A Response to Paul Downes

Paul Downes doesn’t like tired old binaries, particularly those that aren’t “deconstructed” and resolved. His review faults Eric Slauter and me for rehearsing such binaries, particularly the most tired (apparently) in US historiography—that between the Declaration and the Constitution—to which he reduces almost everything in Slauter’s The State as a Work of Art and my Interior States.

There are two binaries, however, in which Downes himself indulges, undeconstructed, throughout the review. I refer to the oppositions between originality and familiarity and between resolution and indecision. Familiarity and indecision are, to take up Downes’s language, the “bad guys” in the review, while originality and resolution, clearly distinguishable from their “others,” would presumably ride the former out of Dodge. These oppositions, so central to Downes’s evaluative process, deserve some attention here, both because they form one of the most repeatedly vexing set of imperatives in literary criticism, and because, struggling between these oppositions, Downes inadvertently supports the thesis of Interior States, even (especially) when dismissing it.

The worst thing a critic can be, apparently, is “familiar,” a dismissive term Downes uses no fewer than 11 times in the review. The ideal, implied in reverse, is originality, something new, unseen before, standing alone. Leaving aside whether any such book has ever existed, I would point out that originality is an antisocial concept (“familiarity” implies an iterated connection, what one has “heard before” and what visibly connects one to others) that leaves the critic isolated with his or her own un-indebted imagination—that leaves a critic, in short, reliant on pure interiority rather than on relationality, the two being supposed opposites. To be working within an established conversation, to draw on scholarship one admires, to learn from others—these may be at the core of a pedagogical mission, but they are also, apparently, critical no-no’s.

But projects like Interior States are not only “familiar,” they are also, according to Downes, indecisive. I am, at various moments in the review, reported to be incapable of deciding whether we should have too much or too little interiority. On this point, I believe my argument is quite decisive: it traces the genealogy of social consciousness from its inception in the Federal period through its regulation in the age of reform and into Romanticism, where an interiority that could no longer be avoided was, as a mode of resistance, made so opaque as to be no longer visible. Having “too much” interiority is clearly a second-best option, endorsable only when the possibility of having no interiority is foreclosed. The review reports that “Castiglia cannot decide if he wants to rescue his nineteenth-century victims from an interiority that he associates with a forced exclusion from sociality and political agency, or locate them at the site of the only authentic interiority, an interiority that enjoys a magisterial, living authenticity with respect to the hollow externalized simulacra of the state and its automata.” I never make a claim for sovereign or “authentic” personhood, but rather for consciousness-generated relationally and for wants produced out of social lack; to claim that relationality has been severely limited is not to categorize citizens as “victims.” Downes ends by charging both books under review with “leaving us feeling somewhat adrift,” that Slauter and I are at once too familiar and not familiar enough. This is not, however, a paradox in a logic that makes indecision (not knowing “one’s own mind”) a rationale for surrendering the pleasures of relationality—including the pleasures of uncertain speculation—for the interior solitude of “originality.”

The seeming oppositions between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between originality and indebtedness, and between resolution and indecision do a lot of work, then, in a review that faults others for not deconstructing oppositions. The charge of indecision, given the logic of Interior States, must follow close on the heels of the charge of familiarity, just as originality and decisiveness are conceptually linked. A central argument of Interior States is that interiority is generated to enclose a social world within the realm of consciousness. The imperative to originality, as I’ve...