Phenomophobia, or Who's Afraid of Merleau-Ponty?

"Literary Criticism for the Twenty-first Century": that special topic took up thirty-six double-columned pages of the October 2010 issue of PMLA. According to Jonathan Culler's introduction to the issue, the section had its origins in an MLA session organized by the Division on Literary Criticism. In addition to papers read at the session, there were more than fifty open submissions, but only one was accepted by the editorial board of PMLA.¹ What does that say about the state of criticism in the early twenty-first century? Confusion? No clear sense of direction? Banality? In the event, nine papers were published, some of them general submissions that were redirected to this special issue. Not one of the nine contributors uses the term "phenomenology." Not one. Why should that be so?

A possible reason may be Culler's identifying "the motif of the return" as the defining characteristic of twenty-first-century criticism, a return to previous concerns and methodologies, albeit with a difference in each case. Returns are the explicit subjects of three of the essays: a return to the political, to a purer Marxism (Jean-Jacques Lecercle); a return to deconstruction, but without the political edge, in effect a purer deconstruction (Richard Klein); and a return to poetics (Simon Jarvis). Supposedly new directions are mapped out in six other essays: cognitive science (Monika Fludernik), trauma theory (Shelly Rambo), aesthetics (Sianne Ngai), performance theory (Peggy Phelan), media studies (Meredith McGill and Andrew Parker), and literature and film (Ian Balfour). Or are these essays likewise variations on the motif of the return? If so, the absence of phenomenology is all the more striking, since the phenomenologies practiced in this issue of Criticism represent a return to, and an updating, of early- to mid-twentieth-century concerns and methodologies in the work of Husserl (1859-1938), Heidegger (1889-1976), and Merleau-Ponty (1908-61). Something else must be at work in the neglect of phenomenology.

Implicitly, but not explicitly, phenomenology informs at least three of the essays in PMLA's "Literary Criticism for the Twenty-first Century": Ngai on three aesthetic categories (the zany, the cute, and the interesting), Jarvis on poetics, and Phelan on performance theory. One reason aesthetic categories are neglected, Ngai notes, is the subjective element: "Like literary affects or tones, aesthetic categories such as cute and zany are thus unusually vulnerable to accusations of subjectivism and impressionism."² Jarvis's argument for an "historical poetics" calls for attention to the repertory of "expressive practices" available in a given time and place. The available techniques work like melodic and rhythmic phrases in music and brush technique in painting, practices that Jarvis reads as "gestures": "The devices of verse have no fixed effects, but readers are seduced into conjecturing effects with them as they notice poets sinking the most powerful thoughts and feelings into even the most abject little phonetic and printed bits and pieces."³ Phelan stresses the affects that attend enactment as opposed to words. In all three cases, the focus is placed not on texts but on relationships, not on words but on the interpreters of those words and on the circumstances of interpretation. But phenomenology goes unnamed.

Why this avoidance? Why this unspoken phenomophobia? Why this reluctance to name phenomenology and embrace it as a critical method? After all, MS Word 2010 has finally recognized "phenomenological" as a word that doesn't call for a dotted red underline. Why, then, should attention to the physical, psychological, and social circumstances of interpretation produce so much anxiety? Let me suggest five possible reasons:

1. 1. The Gertrude Stein effect. Some critics fear that there is no "there" there. Despite thirty-five years of deconstruction, many critics need a text as the object of analysis— something right there in front of them, something just as present as a well-wrought urn was in New Criticism, something that can be gestured toward even as it is being rejected. Phenomenology does not concern itself with objects of this sort; it is concerned with relationships, between subject and object, among objects, among subjects.

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