The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion

Chapter 1: The Task of the Critic: A Game of Registers

o n e The Task of the Critic: A Game of Registers The task of the critic has never been harder. Since the New Criticism concentrated critical activity within the linguistic and formal parameters of the artifact, drawing on the Wittgensteinian strand of twentieth-century linguistic rigor renewing the focus of the critical calling, there has been a prodigious, perhaps impossible growth in the discourses, activities, and registers of oversight associated with literary and cultural criticism. Even as such writers as I. A. Richards1 and William Empson2 sought, with a precision owing to logical analysis, to delimit the field of critical work, Walter Benjamin, for one, invoked anything and anybody in the grand and ultimately tragic endeavor of improving the condition of society through enhanced public attention to the nuances of language and culture.3 Benjamin, taking his cue from German idealism, confused the task of the critic by dissolving any limits around it. The Origins of German Tragic Drama is as much a handbook for a critical practice refusing to determine whether it is literary exegesis, philosophical argumentation, aesthetic appreciation, or 1 2 The Task of the Critic cultural history as it is a paean to a certain formation in the history of a single art form—drama—and the rhetorical usages and circumlocutions that it generated.4 Thus, historical happenstance, philosophical argument, ideological documents , material products, and remains of specific sociological formations —all these became fodder in the critic’s desperate and belated attempt to forestall the banality of evil through the resuscitation and reprogramming of sensibility. The systematic designs of Kant and Hegel, dolls and other toys surviving from the age of Baudelaire, the pronouncements of Marx and Proudhon, Charlie Chaplin’s contortions, not to mention any literary work of consequence, this entire Chinese encyclopedia of phenomena , with all the offshoots that its members generated, became the stuff, material, Stoff,5 with which engaged critics and theorists slapped the face of advanced Western culture as it slipped nonetheless into an irreversible cultural and aesthetic coma. We should not underestimate the extent to which the ferment of the French sciences humaines dedicated itself to the continuation of the discourse of the Frankfurt School.6 The French version of the Gesamtkritik initiated by Benjamin, Adorno, and co-workers brought established academic disciplines , above all anthropology, linguistics, economics, psychoanalysis, and history, to bear on the task of cultural criticism, but the array of artifacts and discourses relevant to the endeavor remained as polyglot as it was under the unauthorized, unsanctioned pickup game of cultural uplift. The sciences humaines settled on structures precisely because they are iterable, transferable , between the multiple disciplines that were now reorienting themselves to semiosis at the basis of their respective systems of meaning and interpretation . Poststructuralism rebelled specifically against the combined field theory that could reduce, if not obliterate the differentiation between conceptual models and épistèmes, the easy, self-aggrandizing iterability of discourses , artifacts, and bodies of evidence available to critical articulation. One might indeed argue that in poststructuralism, philosophy achieved a status as a master framework or perspective to gauge the progress of certain arguments or conceptual projects while productions and formulations from virtually all other areas of discourse, ‘‘high’’ art, and popular culture remained ‘‘game’’ in the critic’s tragically flawed, frenetic effort to make sense and non-sense of the world of ideas and the events that transpire under their aegis. A Game of Registers 3 Apart from that British attempt in the 1950s to imbue some sense into the critic, an endeavor repeated unconsciously, since by the disciplines’ determinations of their professional subspecializations and their weightings, the task of the critic has, in the post–World War II years, only complexified itself, broadened its purview, and proliferated the artifacts and other phenomena for which it takes responsibility and the discourses and other conceptual tools it brings to bear in intellectual work. The contemporary critic of demonstrable theoretical sensibility is, minimally, at once, enough the philosopher to attach her reasonings to broader issues and arguments that have emerged at the level of the conceptual operating system maintained by that discipline, and a poet, in at least two senses: an observer steeped in the history, sensibility, and substantive and formal judgments of modern Western aesthetics, not to mention a writer aiming often, if not in every sentence , at the Baudelairean ‘‘miracle . . . of a poetic prose,’’ in this...