Inside Job—or, How to Deconstruct The West's Asia Fetish (Without Really Trying)

If literature, T.S. Eliot said, is a "mug's game," one might update such a claim by noting that critical theorizing involves a kind of mugging. This would explain why a pairing of critical voices might not hold between them any dialog at all and would even suppress a veritable arena of contest. That would make such an encounter dialogic in another sense, a dialogism that was already at work in Plato, Bakhtin, and de Man, a dialogue that does not pretend to "communication" but reveals a series of traps and anticipatory pre-emptions.

First, I would like to congratulate Ranjan Ghosh on his undeniable genius in crafting a "dialog" with Hillis Miller—as if to say across "continents," as if to say East / West (but not quite)—that manages, somewhat incidentally, to put on display Hillis Miller's current writings in a new and radically contemporary adaption. It is irrelevant that Ghosh's genius is less that of critic or theorist than that of a marketer and academic strategist, which makes his own contribution the more remarkable. I would stipulate, at once, that I read this volume as of its moment, that is, of the Trump era, without the latter's abrupt shifts, reversals, and active de-coupling or demolition of referents. However, the reason I hesitate in my response is my nagging suspicion that I am being played, that this was not so much a gag as a "globalist" version of what the Sokal affair did for critical theory buffs at the time, who were sniffing about too much in the sciences. Ow. Sokal's Trojan text trolled the critical or cultural studies output with a resentful eye, miming what it desired to hear or see, bloating, mimicking, passing. If a troll army or some software were to hologram a product for the internationalist academic crowd—post-post-colonial, defunded and on the defense—it might look something like what Ghosh ostensibly puts on offer. For the Trump era of reality TV "reality," in which the real has become bad literature, algorithmic memes, and mnemo-trances, Miller has reason to say that the question of "literature" matters. And Miller blithely sails off into the ecocidal horizons of climate chaos, where the materiality of inscriptions collude with mass extinction events, where the bio-material and the trace interbraid, and opens the question of how to re-read the entire archive and canonical legacy from this new disappearing point, this "matter" that is neither Marxian nor Aristotelian, nor subject to any narrative beyond cosmic rebalancing against the bizarre set of scars and irreversible accumulated wreckage the brief "Anthropocene" epoch has accomplished.

The Trumpocene arrives, of course, as a second turn in this disaggregration of socio-mnemonic orders and ecocidal acceleration, beyond tipping points: it arrives, though, as the denial and occlusion of "climate chaos" ("fake news"), a decoupling of artificed and weaponized media ecologies from one another and old referential-software. The value of this volume, as I suggested, is the astonishing performance—low-key and good-humored—of the nonagenarian survivor of the theory epoch, the iconic close-reader, who was supposedly trotted out to give a backboard for Ghosh's projection (more in a moment). That is, there is a seamless mode by which this supposed formalist or "deconstructivist" moves into this new mnemo-political order. Ghosh does the reverse, which has to be judged, however, as smart given the "product" being placed and the 3D printing's specification. "Mattering" of the sort referencing climate chaos and bio-digital transcriptions is left to Miller, and what is highlighted is "Making Sahitya Matter"—that is, what matters is what is recognized, circulated, given currency discursively or academically, what is talked about. One of the perks of this volume, as mentioned, is the reversal disclosed: there is no "dialog" taking place, nor can there be with Ghosh's non-positional mega-App, the word Sahitya. Here again is Ghosh's genius: what does the so-called West want, or at least creepily desire, from peering outside its own...