{"id":296,"date":"2019-10-10T15:24:46","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T19:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/?p=296"},"modified":"2019-10-10T15:25:26","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T19:25:26","slug":"christen-hammock-epilogue-1-13-are-we-doing-justice-with-the-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/christen-hammock-epilogue-1-13-are-we-doing-justice-with-the-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Christen Hammock | Epilogue 1\/13: Are we doing justice with the text?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Christen Hammock<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our first seminar, Critique 1\/13: In Search of a Method<\/a>, posed the question whether there is a right or wrong way to read critical theory texts, and in the discussion, I was immediately struck by how personal and emotional the language was that we used to discuss our relationship to these texts. Are we abusing <\/em>or doing violence to <\/em>the text? Are we manipulating <\/em>the text?\u00a0 I was also struck by the metaphors of body and space: Can we use these texts to nourish<\/em> us? Can we return<\/em> to the text and encounter<\/em> it?<\/p>\n

Bernard Harcourt had admonished us in The Illusion of Influence<\/em><\/a> to avoid anthropomorphizing the oeuvre<\/em> of any individual writer as a coherent whole or the authors themselves. But in an effort to follow Harcourt\u2019s suggestions in Illusion<\/em>, it seems that we almost transferred our urge to anthropomorphize onto the abstract notion of a \u201ctext\u201d instead. And I felt some contradiction between Harcourt\u2019s opening suggestion that we imagine our seminar as a space of \u201cbrutalist architecture\u201d and the discussion that followed. Will it be possible for readers to take what\u2019s useful and coldly leave the rest behind?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s intriguing to me that the urge to engage with these texts person-to-person is so strong that it spills out of our language. Given that these configurations of our relationship to the text are metaphorical, it would be interesting to explore how other metaphors might be implicitly guiding or informing our work in the seminar.<\/p>\n

The only metaphor that drew significant attention as metaphor <\/em>was the universally-dissatisfying-but-unavoidable toolbox<\/em>. I actually like the \u201ctoolbox\u201d metaphor, although I understand why, as Harcourt argued, there are no concrete \u201ctools\u201d in any given piece of writing that preexist our own use. Although Amy Allen also \u201cput pressure\u201d on the toolbox, I think it fits quite well with her argument that, while there might not be a single right <\/em>way to read a text, there certainly could be wrong <\/em>ways. You can use a pair of pliers to cut, twist, or grip, but you can\u2019t use a hammer to perform brain surgery. I wonder if, perhaps, the resistance to the \u201ctoolbox\u201d metaphor was less intellectual than emotional.<\/p>\n

In part, I wonder that because of my own deep emotional attachment to many of these texts. I\u2019m reading some of the texts featured in this year\u2019s 13\/13 for the first time, but others\u2014especially Foucault and Said\u2019s Orientalism<\/em>\u2014introduced me to theory and helped me see the world in a new way as an undergraduate. Although I\u2019d never read Foucault\u2019s essays on Nietzsche, I (like many English majors) fell in love with that destabilizing feeling that comes with realizing that many scientific and political \u201cgivens\u201d (e.g., mental illness, or incarceration) are constructed and reproduced. The emotional result of reading these texts for the first time can go in different directions: towards nihilism and complacency (i.e.<\/em>, there\u2019s no meaning to anything, so what\u2019s the point?) or towards an expansive notion of what\u2019s possible (i.e.<\/em>, nothing has <\/em>to be the way it is, so why not imagine other realities?). In some sense, when I read and revisit texts now, I\u2019m still chasing that feeling of seeing the world anew.<\/p>\n

I wonder about the role nostalgia might play in our seminars this year. Postmodernist scholars, in particular, have traditionally been rather unkind to nostalgia, treating it as a necessarily static, conservative, nationalist force. Jameson describes nostalgia as a \u201cdesperate attempt to appropriate a missing past\u201d that cannibalizes and brackets the past until we\u2019re \u201cle[ft] . . . with nothing but texts.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> Linda Hutcheon aligns nostalgia with patriarchal forces, arguing that \u201cfeminism has \u201cno tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in the past\u201d because the \u201cnarratives<\/em> of nostalgia\u2014from the Bible onward\u2014are male <\/em>stories, Oedipal stories which are alienating to women (who usually remain at home like Penelope, while men wander the world and risk getting homesick).\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> This is certainly one way that nostalgia works\u2014see, e.g.<\/em>, MAGA hats and romanticization of the 1950s.<\/p>\n

But I think the actual mechanism of nostalgia could be rehabilitated in more neutral terms\u2014as form rather than substance. Nostalgia often works by imaginatively transforming things from the way they were <\/em>to the way we want them to have been<\/em>, but there\u2019s no reason why it can\u2019t work another way. Couldn\u2019t nostalgia\u2019s transformative power be used critically? I think what I\u2019m arguing is that a kind of critical nostalgia might provide a framework for revisiting texts in a way that is productive <\/em>rather than just deconstructive<\/em>. As we revisit, perhaps we can put our deep attachment to these texts to use, to remember the imaginative power of our original encounters, not necessarily as a tool or weapon, but as a guiding ethos for our seminars this year and for imagining the future.<\/p>\n

One potential way of articulating our relationship with these texts was asking whether we are doing justice to<\/em> the text? This discussion was partially framed as one of legitimacy. In particular, Axel Honneth suggested a number of \u201clegitimate\u201d ways to read texts: philologically, ideologically, dialogically, and instrumentally. Of course, as a law student in the age of a Supreme Court that includes multiple men who have had credible allegations of sexual assault and harassment levelled against them, the idea of legal legitimacy\u2014often grounded in how much a text can be stretched and removed from its historical context without compromising institutional power\u2014looms large in my mind. Legitimacy, though, assumes that there\u2019s an audience for our reading of any particular text; an audience that can accept or reject our assumptions and orientation.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think we owe anything in particular to the texts that we read (even if we feel <\/em>like we do), so I\u2019m not sure I feel an obligation to do justice to<\/em> the writings of Foucault or Nietzsche. I do, however, feel revulsion at the idea of these texts being used to propel what I consider to be fundamentally un-just approaches to the world, e.g.<\/em>, alt-right politics. I suggest a slight prepositional shift, in the spirit of Bernard Harcourt\u2019s Hadron collider of praxis and theory: Are we doing justice with <\/em>the text? This won\u2019t provide universally satisfying answers, but if our commitments to praxis must be individualized, as Harcourt suggests, I don\u2019t think it needs to.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism at 17.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> Linda Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern at 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Christen Hammock Our first seminar, Critique 1\/13: In Search of a Method, posed the question whether there is a right or wrong way to read critical theory texts, and in the discussion, I was immediately struck by how personal… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38960],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-1-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}