Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture

“Criticism . . . resists cautiously all the seductions of intelligence. It tries to be as intelligent as possible, but always fails in order to humble the reason, to teach it humility as the objective correlative to ignorance and failure” (185). Paul Bové’s description of what criticism meant for R. P. Blackmur is also his prescription for it now. Criticism, he says, ought to be a place where reason can have its humility checked.

Or is criticism already such a place? The humbling of reason is one way of characterizing the aim of literary theory, whose rise to disciplinary dominance is one thread twisting triumphantly through these eleven essays. It might seem, then, that our discipline’s version of reason has already been humbled. Bové, who is almost as uneasy representing theory as Blackmur would be standing in for the New Criticism, will have none of this whiggishness. But he flees from progress straight into the entanglement that gives his prose its distinctive richness. His Foucauldian horror at the notion that criticism might participate in some advancement of knowledge collides headon with his delight at theory’s overthrow of its humanist opponents. The result is a forceful and expansive diagnosis of the persistent arrogance that, he implies, even a theoretically informed criticism remains unwilling to surrender.

Critics may think they are mastering discourse, Bové says, but in fact “discourse always masters critics as they become what they are” (xii–xiii). The real benefit of the concept of discourse is that it too teaches us humility. Of course, it is impossible to avoid a certain pride in how well one has mastered this lesson in the impossibility of mastery. The pride is observable, for example, when Bové joins with his humanist antagonists in condemning the discipline’s “professionalization.” Professionalization is coterminous with objectionable ambitions to mastery and totality. In a supplement to Foucault, Bové argues that professional criticism belongs to those “totalizing oppositional discourses . . . such as psychoanalysis and Marxism” that “are inescapably caught up in the same disciplining formations as penology, medicine, and law” (13). This comparison makes some underhandedly self-aggrandizing claims for the power of the humanities, which thereby take on the sinister but useful glamour of more socially consequential fields without any evidence being offered that they are indeed equally significant. At the same time, the anti-totalizing perspective that registers this point becomes evidence of the virtue of the humanities, so to speak—proof that, like humanists of old, we are still somehow purer at heart than the world of discipline and punishment, getting and spending, around us.

Bové doesn’t follow Foucault into anti-Marxism, but his effort to derive a left-wing politics from post-structuralist skepticism runs into exemplary complications. Choosing “tyrannical totalization” (111) as his chief exhibit of What is Wrong with the World, he allies himself with Blackmur’s skepticism about all orthodoxies (18), but he also distracts from his vocal antagonism to “capitalism,” which works these days as much by fragmenting as by totalizing. Trying to force Marx and Foucault together, as he does in a phrase like “capitalist, disciplinary society” (44), means not asking interesting questions about whether capitalism entails disciplinarity, whether disciplinarity entails capitalism, whether the two are joined only contingently, or for that matter whether either one might bring with it some consequences that are politically desirable. In much the same way, both capitalism and disciplinarity slide imperceptibly into the state, another surreptitiously totalizing term better suited to generalized outrage than to properly political discriminations. In a long and subtle analysis of the New Critics in relation to the New Deal, Bové argues that “the extended state system . . . never allows them to escape into true opposition, but manages almost always to affiliate them to state institutions wherein the oppositional practices can be carried out” (141). In this vacuum-abhorring universe, there is no room, for example, for the relatively positive role of the federal government vis-à-vis the civil-rights movement in the...