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Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
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isbn 9781785272806
Автор произведения Jeremiah Bowen
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Misreadings, or even reversals of the meaning of a text, seem inevitable in the exchange of approximations and citations of arguments which, especially if they are not central to the rhetorical task, are often presented in the form of a compromise deemed least likely to raise objections from supporters or detractors. This dim bog of “what everyone knows”—where debunked myths and useful innovations blur in a haze of partial recall, expedience and impatience—seems to more or less constitute every “middle ground.” I do not dispute the inevitability of this middle ground, because certainly there are times when we must deal in compromise and sojourn in bogs to reach an objective. But this foggy place is a waypoint, not a destination. Much is lost when Orwell’s argument is so vaguely characterized, as if from a distance. When it is pulled a little closer, its words and their context comprehended firsthand, we are reminded that Orwell’s irritation with political speech is not articulated as a call for autonomously aesthetic writing cleansed of political and historical impurities. It is not aligned with an ahistorical image of close reading, or a depoliticized common sense. What the essay condemns is the euphemistic jargon that depoliticizes state terror and sanitizes the horrors consequent upon state neglect. Orwell pleads with writers to reject facile professional clichés, but his proposals do not primarily aim at restoring the beauty or even the truth of English writing. They aim instead to renew its utility to the moment, to produce writing shaped to its purpose. Orwell clearly hopes that a reinvigorated forthrightness will renew the shock of atrocity dampened by technical terminology, expose the lie of apolitical consensus hiding a status quo brutality, and unveil the exploitation at the foundation of every flawless professional façade.
In revisiting what seems familiar, we often encounter surprises. Without this seemingly inexhaustible novelty of the old, literary studies would have little warrant for its curricula. But just as we reconstruct each time the memories we seem to merely review, so we stand a chance of changing our cultures each time we reflect on we are supposed to know. The obscure power of this process informs our reflection on “the politics of interpretation,” a phrase that recurs throughout the issue of Critical Inquiry that Mitchell frames as a response to Reaganism. That phrase implicates a broad range of personal, professional and social technics of meaning-making. However we may subdivide those technics for the purposes of academic study, analytic examination remains incomplete without a synthetic account of how these various scales and spheres of meaning interact. And however we may compartmentalize these domains of meaning in our personal and professional lives, our apprehensions of particular objects are incomplete without the comprehension of reality that conditions the meaning we make of them, even as it is conditioned by them. To study interpretation is therefore to study how the subject is formed or produced by a social order, and how a social order can be transformed or reproduced by subjects—or in other words, how a self is constructed by others, and how others are constructed by a self.
But when we reconsider Mitchell’s citation, the question arises as to why one might wish to “keep out of politics”—a wish implied by Orwell’s pronouncement of its impossibility. Reagan’s sheltering, permissive persona reminds us that political efforts to support or encourage social changes can threaten unexamined attachments and enjoyments, which are foundational to one’s sense of significance and worth—just as a politics that supports or restores an exploitative asymmetry of power provokes subalterns to demand recognition that their lives matter. Any view that presumes a zero-sum distribution of worth will define politics as antagonism and loss, and this in turn motivates the search for a realm without struggle or death. In other words, the notion that politics is a fight to the death—one that inevitably ends in a master–slave relation—is correlated with the wish for a domain of eternal, universal excellence, truth and beauty. The fallen world implies a higher world above it. The negative reference of each of these worlds to the other—one inevitable but undesirable, the other impossible but irresistible—constructs a sense of stability, and at the same time produces a reality effect of incompleteness or inconsistency, of compensatory losses and gains. In some sense, any academic discipline that imagines itself in terms of Matthew Arnold’s “study of perfection” necessarily participates in this ambivalent structure of interdependent but irreconcilable worlds, in which the necessity of enduring quotidian struggle, strife and cruelty is compensated by an eternal realm of universal value which guarantees the superiority of social structures that shelter and defend it. This is the logic that frames devotional scholarship.
From within that frame, Orwell’s desire to unmask the atrocities of Western humanist and liberal democratic societies might appear to undermine the institutions that keep the inescapable antagonisms of a fallen world in some degree of containment. This fear of undermining institutional stability and authority informs traditionalists and conservatives, from T. S. Eliot’s attachment to the church and “the main stream” of the Western tradition to neoconservative views of culture and religion.19 But in the last decade or so, the exposure and unveiling for which Orwell advocates has been called into question from an apparently different perspective. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, among others, in their arguments for “surface reading,” suggest that exposing atrocity is simply unnecessary in an era of more broadly available information, and of newly obvious government corruption and ineptitude. Though these authors argue on the basis of liberal or progressive values, their arguments entail the same discrepancy between a world of politics, necessarily defined by antagonistic contradictions, and a higher, more beautiful or harmonious world.
Their opposition to George W. Bush’s policies provide the rhetorical occasion for Best and Marcus to question “symptomatic reading,” a term they employ to characterize a range of approaches in literary studies based on demystifying interpretations, which they describe in terms that evoke Orwell’s: “The assumption that domination can only do its work when veiled, which may once have sounded almost paranoid, now has a nostalgic, even utopian ring to it.”20 Just as Mitchell situates his arguments against the backdrop of Reagan, so Best and Marcus frame their proposal for “surface reading” as a response to the Bush administration’s obvious deceit, incompetence and reliance on culture war. Bush’s failures and bad faith were so plain, Best and Marcus argue, that they obviate the need for literary studies to develop and deploy sophisticated methods of reading between the lines: “Eight years of the Bush regime may have hammered home the point that not all situations require the subtle ingenuity associated with symptomatic reading.” We might pause to wonder what Orwell would make of the tentative tenacity implied by “may have hammered home the point,” but in this uneasy combination of hedging and insistence we can discern the tensions inherent in their rhetorical purpose, which requires both an inclusive breadth and a focused urgency. Best and Marcus make their argument in the introduction to a special issue of Representations that, like Mitchell’s issue of Critical Inquiry, presents viewpoints drawn from a range of current methodologies in literary studies. This inclusiveness allows them to define “The Way We Read Now” as an attempt to overcome the hegemony of demystification.
If one agrees that methods of critical unveiling or skeptical examination were obviated by the overtness of Bush’s abuses of power, then this must be doubly true of the current administration. In a period when the euphemisms of polite society have been scrapped by many politicians in favor of raunchy hate speech and overt racism,