The Tyranny of Critique

Ann Althouse recently drew attention to an article by Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine that examines the death of literary theory. Althouse asks: "How many hours of your precious life did you throw away trying to get your mind around literary theory?" Given that I studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, my answer to that would be "far too many," exhaled with a deep sigh of regret that I didn't major in something else. But unlike Althouse, Metcalf laments the passing of literary theory: "Was it so wrong," he asks, "for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself?" Well, yes, it was wrong insofar as the theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism sabotaged the foundations upon which much of our ability to know was based. Poststructuralism argued that the meaning of a literary text was created through the act of reading. There was no "true," transcendent meaning, but numerous meanings that proliferated each time a new person read the text. The idolatry of the author was replaced by the idolatry of the reader. My interpretation of a text is as valid as yours, and both are as valid as the author's own.

This was perhaps fine when analyzing a gothic novel or a love poem, and it led to many intriguing, imaginative, and downright idiotic interpretations of works of literature. But the problem was that literary theorists stepped out of their own innocuous field and began to subject everything to the tyranny of critique: the entire phenomenal world became a collection of "texts" demanding to be read, whether a TV commercial, a used car, or even an historical period (one of my professors taught a course called "Reading the Nineteenth Century"). Eventually, literary theory took on science, which even Metcalf concedes may have been one step too far. The postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard agued that science is only one language game among many, with no more right to claim itself as the truth than the narrative games of myths, stories, and proverbs. Paul Feyerabend went one step further, arguing that science often failed to use reason and logic in the first place; that there never was any real method to science. Under this radical onslaught, science came to be seen as a vast mythic site, no more capable of describing truth than the lore of witchcraft or the myths of ancient cultures.

But this assault on the very methods by which we come to know anything meant that it became very difficult to be able to distinguish truth from falsehood. Postmodern relativism may be harmless when it comes to determining the psychological motives of a character in a play, but it becomes hugely problematic when trying to understand the reality of the social and political worlds that we inhabit, in which things really happen, where injustices occur. The critique of the methodology by which truth was reached allowed those who did not like the truth to come up with alternative methodologies in order to arrive at a "truth" they preferred. Thus, Holocaust denial in a sense found its legitimation in the anti-theory of postmodernism. The flawed methodology and faulty reasoning of Holocaust deniers are as valid in the postmodern paradigm as the methods and practices of academic historians. There is no truth, only interpretation. History becomes pseudohistory.

So while it was good to some extent that literary theory forced knowledge producers to cultivate what Metcalf calls "the habits of withering self-reflection," to question their ingrained assumptions and inviolate truths, it is also the case that academia took a serious knock from the postmodern assault on knowledge production from which it has never fully recovered. The dangers of Holocaust denial underline how important it is to establish a sound, scientific methodology for any discipline that seeks the truth, and to acknowledge its superiority over other methodologies. Otherwise the truth may become buried by those who seek to deny it.