"Nothing Is Hidden"

From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein on Critique

TORIL MOI

Critique, Method, Reading

It used to go without saying that the purpose of literary studies was to produce critique, and that to do so, one had to practice some form of the "hermeneutics of suspicion." These assumptions long ruled unchallenged. Already in the late 1990s, Eve Sedgwick observed that the hermeneutics of suspicion had become "nearly synonymous with criticism itself." Recently, Rita Felski has shown how the mind-set — the mood or attitude — characteristic of the hermeneutics of suspicion came to dominate literary studies. Whether they are deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, Foucauldian historicists, or something else, Felski writes, most literary critics share the same suspicious — "knowing, self-conscious, hardheaded, tirelessly vigilant" — attitude. To suspicious critics, then, the text is never what it seems, or never only what it seems.

The reasoning behind this belief seems impeccable. To engage in critique is to expose ideology and the workings of power, encourage resistance, and generally contribute to social and political change. Practitioners of critique must therefore be fundamentally suspicious of anything that appears to be ordinary and commonsensical, and anything that presents itself as an "established fact," including the so-called facts of the text. The conclusion imposes itself: radical, committed, political, left-wing critics must read "against the grain."

By now, critique has begun to lose its status as the self-evident goal and method of literary studies. We no longer believe that power always seeks to cover its tracks. Well before terrorists began to release videos of their atrocities — well before they began to commit their atrocities in order to release their videos — Eve Sedgwick asked: "What does a hermeneutics of suspicion and exposure have to say to social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence?" Moreover, she argued, the hermeneutics of suspicion's obsession with the opposition between the hidden and the shown encourages paranoid readings. Bruno Latour notes that the techniques of critique are no longer the exclusive province of radicals. In particular, its trademark skepticism about "established facts" has long since been hijacked by everyone from defenders of the Iraq War to climate change deniers. For him, critique removes us from the things we actually care about: instead of writing about the things we cherish, we focus on their conditions of possibility. When we have exposed them as socially constructed, and thus as contingent, we feel that our work is done. But, Latour asks, what good does it do to know that something we love is contingent, or socially constructed? Is that really all we can say about the objects of our affection and admiration?

Despite their misgivings, neither Sedgwick nor Latour is against critique. Sedgwick wants there to be room for "reparative" readings alongside the usual paranoid readings. Latour wants us to get closer to the facts, to "cultivate a stubbornly realist attitude" by turning to the "matters of concern we cherish." For critique to renew itself, they both imply, we must learn to recognize situations in which suspicion is not called for, situations requiring us to speak up for the things we care about. Sometimes skepticism and suspicion will simply be less politically useful than admiration, care, love. Even Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, who in their 2009 essay "Surface Reading" controversially argued that critique — "political activism by another name" — can't conceivably be the only purpose of literary studies, consider that "surface reading broadens the scope of critique."

As a feminist, I too am convinced that we still need to produce compelling critiques of injustice and oppression. But let's remember that it is perfectly possible to produce critical readings without invoking terms like the hermeneutics of suspicion, or symptomatic reading. Before intellectuals began to speak of the hermeneutics of suspicion, Simone de Beauvoir took apart the sexism in the writing of Henry de Montherlant, Paul Claudel, D. H. Lawrence, and André Breton, and Kate Millett's blistering political critique of writers from Lawrence to Henry Miller and Norman Mailer proceeded quite without reference to hidden depths. Such examples remind us of the obvious: critical readings existed well before professional literary critics began to believe that critique requires a particular vision of language, meaning, and texts, or a particular method of reading.

In "Surface Reading," Best and Marcus don't use the term hermeneutics of suspicion. They prefer "symptomatic reading," a term first elaborated by Marxist thinkers, notably Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson. In Jameson's words, symptomatic readings set out to "seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one [and] rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code." Over time, Best and Marcus note, the term has come to name any reading that "[takes] meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter." In their view, we should oppose the idea that the task of literary criticism is to disclose the hidden and the deep. We should reject symptomatic reading, or "depth" reading, and embrace "surface reading" instead.

The essay provoked innumerable, more or less irate responses. In a particularly well-argued essay, the Marxist critic Carolyn Lesjak accuses Best and Marcus of positing a "benign" and "culturally conservative" reader who is "neutral, objective, self-effacing, humbled before the text." The surface reader, Lesjak argues, "accommodates herself to the given, to common sense, against the now discredited excesses of the theory years." Lesjak, who is certainly not alone, is convinced that critique or symptomatic reading requires critics to probe beneath the surface of the text. In this way, a specific picture of texts (as things with surfaces and depths) gets entangled in a political project: to undo an oppressive status quo, to raise our political consciousness. This logic leads to the idea that...