It must be something in the water in New Haven. North deploys the term “rigor” as frequently as Paul DeMan, with whom he has just about nothing else in common. I will just offer two instances. The first comes from his closing exhortation to his readers “to secure a viable site within the social order from which to work at criticism in the genuinely oppositional sense” (211). Success in this effort would requires “a clear and coherent research program together with a rigorous new pedagogy, both of which, I think, would need to be founded on an intellectual synthesis that addressed the various concerns of the major countercurrents in a systematic and unitary way’ (211).
In the Appendix, the issue is described in this way: “How does one pursue the tenuous task of cultivating an appreciation for the aesthetic without lapsing into mere impressionism? How does one pursue this task with a rigor sufficient to qualify one’s work as disciplinary in the scientific terms recognized by the modern university” (217).
[A digression: nothing in the book suggests that North takes an oppositional stance toward the “modern university”—or to its notions of what constitutes a discipline, what “counts as” knowledge, or its measures of productivity. Rather, he is striving to secure the place of literary studies within that university in order to pursue an oppositional, “radical” (another favorite word, one always poised against “liberal”) program toward modern, capitalist society.]
Rigor, as far as I am concerned, is a half step away from rigor mortis. When I think of brilliant instances of close reading, rigor is just about the last word that comes to mind. Supple, lively, surprising, imaginative, even fanciful. In short, a great close reading quickens. It bring its subject to life; it opens up, it illuminates. The associative leaps, the tentative speculations, the pushing of an intuition a little too far. Those are the hallmarks of the kind of close reading that energizes and inspires its readers. What that reader catches is how the subject at hand energized and inspired the critic.
Similarly, a rigorous pedagogy would, it seems to me, be the quickest way to kill an aesthetic sensibility. The joyless and the aesthetic ne’er should meet.
Not surprisingly, I have a similar antipathy to “method.” Close reading is not a method. To explain why not is going to take a little time, but our guide here is Kant, who has wise and very important things to say about this very topic in his Critique of Judgment. Spending some time with Kant will help clarify what it is the aesthetic can and can’t do.
But let’s begin with some mundane contrasts. The cook at home following a recipe. The lab student preforming an experiment. The young pianist learning to play a Beethoven sonata. The grad student in English learning to do close readings. Begin by thinking of the constraints under which each acts—and the results for which each aims. The cook and the lab student want to replicate the results that the instructions that have been given should lead to. True, as cooks and lab students become more proficient practitioners, they will develop a “feel” for the activity that allows them to nudge it in various ways that will improve the outcomes. The map (the instructions) is not a completely unambiguous and fully articulated guide to the territory. But it does provide a very definite path—and the goal is to get to the designation that has been indicated at the outset. Surprises are almost all nasty in this endeavor. You want the cake to rise, you want the experiment to land in the realm of replicable results.
The pianist’s case is somewhat different, although not dramatically so. In all three cases so far, you can’t learn by simply reading the recipe, the instructions, the musical score. You must actually do the activity, walk the walk, practice the practice. There is more scope (I think, but maybe I am wrong) for interpretation, for personal deviance, in playing the Beethoven. But there is limited room for “play” (using “play” in the sense “a space in which something, as a part of a mechanism, can move” and “freedom of movement within a space”—definitions 14 and 15 in my Random House dictionary.) Wander too far off course and you are no longer playing that Beethoven sonata.
Now let’s consider our grad student in English. What instructions do we give her? The Henry James dictum: “be someone on whom nothing is lost”? Or the more direct admonition: “Pay attention!” Where do you even tell the student to begin. It is not simply a case of (shades of Julie Andrews) beginning at the beginning, a very good place to start, since a reading of a Shakespeare sonnet might very well begin with an image in the seventh line. In short, what’s the recipe, what’s the method? Especially since the last thing we want is an outcome that was dictated from the outset, that was the predictable result of our instructions.
Kant is wonderful on this very set of conundrums. So now let’s remind ourselves of what he has to say on this score. We are dealing, he tells us, with two very different types of judgment, determinative and reflexive. Determinative judgments guide our practice according to pre-set rules. With the recipe in hand and a desire to bake a cake, my actions are guided by the rules set down for me. Beat the batter until silky smooth (etc.) and judgment comes in since I have to make the call as to when the batter is silky smooth. In reflexive judgment, however, the rule is not given in advance. I discover the rule through the practice; the practice is not guided by the rule.
Kant’s example, of course, is the beautiful in art. Speaking to the artist, he says: “You cannot create a beautiful work by following a rule.” To do so, would be to produce an imitative, dispirited, inert, dead thing. It would be, in a word, “academic.” Think of all those deadly readings of literary texts produced by “applying” a theory to the text. That’s academic—and precisely against the very spirit of the enterprise.
Here’s a long selection of passages from Kant’s Third Critique that put the relevant claims on the table. We can take Kant’s use of the term “genius” with a grain of salt, translating it into the more modest terms we are more comfortable with these days. For genius, think “someone with a displayed talent for imaginative close readings.”
Kant (from sections 46 and 49) of the third Critique: “(1) Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinative rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other; hence the foremost property of genius must be originality. (2) Since nonsense too can be original, the products of genius must also be models, i.e. they must be exemplary; hence, though they do not themselves arise through imitation, still they must serve others for this, i.e. as a standard or rule by which to judge. (3) Genius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products . . . . That is why, if an author owes his product to his genius, he himself does not know how he came by the ideas for it; nor is it in his power to devise such products at his pleasure, or by following a plan, and to communicate his procedure to others in precepts that would enable them to bring about like products” (Section 46).
“These presuppositions being given, genius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers. Accordingly, the product of a genius (as regards what is attributable to genius in it rather than to possible learning or academic instruction) is an example that is meant not to be imitated, but to be followed by another genius. (For in mere imitation the element of genius in the work—what constitutes its spirit—would be lost.) The other genius, who follows the example, is aroused to a feeling of his own originality, which allows him to exercise in art his freedom from the constraint of rules, and to do so in such a way that art acquires a new rule by this, thus showing that talent is exemplary” (Section 49).
Arendt on Kant’s Third Critique. Cavell on It Happened One Night. Sedgwick on Billy Budd. Sianne Ngai on “I Love Lucy.” I defy anyone to extract a “method” from examining (performing an autopsy?) these four examples of close reading. Another oddity of North’s book is that for all his harping on the method of close reading, he offers not a single shout-out to a critic whose close readings he admires. It is almost as if the attachment to “method” necessitates the suppression of examples. Precisely because a pedagogy via examples is an alternative to the systematic, rigorous, and methodical pedagogy he wants to recommend.
But surely Kant is right. First of all, right on the practical grounds that our student learns how to “do” close reading by immersion in various examples of the practice, not by learning a set of rules or “a” method. Practice makes all the difference in this case; doing it again and again in an effort to reach that giddy moment of freedom, when the imagination, stirred by the examples and by the object of scrutiny, takes flight. Surely “close reading” is an art, not a science.
And there, in the second and more important place, is where Kant is surely right. If the very goal is to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility, how could we think that the modes of scientific practice, with its vaunted method and its bias toward replicable and predictable results, would serve our needs? The game is worth the candle precisely because the aesthetic offers that space of freedom, of imaginative play, of unpredictable originality. If the aesthetic stands in some kind of salutary opposition to the dominant ethos of neoliberalism, doesn’t that opposition rest on its offer of freedom, of the non-standard, of the unruly, of non-productive imaginings? Why, in other words, is the aesthetic a threat and a respite from the relentless search for returns on investment, for the incessant demand that each and every one of us get with the program? That they hate us is a badge of honor; being systematic seems to want to join the “rationalized” world of the economic? [Side note: here is where critique cannot be abandoned. We must keep pounding away at the quite literal insanity, irrationality, of the market and all its promoters. But the aesthetic should, alongside critique, continued to provide examples of living otherwise, of embodying that freedom of imagination.]
Kant, of course, famously resists the idea that lack of method, praise of an originality that gives the rule to itself, means that anything goes. Genius is to be disciplined by taste, he writes. We judge the products produced by the would-be genius—and deem some good examples and others not so good. I am, in fact, very interested in the form that discipline takes in Kant, although this post is already way too long so I won’t pursue that tangent here. Suffice it to say two things:
1. The standard of taste connects directly to Kant’s fervent desire for “universal communicability.” He fears an originality so eccentric that it places the genius outside of the human community altogether. If genius is originality, taste is communal (the sensus communis)—and Kant is deeply committed to the role art plays in creating and sustaining community. The artist should, even as she pursues her original vision, also have the audience in mind, and consider how she must shape her vision in order to make it accessible to that audience. So we can judge our students’ attempts to produce close readings in terms of how they “speak” to the community, to the audience. Do they generate, for the reader, that sense that the text (or film or TV show) in question has been illuminated in exciting and enlivening ways? There is an “a-ha” moment here that is just about impossible to characterize in any more precise–or rigorous–way.
2. Taste, like genius, is a term that mostly embarrasses us nowadays. It smacks too much of 18th century ancien regime aristocrats. But is “aesthetic sensibility” really very different from “taste”? Both require cultivating; both serve as an intuitional ground for judgments. In my next post—where I take up the question of sensibility—I want to consider this connection further.
But, for now, a few words more about “close readings. Just because there is no method to offer does not mean we cannot describe some of the characteristics of close reading. I think in fact, we can call close readings examples of “associative thinking.” A close reading (often, hardly always) associates disparate things together—or dissociates things that we habitually pair together or considered aligned. So Arendt shows us how Kant’s third Critique illuminates the nature of the political; Cavell enriches a meditation on finitude through an engagement with It Happened One Night; Sedgwick’s reading of Billy Budd illustrates how homosexuality is both acknowledged and denied; Ngai associates a situation comedy with the nature of precarious employment. In each case, there is an unexpected—and illuminating, even revelatory—crossing of boundaries. Surprising juxtapositions (metonymy) and unexpected similarities where before we only saw differences (metaphor). Which takes us all the way back to Aristotle’s comment “that the metaphorical kind [of naming] is the most important by far. This alone (a) cannot be acquired from someone else, and (b) is an indication of genius” [that word again!] (Sectoin 22 of the Poetics). There is no direct way to teach someone how to make those border crossings.
How is this all related to judgment? Both to Aristotle’s phronesis (sometimes translated as “practical wisdom”) and to Kantian judgment. (Recall that morality for Kant is too important to leave to judgment of the reflexive sort; he wants a foolproof method for making moral judgments. Aristotle is much more willing to see phronesis at work in both ethics and aesthetics.) We get wrong-footed, I think, when we tie judgment to declaring this work or art beautiful or not, this human action good or evil. Yes, we do make such judgments.
But there is another site of judgment, the one where we judge (or name) what situation confronts us. Here I am in this time and place; what is it that I am exactly facing? Here is where associative thinking plays its role. How is this situation analogous to other situations I know about—either from my own past experiences or from the stories and lessons I have imbibed from my culture? Depending on how I judge the situation, how I name it, is what I deem possible to make of it. Creative action stems from imaginative judgments, from seeing in this situation possibilities not usually perceived.
That’s the link of judgment to the aesthetic: the imaginative leaps that, without the conformist safety net of a rule or method, lead to new paths of action. If we (as teachers in the broad field of aesthetics) aim to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility, it is (I believe) to foster this propensity in our students for originality, for genius—in a world where conformity (the terror of being unemployable, of paying the stiff economic price of not following the indicated paths) rules. Judgment, like metaphorical thinking, is an art, not a science—and cannot be taught directly, but only through examples. It’s messy and uncertain (expect lots of mistakes, lots of failed leaps). And it will exist in tension with “the ordinary”—and, thus, will have to struggle to find bridges back to the community, to the others who are baffled by the alternative paths, the novel associations, you are trying to indicate.
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