Politics, Deconstruction, Critique
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • February 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1 No. 4 (pp. 8,12,14) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Dick Howard, The Politics of Critique, University of Minnesota Press
The fights over deconstruction and other modes of reading at the present time are not merely conflicts over the “best” way to read; they are part of the ideological struggle over the definition of the real in late capitalism. This struggle over the way the real is understood takes place in culture which is the domain of meanings where various acts, objects and behaviors are charged with or denied social significance. Meanings, in other words, are not natural but constructed in history through a complex process in which diverse classes, races and genders fight over the signs of culture, and cultural activities acquire their meaningfulness as a result of these contestations. The battle over meanings is in effect a battle over the definition of reality: what passes as the “real” in a culture is decided in the intersections of social struggles.
For instance, the contestations over the “sign” for “woman,” or “African-American” which are occurring at the moment are examples of such social conflicts over meaning. “The shift in our self-concept that results from calling ourselves African-American” declares Ramona Edelin, “could be the beginning of a serious cultural offensive.” The struggle over the (cultural) meaning of “African-American” is far reaching since, according to Edelin, “When a child in a ghetto calls himself African-American, immediately he’s international. The change takes him from the ghetto and puts him on the globe. It helps us realize that we are not just former slaves living in the U.S. and makes it easier to change our children’s dwarfed perceptions of themselves.”[1] The history of the conflicts over the meaning of “African-American,” “negro,” “black,” and “Afro-American” during the last century or so is the history of the fight over the “reality” of cultural practices which have consistently been rendered un-real by the dominant class’s “readings” of “African-Americans” in the United States. When a specific social group reads or interprets texts of culture such as films, novels, photographs, Congressional bills or the evening news, it posits certain cultural practices as meaningful or valid and therefore “real” and excludes other practices as unintelligible, absurd and void of meaning, that is to say as non- existent. In other words the “reality” of the rights of African-Americans to equality has been read for decades as “unreal” by many whites with the consequence that equality for African- Americans is still not fully “realized” in social practices. The oppositional reading that Edelin proposes is an intervention in the hegemonic interpretation of American cultural texts and practices.
The “real” in culture, to a very large extent, is decided by how we read since “meanings” are not in the texts of culture themselves but in the way that our mode of reading produces meaning out of those texts. Reading is in effect a political strategy in the social and cultural struggle over “reality.” Because of the power of reading strategies to set the terms by which the real is known, a specific mode of reading is itself an object of social conflict. The mode of reading which is triumphant at a particular historical moment is given philosophical and critical legitimacy by being designated as the “best” way to read. And the “best”, like all signs of culture is a political construct. Reading, in short, is part of the strategies that a social class deploys to achieve its economic, political and ideological goals. At any given historical moment, therefore, there are certain forms of “reading” and interpretation which are not acceptable (“real”) to certain groups but are advocated by opposing groups as the “best” way to read texts of culture. The fact that the way we read (as distinguished from what we read) is itself the site of social and political contestation becomes clear in Dick Howard’s recent book, The Politics of Critique.
“Critique”, according to Howard, is a form of reading which is different from such other modes as “criticism.” Criticism, he maintains, is “nay saying; it stands outside what it criticizes, asserting the validity of norms against facts (or of purportedly ‘real’ facts against pseudo-norms)” (23). Criticism, consequently, is a reductionist mode of reading because it is based on criteria which are already decided before the reading begins. Therefore it is little more than a “one- sided” and “motivated” judgment of the text according to these preestablished norms. Criticism thinks it knows the answers, but in actual fact it is a strategy of avoidance that seeks a forced “certainty” when there is none. Critique, on the other hand, attempts in Howard’s view to understand a text (i.e. any cultural activity that “means” something to somebody) from the inside. This implies that critique does not appeal to values and norms which pre-exist the reading and are thus external to the object of inquiry. Critique reads texts in “their own terms.” For Howard criticism is coercive and totalitarian, reducing “difference” to “identity” and sameness while critique is democratic, open-ended and always sensitive to “difference.”
In rejecting “criticism” as a mode of reading, Howard goes so far as to write “criticism is a safety valve”. The status quo, he argues, perpetuates itself by allowing and encouraging criticism since it vents the discontents of citizens and consequently works as a strategy to maintain and validate the existing social order. Criticism thus has no place in the postmodern world since it is a remnant of the Enlightenment, the age of rational and moral certitude.
Howard, like other theorists of reading, derives a theory of “politics” from his juxtaposition of these two modes of reading — criticism and critique. As the title of his book suggests, he calls it “the politics of critique.”
“Politics,” for Howard, is an autonomous site in which questions about “the political” are raised. But the answers to these questions should not dissolve the questions and consequently reduce “politics” to the social or the economic. “Politics,” according to Howard, is the “constitutive tension” existing between questions and answers, or more precisely, politics is the name of that (cultural) space in which questions and answers occasion a “dialogue”. The idea of “politics” as a “dialogue” or, in Richard Rorty’s term a “conversation,” is one of the recurring topics in contemporary conservative thought.
To describe the tension between questions and answers, Howard borrows two terms from another conservative theory — Husserlian phenomenology — and articulates his theory of “politics” in terms of “genesis” (questions are viewed as part of the act of knowing: the is-ness of a phenomena) and “normativity” (answers are seen as part of the mastery over that which is known: things as they ought to be). The task of phenomenology for Husserl was to analyze the correlation of the “genetic” and the “normative” within the experience of consciousness. “For Husserl,” writes Howard approvingly, “that analysis continues indefinitely”. Modeled after Husserl’s philosophy, Howard’s “politics” is also a non-ending dialogue. This is one reason why he rejects any act of reading that, like criticism, might impose a closure on the openness of dialogue and interrupt politics-as-conversation. Such “interruptions” are for him the mark of a “totalitarian” regime of reading. In fact, the Marxist project, which is the major target of Howard’s attack, interrupts this dialogue through “revolution”. “Revolution,” according to Howard, destroys the tension between the genetic and the normative by opting for the normative (the way things “ought to be”) that is to say for socialism.
The ideal form of “reading” texts of culture and participating in the production of the “real” is critique as far as Howard is concerned. Unlike criticism, critique does not attempt to “answer” questions nor does it strive to “solve” problems. It maintains the productive tension between the is of the genetic (the way things are now) and the ought of the normative (the way things should be) by articulating a space for self-reflexivity and reflective judgment.
Obviously this theory of critique or, as Howard puts it, this “politics of critique” has its own politics. In terms of Howard’s theory of politics- as-critique, for example, Edelin’s attempt to transform “black” to “African-American” is a coercive and totalitarian interruption of a democratic dialogue since it removes the tension between the genetic and the normative and, in the name of a new self-conception for African-Americans (the “ought” of a different social order), opts for the normative. In terms of Howard’s idea of politics, Edelin imposes a “closure” that is to say she removes the democratic options to choose among the signs of “nigger,” “negro”, “black”. Her act, in this politics-as-conversation, is nothing if not “totalizing” (absorbing all “differences” into one) and thus “totalitarian”. In the ethical system which provides the philosophical coherence for Howard’s theory, such a reading of texts of culture is not only bad reading but also, and more importantly, bad citizenship.
If ideology, as Howard himself agrees, is that thought or theory, in Karl Korsch’s words, which “takes the part for the whole” or universalizes “particular needs,” then Howard’s theory of “critique” is an exemplary instance of the ideological. As Marx has so powerfully demonstrated, critique is a multiple “reading” process necessary for making sense of texts of culture. But the way Howard theorizes critique engages only one aspect of this layered reading and its effects. Howard’s “politics of critique” reinforces rather than subverts the logic required by late capitalism.
Howard’s book identifies critique with “immanent critique” — a practice that has become part of the commonsense of postmodern philosophy and criticism. Its most famous practitioner at the moment is, of course, Jacques Derrida. Immanent critique — critique from the inside — is a form of reading that accepts (what it posits as) the text’s “own terms”. The main purpose of immanent critique is to provide a space for contemplating these terms and to explore their consequences for the general economy of representation in the text. Derridean immanent critique demonstrates how the text is always self-divided and marked by “gaps”, blind spots and “aporias.” These drifts and fissures are the effect of the internal “dialogue” of the text — the tension between what it attempts to thematize (argue for and represent) and its own language. Through its tropes (metaphoric structures), the language of the text undermines the “literal” theme and argument the text represents. As a result of this tension, the text does not “mean” anything — in the sense of representing a reliable truth about reality. Its “meaning,” if one may call it that, is a self-reflexive story about its own fate as a text; its own involvement in the tension between the literal and the metaphorical, the genetic and the normative.
Reading for Derrida does not lead to the discovery of the “meaning” of a text, rather it stages the tension in the text and demonstrates that the meaning of the text is “undecidable” as a consequence of this constitutive tension. Thus the “real” meaning of a text for Derrida is precisely the lesson of undecidability. By turning all the meanings of cultural texts into undecidable constructs, Derrida believes he has redefined “politics” itself. A radical, postmodern politics, then, is not so much a matter, for example, of class struggle but a question of denying words and texts of culture clear, decidable meaning. As Barbara Johnson puts it, “Nothing could be more comforting to the established order than the requirement that everything be assigned a clear meaning or stand.” So for deconstructionists, the radical act in politics is to empty words of their ready made meanings by substituting “undecidability” for “clear” meanings. Radical politics, for these readers, should be based not on a “decided” meaning but on a reflection of the constitutive tensions in meaning. Politics, in short, is a matter of “discourse” and not reducible to such entities as “economics” or “history” which are traditionally thought to be extra-discursive referents.
Howard shares this conclusion that politics is, above all, the effect of a tension between the is and ought even though his theory of language is mimetic and thus different from that of Derrida and Johnson. For Howard, as for Derrida, “politics” is not so much a matter of “solving” problems as it is a question of becoming conversant with them. Howard’s idea of politics-as- critique is a reproduction of the Derridean notion of undecidability. Politics, for Howard, is undecidable since a decided politics, like a decided meaning, is an instance of coercion by the totalitarian will of the revolutionary: the one who needs “certainty” and “decidability” in order to make plans and decisions and, above all, to use politics instrumentally to organize oppositional forces. Howard and Derrida both construct the politics-as-undecidability usable in late capitalism. Politics-as-undecidability is a politics of pluralistic dialogue; it emphasizes the process of dialogue and marginalizes its outcome in order to systematically distract attention from “telos”. It is a theory of politics, in other words, compatible with the interests of the ruling classes.
For Marx, who believed that people under capitalism had lost sight of the “telos” (goal) of their practices, “critique” has a very different meaning and form. Marxian critique is what I call a transformative critique. Unlike immanent critique, it is committed not merely to inaugurating a dialogue in the body politics but also to its outcome — the telos.
The very form of critique and the politics it enables is the subject of historical contestation. By essentializing “critique” as “immanent reading,” Howard removes all the “differences” existing in the various modes of critique and suppresses this conflict over different modes of reading. The Derridean and Howardian idea of critique is based on the assumption that texts are best read in their own terms. In other words, they attribute a set of properties to the text and then attempt to investigate those properties and their significance and implications for the meaning of the text. However, texts do not have any inherent properties; they do not enjoy “their own terms”. What are posited as a text’s very “own terms” are the effects of the social conflict over meanings. Social classes struggle over the signs of culture, fighting to assert and secure those signs or terms that can best produce the meanings necessary for their political and economic agenda. Thus the terms that the dominant “readings” attribute to texts — the terms that are posited as inner properties of the texts — are the terms of the ruling ideology. In other words, the inner properties of a text are merely those terms the dominant ideology requires to legitimate its own explanation of the world through the texts of culture. Immanent critique cannot find a normative basis (an “ought”) which does not at the same time legitimate the terms of the status quo. “Immanence” itself, as Adorno argues, has to be theorized as a historical “potentiality” and not essentialized.
Unlike the immanent readings of Derrida, Howard and a host of other critics, Marx’s transformative critique recognizes that the system’s/text’s “own terms” are attributed to the text as a result of social struggles. In his “critiques” Marx moves beyond a mere “immanent” examination of the internal tensions of the text to locate these tensions in historical and socio- economic conditions as his “reading” of “commodity” in the first chapter of Capital demonstrates. By moving beyond a mere immanent reading of the tensions in “commodity,” Marx is able to understand those tension as symptomatic of “commodity” not as a physical object of the senses but as an instance of historical relations: relations that turn commodity into a metaphysical site in which the “innate rights of man” under capitalism are produced.
Having “immanently” observed the “gaps,” “tensions” and “aporias” of the system/text, Marx locates them historically. Then, in the final move of his transformative critique, he points to the “other” reality: the reality that is possible but has been suppressed in the present. In other words, he marks the “telos” of the politics and completely rearticulates the “questions” of the text/system in terms of a revolutionary telos. Immanent readers like Derrida and Howard take the existing questions as “given”, but Marx transforms the questions and in doing so points to “other” social organizations and forms of meanings.
The politics of Howard’s critique is no where more clear than in a “marginal” note where he writes: “What is central is the nature of the total system as defined by relations of alienation and domination. The forms of ownership are but appearances”. It was these very forms of “ownership” and their “centrality” that made that “other” practitioner of modern “critique,” Walter Benjamin, define the role of the progressive intellectual — the exemplary “reader” of texts of culture — as one of “liberating the means of production”.
NOTES:
For a sustained discussion of this and related issues see Teresa
L. Ebert, “Political Semiosis in/of American Cultural
Studies,” in The American Journal of
Semiotics, vol.8, no.1/2 (1991), 113-135.
