Complicity Critiques

We still understand [Louis Armstrong] so poorly because of his determination to swallow experience whole and taste it all and only then to spit out the bitter parts.

Stanley Crouch ¹

What follows is one effort (of several I am planning) to re spond to my students' political criticisms of critique in a seminar I teach on cultural studies and American studies. ² I begin with an examination of one major critical trend within recent work in cultural and literary studies to which I have partly subscribed, but which I believe merits tactical reconsideration--what I call complicity critiques. My discussion then endeavors to reassess an approach to cultural power about which I have been cautiously skeptical, but which I now see as crucial to engage--the affirmative capacity of culture to help produce incentives, energies, and ideas that promote progressive social change.

1. Where Does Your Cultural, Ideological, and Institutional Sugar Come From?
On the Traditions of Complicity Critiques

In 1992 Richard Brodhead sketched some of the "privileged thematics" and "protocols of reading" prominent in the increasingly politicized American literary history that gained some ascendency in the 1980s and 1990s (67-68). These thematics and protocols include the effort to evaluate how a "text [is] complicit in the power arrangements of dominant culture and how [it] might subvert them" (68). Here I aim to reflect on some complicity critiques that have informed some new American literary history and to consider aspects of the politics of what this politicized critique may sometimes overlook, underestimate, or undervalue. I should underscore that complicity critiques are historically specific--they change in response to changing conditions-- and that complicity critics have not always been in agreement about what constitutes the contradictions with which one's behavior, work, thinking, seeing, and feeling may be complicit. The general expansion of the critical imagining of the category of "the political"--especially since the 1960s--has also broadened critical understanding of how social actors can be complicit in a range of oppressions.

Perhaps the locus classicus that exemplifies key aspects of some well-known complicity critiques--a passage whose significance reverberates throughout the work of influential literary and cultural studies critics such as Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Alan Sinfield--is Walter Benjamin's statement about the task of historical materialism in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940), written not long before he committed suicide to escape capture by the Nazis. The "historical materialist," he explains, must try to view the "cultural treasures"--or "spoils"--that he or she may love and admire as a "distanced observer": "For such cultural riches, as he [or she] surveys them, everywhere betray an origin which he [or she] cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence, not merely to the toil of the great creators who have produced them, but equally to the anonymous forced labor of the latters' contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture which was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism" (qtd. in Jameson 281). The historical materialist, unbribed by beauty, wealth, comfort, status, or spurious transcendence, must "brush history" and perhaps his or her own ways of seeing "against the grain" by never losing sight of the conjunctural relationships between the "treasures" and the structures of power and contradictions that make their production possible or predictable (Benjamin 257).

This oft-cited passage is not without problems. Benjamin's abstraction--"cultural treasures"--seems to pertain to high culture. Benjamin does not speculate on how some nonbourgeois or nonruling class observers might view--or repudiate the value of--some of these treasures. His abstraction appears to recycle a victimology in its tacit assumption that the "prostrate bodies of . . . victims" of the "victors" do not or cannot develop a resistant, complex culture of their own (qtd. in Jameson 281). Benjamin does not foreground what he well knew: documents of high culture can themselves advance--albeit sometimes in contradictory ways--materialist critique. Nevertheless, the force of the passage is that it importunes...