Editor's Column: On Critical Dialogues

This issue contains two different contributions to our section on Dialogues, an exchange between Barbara Olson and Jonathan Culler about Culler's essay on "Omniscience" published in January 2004, and a collaborative effort by Jan Baetens and Kathryn Hume following up on Hume's essay on "Narrative Speed" published in May 2005. I recommend both Dialogues for the ways in which they advance the conversations about their respective issues. Here I'd like to use Baetens and Hume's description of their Dialogue as a starting point for some reflections on critical dialogues more generally and on potential uses of our Dialogue section.

Baetens and Hume describe their essay as "an attempt to remediate the traditional 'reply' to a scholarly article, followed by a 'reply to the reply' by the first author" (351). This description implies that they believe their mode of collaboration is superior to the mode of turn-taking—at least for their case. I infer (which means that Baetens and Hume do not necessarily imply) three reasons underlying their belief, two having to do with the nature of the argument itself, the other having to do with the spirit of critical exchange. (1) Baetens and Hume collaborate because they can, and (2) because they recognize that speaking together will make a stronger case for their views than speaking by turns. In other words, although Baetens did not endorse every feature of Hume's original article, when the two of them explored his response, they were able to agree on the new formulations articulated in this issue. Presenting their conclusions together gives those views greater force. (3) Baetens and Hume collaborate because they believe it provides a better model for critical exchange than the more oppositional turn-taking model. Collaboration fosters cooperation and a willingness to alter one's position, while turn-taking fosters conflict and a tendency to defend entrenched positions.

The first two reasons and the third are closely but not inextricably connected. When two critics can come to agreement about the basic issues, they can more readily conduct their dialogue with a spirit of cooperation. But without much trouble we can also imagine a scenario in which Baetens and Hume (or two other critics engaged in a different dialogue) are unable to agree sufficiently to write a collaborative piece, yet are still able to take their turns in a way that reflects such a spirit. Consequently, we can separate the degree of agreement or disagreement between critics from the spirit in which they conduct a dialogue. That separation, in turn, opens up the question of whether the spirit of cooperation should be a touchstone we use to evaluate dialogues. In other words, should we expect better dialogues to be conducted in this spirit and inferior dialogues to be conducted in a more oppositional spirit?

My answer is no. But not, I hasten to add, because I have anything against the spirit of cooperation. My answer is no because I think it would be a mistake to hold out any single model of critical dialogue as best for all exchanges. Sometimes cooperation and mutual movement toward a new position will be most productive. But at other times sharp disagreement and the corresponding effort to find new and better reasons for one's position will be more productive. Sometimes a middle way between cooperation and the pursuit of new reasons for one's positions will work best. And so on for other possible dialogic relations.

At the same time, each way has its risks. The risk of a commitment to cooperation is that the participants find an illusory common ground because they paper over important differences. The risk of defending entrenched positions is that one's ego becomes overly invested in the endeavor; when both parties fall victim to this risk then the exchange can become less about the issues and more about a power struggle between clashing egos—and at that point, the exchange is no longer worthy of the name dialogue. The risk of the middle way is that neither participant fully engages the ideas of the other, as each thinks "I can concede...