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2 See Terry Eagleton’s widely read introductory chapter in the seminal tome, Literary Theory: An
Introduction “The Rise of English” pp. 17–53.
3 Aids to Reflection (1825) was a series of lay sermons aimed specifically at young men and was in
essence a commentary in the form of aphorisms and selected passages from the writings of
Archbishop Leighton. The Aids, which may be regarded as an eirenicon between faith and reason,
and at one time served as a kind of manual of liberal orthodoxy, brought their compiler applause and
recognition, and since his death have been frequently republished. This genre of conservative and
literary work, would also, after the posthumous Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840) became a
mainstay of Anglo-American cultural criticism, exemplified by thinkers as diverse as Carlyle,
Emerson, Thoreau, Arnold, Leavis; and—more recently—Jordan Peterson. One may even discern the
roots of the modern self-help genre in extant texts like this.
4 I refer to Abrams’ stimulating chapter on the “Orientation of Critical Theories” in his seminal
monograph, The Mirror and the Lamp: romantic theory and the critical tradition, New York: OUP,
1953. pp. 3–29. Having read this work twice, I find that it is still possibly the most outstanding of all
of the extant studies that subsist in the category of Literary Theory. It also correctly locates the
continuing importance of the Romantic tradition in its overall relationship to the subject and its place
in the humanities in general.
5 See the book Philosophical Romanticism, Nikolas Kompridis (ed). London: Routledge, 2007.
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What indeed? And why? The current book itself, as anyone can see from
perusing the following pages, covers areas as diverse as cultural studies, the
social sciences, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. This is due in part
because one of the central theoretical frameworks utilised in modern
literary criticism is an interdisciplinary approach called structuralism.
Whilst structuralism was originally a new branch of linguistics, it soon
spread as a theoretical framework for studying the aforementioned subjects
respectively, using a standardised set of metrics.
However, the discrete discipline of literary criticism really came into its
own in the twentieth century as a major study area in the humanities. This
was partly because teachers such as Cleanth Brooks and I.A. Richards
intended to place literary criticism on a par with other rigorously theoretical
subjects such as physics and biology. Thus, came the inception of
movements such as the ‘New Criticism’ and on the continent,
‘Formalism’—both of which were normative and highly theoretical
approaches intended to measure literature in the same way that other, more
scientific areas—could be measured.
However, some critics, such as the British teacher F.R. Leavis,
massively influential in at least early twentieth-century criticism, still took
an “a-theoretical” approach to the subject, arguing that literature was a
special form of discourse that transcended the new age of industrialisation
and modern, mechanised civilisations. Leavisite criticism and the literary
journal edited by Leavis and Knights, Scrutiny (1932–1953)), became
synonymous with what was known as “moral formalism.”1 This was
because, echoing the work of nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold,
certain novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and
George Eliot, supposedly used a literary form that made the reader more
aware of the moral complexities of life, as well as making the reader aware
of the best qualities that were required in terms of how to live a complete
human life.
Other later approaches gradually grew out of other areas of knowledge
—psychoanalysis, Marxism and philosophical areas such as
phenomenology (the philosophical study of consciousness) and gradually
literary criticism became the rich area of study and research that it is today.
Even though the field is a difficult (and at times contested) area of the
humanities, it is also highly innovative and one of the mainly exciting
concepts that seems to have come out of this milieu is that there are a
number of prisms through which to read any given text. Thus, even though
this is a difficult and at times contested area of study, the reading public can
feel in some measure assured by the fact that there is no single and correct
way of reading a poem such as “The Flea” or a novel such as Wuthering
Heights; a single and correct reading would mean, as the structuralist
Roland Barthes famously phrased it, “victory to the critic”2 In some ways, it
can be argued that even though literary criticism and theory is a difficult
area of learning, it also has rewarding heuristic elements, not least of which
is the fact that it “democratises” the text itself, leaving it open to manifold
readings and interpretations, taking the power away from the teacher and
“critical expert,” while placing it back into the hands of the readers
themselves.
The paradox then, is that even though the original “new critics” were
looking for theoretical stability, by the end of the twentieth century, literary
studies had become as open-ended as ever, with a general consensus that
there is no fixed, univocal way of reading a text. Indeed, most critics
nowadays talk of “re-reading” texts. If there were a simple and correct way
to read a text, why indeed would there be such a plethora of literary-critical
texts on the market. Why indeed, would we need to read yet another PhD on
Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Eliot’s The Wasteland? The inventiveness of
readings and the subtleties of reinterpretation have led in some ways to
more readings than ever since the formalists and new critics came along to
objectify literary criticism and to fix it as a science—or break its wings on a
wheel—not everyone subscribes to the eight division of the syntagmatic
high club. One man’s metonymy is another man’s symbolism.
Poorly worded technical ‘jokes’ aside, one constant objection to literary
criticism that is voiced by both specialists and non-specialists alike, is that
taking a mechanical approach such as structuralism, poststructuralism or
formalism to a text in some ways destroys not only the integrity of the text,
but also the integrity of the reading experience itself. This however is a
misnomer. One may use a simple analogy to demonstrate the erroneous
nature of this train of thought. Take a brand new, shiny, aesthetically
beautiful motorbike—or at the risk of piquing the ire of the Virago Press
school of feminist poetics—a brand-new Aston Martin. Now, imagine you
were to take the motorbike apart in order to look at the engine inside: the
carburettor, the oil filters, the spark plugs: the very engine itself. This gives
one a unique insight into the very inner function of the machine itself and it
also provides us with special tools and words for understanding the
mechanics of the bike itself. However, we can still reassemble the
motorbike itself and see it again in all its original aesthetic glory; indeed,
we can perhaps appreciate this glory even more if we understand what is
under the curvaceous surface of the machine, or what drives this wonderful-
looking product. This is the same principle as when we read a poem or short
story: we understand devices such as meiosis (understatement), paradox,
hyperbole, prosopopoeia (personification), metaphor, simile and
onomatopoeia; however, we still appreciate that the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts and this technical understanding in no way detracts from
our overall appreciation of the text as an aesthetic object.
One may also add that traditionally, literary criticism and literary theory
have been viewed as one subject, which is true. A structuralist critic for
example, takes a whole theory (semiotics) which is rooted in a structural
theory of linguistics and then applies this to a text to understand how the
text works or by what rules the text is operating. This form of criticism is
rooted in a theory of language (and by extension composition) and may
give us theoretical insight as well as critical insight; for example, does the
text succeed or fail in what it is ultimately attempting? Whilst literary
theory gives us the tools and groundwork to analyse the text, literary
criticism is the actual use of these tools in order to critique and interpret a
text. If we follow the peregrinations of a literary critic such as Vladimir
Propp for example, we understand that he uses the theory of structuralism
with which to criticise and hence grasp the structural meanings of the
traditional fairy tale.
Another often overlooked point in literary criticism is the function of
the word “criticism” itself. Traditionally, criticism (spanning back
etymologically to the Greek kritikos), means to be able to make judgements
or discern. This has often been related to judging in terms of quality.
However, in literary criticism the term is used simply as a normative term
for understanding the text—or the workings of the text. This in turn gives us
a closer comprehension of the text we are studying. I.A. Richards, for
example, supposedly provides us with the practical principles with which
we can successfully read literary texts.
There is however a second and more judgemental node of literary
criticism, which is usually connected to the later more political nature of
literary criticism. For example, a Marxist critic such as Gyorgy Lukács
makes clear distinctions in terms of the difference of political relevance
between a writer such as Thomas Mann and a writer such as James Joyce in
his essay “The Ideology of Modernism” (1963). Furthermore, feminist
critics and postcolonial critics make other such critical judgments that can
be seen to be rooted, to some degree, in the political, whether they be rooted
in class, sexuality, or ethnic identity.
Take for example Chinua Achebe’s assertion that Joseph Conrad’s
novella Heart of Darkness should be removed from the Western canon
altogether. Without question the politicisation of literary criticism and
approaches to the canon, or to what Barthes also claimed “…Gets taught.
Full stop”3 has also changed our idea of literary criticism since the time of
F.R. Leavis, who celebrates what he sees not only as the moral formalism
inherent in Heart of Darkness, but also the accompanying normative view
of this moral universe, symbolised by the very pioneering spirit of the
merchant service itself,
One may of course argue, as has Terry Eagleton, that Leavis’ humanist
criticism is in itself ideological and by extension, political—on this reading
all criticism is up to a point political as it simply can’t function in an
historical vacuum. However, Achebe’s polemic is more overtly political in
its self-representation, and much more directly political. Leavisite criticism
runs back to S.T. Coleridge’s (post-Kantian)5 idea of a learned cultural
intelligentsia or “clerisy” and Matthew Arnold’s own particular humanist
call to the middle classes to engage with their working-class counterparts.
In wider political parlance it may be contended that whilst the Coleridge,
Arnold and Leavis school of literary humanism form a conservative branch
of literary (and cultural) criticism, the subsequent schools of criticism and
theory have come to represent a more liberal (many would argue Liberal-
New Left) school of criticism. One thing this demonstrates is that it’s
possibly a mistake to simply relegate literary criticism to an a-theoretical
locus, in which it is shielded from the real world in which we live. In point-
of-fact, the so-called “culture wars” that have provoked such civil unrest in
Tocqueville’s formerly utopian Land of The Enlightenment, The United
States, are testament to this very point. Whatever our ideas of literary
criticism, there are deep cultural and political implications, which have
moved from a stress on form and structure towards a far more political
critique of our institutions, at all civic levels—not just on purely aesthetic
considerations.
One should also remember that the raised political awareness provided
by critical theories such as postcolonialism and feminism has meant that the
scope of literature readily available to the scholar has increased
dramatically since the post-war years. Books such as Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening are now regularly taught in liberal arts literature classes,
however the novel’s reception upon its initial publication in 1899 was
nothing short of hysterical. Likewise, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and
works such as Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain also currently get the
recognition they always warranted. These political changes to the canon
would not have been possible were it not for literary-critical theories that
challenged and interrogated the political status quo.
One further pertinent question is: What about the relevance of literary
criticism to Thai students (or other nationalities)—let alone the general
public? There are obviously a number of answers to this query; the first
response may be to simply throw the question back at your interlocutor—
why not? Do all academies simply require Business, Engineering and
Science faculties? Perhaps part of the entrenched fear lies in the fact that
literature historically makes up a large part of any culture and many
conservatives simply don’t want people thinking too critically about
narratives that have hitherto informed a particular culture—whether it be
Thai, US, Polynesian or British culture. However, this does not necessarily
mean that all literary scholars are going to start running around campus,
burning their underwear, or wearing Chairman Mao tee shirts. That said, it
may mean they will be able to pay closer attention to what the structures of
these narratives have in common with other narratives from other cultures.
In fact, while possibly raising the spectres of Marx, Derrida or Butler,
literary criticism may also provide a basis for more conservative values;
structuralism or archetypal criticism can equally bolster the idea that there
are eternal verities that perhaps cannot be deconstructed entirely, or
archetypal narratives and characters that transcend history; social
constructions and what became known as historical or higher criticism.6
These structures present what for the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
were universal archetypal symbolic structures; or narratives that presented,
through mythemes, universal a-historical myths, created through the binary
structures of the human mind.7
One may also add that we could question why indeed did neoclassic
poets such as Pope, Dryden and Grey bother with their ornate and polished
art at all in the first place? Their diction and periphrasis were certainly not
of an accord with the English spoken by common men? However, they were
testing the English language to see what could be done with it and whether
or not it was up to the same rhetorical standard or potential of the classical
and romance languages—and it turned out it was. As for criticism, why not
also see what we are capable of accomplishing in our reception and critique
of texts? How far should we interrogate texts and perhaps the received
assumptions within texts—whether they be Thai or English. Equally, why
should we not move beyond being able to say why we like Collins or
Rushdie? Why is Emily Brontë regarded as better than Danielle Steele?
Why are Thai authors like Pramoj or Wongsuwan worth closer inspection?
Literary criticism gives us the tools to offer arguments that may not be as
scientific as the new critics wished but may at least give us some scope of
objectivity.
Another common objection is to the jargon or specialist language that
makes up literary criticism. This is I think connected to the idea of why
spoil the reading of the text? outlined above. If one takes a course in human
anatomy they will be faced with a plethora of jargon; and in actual fact, if
one studies horticulture in-depth they will encounter certain arcane
terminology. However, in these cases not a word of dissent is uttered. We
rightly feel that literature (and by extension culture) belongs to everyone.
However, this does not ipso facto mean that specialist phraseology should
not be a part of this particular discipline. The simple answer is that we can
usefully employ tools and meta-expressions such as langue, parole, and
discourse to provide us with a linguistic rubric with which to antatomise
language and literature—as do horticulturists and biologists in their
respective fields. Literature, like the model of the body, or the motorbike,
can still be reassembled and appear as aesthetically beautiful as ever
afterwards.
Moreover, as the study of Thai literature mushrooms, the use of these
critical apparatus will be invaluable for closer readings of the texts that will
possibly make up the formative ‘canon’. Books for possible inclusion such
as Red Bamboo, Letters from Thailand, The Circus of Life or A Young Man’s
Fancy will be susceptible to deep analysis and assessment, perhaps
accounting not only for their formal or structural qualities, but also their
contextual, psychoanalytical, historicist and of course, political elements.
This is an exciting enterprise indeed, and one that promises rich rewards if
the scholar is equipped with a strong conceptual apparatus through which to
engage these texts: a grounding that engages with these texts at various
critical levels.
Finally, whether one is more conservative or more radical in one’s
persuasion, literary criticism simply offers tools with which to explore a
large part of our cultural universe. The reading subject can equally take
away conservative views, such as those outlined above and accorded to
Coleridge, Arnold or Leavis—or later on Roger Scruton; or more radical
views such as those attributed to Gayatari Spivak or Jacques Lacan. Then
again, the reader doesn’t have to inherit any of these political viewpoints
and may just enjoy the play, jouissance, or the comparative features of the
text. Whatever one takes away from criticism, one will be encouraged to
challenge traditional, univocal readings or “authoritative” readings of
literature. In sum, one will be encouraged to think critically about the text.
The text is at least given back to the student, which is after all what the new
critics originally wanted.
Footnotes
1 5 The monthly review Scutiny not only ran for 76 issues, but also had contributors and readers as
diverse as George Santayana, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, William Empson and I.A. Richards.
2 Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” in David Lodge (ed), Modern Criticism and Theory,
New York: Longman, 1991. pp. 167–172.
5 Peter Cheyne writes in his tome Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, (London: OUP; p. 262)
“By 1829, in Church and State, Coleridge recommends ‘a national clerisy’ to disseminate the liberal
arts and sciences, thereby to serve as ‘an essential element of a rightly constituted nation’, securing
both its permanence and its progression. He is sometimes cited as coining the word ‘clerisy’ (he was
first to use it in English), although in doing so he effectively translates Kant’s Klerisei. Klerisei is
standard German for clergy, but Kant uses the word for an idealizing church of reason to free faith
from historical forms and direct it towards the moral law discoverable by reason. While Kant
suggested the term, however, Coleridge thoroughly developed the notion from his 1818 revision of
The Friend to its fullest form in Church and State (1829/30).”
6 Historical or Higher Criticism is a form of literary analysis that investigates the origins of a text.
And is contrasted with lower criticism (or textual criticism), whose goal is to determine the original
form of a text from among the variants and is more connected to the recent scholarship of Close
Reading. It is historically linked to the work of the German Biblical School of Hermeneutics as
practiced by the scholars of the Tübingen School, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). As
with Kant’s notion of a “clerisy” These Germanic scholarly ideas in part emigrated to England under
the tutelage of Coleridge.
7 Lévi-Strauss, as we shall see in the chapter on structuralism, coined the phrase “mythemes” from
the linguistic structural study of Ferdinand de Saussure and the binary nature of linguistic phonemes.
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Literary Criticism is a complex term that has its roots in antiquity, going
back to the ages of classical Greece and later Rome. We can examine
ancient texts such as Homer’s The Iliad and its call to the Muses, who
inspired the Bards (early poets) to record in a special discourse, the great
contemporaneous events. In a sense, the early poets were the chroniclers (or
historians) of their time and were therefore always involved in a specialised
use of language; an idea that has been handed down throughout the history
of literary criticism. These poets and sages were originally part of the epic
oral tradition—a tradition that centred on rhetoric and the persuasive nature
of the language figures, tropes and arguments contained within these
persuasive discourses.1
The Greek poet Hesiod famously wrote of how the muses met him on
Mount Helicon, whilst he was tending his sheep, giving him a staff of laurel
and a divine voice. Hesiod indeed founded the genre of the Pastoral. Even
the legendary Greek philosopher Plato, who was critical of the powers that
poets had over language and their influence, wrote that the poets had a
mystical, divine voice in his dialogue, The Ion. Moreover, The Greek poet
Pindar also saw himself, in writing his classical odes, as being set apart
from other men, because he had been being given a special voice in order to
transcend the limits of mortality. His belief was also that natural talent
would outshine learning, something echoed later on by Longinus. Thus, the
early, self-critical attitude of poets often supposed a specialised, divine
voice given by the Gods of the Muses to the poet who was a “seer.”
Poets were also disclosers of ethical information in the early ages. In
Aristophane’s play The Frogs, Aeschylus claims “Children have a master to
teach them, grown-ups have the poets.”2 Ancient literary criticism thus
grew out of a philosophical requirement to discuss the actual functions and
uses of literature—as it had been perceived as having such a high-ranking
place in society. The poets also came to be regarded as superior craftsmen,
which was another conception that challenged the idea of a more divine
inspiration. Pindar himself also endorsed this idea. Indeed, the word
“poetry” has its origins in these meanings, the poet became described as a
maker poietes and his product is a poiema “a made-up thing.”
In an early instance of literary criticism, Aristophanes satirises the ideas
of taste and criticism his play The Frogs by pitting the tragedians Euripides
and Aeschylus together in a discussion of their poetic “trade” in order to
curry the favour of the Greek God Dionysus. This is an early form of
informal satire that challenged the differing views of language utilised by
tragic writers such as Sophocles, Aeschylus and later Euripides. What the
prologue to The Frogs informs us is that Greek writers were becoming more
aware of stylistic questions: questions about the effect a poet should have
on the audience, while also considering general criticism as a form of
discourse itself.
Later orators, such as Gorgias of Leontini, also emphasised the power of
language itself to influence people’s thoughts and emotions; indeed, the
Sophists were teachers of rhetoric who would instruct pupils on the best
ways in which to use language to influence people’s psychology and beliefs
and their influence, as we shall see in a later chapter, has been lasting. One
may think of advertisements today or even the behaviour of politicians and
their use of rhetoric to influence crowd psychology—Donald Trump being
one of the more extreme examples. These were all elements of early literary
criticism that developed as the ancients sought to discover the best usages
of rhetorical language and started to ask questions about who was the best
practitioner of the art(ifice) of poetry. The poets (both Comic and Tragic),
would compete at competitions for coveted prizes, such as the right to
slaughter the sacrificial goat: in fact, the word tragedy means “goat song.”
In a perhaps surprising turn of events, given the rhetorical nature of his own
rendering of his mentor Socrates’ dialogues, the legendary philosopher
Plato wrote about poetry in various dialogues (The Ion, Protagoras,
Republic and Laws). However, although in texts such as the Ion Plato
recognised the mystical, intoxicating power of poetry, in the Republic he
repudiated poets for misleading the people by seizing upon their deeper
emotions and leading them away from reason to emotion—something not
generally celebrated in the rational Socratic dialogues.
Plato argues that in the text through which poets and artists alike
represent the world to us—they are removing us from the ideal realm—of
the Idea or nous. For example, a bed, as an already “imperfect form” or
representation of an ideal bed, in the realm of nous, thus becomes
represented a third time when represented as an aesthetic object such as a
painting of a bed (or a bed as depicted in a poem) or perhaps as Tracey
Emin’s infamous installation art in the Tate Britain—no doubt a feminine
take on the Platonic idea of representation. In other words, all we perceive
is the representation of an ideal (perfect) world, and then to have this object
aesthetically rendered again—as a painting, found object, sculpture or a
poem—is to have it at a third form removed from its original Idea.
Therefore, through mimesis this mimes the ideal original. Plato is trying to
replace poetry with a new form of discourse: that of reason, leading to a
higher rational insight through The Logos. His ideal Nous contained the
ultimate ideas.3 As an ultimate consequence of this philosophy, he wished
to expel poets from his republic. He also saw a moral danger in allowing
Greek plays to take place, because of the strength of their influence on
citizens. Think of debates today about the effects of television and computer
games on young people’s minds. Thus, Platonic literary criticism ultimately
saw the skill and craftsmanship involved, as well as sometimes great
inspiration, but for moral purposes felt that poets should be banned from the
ideal democratic polis. The mimetic nature of poetry was one of the major
reasons for this, as well as its possible morally corrupt capacity (or its
capacity for moral corruption), through false representation and its
emotional sway over people’s emotions.
Later critics and philosophers such as Plotinus and Schopenhauer would
celebrate the power of art to actually by-pass the secondary representative
nature of the world and penetrate into the transcendental inner or ideal form
of life—or the realm of nous; thus, these Neoplatonic art critics would use
the Platonic model but change its emphasis from negative to a more
positive approbation.
The other bearded bad boy of antiquity, and none other than Alexander
the Great’s personal tutor, was of course Aristotle. In his Poetics, he
famously saw poetry in a much more favourable light than had Plato in his
defence of his putative Republic. For Aristotle, much more the proto-
individualist, poets didn’t simply imitate, without thinking, as they did with
Plato, but actively and rationally constructed their works. This view differed
from Plato’s view of the irrational nature of poetic composition and the
more simplistic mimetic view. Aristotle actually celebrates mimesis, and
argues that Greek Tragedy imitates life, but in so doing instructs the
audience and is therefore a positive genre. Whereas Plato feared a deeper
engagement with our irrational emotions, Aristotle actually encouraged and
celebrated this aspect of Greek Tragedy, claiming it offered the audience a
cleansing of their emotions, or a catharsis. Aristotle’s Poetics is the first
real extant text of literary criticism that offers a normative account of the
subject and covers aspects such as magnitude, spectacle, unity and plot.
Aristotle it would appear was asking everyone but the Greek chorus to get
on the couch and get it off their chest and—depending on how you read the
translation of the old Greek—was it seems into not just spectacle but also
mass sublimation. This was perhaps not surprising given he was very much
in favour of a free economy and home ownership, whereas his older
counterpart Plato wanted a proto-communist republic that shared pretty
much everything. It would appear Plato himself needed to visit a few
Aristotlean plays to get some things off his chest.
The Roman critic and poet Horace wrote the next famous literary-
critical tract in history, Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) in which he outlined
the classical idea of decorum and propriety in a work of poetry. By this,
Horace meant that all aspects of a work must be appropriately chosen; thus,
the choice of subject must match the genre, expression, character, meter and
tone, all of which must all be appropriately fitted together into a structural
whole. Verisimilitude and the non-mixing of different genres (something
that is actually a major element in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and much so-
called ‘postmodern’ works), were all parts of Horace’s theory of decorum.
Like Plato and Aristotle, Horace believes art to be imitative, and this should
be reflected throughout the work of art: incongruity was a technical mistake
in Horace’s Ars Poetica. Horace also emphasised the concept of practice
and polishing your poetry, and thus the craftsmanship element of poetry is
ingrained into his poetic theory. Horace looked back to the Hellenistic age
of Greece for the great poetics and as such was a classicist and thought the
highest aim of literature was to please and benefit people morally—a
doctrine echoed below by the neoclassical or pragmatic school of criticism.
After Horace, Longinus was a classical critic whose work was
discovered in the 1600s and is generally regarded as the critic who
introduced the seminal concept of the sublime into criticism. His treatise On
the Sublime states the central idea that great literature contains hupsos
(grandeur/sublimity) and contains passages that are able to transport the
reader, or remove them away in their mind, overwhelming them with its
power. Sublimity often manifests itself in individual lines or phrases, as
opposed to a whole work and the best writers can occasionally slip into the
sublime mode. However, echoing earlier critics, Longinus also argues that
even though the sublime is innate in the writer, it is still a skill that requires
cultivation and needs honing. Powerful emotions, deep thinking capacity,
the ability to visualise a scene and present it to an audience (phantasia) and
the language of enthusiasm are all central to Longinus’ treatise. His major
impact was perhaps felt most strongly in the literature of the Age of
Sensibility and in Romanticism and its attendant expressive theory of
criticism, discussed at length below.
The early part of the Middle Ages followed the dictates of Horace, but
also of Cicero and Quintilian. It comprises the main categories of artes
poeticae, artes dictaminis (or treatises on letter-writing) and above all artes
praedicandi which follow classical precepts. This is be the prescriptive
aspect of medieval literary theory; essentially, a series of manuals giving
instructions for authorial composition, focusing their attention on the
prospective author.
These critics and arbiters of taste however, also faced their own
particular textual issues. The majority of medieval critics were priests,
monks or theologians. Therefore, the hegemony of Christian authority
punctuated the Middle Ages in the history of literary theory and criticism.
Attempting to assimilate the critical theory of the classical writers, they
were doing so within the strict precis of Christian dogma. The resulting
critical hybridity made for major developments in the way we approach
textuality, language, and developing notions of form and taste. The ultimate
textual yardstick was the book of books, the Bible itself. There was a solid
basis in the exegesis of the bible and as a result, the human science of
hermeneutics was born. The importance of this science of interpretation
cannot be stressed enough; as we shall see it was further developed by the
latter romantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, before being assimilated
into modern philosophy by Martin Heidegger and his erstwhile pupil, H.G.
Gadamer. As will be revealed later in this current study, literary criticism
also came to the feast, as part of its wider encroachment into modern
philosophy.
In the early middle or “Dark Ages” the main critics or theoreticians
were Augustine, with his seminal texts, The Confessions and The City of
God; Boethius, with his De consolatione philosophiae; the English monk
Bede, with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and his De natura
rerum; and finally, Isidore of Seville, with his Etymologiae. Boethius’ De
consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), was and still is
a hugely popular text. Written during his incarceration, it polemicises the
notion that the contemplation of God can reconcile us to sublunary
miseries. And what misery Boethius had at this time: he was awaiting
execution. In attempting to reconcile the classical tradition of mimesis and
decorum with the Herbaic tradition, Bede’s De Arte Metrica produces from
this synthesis a formal criticism. In so doing, he argues that Hebrew poets
anticipated the classical stylistics of mimesis. Bede also adds writers such
as Prudentius, Arator, Sedulius, and Ambrose to the canon of “classical”
poetics.
By the time of the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” universities and
organised monastic orders had emerged, with the mushrooming of both
systematic studies and commentaries upon extant texts. These scholastics,
(or schoolmen), faced the issue of incorporating the rediscovered texts of
Aristotle’s universe to the now extremely powerful hegemony of Christian
dogma. In general, the classical authors were usually given a didactic gloss,
sometimes producing a Christian political and moral pathology. This is a
complexity that, borne of the medieval period of literary criticism, has
resurfaced since the Second World War, in the guise of some of the political
pathologies of modern theory and criticism. This is a critical praxis that
rereads texts in terms of prevailing liberal notions, such as feminist,
postcolonialist, and queer theory.
In this scholastic period, Ovid, for instance, was a difficult author to
scrutinize, because of his perceived immoral notions and tropes. Some more
proto-formalist criticism explored the rhetorical forms in Ovid’s oeuvre,
noting that we could at least discern the ornatus verborum (aesthetic
beauty) of its structure, and its pulchras positiones (syntactical beauty) in
works such as his Heroides and Amores. Some commentators also tried to
analyse the Heroides through an ethical topology:
However, other critics, such as Conrad of Hirsau, were not so generous with
their critique. Utilising a Christian-didactic pathology, Conrad writes:
Footnotes
1 The “oral tradition” predates the tablet and early scribes in early Classical Culture, as well as other
cultures such as Norse and Old English, where the first extant poem was a recorded version of the
oral epic Beowulf; with the MS dated at around the year 1000 CE.
2 Penelope Murray writes: “…in the words spoken by Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ play Frogs:
‘Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.’ It is only against this background
of the central importance of poetry in Greek society that we can begin to understand the ways in
which ancient literary criticism developed. For Greek criticism is not primarily concerned with
‘literary’ or aesthetic matters, but rather with philosophical questions relating to the moral authority
and ethical value of literature. The mainstream of ancient literary criticism takes it for granted that
poetry, and literature in general, is a form of communication, and that literature and morality are
intimately connected.” Murray & Dorsch (eds)., Classical Literary Criticism, (London: Penguin,
2000). p. 10.
3 For Plato, his theory of education is therefore also interestingly rationalist, in that the educator is
supposed to appraise the students of these ideas of the noetic realm, already a priori held but
forgotten after the trauma of childbirth. Even if one relinquishes the metaphysical implications of this
original theory of education, a deflationary (non-metaphysical reading) of Platos’s theory sounds in
some ways very similar to much of the neoliberal theories of discovery learning and child-centred
educational theories of pedagogy, currently popular and (quite rightly I think) descried by many
advocates of a more communitarian approach to modern education.
4 Shaftesbury’s seminal Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in
1711 and certainly bears the hallmarks of the neoclassic, in that its title reads like a pragmatist
manifesto. However, the wonderful prose stylistic is of the ‘age of sensibility’ and comes in the
recent wake of the revolution in manners partly inspired by Addison and Steele’s journals, The Tatler
and The Spectator. Neither of which were to do with the newer emanations of the said publications
but were very much to do with the newly gentrified fashion of manners and politeness. Both
Shaftesbury and then later on also Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Genius (1756) advocated the
idea of organic and natural genius. Jonathan Cuthbert (the Cambridge Platonist) had similar ideas and
his work was taught in German at the Tubingen when Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin were students
there, no doubt influencing in part their own neo-Kantian ideas on Organicism.
5 This quote was famously part of Wordsworth’s own Preface, which was not part of the original
1798 anonymously published edition of the poems. By the final 2 volume edition of the book (1804),
Wordsworth had actually failed to include any of Coleridge’s poetic compositions.
6 The “state of nature,” sometimes later used synonymously with the so-called idea of “The Noble
Savage”, untouched by the chains of civilisation, was predominantly celebrated by Jean Jacques
Rousseau in his own book on educational theory: Emile: or on Education (1762); the concept in
terms of a natural connection to nature was also explored in his last book, Reveries of the Solitary
Walker (1776–78).
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The city, in the poet’s insight of the morning, has earned its right to
be considered organic, not merely mechanical. That is why the stale
metaphor of the sleeping houses is strangely renewed. The most
exciting thing that the poet can say about the houses is that they are
asleep. He has been in the habit of counting them as dead—as just
mechanical and inanimate; to say that they are asleep is to say that
they are alive, that they participate in the life of nature. (Lodge,
Modern Criticism and Theory, 294)
Footnotes
1 The Lectures on Fine Art in Two Volumes was published in Hegel’s name but was in actual fact
collated from the lecture notes of one of his erstwhile students, named Hotho—Hegel died in 1831 so
the volumes were published posthumously. Hotho must have been a model student; both punctual
and attentive. The two combined volumes run to well over 1500 pages.
2 Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, Hülsen and Hölderlin, along with the Schlegel brothers, constituted
a large part of the German romantics (Frühromantik) and wrote in aesthetics journals such as The
Athenaeum, The Lyceum and Pollen. See the stellar (pun intended) work of ‘constellation philosophy’
and in particular the work of Manfred Frank, for insightful research into the theory and philosophy of
these thinkers. J.V. Goethe had written some undeniably romantic poetry and the tragic novel The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was also a key player in the Sturm und Drang theatrical
movement but after his trip to Italy and the resultant travelogue, Italian Journey (1786–88) changed
his aesthetic and philosophical position to that of a classicist. He even famously stated “Romanticism
is a sickness” and was very critical of much of the German romantic movement and novels such as
Friedrich Schlegel’s experimental romantic novel, Lucinde (1799).
3 Keats had coined the phrase “the egotistical sublime” for Wordsworth’s particular form of sublime
encounter because of its subjective and biographical mediation through the persona of the poet
himself. In his second (and very successful) and very satirical book of poetry, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers (1809) Lord Byron had ridiculed the ‘Lake School’ of Southey, Coleridge and
Wordsworth. P.B. Shelley also wrote the satirical “Peter Bell the Third” about Wordsworth and many
of the younger romantics accused him of apostasy after his epic The Excursion (1814) and his latter
“Thanksgiving Ode” (1816), which celebrated the defeat of Napoleon. An excellent New Historicist
study has recently been made about this latter period in Wordsworth’s oeuvre by Jeffrey N. Cox,
William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo, Cambridge:
CUP, 2021.
4 Bertrand Russell, the founding father of the analytic tradition in philosophy, had been originally
trained in Hegelianism and later turned against this absolute Idealism in favour of the logical,
mathematical and analytical approach of matching the logic of sentence structures to mathematics
and thus deciphering a language of pure logic through which to underpin our sentences about the
empirical world. This was held in sharp relief by Russell to both Romanticism and German Idealism.
His (in) famous History of Western Philosophy (1945) was clearly also informed by the political
climate at the time of the Second World War, although the roots of his animus also clearly lie in his
apostasy with regards Hegelianism. The major irony of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics project is
that it was actually very Hegelian in design; just as Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1812–1816) was
designed as a foundational text for the sciences and in fact, all forms of knowledge enquiry in
general, so Russell’s text was putatively designed to form a bedrock and axiomatic propositional
logic to underpin all future inquiry. A further and (as far as I’m currently aware) unacknowledged
irony is that the ‘barber shop paradox’ as it later came to be known, would have been sublated-
through-negation in the jargon of the Hegelian system of logic. This option due to the mathematical
system of sets was simply not available to Frege or Russell.
5 This foundational “glitch” in the Frege/Russell project once again demonstrated the impossibility
of absolute grounds for axiomatic philosophical claims—and by extension and within the precis of
this book, in any form of literary analysis within the remit of the humanities. Russell’s paradox
basically runs like this: First of all in order to bring pure mathematics into the reified world of
sentential objects and structures, one had to reduce the pure notations of abstract mathematics to
classes; which produced and necessitated Set Theory. Therefore, for any particular collection of
objects you name there will be a set. For example, three bottles, the people in the room, your family.
The sets themselves become objects, thus, there are higher level sets that have sets as members; the
set that has one member and the set that has three spoons. And we therefore identify numbers with
sets. So, three will be defined as a set.
Then there will be a set whose members are themselves sets (as objects). The higher-level set
three will have the set with the three people, the three black cats and the three teachers. However, the
set of things not identical with itself-the null set-doesn’t exist but it is still by necessity and definition
a set. The logical theory goes that by using these sets with no connection to an abstract notion of
numbers we can explain maths by logical concepts.
The paradox: is that some classes are members of themselves—and there are some that are not
members of themselves. A class is a member of the class of classes (all classes) What about a class
whose members are not the same as themselves. A class of classes who aren’t members of themselves.
The puzzle shows that an apparently plausible scenario is logically impossible. In the paradox, the
barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves”. The question
is, does the barber shave himself?
In answering this question, we instantiate a contradiction. The barber cannot shave himself as he
only shaves those who do not shave themselves. Thus, if he shaves himself he ceases to be the barber.
Conversely, if the barber does not shave himself, then he fits into the group of people who would be
shaved by the barber, and thus, as the barber, he must shave himself. Later, and in a much more half-
hearted effort at his mathematical principles, Russell went on to attempt to resolve this logical
paradox with the theory of types.
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All empirical judgments are of this sort: ‘all crows are black’
predicates ‘black’ to ‘crow.’ ‘Black’ is not entailed in the concept of
‘crow,’ but is attributed to the subject ‘crow’ by means of experience
as the mediating principle. Rather than an immediate identity with
the subject, synthetic judgments depend upon a mediating principle.
Kant’s main interest of course is the possibility of synthetic, a priori
judgments such as ‘everything that happens has a cause.’ The
concept of ‘causality’ is not entailed analytically in the concept of an
event; it must be added from without. (Moss, 369)
The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back
drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in
all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered
with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered
books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by
Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of
Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild
garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few
straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty
bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he
had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to
his sister. (Joyce, 21)
The reader senses in the stark imagery a very austere, dark, dreary abode.
Yet the books in the backroom speak to the exotic and the romantic—novels
by Scott and also The Memoirs of Vidocq (a secret agent in the French
police)—thus, through subtle but contextual details, the scene is set for the
wider scope of the story and in particular, the romantic psychology of the
young protagonist. The “straggling bushes” and “rusty bicycle pump”
further cementing the harshly objective and realist world, in which the
young boy finds his romantic imagination enclosed.
As the story progresses, we are made acutely aware of the boy’s
fascination, and indeed infatuation, with the sister of one of his friends. Her
sensual femininity is presented once again through metonymic details:
The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of
her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand
upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the
white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease. (Joyce,
24)
2 The school in question happened to also be a Christian school, to which I sent my son for a
number of years; despite the obvious verbal irony in this appellation, I can guarantee there were no
brown shirts in sight and not enough drums to produce the sort of cacophony preferred in a parade by
card-carrying Nazis.
3 I presented a paper that included a discussion of this event in a wider Thai context “Thailand,
Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism” at the 1st International Culture, Language and
Literature Conference (ICLLS) in Chonburi, Thailand, in 2013.
4 Jacques Lacan is not discussed in this study; however, his work forms a major component of the
later poststructuralist theory. He brilliantly used the ideas as Parole and Langue and used them in
place of Freud’s theory in The Interpretation of Dreams of condensation and displacement, (by way
of Jakobson’s insertion of metaphor and metonymy in their place) brilliantly applying structuralism
to psychoanalysis. His main dictum was that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” This
may explain why upon reading Lacan, many readers find themselves, understandably, unconscious of
what he’s talking about.
5 There are numerous examples of the postmodern subversion of codes. One such instance is the
historiographical metafiction, such as Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) in which the code of
historical analysis is combined with the code of the detective fiction to produce a history overlaid
with a pulp fictional element. Speaking of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarrantino’s recent offerings,
Inglorious Basterds (2009) and the brilliant Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) also explore the
mixing of codes and genres. Viewers with enough knowledge of the Parole of the ‘spaghetti western’
genre will also pick up this code, as well as the historical narratives in these self-consciously
postmodern masterpieces.
6 These structuralist designs at finding universal codes and narratives in myth, folklore, culture and
other anthropological aspects were also to some degree employed by critics who used the theory of
archetypes to delineate literary theory and criticism. One thinks of Jung and Maud Bodkin. One of
my favourite and currently unrepresented critics is the Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. I am also
guilty of not giving him the voice warranted in this study; however, this is due to obvious limitations.
His classic study Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has been woefully absent in recent decades. One
wonders whether this a in part a political move; Frye’s criticism of texts, it can be argued presents a
conservative and perhaps patrician view of culture, which is at odds with the more fashionably
iconoclastic mood of criticism in the humanities in recent decades. This is something that of course
my study hopes to go some way towards remedying—or at least raising awareness of. It also shows
that criticism need not and IS NOT only left wing and radical. It can be conservative and in arguing
for universal archetypes one is placing a possible check on the notion that all archetypes and figures
are open to reconstruction and revision. Structuralism, in other words, when deconstructed itself, also
finds two opposing notions within its conceptual scope.
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One can here read “countries where Hegel was not forgotten” as signifying
countries under the aegis of the continental tradition, where the Hegelian
project of ‘speculative philosophy’ entailed a move away from a
‘transcendental subjectivity’ towards a more historicised—and by extension
—social formula for philosophy, connecting to both the social and the
political world. A move away from epistemology as posited by Descartes
and critiqued by the empirical tradition to a more political and social praxis,
as originally outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Husserls’ Cartesian
Meditations (1960)1 was a last-gasp attempt at reviving the project of
modern epistemology—Heidegger’s hermeneutics signalled a return to
historicity; Russell’s move away from his earlier Hegelianism (under the
influence of British Idealism), The Principles of Mathematics (1903), was
similarly an attempt to salvage the Cartesian plot, while the later
Wittgenstein, Sellars and Quine also signalled a movement towards to
linguistic historicity, or the primacy of the public over the private in
language. These shifts in the tenor of philosophy and literary criticism,
produced their cross-pollination.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will reconnect to structuralism by
discussing poststructuralism as the inevitable rejoinder to structuralism (so-
called ‘poststructuralists’ are not actually ‘post’; they are simply taking
structuralism to its logical boundaries and as such, remain structuralists). I
will establish this by discussing the later work of Barthes, and referencing
the work of his controversial contemporaries, Paul de Man and Jacques
Derrida, while continuing to situate them in the overall dovetailing of
philosophy and literary criticism that I have been sketching out hitherto.
To broadly contextualise this latter act in the play of the modern
humanities, I’d like to start by turning to a thinly-veiled polemic in the form
of a book review by the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, about a
book by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, in which he wrote tersely
“The poetry of Hegelian Idealism gave way to the prose of Marxist
newspeak, and the moment of French philosophy met its nemesis in the
impenetrable syntax of Badiou, Althuser and Deleuze.”2 Anyone who has
read Scruton would have to admit that his prose, arguments and the tenor of
his language are very inviting. Anyone who has read Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) however, may beg to differ on his
characterisation of Hegelian Idealism as “poetry”; at least in the context to
which Scruton is referring to Hegel. Both Hegel’s Phenomenology and his
Logic (1812–16) have confounded many a specialist and non-specialist
alike—one of my friends to whom I gave a copy of the chapter from The
Phenomenology on the Reign of Terror—informed me that it gave him a
thunderous (and very literal)—headache. Most people, also specialist or
non-specialist alike, would probably contest his purely dismissive analysis,
on rhetorical grounds, of pretty much all of the popular (and unpopular,
depending upon your politics, it would seem), writers from the French
tradition since around 1968. He goes on to write “Unmentioned are the
advocates of traditional philosophy, such as Bertrand de Jounvenal or
Jacques Bouveresse…” Surely Scruton must recognise the questionable
logic of parsing other writers who are not of the poststructuralist or radical
Left tradition as “traditional?” The question not only of tradition but of who
is to be the arbiter of tradition is necessarily begged here. Martin Heidegger,
whom in numerous places Scruton praises, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, and of course the ‘Old Mole’ Marx himself, can all be read as
adhering to traditions in philosophy, yet also writing against the grain,
whether it be materialism, Idealism or Cartesian dualism. It may also be
because the other writers had less to say, were less original, or were just too
conservative to add much value to the ever-expanding dialogical canon of
the humanities. The point is that difficult prose isn’t necessarily bad
criticism or poorly articulated philosophy and that this red herring has been
levelled against both not only the French tradition, but also the German
school of Critical Theory, time and time again. Most unfortunately, it’s
often been made by people who have either read internet commentaries on
the said scholars, or, at best, have heard lecturers in tweed jackets, with
personally signed copies of Scrutiny or unread copies of the Salisbury
Review, perambulate about their disgruntled reception of these allegedly
Left Wing versions of the Mystery Plays.
Heretical and as iconoclastic as these French thinkers may be, it’s
possibly too late to lock up your sons and daughters, who have no doubt
already been exposed to the horrors of Queer Theory or even Michel
Foucault. I only introduce this chapter using these tropes as a warning
against the tide of animus and ignorance that pervades much thought from
the often equally amorphous ‘analytic’ tradition. My use of speech-marks at
this juncture will become, I hope, self-explanatory below. Moreover,
Scruton’s brilliant and illuminating essay “Why I Became a Conservative”3
provides an insightful and as ever concise account of the political reasons
for his own philosophical persuasions; his obvious preference for Burke
over the “immeasurably less interesting Tom Paine,” is made very clear, and
then what still appears to me to be a woefully incorrect reading of Jean
Jacques Rousseau:
I take Scruton’s point about the relationship and debt to the future and the
past in the present, as indeed would a thinker such as Giles Deleuze or
Jacques Derrida; indeed Derrida makes this clear in his book Spectres of
Marx.4 I’m not entirely sure how the voluntarist Rousseauean social
contract, as opposed to Hobbes’ more ‘mechanically contractualist’ vision
of a social contract would in any way disinherit either future or past
generations? Primogeniture and much of the economics of the physiocrats
were already disinheriting future and past social players in the most
egregious fashion.5
I also share some of Scruton’s fears. However, from my current
historical precis, it’s in terms of the current wave of identarian/woke-ism
iconoclasts, who really do seem to work on de-legitimated notions of
historicism. They, more often than not, work with either a revisionist view
of history or a jaundiced and very selective view—but this is something I
will return to below when I discuss the political and ethical turn in
deconstruction.
Moreover, all of this is also not to say that Scruton is completely
incorrect about some of the prose that stems from the French
poststructuralist tradition—there are numerous examples to be had of
impenetrable, prolix and gratuitous prose—just as there are also many
examples of rock stars who do indeed snort coke.
I will commence this chapter with such an example of critique, which
will paradoxically act as a segue into the wider argument of this book: that
the linguistic turn in philosophy of necessity reflected a wider malaise in
the humanities that eventually led to coalescence with literary theory and
criticism.
One needs to recall that the linguistic turn in philosophy was down to
the (perhaps paradoxical) search for truth that had been unsatisfactory in
terms of correspondent theories of truth, coherence theories of truth,
pragmatist theories and an eventual turn to the notion of truth as parsed in
the constructively logical utterances of the syntagmata itself; namely,
sentences and their t-values. Derrida’s terms are couched partly in the
theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics had,
akin to the New Criticism and Formalism in literary studies, moved towards
a more rigid and by extension, closed system of analysis. Before we move
to John Searle’s ‘ordinary language’ critique of Derrida it’s probably best to
lay bare the bones of deconstruction, and the spectre of poststructuralism
that haunts the humanities.
The seeds of poststructuralism can be in part be traced back to the
classic structuralist text, mentioned in the previous chapter, Mythologies. In
a justly famous essay at the end of the book, Roland Barthes discusses the
structuralist methodology he uses in his cultural analysis (of everything
from soap powder to wrestling matches). In the essay Barthes talks of
“second-order signification,” whereby a sign becomes at a second, or higher
stage, a signifier which in turn issues in a new signified and a new sign. For
example, Barthes writes in the essay:
Myth takes the first -order sign and then turns it, in a second-order system
into a signifier for a meta-language, or a critical language. If we look at the
classic example of structuralism of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,
one can discern how he examines the signs of various myths, from Native
American Indian culture (an owl in the Iroquois Indian symbolic system) or
the Sphynx in the Oedipus myth of Greece—and turns them both into
second order signifiers of a higher order (second-order system), that of
Strauss’ own myth analysis—his meta-language, which becomes
constructed of the mythemes he now uses in his parasitical metalanguage of
second-order signification. So, signifying systems can be fed upon
parasitically by second-order “parasitical” systems that in turn, logically,
could be then again turned into another system. Indeed, and by an infinite
extension, theoretically every system of signs could be replaced by another
structural higher-order language every time a new descriptive commentary
vampirises the old system and brings it back in the structuralist form of a
higher-order, descriptive, meta-system.
This is how “Myth” functions for Barthes, something becomes drained
of its original or first-order signification—and becomes captured by a
second, third, or fourth-order signifying system. This is, to use an obvious
example, clear in the narratives that spin the Greek and Roman
mythologies;6 this is how the mythopoetic function works. Furthermore, to
use two modernist examples from the Western literary canon, one could
argue that both The Wasteland and Ulysses, in using the so-called mythic
method to reengage the everyday, humdrum world of modernity in a mythic
net, use this type of structuralist second-order signification.
The signification is reworked, more simply as connotation in other
cultural domains. To use a current cultural Thai example, once again, the
case of the currently popular whitening creams/lotions; they may initially
signify whitening deodorants, but at a higher order level they are
transformed and signify white as opposed to black, which in turn signifies
working in the sun/not having worked in the sun, which in turn signifies the
class background and relative socioeconomic success of an individual.7
The roots of poststructuralism lie just here, in the relative instability of
sign systems; if they can become parasitically taken or appropriated into
another “mythic” system—what is to stop any originary sign system from
being re-appropriated ad infinitum? In fact, how do we know the original
imprints of the putative Ur-system? The answer is, of course, nothing; they
can be expropriated again and again and again…as in an infinite narratorial
palimpsest. The person who writes the catchment of the second-order
mythic system, such as Lévi-Strauss or Barthes are themselves skin-grafting
a myth onto a myth, and I in turn, could write a myth built upon their myth
—their myth being the myth of modern structuralism.
Therefore, Barthes initiates poststructuralism out of his original
structuralist system, whereby all sign systems are unstable and cannot come
to any final meaning or closure. Final meanings are constantly being
disrupted or pushed aside/displaced by other signs, or meta-signs, ad
infinitum. Poststructuralism is at its core an anti-system—a theory of non-
ultimate-knowledge—wherein we cannot get at any final truth or meaning,
just a cloudy web interrelationships and semiotic traces that we cannot step
outside of as we are perpetually in media res; or one may argue we’re in a
semiotic ground hog day.
Barthes later extended this theory in his seminal paper “The Death of
the Author” (1968). In this essay he posits the author as continually
surrendering himself to the weight of tradition and literary history. Writing
becomes the art of constructing ready-to-hand linguistic units in novel
ways; however, each time we formulate or choose a combination we lose
our personality in textual history:
The urge for the presence of the author, that in more traditional historicist or
biographical criticism would explain away the text and once again give
“victory to the critic” is removed by Barthes as he moves into his
poststructuralist phase.8 In one real sense however, there is no “post”
structuralism; the theoretical implications hereby impinged are already
nascent in the very notion of the structuralist theory itself and are already
enunciated by Barthes and, as we shall see below, by Lévi-Strauss himself.
Two years before Barthes’ paper, Derrida explored similar principles in
a paper he delivered on the structural anthropology of Lévi-Straussdelivered
at John Hopkins University in 1966, entitled “Structure, Sign and Play, in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida questions the very notion of
structure itself, or the “structurality of structure” and questions how we can
guarantee a centre-piece to any structural system that would hold the
structure in place—where would it be located? The history of the “Human
Sciences” and philosophy, has been a series of structures built onto other
structures ad infinitum. Derrida claims of the infinite “play” of signifying
systems as we replace one with another, or another structural totality with
another with a supposed newly orienting centre:
The subtlety of deconstructive readings, whilst not easy, obviously give rise
to close readings that, if de Man and Derrida are correct in their structuralist
methodological assumptions, ask truly profound questions about our
relationship with the world and language. It seems to show how the
impossibility of analytic philosophy to hook on to the world with its
nomological net of mathematics, can, by extension, easily be applied to
language and the logic that all sides of this crisis in the humanities realise is
inherent in language itself, when it—as logocentric locus—also attempts to
hook itself onto the world. Hence, we are left with literary theory in the
final instance and as the final arbiter because this hermeneutic discipline
(and practice) acknowledges in its very nature that the world cannot be
entirely trapped within a nomological net. However, there are ways in
which the word is disclosed to us, in a truly Heideggerian sense, and in
which we can through our relative ontological relationship come to deeper
understandings of the world we inhabit—through and within a hermeneutic
circle.
For Frege and Russell the numericity of number was encoded in set
theory (or perhaps furnished is a better phrase). In symbolic language, there
is no set of the non-set as in number. There is just the paradox of the set of
all sets, Langue, which can only be presented in discrete modalities of
parole, or to use Wittgensteinian terminology, in language games. There is
no Ur-language outside of all linguistic sets.
For de Man, however, there is an autological function of literary
discourse—the representation of non-representation—in discourse a
necessarily fictive discourse. In this sense, and we see it in de Man’s
profound reading of Proust’s different modalities, his mimetic and diegetic
speech-acts, his necessarily rhetorical and metaphoric grammar, and his
representation of the outside from the inside. Literature is the new discourse
of philosophy, the discourse that dare not speak its name, except in criticism
and theory. As Schlegel, the high priest of German Romanticism had
already said back in the age of Frühromantik; “the poet can tolerate no law
above himself.”20
In terms of literary criticism, deconstruction has been a very popular—
and divisive—theoretical approach since the 1970s in both the Western and
later the Far Eastern university system. Part of the reason for this is
probably the emphasis on the fact that there are many ways into the text, or
many undecidable readings—not one of which should be privileged over
another; every privilege produces what Derrida calls a “violent hierarchy.”
In de Man’s view, all texts deconstruct themselves in anything from Yeats to
Proust (as with de Man himself above) and also other sorts of discursive
texts, such as the example from popular US culture, Archie Bunker.
As a more literary example than our pop culture friend Archie, we can
look to William Blake and the fact that he famously examined John
Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and argued that the poem, although
traditionally read as a Christian morality tale about the fall of Satan, can
also be read in terms of a certain sympathy for Satan. The undecidabilities
in much of Shakespeare’s work are very clear (or rather murky), for
example, in Hamlet; the central soliloquy of “To be, or not to be…” can be
read in terms of a central crux of Hamlet’s being trapped between two
binary oppositions, each of which “supplements” the other. Critics have
traditionally found it difficult to take a side in Hamlet, or formulate a
decisive reading, and the reason for this is the skill of Shakespeare as a
writer, and his ability produce all of these uncertainties in the texts—
uncertainties that reflect the binary nature of our real lives. For Harold
Bloom, human nature has been crystallised and made richer by
Shakespeare’s work, as exemplified in his book Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human (1998).
Yet another Yale school critic, Geoffrey Hartman in a famous book on
Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude, (actually written before the term
“deconstruction” became part of critical parlance), published in the book
Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814 (1964), famously writes of the poet’s
attempt to attain imaginative autonomy (a commonplace of romantic
criticism) and his reliance upon the necessity of nature as an aid to his
romantic imagination, or his necessary receptivity to the external world. On
Hartman’s seminal reading, Wordsworth remains in a sense “beached”
between the two alternatives, which inform and counter-infect each other;
they are Akedah and Apocalypse; in a sense, two undecidable readings of
the relationship between nature and the self-sufficiency of the romantic
imagination. This I discuss, along with de Man’s treatment of the romantic
relationship between symbol and allegory, in my Hegel and the English
Romantic Tradition (2015).
Three great poems to re-read both in tandem and in a deconstructive
light, whilst offering good examples of the critical utility of this
methodological approach are Wallace Stevens’ “The Anecdote of the Jar,”
S.T. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and P.B. Shelleys’ “Ozymandias.” In
Stevens’ poem, we are given the stark idea of a signifier placed in the
middle of a desert, and how the central signifier, arbitrarily placed, is the
locus for a whole symbolic ecosystem to thrive. Stevens starts the short,
imagistic poem, with the following lines:
The arbitrarily placed jar is set amongst the “slovenly wilderness,” but it so
transpires that the wilderness “…rose up to it/And sprawled around, no
longer wild”. The central signifier, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Eiffel Tower,
etc., sets off a signifying plain and reifies the notion of the process of city-
building by repeating the imagery of “And round it was, upon a hill” with
the imagery “The jar was round upon the ground.” The hill becomes level.
On this horizonal ground, the syntagmatic axis of signification can now
openly thrive. The vertical height of the hill is not displaced, but is forged
into a central signifier upon an axis which can act, like transformative
grammar, in any number of directions or locales. The imagery of “tall” is
still emphasized. However, the paradigmatic vertical axis crosses with the
horizontal, with the locus of the jar set as the central signifier in this
arbitrary social scheme.
The jar, however, is “gray and bare” because it’s function as a
grammatical signifier is paramount here; the jar’s content is of little
consequence; Stevens is addressing its arbitrary function as a signifier
within a newly formed and arbitrarily codified system of difference. Stevens
had also written of “The Idea of Order at Key West”; however, in this
particular poem the very notion of order is deconstructed along its
metaphoric and metonymic axis, in point of fact, the wilderness is
recognised as wilderness because of difference, because of what it is not—
it’s brought into existence by the existence of the central signifier, the jar.
Upon reading this, one may think of the “plain of jars” in Laos PDR, which,
though more recently noted as ritualistic burial signifiers, were at one point
surrounded in mystery, because they originally didn’t have the contextual
signification provided by this parole. Demystification occurs once a system
of signifiers is discerned, meaning is then given to the world, even aspects
of the world that otherwise have no pointed character or identification. The
jar, of course, can also be a symbol for culture—one thinks of containment
or a jar/petra dish, signifying culture in both senses of the term. It can infect
things around or if the culture escapes from the jar, a more literal metaphor
it can be seen as producing the ensuing signifying ecosystem. Furthermore,
that jar can be seen as producing culture in its social sense, and in this
reading the yearning for a return to nature—or the noble savage—is only
signified by the instantiation of the jar. As in Levi Strauss’ The Raw and the
Cooked, one signifying notion comes into a binary relationship with
another. We have a yearning for the signifier “originary nature” precisely
because of what it is not: culture.
In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge similarly places a signifier, the pleasure
dome, in a much less stratified signifying space than that envisioned by
Stevens. Coleridge’s work is already known for its fragmentary nature. The
poem is subtitled “A Vision” and a “Fragment.” It follows the structure of a
hortus conclusus narrative;21 however, the famous troping of the garden
surrounded thus: “So twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and
towers were girdled round;” (6–7), which runs in stark contrast to the barren
imagery of Stevens’ poem, emphasising the syntagmatic horizontality of his
own poiein. Coleridge is addressing (in some senses the act of the process
of poesy itself, on its own self-representational paradigmatic axis). The
wilderness of “that deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill
athwart a cedarn cover!” (12–13). The romantic and metaphoric
imagination cannot be sustained for any prolonged period, locked up within
with the symbolic structure of the hortus conclusus. Indeed, the
unconscious bubbling to the surface of Langue is once again addressed by
the Khan-poet who “’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far/Ancestral voices
prophesying war!” (29–30). In Bloom’s phraseology the anxiety of
influence of symbolic and overridingly linguistic history haunts the poet
through its historical palimpsest, revealed through Coleridge’s symbolic
language, a symbolism that is, on the one hand functioning as a pure
romantic symbol, at the functional rhetorical praxis; whilst at the same time,
it’s equally important grammatical (and allegorical hortus conclusus axis)
strives to bind it within the structural troches of its expressive meter.
Therefore, the poem itself works self-consciously, between the allegorical
and symbolic.
Furthermore, and to cement the unsustainability of the romantic vision
or fragment, we are given a series of opaque images through which to view
the transcendental, but never directly attainable, central romantic signifier:
“The shadow of the dome of pleasure/Floated midway on the waves” (31–
2); “That sunny dome, those caves of ice!” (47) the signified is refracted,
ventriloquised and never beheld directly, because of its fragmentary and
symbolic nature. The floating signifier, in Lacanian terms, glides under the
weight of the symbolical language, reflecting, refracting and
paradigmatically hanging. If Steven’s poem is an allegory for the
categorizing process of poetry, then Coleridge is allegorically presenting the
deeply symbolic nature of his view of expressive poetic language, his
romantic hermeneutics of romantic composition, in his necessarily
fragmented and broken vision.
Shelley’s famous sonnet “Oxymandias” perhaps at this point, and given
the signification of the first two poems, should on my deconstructive
methodology have already deconstructed itself:
The lyric speaker is addressed in the second person, once again by history
and time as a palimpsest, as the signifying and codified discourse of
immutable time and history. This reminds one that without any given
signifying context, without the correct cues and discourse traces, meaning
is just as easily lost as it is created-hanging on a mediated yet necessary
play between the presence and absence of key signifiers. The decay and the
paradoxical power of the ancient sovereign are sustained only through the
lack of symbolic signifiers that are contextually lost in the wilderness, upon
the sand where inscription or trace cannot be sustained. “Nothing beside
remains,” and it’s the strange paradox of the “colossal Wreck, boundless
and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The signification of
non-signification, the oxymoronic power of the negative signifiers that in
turn signify their own “ancestral voices prophesying war”. One is reminded
of the tenuous nature of existence, the folly of pride, the fact that without
the “Works” and signifiers of history, there are indeed only lifeless things—
things given life because of what they are not—or because of what they
bear traces of…logoi.
The three readings afforded here demonstrate the continued utility and
fruitfulness of deconstruction as a form of hermeneutics and as an exemplar
of the linguistic turn in both philosophy and literary theory. Juxtaposing
Coleridge, Shelley and Stevens provides not only an interesting interpretive
rubric through which to read these poets respectively, but also a structuralist
framework of positive tools that can be applied to these writers in their
various guises as both poets and thinkers in general.
In terms of Thai popular culture, and thinking about the example of
Archie Bunker above, one can draw many examples where the ‘text’ can be
read and then reread in other manners. In popular Thai culture the nam nao
drama, which roughly translates into English as ‘soap opera,’ can be seen to
exhibit stock characters, each of which exhibits archetypal traits and
enables them to act as binary foils to each other. If we take the examples of
the nang rai and nang ek stock characters, (the beastly bad girl and the
virginal homely lady), we can see how this works. Both of these characters
are female and are at odds with one another. The Nang Rai is perfidious,
ambitious, cunning, self-centred, ambivalent and indulges in more
promiscuous sexual behaviour than her counterpart, who is abstemious,
cordial, selfless, servile and very conservative in her behaviour. In her, we
can see the Snow White, Cinderella, or Rapunzel stereotype in popular
culture.
The usual pattern that unfolds is one where the nang rai will come
undone because of her behaviour. She will be foiled and will not attain the
societal status she may have desired. In fact, she ends up getting her ‘just
deserts’ and is often rewarded by social exclusion, ostracisation, or even
worse, penal punishment or death. The nang ek will be rewarded with a
stereotypical happy ending with a handsome prince male character, who
will have been tempted, like the chivalric knights of yore, by the sexual
enchantments and entrapments of the female antagonist. In some cases, the
male antagonist, nearly from a traditional, old-monied, well-to-do and
conservative family, may have actually slept with the female antagonist,
whilst being portrayed as being a victim of entrapment or of unsolicited
sexual advances. In some cases, the male character even has been seen to
abuse or rape women, only to come to his senses and adjust his moral
compass to one of a conscientious and civil young gentleman.22 Interpreted
from a more conservative locus, these morality dramas enforce the moral
law of Thai-ness, with their attendant warning of the dangers of perfidious
behaviour, especially by women.
However, read from another angle, these dramas can also be seen as
pointing out the hypocritical nature of the status quo, or the distance of
rights between males and females within this society. For example, a
feminist reading of these programmes may well advocate for the Nang Rai
character, as she is simply going after the same aspects of desire that a
young man, with a certain social privilege within society, will be set to
achieve or desire for his own satisfaction. The feminist reading may
problematise the more conservative reading but stand up equally strongly. If
we add the socioeconomic context to our analysis, we may be using a
Marxist analytical framework; equally, a reading of the combination of the
id, ego and superego could interpolate a Freudian/psychoanalytic reading. A
study of desire and the movement of metonymic signifiers to represent this
displaced and constantly recurring desire—along with an examination of
the way this female character is subverting the symbolic order of this
cultural signifying system, chosen from a background of possible instances
of parole, would instantiate a Lacanian-poststructuralist reading. In any of
these readings deconstruction/structuralism act as methodological tools to
facilitate the particular reading at play here.
The obvious objection would be that of the intention of the author or
director, but there are two obvious objections to this: the first is the
Wimsatt/Beardsley intentional fallacy argument, which is a type of
formalism in itself and the second is the more general idea of theory itself,
whereby langue is in the background, constantly bubbling to the surface so
that even an authorial intention is subject to the same pressures any purely
objective reading would be subject to. If also we refer back to a canonical
writer such as Wordsworth or Shakespeare, we see the undecidabilities of
the various readings of Hamlet or any of the 26 extant manuscripts of The
Prelude and we still encounter that bugbear: hermeneutics. We’re also
aware that what may be regarded as the canon can be constantly up for
review, depending upon the historical context, changes in what Stanley Fish
calls the interpretive community, and what R. Jauss and especially J.H.
Gadamer would argue are the cultural horizons of the time. Has theory
really just worked on a self-fulfilling prophecy and self-sustaining
economy? Are all of the new researches, PhDs, advances in theory down
simply to an academic industry? This would seem a difficult position to
adhere to and sustain. If we take hermeneutics seriously and we see
Saussure’s position as the father of synchronic and diachronic modern
linguistics as tenable, then it seems even more difficult to question the
relevance of theory.
Another objection is the idea that with deconstruction, there are infinite
interpretations of a text and we can’t find a meaning. This is singularly
incorrect and bred of willful ignorance to either engage with theory or to
read second-hand sources (such as Jordan Peterson) who is happy to
incorrectly align Derrida with Marxism. Anyone who has understood either
Derrida, de Man, Hartman or Bloom, or even what I have doggedly
attempted to explicate above, should recognise the fallacy of this claim.
There is more likelihood of my having read all 73 volumes of The Talmud
than Peterson to have read a single essay of Derrida—he hasn’t. The idea is
that the texts’ ultimate meanings are undecidable or it’s ultimately
impossible to find an arche or ultimate telos in which to locate any of these
texts, pace the limited nature of our interpretive faculties.23 Heidegger, who
was the father of the thought under discussion here, and its overall precis,
was also a Christian. However, the implicit claim in poststructuralist
analysis is that the various theses about texts are not impregnable, are
revisable and are always connected to traces and supplements outside or
inside the text in question.
The other claim is that deconstruction (or poststructuralist theory in
general) sanctions any reading, or bathes in the ether of relativism. So, on
this reading, one could not technically argue against Hitler’s discursive
ideas as expounded in Mein Kampf, or the vile racist sentiment of William
Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. However, this illustrates a staggering
misapprehension of the sentiments of deconstruction, which is attractively
democratic. It’s certainly not a theory of didactic normativity, in the
socialist sense of a thinker such a Gyorgy Lukacs. In fact, it’s a watchdog to
remind us that all these normative theories, including Marxism, are open to
investigation and critique. It’s a theory in the purest sense, borne of a
synthesis of hermeneutic phenomenology and structuralist linguistics.
When I was an undergraduate, my teacher in philosophy, who had
precious little time for poststructuralist thought (although, when pressed he
again admitted he’d also never actually read any Derrida), argued
incorrectly that a proponent of deconstruction would have to contend that
there was even an unlimited number of possible readings for a car
instruction manual. Of course, there are texts that one does not need to
really theorise about! I don’t think any other theorist would spend much
time on that ultimate classic, The Audi Quatro Users’ Manual, circa 1984.
As Roland Barthes argued, in his later poststructuralist phase, some texts
are more readerly and some are writerly. Put another way, a text such as
Ulysses is more based upon the authorial technique, whereas a crime novel
by Lee Child is probably more down to the reader’s interpretive skill in
reading the genre of the crime novel and following the structural and textual
clues. A car user’s manual is without question more
metonymic/syntagmatic, using much less of a metaphoric or paradigmatic
technique. It’s still infected by other signifiers and traces, while
supplements are found in the discourse of the manual. The space between
signifier and signified is still open, and although the interpretive gap is
obviously not nearly so wide as with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
—it can’t be read in a pure void—just as a car cannot be worked in a void
without a chain of signification. Once people get over the mistaken idea of
infinite interpretability, they can hopefully flag this error and recognize the
wasted time inculcated by this red-herring reasoning. However, I’ll spend
more time on the more general ramifications of Theory in the chapter on
Postmodernism, which comes later in this readerly book of yours…
Footnotes
1 The German edition was published posthumously, which has led to conjecture that Husserl had
never designated the lectures as ripe for publication. However, the original lectures were originally
delivered at the Sorbonne in February 1929, and a French version had been published as early as
1931. Having read much of Husserl’s other work and judging by the fact that the French edition was
partly supervised and translated by another giant of phenomenology, Emmanuel Levinas, I’d contest
that these lectures are a fair summation of Husserl’s post-Cartesian mission statement for
transcendental phenomenology.
2 Taken from Roger Scruton’s book review of Alain Badiou’s The Adventure of French Philosophy
“A nothing would do as well”. In the Times Literary Supplement, August 31st, 2012.
3 Roger Scruton, “Why I became a Conservative”, The New Criterion, February, 2003. https://
newcriterion.com/issues/2003/2/why-i-became-a-conservative
4 In his book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, Routledge, 1994, Derrida makes it abundantly clear (indeed in the title of the text
itself), why revolutionary thinkers are haunted by historical thinkers, much in the same way Hamlet
is by his father, under the figurative stage upon which we reiterate our injunctions for justice.
5 This is outlined in much of the political economy of the 1800s but to give a clear example, Marx
addresses the issue of both primogeniture and the economics of the physiocrats in his Grundrisse,
1973.
6 This is brilliantly adumbrated by Robert Graves in his “Author’s Introduction” to his seminal two-
volume edition of the Greek Myths. The Folio Society, 2000.
7 One can of course make an easy connection here to the US synecdochical notion of “the redneck”
in this register also.
8 A similar argument about authorial agency is also posited by Michel Foucault when he discusses
the author function and the effect of early capitalist economics upon our notion of authorship in his
essay “What is an Author?” (1969).
9 Jacques Lacan famously took the Jakobsonian ideas of metonymy and metaphor and then used
these structuralist tools to describe the Freudian notions of displacement and condensation. Derrida is
also taking the terminology of structuralism and this time applying it to Heideggerian
phenomenology. It is quite clear upon reading Heidegger’s seminal text, Being and Time (1927) that
without the possibility of the linguistic development of Heidegger’s work, there would never have
been a further de-struction of metaphysics pace the paradoxical centre to Derrida’s oeuvre.
10 Ricouer’s notion of “the hermeneutics of suspicion” was first initiated in the introduction to his
brilliant Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 1970.
11 Austin famously delineates between constative utterances that generally relay information that is
true or false and performative utterances that are being enacted as they are stated, often in the present
continuous or present simple construction of the verb.
12 https://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/advanced/258682/anger-over-nazi-show
13 To further this argument through the self-determinations of the human science of linguistics, one
only has to examine the work that has been done in Pragmatics by thinkers such as Grice, Leech and
originally, Austin himself. Ideas such as NVC (Non-Verbal-Communication), implicature and of
course speech act theory itself all have their basis in contextualized situations. Both Derrida’s and
Austin’s formal arguments rest upon the importance of context and their major difference is of course
a metaphysical assumption about the distance between the signifier and signified in a linguistic sign
and how this can be influenced by contextual praxis.
14 One here recognizes the formulation of ‘Sayre’s Law’; William Sayre was alleged to have stated
“Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”
However, if I’m correct in the assumptions behind my thesis about the dovetailing of literary
criticism and philosophy, and the more recent historicising of criticism, then the tenor of the dialogue
between Derrida and Searle (taken as two obvious players in a much larger play in the modern
humanities), and numerous other commentators, teachers and critics, has ramifications that move
beyond the obvious comedic element of Sayre’s Law.
15 The first English translation of “Signature Event Context” appeared in the first volume of the new
journal Glyph in 1977. The editor of Glyph, Sam Weber, invited John Searle to write a response to
“Signature Event History.” In his response, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Searle
points out a number of flaws in Derrida’s argumentation and his understanding of Austin. For the
second volume of Glyph (also published in 1977), Derrida contributed a response to Searle’s “Reply”
called “Limited Inc. a b c.” In contrast to Searle’s ten page “Reply,” Derrida’s “Limited Inc” ran to
ninety pages. Derrida’s “Limited Inc” is an almost merciless criticism of Searle, whom he calls
“Sarl.” For instance, he points out that Searle in his “Reply” hardly mentions signature, event, or
context. “Limited Inc” indicates Derrida’s growing frustration with the reception of his work,
especially in the Anglophone world. Derrida having been offered an honorary degree at Cambridge
University in 1992, a group of analytic philosophers wrote an open letter (see below) to the Times of
London, in which they objected to Derrida receiving this honorary degree. Despite the letter,
Cambridge University awarded Derrida the degree. It’s hugely ironic that one of Derrida’s main
detractors, as well as someone who clearly hasn’t read Derrida—and who’ll I’ll discuss more in the
chapter on postmodernism—Jordan Peterson similarly had an invitation to Cambridge rescinded back
in 2021. The authorities eventually saw the erroneous nature of this policing and Peterson was quite
rightly allowed to go and share his thoughts at Cambridge. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a talk on
deconstruction although, given the context, the irony would have been too good to be true. Here is a
copy of the original open letter to the Times of London; one can’t help but think of Kissinger’s use of
Sayre’s Law again here:
16 One only needs to examine the evidence of classes in literary criticism themselves: how many
actually critique texts and how many talk about the political context of texts, while in some cases
having become self-appointed arbiters of what gets taught as ‘the canon.’ Moreover, I’ve have been
in meetings, at which a self-appointed guardian of culture has informed me that we should move
more female poets onto the syllabus. We already had a large presence of female poets on the given
syllabus—in proportion to the historical record the ratio was skewed in any case. The person gave a
self-congratulatory snigger when I dared to mention the literary canon and said “we haven’t
recognised a thing called the canon for years in the US”. The irony of the fact that the same person
had been at pains to say we should in no way indulge in hegemony or ideological instantiation in any
shape, form or guise whatsoever, seemed lost upon my colleague, who was patronising the (female)
course coordinator and implying his Neoliberal/humanist/‘progressive’ model was the particular
codification that our department needed to follow. People often do not realise the patronising nature
of this sort of discourse and the implied power-relations themselves that this insinuates; especially in
my opinion, in a context where we are teaching a truly representational Introduction to Poetry model;
a model where the “interpretive community” to use Stanley Fish’ phrase, needs to be taken into
account. With regards to the notion of the canon, this is something to which I will return in the final
chapter.
17 After de Man’s death in 1983, it was discovered that he’d penned antisemitic journalism for the
Belgian newspaper Le Soir. Because of the storm in the humanities that deconstruction had caused,
de Man had many supporters who offered weak and quite frankly embarrassing excuses for his
somewhat shady literary soirees in the past—the worst of which was probably that proffered by
Derrida. That said, I wouldn’t refuse to employ a great painter and decorator if they were
philanderers, so I don’t see why we can’t celebrate and recognize the brilliance and originality of de
Man whilst holding his decidedly questionable political views in abeyance. I’ve also read and
enjoyed Lous Ferdinand Celine…
18 Gadamer’s seminal text, Truth and Method (1975), uses the newly developed techniques of
hermeneutics and historicism to demonstrate how our historical and social juncture will invariably
affect our reading and reception of given texts, works of art or cultural artifacts. I’ll discuss Gadamer
more in the chapter that concerns reception theory.
19 Greilling articulated the semantic paradox “Greilling’s Paradox” in 1908. Essentially, some words
have the same property as what they signify, such as “short”; however, “long” doesn’t have this
property. “Polysyllabic” does in itself have an unusually long number of syllables, so is also the
same; monosyllabic does not have the semantic properties that is suggested by the signifier however,
as it only has one syllable. Words such as “polysyllabic” and “short” are homological or autological;
words such as “long” and “monosyllabic” are heterological. The paradox arises with the word
heterological itself: if it’s “heterological” it does not instantiate its meaning but this is what
heterological means, therefore it’s also “autological”. On the other hand, if “heterological” is
“autological”, then it must instantiate the character of applying to itself: therefore heterological is
also heterological. In my adapted usage of Greilling’s notion, Literature is an autological discourse
and not heterological; even though it semantically purports to non-representation of the real it’s
actually autological in that this non-representation is in fact, representational; this is a way of seeing
the self-referentiality of Modernism and later Postmodernism as referring to itself as fiction, therefore
as literary discourse making itself more autological than say, Realism.
As subject to de Man’s critique, other discourses on de Man’s reading would be heterological
because they don’t acknowledge the tenuous, mediative nature of the linguistic sign. This is in part
the basis for perhaps his famous essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969) in which he treats of
Romanticism’s contingent relationship to allegory and symbol. The Platonic (and more conservative)
notion of referentiality, the original correspondence theory of truth would invert this model and see
discourses such as science and history as autological and view literary discourse (the poets) as
heterological because the “sophistry” that they weave as truth. The phrase “sophistry” is
philologically taken to be negative in common parlance but originally was connected to rhetorical
skill, such as that used by politicians, lawyers and, in Plato’s case, the false prophets, three times
removed from the original, the poets. This in itself, is of philosophical interest and warrants further
investigation.
20 F.W. Schlegel also saw the intertextual predilections of philosophy and also argued for the
transcending of rhetorical, semantic and grammatical textual boundaries. Hence the philosophical
importance of his (admittedly poor) novel Lucinde (1799). His idea on the inability to completely
master epistemic knowledge of “worldhood” was also reflected in the Lyaceum and the Athenian
Fragments. It appears to me that these were also powerful influences on Nietzsche’s poetics in his
approach to philosophy—both in his aphorisms and also in the poetics of works such as Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1885).
21 The hortus conclusus refers to an aesthetic representation of the Virgin Mary both in pictorial and
in actually constructed gardens, which began in the late Middle Ages. Coleridge’s depiction of the
landscape in “Kubla Khan” (1797) can be seen as connected to this aesthetic symbolism. See my own
chapter on “Intellectual Intuition in Coleridge’s Poetics” in Hegel and the English Romantic
Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
22 For an excellent and engaging discussion of the Thai romance genre and its distribution in Thai
literary discourse, please see Dr. Sasinee Khunkaew, Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected
Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions; School of English, Communication and Philosophy,
Cardiff University: unpublished PhD Thesis, June, 2015.
23 The obvious objection to this is to stand by the alternative absolute Idealism of Fichte or Hegel,
which relies upon a teleological logic exemplified brilliantly in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),
where Hegel uses theories such as Anerkennung (mutual recognition) to demonstrate how the human
subject can escape subjectivity and enter into the realm of intersubjectivity and eventually absolute
spirit, Geist, or knowing. Or in faith-based reason, the Abrahamic faith in a God or Holy Trinity. In
poststructuralist terms these ideals are “transcendental signifieds” that stand outside the chain of
signification and are therefore unknowable.
OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_6
Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the
Twentieth Century, whose propensity for philosophical acuity was
unfortunately matched by his apparent love of gin. As a philosopher in the
tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap and Quine, one certainly wouldn’t have
placed Sellars on a list of philosophers with a penchant for meditations
Hégéliennes but those were his words. His principle work was in the
philosophy of mind and language. As with all the other successful analytic
philosophers, he seemed to end up at the same Janus-faced revolving door
that led either back to the European room of academic scepticism or an
holistic room that, whilst dispelling the so called myth of the given (or logoi
to parse the jargon I’ve used thus far), dropped one into a post-metaphysical
linguistic garden. A garden in which he would have encountered W.V.O.
Quine, if not Alice herself.
After the continental tradition had embraced the linguistic through
phenomenology and hermeneutics, it seemed the analytic was heading
down the same cul-de-sac, with the difference that the continental had a
tacit embrace of the limits of language from the outset. This occurred partly
after Heidegger’s Kehre (change of direction towards an emphasis on
language) and Gadamer’s brilliant development of hermeneutics, which I
will discuss briefly below. However, the analytic tradition was still holding
onto the post-Kantian synthetic-analytic distinction and still determined to
find that elusive set of all sets, without falling into paradox or, worse still,
the Sturm und Drang of theory itself. Philosophers were perhaps finally
coming to the realization that historicity would trump all universality.
However, I added the modifier “Literary” to the title of this chapter and this
chapter will indeed bring the second modifier to the table. This allows a
future based not upon parochial notions of identity, but upon commonality,
historical perspicuity and an altar where we won’t sacrifice our literature
teachers or academics, who have finally firmly awoken from the nightmare
of history.
In the wake of Paul de Man having challenged the “resistance to theory”
that was incumbent on all humanities professors in the early 1980s, a couple
of new incumbents, Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels decided to
raise the bar with the notorious neo-pragmatist paper, “Against Theory.”1
Roland Barthes had challenged “victory to the critic” that was supplied by
the sleight-of-hand provided by biographical-historicist criticism, bringing
theory back to the fore. However, these straight-talking neo-pragmatists,
obviously influenced by Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, were
trying to wipe the pragmatist slate clean by in some ways flagging E.D.
Hirsch’ phenomenological criticism. This was a criticism wherein one could
find a meaning or pure essence or pure intentionality by discovering—much
to the ire of Wimsett and Beardsley—the author’s intention: victory once
again to the critic. Knapp and Michaels argued:
They go on to state their main thesis that “The mistake made by theorists
has been to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term
(the author’s intended meaning) to a second term (the text’s meaning), when
the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed nor fail in deriving one
term from the other, since to have one is already to have them both.” (724).
Given this desideratum, the simple truth is to find this purported apodictic
truth (the authorial intention), which is for example perhaps bound up in a
particular speech act.
However, there were a series of essays published in response to this
seminal paper on what is not just a critique about theory itself but also (and
more pertinently) a position about philosophical scepticism and the modern
epistemological enterprise as modern philosophy, which acts a good
catalyst with which to commence this chapter. It deals with the certainty of
meaning and the idea that theory only finds space to thrive in an area where
there is space for scepticism about final meanings, intentions and
foundations. We can read this space between foundational meaning and the
variously posited meanings of theory as in one sense the juncture where
literary theory and philosophy cross. One of the responders was a writer
who is a philosophical romantic in that he challenges the idea that there is a
clearly defined gap between genres such as psychoanalysis, film studies,
philosophy, literary theory and criticism: Stanley Cavell. His book of
essays, Must We Mean What We Say (1969), and his magnum opus The
Claim of Reason (1980), neatly summarise his signature position of
acknowledgment. This is a version of Hegel’s idea of “mutual recognition,”
or Anerkennung; but a deflationary or non-metaphysical position. It posits
that acknowledgment (as opposed to avoidance) of someone, something, or
some extrinsic logoi held by two subjects is how we foster knowledge (ac-
knowledge) any posited hypothesis about the logoi of the phenomenal
world.2 Cavell argues that this inter-subjective position is one explored by
many Hollywood movies, classical myths or modern novels—as well as by
psychoanalysis.
This mutual acknowledgment can be the basis for knowledge about the
world and deals with areas such as Wittgenstein’s work on the
incorrigibility of things such as raw feels and pain, because of how
knowledge is deduced or induced, in the sphere of public reason. Thus,
acknowledgment also locates knowing in a post-Wittgensteinean loci and is
deeply connected with both de Saussure’s and Peirce’s ideas on the
logically prior public nature of semiotic systems and structures before they
are private. Within the scope of these systems, we hold a series of
propositional attitudes that come bound with subjective stances and
positions on these topics. Once again, we can also clearly discern (or
acknowledge) in this semiotic ecosystem the connection between the whole
system of Langue and individual Parole.
It can be discerned how the nature of sign systems is once again
autologically represented by a system such as that of an aesthetic idiolect,
optimally explored in the self-conscious aesthetics of Romanticism,
Modernism and (up to a point), Postmodernism. Another philosopher whose
work I’d like to offer up as a counterpoint to the anti-theoretical approach
of Knapp and Michaels is Donald Davidson. His culminated response to the
issues explored by Sellars and Quine, comes out in close proximity to
Cavell’s, Derrida’s and de Man’s work. Davidson also rejects the bald
notion of philosophical certainty, while positing that by a form of mutual
acknowledgment about propositions, translations and triangulations—
without subscribing to a holistic nomological theory of meanings, or a fixed
schematic model that explains the whole of the external world for us—we
can semantically communicate in mutually meaningful and reasonable
ways. It is because of this continued sense of the subject negotiating the
physical world, the breakdown of different genres or criticisms, or the
reorientation of the relationship of literary theory to philosophy, that I label
all of these philosophers, Philosophical Romantics.
In this chapter, I shall briefly breakdown the arguments of the
philosophers just mentioned, arguments that culminate in the re-
instantiation of theory, before examining the further possible political
ramifications of what I would call this Communitarian literary theory. I
supplement these theoretical standpoints by first offering a reading of
William Carlos Williams’ seminal modernist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”
(1923) and then I offer a reading of a more recent and highly regarded
poem, Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy” (2007). I go on to outline the
concomitant phenomenology and hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer and
Wolfgang Iser, which explicitly embraces the communitarianism that is
only implied within the work of philosophical romantics such as Rorty,
Cavell and Davidson. I conclude the chapter by illustrating its own utility in
reading a short story by Ernest Hemmingway.
John Searle, in addition to his war of the words with the Gallic upstarts,
was also the philosopher who famously took on the mantle of the
intentionalist theory of Austin’s speech act theory in the 70 and 80s by
developing a whole new range of speech acts, with perfomativity at their
centre. He also invented the famous Chinese Room argument for a computer
that could eventually learn all of the correct moves in following certain
speech acts or transformational-grammar-syntax rules to allow for the
computer to become a competent speaker.3 However, because of the rules
of implicature and context—in short pragmatics—Searle still argued we
could tell if it was a human being or a machine who was conversing with
us. This was in tandem with his Berkeley colleague Hubert Dreyfuss, who
tackled the same subject of AI from a phenomenological angle in his book
What Computers Can’t Do (1972); Searle’s was one of the first influential
philosophical ideas to tackle the subject of AI.
For Dreyfuss, phenomenological intentionality is key in reading and for
Searle the bare intentionality bound up with a speech act bears inscription
upon a text. However, in their own philosophical area, Quine and Sellars
were working within an empiricist tradition that was still looking for other
hallmarks of epistemic/empirical certainty within the post-analytic
tradition. The Sellars-Quine approach is premised upon the idea that there
is a relation of knowledge to reality, which is either the prospective given
structure (the holistic framework of “the given”) for Sellars; or for Quine, it
is an ultimately holistic analytic-physicist ur-vocabulary or radical
reductionist schematic model. However, by following the logic of his most
famous essay, “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine starts to distrust
“privileged representations” because he can’t logically justify or discern the
“‘idea’ idea” itself—which in poststructuralism is akin to the
transcendental signified. His logical-empiricist realism may appear
strategically different from continental hermeneutics, but he is also led to
the denial of extra-linguistic transcendent meanings in objects themselves
(logoi). The “‘idea’ idea” in modern epistemology is connected to direct,
unmediated representation, or what Rorty tropes as the mind as “the mirror
of nature” and something that can be now replaced by post-Wittgensteinean
epistemological behaviorism.
The Geisteswissenschaften (modern humanities, which are opposed to
the Naturwissenschaften) under the aegis of both the ‘continental’ and
‘analytic’, should be replaced in Rorty’s eyes by epistemological
behaviorism or what he later called “ironism” because there is no
“philosophical point” to be made about translation or “intentionality” or
“certainty” of the “problem of other minds”.4 The Quinean attempt to
distinguish between “scientific” and “unscientific” explanations, or for what
for Sellars would be a more holistic schema, for Rorty were pointless.
Rortyan Ironism, Derridean Poststructuralism, or what has loosely and
incorrectly been grouped as ‘postmodernsim’ are the forms of philosophy
that are the off-cuts of this crisis of modern philosophy for the humanities.
However, they can now produce some great readings and historically acute
hermeneutics in our tradition of reception, or in the newer tradition of
critical forms such as New Historicism. As Wheeler has recently pointed out
in the often-missed connection between figures who appear as historically
and epistemologically diverse as Derrida and Quine:
Both Quine and Derrida, then, attack the hidden realism built into
the kind of present meaning-content that will make the necessary the
a priori. Whatever has the full presence required either by
phenomenology or by logical positivism has to have some
objectively real objects, and so some objective necessities.
Furthermore, they both see no way to separate the meaning from the
sign. Meaning as pure, extracted, semantic content is an incoherent
notion. This hyperbole, once the special concerns of Derrida are
disregarded, makes the Quinean point that there can be nothing
behind writing or speech but more writing- or speech-like
phenomena. While Quine does not discuss “logocentrism,” his
treatment of speech and thought as inscription supposes that the
model of thought is writing. (Wheeler, 9–10)
Once we have lost the contrast between the rhetorical and the truth-
conditional, it should not be surprising that the contrast between the
metaphorical and literal could not be sustained. In fact, this
breakdown seems to follow directly from there being no level of
representation which is not language-like. Davidson himself has
made this kind of point in a widely misread paper. Davidson argues,
apparently, that there is only the literal meaning of any term or
sentence. The metaphorical “This essay is a quagmire of self-
descriptive traps” is to be explained, not in terms of some alternative
meaning which the metaphoric context directs us to, but as the
production of a sentence for a purpose other than alerting the hearer
to the drainage problems of my prose. Davidson is widely held to
have assigned a special privilege to something called “literal
meaning.” In fact, given Davidson’s dogmas of empiricism,
Davidson’s view could not be that metaphors have literal meaning.
Davidson’s claim is that to give the meaning of a metaphor is the
same as giving the meaning of any other use of language. A theory
of meaning pairs sentences with truth-conditions. “This essay is a
quagmire of self-descriptive traps” est vrai en Anglais si et
settlement si cette essai est une fondriere de trappes soi-
descriptives. Such a sentence gives all there is to give of the
meaning of the sentence. The point is that there is nothing behind
language but more language-like phenomena, and any explication of
a metaphor will itself have metaphorical as well as non-
metaphorical uses. (Wheeler, 14–15)
Here, “M” denotes some mental state or event and “P” denotes some
physical state or event and “iff” abbreviates “if and only if.”6 This crucial
rejection of bridging laws for Davidson indicates that one remains only
within another hermeneutic circle; one open to constant negotiation and
alteration—within its own semantic limits. Therefore, (and also in the same
sense as Rorty and the poststructuralists), Davidson is against holistic or
reductivist epistemology of any kind. For Davidson, there is no “underlying
mental reality whose laws we can study in abstraction from the normative
and holistic perspectives of interpretation.” Therefore, in a major sense,
what we get with the Davidsonian theory of meaning is an analytical-
hermeneutics, which is suddenly not so far from the hermeneutics of
Gadamer.
Crucially, Davidson finds that it is an a priori and apodictic truth that
mental and physical predicates are not logically connected to each other.
This is because both mental and physical phenomena have distinctly
different sets of features incompatible with each other. Therefore, bridging
laws linking properties from two distinct theoretical discourses (in this case
the mental and physical) would transmit properties from one distinct
discourse to another. In the case of mental and physical phenomena this
would lead into incoherence. Consequently, propositional attitudes, or
intentional states as they are sometimes called, are nothing more than
various cognitive attitudes: we can have hope that the proposition p is true,
we can fear that p is true, we can desire that p is true, and so forth. You and
I can have different attitudes toward the proposition “All swans are white.”
I hope that all swans are white, whereas you believe that it is but don’t hope
it is. The proposition itself, namely, that “All swans are white,” towards
which one has an attitude, is said to give the content to one’s mental state.
Due to this nomological gap between the mental and the physical,
radical interpretation is another interesting theoretical standpoint that
Davidson inherits and develops from Quine. For Davidson, we infer and
triangulate meaning as part of an ongoing interpretive process where we use
prior theory which in turn can become passing theory in the transactional
process. In fact, as stated above, Davidson’s theory is also about letting
oneself be determined by both prior and passing theory, which in terms of
literary theory is hugely interesting. Objectivity is actually attained through
subjectivity because without there being this triangulation of the world
there would be no objectivity. Therefore, walls of propositional statements
are being constantly amended, tested, teased out and modified though one’s
intersubjective interactions with others. These interactions help forge the
development of one’s triangulated standpoint towards an objectivity that is
constantly being postulated and triangulated, as in Cavell’s sense of mutual
acknowledgment. Therefore, the social is logically prior to the personal. In
fact, as with radical interpretation, the notion of the objective world is
developed and passed along through communitarian, social interactions, in
the very first place.
Another interesting point to note about Davidsonian ordinary language
philosophy, is that contra Searle’s ordinary language notions of speech act
theory and performativity as noted above, Davidson is an externalist in that
the subject gets to (possible) intentions through the process of radical
interpretation. In contrast, Searle is an internalist because he starts out with
the intention. Like Knapp and Michaels as literary critics, a definite
intention is postulated at the outset by the speech act itself. For Davidson,
Rorty, Cavell (and in this sense Quine too), the social is logically prior to
the personal, and even the objective with Davidson. Consequently, it is
constantly being triangulated, radically interpreted, acknowledged, and
reconstructed. So, the bald argument I postulate here, is that ordinary
language philosophy has also resulted in two sub-branches: one which is
externalist and one internalist. In light of the foregoing arguments, I’d like
to postulate that in terms of letting oneself be determined, constantly
allowing literary interaction to remodify one’s schematic of the world is a
Davidsonian (and Perhaps Proustian), notion. This notion crucially entails a
buttress against stagnation and falling back into one’s stultified identity (or
identarian) politics. If the most honest way we can receive the word is
represented through the joyous, representational, and symbolic art of
literature, then perhaps this is the best way we can constantly hit the
“refresh” button in our mental schema of the world. This certainly goes
some way towards explaining our propensity towards literature and the
theory of literature’s encroachment (along with, to a degree) the social
sciences, into the modern philosophical landscape.
Furthermore, the work of thinkers such as David Damrosch and the rise
of World Literature as a sub theory can also be, to an extent, explained by
the rise of the theory of literature in the last 100 years or so.7 If philosophy
is running out of paradigms and historicity is the way to explore ideas and
new concepts, then perhaps the bridging laws we alluded to above are in
one sense only to be drawn or constructed through projects like those of
Damrosch. He posits the subject of World Literature as a connective
polyglot tissue, which will open up new horizons for us rather than closing
them off under the politicisation and weaponisation of the various identities
that make up the rich cultural tapestry spoken to by World Literature. It’s to
two apparently very different texts that I now turn, to substantiate the major
claims of this communitarian argument.
The first poem is very well known and is, in the same sense as
Hemmingway in prose, deceptively easy to decipher at first glance. It also
celebrates the new ‘red face’ tradition of American literature.8 The poem is
William Carlos Williams’ seminal “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923). It works
in such a way as to straight away problematise the notion of intention, but
also to triangulate the reader in such a way as to reconsider their
phenomenological relationship with the external world of the everyday; it
asks the reader to suspend or bracket (epoche) their everyday or ‘natural’
attitude and reformulate their Being-in-the-everyday. The poem is a short
four stanza work and reads as follows:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
The first thing one notices is the concrete nature of the poem. The stanzas
are typographically spaced, to almost represent and concretise the shape of
the red wheelbarrow. The reader has the sense of the modernist
interrogation of form and content and in this work the actual form does
inform the content of the poem. One also notices how the form informs the
content in terms of the series of noun-phrases that sit underneath and
support their modifying phrases: “barrow” “water” “chickens”; couple this
with the fact that these phrases in turn sit beneath the highly symbolic
prepositional phrase “so much depends upon” and we discern a structural
pattern, based upon the layout of the sequence of the poem. Williams is
asking us (perhaps?) to consider the various codifications and formats that
make prose poetry. Wordsworth had famously written in his literary
criticism that there is essentially no difference between prose and poetry
and here Williams seems to be offering the same conclusion. If we read the
‘poem’ as a series of simple sentences, paratactic in their structure, and
rewrite the poem in the style of syntagmatic (horizontal) grammatical
structure one may not even discern a poem. However, once the prosody and
lines are broken up in this fashion, the syntagmatic axis becomes combined
with the paradigmatic axis, and we now have the form of a poem. Again,
the lines between the grammatical and the rhetorical are blurred, in such a
performative way as to challenge their scholastic and traditional parsing as
separate linguistic encodements.
One can also read this as a combination of two semiotic codes in a
Peircean sense. So, the first code is the symbolic code where we read each
signifier in terms of its denotative or connotative meaning, and the second
is the iconic, where we examine the layout of the signs to represent the
formatting of a poem. These combinations seem to imply that Williams is
perhaps interrogating the way things get presented as ‘art’ in much the way
as continental modernists such as Marcel Duchamp did with his ready-made
sculpture, R Mutt (1917).
In the final instance, based upon this purported interrogation of the
boundaries between form and content, grammar and rhetoric or the
symbolic and the iconic, one also senses an instance of Shklovsky’s key
formalist notion of defamiliarization at work here. The notion of the
everyday wheelbarrow-itself presented as a Duchamp-style ready-made
sculpture; but perhaps there’s also an interrogation at work of the use of
language itself? As the wheelbarrow or tool that composes the grammar of
our social reality to us. These very nouns and modifiers that are premised
upon this prepositional relationship of the fabric of our reality are all
linguistic and all carry our everyday world for us. As so much depends
ALSO upon the red wheelbarrow as an everyday farmyard tool. To use
Heidegger’s famous example of Being ready-to-hand and Being-at-hand:
when we use a hammer or drive a car, we aren’t really considering our
relationship with the car or hammer as utensils unless they are damaged.
Once they are damaged, our relationship with them is completely changed,
as is our phenomenological sense of Being. So, in one sense, we can
perhaps pinpoint an interior meaning but equally we can also read this
poem as challenging the very notion of our place in the world. This can also
mean opening a new horizon of Davidsonian triangulation, through which
to radically interpret our world. This can in turn be accomplished simply by
the actual process of reading the poem and the concomitant reformulation
of the form-content relations within this poem itself (as a poem).
The second poem I’d like to explicate, using this novel, Davidsonian
form of reading, is Keston Sutherland’s original and powerful 2007 poem,
“Hot White Andy”. This poem is much more overtly experimental and very
long indeed. Similar to Williams however, Sutherland is very much
interrogating the perceived difference between various presentational
formats. The first thing we notice at work here is the gap between written
and spoken language; on the one hand the poem is clearly meant for
recitation, because of its verbal play and dexterity. On the other hand. it’s
also designed to be read because of the ‘notation’ of the punctuation within
the poem. Therefore, there’s straight away a sort of deconstruction of the
grammatical and the rhetorical difference in language, if we take
punctuation marks as functioning under the logic/grammar rubric, but also,
in this poem, acting as rhetorical and deictic devices illuminating or lighting
our path through the poem itself. The poem commences:
• A
Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to
the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap
buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck,
phlegmophrenic, want to go to the windfarm,
Your * kids menu lips swinging in the Cathex-Wizz monoplex;
Your * face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-cut peel lids;
ng pick Your out the reregulated loner PAT to to screw white
chocolate to the bone. The tension in an unsprung
r trap co
The incantation of the Asian fetish for the white, the occidental, is herein
personified by someone who traverses these cultural boundaries AND does
stunts for a living. But then traversal of the cultural boundaries is not
enough, and in the age of desire and fetishism the visceral boundaries are
also crossed “but what is there/to eat in a specific fang/defecation being
otherwise a welding helmet,/being a gas lens,/being this hot skit spilt on
glass/eat all of me like a dispassionately incinerated fish cheek…” The
liminal imagery blends and rolls out like Hegelian desire that eats itself
from the inside out and as love that is grounded in the body (as the Marlowe
quote that prefaces the poem tells us) “the asymmetry of self-inclusion/each
of them will have the whole of love in it.” There is also the desire that turns
into the acknowledgment of “the I that is We, and the We that is I” in Hegel,
which becomes “them” before becoming “it.” In other words, this is the
desire that cannot be transcended. In a Lacanian sense, the desire is
metonymic and linked in a chain of signifiers that cannot be elided, the
floating signifier of the “ng” in Cheng’s name is the Lacanian self-desire
that links-up throughout the poem. This is accomplished through sounds,
words, morphemes, identities; in fact, in chiasmatic modulation, it moves
back and forward and ultimately you can take the Andy out of Cheng, but
you can’t take the “ng” out of Cheng. This floating signifier that ultimately
elides any final, transcendental, fixed identity, wonders about and mutates
throughout the poem. Therefore, the chiasmatic image of desire presented
by a white hot—hot white Andy Cheng, floats until the end of the poem,
through a play, we are told, and various other forms until:
“I feel fine” she said, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine”.
The story ends with the older man asking a question, which is a clear
reversal of the power dynamic, and the girl making what appears as the
most declarative sentence of the whole story—a sentence repeated—for
added effect. The symbols in the story are also connected with transitory
and liminal elements associated with the trope of passing through: a bead
curtain that separates the man and the woman, the station itself and the fact
the man and the woman finish the story on different sides of the room, after
he’s been out alone to the train tracks, which may signify a sense of
abandonment or separation. The girl holds on to two of the beads on the
curtain, which could also signify a rosary, and the setting is a Catholic
country, Spain. The implications of abortion, given this context, are clearly
lurking in the narrative gap. Importantly, and as part of my radical
translation of the text, my own reading of these symbols opens-up a
dialogue, based upon my own assumptions, on whether the girl will go-
ahead and have the abortion after the story is completed. Indeed, one of the
most interesting aspects of teaching a story like this, is also the opportunity
it affords both the teacher and the students to provide possible endings to
the story itself. There is also the element that a white elephant sale can
signify something that’s unwanted in Western parlance, which again could
figure as an aborted child. In Asia however, this is often read as a rare white
elephant, and can this signify the special and rare nature of a child itself. Yet
another translation one may bring to the story is the idea of an elephant in
the room, which of course signifies something figuratively in the
background of a scene, huge, unwelcome, but nonetheless lurking in the
picture. This idea fits well the idea of the nascent abortion and the fact that
it is never alluded to directly in the story itself.
It’s clear that the abundance of possible interpretations that one brings
to Hemmingway opens-up a classroom and helps us each interrogate our
own assumptions and suppositions, as do all forms of literary discourse. It’s
communitarian sense thrives on the fact that we interrogate our own
bedrock assumptions, when entering-into a discourse that requires that we
take a tightrope walk, throwing or interrogating any pre-existing keys or
apparatus. Thinking outside of our own structural boxes in this way can in
no small measure act as a bulwark against ignorance and prejudice. This is
because we are expected to inhabit a territory that acknowledges the
sceptical limits of language and embraces this limit by exacting an act of
acknowledgment on the part of the careful and sensitive reader. Or perhaps
even upon the careful philosopher of language, such as Sellars or Davidson,
who further recognise the communitarian, social—and by extension
Hegelian—nature of language.
Footnotes
1 This is covered brilliantly and in great detail by Yale Professor Paul Fry, in a remarkable series of
Literary Theory lectures that are all available in the public domain on YouTube and are well worth
the time for anyone who not only wants a free course at Yale but also wants to hear a true master at
work. The lecture on Knapp and Michaels is very clear and concise, showing the importance of their
neo-pragmatic contribution to the whole literary theory debate. The whole series of lectures are
available for perusal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY4CTSQ8nY&list=
PLD00D35CBC75941BD
2 The title of his seminal book of essays “Must We Mean What We Say” of course goes a long way
to indicate the theoretical position taken by Cavell. There is a philosophically loaded concept
regarding the identity of “saying” and “intention” in this very statement itself. Another pregnant
Cavellian statement is his dictum: “I can know the meaning of a word, but can I know the intention
of a word”.
Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of
Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the
symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols
which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine
that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out
Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program
enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does
not understand a word of Chinese.
Searle, J., ‘The Chinese Room’, in R.A. Wilson and F. Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the
Cognitive Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
4 Rorty speaks at length about “ironism” in his next major work after Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature, in which he introduces various other works of philosophy and literature as “ironist”; these
include Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger and even Hegel. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).
This work is interestingly also way less analytical in its methodological approach, and as such it’s a
much easier read than its predecessor.
6 A stronger version of a bridging law claims identity of properties from different theoretical
discourses. A weaker version claims only that whenever an object instantiates one property—then it
instantiates the other; either way these laws are rejected at the outset by Davidson—this goes some
considerable way in moving away from the Quinean notion of an Ur language based upon theoretical
properties of a field such as quantum mechanics. This would it seems to me signify that ideas such as
those expounded by Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self (1991) would at some epistemological
juncture face problems of translation from one discourse to another.
7 David Damrosch’ interesting work in the study and heuristic dissemination of World Literature
itself implies the communitarian notion of literary criticism that I am promulgating here and
delineates a similar educational ethos. Princeton University’s promotional blurb for his 2003 book
What Is World Literature reads as follows: “Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as
a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in
translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space
created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither
alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they
can be seriously mishandled in the process.” Damrosch gave a similarly positive account of his work
when I met him at Chiang Mai University a number of years ago. The communitarian aspect of this
project and its attendant notion of World Literature is without doubt a perfect corollary for the type of
literary criticism in the humanities that I am proposing for our new world of global citizenship.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691049861/what-is-world-literature
8 The distinction between ‘pale face” and “red face” literary sensibility was postulated by US critic
Philip Rahv, who contended that the two poles were best represented by Henry James as the
Anglophile writer and man of ‘pale face’ sensibility as opposed to Walt Whitman or Mark Twain,
who presented the authentic ‘red face’ indigenous US sensibility. One may of course take issue with
this dichotomy on postcolonial grounds.
9 I have also started conducting a study in this area tentatively entitled “Reading Dickens’ Little
Dorrit in the Age of Distraction” in which I argue that the “Age of Enlightenment” has been replaced
by the “Age of Entitlement” and that a major factor in the new age ethos is the return to tablets and a
digital scribal culture. In line with Foucault’s argument to which I refer to above, the author-function
has once again changed and with new platforms such as Facebook and Tik Tok, our conception of
both publication and authorship has moved into a whole new paradigm. Moreover, in terms of
Reader-Response criticism, I argue that the response of reading subjects and their response times
have changed to such a degree that the skill of responding to hypotactic sentences used by a writer
such as Charles Dickens is no longer phenomenologically available to a worryingly large
demographic of the implied reading public. This is connected to the short cuts to real textual analysis
and thinking expounded on the plethora of social media platforms. This is arguably connected to a
new historicist phase in which we now find ourselves—an age where the concept of self-authorship
has also given rise to an extreme lack of trust in the mass media, even promulgated by the former
President of the United States, Donald Trump.
OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_7
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And for the rest of the poem, the lyric speaker is trapped in the present of
the poem, constantly aware of uncertainty through the tonal modulations7 of
his rhetorical temporality and his modal verb constructions “Shall I say,” “I
should have been a pair of ragged claws” (73)—every editor’s nightmare,
both figurative and it seems literal (perhaps the most poignant literal
metaphor ever uttered)“And would it have been worth it, after all…” (87).
These ‘verbal icons’ signify this chiasmatic temporality, whereby the poet
continually returns and reverses his positions and tropes in the poem:
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (45–49)
This rhetorical and grammatical lag of Eliot’s reflects the earlier semiotic
examination of the rhetorical and grammatical as beautifully postulated by
Paul de Man, playing out in a wonderfully performative praxis. In one
sense, the whole poem is one long speech act almost written for a self-
conscious, Brechtian, Elizabethan theatrical audience. After defamiliarizing
the audience and the lyric speaker, in true modernist style, we are reminded
at the close of the poem that:
Anyone familiar with Pound’s Cantos, will here see the intertextual
influence of Pound here, and the brilliant bathos at the end of the poem, the
human voices in which we ultimately drown. For all our rhetorical tropes,
figures, characterisations and nightmares of history, we are reminded that
history and language are all too human. It’s not the sirens, the wreckers, the
mermaids, the music of poesy that will drown us, not the mythopoetic but
the literal. The final chiasmatic turn is that drowning comes with the
awakening of the grammatical at the poem’s end. Once again, the rhetorical
is laid to rest (like the zoomorphic ambiguity in stanza one) reversed all the
way down through the indecisions and non-poetic starters to the end of the
poem, where we are snapped back to history and we “drown” in yet another
figure. A figure piled on hypotactically to the other blind tropes of the
modernist poetic. This is the brilliance of the highest modernism and the
sublimity of Eliot’s patient gaze.
The strange tropes attest to Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ thesis and
also to the idea that, in this anti-subjectivist metaphysic, Eliot has strong
affinities with the later work of Roland Barthes, because both reject the
proto-humanism inherent in the metaphysics of subjective presence in
Romanticism, the author-ity of the author; for Eliot the author surrenders his
or her personality to tradition, while formulating their own voice
somewhere through the voice of their individual talent. Perhaps, had Eliot
attempted ‘Prufrock’ at a later stage in his career, he would not have
drowned in other human voices at the end of the poem.8 In a beautiful
further twist to this rich poem, Eliot takes the former protestations of two
canonical poets in the metaphysical tradition and he debunks their original
stance towards their prospective ‘sexual quarry’ or partners. For example, in
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker opens with the lines “Had we
but world enough and time, /This coyness, lady, were no crime,” whilst
finishing with the rhetorical flourish:
So, Marvell takes up an actively erotic position of agency and switches the
common troping of the sun as life-sustainer and life-giver. In so doing, he
combines the apparent opposites of sweetness and strength, in order to
overrun the natural energy of the sun and transcend the movement of time
itself. He elongates the night that no longer belongs to the springes of
cyclical temporality. Likewise, Donne’s The Flea also uses conceit and
paradox to use an abstruse scholastic linguistic logic, to challenge once
again and open-up the gaps between the triumvirate of logic, rhetoric and
grammar, as also flagged earlier by de Man. The brilliance in Eliot is also to
subvert these codifications, demonstrating the opposite in the ability of the
speaker (or so it seems) to consummate the figural sexual relationship. The
logic of the discourse itself and any rhetorical unity that would play into a
more unified notion of temporality. The result is the startling high modernist
negotiation with tradition and history that is self-consciously, and
autologically, played out in the actual praxis of the poem itself.
But what of this reading of high modernism? Once again, we find
ourselves in a situation where, to use a structuralist trope, we can perhaps
now at least partially define postmodernism by what it is not. Perhaps we
can find our way past the myopic protestations of Jordan Peterson & Inc.,
by defining the post-modern primarily as an art form that challenges or
attempts to give art back to the people, or remove the inherent elitism of
Lawrence, Woolf, Pound, and Yeats. Or is it a form that supports the
commodification of art in the age of capital? True to the form of the rest of
this book, it’s also necessarily a corresponding philosophy of sorts, to which
this literary genre can of necessity be, at least partially, yoked.
The answer is that there is no clear truth, either in the work of art, the
text, or any philosophical system or hermeneutics of being that gives one
the topographical key to Being itself. The modernist appeal to both
tradition, mythology, a lost golden age, or a more self-conscious work of art
is one that was mirrored in the philosophical and mythopoetic tropes of the
Frühromantiker themselves.9 This is the high—and as yet unachieved—
ideal of art and culture in social life, the linguistic and public-sociological
organisation of the polity that sociological thinkers such as Jürgen
Habermas have repeatedly endorsed.10
The conservative bias against this type of philosophical outlook—an
outlook which is not at all new, when judged by philosophy’s own terms
and self-representations—goes back at least as far as Socrates with his
injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth the living” and his
oxymoron “The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.”11
Therefore, it’s nothing new for philosophy to be in this state of
epistemological remonstrance with the powers-that-be; whether it be card-
carrying Functionalists such as Habermas on the Left, or on the right Talcott
Parsons; or with the good old Sophists and Cosmogonists. One should also
remember that the use of irony is hardly new. Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe,
must have been long in the teeth with her husband as he strolled around
‘ironising’ in the local markets while she ironed his togas. The modern
philosophical era commenced with the academic and Pyrrhonist scepticism,
engaged by Bacon and Descartes and never really truncated until it found
its way inside the mind of Hegel. Unfortunately, history did not culminate
in the Prussian State of 1821 and the young Hegelians were allegedly, even
arguing over poor Friedrich’s grave ten years later. So, anyone who thinks
academic scepticism is something novel needs to get out more. Postmodern
irony and scepticism display a marked distrust of what Lyotard termed
‘metanarratives’ but after a twentieth century that produced Nazism,
Communism, Fascism and EastEnders, who could really blame them?
These philosophical roots of the current postmodern debate are something I
will return to in the concluding chapter of this study.
The “postmodern” is often used by thinkers as a strawman, and more
recently this has been the case with the outspoken Canadian clinical
psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has courted celebrities such as Stephen
Fry and philosophers such as Roger Scruton.12 Besides this, he partook in
the infamous and utterly tedious ‘debate’ with Slavoj Žižek, to which I
alluded at the commencement of this chapter: a spectacle that made the
presidential debates between Trump and Biden appear like the World Mensa
Finals.
Peterson’s early monograph, Maps of Meaning (1999), is excellently
articulated and makes perfect sense in an age of what Heidegger frames by
the term Gestell and in which Being is disclosed in such a technological,
alienating and industrialised fashion, that people are essentially
dehumanized and seen as raw products. However, as is the case with
Peterson’s more recent polemical postulations, one should perhaps be more
cautious than to use the hyponym ‘postmodern’ as a nomological net within
which to grasp all of the current existential crisis. I will attend to the logic
—or in Lyotard’s formation “Inventor’s Paralogy”—of the postmodern
artwork/science/political praxis, before then assessing its connection to
what certain thinkers term ‘postmodern’ philosophy. This being a
philosophy placed in speech-marks precisely because I don’t actually
believe there exists such a body of philosophy (I’m sure someone would
accuse me taking a typically postmodern position in making this utterance);
certainly, not in the sense that there existed a coherent analytic or
phenomenological tradition of philosophy. The term has more recently
come to be used in a derogatory fashion, much as the term “romantic” was
used once by more conservative thinkers.
To commence with, there are a number of key aspects or notions that
postmodernism shares with its modernist predecessor, such as what one
might call the self-conscious nature of the work of art itself, and the
ontologically interconnected nature of various works of art, (people
sometimes use Julia Kristeva’s phrase intertextuality in this sense). There is
a natural leaning towards poststructuralism here, although Derrida himself
was loathe to use the term (or even the term postmodernism). The inherent
difficulty of the work, as with my argument of homology or autology used
throughout this book, the self-reference to a discourse as inherently
negative or indirectly linked to an ultimately unknowable logoi, Quine’s
Idea idea, or Wilfrid Sellars’ Myth of the Given, is obviously destined to be
as clear as mud. None of this is going to add up to clarity of formulation in
the final instance; what is known is known by ambiguity and a naturally
limited or indirect formulation.13 One may even say that in Marcuse’s sense
of recuperation, the work of art is postmodern before it is recuperated and
transformed into a modernist work. The new is always already postmodern
and becomes modern once it is recuperated, so, boundaries are constantly
being interrogated with the postmodern.
Perhaps writers such as John Fowles best personify the aesthetic
postmodern, in novels such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).
Fowles constantly steps out of the text: referring for example to a young
man working away at that time in The British Library Reading Rooms
(Marx) and another young man digging away at a different form of
stratification, (the geological work of Thomas Lyle), on another part of the
Dorsett Coast. Alternative endings are produced, and the author is
constantly reminding us of his tenuous ontology as author. The movie that
was made in 1981 is equally self-referential and postmodern, starring
Jeremey Irons and Meryl Streep. The screenplay by Harold Pinter is about a
movie being made about the book, brilliantly reflecting the postmodern
aspect of a hall of mirrors without a fixed original (all is simulacra—
another major theme of postmodernism). A theme of course explored by
various other authors of the postmodern novel, who developed one of its
most successful sub-genres, that of Sci Fi. Most famously, one thinks of
Phillip K. Dicks’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), which of
course, became the movie Bladerunner (1982).
Much of the British popular comedy of the nineties was postmodern in
its origins, from Ricky Gervais’s brilliant—and at times bathetic—The
Office, Ali G, Trigger Happy TV, the brilliant satirical newsroom spoof, The
Day Today to the comedic tour-de -force, Brasseye. The self-conscious
nature of the postmodern aesthetic, the reshaping of boundaries and the
elevation and admixture of high and low culture made for an explosive
cocktail of comedy where boundaries and limits were constantly
rechallenged and reinterpreted. It would seem that even the most patrician
and traditional cultural guardians were no match for the satirical speed and
wit with which postmodern humour would take its merciless aim.
Then there was the rise of much of postcolonial studies in universities,
such as Sussex and cultural studies departments such as that of Birmingham
(in the UK), under the aegis of Ranajit Guha, Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart
Hall. The last bastion of the elite was being challenged, culture, along with
the cultural superiority of (E)nglish; the pluralisation and nominalisation of
RP (Received Pronunciation) “RIP RP” as Tony Harrison memorably put it
in his poem “UZ and Them”; the age of knowledges, englishes and
epistemes was well and truly upon UZ. Now we could all take the episteme
—or so it seemed.
In short, very short, there was no place left to hide and a Welsh bloke
was reading the BBC News as 6 pm. Hugh do you think you are?14 The last
symbolic system was finally being eaten by capital, and as it turned out, it
was quite the feast. The only issue with liberal humanism on such a scale
was that with the cultural system’s structurally self-deconstructing identity
was suddenly rearing its Janus-faced, hybrid visage. If set theory had been
set for a collapse, if Russell had ruined Frege’s Christmas one hundred
years or so previously, if Husserl’s psychologism had fallen to linguistic
psychologism after the Origins of Geometry, then philosophical scepticism
was to be given free reign again; call it postmodernism, poststructuralism,
or even The Left, as many thinkers with intellectual Turret’s syndrome—a
propensity for philosophical category errors and badly misused terms of
metonymy—were prone to do.
The fact is, there aren’t many people in the twenty-first century who are
prone to go all Martin Luther and nail their demands upon the door these
days. One only needs to take a cursory glance at twentieth century
paradigms such as Stalinism, Maoism, Fascism and Nazism to remind
oneself why we have identity crises; at least, in the achieved or political
sense of the phrase anyway. One of the reasons ascribed identity has been
politicised is the fact that it seems the one form of identity that can be safely
bet upon in a neoliberal casino where the stakes on achieved identity are
way too risky. The philosophical game of Texas Scepticism is alive and
well, but the terms have been refreshed and you’re no longer a card-
carrying political player but a passport-carrying player. Bio-identity
became politicised while the lights were out. The stakes are way less risky
too: there’s no political position to ostensibly defend—with history
invariably against you—you simply show your passport and history is NO
LONGER the nightmare from which you’re trying to awake. In fact, it does
all of the legwork for you—a late capitalists’ wet dream.
In 1945, Bertrand Russell made another one of his bold claims about the
university system in general but it stuck in my head at the time I read it and
even though I was a just starting out as a doctoral candidate:
Lutheranism did indeed sit well with the underlying theological arguments;
and the newer one-size-fits-all options inherent in Lutheran eschatology
also sat well the new Protestant profs, who took tenure in perhaps more
ways than the simple academic parsing of the phrase. If this sounds
suspiciously Marxist (in the genuine and now ironically
conservative/classical sense of the phrase—as opposed to Jordan Peterson’s
fairytale version of the Left) then it indeed is. The fact is that the university
system, while allowing for a number of great teachers and philosophers,
was also singing to the tune of modern Liberalism and Adam Smith’s
hidden hand, or Marx’ base was sitting just below the superstructural
surface. In fact, the idea of tenure in this ironic landowning sense has now
burgeoned into something far more perilous, and querulous. For professors,
tenure is now tenuous at best, depending on your overall politics and
unfortunately sometimes upon your ascribed status. Politics have come to
mean something much more than previously imagined.
The new doxa (or intellectual status quo), has also been illustrated also
by Steven Connor in his excellent monograph, Postmodernist Culture:
Sheer size does not in itself disprove the charge of impotence
levelled at the academic humanities, however, and it would be
possible to point to this as the mode of the academy’s withdrawal
from real life, in a bureaucratic multiplication of devices for How
Not To Do It, like Dickens’s Circumlocution Office. The point is
that, despite all this involution, the humanities in Britain and the US
have maintained a clearly visible and highly successful function of
accreditation for all the traditionally privileged professions and
social functions—which includes banking, commerce, and
individual management alongside ‘humane’ occupations like
teaching and social work. Far from being merely ‘irrelevant’, or
sacrificing their task of oppositionality, the humanities have come to
act as a it were, via their lack of direct effectuality, and in their
claims to provide ideological completeness and adaptability as an
important kind of lubricant in the machine of higher education, in its
reproductions of power and privilege. (Connor, 15)
In terms of SE Asia, one only has to see the reflection of this in the courses
that are for example provided by English Departments for other
specialisms, in particular, the growing roles of on-campus Language
Institutes to provide generic language courses for non-English majors in the
various areas of business language. A fine reflection of this was that two
years ago, after I’d been invited to give a keynote speech at a small One
Day Conference on The Rise of the New Left at CMU, the conference was
moved, for no ostensible reason, off-campus.
The postmodern politics we are discussing here, as opposed to the
aesthetic postmodernism delineated above, has also been accused of
complicity by Terry Eagleton. The complicity is in not only forging ahead
with an ideological agenda, but further neutralizing the critical and aesthetic
transmissions of modernism, to the point where once again the genuinely
new Avant-garde postmodern is recuperated, neutralised and then re-
acculturated into becoming an acceptable cultural discourse itself.
For Eagleton, as for myself, the romantic period seemed to mark the high
watermark of the humanist critic as hero, from Hogg, Hunt, Pater,
Coleridge, Carlyle, Shelley, to Hazlitt and Cobbett. Examples of public
debate about Wordsworth himself as the poet laureate after his Excursion
(1814) and his “Thanksgiving Ode” in 1815 really signify an original
‘culture war’ that was gloriously public and beautifully articulated on all
sides; this includes also the work of caricature by brilliant artists such as the
magnificent Gillray.15
One however needs to add yet another political proviso to the
postmodern/liberal politicisation not just of academic discourse, but also of
discourse in the public sphere of reason. Habermas’ dream of
‘communicative rationality,’ it seems to appear, has found a fertile ground
in the fecund jungle of social media. Yet here perhaps, we have all been
prithee to the great tech n’ scroll swindle. Suddenly, the intellectual dream
of a Coleridgean clerisy is no longer needed because we have all been given
our 15 minutes of infamy—we have all subscribed to the great online public
debate. While Rome is sizzling, between cross-cultural burger baps, we
have all switched off to the rational instrumentalisation of the university
campus and the rationalisation of the sphere of public discourse.
Unfortunately, it’s way more postmodern (and ironic) than that. We freely
give our biodata to Facebook, in the hope of having some idea how we’ll
look when we’re 64 (I’m sure that WAS NOT what McCartney had in mind
in Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), and we’re freely farmed every
day of the year, 365 DAYS… The real irony is of course the situational
irony of someone waxing lyrical on the Facebook platform about Julian
Assange’s rights or their (perish the thought—yet alone notion) freedom to
say what on earth they damn well please.
These very nefarious aspects of postmodernism, also attest to the other
frightening fact of screen time in the digital age. Reading energy is indeed
lost in the rabbit hole that is social media, and the simple fact is that yes,
we’ve retuned to a culture of tablets and yes, the literacy rate seems about
as high as what it did when the original stone tablets were in place a few
millennia back. Can anyone hear a cultural Tik Tok? Even our use of
language LOL, has become shortsighted. If Wittgenstein was correct in
assuming that the “limits of my language are the limits of my world” then
we need to stop our myopic somnambulism sooner rather than later.
Prescient as ever, Heidegger wrote this in the introduction to his lectures on
the seminal German poet, Hölderlin:
One now speaks and writes of the “uni” and means the university.
The hideousness of this linguistic construction perhaps corresponds
to the degree of understanding one is able to summon for the
aforementioned institution.
This Americanization of language and increasing erosion of
language to a technical instrument or vehicle of communication
does not stem from some casual neglect or superficiality on the part
of individuals or entire professions and organizations. This process
has metaphysical grounds and for this very reason cannot be
“stopped,” which would indeed also only be a technical
intervention.
We must reflect upon the event that is transpiring [sich ereignet]
in this process: that the contemporary planetary human being no
longer has “time” left for the word (that is, for the highest
distinction of his essence). All of this has nothing to do with the
corruption or purification of language. This process––in which the
word is denied time and a phonetic abbreviation is seized upon––
extends back into grounds upon which Western history, and thereby
European, and thereby modern planetary “history” in general, rests.
(Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” 25)
Heidegger was however aware of—even before his own Kehre (turn)—the
dangers of a truly truncated linguistic world disclosure and where nations
could be heading if this decline was left unchecked. Our essence and its
development could, (and in my opinion) has, been paradoxically halted in
the wake of the fusion of the linguistic turn, in a sense we need to refresh
our home screens and start reusing language in such a manner as to still
give us all communitarian hope for the future. If literary theory and
philosophy dovetailed to disclose the postmodern world to us, it can equally
reenvisage—as it’s constantly prone to do—or refresh its vista of the world
for us, to reinvigorate our sense of Being-in-the-world. The verbal brilliance
and dexterity of postmodern aesthetics paradoxically also reminds us of the
power of our self-conscious, autological discourse, to re-disclose the world
to us. Our human ability’ as linguistic arbiters of ‘worldhood’, to reengage,
reconstruct and refresh the screen, reminds us not only of the ethical parsing
central to deconstruction but also of the new form of communitarian
pragmatics that I will offer in the subsequent chapters as one of the
solutions to the current crisis of the humanities—and culture at large.
The refresh button is also required in light of the crippled epistemology
that the internet autodidactics are daily offering up as cultural knowledge.
One indeed cannot expect more when confronted with the dizzying array of
conspiracies that form the current spectrum under the refraction of the
internet. One of the amazing sleights of hand has been the fact that the so-
called ‘New Left’ has become so parsimonious, as to reorganize categories
using ‘Newspeak’ in a manner by which Orwell himself would have been
more than impressed. A certain man, recently elected to the highest office in
the world, became a ‘fascist.’ Yet his predecessor, Barack Obama, not only
sold out en masse to the banks both during and after his tenure as president,
but also dropped more bombs by way of drone strikes than any other
president in US history.16
Moreover, “fake news” and “fake narratives” are about as postmodern
as things get. When we have a president falling victim to the legacy of
theory and in particular the synchronic/diachronic disjunct of modern
linguistic theory, it’s no surprise that the partisanship reaches such ugly
proportions and the covid 19 ‘metanarrative’ has becomes so questioned by
the general public. Perhaps the most colossal irony of all lies giftwrapped in
the lack of a metaphysics of ‘presence’ that, after the supposed rigours of
both Peircean and Saussurean semiotics/semiology, was bequeathed the so-
called ‘soft humanities.’ People are staggering around without any idea who
Jean Baudrillard or Jean Francoise Lyotard were.17
The narratives that I have claimed inherent instabilities for in this study
have been the formalist/ structuralist and analytical signifying systems that
in formal mathematics, logic and semantics were, by the very nature of their
DNA, doomed to paradoxical failure. These tectonic shifts of linguistic
scepticism aren’t going away; in fact, they’ve just finally erupted in media
res on an historical faultline, that stretches all the way from ancient Greece
to modern Washington. The irony is that the “postmodern” is a symptom
and not cause of this historical instability and needs to be addressed
accordingly.
The state of the democratic praxis is due, in large part, to the problem
that seasoned signifiers such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ should now be disbanded
altogether. The old binary logic needs realignment with new political
realities, which are bound up with the dynamism and the synchrony of the
changing structuralist landscape—otherwise there will be many more cries
of fake news and much more division amongst the working classes and the
rapidly shrinking middle classes. This is why the limits of Liberalist
political economy have been dressed up as Marxism. The problem is, and
here is yet another of the proliferation of fake narratives, Marxism, like
Christianity and Hegelianism, is one of the metanarratives to which Lyotard
referred in The Postmodern Condition, so it seems odd that it’s been aligned
by otherwise erudite thinkers such as Jordan Peterson with postmodernism?
This monumental category error was also outlined and countered by Terry
Eagleton’s neo-Marxist argument way back in 1986, in which he correctly
situates postmodernism as the aesthetic currency of Late Capitalism.
For Eagleton, the traditional humanist subject is brought under scrutiny and
these two forms of aesthetics instantiate two divergent responses. One can
trace this back to the implacable bourgeois subjectivity of Prufrock to see
the selfsame narratorial subject under scrutiny. However, for Eagleton the
postmodern results in a negation of this subjectivity (a notion I’m confident
is also shared by Peterson—but under the incorrect nomenclature of
Marxism). However, according to Eagleton, the political agitator, the
Marxist man of political action hangs onto this subjectivity, whilst the
aesthetic currency of Late Capital, postmodernism, does not require this
subjectivity. The Warholean soupcan or the re-printable, re-stampable
commodity that is fed by the fetishism of capital and wage labour has no
need of this subject. The aura, once so messianically calibrated by
Benjamin is now celebrated by its absence. This well-thought-out position
is a long way from the oversimplified straw man Marxism carved under the
hammer and battery-driven scythe of Peterson.18
Eagleton’s vision of postmodernism and modernism was not the only
version in town, as was the case when The Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory analysed modernism. Their sense of the uses of modernism, was not
the same as either Benjamin or Brecht at the time.19 The whole point,
however, is that the one-dimensional argument of Peterson is a straw man.
One also imagines a very different ‘rumble in the jungle’ had Peterson
encountered Eagleton instead of the carnivalesque Slavoj Žižek.
Footnotes
1 One of the finest and clear-headed responses to deconstruction was delivered by that stalwart of
Literary Criticism and its attendant history, M.H. Abrams. His talk, at the MLA conference of 1976
addresses his fellow attendee J. Hillis Miller, directly. The talk was entitled “The Deconstructive
Angel” Lodge, 264–276. At least the spirit and tone in which Abrams addresses deconstruction
echoes the tones and the precis of my own work: in the spirit of an on-going conversation with
criticism and history.
2 The currently popular conspiracy theory of a more Marxist radical system of institutionalized
warfare was originally promulgated in the essay “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political
Correctness’” (1992) written by Michael Minnicino, which was originally published in Fidelio
magazine. Later, in 1998 Paul Weyrich equated “Cultural Marxism” with the concept of “political
correctness”; even though “political correctness” originated under the aegis of Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan, who were hardly bastions of the Left. Later in the 1990s, Paul Weyrich
commissioned William S. Lind to write a history of “Cultural Marxism,” and hence in 1998 the term
was formally born. However, it has only been since around 2011 that the term has slowly gained
currency. One reason for this may of course be the mushrooming of the “freedom” of the internet.
The interesting semiotic aspect of this is how so many conspiracy theorists take this as what Emile
Durkheim would call a social fact, with precious little, if any, actual historical acuity or actual serious
academic research. I covered this aspect of Social Science Research and the new dangers of
conspiracy thinking/crippled epistemology in a talk given at the Faculty of Political Science, Chiang
Mai University; entitled: What Is Theory and What Are it’s Uses in E-Government Research and
Practice: A philosophical perspective. On Thursday March 17th, 2022.
3 I say nefarious because one always remembers Pound’s relationship with Italian fascism.
Heidegger was no card-carrying modernist but he was a card-carrying Nazi.
5 Eliot acknowledged his debt to the metaphysical poets and their influence upon his theory of the
poetic ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ Furthermore, his poetic notion of the ‘objective correlative’ to
represent a thought or emotion is also clearly influenced by their poetics.
6 John Dryden famously claimed that John Donne, as an exemplar of a then new style of poetry,
“affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should
reign”. “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693).
7 Hölderlin famously formulated a poetology that included a theory of tonal modulation throughout
the progression of a poem; the tonal modulations seem to have been worked through brilliantly by
Eliot pace his use of the varying sites of allusion and imagery as vehicles for developing his
argument or complaint, in much of his poetry.
8 The historical voices can also be read psychoanalytically, as in Harold Bloom’s argument in his
monograph The Anxiety of Influence (1973) in which he claims the writer searches for a voice but has
to labour under the Oedipal (or Electra) influenced anxiety of the historical influence of their
parental figure in their selected genre. For example, for Wordsworth in his epic work The Prelude,
this would be the influence of John Milton in Paradise Lost.
9 Both the German romantic and Idealist relationship to a new mythology of the aesthetic for
modernity is discussed at length by Andrew Bowie in his excellent in Chapter 4 “Schelling: Art as the
Organ of Philosophy” in his study Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietszche. Manchester,
MUP, 2003.
10 It came as no surprise that a friend of mine who teaches at the neighbouring Payap University,
mentioned a number of years back that when he stays at the home of his German wife, they notice a
sociologically wide interest in aesthetics and lots of civic promotion at both a local and national
governmental level of arts and cultural events.
11 In point of fact we can locate this sort of proto-nihilism even further back, to the first
metaphysicians and the pre-Socratics. One thinks of Heraclitus’ famous dictum that one can’t jump in
the same river twice.
12 Peterson’s work in his own field is way better, as if the case with his excellent 1999 tome, Maps
of Meaning. I also largely agree with his distrust of much of what now passes as political correctness
and identarian politics in the academy. The occurrence of what I would be as bold as to call linguistic
fascism and the bullying in the academy that has run in tandem with this new paradigm is something
that warrants genuine concern. I am also a member of the organisation SAFS (the Society for
Academic Freedom and Scholarship), www.safs.ca and sincerely hope more new academics will join
organisations like this, rather than bowing to divisive and often unwarranted, pressure from faculty
and admin staff keen to tick the PC checklist.
14 The awful pun above was inspired by the fact that throughout the 90s, the early evening BBC 1
main news was read by the Welshman, Hugh Edwards. I could however still remember the age of
Alistair Burnett and Angela Rippon, where RP was still in full swinging parlance on the main
evening news. I hope to be excused my silly and profoundly tacky puns on the grounds that
Postmodernism is the subject under discussion and in the name of authenticity, I’m trying to break
down as many barriers as possible.
15 Jeffrey Cox’ monograph William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: contesting poetry
after Waterloo, CUP, Cambridge, 2021 does a great job of historicising Wordsworth, whilst outlining
and assessing the cultural reaction to his perceived political apostasy after Waterloo, by thinkers such
as Hunt, Byron and Shelley.
16 This is not to politicise my polemic—I’d still personally vote for Barack Obama over Donald
Trump anyway—this is just to try give to some deictic sense to the sort of chicanery that goes on
under the aegis of the ‘postmodern.’ And Trump himself is also guilty of exploiting the literary and
cultural theory we have inherited, as are his Democratic opponents.
17 Jean Baudrillard famously made the claim that the 1991 Gulf War never happened-meaning that
in the age of simulacra/simulation and the hyperreal it’s hard to actually tell where the original is
located pace the mass media bombardment of our senses: therefore, how much of the presentation of
the war was mass media manipulation? Furthermore, one recalls the horror of 9/11 and the often
heard rection of people to those macabre events: ‘it was like watching a movie.’ Given current claims
about fake news narratives and sinister manipulation of the ‘real’ it’s hard to say just where one
stands ontologically, which of course is not to be taken literally but only in the context of the
symbolic exchange of signs in a mass-media habitat. Without question, the general public’s trust in
the mainstream media is down exponentially. Baudrillard’s work and thought was always recognised
as one of the mainstays of postmodern thought. As was Foucault, and now many on the ‘right’ would
find it hard to contend Foucault’s claims about the uses and manipulations governments make of
narratives in order to fit and facilitate political structures to new civic programmes or paradigms. The
obvious current example, which is connected to bio-identity, social gatherings and the organization of
labour amongst other things, has been the political and civic fall out from the Covid 19 pandemic.
18 Both Benjamin and the famous US Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, saw mass media production
in a much more positive light than did Eagleton. Jameson adumbrated his much more positive
rendering of the postmodern and the Marxist in his tome Postmodernism, or the Cultural logic of
Late Capitalism (1991). Benjamin’s famous and much-lauded essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) celebrates the revolutionary potential of the industry of mass
reproduction whilst famously adumbrating the potential loss of the ‘aura’ of an original work of art.
19 The Frankfurt school of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, saw modernism as a tool for alienation
that could both provide verisimilitude to the true state of the subaltern’s class position under the
labour conditions of capitalism, whilst also heightening their awareness of their situation in a
Brechtian sense by defamiliarising the familiar state of the mass-produced commodity markets
through its requirement for deeper intellectual engagement by the individual subject. By way of
contrast, the SS (Soviet Socialist) Realists, as represented by the thought of György Lukács in “The
Ideology of Modernism” (1963), argued that experimental novels written by writers such as Joyce
simply reflected the static consciousness of the human subject under capitalism, presenting a sort of
pathology that was normalised and in actual fact prevented the subject from acting in any politically
revolutionary manner whatsoever. Lukács compared a ‘realist’ monologue of Goethe’s novel Lotte in
Weimar with Molly Bloom’s interior monologue at the end of Ulysses, arguing that Goethe’s work
showed up the real historical context and circumstances, whereas Joyces ‘static’ representation did
nothing but replicate and reinforce the subjective pathology of the alienated proletariat under the
aegis of capitalism. Therefore, from a critical perspective Goethe’s work demonstrated more
verisimilitude and was consequently more valuable as a work of art.
OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_8
All of the arguments adumbrated in this study arise from the idea that
literary theory and criticism came about in the modern sense of ‘theory,’
that is, out of a dovetailing of philosophy and the original notion of literary
criticism. This can be traced back to the fact that both philosophy in its
Anglo-American formations and its broadly labelled continental
formations, both reached limits within the guise of the scepticism by which
it has it has partly been characterised by since the classical era. The Anglo-
American tradition morphed from the logical form postulated by Russell
and Frege, as a counterattack upon the then Hegelian continental tradition,
(which at that time also dominated British philosophy), into the ordinary
language philosophy and its important sub-categories such as speech act
theory. Concomitantly, the continental tradition morphed into Husserlean
transcendental phenomenology, then into hermeneutical phenomenology
and its own sub-categories of poststructuralism, deconstruction, etc.
The scepticism upon which both traditions found themselves beached,
was now linguistic in its bent. I’ve also argued that as philosophy for the
humanities, it has become more and more identified with literary criticism
and theory. This is, in the main, due to this linguistic scepticism. This was
also the reason why thinkers such as Rorty, Cavell and Taylor have come
more and more to base their philosophical work in the purview of literary
theory and criticism and in particular theories such as Rorty’s behavioural
pragmatism, which give us a deictic sign towards new forms of knowledge
based not upon the traditional philosophical questions about certainty or
scepticism itself, but upon asking new pragmatic questions based upon
historical contextualisation and hermeneutics. Such questions find a
congenial home within the purview of literary criticism and theory. In this
chapter, by way of summary, I’d like to follow this line of argument for
literary theory and criticism, pointing to possible future developments, and
also assessing some of the pernicious dangers that have also arisen from the
politicisation of literary theory and criticism since the Second World War. In
what has very loosely been labelled: the postmodern era.
The Greek term phrónēsis is loosely translated into English using
phrases such as prudence, practical value, and pragmatic. It’s a form of
knowledge or wisdom that relates to what John Dewey, William James and
later Richard Rorty, parsed as pragmatism. It implies also both good
judgment and character, in a similar vein to what Spinoza would call
fortitudo and generositas. Through Medieval times, it was commonly
discussed in the categories first brought to light by the ancient Greeks. For
the purposes of our discussion, this form of knowledge is somewhat
different from the certainty that is implied within the remit of analytical,
positivist, empiricist or verificationist notions. The more general purview of
phrónēsis is closer to the sort of knowledge commonly farmed within the
husbandry of the humanities—the reason the humanities are held in such
high regard as an area of knowledge in Germany is because, going back to
their romantic movement, Das Geisteswissenschaften was regarded as an
epistemological category in its own right, as distinct from Das
Naturwissenschaft—which is the area of the natural sciences.
Perhaps one reason that philosophy for the modern humanities strayed
into the ball-park of set theory paradox and phenomenological hermeneutics
was that it partially took on the extra ballast of Naturwissenschaft.
However, philosophy clearly didn’t climb back through the fence without a
newly reinvigorated game of Phrónēsis. This, I would contest, is the reason
that humanities professors have been hammering out the finer points of
Sayer’s Law throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps the telos of
knowledge in the humanities was in the paradoxical recognition or
acknowledgment of our epistemological, ethical, and ontological limits.
From here-on-in, philosophers and theorists can peruse their institutional
libraries (or LRCs as they’re fashionably labelled), without the Manichean
baggage of avoiding either Lacan, Lyotard or Žižek, in preference for
Austin, Ryle or Russell. I dare them…
Of course, language, and, more specifically, rhetoric, are commonly
sighted as a salient reason for the avoidance of much of the continental side
of the library.1 However, this also has deeper roots in the wider history of
both Western philosophy and theology. This was more recently flagged by
the conservative critic and theorist Leo Strauss, who argued that in the
Western tradition the apparent schism between Athens and Jerusalem, or
Western philosophy and the Judaic-Christian tradition has led into our
modern crisis of the Humanities (or culture) and can be traced to, amongst
other things, the difference between the conceptions of mythos and logos
and the sophists or the Platonists. These initial tensions are contestably
inherent in the DNA of modern Liberalism, between the Millenarian
narrative of the Logos and the pre-socratic metaphysical scepticism that
was outlined in Plato’s dialogue on the philosopher Gorgias.2
The original sophists, who attracted the ire of Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle, had argued pace the cornucopia of metaphysics concocted by the
pre-Socratics, and as exemplified by Gorgias, that we can’t know
knowledge, however, we can know the human world of politics and can
therefore understand this through a non-metaphysical, social constructivist
notion of the world.3
The baton of the Logos was however taken on by Christianity, which
was one of the reasons that Strauss argued that the idea of reason as against
revelation was a misnomer (a notion that would no doubt depend upon
one’s wider faith and politics). Having joined the historical relay,
Christianity refined pre-Socratic narratives such as the apeiron and post-
Socratic notions such as the demiurge, the unmoved mover, and the forms.
Moreover, these narrative schematics also theologically matured later
through St. Augustine’s famous Chapter 13 of The Confessions.4 The Logos
comes from this lineage and is a foundationalist ontology and epistemology
that stemmed from challenges to the sophistry of the Sophists.5 These two
positions have changed masks at the historical ball but have remained
within the genome that has blossomed in the numerous tensions in Modern
Liberalism.6 Indeed, in a prescient article in 1967, “Jerusalem and Athens:
Some Introductory Reflections” Leo Strauss wrote:
However much the science of all cultures may protest its innocence
of all preferences or evaluations, it fosters a specific moral posture.
Since it requires openness to all cultures, it fosters universal
tolerance and the exhilaration which derives from the beholding of
diversity; it necessarily affects all cultures that it can still affect by
contributing to their transformation in one and the same direction; it
willy-nilly brings about a shift of emphasis from the particular to the
universal. By asserting, if only implicitly, the Tightness of pluralism,
it asserts that pluralism is the right way; it asserts the monism of
universal tolerance and respect for diversity; for by virtue of being
an “-ism,” pluralism is a monism. (Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens)
The paradox of the monism of pluralism, that, according to Strauss,
back in 1967 was an issue amongst cultural studies, has its roots in the
narratorial tradition of the logos and its failure to be able to fully
incorporate simple differences between cultures, unbridgeable gaps that are
currently manifest in not just Liberal Praxis, but also in the ethnocentric
execution of cultural studies.7
Transposing these ideas into the area of Thai culture and much of its
own literary persuasions, one may not be entirely incorrect in considering
the fact that a large region of the modern cultural doxa could be regarded as
way more conservative than its Western counterpart. Theravada Buddhism,
as opposed to Mahayana or Zen Buddhism is certainly in practice more
oriented towards a group mentality than an individualist mentality and one
would have to consider whether or not this is a mere coincidence, or related
to the wider cultural ideology or logos.8 A Marxist take on this cultural
praxis would indeed see the adoption of this branch of Buddhist thought, as
suited to the wider economic base and as part of the superstructure and as
such it orients citizens towards sustaining that branch.9 Literary texts in
Thai often seem to reinforce this status quo. However, the ultimate
undecidabilities in meaning also reflect the tensions discerned in the wider
DNA of foundational epistemology in general, which returns us to the
contestation between a Logos and the sophistry of the knowledge of
unknowing, or a pluralism and monistic aspect that can be deconstructed in
the wider self-representations of Thai culture, or waddthantham.
In Thai literary history, an apparent conservative bias can at first be
discerned in texts such as Kukrit Pramoj’ Red Bamboo, in which the
metonymic “red” signifies the threat of communism to the social order, and
the bamboo itself synecdochically represents agrarian promise, honesty and
labour. The bamboo can also represent nature itself and the red can
therefore be seen as sullying the natural purity of the bamboo. The
conservation of a natural order, a tree that is indigenous to Thailand, can
signify the danger of what would be lost when the natural state of things
fails to be preserved.10 The short preamble to the book ends:
Apart from the parallel here mentioned, the writer attempts to depict
a Thai village as it actually is, especially at the moment when life
there comes into contact with the new Thought and new Doctrine,
which seem to drive the world into a mad series of international
conferences at the present moment. (Pramoj, 2)
The “new thought and doctrine” are, of course, communism and its
perceived threat to the hegemony of the newly established world hegemon,
the United States, especially after the Marshall Plan and the economic and
national successes of World War Two. After this terse introduction, Pramoj
uses the literary device of local colour to metonymically (in a Jakobsonian
sense of the phrase) build up a rural idyl of an untainted and almost Elysian
village in a significant locale well north of Bangkok, which of course
signifies the new and cosmopolitan ideas threatening the idyllic village in
the north. We are also told, in a slightly ironic fashion that “…the name of
“Red Bamboo” may have an influence on the actions if those who have
chosen that village as a place to make a living or carry on their religion,
which, broadly speaking, may be described as the way towards self-
expression.” (4).
The remainder of the often highly amusing text is centred around the
conflict, more often than not portrayed in a satirical and commedia dell’arte
fashion, between the abbot of the monastery and the man with the ideas
towards self-expression, Kwaen. One more amusing chapter will suffice to
illustrate the satirically conveyed conservatism, and also the inherent
historicist tensions bubbling below the unconscious of the text.11 In chapter
five, which commences:
One hears the naiveté of the character, who functions as the symbiotic foil
to the Abbot, who in turn is subject to the humorous disdain of the Lord
Buddha idyl throughout the text, as his hyperbolically-charged rhetoric rails
against the “exploiting capitalists” and bemoans the loss of his “clean ears.”
Pramoj then uses the imagery of light as a predominant literary device in
the story, inheriting the archetypal binary relationship between light and
dark, with the image of red being exploited in the title of a “False Dawn.”
This seems to play on the semantics of a “red dawn” and the metonym
“red” as being similarly false. Then, as the character Thom gets excited
about the mistaken Red Army invasion he thinks is taking place, Pramoj
plays with comic effect on the specular imagery of the stars in his head:
Kwaen sat as still as a statue. His heart was beating in a way it had
never done before. Hot blood seemed to rush to his head, making it
reel and causing his eyes to see a constellation of red stars shining
brightly in front of him. He did not notice whether each red star had
its supporting sickle and hammer or not, since other thoughts were
coming into his mind with a terrible rush. (Pramoj, 67)
“But wait, Kwaen,” Thiem said and nodded to Sai as though they
already had an agreement, “I’ve listened to the Abbot and I’m
beginning to wonder whether we’re on the right track. Everyone
loves his own country, and we don’t really know who is invading
our country at this moment…” (Pramoj, 76)
The singular, logocentric, metanarrative of international communism has
been superseded by the narrative of romantic nationalism. This is another
pluralistic narrative that draws on the paradox of cultural primitivism and
purity, in light of the monistic narrative of cultural materialism;
emphasising the sense that there is always another reading of history,
culture, or economics. The idea that none of the narratives that have been
spun in history are ever going to discern ultimate truth and certainty. In the
case of Red Bamboo it is true that Pramoj is defending against the very real
threat of both the cultural and material hegemony of the Communist
International, and is no doubt a writer with a conservative bias.12 Yet, even
with the inherent conservative ideology, as well that of his major novel,
Four Reigns (1950), the historical ambiguities and ambivalences brought to
the fore also illustrate, (whether Pramoj meant this or not),13 the
undecidabilities of our knowledge of the world and the instability in taking
any one clear epistemological position because of the inherent uncertainties
entailed in historicism and hermeneutics. The uncertainties and
undecidabilities in this theoretical praxis always lie just below the textual
surface, manifest inn Saussure’s langue and parole, or in the multifarious
categories of C.S. Peirce, which stem from the hypernyms index, icon,
symbol, or the tension between logos and sophistry.
All of these claims of reason have one thing in common, which is that
there is always necessary room for scepticism, unless we take a
metaphysical leap of faith. Such a leap might resemble the Coleridgean
romanticism of the organic versus the mechanical, or the supremacy of the
linguistic symbolic over the allegorical, which is based upon a faith in
contemplative reason, leading one to the steps of the divine.14 Coleridge’s
romantic argument runs back to the Platonic notion of an idea and runs as a
form of noetic contemplation, based partially on Jakob Böhme’s Christian
mysticism and ultimately has its own roots in the theory of the Logos as the
ultimate divine being and structural anchor, or transcendental signified.15
One other different but equally fruitful perspective on the dynamics of
language and its relationships to new technologies is the novel fusion of
sociolinguistic and historicist frameworks as expounded by Walter J. Ong,
particularly in his brilliant Orality and Literacy (1982), in which he
specifies the variegated forms of language use and the notion of narratorial
genres such as biography, law, narrative and literary criticism as being
suited to specific historical epochs and precis. For Ong, the various
linguistic paradigms within which these narratives are bound, such as the
oral tradition of language use, the written form of its use, and the more
recently technologised formats are part of the key to both comprehending
various texts, and to interrogating our own historical regionality.16 Ong’s
polemic entails the idea that language, as seen in structuralist analyses as a
fixed architectonic structure, was only inculcated after the codification and
systematisation implicit in the alphabetised and then the subsequently
developed written formats of language.
Ong, in drawing attention to the relationship between the oral and the
textual as a mark of civilisation, is here ironically perhaps, drawing
attention towards the self-consciousness that textual expansion brings to
simple orality.17 The technology of print, as adumbrated earlier by Foucault,
and the printing press’ early capitalist mode of production also helped
shaped our notion of the “author” (the “author-function”). Ong also draws
our attention to deconstruction’s parsing of the Logocentric and the
Phonocentric traditions in philosophy. In relation to my own argument, the
technologising of the word has meant holding the word up to itself in a
mirror and seeing itself as ontologically divided. The result in modernity
has been the rise of the novel and its various forms18 as a form of
knowledge dissemination and as the literary critic as the theoretical-heretic
who stands on the fence in this no man’s land between the newly
historicised oral and textual traditions.19
One may even see a strong link between modern philosophy, after
Descartes, Newton, Galileo and Bacon, as also reflecting the new age of
McLuhan’s “Guttenberg Galaxy” after the codification of the Logos as
language and the ensuing post-Lutherean religious and market conditions.
This new historical paradigm expected closed systems, not just in the
ontology of the universe, but also in the newly codified universe of the
written word.20 The structuralist search for closed structural systems, and
the “rupture” as Derrida called it, that comes from this anthropological
codification: the question of the “centre,” or “structurality of structure,”
both stem from an historical epoch. It is an epoch that has now been
superseded by what people disparagingly parse as the “postmodern” but is
actually the tension between the Logos and Sophistry, a fixed parole as
opposed to an unfixable, dynamic, sophistic undercurrent that continually
rises to the surface, as in the subterranean forces of history and tradition in
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” When language is made self-conscious as logos,
is turned upon itself, the inevitable result will be the logical paradox of
Russell’s set theory, or the rupture from transcendental phenomenology to
hermeneutical phenomenology, or the rupture of structuralism to
poststructuralism. Language as form was never supposed to be closed in the
first place, which is what I think Ong and the poststructuralists agree upon.
In Ong’s words:
Yet when I speak of the “end of the book,” or better, “the absence of
the book,” I do not mean to allude to developments in the audio-
visual means of communication with which so many experts are
concerned. If one ceased publishing books in favour of
communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in no way
change the reality of what is called the “book”; on the contrary,
language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its
predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words,
the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of
notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of
thought over language, and the promise of a communication that
would one day be immediate and transparent. (Blanchot, 2)
In the very notion of “the book,” is the notion of a coming unity, a unity
that in this study has been characterised as Logos and is a-historical so that
even in an age that has jettisoned the notion of the unitary book in favour of
social media, still inherent, in Blanchot’s Saussurean terminology,21 is the
notion of the book-as-logos in the current post-digital age. For Blanchot,
this will-to-knowledge as power will no doubt be encapsulated in a digital
parole or speech, that will still come up against the recalcitrance of langue
and the whole, infinite system of signs that will continue to bubble to the
top, producing elisions, paradoxes and new forms of theory. This is the
same notion of the unitary book transmuted in Russell to be language as a
purified, yet unitary, logical form.
The communitarian term acknowledgement best sums up the
epistemological state in which we continually find ourselves as human
subjects, the closest we come to foundational knowledge is through
foundations based upon common, reciprocated, acknowledgment. We
acknowledge things in science, engineering, logic, and, of course,
philosophy. Stanley Cavell first formulated the notion of acknowledgment
as opposed to avoidance and in the very word itself we indeed find
‘knowledge’. Acknowledgement is a non-metaphysical version of what
Hegel termed Anerkennung, or “Mutual Recognition.” Cavell claims that
our sense of acknowledgment is also due to our recognition of the sceptical
limits of our everyday existence. It functions as a replacement of
philosophical certainty, so, we can only know the world within the limits of
our mind. However, we can acknowledge another’s pain, or even freedom,
without entering-into an inter-subjective mode of recognition, which leads
to the discovery of Spirit (Geist) as it does in the metaphysical work of his
predecessor, Hegel. Cavell’s version of Hegel’s social theory of mutual
recognition (Anerkennung) differs crucially in retaining the sense of
scepticism localised in the “problem” of other minds. Whereas Hegel seeks
an inter-subjective route out of scepticism through mutual recognition in the
famous chapter 4 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),22 Cavell retains a
scepticism that can only be countered by mutual acknowledgment.
However, we, as human subjects, always remain haunted by scepticism, and
avoidance of any formal truth acknowledgement is always a possibility.23
Therefore, scepticism is something, which, although avoidable in
Hegel’s formulation of Spirit, is ultimately part of the limitation of the
human subject in Cavell’s work—and is something we live with as human
subjects. For example, Cavell famously exemplifies the abdication scene at
the beginning of Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the king enacts the
impulse to scepticism towards his daughter Cordelia, and this failure to
acknowledge his daughter, or avoidance of love, feeds the logic of the
eventual tragic outcome of the play. Lear personifies the sceptical impulse
that haunts our human condition. In avoiding acknowledgement of
Cordelia’s love, he forgoes his knowledge of the responsibility the claim of
Cordelia has upon his person. This can likewise be instanced by the claims
that others have upon our person, and how our failure to acknowledge them
leads to scepticism and recognitive breakdown. Cavell’s application of the
philosophical concept of acknowledgement to Shakespeare can likewise be
applied to all texts and narrative forms. It is in this sense that Cavell is a
romantic thinker: he retains the sceptical sense in media res or infinite
Sehnsucht, central to the thought and poetics of the romantics and the
poststructuralists.24
This reading of Lear is also applied brilliantly in a Marxist framework
by Terry Eagleton. However, Eagleton uses Lear to exemplify the ultimate
“disembodiment’ of sovereign geopolitical power states such as the USA (of
course, one should also add Russia to this very short list, something often
unmentioned in Marxist commentaries). Eagleton’s reading of Lear does
however reflect nicely the idea of avoidance—as opposed to
acknowledgement—inherent in Lear’s actions. This changes, when he
finally recognises his biological, familial, and national ties, to his family
and his subjects, after he wonders off on the heath and gets lost in a literal
and figurative storm, which awakens his senses and forces him into an
acknowledgment of his “creatureliness” Eagleton writes:
Footnotes
1 Samuel Wheeler claimed that he once gave Derrida a copy of a clear and concise example of
analytic philosophy; the book Naming and Necessity by Kripke. Derrida said he couldn’t make sense
of the text, which may indicate a residual difference in reading methods and philosophical training in
the humanities. I personally find Heidegger less labourious to read than I do Donald Davidson or
W.V.O Quine. It would appear the sword of comprehension cuts both ways.
2 Strauss’ dichotomisation of Jerusalem and Athens was not the first as this was also flagged by the
second century African theologian Tertullian.
3 This is of the original form of ‘ethical egoism’ and so has its terminus in the work of another
conservative philosopher, Ayn Rand.
4 The notion of Christian values disguising their face in Enlightenment garb was also discerned by
Schopenhauer who had allegedly claimed that taking on the values of Kant’s ethical system of the
categorical imperative was like dancing at a masque all night with an Enlightenment notion and then
at the end of the night the dancer removes its mask and one sees that they’ve been dancing with a
Christian ethical system hidden in the deontological ethics (of duty) as argued in Kant’s theory of the
moral law.
5 Once again, under a philological microscope we see how a word has changed meaning due to
historicist happenstance. Sophistry has come to attain negative connotations since the historical
success of the Logos narrative. When people cite the sophistry of postmodern thought, they likely do
not realise how accurate they actually are—even though it’s in the original sense of the word.
6 Derrida has been criticized for his characterization of the “Logocentric” nature of the dominant
Western philosophical narratives. This is because it has been charged as an attack upon “logic” as it
has been characterised in this book. However, upon a close reading and in the context of the
historical facts delineated here, we can see that Derrida is critiquing the tradition of the Judeo-
Christian narrative as inherited from the Socratics and the claim that it’s an attack on the hegemony
of “Western” logic and reason is an utter straw man argument.
7 Without straying too far beyond the remit of the current study, one thinks of Edward Said’s 1979
classic postcolonial challenge to Western ethnographic hegemony, Orientalism.
8 In Thai secondary education, the humanities are very conservative, and often referred to or seen as
synonymous with “Thai Social Studies” and are very much an ideological tool through which to
communicate the ideational and hegemonic aspects of Thai culture. In Wittgensteinian terms the
forms of life communicated are often conservative; as in the West, the praxis of the Thai educational
system matches that in the Western system, as outlined by the neomarxist sociologists, Herbert
Bowles and Samuel Gintis, whereby a “hidden curriculum” is communicated through the structure of
the Thai school system, preparing Thai youth to be good citizens within the parameters of the wider
Thai culture.
9 Marx’ famous diagrammatic of the superstructure and the base was in actual fact popularised due
to the seismic growth of sociology during the second half of the twentieth century. Marxist theory is a
large contender for the crown in economics and philosophy but also more latterly in the field of the
social sciences, where this actual minor aspect of his political economy was outlined in a small
number of pages in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political of Economy (1859). It
was also explored as part of the main thesis in The German Ideology (1945), although in the main
that particular monograph became an Ad Hominem attack on Max Stirner and a survey of the main
figures involved in International Communism at that time.
10 Pramoj acknowledges the plagiaristic nature of the original serialised text, which was based upon
the series of short stories about the conflict between the pig-headed and tenacious priest Don Camillo
and the communist mayor Peppone in the Italian work of Giovanni Guareschi. The twentieth century
literary fashion in Thailand for plagiarising European texts, especially in the genre of Romance, is
also deftly coverd in Sasinne Khunkaew’s unpublished PhD thesis, Femininity and Masculinity in
Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions, 2015.
11 There is indeed more to be said of the specific Thai modality of hegemonic didacticism of this
text in comparison with that of two other books, A Young Man’s Fancy and The Circus of Life, which
this author intends to write about in this sociopolitical vein, for his next major project.
12 As well as being a polymath scholar, Kukrit Pramoj established the conservative Social Action
Party, the conservative newspaper Siam Rath in 1950 and was the Prime Minister between 1975 and
1976.
13 One of the arguments for theory over and against Knapp and Michaels’ “Against Theory”
argument is that this form of neo-pragmatism doesn’t take into account the Saussurean split between
langue (as an independent linguistic whole) and parole (as individual speech) and assumes langue
and parole are one and meaning is simply the author’s intention. The ethos of theory is of course that
langue is constantly at odds with individual utterance and as such constantly interfering with the idea
of meaning being as simple as the author’s intention. In Pramoj’ text the overall langue produces
meaning beyond any simple conservative intention that may have been intended by the author.
14 I discuss both Coleridge and Goethe’s linguistic analysis of symbol and allegory in Chapter Two
of my own Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition (2015), providing a poststructuralist bent to the
kernel of my thesis.
15 See Peter Cheyne’s excellent study; Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, OUP, 2020.
16 One can also see a lose connection here with the rise of the academic discipline The History of
the Book, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. This fascinating subject area, which I
studied as part of my MA, traces the social, economic, aesthetic, historical and anthropological
factors that led to the various paradigms of book production, construction and reception. Notable
scholars in this field are William Ivin Jr. (1953), Martin and Febvre (1958), McLuhan (1962),
Eisenstein (1979) John’s (1998), Sherman (2008) and Blair (2010). It would seem with the decline in
readership, the change in reading interfaces and book reception in the technological age this subject
is now as timely as ever.
17 Ong also brilliantly draws attention to the possibility of reading philosophy comparatively, hence
a locus for “comparative philosophy” as well as comparative literature. How for example does the
relationship between textuality and orality reflect upon our understanding and reading of medieval
philosophy as opposed to Greek philosophy and in turn of course modern post-Cartesian philosophy
in relationship to its own relation to textuality and its distance from the oral tradition? While strictly
speaking his characterisation of Hegel’s work as phenomenological is incorrect (it’s a form of
Absolute Idealism), the self-consciousness and concurrently divided nature of his work, especially
his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is accurate. The notion that this is purely due to its self-conscious
relationship to the oral tradition as a textual work itself is I’m sure in part correct.
19 Moreover, if the thrust of my historicist argument is correct, then the technologising of the word
has also had a paradoxical effect in that it has culminated in a less-literate populous. This means the
logocentric (in both meanings as the privileging of “the Word” and as the tradition of ontological
narrative inherited from Socrates), has led to both a “postmodern condition” where metanarratives
such as Christianity have left town, or need ‘get out of jail free’ cards; or where the presence of ‘the
Word’ is less felt and has been superseded by less literacy, the return of a scribal/tablet relationship
with culture and in Peirce’s terminology, the rise of the icon as the dominant semiotic signal. So,
Ong’s technological-historicist analysis of orality, technology and the word seems more prescient
now than ever.
20 Such changing codifications and openings up in the British English of the burgeoning Second
Empire, caught between the twin peaks of Protestantism and classical linguistic influences were no
doubt in part the reasons for ships such as The Mayflower with its puritan baggage and the need for a
“good old lad” such as Noah Webster to reinvigorate into parlance, such stock phrases as “the fall”
instead of the lovely new “autumn.”
21 So, one here remembers that speech and language are no doubt being used in the Saussurean
sense. The notion of parole mastering langue is key to the idea in Russsell, Frege, Husserl and even
(to a point) the latter Heidegger after the Kehre. The notion of a pure, unitary language providing
certainty—for Russell at least—in place of his older search for certainty through the British take on
the absolute Idealism of Hegel. Of course, Russell would no doubt dispute the Saussurean claim.
22 I am here using the term “acknowledgment” more specifically in Cavell’s sense in that
knowledge acquisition, in a similar vein to that of Richard Rorty, in the sense that is not necessarily a
discovery of a truth that is in some way “out there” but an acknowledgment of something previously
not recognized by a human subject and thus literalized within a pre-existing discourse. This is also a
further expansion of recognition beyond that of Anerkennung as posited by Hegel. For the key
passage of Hegel’s movement into “Spirit” and eventually ethical substance, Sittlichkeit, see his
Phenomenology (110–12). Moreover, Cavell’s development of “acknowledgment” was outlined in
the essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” (Cavell Reader 46–71). It is in this sense of
acknowledgment that poets such as Hölderlin and Wordsworth add to existing experience of the
natural world, not in the sense of acknowledgment between two agents (as with Hegel). For a further
discussion of this in relation to romantic poetics, see my own “Acknowledgment and Avoidance in
Coleridge and Hölderlin.” In The European Romantic Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, 225–239, https://doi.
org/10.1080/10509585.2015.1004548 (2015).
23 Hannah Arendt springs to mine here and the concept of “dehumanization” of whole ethnic
groups. The worst case avoidance would be the callous and instrumentally rationalised treatment of
the Jews, meted out by the Nazis during the Second World War.
24 See Cavell’s discussion of Lear and his relationship with Cordelia in “Prologue: The Avoidance
of Love (The Abdication Scene)” in The Cavell Reader. London: Blackwell, 1996. pp. 22–30.
25 One thinks of Fredric Jameson’s forceful point, which is made at the outset of his classic study
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1981. Jameson wades right in, but, given the climate of literary studies at the time, and the
controversy within the academy, this really was the only way to go about this task. The opening
paragraph reads as follows: “This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary
texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional
luxury to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the
stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all
interpretation”. Talk about coming out with all your Left-hand guns blazing! Upon the argument
presented in my own study, the stage Jameson talked of has very much passed, and his wish for the
political as the horizon came very much true. However, this polemic has now itself become dated and
the time has come to perhaps reorder the priority of the political, as it now risks occluding genuine
critical engagement.
26 The fact also mentioned earlier about critical reappraisals (or “re-readings”) of ‘the canon’ or the
constant rejection of formerly recognised texts, from Shakespeare to Dickens, to Kant and Hegel as
being no longer suitable or at least in need of editorial bowdlerisation, is something that has formed
what has become both the political and existential crisis in academia; particularly in the area of the
humanities. This warrants further examination and sustained assessment, which is outside the
purview of the current text.
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W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_9
The sense of the role of literary discourse and criticism as moral philosophy
is what ultimately takes us back to the period of German Romanticism, with
its self-conscious fragments, self-conscious irony and its celebration of
literature and philosophy as being interdependent in their philosophical
roles and cultural value. I return via the long road home, to the
Philosophical Romanticism alluded to at the beginning of this book. In fact,
the sense of ironic limit to the self-conscious work also pervades the book
I’m writing here, as I try to find closure to my argument, a sort of
denouement: a sense of closing off of the book as a unitary whole.
Blanchot’s sense of the book as limit, as a specter that haunts both
exclusively the literary, and the literary-critical landscape, whilst other
aspects are constantly bubbling underneath the surface, trying to force
themselves through the literary and aesthetic idiolect.
The argument presented here has shown both the inherent strengths of
the critical tradition, whilst also flagging implicit weaknesses in the
direction of the discipline after the Second World War, and more
specifically after the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in poststructuralism. Criticism
became a formalistic discipline with scientific aspirations in tandem with
the concomitant analytical bent within the philosophical tradition, after the
work and aspirations of both Husserl and Russell. However, after the dead
end within which Russell, Frege, Husserl, and others, found themselves
after the analytical impasse and the structuralist crystallisation into
poststructuralism, these subjects merged under the aegis of literary criticism
—at least in terms of their pretensions at moral and ethical verisimilitude.
The fact that the aesthetic idiolect of literature acknowledges its limit as
descriptive discourse, or its ontological limits as a correspondence theory of
reality, makes it an autological discourse. It “does what is says on the tin”,
so to speak, or it acknowledges its limit with regards its fictional
representation of reality. This is something that the analytical and objective
discourses that made their appearance at the turn of the century signally
failed to do, making them, in my parlance, heterological discourses.
Furthermore, it allows for distance, irony, authorial intervention, and
questions about the reliability of the narrator. Or, in Friedrich Schlegel’s
romantic formulation: wit, parabasis, and the wonderful phrase,
transcendental buffoonery.1 This self-consciously ironic stance is not
obviously available to discourses that adhere to a rarified notion of logical
form. Of course, there are subsequent political implications that take root in
this rich, yet subversive soil, composted of cultural bricolage and inevitable
precautionary, yet consequently didactic, seedlings.
One of the political implications of this newly discovered and
particularly modern sense of the perspicuous and accurate nature of literary
criticism and theory has been the more recent politicisation and in one sense
unfortunate weaponisation of identity, leading in some cases to critical
amnesia when it comes to the reception and recognition of literary texts as
canonical.2 A work such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with its
racial tropes, or The Taming of the Shrew, with its fairly obvious sexist
tropes, faces the danger of further cultural bowlderisation. Whereas, a poem
that ticks the correct (tropical) boxes, such as an emphasis upon hybridity, a
raised awareness of double-voiced discourse, or more generally sensitive
characterisation, would be critically celebrated in terms of its political
pretensions, rather than in terms of the more traditional formalist, rhetorical
and acoustic devices.3 This begs the question as to whether one is engaging
in literary criticism or sociological research into attitudes and popularised
rhetorical figures at various points in textual history. Is someone engaging
in historical exegesis or genuinely going back to the Greek kritikos at which
we started this journey into formal, literary and cultural taste? After all, is
not literary criticism at the very least, or in part, a form of rhetorical
criticism?
The other danger in this politically correct game of the Monopoly of
Taste, is whether, in falling over oneself to tick all of the correct boxes on
your task sheet, you’ve actually become so neutral as to have lost your own
identity. No one wants to become Switzerland at a drinks party. After all,
we are all formed from cultural creeds and traditions, some no doubt more
un-savoury than others. But, if we only claim to adhere to what is always
expected as the best form, it really wouldn’t take someone with a higher
qualification in sociometrics to find the best place to seat us at a wedding
ceremony: somewhere at the back, alone, where even if we couldn’t upset
anyone, we certainly couldn’t bore anyone to tears.
The political dangers of the said whitewashing of criticism and theory
have been touched upon within the body of the book but have not been my
primary focus. However, they are certainly something to consider when
thinking about the wider institutional ramifications of this type of
rationalisation of the academy. As I’ve also pointed out, the dangers of
taking what one might term “automated subject positions” and the further
danger of critics being unable to freely, and without perceived intellectual
prejudice, discuss many issues that have slowly become off-limits
altogether, without causing “trauma,” is of deep concern. Consequently, the
newly appointed ministers of philology and nomenclature may need to be
on their guard against an eventual intellectual rebound, if they continue to
police not only the academy and the humanities, but also the wider society
at large in such a fashion as to revise what starts off as literary history, and
soon becomes a disfigurement of history in general. The critical sphere
should be not only critical about the rhetorical quality of whatever gets
recognised as literature, but also whatever gets recognised as having
intrinsic value in the wider socio-cultural sphere.
Deconstruction was initiated as a way of auditing ideological
boundaries and preferences that naturally occur in texts that deconstruct
themselves and do indeed present historical doxas at certain points in
history. However, the conscious replacement of one cultural tower of Babel
with another, using the very self-conscious critical tools of
poststructuralism, is ironic beyond words (that can self-deconstruct).
Replacing one violent hierarchy with another is not what this philosophical
methodology was aiming at, raising our awareness of the linguistic nature
of our practices and the relationship between our mind, phenomena and
speech certainly was what this phenomenological theory was about. This
philosophical hybrid of Saussurean linguistics and Heideggerean
phenomenology was posited as a descriptive precis, but not as a prescriptive
one.
The final issue which I hope to have gone some way to disentangling in
this book is that of the other dreaded specter that haunts theory, criticism
and the humanities in general: postmodernism. In this text I hope to have
shown that a postmodern ‘condition’ is not something that is unique to the
contemporary intellectual landscape. The rupture that can be at least traced
back to Greek civilization, between the logocentric and the sophistic,
through the Enlightenment to Hegel’s absolute monism and Kant’s dualism,
and now the postmodern versus other forms of culturally absolute
epistemology, has always in some way haunted the humanities and perhaps
always will. These indeed build up the essence of inquiry, because without
some subterranean forces haunting or challenging our traditions, we find
ourselves without critical enquiry and without challenges to any form of
existential cultural, epistemic, or ontological hegemony.
If Marx didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent him. The reason why
Marx and Engels themselves spent precious little time pontificating about
aesthetics, art history and hegemony was because, (judging by the allusions
and references Marx makes in Capital Volume One to works of cultural
significance), they seemed to have recognised the freedom and distance
engendered by great works of art and were inculcating a positively Hegelian
notion of aesthetics, at least in their recognition of the value, significance,
and the special place of aesthetics in the overall structure of political
economy.4 Finally, as indicated itself in the chapter on postmodernism, the
notion that Marxists—at least in the classical sense of the term, in which
someone like Jordan Peterson parses the phrase—are in any way
postmodernists, with a concurrent disavowal of meta-narratives, is self-
evidently deeply ironic!
However, one can see the deep water within which one may find oneself
if they embark too deeply upon the political exigencies and possible
ramifications of criticism and theory. This is not to say the political should
be divorced from literary theory and criticism, as this notion is itself absurd.
However, one should take care in then allowing the political, as an
epiphenomenon or by-product of criticism and theory, to become the over-
determining factor in divining theory and in then legislating which theory is
good and bad. Neither should we allow it to arbitrate which texts should be
read or not read, and whether there should be a canon in the first place. We
forget our place as critics if our criticism becomes determined from without
by pre-existing political pathologies that take us away from the privileged
and autological nature of literary language, philosophical theory, and
criticism itself. The Christian-hegemonic condition of scholasticism itself
should bear witness to the inherent dangers of these pathologies.
I can only close this sense of the “book” by affirming that if I’ve upset
anyone of offended their moral or intellectual sensibilities at all, then my
job here—for better or for worse—is done. Now we can all get on with the
job of reinventing, interrogating, triangulating, or rediscovering our
sensibilities though the critical enjoyment and assessment of novels, poems
and plays, in true philosophically romantic fashion…
Footnotes
1 Schlegel’s concept of the wit, distance irony encapsulated in transcendental buffoonery was taken
from Italian renaissance commedia dell’arte plays and the buffoon character—something also taken
up by Shakespeare in his own final, and very self-conscious play, The Tempest in 1611.
2 Christopher Hitchens in his at times super-egotistical autobiography, (I suppose it comes with the
terrain) dates the decline of the Left and the swerve towards identity politics to the end of the
swingingly ubiquitous 1960s. “As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began
to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the
words “The personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one
does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very
bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal
subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to
ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words:
“Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the
old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and
work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or
pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the
moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was
the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.” Hitchens’ divorce from the Left was
played out in great theatrical fashion through the ‘spat’ he had years later with his old comrade; non-
other than our own champion of the Left: Terry Eagleton. I have to say, a debate between Eagleton
and Hitchens, given their history would have been well worth the ticket price. Although their later
exchange was more concerned with Hitchens’ much publicised and slightly tedious foray into
atheism. One has to respect both of these giants of this period for their verve and gusto when it came
to discussion and debate. Hitch 22: A Memoir. New York: Hatchette, 2010. p. 121.
3 A number of years ago at a conference, I raised this issue when it seemed that many of the texts
under discussion were being given critical recognition by virtue of their adherence to aesthetic
devices such as hybridity and double voiced discourse, as posited by Homi K. Bhabha, rather than for
their own merit it terms of the more formalist structures inherent in the works themselves. Bhabha
himself, as I understand his (post Edward Said) postcolonial theory, justifiably celebrates these
aspects of the wider multicultural milieu, but doesn’t suggest a critical checklist in which these
potential aspects of a text are checked off in order to measure the critical worth of a particular text.
Suffice to say, in the main it appeared that my interjection was perceived at best as simply dated and
at worst, politically incorrect.
4 Aside from the allusive references to art works in Capital and the reference to classical works of
art at the start of The Grundrisse, which is Hegelian in its bent, Marx certainly exhibits precious little
“Marxist” theorising about literature, or indeed about art in general.
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De Man, Paul, Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis:
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Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass (New York, Routledge, 1978)
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
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Dreyfuss, Hubert, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence; Revised Edition
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Gibson, John, “On the Ethical Character of Literature,” in Espen Hammer (ed.), Kafka’s The Trial:
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Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths Vol I & II (London: The Folio Society, 2000)
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Hegel, G.W.F., The Science of Logic, Trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: CUP, 2010)
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Index1
A
Abrams, M.H.
Academic scepticism
The Academy
Achebe, Chinua
Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment and Avoidance in Coleridge and Hölderlin
Addison, Joseph
A Defense of Poetry
Adorno, Theodor
The Adventure of French Philosophy “A nothing would do as well.”.
Aeschylus
Aesthetic heterocosm
Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietszche (n)
Against Theory
The Age of Sensibility
Akedah and Apocalypse
Alastor
Ali G
Alighieri, Dante
Allegorical
Allegories of Reading
Althuser, L.
Ambrose
Among Schoolchildren
Amores
Anagogical
Analytical
Analytic philosophy
The Anatomy of Criticism
Ancient Literary Criticism
The Anecdote of the Jar
Anerkennung (mutual recognition)
An Essay on Criticism
Anglo-American
Anglo-Thai
The Anxiety of Influence
Apeiron
Appointment in Samarra
Aquinas, Thomas
Araby
Arator
Archie Bunker
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
Arnold, Matthew
Ars Poetica
Art as Technique
Artes dictaminis
Artes poeticae
Artes praedicandi
Art of Rhetoric
Ascribed identity
Assange, Julian
The Athenaeum
Athenaeum Fragments
Augustine, Saint
The aura (Benjamin)
Austin, A.J.
Austin, J.L.
Autodidactics
Autological
Autological/autologically
Autological discourse (literature)
Autologically
Autology
Automated subject positions
Avant-garde
Avoidance
The Awakening
Ayer, A.J.
B
Bacon, Francis
Badiou, Alain
Bangkok
The Barber Paradox
The Bards
Barthes, Roland
Basil Ransom
Baudrillard, Jean
BBC News
Beardsley, Monroe
Bede
Behavioural pragmatism
Being ready-to-hand/being-at-hand
Benjamin, Walter
Beowulf (n)
Bhabbha, Homi K.
The Bible
Biden, Joe
Biographia Literaria
Bladerunner
Blanchot, Maurice
Blindness and Insight
Bloom, Harold
Bodkin, Maude
Boethius
Böhme, Jakob
Booth, Wayne
Botan
Bouveresse, Jacques
Bowie, Andrew
Brasseye
Break of Day, The
Brecht, Berthold
Brechtian
Bridging laws (BL)
British Philosophy
Brontë, Emily
Brooks, Cleanth
Burke, Edmund
Burnett, Alistair
Burroughs, William
Butler, Judith
Byron, Lord
C
Cabaret Voltaire
Calvino, Italo
Cambridge University
The Cantos
Capital Volume One
Carlyle, Thomas
Carnap, R.
Cartesian dualism
Cartesian Meditations
Cassiodorus
The Castle of Otranto
Category error (philosophical)
Catharsis
Cavell, Stanley
The Cavell Reader
Celine, L.F.
Centrifugal
Centripetal
Cheyne, Peter
Chiang Mai
Chiang Mai University (CMU)
Chibber, Vivek
Child, Lee
Chinese Room
Chinese Room argument
Chopin, Kate
Chotiudomphan, Suradech
Christian dogma
Christianity
Christian mysticism
Cicero
The Circus of Life
The City of God
The Claim of Reason
Classical Literary Criticism (n)
Cobbett, William
Coleridge, S.T.
Coleridgean clerisy
Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy
Collete
Collins, Wilkie
Commedia dell’arte
Commedia d’ellel arte plays
Commodified culture
Commodity fetish
Commodity fetishism
Communism
Communitarian (hope)
Communitarian literary theory
The Confessions
Connor, Stephen
Connotation
Conrad, Joseph
Conrad, of Hirsau
Constative utterances
Constellation philosophy
Contemplative reason
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
Copernicus
Cordelia
Cosmogonists
The Course in General Linguistics
Covid 19 ‘metanarrative,’
Cox, Jeffrey, N.
Crippled epistemology
Critical Race studies
Critical Theory
Critique, The Limits of
The Crying of Lot 49
Cubism
Culler, Jonathan
Cultural bowlderisation
Cultural hegemony
‘Cultural’ Marxism
Cultural studies
Cultural tower of babel
The “culture wars,”
Cuthbert, Jonathan (n)
D
Dadaism
Damrosch, David
Dark Ages, The
Dasein (Being-already-there)
Das Geisteswissenschaften
Das Naturwissenschaft
Davidson, Donald
Davies, Stephen
The Day Today
De Arte Metrica
De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy)
De Jounvenal, Bertrand
de Man, Paul
De natura rerum
de Saussure, Ferdinand
The Death of the Author
Deconstruction
The Deconstructive Angel
Defamiliarisation/defamiliarization
Deleuze, G.
The Demiurge
Demystification
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, Rene
Dewey, John
Diachronic
Dialectics
Dick, Phillip K.
Dickens, Charles
Dickensian Parole
Difference
Dionysus
Discourse
Dissociation of sensibility
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Doctor Who
Donne, John
Double-voiced discourse
Dreyfuss, Hubert
Dryden, John
Dualism
Dubliners
Duchamp, Marcel
E
Eagleton, Terry
Eastenders
Eco, Umberto
Ecocriticism
Ecrivain
Educational pragmatism
Edwards, Hugh
EFL literature classrooms
The egotistical sublime
Eidetic essences
Elenchus
Eliot, George
Eliot, T.S.
Elizabethan
Elizabethan pentameter
Emile: or on Education
Emin, Tracey
Empson (n)
Engels
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
English Romantic Irony
The Enlightenment
Epistemological behaviorism
Epoche (bracket)
Eraserhead
Essentialist
Ethical (limits)
Ethical turn (in deconstruction)
Etymologiae
Eudaimonia
Euripides
The Excursion
F
Facebook
Fake narratives
Fake news
The fancy
Fascism
Fauvism
Felski, Rita
Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai
Romance Fictions
Feminism
Feminist reading
Fetishisation
Fidelio magazine
Film studies
Finnegan’s Wake
Fish, Stanley
5 Readers Reading
The Flea
The floating signifier
Flourishing
Formalism
Formalist self-consciousness
Formal logic
The forms
Fortitudo
Foucault, Michel
Four Reigns
Fowles, John
The fragment
Frank, Manfred
Frankenstein
The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
Frege, G.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (movie)
Freud, Sigmund
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation
Freudian/psychoanalytic reading
The Frogs
Frühromantik
Frühromantiker
Fry, Paul
Fry, Stephen
Frye, Northrop
Futurism
G
Gadamer, H.G.
Galileo
Gattungsweisen, (species being)
Geist
Geisteswissenschaften (modern humanities)
Gender studies
Generositas
Geoffrey of Vinsauf
Gerard, Alexander
The German Ideology
German Romanticism
Gestalten (shapes of consciousness)
Gestell
Geworfenheit (thrownness)
Gibson, John
Gillray, James
Ginsberg, Allen
Glyph
Goethe, J. V.
The Golden Bough
The golden mean
Gorgias of Leontini
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Gothicism
The Grapes of Wrath
Graves, Robert
Greece
The Greek Chorus
The Greek Myths
Greeks, the
Greek Tragedy
Greilling, K., (Greilling’s paradox)
Greimas, A.J.
Greimas, H.
Grey
Grice, P.
Grundrisse
Guareschi, Giovanni
Guha, Ranajit
Gulliver’s Travels
Gyorgy, Lukács
H
Habermas, Jürgen
Hall, Stuart
Hamlet
Harrison, Tony
Hartman, Geoffrey
Hazlitt, William
HD, (Hilda Doolittle)
Heart of Darkness
Hegel, GWF
Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition
Hegel, G.W.F.
Hegelian continental tradition
Hegelian notion of aesthetics
Heidegger, Martin
Heideggerean phenomenology
Hemmingway, Earnest
Heraclitus
Hermeneutical Phenomenology
Hermeneutic circle
Hermeneutics
The hermeneutics of suspicion
Hermeneutics of worldhood
Heroides
Hesiod
Heterological discourses
The hidden hand
Higher Criticism
High modernism
High Modernists
Hilda Doolittle (HD)
Hills Like White Elephants
Hirsch, E.D.
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
The History of Western Philosophy
Hitchens, Christopher
Hitch 22
Hitler, Adolph
Hobbes, Thomas
Hogg, James
Hölderlin (poetology)
Hölderlin, F.W.
Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,”
Hölderlin’s tonal theory of poetry
Holland, Norman
Holy Scripture
Homer
Homology
Horace
Horizontal (speech) conventions
Horkheimer, Max
Hortus conclusus
Hot White Andy
Houellebecq, Michel
Huckleberry Finn
Hulme, T.E.
The humanities
Hunt, Leigh
Hupsos
Husserl, Edmund
Huxley, Aldous
Hybridity
Hybrid visage
Hybrid (works of literature)
I
The Iceberg method
The "idea,”
The Idea idea
Idealism
Identarian politics
The Ideology of Modernism
The Iliad
Imperatives
Implied reader/actual reader
Infelicitous (utterances)
The Infinite Conversation
Inglorious Basterds
Intensional and extensional vocabularies
Intentional/affective fallacy
Intentionalist theory
Intentionality
The Interpretation of Dreams of condensation and displacement
The interpretive community
Intertextuality
The intuitive cogito
Inventor’s Paralogy
The Ion
Irigaray, Luce
Ironism
Irons, Jeremy
Iser, Wolfgang
Isidore of Seville
Italian Journey
Iterability
Ivanhoe
J
Jakobson, Roman
Jakobsonian
James, Henry
James, William
Jameson, Frederic
Jauss, H.R.
Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections
John Milton
John, Eileen
Jouissance
Joyce, James
Judeo-Christian narrative
Jung, C.G.
K
Kafka, Franz
Kant, Immanuel
Kantian
Keats, John
Kehre
Kehre (turn)
King Lear
Kissinger, Henry
Klerisei
Knapp, Stephen
Knights
The knowledge of unknowing
Kompridis, Nikolas
Kripke, Saul
Kristeva, Julia
Kritikos
Kubla Khan
Kuhn, Thomas
L
Lacan, Jacques
Lamarque, Peter
Language as ‘the House of Being,’
Language games
Language Institutes
Langue
Laos PDR
Lasuka, Pasoot
Late Capitalism
Late capitalist
Lawrence, D.H.
The Laws
Leavis, F.R.
Leavisite criticism
Lectures on Fine Art in two volumes
Leech, G.N.
Le Soir
Letters from Thailand
Letting oneself be determined
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
Liberal Humanism
Liberalist political economy
Liberal-New Left
The Liberal Praxis
Liminal
Liminal elements
Limited Inc. a b c
Linguistic psychologism
Linguistics and Poetics
Linguistic scepticism
Linguistic turn
Literal meaning
Literary criticism
Literary Criticism and Theory
Literary Theory: An Introduction
Little Dorrit
Local colour
Lodge, David
Logic, rhetoric and grammar
Logical form
Logical positivism
Logical realism
Logocentric
Logoi
Logos
Longinus
The Lord of the Rings
Lotman, Yory
Lotte in Weimar
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Lucinde
Lukács, György
Luther Pierce, William
Luther, Martin
Lutheran eschatology
The Lyceum
Lyceum Fragments
Lyle, Thomas
Lyotard, J.F.
Lyotard, Jean Francois
The Lyrical Ballads
M
Magnitude
Mahayana Buddhism
Mallarme, Stephane
Manfred
Mann, Thomas
Mao, Tse Tung
Maoism
Maps of Meaning
Marcuse, Herbert
The Marshall Plan
Marvell, Andrew
Marx, Karl
Marxism
Marxist
Marxist analytical framework
Marxist approaches
Materialism
Maugham, W. Somerset
Maurus, Rabanus
Mayweather, Floyd
McCartney, Paul
McGann, Jerome
McLuhan’s “Guttenberg Galaxy,”
Mechanical
Medieval Criticism
Meditations Hégéliennes
Meditations of a Solitary Walker
Mein Kampf
Mellor, A.K.
The Merchant of Venice
Metanarratives
The metaphoric and metonymic poles
Metaphysical conceit
The Metaphysical Poets
Metaphysics of presence
Metonymy
Michaels, W.B.
Middle Ages, the
Miller, J. Hillis
Mimesis
Mise en scene
Modern Criticism and Theory
Modernism
Modern semantics
Modern Theory and Criticism
Modern Washington
Molly Bloom’s interior monologue
Monism
The Monist
The Monk
‘Monk Lewis’ Matthew
Moore, G.E.
Moral formalism
Moss, Gregory
Mrs Dalloway
Murray, Penelope
The Muses
Must We Mean What We Say
Myth
Mythemes
The ‘Myth of the Given,’
Mythologies
Mythopoeia
Mythos
Myth Today
N
The Name of the Rose
Naming and Necessity
Nam Nao Drama
Nang Ek
Nang Rai
Natura Naturans
Naturwissenschaften (modern sciences)
Nazi salute
Nazism
Nazi swastika
Negative capability
Neoclassic
Neoclassic poets
Neoliberalism
New Criticism
New Historicism
New Historicist
The New Left
New Liberalism
Newspeak
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nolan, Christopher
Nomological net of physical theory
Nous
Novalis, (Friedrich Von Hardenberg)
O
Obama, Barack
Objective correlative
Objectivism
The Office
Olsen, Stein Haugom
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Ong, Walter, J.
On the Sublime
Ontological limits
Orality and Literacy
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Organic
Orientalism
The Origins of Geometry
Ornatus verborum
Orphaned signifiers
Orwell, George
Ovid
Ozymandias
P
Pacquiao, Mani
Paine, Thomas
Paradise Lost
Paralogical
Parasitical (signifying) systems
Parole
The Pastoral
Pater, Walter
Payap University
Peirce, C.S.
Peircean
Performative function
Performatives (utterances)
Performativity
Peter Bell the Third
Peterson, Jordan
Phantasia
Phenomenalism
Phenomenological criticism
Phenomenology
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Philosophically romantic
Philosophical Romanticism
Philosophical romantics
Philosophical tradition, the
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Phonemes
Phrónēsis
The Physiocrats
Pindar
Pinter, Harold
Plato
Plato’s Gorgias
Plot
Plotinus
Poetria Nova
Poiema
Poietes
Political economy
The Politicisation of literary theory
Pollen
Pope, Alexander
Positions/doxa
Positivist
Postcolonial
Postcolonial criticism
Postcolonialism
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Post-digital age
Posthumanism
Post-Lutherean
Postmodern
The Postmodern Condition
Postmodern era
Postmodern irony
Postmodernism
Postmodernism, or the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism
Postmodernist
Postmodernist Culture
Postmodern novel
Poststructuralism
Poststructuralist
Pound, Ezra
Practical Criticism
Pragmatic Denouement
Pragmatics
The Pragmatic School of Criticism
Pragmatism
Pramoj, Kukrit
“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political of Economy (1859)
Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800)
The Prelude
Pre-Socratic
The primary imagination
Primogeniture
The Principles of Mathematics
Prior theory/passing theory
Privileged representations
The problem of other minds
Propositional truth tables
Propp, Vladimir
Protagoras
Protestant Profs
Proto-Formalist Criticism
Proust, Marcel
Prudentius
Prufrock
Prussian State (of 1821)
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytical criticism
Psychologism
Psychophysical parallelism
Pulchras positions
Pulp Fiction
Pynchon, Thomas
Pyrrhonist scepticism
Q
Quadrivium
Quantum mechanics
Queer theory
Quine, W.V.O.
Quintilian
R
Radical empiricist reductionism
Radical reductionist schematic model
Rahv, Phillip
Rama VI, King
Rand, Ayn
The Rape of the Lock
Rationalisation (of public discourse)
The Raw and the Cooked
Readerly (texts)
Reader response theory
Reading Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” in the Age of Distraction
Realism
Received Prounciation (RP)
Recognitive breakdown
Recuperated
Red Bamboo
Red face/pale face literature
The Red Wheelbarrow
Reflexive constructions
Reiterating the Differences:A Reply to Derrida
The representation of non-representation
The Republic
The Resistance to Theory
The Rhetoric of Temporality
Richards, I.A.
Ricouer, Paul
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Rippon, Angela
The Rise of the New Left, (keynote speech)
R Mutt
The Romantic Ideology
Romantic irony
Romanticism
Romanticism and Classicism
Romantic movement, the
Rorty, Richard
Rousseau, Jean Jacques
Rushdie, Salman
Russell, Bertrand
Ryle, Gilbert
S
Said, Edward
Santayana, George (n)
Sartre, J.P.
Sasinee, Khunkaew
Saussure, Ferdinand de
Saussurean
Saussurean linguistics
Sayer’s Law
Sayre, William (Sayre’s Law)
Schelling, F.W.
Schiller, Friedrich
Schlegel, August
Schlegel, Friedrich
Schlegel, F.W.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich
Scholastic critics
Schopenhauer, Arthur
The Science of Logic
Sci Fi
Scrutiny
Scruton, Roger
Searle, John
Second-order signification
The Second World War
Sedulius
Seel, Martin
Self-conscious idiolectical discourse
Sellars, Wilfrid
Semiology and Rhetoric
Semiotic idealism
Semiotics/semiology
Semiotic systems (and structures)
Sensitive characterisation
Set theory paradox
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Shaftesbury, Lord
Shakespeare, William
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Shelley, P. B.
Shklovsky, Victor
Signature, Event, Context
Signifier/signified
Simulacra/simulation
The Sistine Chapel
Sittlichkeit
Smith, Adam
Smith, Barry
The social contract
The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS)
Socrates (Socratic)
The ‘soft humanities,’
Sangkhaphantanon, Thanya
Sophistry
The Sophists
Sophocles
The Sorrows of Young Werther
South East Asian
Southey, R.
Soviet Socialist Realists (SS)
Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International
Speech-act philosophy
Speech act theory
Spivak, G.C.
Spots of time
Stalinism
Star Wars trilogy
Steele, Danielle
Steele, Richard
Steinbeck, John
Stevens, Wallace
Stirner, Max
Strauss, Leo
Streep, Meryl
Structuralism
Structuralist narratology
Structure, Sign and Play, in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Sturm und Drang
Subaltern studies
The Sublime
Submission
Superstructural surface
Surrealism
Sutherland, Keston
Swift, Jonathan
Swinburn, A.C.
Symbol and allegory
Symbology of the swastika
Synchronic
Synecdoche
T
The Taming of the Shrew
Tarantino, Quentin
Taylor, Charles
The Tempest
Tertullian
Thai culture
Thailand, Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism
Thai popular culture
Thai Secondary Education
The Thai Social Action Party
Thanksgiving Ode
Theory of descriptions
Theravada Buddhism
Things Fall Apart
Tieck, Ludwig
Tik Tok
The Times(London)
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Todorov, T.
To His Coy Mistress
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Tolstoy, Leo
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Transcendental buffoonery
Transcendental phenomenology
Transcendental signified
Transformational-grammar-syntax rules
Trans-humanism
Translations (radical)
Triangulated interpretation
Triangulations
Trigger Happy TV
Trivium
Tropological
Trump, Donald
Truth and Method
The Turner Diaries
Twelfth-Century Renaissance
The Two Dogmas of Empiricism
U
Ulysses
Un Chien Andalou
Unity
The Unmoved-Mover
Ur-language
Ur-system
Ur-vocabulary
UZ and Them
V
Verbal icons
Verificationism
Verificationist
Violent hierarchies
Virago Press, the
Vorticism
W
Wackenroder, W. H.
Waddthantham, (Thai culture)
War and Peace
The Wasteland
Weaponisation of identity
We Are Seven
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong
The Well-Wrought Urn
Weltanschauung (World view)
The Western Tradition
Weyrich, Paul
What Computers Can’t Do
What is an Author
Wheeler, Samuel
Whitehead, C.
Whither Marxism
Why I Am a Conservative
Williams, William Carlos
William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after
Waterloo
Wimsatt/Beardsley (intentional fallacy)
Wimsett, W.K.
Wittgenstein, L.
Woke-ism
Women in Love
Wongsuwan, Rong
Woolfe, Virginia
Wordsworth, William
Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
World Literature
Writerly (texts)
Wuthering Heights
X
Xanthippe
Y
Yeats, W.B.
Young Hegelians
A Young Man’s Fancy
Z
Zen Buddhism
Žižek, Slovaj
Footnotes
1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
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