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When The Social Becomes Literature

Why is it that the primary qualification required for publishing hip-radical social theory is a degree in literature?  I really have no problem with people of various academic/educational backgrounds writing social theory, I just have a problem with people becoming authorities on politics and history when they spurn as part of their methodology any concrete grounding in political economy or history.  The literary dimension of social theory is obviously important, but when people whose only foundation to social theorizing is literary analysis refuse to engage with political economy and/or concrete history then they really should not be publishing in an area beyond their realm of academic know-how.  An analysis of history and society that relies primarily on a proficiency in literary theory tends to reduce the world to a text, reading it only at a very limited ideological level, and cannot truly be radical.  We should be starting from the concrete, moving to the abstract, and then applying the abstracted categories back upon the concrete: this is scientific analysis.  But the basic literary theory method is to start from the abstract, apply it to the concrete, and move back to the abstract.

Coming from a philosophy background, I am very aware of how this same critique can apply to my discipline.  In fact, I know of many attempts at social theory made by hard-line philosophers that are ultimately useless because of a failure to study political economy and history.  Many philosophers think they don't have to read anything else except abstract philosophical texts because they're still under the eighteenth century impression that philosophy is the "queen of the academic disciplines."  This was why a group of overconfident philosophers in my department decided to be against my labour union's strike two years ago, though they had no knowledge of what was going on, because they abstractly deemed it "illogical."  (This is also why I had a hard time proving that my PhD dissertation, which relied heavily on political economy and history, counted as "proper philosophy.")   Hip-radical social theory, however, is not written by philosophers: many of the "philosophical" attempts at social theory these days tend to be liberal, conservative, historically redundant, and/or woefully boring to be radical or hip.  (I exclude, for obvious reasons, philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Lorraine Code from these categories.)

My problem with the literary theorists writing social theory, then, is that they are generally writing about important things and aligning themselves with radical-progressive positions.  That is why the lack of a concrete approach to methodology is such an issue: they leave themselves upon to rightist critiques (and sometimes appropriations) who can dismiss their potentially important insights due to the lack of social and historical rigor.

1.  Edward Said

I love Edward Said and I think Orientalism is important because it was the first book that popularized in academia the notion that there was something wrong with so-called "Western History" and the way the so-called "Orient" was understood by this history.  Without Orientalism there might not be a wealth of literature available in universities, along with innumerable critical courses, that was critical of what we now call, thanks to Said, "orientalism."

And yet Orientalism is marked by a lack of rigor that gets in the way of Said's otherwise important insights.  The very idea that orientalism existed in the way the ancient Greeks saw the ancient Persians, as Said suggests, is utterly ludicrous and ahistorical.  As Samir Amin pointed out in Eurocentrism, this was a "banal ethnocentrism" that was utterly different from what we can understand as orientalism or eurocentrism now.  (I won't go into this because I've discussed it in a review posted here.)

Granted Orientalism was the first of its kind in North American academia and was significant because it was the first book, at least in that context, that took apart an entire discipline and revealed its underlying racist commitments.  There was a history of this critique, however, in concrete political economy and historical engagements outside of western academia.  Said even borrowed the germ form of his theory of orientalism from Anouar Abdel-Malek's Social Dialectics, clearly evident from the heavy citation of Abdel-Malek in Orientalism.  At the same time, however, Said spirited away Abdel-Malek's marxist commitments in an onslaught of post-structuralism and a spurious and utterly unfounded rejection of marxism (so as to subtly promote an appeal to difference) that became paradigmatic of everyone who accepted Orientalism's authority.  So much so that later literature-become-social theorists would not even read Marx and Engels, dismissing them simply by referencing Said.

Now I have no problem with critiquing Marx and Engels––good dialectical/historical materialists should never read their books dogmatically as sacred texts.  Indeed, the whole "return to Marx" phenomenon that is being promoted in certain sectors––a return that wants to obliterate the marxisms that developed out of Marx and Engels, the marxisms critical of Marxism––is something that should be critiqued, as my comrade BF has done in a recent blog entry.  But Said's criticism is the wrong criticism and does not take into account how the revolutionary marxist traditions of the peripheries have already dealt with the problem of Marx and Engels' eurocentrism.  Aijaz Ahmad was even prompted to write a theoretical response to Said's claims about Marx in In Theory, and though I do not wholly agree with some of Ahmad's criticisms (nor do I agree with Ahmad's commitments to a revisionist party) they did bring up some salient points.

Furthermore, Said misreads Marx and Engels' ironic comments about European capitalism's drive to "civilize" foreign countries; nor does he show any comprehension of how Marx and Engels understood––and despised––colonialism and slavery.  The wholesale write-off speaks to a lack of rigor, a blaise approach to texts, and caused Fanonists like Lewis Gordon to wonder why Said and other postcolonialists to wonder why Marx would be written off but not Foucault who was committed to the consummately proud eurocentric thinker Nietzsche.

The general failure to base his theory of orientalism on a concrete analysis of concrete circumstances is Said's failing.  He approaches his problem at a textual level, from the space of ideology, and fails to properly grasp the social-historical context that produced these texts.  Thus he reads the occident-orient binary he critiques back unto history, imagining it exists in the regional disputes of civilizations who never thought of the world in the same way as modern Orientalists.

2.  Anne McClintock

I discussed McClintock's Imperial Leather briefly in my previous post in reference to Butch Lee and Red Rover's Night-Vision.  Like Orientalism I think Imperial Leather is an important text; its extremely involved interrogation of colonial texts surrounding race-gender-class is definitely impressive.  But also like Orientalism, McClintock's book fails to deal with concrete circumstances beneath everything she critiques, even though she makes this promise at various points in her book.  History becomes nothing more than spectacle, lurking at the level of impression.  The methodology is fragmented and the reader is left with the impression that s/he is reading nothing more than an analysis of a novel.

Despite using Marx's theory of commodity fetishism usefully at a few points, McClintock generally spurns methodological depth and, like the average post-structuralist, ends up with a pot-pourri of cherry-picked theories.  She also seriously misreads and misrepresents Engels' history of the English working-class, applying her pre-formed categories to its insights and making it say something Engels was definitely not saying.  The death of the author theory might work with pieces of literature––and I would not deny it is useless to look at Engels' work as literature and what that means––but historical analyses in a book about history should be treated in a different manner even if they are to be engaged with critically.  We would not reject Einstein's General Theory of Relativity because of literary principles.  These are category mistakes and are damaging to a piece of critical social theory.

Thus, lacking a concrete methodology, McClintock cannot properly articulate the connection between the categories of race, gender, and class.  Locked in the realm of appearance, the social forces beneath everything she examines so compellingly and beautifully are never addressed and thus cannot provide unity to her position.

3.  Homi Bhabha

Unlike Said and McClintock, Bhabha's fragmented and utterly idealist approach is generally worthy of dismissal.  Bhabha represents, at least in my opinion, the utter nadir of literary theory eclipsing serious social scholarship: he applies abstract theory to reality to distort it through his post-structuralist lens so that he can dismiss everything modern and speak for the marginalized without demonstrating any understanding of what the marginalized actually want.  Bhabha has done so much damage to the way people understand Frantz Fanon (why is he treated as an expert as opposed to Lewis Gordon and Ato Sekyi-Otu who have spent their lives rigorously studying Fanon) and has caused Fanon to be dismissed, relegated to a prefiguration of "the postcolonial."  Even McClintock reads Fanon through Bhabha which leads to some of her spurious dismissals of this important social theorist who actually lived the theory he wrote.

Although some might argue that Bhabha's concept of "hybridity" is useful, Ella Shohat has pointed out, her essay about how Bhabha is read in Israel as a replacement for Said, that we should be wary of a theory that is used by colonizers.  Perhaps this is because Bhabha, so unwilling to talk about the concrete and so willfully ignorant of political economy, can only be read as an abstract melange of jargon and fragmentary theoretical commitments.  In the end Bhabha relegates real world colonialism and imperialism to the past (he only ever talks about it in past-tense) and radicalism becomes a textual exercise.

Bhabha represents, therefore, the danger of this literary theorizing about the social.  Although I think literary theory can be radical social theory, and I have friends who approach it in a manner that pays attention to real history and concrete political economy outside of textual impressions, my point is that I am always wary of its disciplinary eclipse of those progressive social theorists who are grounded in political economy and history.  Bhabha and those who follow his pseudo-radical ilk might argue, perhaps this grounding is "totalizing and terrorizing."  But if that's the case, then why do radical social theory at all?  And if the real world is totalizing and terrorizing, does that mean that the solution is to accept everything as an ideological milieu of fragmented difference and meaningless texts?

Hopefully the next hip books in genetic and mathematical theory will not be written by literary theorists… but this is probably just because the philosophers-with-no-scientific-training got there first.