P mentioned. truncated without irony

[Mark Kohut]

The Hangman of Critique

By Lee Konstantinou
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/lee-konstantinou>

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JULY 17, 2016

IN 1993, the novelist David Foster Wallace wrote an essay in which he
criticized the pervasive irony of American culture. Irony “serves an almost
exclusively negative function,” he complained. “It’s critical and
destructive” but “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing
anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” The literary and political
cohort who started writing in the 1960s and in the ’70s — postmodern
pioneers such as Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Kathy Acker — had by the
1990s successfully demolished conventional thinking, but had failed to
construct any positive alternative. Wallace hoped a different ethos might
arise. He famously called on his fellow writers to become a “weird bunch of
anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic
watching.”

More than 20 years later, Wallace’s argument continues to find an
appreciative audience. And in many ways, his hopes have been fulfilled. A
prominent new cohort of writers (including Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Colson
Whitehead, and Jennifer Egan) have written fiction sympathetic to Wallace’s
criticism of irony and postmodernism. These writers do not so much abandon
postmodernism as attempt to move beyond its limitations toward something
new.

And it turns out it wasn’t only artists who were rejecting the irony,
skepticism, and paranoid incredulity that many critics described as
characteristic of postmodern culture. Many well-known literary critics,
philosophers, and critical theorists were making the same transition. Using
rhetoric that resembles Wallace’s attacks on irony, these critics have
specifically targeted the academic practice known as ideology critique: the
practice of exposing, through close textual analysis, the ideological
presuppositions that artistic works (or other texts) cannot acknowledge.
The dissident intellectual Randolph Bourne pointed out the affinity between
irony and critique, in 1913, describing irony as a way of “letting things
speak for themselves and hang themselves by their own rope.” The ironist
(no less than the practitioner of critique) repeats “words after the
speaker, and adjusts the rope.”

But many have now have lost faith in the hangman. In the pages of *Critical
Inquiry*, the philosopher Bruno Latour asked a question that many have
since repeated, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Latour’s essay
expressed a desire to replace the intellectual commitment to “debunking”
false claims of objectivity with a new commitment “to protect and to care”
for what we cherish. Writers who once identified as advocates of critique
likewise share doubts
<http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/hermeneutics-suspicion> about the
“hermeneutics of suspicion.” The literary critic Michael Warner has
observed, “Whether we are propounding new criticism, deconstruction, or
cultural studies, our common enterprise is to discipline students out of
their uncritical habits into critical reading.” The effort to question that
“common enterprise” (whether that enterprise is specifically postmodern or
dates back to the Enlightenment) has taken on many names: reparative
reading, surface reading, generous reading, uncritical reading, among
others. But the best name for this new intellectual tendency in literary
studies is the term Rita Felski uses in her lively manifesto, *The Limits
of Critique*: postcritical reading.

Like Wallace, Felski worries that “[a]n entrenched disbelief […] pervades
contemporary culture,” but that “familiar divisions between the savvy and
the sappy, the critically enlightened and the sheeplike naïveté of the
mass” have lost “their last shreds of purchasing power.” “Why is it,”
Felski asks, “that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate,
unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and
take umbrage?” She wonders what literary scholars might be overlooking by
focusing excessively on critique. In a previous book, she argued that
devotees of critique might instead focus on how literature fosters
recognition, knowledge, shock, or enchantment, among other capacities and
emotions. Felski wants us to treat literature not only as an object of
academic criticism, not only as an agent that sometimes has the capability
of criticizing reality, but also as an agent that has the power to act
positively in that world.
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