narrative action–comes in her meditation on Dickens’s description of the Grandgrind children’s neat cubbies. The cubbies are tidy, bare, intricately lined with catalogues of objects of rational inquiry that would make Aristotle and Linnaeus forsake the bathhouses:

The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in various departments of science too. They had a little conchological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinent, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the parent substances by those tremendously hard instrumentd their own names; and to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper…                    (Dickens, in Nussbaum 41).

Dickens’s narrator’s description is anything but: he is posh, elaborate, and, as (most of us) can’t fail to see, hilariously inappropriate to the intentionality of the arrangement that careful Mr. Gradgrind is trying to effect. Nussbaum gets this–in fact, she likes it. According to Nussbaum, the narrator’s move “deliberately embodies and evokes forms of desire and sensuality profoundly opposed to those it imputes to Gradgrind’s version of economics. Imagine language as a way of touching a human body, Dickens suggests, and you have a way of scrutinizing the claims of Gradgrind’s theory to stand for us in the fullness of our selves…” (41).  Nussbaum likes language–style, though she does not ever put it that way–because it wakes us up to the “fullness of ourselves”–it is the little knot that shows all of Gradgrind’s grand reductive theories to be just that (41). Nussbaum’s problem is that she also likes Grandgrind, Sissy Jupe, Bounderby and Louisa–and doesn’t distinguish in any sense what we might learn from each domain (the stylistic fullness and richness of the text vs. our “full person” reading of a character), or how, as most of us already-poisoned English Department folks would expect, the one influences the other.

I can be less coy: by “one influencing the other,” I mean that Nussbaum does not significantly engage the fact that the literary medium through which we get these characters is itself a highly constructed and mediated thing. This critique is important for two reasons, and for two (perhaps not wholly) different contingencies: first, by not taking the literariness of the literature seriously, Nussbaum denies all of the “outside” socio-political elements that bear in on a text and are the things that speak its language. Here, I mean culture, discourse, society–Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt wearing party hats, everybody else’s spit roiling in the authorial mouth. Second (and managing, miraculously, to offend both sides of the road), Nussbaum fails to take seriously, if not the intentionality of the author, his willful binding up of those characters and those words in that way in that book, with 509 pages instead of 232, or beginning with Stately and not Fat. The problem here is that, in a hopeful anti-utilitarian crusade like Poetic Justice, Nussbaum’s chief line of talk is taking seriously the irreducible specificity and uniqueness of persons: Sissy Jupe is not What’s-His-Face who gives the “rational” description of the horses; we shouldn’t treat them alike because they speak differently, think differently, and imagine differently–what might elate Sissy would be lost on Bitzer, and what Louisa really needs is a bit more Linda Williams and a bit less time with the Little Miss Curie training set. But what about the irreducible specificity and uniqueness of the author? Charles Dickens is not William Faulkner. Fleshing out–and respecting– what this different means demands paying more attention to language (and by that I mean literary style). And, in a return to the first problematic, it may just mean paying attention to conditions of cultural production, to power and circumstance, to the conditions of serializing novels or the laughing shadow of satire in realism. Nussbaum doesn’t want to be Greenblatt or William Empson. But if she wants to take literature seriously, she has to take literary difference seriously–and that means talking about some of the things they talk about, jargon or no jargon.

But, to return to the two problems:

Among the significant lacunae–lacunae, and not faux pas, since Nussbaum, again, is conspicuously silent on these issues–that Nussbaum makes is not taking seriously the meaning and history of the 19th century Anglo realist novel as genre. There’s an assumption behind that–an assumption which governs what she is able to conclude in Poetic Justice, and how she concludes it. Presumably, Nussbaum takes the 19th century omniscient narrative voice as her example because it sounds the most like us. She picks realist because, if you squint hard enough, we can read it like it’s a window–which is to say that we can forget that we are reading at all. With this squint still on our brow, we can take Gradgrind, Sissy, Bounderby and the rest of them as people like us–more people to know, more people to learn from, people who, interestingly enough, live in Industrial-era England, and who are alternately quite dumb and quite wise about how best and most expansively to get on in their circumstances. But the difficulty–and the trouble Nussbaum’s argument–is that they aren’t just people. There’s something wrong with taking literature as a sort of cheap brothel for interesting exemplars. We get in trouble on all fronts, syphilis in the Attic and climydia smoking on the stairs: either we forget that literature is literature and think (opposite those folks from Soliant Green) that “it’s people!”, and thus subject ourselves to the prejudices of Jason Compson, the bafflement of Leopold Bloom, the nihilism of Raskolnikov; or we get really disappointed and disaffected with the text, and fail to be moved by it at all. The consequences of the first mistaking is our relinquishing of a necessary distance–not the ability to judge Raskolnikov as if the narrator weren’t there, but the ability to productively deliberate between what the narrator says and how the narrator says it. Which are the only gates of access to Nussbaum’s people (I’ll call them characters) that we have, anyhow. The consequences of the second mistake, I think, are somewhat more dire–in being disaffected by literature, in sticking too strongly to our moorings in philosophical and scientistic discourse to grapple with the problem of what Derrida calls “fictional discourse,” we lose something: not just the canons of experience (factories in England, the horse-riders at the circus, angry utilitarians) or moral lessons (don’t teach, or for that matter, marry off your children according to a quanta theory of happiness) that Nussbaum acknowledges so well, but the deliberative struggle of deciding, almost “on our own” but always within the strong arms of the author’s language, by what and how to be moved. 

Even so, Nussbaum’s theory assumes altogether too much clarity: why are we to presume, considering all of these factors, that literature will allow us to better come to a clear moral consensus on the decisions we make in our lives, in our subsequent reading experiences? Nussbaum’s clarity is possible because of her initial reductions (bracketing out, except in a few places, style and context in exchange for “higher-order”–and less specifically literary–concepts like “imagination” and “fancy”); it’s much more likely that an actual reader (and a careful reader) would land fairly firmly in confusion. We can assume that Nussbaum doesn’t want to go there, because it’s a scary thought: what good is it to make the case that literature produces muddle and not clarity, moral chaos instead of a quiet citadel of deliberative reflection? Certainly this case wouldn’t be persuasive for perplexed law school deans looking for a course to cut (“Joyce for Jurisprudence”?); neither does it pass the hopeful-cum-messianic markers required for a basic sort of later-day Humanism. Nussbaum effectively must argue that literature does real moral work. After all, she’s presumably writing this book because literature fulfills some need in reasoning, in the demands of being a good person, a good judge, that theories of moral reasoning don’t quit get to the bottom of. To put it another way: Nussbaum thinks that learning to be a good reader isn’t just analogous to learning to be a good person or lawyer or doctor or judge–rather, literature is additive: it gives us something more, something sort of mysterious, something that’s in there in the book somewhere, something that is so truly great and transformative and on the diminishing horizon of public consideration that someone–Nussbaum–should make a case for it.

Aristotle, one of Nussbaum’s darling, writes in the Nicomachean Ethics that phronesis (or, practical wisdom) helps us shoot with the right aim at the right target. Nussbaum, bless her with contemporary necessity, has the right target: there’s something to literature, alright. But her aim is somehow askance–pointing to the book and saying it’s in the book is enough to get those vaguely mystic souls who are compelled by conversion experiences that can’t be articulated to file down from Mount Moriah and into the local Barnes and Noble. But if Nussbaum wants her book to talk–not just to lawyers, but to the people who were already taking literature seriously–she needs to do something more. If we aren’t to view persons as mere “containers of satisfaction”–which Nussbaum poignantly argues we should not do–means that we need to be open to hearing all of literature,  instead of treating it as a convenient sort of “containers of persons” for possible moral experience (Nussbaum 50).  We must tread in its confusions, in its clarificatory power out of the muddles it makes real to us–the muddles that are as much muddles of language, and of language and interpretation over and against character and happening.

1. Aesthetics and ethics in Gadamer, Levinas and Coleridge: Problems of phronesis and techne  http://www.jstor.org/stable/463425?seq=4&Search=yes&term=paul&term=ricoeur&term=phronesis&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dpaul%2Bricoeur%2Bphronesis%26x%3D0%26y%3D0%26wc%3Don&item=3&ttl=88&returnArticleService=showArticle&resultsServiceName=Arguments: phronesis is missing from the (pyramid) of Heidegger/Gadamer’s hermeneutics–they both problematize the relationship between episteme and techne as it relates to meaning, the construction and execution of method in the disciplines (esp. the human sciences) and something like mystical experience (Heidegger’s Concealed; technological Enframing’s “saving power,” as per “The Question Concerning Technology”); but neither considers the ethics of reading or the sorts of wisdom and judgment required in acts of interpretation–which, as Ricoeur reminds us, are already acts of decision.

1. Psychoanalytic demystification–”the hermeneutics of suspicion”

Who does this? : Freud. Nietzsche. Marx.

2. Remystification of the ambiguity of the symbolic–”the fullness of meaning”; getting (back?) to a second naîveté.

Who does this? : Theologians. Poets. 

Weird-ass concept: Theopoetics.  John Caputo. 

…solutions?