Ordinary Language Criticism: A Manifesto

KENNETH DAUBER Ordinary Language Criticism: A Manifesto I love theory, but I love practice more. John Neal, Rachel Dyer 'hen convictions are hard to come by, skepticism must serve instead. But we need, all the more, the courage of our skepticism, lacking which even faith may be a preferable attitude for criticism to assume. I wish to propose such a critical faith—a faith which skepticism, conceived generously enough, in fact elicits. For the moment, however, to elaborate the context in which such a project finds its urgency, what needs attention is the peculiar weakness with which much of current American criticism entertains both the one and the other. It is a weakness, especially, in current criticism of American letters, where the result has been an impasse that threatens even the considerable achievements of such criticism in opening the American literary landscape. Thus despite its recent successes in undermining long-established traditions of language and literature, criticism in the skeptical vein has not quite come to terms with its need for the very idea of tradition, which seems indispensable for establishing alternative literatures. Its revolutionary aims of unsettling canons and histories come into conflict with its simultaneous goal of settling new histories and new canons. Its skepticism and its faith work at cross-purposes. And, indeed, they must. For they will not really work at all until they work together. Ungrounding canonical America must appear a pecuArizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 124Kenneth Dauber liarly incomplete enterprise so long as a canon without grounds has not been fully attempted. Establishing new voices and new literatures must remain a dream so long as doubts about voice and literature are not themselves what establish them. And perhaps, it should be admitted, it is easier to dream than to come to terms with the consequences of revolution , with the responsibility that a skepticism or a faith large enough to embrace requires. Perhaps it is easier to temporize than to confront what might really be doubted and believed, what grounds criticism might in fact choose to stand on, after all. The situation is not unfamiliar in literary studies. This is not the first generation to become disaffected with what seems a previous generation 's limitations, only to find itself caught in limitations of its own. Still, this generation's formulation of its disaffection in the global terms of post-modernism has created something of a crisis. Revisionism cannibalizes itself, as the post-modern de-privileging of any current moment as a point, for better or worse, of larger enlightenment than what has come before turns the mere partiality of this time and that place from a provocation to further work into a kind ofgeneral philosophical debility. Not only previous authority, but all authority is discredited. The idea of literary history as a conversation among ethical subjects is now almost universally read as serving particular political interests. Yet, seeking a more ethical history, or at least a more ethical conversation, has, accordingly, seemed to mean invoking other interests—no less political—and thus generating a double-bind of politics from which it would appear impossible to escape. Clearly, European formalism and a native reformism have not blended well. Eschewing, as insufficiently radical, the more pragmatic skepticism that runs in an American line from Franklin through Emerson to William James for the transcendental analytics of deconstruction, American critics have still, almost from the first, wrestled with deconstruction's radical destabilization of the authority of society as such. De Man's stoicism—the power of unsaying Derridean aesthetictsm—unsaying stylized as you want it—have never seemed to them an adequate compensation for the inability to say, any longer, what is wanted. And so, saying what is wanted has remained to trouble their discourse, however post-structural it may seek to be.1 For a forceful example ofthe difficulty, we need look no further than de Man and Derrida themselves. In their American phases, they too exhibit a kind of bad reformist conscience about their formalism, and so Ordinary Language Criticism125 the history of their careers reads as a painful new history of wrestling with...