In "The Limits of Critique," Felski argues that critique has become the very kind of common sense it sets out to expose.
In "The Limits of Critique," Felski argues that critique has become the very kind of common sense it sets out to expose.
Felski argues that this style takes two basic forms and that these forms have become second nature for the critic. Critics “dig down” and “stand back.” Digging down is the practice of the Freudian and the Marxist. These critics stoop to excavate, interrogate, and dissect the text. They mistrust its surface. Standing back is the move of the poststructuralist and the New Historicist. These critics distance themselves to situate, contextualize, and denaturalize the text. They mistrust what seems natural. These metaphors of digging down and standing back function as the centripetal forces of critique. They encourage the critic to adopt a distrustful attitude toward the text. Interpretation hinges on the assumption that all texts mean more than they say. The act of reading simply becomes the act of “drawing out the nonobvious.”
Although standing back does not buy into the same search for foundational truth that motivates digging down, it turns a similar critical gaze on whatever seems natural. That which is taken for granted must be scrutinized. But, as Felski counters, “It is one thing to point out that certain ideas are bad and also taken for granted. It is another to conclude that they are bad because they are taken for granted …” Critique assumes that what is taken for granted is necessarily bad and cultivates such an assumption as the default mood of the critic. In a characteristically smart turn of phrase, Felski quips that “opposing critique to common sense fails to acknowledge the commonsensical aspects of critique.” Suspicious readers may not take note of how their guarded approach to a text produces one reading instead of another. They may always assume that the text or author is guilty of some crime requiring suspicious interpretation.
Felski describes the suspicious critic as an inspector or detective. If critics read by digging down and standing back, then we write by working from effect to cause like good detectives always do. Critics must tell a persuasive story about the text’s complicity with larger social structures. The point is not only that the critical reader adopts the mistrustful eye of the detective but also that it is the suspicious spirit of critique that prompts her to take on this persona in the first place. Every text has something to hide, and once the critic has figured out which social forces lie buried beneath its surface or hidden in plain sight, she must give a persuasive account of the text’s complicity. The text is always an accomplice, if not a perpetrator. The thrill of detection is what draws so many of us to literary studies in the first place. We take pleasure in discovering the hidden forces that determine the structure and content of the text and in belonging to the exclusive club reserved for those who can think this way. But like many other specialized forms of knowledge, critique depends on self-awareness, even a hyper-self-awareness, and suspicion can become monstrous when turned on itself.
In recent years, Felski observes, “the kinship between critic and detective has become frayed …” As the detective has come to represent the state’s panoptic eye, critics have come to distrust the detective and identify with the criminal instead, all the while continuing “to read like a sleuth.” More and more, the critical reader begins to perform a critique of critique: “It is no longer the text that is charged with criminal activity but the exegesis of the text.” We have reached a point of diminishing return, a vicious circle: the more suspicious we become of critique, the more we are captured by its style.
This endless critique of critique haunts every chapter of the book. Felski defends her project again and again from the accusation that it simply doubles down on critique. This repetition is no doubt necessary as her intended audience is made up of those who live and breathe critique. In my view, she successfully answers this objection. The book does not set out to reveal how critique has overshadowed a truer path to meaning, but to catalog just how it has become “synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and noncompliance with the status quo,” how it has become “not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing.” Felski’s goal is not to critique critique, but to redescribe it as the air of literary studies with an eye toward expanding our atmosphere. She does not seek to undermine, expose, and thus dismiss critique, as critical readings typically do with their objects. If anything, we come to understand its strengths and pleasures more deeply by exploring its limits.
And yet, don’t we have to consider the political implications of curbing critique? Critique has become the default mode of the literary critic in part because of its refusal to settle for the status quo. If we move away from critique as the foundation for literary studies, don’t we risk ignoring the political conditions in which texts are produced and read? In fact, Felski insists that there is nothing “automatically progressive about a stance of suspicion.” The irony and detachment that propel critics are now commonplace. The critic is no longer an outsider railing against the establishment. Critique is no longer marginal; it is mainstream. But the political implications of Felski’s argument extend far beyond reassessing the claim that critique is inherently politically progressive. She also draws on the work of philosopher and science studies scholar Bruno Latour to reimagine the very idea of “politics.”
Latour is perhaps most widely known for his claim that, as the title of one early book puts it, We Have Never Been Modern. He is also well known for his theory of social relations, which he outlines in Reassembling the Social. In this book, Latour pioneers his own brand of what other sociologists and philosophers call actor-network theory. The basic idea is that groups we generally think of as “social” are not static or essential, but constantly in process or under construction. That is, we can’t look to “social explanations” for why things are the way they are because the “social” is the very thing that always needs to be explained. We cannot rely on social forces to explain a text, or on a text to explain the social forces that produced it. For Latour, what’s important about this view is the significance of all humans and nonhumans in forming these networks. In other words, all humans and things are actors. Everyone and everything is a mediator rather than a mere intermediary, even and especially literary texts.
Latour’s actor-network theory helps Felski redescribe the relationship between texts and their contexts because it refuses to think of them as somehow separable or distinct. So when we think about the political implications of how we read, we cannot simply think of the text as an object produced in a certain political context, or as an intermediary that can transmit that context to us, or even as a mere critique of that context. The text must be understood as a mediator, an actor that plays a significant role in the very formation of that context. “Politics, in the sense developed by actor-network theory,” Felski explains, “is no longer a matter of gesturing toward the hidden forces that explain everything; it is the process of tracing the interconnections, attachments, and conflicts among actors and mediators as they come into view.” Under the banner of critique, to ask about politics is to ask how the text is complicit or subversive in its social context. actor-network theory, by contrast, sees the politics of reading in the relations between the myriad actors involved in the act of reading. Examining the limits of critique does not mean that we must abandon politics. It means that we must think about politics in a more rigorous way. It certainly does not mean that we must no longer be critical. The question, for Felski, is: “Can we be postcritical — as distinct from uncritical?”
What would it mean to be “postcritical” in Felski’s sense? In September I had the opportunity to attend “Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour,” a conference hosted by Felski at the University of Virginia. Latour closed the all-day affair with an unsurprisingly refreshing and funny presentation. But it was Felski’s talk, “Doing the Humanities,” that has stayed with me most. In an effort to take a further step beyond the limits of critique, she offered four answers to the question, “If we’re not only doing critique, then what else do we do when we do the humanities?” First of all, she says, we curate. We are caretakers who preserve a tradition (yes, even when we critique that tradition). We also convey, both communicating and transporting values, sensibilities, texts, and stories. We criticize. Criticism in this sense includes forms of disagreement and objection that do not follow the mood and style of critique. Finally, we compose. We make. Composition is not creation out of nothing, but creation through gathering, assembling. It is encouraging that Felski is already building on the work of her latest book, and to know that there are critics who look at literary studies as a discipline of building up and not only tearing down. We need a book like The Limits of Critique now, at a time when, as Latour has famously said, critique has “run out of steam.”
Some books are so incisive and timely that they seem inevitable. To read them is to feel that if their authors had not come along to write them then surely someone else would have. The Limits of Critique is such a book. By exploring its limits, Felski frees critics from relying on critique as the gatekeeper of literary studies and offers a prescient guide to life in a postcritical world.
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