The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion

Chapter 3: Walter, the Critic

t h r e e Walter, the Critic Culture is a sociological arena for entities that are by their nature, in their constitution, and at all times—textual. It remains a profoundly troubled and always contested question as to whether there are any manifestations of culture independent of textuality. Indeed, one paradox upon which this entire study is founded is the allure to the critic of an outside of language, often a quintessential, necessary condition for a particular intervention in writing. This outside may be posited and gauged historically, sociologically, ethnographically, geographically, technologically, even geologically, but upon close reading, it morphs into the very linguistic medium that was to be flown from, escaped, left behind. Based on the inquiries that I have managed to conduct so far, I would have to conclude that these ‘‘flights from language,’’ which can be thought of as well as temporary erasures, obliterations , and forgettings, some of which are indispensable to the generation of new writing, end up invariably ‘‘grounded.’’ But what a ground this is, this takeoff point and landing strip for escapades in script! It is infused with all 56 Walter, the Critic 57 the arbitrariness, accident, volatility, and materiality of the language that it is. Culture is not only a locus, it is a metaphor. Like the self itself, it describes and circumscribes a space in which the effects of language and textuality rebound. There is no advantage to ignoring the metaphorics of culture in the same sense that there is little gain from categorically repudiating the appeal or the phenomena of selfhood and experience. Any turn toward culture in the effort to bracket questions and effects of language is, congenitally, an oversight, blindness in a de Manian sense. The meditation on culture and its relation to language by the Frankfurt School is one of the most intense and sustained to be registered by twentieth-century Western discourse. It is part of an ages-old contrapuntal exchange through which, on the one hand, language makes itself intelligible by means of cultural institutionality, while on the other, ideology constructs genealogical myths of language whose effect is to domesticate its workings while grounding it in a particular community.1 Over the engagement, the Auseinandersetzung, that also embraces the Frankfurt School, cultural institutions and individual writers have often devoted vast expenditures of energy to representations of the transfer or the interface between ideology and metaphysics, on the one hand, and the material dimensions, dirty and lowdown though they may be, of textuality on the other. Instances of this unavoidable cultural and discursive myth are legion. They extend from the Platonic allegory of the cave, to Hegel’s upending the undecidable and reciprocal play of forces in the ‘‘Force and the Understanding’’ and ‘‘Lordship and Bondage’’ passages of The Phenomenology of Spirit, to the nummo, the textually dynamic player-demigods of the Dogon cosmology as recounted in Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemme ̂li. As Walter Benjamin set about assembling his own pointed intervention as a lifelong reader, cobbling together his own platform as a messianic, that is, society-redeeming and transforming critic, he found it incumbent upon himself to address the same interface, whether described as an entry, a void, or a hopeless disjunction, that is figured in the above-named works. The textual evidence indicates a deep commitment on his part to adapting and extending the speculative philosophy that had been featured so prominently in his education and to the Romantic theory and aesthetics that still exercised such a hold on his on his sensibility. 58 The Task of the Critic His ultimate destination, I would argue, was to be an astonishingly erudite and literate ‘‘full-service’’ critic, one capable of rising responsively to any occasion or set of emergent historico-cultural conditions significantly affecting the future of culturally inflected and motivated life. Within the framework of the present constellation of essays, this adaptability, this commitment to responsiveness and responsibility toward the unfolding transcript of the political conditions and cultural articulations emerging within a broad arena, whether known as an economy or as a civilization, is the ultimate mark of the critic. In this sense, Benjamin was not merely one other critic or cultural commentator. He labored long and hard to exemplify a labor, a sociocultural posture and bearing, that he had delved deeply and ranged widely in his readings in order to conceptualize. Out of an explicitly critical positionality...