The opponents of theory may feel that raising questions of this kind is sinister, robotic, stony-hearted and outrageously partisan. Others may feel that it is actually quite interesting. Take, for example, the difference between poetry and prose. The only satisfactory way of describing this difference is that in poetry it is the author who decides where the lines end, whereas in prose it is the typesetter. To find out why this is the only adequate way of describing the difference between the two forms – why the more obvious apparent differences will not really do – you have to read some theory.
Or think of the question of how much a reader brings to a literary work, and how much the work provides itself. Take, for example, the unbeatably comic first sentence of Evelyn Waugh’s short story ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’: “ ‘You will not find your father greatly changed,” remarked Lady Moping as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.’ This is really a form of English irony, bringing the momentous (insanity) and the everyday off-handedly together. The stiff upper lip lurks somewhere behind this comic device, as the grotesque or catastrophic is taken impassively on the chin.
Waugh’s sentence, however, is also a fine example of English understatement. As such, it reminds us just how understated all literature is, even at its most luridly melodramatic. It illustrates how the reader of a literary work unconsciously supplies information which is needed to make sense of it, or makes vital assumptions which may not be entirely warranted. We assume that Lady Moping is talking to a child of hers sitting alongside her in the car, who is also the offspring of an inmate of the asylum whom they are about to visit. We also probably assume that the inmate in question is Lady Moping’s husband – presumably Lord Moping.
None of this, however, is actually stated. We will, of course, discover the truth of the matter as we read on, but we can still enjoy the laconic comedy of the opening sentence simply by making certain assumptions. If we assume that the father in question is indeed Lady Moping’s husband, the comic edge of her callous nonchalance is notably sharpened. The humour only really works if we assume that the father is an inmate of the asylum, though this is pure conjecture. It may be that Lady Moping simply happens to mention him while visiting the asylum for some other purpose, or that he is indeed in the building but one of the medical staff. That the father is not greatly changed amusingly suggests that he was as mad as a hatter when on the loose, though it could be Lady Moping’s way of reassuring his son or daughter that despite his incarceration he is as sweetly reasonable as he always was. The syntax of the sentence (‘as the car turned…’) hints at the shadowy presence of a chauffeur, Lady Moping being too grand to drive herself, though this, too, is readerly inference.
It is a shame to ruin a good joke with too much theory. But finding out what it takes for comedy to work is an interesting business. One might note that doing this has just involved a spot of reasonably close reading, of the kind which theorists are said to be incapable of performing. That theory is incapable of close reading is one of its opponents’ most recurrent gripes. It is now almost as received a wisdom as the belief that baldness is incurable or that Naomi Campbell lacks humility. In fact, it is almost entirely false. Some theoretical critics are careless readers, but so are some non-theoretical ones. When it comes to a thinker like Jacques Derrida, the more apt accusation might be that he is far too painstaking a reader – that he stands so close up to the work, fastidiously probing its most microscopic features, that like a painting viewed from too near it threatens to disintegrate into a set of streaks and blurs. The same can be said of many other deconstructive writers. As far as most other major theorists go, the charge of standing too far back from the work simply will not stick. Most of them read quite as tenaciously as non-theoretical critics, and some of them rather more so.1
The advocates of close analysis sometimes assume that there is an ideal distance to be established between the reader and the work. But this is an illusion. Reading, viewing and listening involve constant focus-changing, as we sometimes swoop in on a stray particular and sometimes pull back to pan the whole. Some readings or viewings approach a work head-on, while others sidle shyly up to it. Some cling to its gradual unfolding as a process in time, while others aim for a snapshot or spatial fix. Some slice into it sideways, while others peer up at it from ground level. There are critics who start off with their noses squashed against the work, soaking up its most primitive first impressions, before gradually stepping backwards to encompass its surroundings. None of these approaches is correct. There is no correctness or incorrectness about it.
A common assumption of the critics of theory is that theory ‘gets in between’ the critic and the work. It interposes its obtrusive bulk between the two, throwing its ungainly shadow over the words on the page or the shapes on the canvas. It is a thick mesh of doctrine laid across the work, allowing only select bits of it to peep through. Other bits get distorted or blocked out. Moreover, the same mesh is laid monotonously across every work which comes along, destroying their uniqueness and erasing their differences. It is true that some criticism behaves in this way, but not all of it is theoretical. The belle-lettristic gentlemen who ran the critical show some decades ago certainly wielded such a doctrinal filter. Bits of art concerned with gender or class conflict got regularly blocked out, while negative criticism of great authors was felt to be discourteous. The social context of art was admitted only in a highly filleted fashion. The same fulsome vocabulary – ‘remarkably fine’, ‘splendidly robust’, ‘drearily naturalistic’, ‘sublimely accomplished’ – was ruthlessly superimposed on every work. The prejudices of the patrician class clumsily obtruded themselves between the reader and the work.
In fact, the whole idea of a critical language ‘interposing’ itself between the reader and the work is a misleading spatial metaphor. Some critical commentaries are indeed unhelpful, but this is not the best way of seeing why. Without preconceptions of some sort, we would not even be able to identify a work of art in the first place. Without some sort of critical language at our disposal we would simply not know what to look for, just as there is no point in introspection if we have no vocabulary in which to identify what we find inside ourselves. The wholly disinterested view of a work, one which did not come at it from a specific angle, would be struck blind. It would be completely at a loss, like a visitor from Alpha Centauri confronted with The Simpsons.
At their most useful, critical concepts are what allow us access to works of art, not what block them off from us. They are ways of getting a handle on them. Some of them may be more effective handles than others, but that distinction does not map on to the difference between theory and non-theory. A critical concept, even a useless or obfuscatory one, is not a screen which slams down between ourselves and the work of art. It is a way of trying to do things with it, some of which work and some of which do not. At its best, it picks out certain features of the work so that we can situate it within a significant context. And different concepts will disclose different features. Theorists are pluralists in this respect: there could be no set of concepts which opened up the work for us in its entirety. The key difference is between those concepts which are so familiar to us that they have become as transparent as words like ‘bread’, and those which still retain the strangeness of words like ‘jujube’. It is the latter which are generally called ‘theory’, though jujubes are in fact no odder than bread.
What have been cultural theory’s achievements? To begin with, it has disabused us of the idea that there is a single correct way to interpret a work of art. There is a joke about the bogusly ecumenical Catholic who conceded to his Protestant colleague that there were many ways of worshipping God, ‘you in your way, and I in His’. This is pretty much how many conservative critics regard theorists. They themselves read the work as it would wish to be read could it but speak, whereas theorists perversely insist on importing a lot of fancy ideas into it. To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without Go
d is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilization in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem. To speak of spiritual exploration in D. H. Lawrence is to be true to the texts, while to speak of sexism in his work is to twist them to your own political purposes.
To read Wuthering Heights as a novel about death is to respond to what is there before you, whereas to read it as a novel about the death drive is to let Freud come between you and Heathcliff. Jane Austen is about love, marriage and moral values; only those deaf to the claims of the heart see all this as inseparable in her novels from property and social class. To read Philip Larkin straight is to appreciate his wry regret for the passing of pastoral England, whereas to read him between ideological blinkers is to see his poetry as part of a jaded post-imperial Britain.
To acknowledge that King Lear has more than one meaning is not to claim that it can mean anything at all. Theorists do not hold that anything can mean anything; it is just that their reasons why it cannot differ somewhat from other accounts. It is only authoritarians who fear that the only alternative to their own beliefs is no beliefs at all, or any belief you like. Like anarchists, they see chaos all around them; it is just that the anarchist regards this chaos as creative, whereas they regard it as menacing. The authoritarian is just the mirror-image of the nihilist. Whereas true meaning is neither carved in stone nor a free-for-all, neither absolutist nor laissez-faire. You have to be able to pick out features of the work of art which will support your interpretation of it. But there are many different such features, interpretable in different ways; and what counts as a feature is itself open to argument. No critical hypothesis is impregnable; all of them are revisable.
What other achievements has cultural theory to its credit? It has persuaded us that there are many things involved in the making of a work of art besides the author. Works of art have a kind of ‘unconscious’, which is not under the control of their producers. We have come to understand that one of those producers is the reader, viewer or listener – that the recipient of a work of art is a co-creator of it, without whom it would not exist. We have become more sensitive to the play of power and desire in cultural artefacts, to the variety of ways in which they can confirm or contest political authority. We understand, too, that this is at least as much a matter of their form as of their content. A sharper sense has emerged of how intimately works of culture belong to their specific times and places – and how this can enrich rather than diminish them. The same is true of our responses to them, which are always historically specific. Closer attention has been paid to the material contexts of such art-works, and of how so much culture and civility have had their roots in unhappiness and exploitation. We have come to recognize culture in the broader sense as an arena in which the discarded and dispossessed can explore shared meanings and affirm a common identity.
Of all these gains, one of the most controversial has been the link between culture and power. The point about culture for the liberal or conservative is that it is the very opposite of power. Indeed, it is one of those blessed, beleaguered places where we can still escape power’s unlovely sway. As social life fell increasingly under the rule of utility, culture was on hand to remind us that there were things which had value but no price. As a crassly instrumental reason tightened its grip on human affairs, culture rejoiced in whatever existed purely for its own sake, with no end in sight but its own abundant self-delight. It bore witness to the profundity of play, in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. As human life became increasingly quantified and administered, art was there to press the claims of the uniquely individual. It recalled us to our bodily, sensuous existence in a world where even this was being relentlessly commodified.
In all these ways, culture has acted as a precious remembrance of Utopia. As art became less and less integral to a civilization for which value was whatever the market declared it to be, it was able to turn this very non-necessity into a kind of virtue. It could speak up for the contingent, the stray particular, the gloriously pointless, the miraculous exception, in a world of iron laws and inexorable forces. Indeed, it could illustrate this contingency by seizing on the miracle of its own stubbornly persistent existence, in a society to which it mattered less and less. Because it had less and less identifiable function, culture could question the whole brutal assumption that things had to be functional in order to earn their keep. It could act as a political critique simply by being stubbornly faithful to itself.
At the same time, it could take advantage of the fact that it was adrift in society to peer beyond society’s provincial limits, exploring issues which were of vital concern to humanity as a whole. It could be universal rather than narrowly historical. It could raise ultimate questions, not just pragmatic, parochial ones. Those who dismiss the universal out of hand forget that this is so often the alternative. Culture could provide a home for all those vagrant values which orthodox society had expelled as so much unproductive garbage: the deviant, the visionary, the erotic, the transcendent. As such, it was a living rebuke to the civilization which had given birth to it – not so much because of what it showed or said, but simply by virtue of its strange, pointless, unnerving presence.
One can understand, then, the fury of those who see cultural theory as seeking to demolish this last bastion of the human spirit. If even this frail citadel of human value can be invaded by power and politics, it is hard to see where else one can retreat to. This was by no means always the case. In the days before culture shifted centre-stage, there was an obvious dwelling place for the spirit, known as religion. Religion did all that culture was later to do, but far more effectively. It could enlist countless millions of men and women in the business of ultimate value, not just the few well-educated enough to read Horace or listen to Mahler. To assist it in this task, it had the threat of hell fire at its disposal – a penalty which proved rather more persuasive than the murmurs of cultivated distaste around those who hadn’t read Horace. Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, even though almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassedly ignore it.
Through ritual and moral code, religion could link questions of absolute value to men and women’s everyday experience. Nothing was less abstract than God, heaven, sin, redemption. Just as art fleshes out fundamental issues in sign, sound, paint and stone, so religion brought them home to everyday experience in a whole iconography, devotional sensibility, pattern of personal conduct and set of cultic practices. It planted the cosmic Law in the very depths of the individual, in the faculty known as conscience. Faith bound together the people and the intellectuals, the simple faithful and the clergy, in the most durable of bonds. It could create a sense of common purpose far beyond the capacity of a minority culture. It outlined the grandest narrative of all, known as eschatology. It could interweave art, ritual, politics, ethics, mythology, metaphysics and everyday life, while lending this mighty edifice the sanction of a supreme authority. It was thus a particular shame that it involved a set of beliefs which seemed to many decent, rational people remarkably benighted and implausible.
It is no wonder, then, that culture has been in perpetual crisis since the moment it was thrust into prominence. For it has been called upon to take over these functions in a post-religious age; and it is hardly surprising that for the most part it has lamentably failed to do so. Part of religion’s force was to link fact and value, the routine conduct of everyday life with matters of ultimate spiritual importance. Culture, however, divides these domains down the middle. In its broad, popular, everyday sense, it means a set of ways of doing things; in its artistic sense, it means a body of work of fundamental value. But the connection between them is fatally missing. Religion, by contrast, is culture in both senses at once.
To speak of a post-religious age is to speak a good deal too hastily. The age may look that way in Leeds or Frankfurt, but hardly in Dacca or Dalla
s. It may seem irreligious to intellectuals, but not to peasant farmers or office cleaners. In most stretches of the globe, including much of the United States, culture never ousted religion in the first place. Even in some regions where it did, religion is creeping back with a vengeance. On the planet in general, it is still by far the most resourceful symbolic form. As men and women feel more vulnerable and disregarded, we can expect ugly religious fundamentalisms of various stripes to escalate. The age in which culture sought to play surrogate to religion is perhaps drawing to a close. Perhaps culture, in this respect at least, has finally admitted defeat.
Conservatives are mistaken to believe that radicals are out to rob culture of its political innocence. Like most forms of innocence, it never existed in the first place. In any case, it is radicals and not conservatives who have emphasized the affirmative, Utopian dimensions of culture. It is just that they have pointed at the same time to the ways in which it is complicit with unsavoury forms of power. Indeed, these two aspects of culture are not unrelated. By encouraging us to dream beyond the present, it may also provide the existing social order with a convenient safety-valve. Imagining a more just future may confiscate some of the energies necessary to achieve it. What cannot be achieved in reality can be fulfilled in fantasy. In any case, fantasy is far from a stranger to the workings of advanced capitalist orders.
This, however, qualifies the Utopian role of culture rather than undermines it. It means simply that culture is Utopian in both a positive and a negative sense. If it resists power, it is itself a compelling form of it. The radical view of the matter, in other words, is more pluralistic and open-ended than that of those for whom artistic culture is of unequivocal value; radicals are rather more nuanced and equivocal about the subject. They like to see both sides of the issue. They do not assume, in dogmatically generalizing spirit, that art is always and everywhere positive. They are mindful, for example, of the abuse and exploitation which so often lie at its roots. This does not invalidate art for them; it simply makes their approach to it more tentative and multi-faceted. They are wary of being too sweeping about the matter, in the manner of their liberal humanist colleagues.
After Theory Page 10