Not easy, I know.
A eloquative one with fancy vocabulary. Love her dedicacy in phrasing.
Intro
Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage?
as critical thinkers, we value literature because it engages in critique!
1.The Stakes of Suspicion
在这种情况下，堆砌更多的怀疑论，真的对我们有益吗？ 简而言之，怀疑的立场本身并不具备天然的进步性 — 而且，也不具有本质上的边缘性和反对性，甚至根本不稀罕。
Reading becomes, as Judith Fetterley famously argued, an act of resistance rather than assent, a way of unbinding oneself from the power of the text.
What we might question, though, is the fervor with which “criticality” is hailed as the sole metric of literary value. We can only rationalize our love of works of art, it seems, by proving that they are engaged in critique—
One can, directly, love a work, without critique. It should not be deprived.
Critique has been so far
rhetoric of againstness
That the shake-up of the canon in recent decades and the influx of new voices and visions has altered our perceptions of what literature is and does is indisputable. Yet it hardly follows that such changes are best captured in the idiom of critique—rather than inspiration, invention, solace, recognition, reparation, or passion. Such an idiom narrows and constrains our view of what literature is and does; it highlights the sphere of agon (conflict and domination) at the expense of eros (love and connection), assuming—with little justification—that the former is more fundamental than the latter
So-called Critique is merely mood
Moods are often ambient, diffuse, and hazy, part of the background rather than the foreground of thought. In contrast to the suddenness and intensity of the passions, they are characterized by a degree of stability: a mood can be pervasive, lingering, slow to change. It “sets the tone” for our engagement with the world, causing it to appear before us in a given light. Mood, in this sense, is a prerequisite for any form of interaction or engagement; there is, Heidegger insists, no moodless or mood-free apprehension of phenomena. Mood, to reprise our introductory comments, is what allows certain things to matter to us and to matter in specific ways.
Critical detachment is not an absence of mood, but one manifestation of it, casting a certain shadow over its object. It colors the texts we read, endows them with certain qualities, places them in a given light.10 A certain disposition takes shape: guardedness rather than openness, aggression rather than submission, irony rather than reverence, exposure rather than tact
Critical mood and critical rhetoric are thus closely intertwined.
Moods, in this sense, muddy the distinction between inside and outside, self and world. They often seem larger than our individual selves;
Mood, in this sense, is neither subjective nor objective, but the way in which the world becomes intelligible.
就是说，存在一种超然的、冷静的、怀疑的举止，它已成为 现代知识传播者的重要姿态
a posture of critical detachment no longer brings with it any particular epistemological privilege; it is just one kind of mood rather than an absence of mood
Mood…
underscore the unreliability of knowledge
reverse the falsifications of everyday thought
What unites them, in spite of their differences, is a spirit of ferocious and blistering disenchantment—a desire to puncture illusions, topple idols, and destroy divinities
depth is only one of the spatial metaphors on which literary critics rely
The unreliability of signs secures the permanence of suspicion:
Hermeneutics simply is the theory of interpretation and leaves room for many different ways of deciphering and decoding texts. While suspicion spurs interpretation, not all interpretation is suspicious.
Ricoeur’s two key words:
Interpreting, Ricoeur reminds us, can be a matter of dispossession rather than possession, of exposing ourselves to a text as well as imposing ourselves on a text.
and
…accusing others of paranoia looks uncannily like a paranoid move. To describe a standpoint as skeptical is to situate it within a long history of reflection on the limits of knowledge that stretches back to the ancient Greeks. We are no longer in the world of psychological disorders but of philosophical propositions, epistemological arguments, and world views
Skepticism, in other words, implies a world view, a metaphysics or antimetaphysics. Suspicion, however, denotes an affective orientation—one that inspires differing lines of argument and that does not always terminate in the grand abyss of radical doubt.
“suspicion” is thus ideally suited to an inquiry into the style and sensibility of critique.
what exactly is suspicion
a secondary emotion composed out of basic affects such as fear, anger, curiosity, and repugnance. It is a sensibility that is oriented toward the bad rather than the good, encouraging us to presume the worst about the motives of others—with or without good cause.
suspicion is driven by conflicting aims. On the one hand, we distrust someone or something—the other hand, we are also compelled to keep a close eye on what bothers us, so as to prepare for the eventuality of an attack. Know thine enemy! We remain physically close while psychically removed. Our attitude is guarded, tense, wary, defensive
Suspicion, he observes, is synonymous with doubt and uncertainty; it springs from a lack of knowledge. To suspect something, after all, is not to know it for a fact: it is to speculate and second-guess rather than to be sure.
suspicion is thoroughly enmeshed in the world rather than opposed to the world and offers no special guarantee of intellectual insight, political virtue, or ideological purity.
2.Digging Down and Standing Back
Core question
Why is literature worth bothering with? What is at stake in literary studies?
two highly influential and widely disseminated schemas of suspicious reading.
The first pivots on a division between manifest and latent, overt and covert, what is revealed and what is concealed
second metaphor cluster emphasizes the act of defamiliarizing rather than discovery
两种极具影响力且广泛传播的怀疑阅 读模式。第一种区分了显性和隐性、公开和隐秘、被揭示的 和被遮蔽的。阅读被想象成向下挖掘的行为，以求抵达被压 抑或掩盖的现实。第二个隐喻群强调的是实现陌生化的行为, 而不是发现。文本不再由地层组成；批评家不是往下钻，而 是靠后站。批评家不是拂过表面的意义、追求隐藏的真相, 而是紧盯着表面，通过沉静的凝视，使其变得可疑
the act of interpretation is inherently mistrustful, driven by the desire to translate the words on the page into a more comprehensive and clarifying idiom. For Jameson, it is Marxism that plays the role of this master code, allowing the critic to redefine cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts in order to restore a buried reality of material conditions.
What lies in the psyche is ambiguous and elusive, yet also indestructible. The archaeologist is all too aware of how much has perished, yet the analyst knows the opposite to be true: “Even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject.” Nothing is ever definitely lost; absence can be alchemized into presence; silence can be made to speak.
What appears to be dead must be retrieved, resurrected, brought to light. For the literary or cultural critic, however, this transtemporal tie holds minimal interest. What the work of art represses is not the distant past but its own moment
Depth, in other words, loses its associations with pastness; what is disavowed or concealed by the text is a “social context” that comes earlier only in the sense of being a foundation,
interpretation-as-excavation
我把这种阅读风格称为”朝下挖” (digging down),它将 表层/深度的空间隐喻与文化批判捆绑在了一起 。挖掘是必要 的，因为文本由地层组成，它的意义隐藏在视线之外 。意义 问题被遮蔽、被模糊，普通观察者无法接触到，只能通过细 读的精准技术来进行挖掘。
The job of the critic, then, is to demonstrate that texts are less cohesive, coherent, and unified than they seem.
Marginal or eccentric characters, incongruous, awkward, or clumsy stylistic usage, unresolved or mystifying plot elements, weird camera angles and odd filming techniques: all could be hailed as evidence of failed repression.
There is no moment of revelation, no startling of consciousness, no transformation of thought; the world view of the critic is neither shaken nor stirred. What a text ultimately portends is foretold by a prior theoretical-analytical scheme.
By way of contrast, we can look at George Steiner’s account of the fourfold structure of interpretation. Reading begins, according to Steiner, with an initial moment of trust: we venture a leap, taking the risk of an encounter with the unknown in the hope that there is something to be understood and that our effort will not be in vain.
Such a prejudging, from the standpoint of hermeneutics, is not a naïve blunder or an act of egregious violence but the only entry point for understanding: we must begin, by default, with what we know.
Why not think of a text as gradually yielding up its interpretative riches rather than being probed for its unconscious contradictions?
The key difference is that the text is no longer deemed unknowing and unwitting, in need of the critic’s intervention in order to be freed from a coercive regime of ideological containment.
This quizzical gaze is designed to “denaturalize”—to show that there is nothing self-evident about its form or content.
Russian formalism and its idea of ostranenie, usually translated as “defamiliarizing” or “making strange.” The language of everyday life, according to Viktor Shklovsky and his Soviet compatriots, has been dulled, deadened, and rendered inert by the force of habit. We look without really seeing, hear without really listening; we mechanically utter the commonplaces of speech like vending machines spitting out chocolate bars
is merely
scholarly self-fashioning
Detachment was not just a matter of disinterestedness,
In short, the metaphorical act of standing back has its own risks and epistemological losses
The natural, normal, or intrinsic is now demoted to a mere façade; what seems to be an “inner psychic or physical necessity” is merely a surface sign that produces the misleading “illusion of an inner depth.”
That is to say, metaphors of surface and depth switch places: it is superficiality that is now the hidden truth, while interiority is demoted to a deceptive façade.
As Stanley Fish never tires of pointing out, we cannot access all the conditions that make our speech possible; we cannot turn all of our background into foreground; we cannot turn all that is unthought into thought
We have considered two variants of critique: hermeneutics versus genealogy
In the first scheme, the critic strives to recover or retrieve something precious: interpretation pivots on a division between what is concealed and what is revealed. False gods are cast down in order to usher in a new regime of truth; critical doubt is deployed in the service of a final revelation. For a second group of critics, this hermeneutic is not yet suspicious enough, thanks to its pesky attachment to final vocabularies and ultimate truths.
允许批评 家将批判和爱混合起来，将对文本的敌意和欣赏融为一体 。 正如前文所述，怀疑很少是纯粹的或不掺杂任何杂质的 。
3. An Inspector Calls
Author draws a creative analog between critics and detective. The “reading as detection” drives the reasoning and reveal the similarities.
“Scholars are, in the end, only the detectives of thought.”
in this chapter, is not the interpretation of narrative but interpretation-as-narrative—the means by which a critical sensibility spins out story lines that connect understanding to explaining
This façade of innocence is pierced by the critic, who, in imputing intention to the text, treats it as a quasi-person equipped with a desire to deceive.
Invisibility is key; it is a premise of critique that the act and fact of coercion are camouflaged and kept from view. The suspiciously minded scholar differs from others not just in an ability to solve the crime but, more fundamentally, in knowing that a crime has taken place.
a clue is a significant detail that does not come into visibility until it is recognized and interpreted by an expert
Reading-as-detection, in engendering a deep-seated suspicion of everyday reality, also has the effect of rendering that reality newly gripping and worthy of attention; every detail is pregnant with potential purpose, haloed with a heightened, even hallucinatory, intensity of meaning
Ferreting (=searching), I’ve been suggesting, is a matter of storytelling, of creating a compelling narrative. The detective must reason backward, from an effect to a cause, from a corpse to a killer, weaving disparate scraps of information into a coherent sequence. The clue is indispensable to this process, and yet clues speak with many voices and their messages are sybilline and often opaque
In both detection and criticism, then, the story dictates what counts as a clue as much as the clues determine the shape of the story. It is narrative that turns signs into clues; only when the detective already has some inkling about the nature of the crime or a possible criminal does a potential clue hove into view.
Suspicion conjures up a never-ending stream of signs-to-be-read and conclusions-to-be-drawn; crime is premeditated not only by the criminal but also by the industrious and ever-vigilant investigator!
WTH IS META
….Metasuspicion
Is it possible to read critically without investigating, interrogating, and indicting
The so-called “sexual” means the primary driving force of desire, instead of intercourse.
In Freudian accounts of interpretation, the desire for knowledge is linked to a sublimated sexual curiosity or an unconscious drive for domination.
Now that she is turning to Barthes.
In a famous essay, Roland Barthes declared that the author’s death frees up the reader to make of the text what he wishes, to cast off, in revolutionary fashion, the repressive yoke of God-given, author-sanctioned meaning
Indeed, the words we are dissecting may be words that once seduced and entranced us, at an earlier moment in our reading history. We must inhabit the text, come to know it thoroughly, explore its every nook and cranny, if we are to succeed in drawing out its hidden secrets.
Yes, the ubiquity of suspicion is unfortunate; no, critique is not a capital crime. Yes, we need to dial down the frequency of interrogation and cross-examination; no, suspicious reading is not an act of unconscionable violence.
Lol very religious interpretation
we are all stained by the original sin of interpretation
Once we acknowledge that suspicious interpretation is not only thought-driven but also pleasure-driven, not just a critique of narrative but also a type of narrative, its exceptional status is diminished.
4.Crrritique
five qualities that come into play in the current rhetoric of critique
1)Critique is secondary.
A critique is always a critique of something,
The secondariness of critique is not just a conceptual issue—critique presumes the existence of an object to be critiqued—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing: a time lag that can span decades, centuries, even millennia.
While definitions of “critique” often cite its origins in the Greek word krinein—meaning to separate, to distinguish, to judge—the subject and object of critique are more closely intertwined than such definitions admit.
critique opens up a gap between itself and its object; it affirms its difference from what it describes and asserts its distance from the voices that it ventriloquizes.
2)Critique is negative.
negativity is also a matter of rhetoric, conveyed via acts of deflating or diagnosing that have less to do with individual attitude than with a shared grammar of language
Critique is associated, in this sense, with what Koch calls the pathos of failure;
3)Critique is intellectual.
defamiliarization, as Michael Warner observes, does not work all by itself, and we need to think in more specific terms about how what we say is heard, misheard, or ignored in public life.
critiquer includes both critique and criticism, even though the English translation must resolve this ambiguity in a specific direction.
4)Critique comes from below.
What is needed, in short, is a politics of relation rather than negation, of mediation rather than co-option, of alliance and assembly rather than alienated critique
5)Critique does not tolerate rivals.
5.“Context Stinks!”
A combination with social theory.
actor-network theory offers another view of works of art and of the social constellations in which they are embedded
- History is not a box—that is to say, standard ways of thinking about historical context are unable to explain how works of art move across time. We need models of textual mobility and transhistorical attachment that refuse to be browbeaten by the sacrosanct status of period boundaries.
- Literary texts can be usefully thought of as nonhuman actors—a claim that, as we’ll see, requires a revision of common assumptions about the nature of agency. A text’s ability to make a difference, in this line of thought, derives not from its refusal of the world but from its many ties to the world.
- These ideas lead, finally, to a notion of postcritical reading that can better do justice to the transtemporal liveliness of texts and the coconstitution of texts and readers—without opposing thought to emotion or divorcing intellectual rigor from affective attachment
History, in this light, consists of a vertical pile of neatly stacked boxes—what we call periods—each of which surrounds, sustains, and subsumes a microculture. Understanding a text means clarifying the details of its placement in the box, highlighting the correlations and causalities between text-as-object and context-as-container.
It is no longer a matter of treating literature as foreground and context as background, but a systematic leveling of such distinctions.
Why, in short, are we so sure that we know more than the texts that precede us
Their temporality is dynamic, not fixed or frozen; they speak to, but also beyond, their own moment, anticipating future affinities and conjuring up not yet imaginable connections.
The ANT viewpoint, then, is rather different: that art’s distinctive qualities do not rule out social connections but are the very reason that such connections are forged and sustained.
Art works can only survive and thrive by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts.
-—
fanfic
“idioculture,” which he defines as follows: “the singular, and constantly changing, combination of cultural materials and proclivities that constitute any individual subject . . . registered as a complex of particular preferences, capabilities, memories, desires, physical habits, and emotional tendencies.”
Even if we are all products of the cultural blender, each mixture of influences, vocabularies, memories, orientations, and temperament possesses a distinct and unmistakable flavor. We make ourselves out of the models we encounter; we give ourselves a form through the different ways we inhabit other forms. And we bring these differences to the event of reading, even as we are reoriented—sometimes subtly, sometime significantly—by the sum of what we read.
At the end of day, it is an exhausting reading….