The Limits of Critique by Rita Felski

Author:Rita Felski [Felski, Rita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780226294179
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Works of metafiction (Pale Fire) openly advertise and revel in these gamelike features of interpretation, but all texts can be read along similar lines by being treated as imaginary opponents to be bested rather than voices to be trusted. We scan the text for weak spots and vulnerable areas that will yield to our critical probes and pliers. The payoff of such an approach includes the delight of deploying skills and plotting strategy; critics strive to devise intellectual moves that fit the protocols of academic reading while also looking for new ways to outwit an adversary. They engage in a series of moves that fuse convention and innovation, striving to become ever more skillful players, to outfox not only the text but also other critics. What drives such maneuvers is not just an allegiance to ethical or political values but also aesthetic criteria of adroitness, ingenuity, sophistication, intricacy, and elegance. The critic, as Matei Calinescu remarks, is “involved in a competitive game in which he or she wants to be the first to have made certain interesting, subtle, compelling, and quotable observations.”49

Game theory, however, is flawed by its tendency to conceive of players as purely rational actors. In a recent survey of Victorian criticism, Anna Maria Jones wonders why the field has been so overrun by Foucauldian styles of suspicious reading. Her answer: a hermeneutics of suspicion is also a hermeneutics of sensation. That is to say, a critic’s sifting of textual clues and ferreting out of hidden truths offers pleasures that not only intellectual but also emotional. Suspicious reading generates a gripping story line in which the experience of suspense is followed by the ultimate pleasures of revelation and explanation. Here, Jones proposes, criticism borrows not only from detective fiction but also from the Victorian sensation novel, a genre that triggered emotional and visceral responses in its readers. Foucauldian critics, like the nineteenth-century texts they analyze, take delight in the revelation of shocking secrets, the pursuit of guilty parties, and the detection of hidden crimes. In both cases, the most obvious answer is never the right one, and the counterintuitive explanation is the one most highly rewarded. We write and read suspiciously not only in the hope of acquiring more critical knowledge but because we are addicted to the charge of narrative suspense and revelation. Uncovering the hidden import of seemingly inconsequential clues drives the pleasure of both fiction and criticism.50

As we are coming to see, the tone of suspicious reading is mixed and multihued, its motives often ambiguous and equivocal. On the one hand, the practice of critique harbors an unmistakable kernel of antagonism, as we proceed to arm ourselves against imagined adversaries to whom we impute malicious or hostile intent. Critical prose may take on a triumphalist cast, as we take pride in casting off our former naïveté, congratulate ourselves on our newly acquired perspicacity, feel sharper, shrewder, more knowing, less vulnerable. Suspicious reading, as Sedgwick remarks, pivots on a sense of prideful self-vindication, a trust in the inherent merits of critical exposure.

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