Hyper-Semiotization and De-Sexualization of Desire: On Félix Guattari - Journal #133 February 2023 - e-flux

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Guattari and Autonomia

In 1974, I was in compulsory military service, living in an Italian army barracks. But military life was not my cup of tea and I was looking for a way out. A friend suggested I read a French philosopher. And so, I began to read Félix Guattari.

I started with his Psychoanalysis and Transversality and drew inspiration for choregraphing a fit of madness. The colonel of the psychiatric clinic deemed I was indeed crazy and they sent me home. From that moment on, I considered Guattari a friend whose work can suggest paths of escape from any type of barracks, physical or otherwise.

Lotta Continua (English: Continuous Struggle) was a far-left militant organization in Italy active during the historical period of social turmoil and political violence in the country known as the “Years of Lead.” License: Public domain.

Lotta Continua (English: Continuous Struggle) was a far-left militant organization in Italy active during the historical period of social turmoil and political violence in the country known as the “Years of Lead.” License: Public domain.

I continued those studies throughout the seventies, when a movement comprised of students and young workers called Autonomia emerged from universities, factories, and occupations. This movement was expressed through many different types of action and organization, including countercultural and aesthetics projects.1 In 1975, I published the first issue of A/traverso, a journal that sought to translate “schizoanalytic” concepts into the language of Autonomia. Then, in 1976, with a group of friends, I launched the first free Italian radio station, Radio Alice. Eventually the police closed the radio station, accusing us of organizing the riots that followed the assassination of Francesco Lorusso, a militant from the extra-parliamentary group Lotta Continua.2

To define itself, the 1977 Bologna movement chose the slogan “desiring autonomy.” Sometimes the expression “we, the transversalists” was used. The reference to post-structuralism was explicit in public declarations, in leaflets, in the watchwords of the spring 1977 demonstrations, in the face of state violence and mass repression.

We had read Anti-Oedipus but hadn’t understood much of it. However, one word had hit us hard: “desire.” We had clearly understood that the driving force of the process of subjectivation is desire. In other words, we proposed: let’s stop thinking in terms of “subject,” let’s forget Hegel (or spit on him, as Carla Lonzi’s 1970 essay is titled).3 In other words, subjectivity is not something ready-made that we have to simply organize. We came to see that there are no subjects, but rather flows of desire traversing organisms that are at the same time biological, social, and sexual—and conscious of course. But consciousness is not something pure and indeterminate. Consciousness does not exist without the incessant work of the unconscious, of that laboratory which is not a theater where one plays out a tragedy already written, but a tragedy traversed by flows of desire that one writes and rewrites nonstop.

Moreover, the concept of desire should not be reduced to an always positive tension: desire is key for explaining the waves of social solidarity and those of aggressiveness, the explosions of rage and the hardening of identity. Both revolutionary libertarian movements and repressive reactions to them are rooted in fluctuations of desire.

Finally, desire is not a happy good boy. On the contrary, it can curl up, it can withdraw into itself and finally produce effects of violence, destruction, barbarism. Desire is the factor of intensity in the relationship with the other. Intensity can go in different directions, even contradictory ways indeed.

Guattari coined the expression retournelles (refrains) in order to define the semiotic concatenations capable of being in a harmonic relationship with the wider environment. The refrain is a vibration whose intensity can be linked with this or that system of signs and nervous stimulations. Desire is the perception of a refrain that we produce to capture the lines of stimulation coming from the other (a body, a word, an image, a situation) to then relate to these lines. Similarly, the wasp and the orchid, two entities having little to do with each other, can nevertheless network, enjoy each other, and produce beneficial effects for each other. Desire is not a natural fact, but an intensity that changes according to anthropological, technological, and social conditions.

Toward a Reconfiguration of Desire

We must reconsider desire in our age that is defined by neoliberal and digital acceleration. We must also reconsider desire in the context of contemporary identitarian reactionary movements.

Neoliberal economics has accelerated the pace of labor exploitation, especially cognitive labor; connective digital technology has accelerated the circulation of information and consequently intensified the rhythm of semiotic stimulation which is, at the same time, nervous stimulation. This double acceleration is the origin and the cause of the increase in labor productivity which has in turn allowed an unprecedented increase in the accumulation of capital. But it is also the cause of the hyper-exploitation of the human organism, especially the brain. Today we have the task of determining the effects that this hyper-exploitation has produced on the psychic balance and on the sensitivity of human beings—as individuals, but above all as a collective.

We must reflect on the mutation of desire following the trauma of the pandemic. The virus may be less visible, the infection may be somewhat under control, but the trauma doesn’t go away overnight; it continues to do its job, which manifests in part as a kind of mass phobic sensitization to the body of the other, their skin, their lips.

During the last two decades, several studies have shown that sexuality is changing in a profound way, and the recent viral shock has only reinforced this trend, which has its roots in a techno-anthropological transformation that dates back thirty years at least. For example, in the 2017 book iGen, Jean Twenge analyzes the relationship between connective technology and the change in the psychological and affective behavior of generations who have been formed in a techno-cognitive environment.4 Following such studies, I have taken to defining the human beings born since the beginning of the century as the generation that has learned more words from a machine than from the singular voice of a human being.

In my opinion, this definition is useful for understanding the depth of the changes underway. Freud introduced the notion that access to language is not understandable without considering the affective dimension. We should also remember what Giorgio Agamben argues in the book Language and Death: the voice is the meeting point between flesh and meaning, body and signification. Moreover, the Italian feminist philosopher Luisa Muraro affirms that the apprehension of the meaning of words is linked with affective confidence in the mother.5

I believe a word means what it means because my mother told me so. More generally, I believe that the world is meaningful because my mother told me that words signify the world. The psychic foundation of the attribution of meaning is based on this primordial act of affective sharing, of cognitive co-evolution supported by the singular vibration of a voice, a body, a sensitivity.

What happens, then, when the singular voice of the mother (or anyone else) is replaced by a machine? The meaning of the world is replaced by the functionality of signs that allow us to produce operational results from the reception and interpretation of signs devoid of affective depth and, therefore, of any intimate assurance. The concept of precariousness here takes on its full psychological and cognitive meaning as a weakening and dis-erotization of the relationship to the world. In question here is eroticism as the fleshy intensity of experience, and desire in its (non-exhaustive) relationship with eroticism.

Desire and sexuality

Typically, we associate desire with the flesh, with sexuality, a body approaching another body. But we must emphasize that the sphere of desire cannot be reduced to its sexual dimension, even if this implication is inscribed in history, in anthropology, and in psychoanalysis. Desire is not identified only with sexuality, and moreover one can conceive of a sexuality without desire.

In the concept (and in the reality) of desire there is something more than sex, as the Freudian concept of “sublimation” shows us, which concerns the indirect sexual investments of desire itself.

The pandemic has completed the process of the de-sexualization of desire that had been underway for a long time, as soon as the communication between conscious and sentient bodies in physical space was replaced by the exchange of semiotic stimuli in the absence of bodies. If this dematerialization of the communicative exchange has not erased desire, it has nonetheless moved it into a purely semiotic (or rather: hyper-semiotic) dimension. Desire then evolved in a de-sexualized, or post-sexualized, direction, which now manifests as a condition of isolation that the pandemic has normalized and almost institutionalized. The theory and practice of psychology, psychoanalysis, and also the practice of politics are to be questioned, because the underlying subjectivity has been upset and transformed in an irreversible way.

The Italian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja published a book on the exhaustion (and the tendential disappearance) of desire; indeed, the title is Il declino del desiderio (The decline of desire).6 The book is full of very interesting data on the dramatic reduction in the frequency of sexual contact between people today, as well as the time dedicated to bodily contact in general. But the central hypothesis of the book, the disappearance of desire, seems questionable to me. In my opinion, it is not desire in itself that is destined to disappear, but rather the sexualized expression of desire. The phenomenology of contemporary affectivity is increasingly characterized by a dramatic reduction in contact, pleasure, and the psychic relaxation that touch makes possible. This is coterminous with a loss of sensual trust, a loss of that feeling of deep complicity that makes social life tolerable: the pleasure of the skin that recognizes the other through sensual touch, the sweet enjoyment of the intimacy of the gaze.

The Perversion of Desire and Contemporary Aggressiveness

The de-sexualization of desire indeed risks transforming desire into a hell of loneliness and suffering just waiting to be able to express itself in one way or another. The senseless violence which explodes more and more often in the form of armed and murderous attacks on innocents—the killing sprees which have multiplied everywhere since Columbine in 1999 and for which the United States is the main theater—is only the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that at the political level is upsetting the history of the world. How can one explain the election of someone like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro by half the North American or Brazilian people, if not as a manifestation of desperation and self-contempt? The election of a person who openly expresses racist or even criminal remarks has deep analogies (at the psychological level, but also at the political level) with the killings that can only be explained by a suicidal desire.

Kurt Wimmer, Equilibrium, 2002. Film still. In an oppressive future where all forms of feeling are illegal, a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system and state.

What we call “fascism” today must be explained in terms that are not only political. Politics is only the spectacular terrain on which these movements manifest. While sharing a rhetoric that is very close to historical fascism, contemporary right-wing movements do not have any rational content.

Only the discourse of humiliation, loneliness, and despair can account for this worldwide phenomenon.

The members of the generation defined, with ironic bitterness, as the last one (Z), those human beings who have learned more words from a machine than from the singular voice of a human, have grown up in an environment that is increasingly unlivable and pathogenic, either at a physical level (pollution) or at a psychic level. The communication of this generation unfolds almost exclusively in a techno-immersive environment, the consistency of which is purely semiotic. Extinction looms as an experience of techno-immersive simulation. Media production is increasingly saturated with signs of this despair. These signs act as signals of unease, but also as factors that help to spread pathology. I am thinking of films like Joker, Parasite, and shows like Squid Game, as well as a thousand other similar products.

The viral trauma of the Covid pandemic only multiplied the effect of the hyper-semiotization of the environment, but the technological and cultural conditions of the phenomenon were already there.
A mutation is reinventing desire: it is expressed less and less in a sexual form, but rather in a semiotic form. Desire has not ceased to be the driving force in the process of collective subjectivation; but the process of subjectivation takes the shape of anxiety, self-mutilation, or sometimes of aggression because desire is perverted into purely phantasmatic forms.

The de-sexualization of desire, the traces of which are everywhere, translates at the social level as a de-historicization of the motivations for collective action. We are witnessing a massive phenomenon of disengagement: majority abstention from traditional politics, desertion from procreation, the abandonment of work. This phenomenon must be the object of a theoretical analysis (diagnosis) and must lead to the creation of strategies for psycho-political collective action (therapy).

This is an edited transcription of my contribution to the congress dedicated to Felix Guattari that took place in Paris in October 2022, the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the author of Chaosmose.

 

Literary Criticism and Its Caricatures

Chronicle of Higher Education · by Wikimedia Commons · February 8, 2023

As a precocious child in the early 1940s, the American philosopher Richard Rorty became a connoisseur of exotic flowers. His passion sent him hunting for wild orchids in the mountains of northwestern New Jersey and on research expeditions to the 42nd Street public library in New York City, where he learned their Latin names. Yet he worried that this “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable” diversion was also politically dubious, at odds with his own nascent commitment to social justice. Having read Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, the young Rorty was “afraid that Trotsky … would not have approved of my interest in orchids.”

This fear led to philosophy and the quest for an intellectual framework that could “hold reality and justice in a single vision” (the phrase is W.B. Yeats’s). Eventually Rorty gave up. It was important, he concluded, “to abjure the temptation to tie in one’s moral responsibilities to other people with one’s relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one’s heart and soul and mind.” It is no mark against wild orchids or Marcel Proust, Rorty argues, that they are finally irrelevant to the struggle against injustice.

Bruce Robbins feels otherwise. In his pugnacious new book, Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction, the English professor expresses dismay at what he deems a reactionary backlash within his discipline — a desire to surrender the critic’s “permanent opposition” to the culture of the present. “What’s at stake,” he writes simply, “is democracy.”

His antagonists are those scholars who want to keep Trotsky away from their wild orchids. Over the past two decades, academic literary studies generated a rash of manifestos that reject the politicized “critique” of literature in favor of aesthetics, affect, and the ordinary pleasures of reading — identifying with characters in a novel, say, or falling in love with an author. “Post-critique” offers a course correction; the discipline has invested too much in discovering power and domination lurking behind every literary device. What’s lost, post-critics like Rita Felski and Toril Moi ask, when the protocols of reading in English departments ignore the companionable pleasures of literature in favor of ferreting out forms of political complicity?

It can be hard to recognize in these complaints the everyday practices of writing about or teaching literature in the academy. The undergraduate literature classroom rarely features the scenes of ideological vivisection imagined by post-critical polemicists. As David Kurnick observes in these pages, the so-called method wars of literary studies have really been “melodramas” starring “the professional critic as a cartoonish neurotic.” By treating the enchantment of literature as a sinister ploy disguising the workings of power, this mustache-twirling Malvolio burnishes his own self-image (and career prospects) as a professional truth-teller.

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Impatience with this picture is understandable. But if post-critique seems to argue with caricatures, so does its critic. For all its rangy familiarity with the history of cultural critique, Robbins’s noble-minded polemic against the depoliticization of English trades in reductive formulations of its own. What emerges is a meandering and tendentious account of our current disciplinary troubles and the paths forward we might take.

To set the discipline right, Robbins reintroduces us to the intellectual legacy of the 1960s, when radical scholars brought the energy of the era’s emancipation movements into literary criticism and its institutional spaces. What emerges is a spirited defense of the critic as an oppositional figure — articulating and shaping cultural values in the name of progress. The heroes of this story include some unsurprising names, such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, though more unusual suspects like Matthew Arnold and Lionel Trilling are given qualified approval as well.

Wikimedia Commons

“Girl Reading a Letter by Candlelight, With a Young Man Peering Over Her Shoulder” by Joseph Wright of Derby

At least since Arnold, Robbins argues, criticism has been defined by its adversarial relationship to the dominant culture. This stance shaped not only the humanistic tradition of literary study in its conservative form (represented at the midcentury by figures like Trilling), but also the left-wing political formations that found purchase in English departments in the 1960s and ‘70s. (For all their apparent antagonism, this shared commitment to opposition was precisely why conservative humanists and radical activists found a common home.) A synergistic hybrid emerged: The prevailing Arnoldian ethos of self-scrutiny and disinterestedness was complemented by an investment in the politics of difference and exclusion.

The ‘60s left also furnished English departments with a diversity of critical perspectives as the attitudes and knowledge of the marginalized were finally factored into the methods and canons of literary study. As both an interpretive practice and an intellectual ecology, then, criticism could serve democracy. Robbins rightly celebrates this achievement. The intellectual ferment he describes broadened the imagination of the discipline, pluralizing both the ranks of the academy and the objects we study. English departments became somewhat more democratic and equitable. This is one of the things Robbins means by “politics.”

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After this reasonable history lesson, things get shakier. Robbins presents a series of case studies in which the political force of critique comes into focus, ranging from the role of aesthetics in governance to the uses and abuses of historicism to the ideal form of a global cultural criticism. Along the way, readers will encounter various axioms wielded like defensive charms against depoliticization: Critique is not reducible to fault-finding (though fault-finding has its virtues, too). Critique has neither produced the crisis of the humanities nor can its political claims be treated as a symptom thereof. Critique is crucial to the demonstrable expertise of the discipline. Critique is “part of the work of governing,” a counterforce to the power exercised by the state and other actors.

“Does it sound absurdly idealistic,” Robbins asks, “to maintain that, rather than merely reflecting passively the values of the society around it, the university also works to shape those values by bringing them to fuller articulation?” The question implies something like the opposite of what it purports to ask. Most professors of the humanities, I think, would agree to some version of this therapeutic mission. What ensures, though, that literary or cultural criticism itself “makes changes in the world,” as Robbins goes on to assert? He never quite says.

Academics in literary and cultural studies often invoke “politics” in ways bound to baffle lay readers. While “politics,” as Robbins himself notes, “has the positive appeal of connecting what academics do with matters of pressing interest to people outside academia, … it is rarely mentioned without provoking confusion.” Absent training in the habitus of the contemporary humanities, it may not be immediately evident, for instance, why reading a sonnet or studying a painting should be called “political.” Robbins’s own claims for the political urgency of criticism occur at a remove from the messy particulars of literary interpretation. Scholars who rush to call their work “political” often borrow urgency on credit. Someone has given Robbins a very long line.

For all that he demands in terms of political commitment and engagement, Robbins offers an oddly vacuum-sealed version of the critic, in touch with ideas of political progress but little else. Who writes criticism and where? Who reads it? How do interpretations of Victorian novels “nudge” the culture forward? What are the vectors of this change? It’s particularly strange that teaching plays effectively no role in this argument. The classroom may not be the subject of this book, but some estimation of its worth relative to the activity of criticism might help secure any claims to its political value.

Literature mostly disappears from the conversation as well, and Robbins is especially unconcerned on this front. “For the variety of criticism that came out of the 1960s, literature continues to matter, but demonstrations also matter. … If mattering is a pie, literature gets a smaller slice.” Fair enough, though most professors of English are specialists in particular cultural forms and media: Elizabethan drama, Romantic poetry, graphic novels, African cinema. Our methods are fitted to our objects of study, and it makes little sense to defend these methods apart from the objects they strive to know and present. If Robbins wants to promote the expertise of English professors, the divorce of criticism from any specific object is troubling.

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In fact, we have excellent reasons to defend the teaching of literature as in itself a social (and, yes, political) good. We provide access to literacy, to habits of thought useful to future citizens and professionals, to bodies of knowledge both germane and esoteric to everyday life, and to diverse worlds of human experience and expression. But what sort of political efficacy, finally, inheres in producing interpretations of novels or poems, no matter how pointed on matters of political grievance? Robbins himself wrote a brilliant book on the representation of servants in the 19th-century English novel. One wonders how many cleaning staff at Columbia University have benefited from its existence.

For all its polemical vigor, Criticism and Politics is driven by anxiety: specifically, that the institutional cloistering of English professors does in fact prevent criticism from meaningfully doing politics or speaking to the culture in general. John Guillory argued 30 years ago in Cultural Capital that criticism’s entrance into the academy has haunted its practitioners with dreams of a lost public significance. (Disturbingly, Robbins calls his own version of this dream “governance.”) After criticism’s formalization as an academic discipline, it can touch the larger world only (or almost only) through its place in the university.

This state of affairs is unacceptable to Robbins, who has ardently defended the political power of criticism for nearly four decades — in debates with Catherine Gallagher in Diacritics in the 1980s, in his book Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), and, most recently, in the “pugilistic roundtables” of the method wars. In 1985, Gallagher suggested that “Robbins claims for professionalism just what Said claims for worldly criticism: an automatic political content. But once again, this content tends to become featureless.” Indeed, one way to understand the contortions of his argument is to see it as part of an ongoing defense of the political agency of the academic professional.

Robbins launches this defense in response to Guillory specifically, in particular to Guillory’s account of the literary critic’s “lost centrality.” Here’s Guillory, in a passage quoted by Robbins, on the critic’s desire for the cultural reach of an older journalistic mode: “The practices of journalism and of literary criticism … continue to confront each other as mirrors in which they see … an idealized image of their former Enlightenment identity (their identity with each other), an image of their former function as autonomous critics of politics and culture.” Robbins thinks he’s made short work of this claim: “There was no earlier autonomy. The critic/journalists depended on the market; they were never truly autonomous.” Since critics never possessed any such autonomy, the argument goes, our status now as academic professionals, too, can be no real bar to our political aspirations. What disappears with a wave of Robbins’s hand are the structural changes in both the profession and the public sphere.

In fact, Robbins has simply misread. At no point does Guillory argue that critics once enjoyed a moment of real autonomy (whatever that would mean) from the market. What freedom they enjoyed was from professionalization of the sort that currently organizes the discourse and labor of both journalists and critics in their separate spheres. If the critic today intervenes in worlds beyond the academy, Guillory explains, it is only by entering the world of mass publicity and leaving the restricted sphere of academic discourse behind. More importantly, Robbins fails to see the emphasis on representation in Guillory’s description. The image of the autonomous journalist-critic is a fantasy projected by critics and journalists onto one another. It is also the very image that has dazzled Robbins into writing this book.

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This confusion about the difference between real things and representations persists. Here is Robbins in the these pages, writing on Guillory’s latest book:

[Guillory] warns against too much thinking about “the depredations of colonialism or the anti-colonial struggle,” preferring “the use to which writers on the global scene have put the English language.” Think about this. It’s as if the uses to which writers on the global scene have put the English language didn’t include wrestling with “the depredations of colonialism or the anti-colonial struggle,” or as if this wrestling could not possibly have resulted in the sophisticated, refined uses of the English language that he is clearly looking for.

Peer around the edges of these quotations, and you’ll discover the rest of Guillory’s sentence performing a rather different sort of work: “For contemporary works, it is again, in my view, a question less of who best represents the depredations of colonialism or the anticolonial struggle than of the use to which writers on the global scene have put the English language, as an agent of global interconnection.” The question on Guillory’s mind is how best to add works to a global literary curriculum without reducing them to tokens of experience. This doesn’t preclude talking about the “depredations of colonialism” as part of those “conditions of production” (the language is Guillory’s) that “enter into the fabric of a literary work.” It merely respects the fact that, as English professors, the literary is our primary category of knowledge.

Indeed, though the dust jacket advertises Criticism and Politics as an “accessible introduction to cultural theory,” readers will want to tread carefully. Robbins quotes and interprets opportunistically. When Stephen Greenblatt, don of New Historicism, declares poetically, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead,” Robbins hears politically quietist reverence for the dead as such. His response is worth quoting in full.

Greenblatt’s criticism, in this book and elsewhere, of course respects the particularity of the dead he chooses to discuss, but his general statement does not. Why does he want to speak with the dead? Simply because they are dead. To him that seems reason enough. It’s not a particular dead person or persons with whom he wants to make contact; it’s not because there is some special connection between the unresolved present of this particular critic and the unresolved past of these particular lost lives — for example, a shared collective injustice or aspiration. The principle would be the same, the desire to speak would be the same, for anyone and everyone, simply because they are no longer there. Some of the dead are dead merely because their lives ended centuries ago. But some of the dead are presumably dead because they were killed. Despite the time that has gone by and the fact that by now they would be dead anyway, indignation at the manner and motives of their killing would not be inappropriate. Nor would it be inappropriate to draw political conclusions from that indignation. Greenblatt flattens out all these deaths, leaving no place for selective and creative compassion, selective and creative fellowfeeling, selective and creative indignation. Reverence like this, which creates an all-inclusive category of “the dead” while eliminating, for example, specifically political motives for speech between certain members of the dead and certain members of the living, seems doomed to end in irreverence.

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Robbins’ interpretation here is, well, selective and creative. Greenblatt’s desire isn’t to speak with just any dead person but with William Shakespeare, presumably for the usual reasons scholars, readers, and theatergoers have pursued the poet through his work for 400 years. It’s a failure of critical tact and generosity to single out an individual sentence in this way, to strip it of intention and rhetorical context in the service of a self-interested polemic. That sounds a lot like the kind of reading Robbins accuses his antagonists of performing.

Robbins’s claims for the political urgency of criticism occur at a remove from the messy particulars of literary interpretation.

In any case, Robbins apparently finds it impossible to imagine motives for literary history except either blind reverence for the dead, a trite conservative nostalgia, or politically radical presentism. It did not used to be so difficult for writers on the left to see cultural preservation as a fundamental. In the 1970s and ‘80s, though, Robbins writes approvingly, “it became obvious to much or most of the discipline that to read a work of past literature without asking what sort of society the work emerged from was as reprehensible, in its way, as ignoring those who were suffering injustice around you.”

How is reading John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” without attention to British Regency-era politics as morally blameworthy as ignoring, say, the victims of poverty or police brutality? Then again, the more important question might be not the relative degree of moral culpability, but rather why politics ought to furnish us with our language of responsibility and failure when we read literature. Robbins is surely right in at least one respect. Something is lost when we divorce the act of writing from the world in which writing is done, but this is first and foremost an intellectual failure — that is, a failure of understanding, of knowing. That knowledge may be one precondition for a progressive politics, but it ought not be reduced to it.

In Politics by Other Means, David Bromwich writes that “politics and education turn out to be identical if one accepts the ethic of group thinking, which looks on all learning as a form of social adjustment.” Robbins welcomes this identification. What power he accords to literature and the teaching of literature is simply the ability to “govern” others, a word he prefers over “persuade.” He invokes “Aristotle’s old-fashioned sense of politics as the art of governing” and explains that, though academics might not be ready to admit it, “disciplines and universities do exercise power.”

How so? Some ideas are — and must be — silenced, he argues. Likewise, not all students’ views in the classroom (this is one of the rare moments that teaching appears in the book) will get a hearing:

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The instructor applies pressure — pressure in some directions and not in others. This is what movement toward genuine democracy requires. It is what happens in literature itself. We do not cry authoritarianism when a novel pushes its reader toward a particular resolution of the perspectives it has raised. We do not cry authoritarianism when an academic discipline curtails the freedom of racists, homophobes, and flat earthers to speak their minds and set agendas of debate for others.

This passage works by moving quickly away from an actual subject of debate to a place where no one would dare to disagree. Of course, the bad people must be silenced. Finding themselves nodding along to this premise, readers might forget to ask: Is the kind of agreement solicited either by professors or novels an exercise of power, in the sense Robbins means? Has one, in truth, been governed by Mrs. Dalloway — or even by Bruce Robbins?

Yet governance is finally the role to which Robbins relegates aesthetics: “The place of politics in the practice of criticism cannot be understood unless one understands … that in aesthetic judgment pressure is and must be applied.” This travesties Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. As Sianne Ngai and Stanley Cavell have both argued, the embarrassment of our aesthetic judgments is that we cannot guarantee their confirmation by others. Like our compliments and apologies, our declarations of beauty and value may be accepted — or not. This is why so many scholars, from Hannah Arendt to Elaine Scarry, have turned to beauty in search of justice. Reducing education to social adjustment, Robbins would reclaim aesthetics as a style of coercion.

In this respect, what Robbins describes as the politics of criticism has become what David A. Bell recently called “antipolitics.” Antipolitics involves a “fear of the weakness and failure of politics.” It suggests that persuasion is an unfeasible solution to the problems of the present, and so works to remove matters of import from debate or deliberation. Some people (maybe all people) are unreachable.

Coming to this distressing conclusion, it’s some relief to turn back to a review Robbins wrote several years ago of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. He’s sharply critical of North, who argues that literature should return to a project of aesthetic education. Against North’s position, Robbins offers this rather touching and humble description of the (politically) therapeutic value of the literature classroom.

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When I ask myself why I do what I do for a living, I tend to fall back on the kind of Kantian aesthetics that North sees as hopelessly old-fashioned: the pointing out of something beautiful as an appeal for the agreement of others, yet an appeal that asks them to look at it in a disinterested way. According to this theory, what happens in a classroom, as students and instructor give a text their unusually close and more or less undivided attention, is an experiment in political community-building, a testing out of the terms on which we might or might not be able to agree with each other about how life is and how we ought to feel about it. The detour through the disinterested is, finally, socially useful. I’m not sure this belief marks any progress whatsoever beyond what I learned in those formative months when I was first exposed to close reading. It’s not a revolutionary creed. Most ways of earning a paycheck aren’t. But when it works, it’s a thing of beauty.

This paragraph eloquently evades the self-caricature of the political English professor in Criticism and Politics and reveals the humane and generous teacher of literature who wrote it. Literature does not govern, nor does criticism. People do, and sometimes they achieve that goal together. It remains unclear to me, finally, why one cannot have both Trotsky and the wild orchids, and perhaps even find them mutually illuminating devotions — if only we didn’t demand so much of one in the presence of the other.

Chronicle of Higher Education · by Wikimedia Commons · February 8, 2023