In(ter)discipline: New Languages for Criticism (review)

Emerging from conferences organized between 2002 and 2006 within a research project New Languages for Criticism: Cross Currents and Resistances, this compendium addresses the question of the search within the modern humanities for new languages for criticism in the light of a broadening awareness of the increasingly interdisciplinary or intermedial nature of cultural production and research. While recognizing that individual disciplinary knowledge continues to be the probity of interdisciplinary research and commentary, modern scholarship and cultural expression is acutely aware of the necessity of developing new conceptual and critical tools. The twenty essays in this volume suggest ways in which this goal might be achieved. Whether the essay format is the most economical way of tackling the problem is, however, open to question. Of course ideas from a range of commentators are welcome, but only some of the essays here try to get to grips in a concerted manner with the issues at stake. In the light of this, it is regrettable that the Preface does not take more of a lead in presenting key issues in a comprehensive and elaborated form. It falls to the strongest essays in the volume - such as those by Bal (no. 1) and Brandstetter (no. 5) to take on this responsibility, by attempting both to tackle theoretical issues and at the same time show how the use of medial difference can clarify the critical issues at stake. Bal's strongly semiotic orientation is clearly an advantage here given semiology's track record in identifying, mediating between and providing a stable terminology for different fields and forms of representation. Though she, like others in the volume (perhaps reflecting the recent tendency to avoid fetishising 'the linguistic turn'), is shy of stating the continuing centrality of language as a mediating tool in interart comparison, a fact that the volume nevertheless as a whole manifestly demonstrates. In this respect, Brandstetter's essay also stands out in the illuminating way it uses the work of the painter Gerard Richter to cast light on the problem of the performance aspect of art, bringing into close juxtaposition questions raised by two different art forms. However, for a volume aiming to clarify intermedial interaction, the use of illustration is very patchy. While we are treated to a photograph of the editors of the volume and a bemusing cover image showing a monkey from Buffon's Histoire naturelle (Monkey Business? Painting monkeys? a play on the French verb 'singer'?), Essay no. 16, on Kafka and Adorno, illustrates only one of the two key images under discussion. On the other hand, Das's essay (no. 15), the most lavishly illustrated, is among the least needing iconographic back-up, since it is so persuasively and evocatively written. The volume also shows a strong concern with musical criticism, the project having been originally inspired by a musicophilosophical essay of Adorno. Essays by Kramer (no. 4) and Bowie (no. 7) are illuminating in this respect, though both could have pursued further the potential of prosody as a mediating discourse between poetry and music.