What am I defending when I defend literature? (I am not, by the way, too hung up on the name: call it poetry, call it art, call it the aesthetic, whatever; nor am I hung up on any particular forms: comics can count, as can hip-hop, as can teen TV dramas, etc. etc.)
Let me quote a sentence from another contemporary academic literary critic (I don’t quote these critics by name because 1. my quibble is not with a specific argument but with a climate of opinion and 2. the “democracy” of the internet might allow the self-googling powerful to harass the powerless who wish to discuss them at a distance from the exercise of their power). At any rate, onward with my quotation: “Let’s let ‘lyric’ [i.e., lyric poetry as opposed to all other forms] dissolve into literature and ‘literature’ into culture.”
The critic here takes issue with the privileging of lyric as that genre of literature which, because it is farthest from the prosaics of social description, political declamation or philosophical system-building, can best encapsulate what differentiates literary discourse from all other types of discourse. Instead, the critic implies, discourse is discourse is discourse: all are equally socially-constructed, thus all equally express cultural solutions to cultural problems; ergo, to privilege one as somehow transcendent is to flee the cultural.
What could be wrong with this? There are mundane objections that don’t interest me (e.g., from a pedagogical perspective, it helps students arrive at an understanding of a text if they understand what tradition the text places itself in, which means that you cannot merely discard these categories as if they were last season’s fashions), but I want to focus on the claim that literature should be dissolved into culture.
This claim will be read by anyone schooled in the last thirty years of academic literary criticism as left-wing, that is, on the side of the oppressed and against constituted authority. But if literary theory has taught us anything (and I would never argue that it has not), it’s taught us that all discourses persuade by making their assumptions seem natural. The assumption underlying the claim under discussion seems to be left-wing because to privilege any discourse is 1. elitist, since not all people will, because of class or cultural barriers, have or not wish to have access to privileged discourse, and 2. conservative in that it assumes a realm apart from the cultural struggles wherein the marginalized work to gain their fair place.
We regard as natural the assumption that elevating any one discourse necessarily excludes and marginalizes and that attempting to flee from the field of the political is conservative. But these assumptions only seem natural because they conceal their dubious foundation, which is the idea that liberation is essentially collective and that it can only come about through politics (which means through the bullet and through the state, or, to reduce further, through coercion).
What does the word “culture” mean, anyway? Don’t we just use it as a polite term for religion, or, more properly, for internalized theocracy? The benighted liberal who hasn’t studied literary theory says, when confronted with a strange cultural practice, “Well, they just do that because of their culture,” i.e., they, whoever they are, have collectively chosen to submit themselves to some totalizing body of doctrine which they mindlessly enact, and so we cannot judge them for that. The wised-up liberal who has his or her Foucault by heart, knows that we, whoever we are, are no better than they, and mindlessly enact our own subjection to fictive totalities.
The purpose of coming to this realization was, initially, to distance ourselves from our “culture,” to attain mind, in the old Hegelo-Marxist logic to make of ourselves the object of our reflection and thus achieve immanent self-transcendence, which may just be a myth, but, hell, it’s a great one.
We’ve arrived now, though, at a mere conservative cynicism that still manages to disguise itself as progressive: discourse is discourse is discourse, culture is culture is culture, that’s just the way it is, some things don’t ever change. There’s no escape. And not only is there no escape, but the elaborate explanations of the logic of no-escape still called for by a quietly science-envying academic establishment will have the delightfully paradoxical effect of inviting into the socially-constructivist redoubt of the embattled English department who else but the sociobiologists and cognitive scientists. If we want to know how it all works, they will surely tell us better than a gaggle of amateur sociologists. No escape, say the social Darwinists, for race actually exists and women think math is hard; no escape, say the cognitive scientists, for the mind is an illusory projection of the cruddy grey brain. And I am sure I will live to see the historicists and the sociologists of literature agreeing with them: no escape.
And that, ultimately, is what I’m defending: escape. Literature cannot be equal to culture because culture is the totalizing system that wants to claim us, that wants to make us alike, that wants us to worship it. Culture (and here I will offend people by saying that I don’t care which culture, whether that of the oppressor or of the oppressed, who will change places in the long run anyway, which is the lesson, if we must have a lesson, of Zionism) is difference expressed collectively, over the heads and over the voices of those it would organize.
But literature, or art, or poetry, or the aesthetic, is the snake in culture’s garden. It points the way out by reminding us that difference meaningfully exists at the level of the individual, not the individual human person, for that too is a totalizing and culturally-constructed category, but of the individual word, sentence, paragraph or utterance. And liberation will consist of allowing people the means to access this difference, because literature dissolved into culture is nothing other than achieved totalitarianism, whether of a religious clerisy or a scientistic elite, literature dissolved into culture will dissolve the fragile materials by which a self, or a relationship, or a feeling is constructed.
