The Medium is the Maker, Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies (review)

The Medium is the Maker is a playful enterprise. Wallace and Gromit greet the reader on the front cover, and a Mike Flanagan "custom" Flantoon anchors the back cover. But this slim volume also marks another chapter in Hillis Miller's long saga of navigating the perilous seas of Critical Theory. It abounds in paradoxes. While this book bears many traces of the author's previous work in theory and practice, the style and relation to his audience here are new ventures. While the book is a cheerful celebration of the "age of digitalization," its three featured writers all undertook their labors of the imagination without benefit of digital prostheses (Derrida resisting email to the end), but all played the role of "mediums." And yet Miller confesses that "this present book is possible only because it is being written on a computer connected to the Internet." This is one sense in which the medium is the maker (or perhaps facilitator), but the word "medium" in the title's reformulation of the McLuhan mantra carries a number of different senses, from Aristotle's initial division of the three ways of representation, the first of which is usually translated "by different media" (en hetérois mimeĩsthai, Aristotle having no abstract noun for the term) on to the most sophisticated of modern communication devices. But the term will also be used for a "spiritualist" who handles communications with the dead. (The neologism "telepathic" in the subtitle also deserves a word: the cognate noun was coined by the polymathic F. W. H. Myers at the first session of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, along with its twin term "telesthesia," which as their etymologies suggest, stood for feelings and sensations conveyed at a distance and "paranormally"; but telepathy soon acquired a cognitive force that could be called "mind reading.")

For more than half a century now, J. Hillis Miller has been a major player on the American academic scene. The author or editor of more than thirty books and monographs, he has also served effectively as a spokesman for the better instincts of his profession, notably as the president of the Modern Language Association of America, a somber honor that he turned into a bully pulpit. In fact, with the appearance of The J. Hillis Miller Reader (2005), he has attained a lay status somewhat equivalent to a Vatican beatification. The jacket copy of the Reader baldly announces that Miller is "the single most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century." Julian Wolfreys, the editor of that shrewd and helpful collection, begins his introduction much more modestly: "You can learn quite a lot about reading from J. Hillis Miller." And he reminds us that close reading is a "difficult, impossible, always fallible, but necessary" activity.

Miller's significance is clearly not merely a matter of longevity, productivity, and the occupancy of high offices. He has resisted the academic temptations to become a media personality, a university administrator, a syndicated blogger, or a cultural guru. Instead he has insisted on numerous occasions, "My métier is now and always has been 'literary studies'." For him this means reading, teaching, and writing. Thus early and late he has been, as Wolfreys suggests, an admirably responsive and responsible reader of both canonical literary texts and the major critical theorists of our time. Unlike many of the most influential of these critics, Miller does not hold a unique franchise on a single theoretical position, one to which the others then devoted a lifetime of defense, revision, and polemical skirmishes. Rather, he has been remarkably successful in interpreting, adapting, and then applying the theories of his colleagues and friends to the understanding of a broad, almost bewildering, range of literary texts. Thus he has been a "critic in motion" and, more exactly, an "applied theoretician." As such, he has served as a bellwether for several generations of younger critics and...