2018 in taste and appetite - 1: Reading

If there was ever an "end" to meta-narratives it was only a brief moment, enjoyed by the few who could name it as such — an alibi for those with resources and the freedom to spend them. For the rest of us, common stories continue but with renewed urgency. Climate change presents a very real and tangible meta-narrative, even if we don't yet have eyes to see or ears to hear. What we value, consume and celebrate in this moment will forever be relativized by our current way of relating to the planet and the destructive systems that plunder it. History, it seems, will not be kind to us in 2018, no matter how much music we listened to or how many books we read.

We all have rituals that help us cope with the forces that lie beyond our control. Each day I check my news feed because I want to see a breakthrough, a way to avert the coming catastrophe or halt this environmental assault on lives around the globe. But this expression of anxiety — my need to keep up with the news cycle — usually makes me more anxious. Time passes. Sometimes I simply want that impending limit, however destructive, to arrive and prove once and for all that our current trajectory is doomed. In those moments, which are frequent, I realize the pessimism of my appetite. This is not fruitful behaviour, nor is it a healthy place to be. 

Much of what appears in the list below prevented me from lingering there, on the edge of my news feed, for too long. Twitter helped but it also didn't help.

This year, I spent a fair amount of time reading about aesthetics, mostly from Marxist perspectives. Terry Eagleton's major study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic was a springboard for readings from Kant, Schiller, Marcuse, Sontag, Ranciére, Ngai and others. Those readings, mostly essay-length, were left off the list. The big highlights of my year in reading were Billy-Rae Belcourt's poetry collection, This Wound is a World, Miriam Toew's Women Talking and John Berger's posthumous collection, Landscapes. 

I was able to see Belcourt read and discuss his writing with Rosanna Deerchild this past November. His ability to weave through poetics, theory and the politics of indigeneity left a deep impression on me. I've been following his work since finding him in GUTS magazine's "futures" issue. At once personal and philosophical, Belcourt's writing navigates around and through the loneliness rendered by colonization — a form of negativity that "stalks" indigeneity — all the while gesturing toward a future that can't be contained by settler logics. Belcourt thinks deeply about his writing practice, at an almost ontological level, but he avoids the pitfalls of esotericism or academic jargon. I look forward to reading more of his work down the road. 

Miriam Toews also came through Winnipeg this summer to promote her new book. I've never seen McNally Robinson so crowded. Women Talking takes its premise from horrific real-world events — over several years, hundreds of women and girls living in a conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia were drugged and raped in their sleep. Toews's novel imagines a scenario in which the men of the colony have all gone to town, leaving the women behind to determine whether stay and fight or quickly pack up their belongings and flee. I found the novel quite moving and read it quickly. But in discussing the book with other Mennonites, I've come to realize that many of them have complicated feelings about the book and the way that it frames its subject matter. More than once I heard the complaint that Toews was stealing a story that doesn't belong to her and conflating cultural categories. How many of them actually read it, before levelling those critiques, is another question. I'm suspicious of those who treat Toews as inauthentic or even dangerous because she is "outside" the Mennonite church proper. Her work has always fallen somewhere between truth and fiction, and I can't help thinking that at least part of the Mennonite critique of Miriam Toews is couched in sexism. (It's not uncommon for Rudy Wiebe to be held up as the shining example of what a Mennonite writer should be.) Women Talking raises the stakes, helpfully for some, arguably less helpfully for others. 

In 2018, I continued to read more John Berger. Landscapes collects essays from his long career of art criticism but it's his discussion of drawing, which emerges in several essays, that interests me most. "For the artist," he writes, "drawing is discovery. . . . A line, an area of tone, is important not really because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see." Perhaps that is why I continue to draw, why it so often lifts my spirits. Drawing, at its best, is for me a practice of remaining open to the possibilities of whatever comes next. Often the effect of this practice arrives like the opposite of anxiety. 

Poetry
This Wound is a World by Billy-Rae Belcourt
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Fiction
Women Talking by Miriam Toews (2018)
The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère
No Strangers in Exile by Hans Harder
Little Fish by Casey Plett (2018)

Non-fiction
Landscapes by John Berger
Stolen City by Owen Toews (2018)
Martin Heidegger by George Steiner
Civil Imagination by Ariella Azoulay
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Mourning Becomes the Law by Gillian Rose
Aesthetics and Politics by Adorno et al.

Comics
Why Art? by Eleanor Davis (2018)
Beverly by Nick Drnaso
Wendy by Walter Scott
Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero by Michael Deforge

Something conclusive

-->Last month, I posted the first draft of the introduction to my thesis on Milton's post-Restoration poetry and the theology of reading. Here, at long last, is the first draft of its conclusion. I cut some of the text from my intro and included it near the end, so some of my closing remarks may seem familiar.

From a contemporary perspective, the glaring irony of Milton’s “tolerationist” pamphlet is impossible to ignore. The 1673 tract’s title page is dominated by one word, which for Milton marks the limit of Protestant reading: “POPERY.” Of True Religion stakes its claims on Protestantism’s absolute opposition to the “Romish Church” and a distillation of the “main Principles of the true Religion: that the Rule of true Religion is the Word of God only: and that their Faith ought not to be an implicit faith, that is, to believe, though as the Church believes, against or without express authority of Scripture.” If Protestants were to adhere to these two principles, Milton continues, not only would they avoid the various “Debates and Contentions, Schisms and Persecutions, which too oft have been among them”; they would also “more firmly unite against the common adversary.” True heresy, we discover, lies not in differences of worship or in errors of doctrine, but is in the “Will and choice profestly against Scripture.” Reading scripture is a way of resisting spiritual idleness—that is, untested or “implicit faith”—which is as much an obstacle to salvation as it is a gateway for “popish” superstition.

But so long as all these profess to set the Word of God only before them as the Rule of faith and obedience; and use all diligence and sincerity of heart, by reading, by learning, by study, by prayer for Illumination of the holy Spirit, to understand the Rule and obey it, they have done what man can do.

Based on these qualifications such men, “the Authors or late Revivers of all these Sects and Opinions,” are not God’s enemies but should instead be considered “painful and zealous laborers in his Church.” Conscience appears throughout Milton’s writing as a space of negotiation and liberty, but in Of True Religion, we confront its limits, for “we have no warrant to regard Conscience which is not grounded on Scripture.” Thus Protestant opposition to Popery can dispense with notions of privacy and the supposed rights of the individual. The fundamental problem with Catholicism, explains Milton, is it always decides in advance of the individual; and thus, by its very nature, the institution cannot begin to understand or appreciate the realm of the conscience as a textual, interpretive space.

While Milton’s politics of reading turned from construction to destruction, following end of the England’s Commonwealth and Charles II’s Restoration, his preoccupation with textual interpretation remained consistent throughout his career. My first chapter explored how Milton’s early writing fashions reading as a form of labor that is necessarily unproductive. Not only does reading replace “work” as a means of attaining the free gift of salvation, it also has the potential to unite England in the collective labor of Reformation, a political project whose value exceeds any kind of mercenary exchange. Along with its vision of a unified nation of readers, Areopagitica clearly spells out why this labor of interpretation is an ethical imperative:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.

By disrupting this process, the licensing of books would remove this “working out” of salvation from the purview of believers. It thus constitutes “a particular disesteem to every knowing person alive, and most injurious to the written labors and monuments of the dead . . . [and] seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation.” Reading is ennobling, in this sense, because it instills a sense of shared value, an anticipation of surplus in the form of Reformation, among its participants.

At this early point in his career, Milton’s anticipation of social capital was equivalent to the advance of England’s Reformation, a conspicuous cause, which he imagined as an international competition. “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live,” he wrote in the parliamentary address of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. With his divorce tracts, Milton’s conception of interpretive labor as unlimited and unregulated rests on a contradiction between private leisure and public vocation that only the “law of charity,” embodied in the interpretive posture of Christ, can resolve. Milton’s free market model requires that conscience be active in public life, but as Areopagitica reveals, some degree of leisure is necessary for conscientious activity in the first place. At the authorial level, the licensor represents the threat of an “unleisured” participant. Unlike those whose material labor is subsumed by unquestioning output of the printing house—a cause that unites author, publisher, and the wage-labor of the print shop—the licensor impinges on the process of production from outside of it. In this way, Milton’s logic of Protestant interpretation—his strong opposition to any kind of extra-textual authority—plays itself out in the material conditions of early modern book production, thus revealing the secret alliance between reading and commerce in the bourgeois individual.

Since Stanley Fish, Milton has often been associated with a horizon of reading that is untranscendable. In Chapter 1’s analysis of Areopagitica, I sought to historicize this appeal to interpretation as an immanent requirement of bourgeois ideology, which, at the expense of material labor, draws on the tensions of Protestantism (a contradiction between grace and works) while adopting its aversion to extra-biblical mediation—usually in the form of custom or regulation. If critics like Fish fail to give proper attention to the material conditions of book production, many advocates of print history are equally at fault for adhering to narrative of modernization that treats the printed text as a complete or uniform object. The material irregularity of the 1671 edition of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes has for this reason been glossed as an error, the correction of which depends on the interpretive agency of astute readers. In my second chapter, I suggested that this depiction of the reader as a material corrector—that is, an extension of the print shop’s imperative to present a text available for purchase—must be considered alongside Satan’s method of reading, which not only confuses the Book of Nature with the Word of God, but seeks to arrive at a position of secure, extra-biblical knowledge. If the “paradise within” that Milton deploys at the end of Paradise Lost is depicted in Paradise Regain’d and hinted at in Samson Agonistes, it is anything but an inactive place. Instead, in Milton’s later works, readers encounter an expansive space of conscientious reading and “revolving,” a space that Samson violently opens and the Son actively redeems. As I have sought to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, the production of such space, in the act of reading, was also a political and theological strategy. The 1671 poems, in particular, work to reveal the contradiction between faithful reading and the mass resignation to history encouraged by the Restoration state.

Milton’s late poems attempt to make textual interpretation constitutive of the radical Protestant subject, a ground of potential for an undisclosed future. Both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes reveal how the textual condition that Milton is trying to produce in his audience is a historically contingent production, one that is ultimately hegemonic. By drawing recent discussions of book history and print culture together with contemporary Milton criticism’s emphasis on the politics of reading, I have tried to show how the kind of interpretive agency emphasized by Fish and other reception theorists arises from a distinctly Protestant hermeneutic, which Milton assumes and alters to respond to the social, economic, and political conflicts of seventeenth century England. My third and final chapter focused on the disjunction between strategies of the state—premised on the visibility of its subjects—and Milton’s fit reader. In the shift from audience to reader in the poems of 1671, I located Milton’s attempt to retain the social (as it first appears in Areopagitica) as form of potential that depends on the willingness of his readers to inhabit a specifically textual space. The original edition of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes works to recondition readers for precisely this vocation. Samson Agonistes, in particular, draws the representational space of the public theatre into opposition with the textual space of the English Protestant subject. To explain this contradiction and its relationship to the brutal destruction of Samson’s final act, I relied on Walter Benjamin’s theory of divine violence and briefly touched on the material format of the first edition of Milton’s last poems. The point of this violence, I argued, is not simply to produce a moment of ethical ambivalence for the conscientious reader or to provide an instructive model of patience to Dissenting Protestants; it can also be found in the 1671 volume’s formal features. Samson Agonistes, in particular, delivers an interpretive situation that is radically incompatible with the immediate situation of his audience. It requires, in other words, something other than the visible forms of identity and commemoration that are relied upon by Israel and its Philistine oppressors. Part of what makes the poem so compelling is the way in which it works as a formal analogue to Samson, transforming a popular mode of entertainment from the inside out. In this context, reading becomes synonymous with iconoclasm, opening up new spaces of subjective freedom and deliberation. With this in mind, the Omissa assumes a new kind of significance.             

Not only does this material feature require the reader to become an active agent in the textual correction, echoing the call of Areopagitica to collaborative reconstruction of Truth; it also produces a space of interpretation that cannot be thought apart from the published text—that is, against the formal constraints and distractions of popular spectacle, the Omissa represents a strategy of containment for the reader, thus extending the interpretive situation that Samson violently delivers to Milton’s fit reader. More complicated, however, is the relationship between different texts, the priority of God’s Word over the Book of Nature, which is challenged in Samson Agonistes by Israel’s continual misreading of the occasion. For Milton, Samson’s moment cannot be properly messianic. Due to his historical circumstances, Israel’s liberator cannot possess an understanding of kairos necessary to distinguish between secular occasion (chronos) and divine guidance. In Paradise Regain’d, however, the Son resists Satan’s deployment of the familiar emblem of Occasion. Where the captive Samson understands time as punctured by moments of opportunity for collective action, the Son’s recalls his personal development as a sequence of events, which allows him realize the fullness of time at the moment he overcomes private temptation. The result is the beginning of his public ministry. Following Agamben, my final chapter understood kairos (or messianic time) not as an additional time, but instead as the negative relation between time and its end, a relation that reconditions all time. Agamben’s conception of time provides us with a new way of approaching the counter-intuitive sequencing of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in the 1671 edition. Milton’s poem is not simply a classical tragedy, but a messianic revisioning of the Old Testament story, which responds to the limitations of Restoration England and points to the possibility of a future remnant of readers. By articulating this utopian valence within Milton’s 1671 poems, my aim has not been to evade the historical conditions of their material production and reception; it has been, rather, to historicize the sort of reading subject that Milton’s texts work to produce: a fit reader, perhaps best represented in the class potential of the “middling sort,” which rose to new prominence through the social and political crises of the mid seventeenth century.

Milton’s literary achievements rest upon his refashioning of Protestant hermeneutics into a condition of active dissent and revolt against a coercive state, but they also suggest the inextricable link between theology and radical politics in the early modern period. In closing, I want to suggest that this irreducible link is analogous utopian energy that Ernst Bloch famously located in the Radical Reformer, Thomas Muntzer. For Bloch, Muntzer’s theological basis of revolt “legitimize[d] the demand for communal autonomy, exemplified in the call for the right to decide issues of correct religious doctrine, to elect the minister and to allocate tithes; and it [was] ultimately made the yardstick of social and political order.” Bloch looks to Muntzer for utopian forms of immediate, non-alienated experience that could be produced by working through worldly relations. In his recent discussion of Bloch, Alberto Toscano concludes that one cannot simply reject theological positions as anachronistic. Instead, he writes, we need to understand and preserve the affective content that theology conditions, and the transformative collective energies that “drive the situated negation and transcendence of the social status quo.”  Against the background of Restoration, Milton’s multi-faceted consideration of reading in his late poetry similarly cuts in both directions. Milton, as Christopher Hill has repeatedly emphasized, “was not a modern liberal Christian.”

If reading constitutes an ethical activity, whether through the imagination of “alien subjectivities” or through the experience of self-contradiction, it remains an ideological practice, the value and form of which have changed over time.[1] Reading produces subjects because it is fundamentally responsive and conditional: that is, following the insight of Louis Althusser, like religious ideology, reading, in its modern guise, “is indeed addressed to individuals, in order to ‘transform them into subjects,’ by interpellating the individual.” Despite the vast difference of their historical circumstances, Althusser’s description of subjectivity is also the insight upon which Milton’s 1671 poems build: reading is the condition of production for free Protestant subjects.

In Milton’s increasing attention to “fit” readers, I located the potential of a non-identical collective, the subject of recent discussions by contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains) and Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism). St Paul represents for both critics a figure that demonstrated the ability to think the social or “universal” without recourse to some prior condition of belonging, whether a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a class. Rather than objective victory, it is “subjective victory,” writes Badiou, “that produces hope.” A subject is born out of her commitment to what Badiou calls, a “truth event,” while the corresponding domain of ethics, in this program, is determined by a subject’s fidelity or faithfulness to such an event. According to Badiou, this is what the Resurrection of Christ means to St Paul. If, as I have argued, Milton can be said to oppose a certain “identitarian” logic in his conception of reading, it is only because he opposes such activity to government surveillance and state repression. This to say, the definition of reading that these chapters articulate is strategic and historically contingent rather than absolute. For Badiou, contemporary understandings of “identity” refer to a static condition of belonging, while “subjectivity,” by contrast, entails a responsive and excessive kind of agency.

Early modern Protestant poetry highlights the subject’s reception of God’s free gift of grace as a political and theological problem. Against laws that divide, enumerate, and name, and against the sacramental tradition of Roman Catholicism, the fit readers of Milton’s texts work within defined limits to produce a space in which right reception (that is, free reception) can take place. Badiou’s analysis of St Paul’s universal subject locates a similar logic. In his reading of Romans 6:14 (“for you are not under law, but under grace”), Badiou understands a restructuring of the subject according to a logic of becoming: “For the ‘not being under the law’ negatively indicates the path of the flesh as suspension of the subject’s destiny, while ‘being under grace’ indicates the path of the spirit as fidelity to the event.” Here a potential dissolution of various identities is indicated first by a negative declaration; the “but,” on the other hand, “indicates the task, the faithful labor in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event (whose name is ‘grace’) are the coworkers.” As Terry Eagleton has recently suggested, Badiou’s work “grasp[s] the vital point that faith articulates a loving commitment before it counts as a description of the way things are.” Perhaps, then, Milton’s late poems can, in fact, be understood as signaling a turn to faith. We should, however, be careful not to dismiss such faith as a departure from politics. If, following Badiou, England’s Reformation can be considered a truth event for Milton, then the fit reader is one who remains open and loyal to its unseen potential. It is in this sense that the young poet’s stirring advice to his compatriots in Areopagitica, can again be imagined echoing throughout the spiritual darkness that, for Milton and other Dissenting readers, characterized the Restoration:

The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitering of a bishop, and the removing of him from off the Presbyterian shoulders that will make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the church and in the rule of life both economical and political be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind.

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[1] The argument for reading as constitutive of ethical activity remains prominent, despite the fact that contemporary readers have, for the most part, continued to treat books as objects for private consumption. The phrase “alien subjectivites” comes from Feisal G. Mohamed’s recent book, Milton and the Post-Secular Moment: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). In his second chapter, Mohamed treats the ethics of reading in Areopagitica as the product of rhetorical excess, “a cover for its ideology of hegemony of an emerging reforming class.” Against this, he follows Gayatri Spivak, who grounds the possibility of an ethics in unrecognized Other, and suggests that “Reading is not only an ethical activity, it is the ground of ethical activity in its initiation of the call by which positive political change can occur, because it is only through the kind of reading sometimes fostered in the humanities that we are invited to imagine alien subjectivities.” As much as reading might be an ethical activity, it is also an ideological procedure carried out on an ideological object. Although I find Mohamed’s attempt to “desecularize” Milton compelling, this appeal to an ethics of openness that is grounded on the practice of reading, often takes the neutrality of reading for granted. Any discussion of Milton’s ethics of reading must also contend with Of True Religion, where such ethics confront their limits. With Milton, in other words, we have seen that reading is not a posture of postmodern pluralism, but a formal practice that is conditioned by its opposition to other types of cultural consumption.

Milton, Reading, and Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence"

Violence, in Benjamin’s theory, occurs at the instance that any positive law is put into place. “Law-instating violence” falls under the category of “mythic violence” because it unfolds arbitrarily, as though by fate. “Law-preserving violence” is a byproduct of mythic violence; it is tautological in the sense that it legitimates violence for the sake of its own name. It reproduces the law by re-asserting its binding function through state institutions and policing. These overlapping forms of violence work together to produce a subject accountable to the law. Benjamin’s theory of divine violence attempts to articulate a form of violence that occurs outside of this framework and, similarly, outside of the instrumental logic of means and ends that defines the activity of its agents. In her reading of Benjamin’s essay, Judith Butler highlights the distinction between the guilt necessary to legal accountability, and the divine violence of the Jewish God who, for Benjamin, is “decidedly not punitive.” Rather than a guilt-inducing law, she writes, Benjamin understands the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” as

mandating only that individual struggle with the ethical edict [that is] communicated by the imperative. This is an imperative that does not dictate, but leaves open the modes of its applicability, the possibilities of its interpretation, including the conditions under which it may be refused.

The commandment is not coercive, but is rather an occasion for interpretive struggle, from which, Benjamin writes, “no judgment of the deed can be derived.” As he acknowledges in the essay’s conclusion, divine violence will not be recognizable with the certainty that can be attached to mythic violence “because the expiatory power of violence is not visible to men.”  Benjamin’s definition thus helps us to articulate the moment of transition that Samson’s destruction initiates.

Rather than producing a site of free interpretation for his audience, I want to suggest that Samson’s violence reproduces a textual space: a space of reading and struggle, premised on the destruction of theatrical spectacle. Indeed, a similar kind of operation is at work in Milton’s 1671 publication. In a recent essay for the PMLA, Daniel Shore notes how Milton’s rhetorical strategy in the combat of idolatry is not to destroy idols, but to preserve such monuments by putting them on display for his readers. “Like errors more generally,” he writes, “idols must be singled out, materially preserved, and made available for ‘survay’ and ‘scanning.’” Milton’s late poetry, in particular, finds him countering his opponents by reinscribing them in the material text, thus reintroducing them to an active ground of biblical hermeneutics. The point is to deliver an interpretive situation to his audience that reveals the contradiction of their present political moment. No surprise, then, that Milton’s preface to Samson Agonistes is preoccupied with the development of a reading audience against the popular appetite for theatrical spectacle. Rather than a revolution in form, however, Milton’s description sees the poem as a reformation of classical elements. Scolding his contemporaries for having embraced the “intermixing” of comic and tragic elements on the Elizabethan stage, Milton presents Samson Agonistes in opposition to common taste and public opinion, working against the grain, not simply “to gratify the people,” but by raising “pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those such-like passions . . . stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well-imitated.” At once gesturing back to the Greek tradition and forward to the cathartic potential of his dramatic poem, Milton’s preface reconfigures the genre specifically for an audience of readers.

Although Samson Agonistes takes a dramatic form, the author’s preface makes it clear that his work is not to be publicly performed. Rather, the poem is a text awaiting collective interpretation within a culture defined by theatrical representation and architectural restoration. This formal opposition is reproduced within the poem, where, as I’ve mentioned already, the public visibility of Samson’s labor conditions its reception as idolatry for the Israelites and divine proof for the Philistines. At the poem’s ideological centre, is the Philistine temple. “The building,” relays the Messenger,

was a spacious theaterHalf round on two main pillars vaulted high, With seats where all the lords and each degree
Of sort, might sit in order to behold. (1605-8)

The sight of Samson in this highly charged political space is enough to excite the Philistine audience into shouts of praise to Dagon. After he has fulfilled their requirements for performance, Samson is allowed to rest between “two massy pillars / That to the arched roof gave main support.” In what follows, Samson strikes his enemies precisely where they are most powerful: at the very site of cultural production. We, along with Manoa and the Chorus, are again reminded of our textual condition when the Messenger appears and begins to describe the actual violence of the event with a list of natural similes. Along with Manoa and the Chorus, the reader is left to imagine the disaster, prevented from accessing Samson’s inward state at the time of his performance. All that’s clear in the Messenger’s description is the class status of Samson’s victims:

Lords, ladies, captains, counselors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this but of each Philistian city round
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself;
The vulgar only scaped who stood without. (1653-59)

Here, Milton alters the biblical account, in which three thousand commoners, watching from the roof, die along with the Philistine nobility. Rather than a moment of transcendent irruption, Samson’s final act repositions his people, along with the vulgar Philistines, as readers within an immanent horizon. Samson embodies what Benjamin has called “the destructive character,” whose only activity is that of “clearing away.” This character is by nature iconoclastic. As Benjamin writes,

No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space, the place where the thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without its being filled.

On the Philistine stage, the identity of labor and idolatry achieves its apotheosis in Samson’s feats of strength: shows of power that would reaffirm the ruling elite but instead lead to its destruction. While it is common for traditionalists, writes Benjamin, to “pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them,” the destructive character passes on “situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them.” Samson’s demolition of the Philistine temple delivers a pivotal situation to his people; but, by the end of Samson Agonistes, they have again exchanged this textual space for the theatrical space of visible signs and proofs.

Stanley Fish and institutional evasion

 Departing from Wolfgang Iser, whose theory of reading remains tied to the notion of an objective (albeit "inaccessible") text that exists outside of interpretation, Stanley Fish is able to regulate the sort of free play which Roland Barthes celebrates by invoking the “interpretative strategies of interpretative communities.” Much like Barthes, Fish’s critical readings reveal how the objects of interpretation are always constructed (or “written”) by their readers. As he explains in Is There a Text in This Class?, such strategies are not so much “for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.” Fish’s aim is to demonstrate how textual ambiguity is resolved by the modifications we make to our own interpretive strategies, like, say, establishing a context or ground that exists at a deeper level than interpretation. In this way, his theory always returns the text to a constitutive indeterminacy, a function of the “reader” rather than the “text.” At times, however, it is difficult to see Fish’s overt lack of a critical position as little more than evasive. It becomes obvious enough when Fish attempts to break free from accusations of relativism: “No one can be a relativist, because no one can achieve the distance from his or her own beliefs and assumptions which would result in their being no more authoritative for him than for the beliefs and assumptions held by others."

A brief example of how this lack of position supports Fish’s critical program can be found in an essay on Milton’s Areopagitica. Here, Fish argues that the importance of the tract lies in its process of “rhetoric” or “persuasion”: the making of virtue by what is contrary. He then proceeds to distance his reading from Christopher Kendrick’s Marxist interpretation, finally endorsing both critical positions as equally tenable sites of literary criticism: an institution that both determines and enables each critic’s respective work. “No criticism is more political than any other,” writes Fish, “at least not in the sense one normally means by ‘political,’ an intervention in the affairs of the greater—non-academic—world.” Again, the strategy echoes Milton, for Fish’s point in saying this is to demonstrate how Kendrick’s “political reading” is a product of the institution for consumption by the institution; that is, that “there is nothing larger, that institutional life (of some kind or other) defines and exhausts those possibilities, but (and this is the crucial point) that those possibilities are rich and varied, and they are, in the only meaningful sense of the word, political.” There is, in short, no deeper (i.e., political) reading of a text than the one that is produced within an institutional politics; there are only differences in institutional life, which as Fish bluntly puts it, cannot even amount to a conscious choice but are rather given as the “groundless ground” of our very freedom as academics. "Groundless ground"? How convenient. This academic paradigm is beginning to resemble the very author that Barthes and Foucault had sought to demystify.

For Fish, like Barthes, the agency of the reader comes to resemble that unity which had traditionally belonged to the author; both are, of course, the products of certain institutional or ideological histories that we cannot break free of. As Barthes writes in “The Death of the Author,” “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biology, psychology; is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which a written text is constituted.” Fish makes a similar claim when describes his critical method as a kind of production that can only occur within the confines of the institution. “Rather than restoring and recovering texts,” he writes in his well-known essay “Interpreting the Variorium,” “I am in the business of making texts and teaching others to make them.” This is to repeat the basic claim he makes against the “political” readings of those like Kendrick; but the earlier example also illustrates how Fish’s appeal to the institution as “a definable set of commonly held assumptions” fails to account for the indeterminacy and debate that defines this supposedly untranscendable category. As Samuel Weber has argued, Fish’s concept of an interpretive community is “ultimately nothing but generalized, indeed universalized form of the individualist monad: autonomous, self-contained and internally unified, not merely despite but because of the diversity it contains.” When Fish opposes a critic like Kendrick, his strategy is to explain away their difference by placing it within the unity of the institution. In Weber’s words, “The institution thus emerges as the condition of possibility of controversy, and hence, as its arbiter."

starting off on the wrong foot

Today marks the beginning of my second term in Edmonton. It's been snowing nonstop for the past three days and it's hard to say when I'll begin biking again (residential streets are not a priority for snow plows). It looks like I'll be doing plenty of walking, so it's a good thing I found my old winter boots. Here's how my upcoming semester looks:

Shakespeare and the Commons
This graduate seminar in the Shakespearean drama takes up the challenge of much contemporary legal theorizing of the common, which urges a turning-back to the early modern period for reclamation of ideas and practices displaced by the rise of capitalism. Its principal premise is that one way to understand what early modernity might offer to a contemporary politics of the common is to turn back to one of the most important writers of the early modern period and investigate the various constructions of the common and the commons in his work. To study the various expressions of the common in Shakespeare is herefore to ask (with a specific writer as test-case) how literature contributes to the common, and thus to contribute to a theory of literature (if only by theorizing one of the things that it does). The course’s second premise is that we can only achieve this, in Shakespeare’s case, by bringing historical conceptions of the common and the commons to bear, and so the enterprise demands historical enquiry. We will therefore read, in addition to select plays by Shakespeare including Henry VI Part II, Timon of Athens, and King Lear, some early modern case material, the text of key early modern laws, and excerpts from debates in the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons. Some of our readings will be philosophical, some legal, but the emphasis will fall on our inquiry into the Shakespearean theatre as a forum for a practice of communing, for it is only by understanding the Shakespearean theatre as a historical practice of the ‘common’ that we help the early modern irrupt into and shape what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘altermodernity.’ Depending on student interest, we could build towards a study of contemporary constructions of the ‘creative commons’ in order to consider how we might, with our investigation of Shakespeare’s engagements with the ‘common,’ revise standard constructions of Shakespearean authorship (which continue to be bourgeois, Romantic, and Lockean).

Introduction to Cultural Theory
The primary aim of this course is to give graduate students in English an opportunity to focus on the complex relationships that exist between forms of power, the constitution of knowledge, and the activity of contemporary criticism. By working through the ideas and concepts deployed in a number of influential essays in cultural theory, the goal is to enhance students' critical vocabularies and to challenge the 'commonsense' of contemporary theory in an effort to help students develop new insights into their own projects and fields of interests. With respect to the study of culture, what can we do with the theoretical concepts and approaches we have inherited? What relevance do these have to contemporary circumstances and situations? What are the connections that we have identified between knowledge and power? And how do we imagine that criticism intervenes in this relationship to interrupt regimes of knowledge/power in order to create new ways of thinking, knowing, acting, and feeling? These are the kinds of macro-questions that will guide us as we work through key concepts in cultural theory across seven areas: culture, power, ideology, scale and space, time and history, subjectivity and collectivity.
 
 Aesthetics and Politics of Literary Reading
What it means to read a literary text has become a highly contested question. Are our readings determined by our cultural position, or are they an outcome of the power of literary language and our experience as readers? Stanley Fish argues that understanding is constrained by the institution we fi nd ourselves in. Interpreters “are situated in that institution, their interpretive activities are not free, but what constrains them are the understood practices and assumptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a language system” (Is There a Text 306). Fish goes on to argue that, for this reason, an interpretation is always to hand. Reading literature does not involve puzzling out its meaning: “sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious or at least accessible” (307). This representive view is open to challenge: according to Martha Nussbaum “good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles” (Poetic Justice 5). The reader who “is not at risk,” says Howard Brodkey, “is not reading.”
While these contrasting approaches also have much to say about the role of criticism and theory, and the institutional practices of English as a discipline over the last 150 years, in this course we will primarily be concerned with their implications for reading. We will interrogate historical and current practices of reading in their light. We will also compare them with a third possibility, that of investigating actual readers, a focus that has so far received little attention and has been actively discouraged by some authorities. Jonathan Culler, for example warned of “the dangers of an experimental or socio-psychological approach which would take too seriously the actual and doubtless idiosyncratic performance of individual readers” (Structuralist Poetics 258). But are readers really idiosyncratic? What do empirical studies show occurring during literary reading? First we will review the history of formalist accounts of reading, from Kant and Coleridge, through the Russian Formalists, to the Lancaster school of stylistics (Geoffrey Leech, Mike Short, Willie Van Peer) and the cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur. Second we will look at some of the standard theoretical accounts of the reading process, contrasting the aesthetic approaches of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser with the constructivist views of Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Siegfried Schmidt. We will go on to look at empirical studies of literary reading, beginning with studies of historical readers by Richard Altick and Jonathan Rose, then examine several typical modern studies of readers, including a critical review of the methods used to study actual readers and the different levels at which response to literary features has been studied, from phonetic to narrative.

summer reading wrap-up

My summer reading list was a cross-section of texts I've been anticipating for quite some time. Among the many false starts (failed attempts at reading Joyce's Ulysses, Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being, and Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: texts which will no doubt be attempted again), I actually did finish reading a few books that were on my list.

For me, summer reading projects are always more successful when others readers are involved. I was part of reading group for Dante's Divine Comedy (something I've tried and failed at reading in the past), which led to a series of posts on the Inferno, Purgatorio, and some reflections on Milton.

I finally got around to reading Violence by Slavoj Zizek. Thoroughly enjoyable, not least for passages like this: "The characterization of Hitler which would have him as a bad guy, responsible for the dead of millions but nonetheless a man with balls who pursued his ends with an iron will, is not only ethically repulsive, it is also simply wrong: no, Hitler did not "have the balls" really to change things. All his actions were fundamentally reactions: he acted so that nothing would really change; he acted to prevent the communist threat of real change. His targeting of the Jews was ultimately an act of displacement in which he avoided the real enemy -- the core of capitalist social relations themselves. Hitler staged a spectacle of revolution so that the capitalist order could survive."

I did some proofreading at my previous job and was therefore given the opportunity to read through The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation, edited by Chris K. Huebner and Tripp York.

Finally, two days ago I finished Moby Dick, which is quickly climbing the list of my favourite novels. Today, by happy coincidence, Brad Johnson over at AUFS, posted a link to a PDF download of his dissertation entitled, The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville: Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity.

But now I must begin reading for my courses. To work!