Critical Theory Since Plato: the Twentieth-Century and After

CTSP rev. / 33

PART II

Introduction: The Modern Era

In the long history of philosophical and aesthetic speculation upon which this volume draws, developments from the later nineteenth appear as both a culmination and a departure. What is striking in both respects is that modernism in virtually all of its manifestations has had the effect of calling into question the terms in which the prior history of thought about literature, the arts, and philosophy have been represented. It is not that the problems which surface especially in the twentieth century are new. The issue is the sometimes confusing process by which unexpected links and reconfigurations of problems come to light, often requiring a reconception of disciplinary—and interdisciplinary—histories.

In the specific case of literary criticism, one widely rehearsed version of its history, articulated most clearly by Murray Krieger, the emergence of modern literary criticism as an academic specialty is the culmination of what Krieger has characterized as an apologetic tradition, driven by the attempt to defend poetry from its many and varied detractors, responding to Plato’s notorious decision in Republic to have Socrates exile the poets from the ideal state.[1] This is a narrative that tends to be repetitive in the sense that no defense of poetry, no apologia for it, can be final or bring any guarantee that in the next generation (or even the next decade) some new attack against poetry will not emerge. More importantly, however, the apologetic tradition encourages the assumption that a definitive defense of poetry ought to be realized in a comprehensive theory of poetry as a specific subject of study. Whether it is Aristotle, apparently answering in his Poetics the charges of Plato, or later writers, from Dante and BoccacCio to Mazzoni and Sidney, or from Shelley to Frye, the defense of poetry has appeared to depend upon argument: if the attacker only understood what poetry really is and why it matters, the case would be closed and poetry would be vindicated, once and for all. Yet no argument has yet proved so powerful or compelling as to be genuinely decisive.

Though the point is clear only in hindsight (if at all), the assumption that there should be some ultimate and therefore decisive argument is contained from the start in the philosophical principles or concepts that shaped the original Socratic attack. The immediate response, that is to say, is likely to be not only apologetic but defensive, thereby granting to the opponent more than may be warranted. While there are cases (such as Shelley’s reply to Peacock, or Sidney’s response to Gosson) where many details of the exchange are ironic, defenses of poetry are commonly directed, as it were, over the head of a specific detractor to a general audience, borrowing both the concepts and the rhetoric of theoretical discourse that may be fundamentally incompatible with poetry. The deeper problem is less some alleged defect in poetry than a radical insufficiency in the idea of theory itself. A little later, we will examine this matter in more detail, but it will suffice for the moment to recall that the idea of an intellectual theory of anything emerges from the very line of argument in Plato’s Republic that excludes poetry—and the exclusion assumes that “truth” is simple, universal, and accessible to intellectual intuition. After Aristotle’s Poetics, the subject of poetry is restored at least to the status of being discussable—but only within the framework of a theory of Eidos or Form which locates the truth or essence of things in some discernible invariance of form, whether it be an oak tree, a ship, or tragedy. That framework, for Aristotle as for us, is directly traceable to Plato, and is so pervasively incorporated into our ordinary modes of thinking that it effectively disappears as something obvious, something that goes without saying.

In this sense, the apologetic tradition since Aristotle has seemed to pursue a theory of poetry as its end, without necessarily taking up the question of whether or not the fault may lie less with poetry than with a conception of theory which assumes such a formal and timeless framework for truth—a conception congenial to the common understanding, but one which has often been reduced to paradox in the face of genuine novelties or the incontrovertible historical evidence that notions of truth change.[2] We have tended to assume that “truth” can only be empirically or logically discovered, and by necessity always was and always will be True. In this sense, statements valorized as true are distinguished from bare assertions of faith because they can be consistently identified as always being the case. Such truths as the fact that acorns always turn into oaks (but never pine trees), or that the specific relation for acceleration due to gravity is the same for all objects, serve as paradigmatic instances of theoretical propositions because they offer both an explanation and a basis for predictions, evidently grounded in the nature of things.

But what should a theory in criticism do, and what would it be a theory of? If a theory takes poetry, or more broadly, imaginative production, as its object, then the closure sought by traditional theorizing evidently does not fit. Poems are not among the natural kinds, like oak trees, nor are we interested in them because of their physical properties, as we are with boats. They matter to us because of their effects on thought and feeling, and there is no guarantee that anyone could distinguish a poem from random strings of graphical marks just by looking at it. Poems as such are recognizable only as they are read and interpreted. Taking poems as mental or ideal objects, however, would involve a contemporary critic in arguments hinging on a kind of Idealism most likely to be treated as either an anachronism or merely a gesture. But in any case, poems are deliberate constructions that we assume, in principle, to be intelligible and readable, just as they are also constructions that address us, frequently in immediate and practical ways, as in the celebrated line that concludes Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

In this sense, the preponderance of arguments in criticism taken as theoretical are in fact resolutely practical, having to do with judgments and complex relations pertaining obviously to persons and societies, more than to ascertainable and repeatable states of affairs as one would expect in the natural sciences. Moreover, the judgments and relations in question are not guaranteed by any direct accuracy in the depiction of events, but only by their intelligibility. If we view the twentieth century from the vantage of its closing decades, the most striking feature of criticism in this regard is the emergence and rapid rise of theory as a designation for a kind of discursive practice that seeks to situate literary works and other cultural products and artifacts within the social field and, to greater or lesser degrees, to examine them in a generally political (or moralistic) way. Unlike theory in other disciplines, recent theory in criticism appears not to have a definite object (even as it constitutes as a “text” any virtual object that can be talked about relative to some theme in discourse) but is instead an apparently unfolding analysis of a set of questions pertaining to such issues as representation, social justice, systems of value, cultural history, and highly charged contemporary topics such as race, gender and class.

One among many reasons that recent theory in criticism has been controversial is that it thereby tends on the one hand to go very much against the grain of poetics in the apologetic vein, where recent literary criticism, far from defending poetry against its detractors, seems to take on the role of attacking poetry for its multifaceted complicity in the politics of privilege. But on the other, it also goes against the grain of traditional philosophical models of theorizing by substituting a politicized rhetoric for formal logic, and taking the disclosure of the illegitimate or unjust use of power as a more important issue than formulating propositions held to be incontrovertibly true. The resulting quarrels have been hot and difficult (as the habit of calling them “culture wars” suggests), since they are embedded within the crisis ridden cultural-political reality of our times, where views about particular social issues have served as a kind of moral litmus test for right thinking—including vitriolic attacks on that very notion as an inherently dogmatic insistence on what has come to be called “political correctness.”

But the larger (and older) question remains intellectual and philosophical, pertaining quite specifically to poetry as a paradigmatic product of human intelligence and imagination. From beginning to end, the twentieth century has confirmed the venerable point, sometimes ironically through the pursuit of purportedly “scientific” programs, that poetry is not a subject that lies still for patient observation upon a laboratory table. So what does poetry have to do with theory? If we understand that term as it is used in science to cover well-formulated and highly verified principles of explanation and prediction, the answer is, evidently, “Not much.” At the other extreme, what does theory as a politically inflected practice of social critique have to do with poetry, considered as a richly exemplified practice and an art, a techné, and not simply the reflection of a particular ideology? To a convinced advocate of the apologetic tradition the answer might also be, “Not much.” But that would be to ignore the most deeply embedded themes and preoccupations of poetry as a subject matter that have, after all, called forth the kind of politically inflected theory so prominent in recent years. To read Shakespeare as if his plays were not profoundly engaged with questions concerning the actual politics of kingship, or to strip away morality from Milton in Paradise Lost as if it were a mere rhetorical decoration would be to egregiously miss the point, as both John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren observed over half a century ago. Poetry is not pure, and its vital complexity lies precisely in the fact that it speaks from and to a human world where all realities are multifaceted.[3]

The specific selections and the approach in this revised edition of Critical Theory Since Plato reflect an effort to articulate these issues more thoroughly and thoughtfully. It will be plain from perusing the table of contents that this edition does not simply carry on the generally aesthetic focus of the apologetic tradition, just as it obviously remains committed to the cultural and intellectual history that various defenses of poetry have made. So too, it will be clear that we have not attempted to create a comprehensive smorgasbord of currently practiced “approaches” to literary study and criticism. In an earlier companion volume, Critical Theory Since 1965, we took the step of broadening the horizon of what ought to be included in the study of “criticism” by adding an appendix that published, for the first time, a broad collection of materials which before 1965 would not have been seen as germane to literary study, but had definitely become so in the emergence of theory after the 1960s, including such figures as Saussure, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Lacan, to mention only a few. We believe that subsequent developments certainly justify having taken a broader than usual view of the field.

In this volume, for both theoretical and practical reasons, we are taking a more determined step in the same direction. On the practical side, literary study has virtually exploded (in more than one sense) since mid-century, with the remarkable institutional consolidation of the New Criticism in the 1950s followed by a larger international advocacy for Structuralism—and the equally remarkable and rapid implosion of both after 1965, in successive waves of post-modernist, post-formalist, post-structurualist critiques that threatened for many decades to make crisis a permanent state of affairs.[4] What has emerged from this sustained ferment is a proliferation of orientations, practices, and approaches to the study of literature and culture, in the aggregate lumped together as theory, that seems to defy any obvious or cogent taxonomy. The emergence of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies, studies of race, class and ethnicity, new historicism and cultural studies following Foucault, Raymond Williams, and others, queer studies, science studies, and so on, presents for the would-be anthologist what we have concluded is an impossible problem. The “field” is so various and fractured that only by an ill-advised indulgence of the fallacy of mimetic form could anyone hope to “represent” the field—and the result would be as various and fractured as the field itself appears to be, to say nothing of producing a volume so massive and unmanageable that it would be more a burden than a service to students and teachers alike.

Read symptomatically, however, this proliferation of sometimes warring factions and incommensurable approaches does have a much deeper coherence which we make bold to think indicates that we are entering a new epoch that is no longer well served by many of the models and methods that have shaped prior practice. Accordingly, we have not tried merely to “represent” ways of doing criticism (including, in current terms, cultural studies), but have taken a broader view of the problems that poetry has always presented, in the belief that a review of them will show with some precision why it is that no conventional idea of theory, from Plato to yesterday, has had much success with imaginative and creative thinking in any form. The self-complicating nature of this possibility is, we believe, now very well known, as it leads into the thickets of such dense paradoxes and deeply layered ironies that even the most intent and focused critics may be led step by step to the point of exasperation with literature precisely because it resolutely refuses to conform to the conventional political or philosophical wisdom of the moment. The now familiar complication is our intellectual desire for some conclusion, any conclusion, even it if is the embrace of paradox or contradiction as if it were unavoidable or necessary, or the suggestion by the late Paul de Man that the only truth about language is that it always lies, or that the only truth about poetry is that it cannot be read.[5]