Why Alex Rosenberg is Wrong About the Humanities

The Leiter Reports blog linked to this piece today, calling it "provocative" and "worth reflecting on." I'm frankly surprised that Leiter linked to such a silly and wrong-headed essay. I'm no fan of Leiter's but he usually has a pretty good bullshit detector. Not today.

Rosenberg has three claims about why interest in "the humanities" (excluding the master disciple of philosophy, of course) is falling off, two of which are simply wrong. He also, as is typical of too many analytic philosophers, condescends to humanities scholars other than philosophers and more broadly to the study of culture (as opposed to the study of thought, I suppose) as such.

His first claim is "over the last two generations the humanities (except for philosophy) have lost faith with their callings as the bearers of a continuous cultural inheritance–a canon, for want of a better word." The result, according to Rosenberg is that "the 'boutique' courses [humanities profs] teach in their majors, the heavy doses of 'theory' they lay on in graduate classes, make it difficult to connect with their students in ways that would provide... purpose, meaning, appreciation of complexity, or recognition of adversity." The implication here that canon = accessibility is both unsupported and deeply prejudicial about which cultural artifacts, and thus which cultures, matter. It's also a picture that is completely alien to most English departments which have, if anything, only retreated to the "canon" in the post-Sokal hoax years.

Rosenberg's view may be colored by the fact that he's at Duke, which features a very theoretical English department, but even if he's right about how things work at Duke (and I have no evidence that he is), he's certainly deeply wrong about how English and other "traditional" humanities departments operate pretty much everywhere else. To say that "Philosophy has never surrendered its canon," while implying that other disciplines in the humanities have, is ludicrous. Rosenberg continues: "we [philosophers] are still teaching Plato, Hume, Kant, along with Amartya Sen, Judy Thompson and Ruth Marcus." Rosenberg might be surprised that this is just what goes on in literature and language departments too! Here is a short list of some courses, texts, and authors being taught here in my English department this winter quarter alone: Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, poetry of Emily Dickinson, Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd, A Winter's Tale, the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Restoration comedy, "Marlowe, More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton," a course entitled Political Shakespeare, "Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Dickens," Walden, Leaves of Grass, The Canterbury Tales, Clarissa, and a course called Renaissance English Poetry. I myself will teach The Bacchae, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Pygmalion and Waiting for Godot this quarter. Canonical enough for ya? All of this occurs "along with" "boutique" courses in German Fairy Tales, Latina/Latino lit, Asian-American lit and film courses, and an introduction to theory course. Since our student body is well over 60% non-white, the question of whether Latina/o or  Asian-American courses can be accurately called boutique courses is another question entirely. Regardless, this is not quite the picture Rosenberg paints of the "other" humanities, to say nothing of the very questionable conclusions he draws from that distorted picture.

Clearly Rosenberg simply has no idea what really goes on in literary study (to say nothing of other humanistic disciplines), a field from which Anglo-American philosophy has entirely distanced itself. The none too subtle glorification of his own field must come at the expense of something, of course. So facts be damned, according to Rosenberg literature departments aren't canonical enough (!!) and as a result aren't accessible enough (!!!). Never mind that the central and even immanent complaint about Anglo-American analytic philosophy is that it often has so little to do with the world as we know it, at least on the surface, and that some examples are completely indecipherable to the average educated person. 

His second claim is the only one that has merit. The fact is that tenured research scholars do not commonly teach introductory composition or foreign language or literary courses and this contributes to a number of problems. To compare "baby logic" to introductory literary courses or composition, though, is in bad faith. 

First of all, the methodological approach of a logic course is closer to mathematics than it is to the interpretive disciplines of the humanities. In an introductory course on logic, students are taught a repeatable method that can be used to evaluate arguments and truth claims. This is not at all what occurs in a literature course. There are no hard and fast rules in literary study, despite what some profs would have you believe. As a result, in contrast to an intro to logic, an introductory course on literary study is not best done in large lecture halls. This is because the primary goal of instructors of literary study is not to impart to our students definitive knowledge or a stable methodology. In this respect, introductory courses in literary study more closely resemble upper division philosophy courses than they do intro to logic for the simple reason that the former concern themselves with the praxis of analysis more so than the latter. 

But I have been speaking of literary study. What of composition? What Rosenberg forgets, of course, is that most of the students in the baby logic course--their first philosophy course--have been taught writing by a TA or instructor, perhaps for multiple quarters, before they land in baby logic. That is, the first course that students take in philosophy benefits from some basic prior instruction. Whatever writing or reasoning skills those students have when they hit intro to logic were fostered in composition, which of course is usually taught by grad students in literary study. So it appears that Rosenberg simply forgets what happens before he and his tenured colleagues ever see these students.

At the same time, Rosenberg is also guilty of a false comparison when he equates baby logic with composition. Philosophy does not have a disciplinary equivalent to composition. Comp is essentially a remedial course, or at the very least a quasi-vocational one. As a result, it has very little to do with literary study even if the two are housed in the same department. So to say that that honorable philosophy professors teach intro courses while lazy "other" humanities professors do not is true on the factual level, but this is only so because there is nothing like composition (or a language course) in philosophy. If there were, I guarantee the tenured philosophy faculty would have nothing to do with it.

The third claim Rosenberg makes is that "the abdication of the humanist’s traditional role has been combined with an attempt to compete on the terrain of the sciences, an attempt that sometimes make the humanist a laughing stock among scientists and their students." There is a modicum of truth to this. The "other" humanities have been vexed by the research paradigm of the sciences which now more than ever dominates the academy. Analytic philosophy has less of this problem for the simple reason that it has, as a discipline, abdicated its roots in the humanities for a more positivistic model. But Rosenberg then goes on to refer to the title of noted plagiarist, sciences major, and poor man's Malcolm Gladwell Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist as a putative example of how the humanities are struggling to jibe with the research paradigm of the sciences. The example, of course, has very literally nothing to do with the "other" humanities as they are practiced in the academy. It's a red herring, just as is his apparent allusion to Michael Chwe's (a political scientist, not a humanist!) Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Rosenberg thinks that "[t]he humanities must surrender the pretension of competing with science on its own explanatory turf" then, but he offers no proof that this is actually happening. This reason for this is simple: what Rosenberg thinks is happening is simply not happening. By way of example, a quick glance at the MLA 2014 convention program will suffice. In fact, when I searched that program for "neuro" with a wildcard, I got nine sessions. There are 810 sessions in this year's convention. ("Cognitive" came up with fifteen hits, some repeats of the nine.) The point is twofold. The first is that in literary studies there is no significant movement to claim that Proust was a neuroscientist or anything of the sort. The second is that while the problem presented by the current paradigm of research in the academy to the "other" humanities is real, it has nothing to do with the humanities trying to make quasi-scientific claims. Instead, it is the research model that presents the problem. Humanistic research simply doesn't map well onto genre of the science paper, social or physical. Literary study does not, at the end of the day, produce findings. And findings are the metric of academic work in present era--for better or for worse.

Rosenberg knows this, of course. He realizes that unlike analytic philosophy, the rest of the humanities endanger themselves if they try to mimic the paradigm of the sciences. But despite the fact that self-identifying analytic philosophers are often hyper-territorial about who can and may "do" philosophy, they are very rarely willing to cede the same sort of respect to other humanistic disciplines. So Rosenberg predictably graces us with his view of what literary study should be and do. Unfortunately, that view is both dull and problematic. "[A]t their best," Rosenberg writes, "the humanities are in the business of moving us emotionally." There are all sorts of problems with this sentence (one might start with the rather infelicitous use of the term "business"). Most crucially, Rosenberg seems to make no clear distinction between culture as such and the study of culture. He is a smart man, so he is aware of this. In order to shore up his claim, then, he must argue that there is no distinction: "After all, great literary scholarship can guide and sometimes even create the kind of human response produced by the art it seeks to valorize. In Less than One, Joseph Brodsky offered an analysis of W.H. Auden’s poem, 'September 1, 1939' [sic]. Those 50 pages were an act of artistic creation, informing and moving the reader as much as the poem they come to grips with. Brodsky’s Nobel Prize in literature was deserved as much for his criticism as his poetry." So apparently the business of humanities scholarship is little more than providing enjoyment.

Taking nothing away from Brodsky, the real problem here is that Rosenberg's understanding of the value of the aesthetic, apparently only a concern in "canonical" high culture, is an uncritical one. In fact he assumes that A) it is the goal of art to move us emotionally, which certainly not always the case and is also certainly a view of art that first appears in early modern Europe, and B) that moving us emotionally is good in itself. This latter is the familiar view of the aesthetic we get from Schiller, Emerson, and Matthew Arnold among many others. Through the pleasure of art, we ostensibly learn. We are supposed, as a recent study has posited, to have an emotional experience with art that makes us better people. How this actually happens is not so clear. The study in question argues that literary fiction allows us to escape the trap of narcissism by exposing ourselves to the (imaginary) experiences and feelings of others. As a result of this we are supposed to be better people when we read fiction. Leaving aside the problem the other arts pose to this theory (how does listening to Bach make me a better person?), the question begged here is why this simply isn't true. Empirically speaking, to be well-read is not to be a good person. Exposing ourselves to the worlds of others, imaginary or real, has no reliable track record of making societies or people "better." As another great literary critic, George Steiner, wrote: "We come after [the Holocaust]. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?"

In fact, the assumption that our relationship to art and culture is a simple one of emotion and empathy is deeply dangerous. The thing about art, and I realize this too is a cliche, is that it doesn't work the way Rosenberg wants it to. It cannot be relied upon to give us pleasure in every case, much less to "teach" us how to be better humans in any reliable way. It may be objected that this standard for art is too high. Why should art have to be epistemologically or emotionally or pedagogically reliable? In the pragmatic sense, it doesn't. It doesn't matter too much if my interpretation of Hamlet differs from Stephen Greenblatt's. But the very fact that those interpretations differ is what, at the end of the day, makes Hamlet art (rather than a textbook, say) in the first place. The moment we begin to preclude sufficiently evidenced interpretations in favor of a "moral to the story," we have gone from the art world to the world of a fable or a parable. The fact that any decent artifact of culture can support many interpretations (Is Lolita definitively against pedophilia? Is Heart of Darkness definitively racist?) is precisely what makes it interesting. It is when we think that interpretive work is finished and closed off by a definitive statement of meaning that we have failed to see the crucial fact that what the recently deceased Arthur Danto called the artworld is--at a very fundamental level--predicated on art's failure to be reliable in any of the senses mentioned above. The claim that the purview of art is to move us emotionally, which it certainly can do,  is itself an example of that failure to see. Like Matthew Arnold, Rosenberg seems to think that being moved per se is something that can improve us. This assumption, although Rosenberg's version is no doubt more subtle than my phrasing of it, is nothing less than a theory of the moral or social usefulness of art as such. And as such, it is far from an original proposition. More importantly, though, it is an uncritical one. There's a reason this view is appealing to someone like Rosenberg, and it's not just that it is his personal experience of art. On such a view, we wouldn't need the "other" humanists in the first place, or at least not so damned many of them. We could simply assign the book, the student would have an emotional experience and be improved by it, and we could all have a group hug at the end. Maybe for very difficult works an expert interpreter would be needed, but in the majority of cases a reasonably intelligent reader could simply enjoy the book and therewith improve herself. Problem solved! 

But the critical study of culture--as separate from culture itself--is not "in the business of moving us emotionally." Instead its goal is to ask how and why a given artwork moves us (or moved others), or fails to move us, and perhaps most importantly what it means to be moved by "art" at all. While humans as a species experience common emotions, what triggers those emotions is not common. This is true from person to person, but far more so from culture to culture and from era to era. What this means is that we should be especially skeptical of art that moves us. When we are moved, our critical sense is often subsumed. That is not to say we should not be moved, not at all. But to be moved is only the first step, if a crucial one. The next step is to think about why we are moved, how it happened, and what it means to be moved in this way. These questions are precisely what separates literary study from a book club or from a casual reader, and they are the often uncomfortable ones that academic literary study should, if not always does, ask. (An excellent example of someone who did this kind of work is Edward Said.)

It should be clear why these questions are so important to ask from reading Rosenberg's essay. He is a very smart man who doesn't appear to understand the critical potential of art or the importance of a critical assessment of the aesthetic. His view of art is, in Socrates' (or is it Plato's) term, unexamined. Perhaps he could benefit from taking an introductory course in literary study. 

The Etiology of Metal Writing

My friend Paul shared the following article with me on a certain ubiquitous social media site:

http://www.xojane.co.uk/entertainment/how-black-metal-saved-my-life-or-at-least-my-sanity

Here's my response, which takes on a larger issue that bugs me a bit about a lot of metal writing aimed at the general public.

Pardon me for the soapboxing I’m going to do below, and I’d like to note that it is not the result of anything specific in this piece, which I find all well and good.

BUT the article relies on one of the things that annoys me about many accounts of metal, even from insiders. Too often, the narrative about metal relies on what folks who study culture call the “symptomatic reading.” The basic premise of the symptomatic reading is that a cultural phenomenon, an artwork, and/or an interest in either of the above can best be understood as a symptom of something else, often some version of capitalism. Now capitalism isn’t usually seen as the root cause of the development of metal or a given person’s interest in metal, although it would easy (far too easy) to make that claim. Instead, an interest in metal is typically seen as symptomatic of personal or social struggles. In this piece, it’s the author’s mom’s illness. In Sam Dunn’s movies (and in the work of Deena Weinstein upon which Dunn heavily relies), it’s outsider status, adolescence, alienation, negotiation masculinity, etc. In all these cases, a person’s interest in metal, and indeed the genre itself, is seen as a logical symptom of something else.

Now, it’s entirely clear that an interest in metal very often does correlate with some or all of the personal and social issues we’ve seen above. And it’s also true that when we tell the narrative of the art and/culture that was formative for us, always a reflective and even nostalgic practice, we will often seek to understand why we were drawn to certain works or genres as opposed to others. Finally, people like Dunn and Weinstein are looking at metal through the lens of social science, which seeks to uncover the roots of human behavior. All this is to say that there’s nothing essentially wrong with the symptomatic reading of metal.

However, the symptomatic reading of metal has become de rigueur, and in fact all too often it’s become a lazy shorthand way of encapsulating the genre and its fans themselves. Before I get to why I think the symptomatic reading is problematic, I want to repeat my caveat. I don’t accuse this author of lazy encapsulation because she’s writing in the mode of personal reflection, and as such this narrative (which is more about her life than about metal) works. I do however think that a piece like this is likely to be published precisely because it does rely on the symptomatic reading, a paradigm that makes metal and metal fandom accessible to the outsider.

So why is the symptomatic reading of metal problematic? There are a few reasons. The first is legible in the word symptomatic itself. That is to say that the symptomatic reading is by definition predicated on the idea that in order for one to produce or like the artform in question, either one’s society or one’s self must be seen as ill. On this model, metal and the liking thereof are aberrant and they need to be accounted for. The typical pro-metal defense is that that aberrance should be celebrated, and that metal is just a healthy relief for the troubled. I think such a defense struggles to say anything very interesting because in the first place it relies on the exact narrative of metal’s critics. In essence, what’s going on here is that metal and the interest in it must be justified, but that the logic of justification simply reinscribes metal’s status as aberrant. Let’s illustrate this by counterexample. When people write about R&B or math rock or new wave, do they commonly offer a justification for the genre itself? Do they explain their love for the genre in terms of illness, of being somehow broken? Sometimes, perhaps. But it seems to me that this is the saw of writing about metal and only a footnote for writing about other genres.

In addition, the notion of metal as release valve devalues the artform, making it into little more than one of those palm-sized rubber stress balls. Look, it is true that music, dance, drama and other performing arts offer release to both performers and spectators. But at the same time it is undeniably reductive to say that these arts are best understood or discussed as release valves. Indeed in doing so, one removes from them the status of art and sees them instead as simply instrumental, as tools that make life a bit more tolerable. While art can certainly be instrumental in a number of ways, to those of us interested in aesthetics (which should be anyone at all who is fascinated by art) art can be and is something besides purely psychologically instrumental.

What the symptomatic reading really does is deny the ability to take an artwork or artform seriously on its own grounds as an aesthetic production. Instead of asking questions like “Why do people like this stuff,” we should be asking, “How does it work? What does it do? What are its rules and logics, its philosophic undergirdings?” Ultimately, I’m interested in what happens when we study art on its own terms rather than as a product of neurosis or social ills. To do so is the first step in taking art seriously. No one seriously reads the work of Shakespeare or Dante or Jane Austen as simply products of troubled times that offer a dab of salve to a broken audience. Instead we look at what these works do and how they work. Rarely do we see such work done on metal. (If I may plug my own work, I try to think about what I consider to be the central aesthetic move of death metal in this piece: http://holeinyoursoul.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-experience-of-brutality-breaking.html)

In the end, the symptomatic reading doesn’t necessarily preclude other readings, and there’s nothing essentially wrong with the former as a perspective on a given artwork, genre, or subculture. On the other hand, when the symptomatic reading of metal becomes the only reading, and when it is unexamined, it covers over the fact that it is itself symptomatic of the resistance to taking and thinking about metal seriously, and to acknowledging it as art.

I should add as a final note that Grim Kim no doubt knows a ton more about metal than I do, and that I would love to hear more from her.

Reading between the Lines: Analytic (or Anglo-American) vs. continental philosophy

I don't have time to fully flesh out this post right now (or to edit it properly), but I wanted to get a thought out there before it slips away.

Much breath has been used (wasted?) on the so-called divide between the approaches of analytic, more properly called Anglo-American, and continental philosophy. Clearly enough, there are differences, and especially recently, at least the Anglo-American side has been interested in re-thinking or re-characterizing that divide. Perhaps the most prominent version of this account has been Brian Leiter's discussion of the divide as one based on assumptions of realism (Anglo-American) vs. assumptions of anti-realism (continental). There are also, of course, the inherited definitions against which the recent work has taken a position. Those definitions are familiar enough that I don't think they need to be discussed here.

I take this topic up for a few reasons. First, I work in an English department, which means I tend to be exposed far more to continental thought than analytic. Second, because Leiter's account, although useful, seems no less reductive than past accounts. Third, because I spend the early part of this morning reading a couple of interviews with philosophers over at 3Am: one with Gary Gutting  and one with Lee Braver. Both of these philosophers take up the so-called divide in helpful ways, especially because the interviewer Richard Marshall (who does an excellent job with all his interviews) would appear to fall on the analytic side. That means that both Gutting and Braver have to articulate a basic defense of continental thought to a skeptic, always a useful exercise which allows for good nutshell accounts. But again, I find myself thinking that the defenses offered don't fully flesh out why this divide exists.

I tend to think that any account of the divide between Anglo-American and continental thought, although it clearly does have to do with subject matter, use of language, different traditions, realism and anti-realism, needs to take account of another issue--that of reading. I want to argue that one basic and fundamental difference between the two schools rests in how they approach texts, here meaning anything that is "read" philosophically, including culture. I don't know if this difference is the foundational one, but I think it's more than symptomatic of another, larger issue such as realism vs. anti-realism.

What brings me to this issue of reading? One of the most common complaints about much continental thought, especially the broadly post-structural strain, is that it consistently and problematically misreads. An example of this accusation occurs in the Gutting interview, in which Marshall brings up Foucault's apparent misreading of Nietzsche. Leiter, too, has been attacking Heidegger for years concerning his misreading of Nietzsche. A few other examples: Searle famously argues that Derrida misreads Austin, Raymond Geuss argues that Paul de Man misreads Hegel, etc.

Perhaps the most famous example of the misreading accusation, which Braver lumps in with the tu quoque fallacy, is Bricmont and Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense. Now, there is a key difference between, for example, Searle's critique of Derrida and the argument in Fashionable Nonsense. To wit, while it is one thing to accuse a philosopher of misreading philosophy, it would appear to be quite another to accuse her of misreading a scientific theory. Instead of getting into the argument for why this is so, which would seem to rely on certain assumptions of truth that continental philosophy will generally see as problematic, I want instead to bring up the act of reading itself.

Much of continental philosophy is based on reading, but reading construed broadly. Foucault reads history, "culture," and human sexuality in the same manner that he reads Nietzsche. Badiou reads set theory. Zizek reads Marx, Lacan, and films. Deleuze reads film and philosophy. Heidegger reads a certain philosophical tradition. Adorno reads culture. Nietzsche reads the history of morality. Benjamin reads translation, architecture, and culture.

Ok, so doesn't Anglo-American philosophy read? Of course it does, and well, and just as broadly. But the difference is that often Anglo-American philosophy reads with the assumption that a text can be read correctly. A text, let's say the work of Hegel, means something on its own terms, a meaning given to it (and no doubt agonized over) by its author. Thus, the key to Anglo-American reading is rigorous fidelity to meaning.

Continental thought, on the other hand, wants to engage in productive (and sometimes de[con]structive)  readings that often mobilize the text's meaning against itself. These are acts of interpretation, sometimes violent ones, that don't so much de-contextualize a text as re-contextualize it in a productive manner. Think of Heidegger on the Greeks. Does he get the Greeks wrong? Many think so. Does he use his idiosyncratic "misreadings" of the Greeks to develop a far-reaching theory on meaning and Being? Yes. The question of whether the result excuses the process is one I can't take up here, but it seems clear enough to say that to say that Heidegger or Kojeve or Foucault misreads something and should therefore be ignored is to fail understand what each is up to. These kinds of misreadings are neither wrong or right; in fact the only useful way of judging their value is to argue whether or not they are productive of further thinking, and even praxis, or not.

To say all this is not to excuse sloppy or lazy misreadings or to say that Anglo-American thought is inflexible or doctrinaire. Indeed, the charges that the practice of misreading skips over meaning and does violence to it, and that opening the field to unending interpretive misreadings threatens to make all texts into nonsense, are grounded ones borne out in the "high theory" years. On the other hand, to read innovatively is central to what makes reading important. Gadamer and Derrida are not so far away on this point, nor are Heidegger and Adorno.  One thing that has to occur for these two schools, both which contain tremendous variegations, to be able to speak to each other is that the Anglo-American school has to stop saying that the continental school is misreading, full stop. Instead, it should be asked whether the "mis"reading is productive or not. The implication being, of course, that there are different kinds of readings and misreadings and that to say that something has been misread is not to say that it hasn't been read well, or interestingly, or productively. By the same token, the continental school needs to realize that rigorous attention to producing fidelity to meaning can birth readings as productive and compelling as "misreadings" can, that reading idiosyncratically does not in and of itself produce useful results.

Addendum: At the heart of the difference in approaches to reading that I'm trying to work through here lies a really fundamental difference relating to the status of philosophical texts. The idea of a correct reading that prioritizes fidelity to meaning approaches philosophical texts as essentially different from other kinds of texts. While it is false to say that an analytic philosopher would not see a given philosophical text as a product of culture, it is the case that the fidelity to meaning approach makes assumptions about reason that are perhaps just as radical as are explicit critiques of reason coming from the continental side. 

The Experience of Brutality: Breaking Bad, Death Metal, and an Inquiry into Experience as Such

This intriguing post by Phil Walsh got me thinking about the meaning of Breaking Bad. I’d agree with Phil that the specific plotline of Breaking Bad he refers to is about belief and its pitfalls. But perhaps more interesting to me is trying to answer the question Phil begins with: What is Breaking Bad (as a whole) about? 

The juxtaposition of Breaking Bad to The Wire Phil makes in his initial move drives home the a key distinction between the two. The Wire is most definitely about something, perhaps more so than any other television series. It’s about the failure of the War on Drugs, it’s about systemic racism, it’s about the inhumanity of capitalism, it’s about government corruption, and so on. Whether the series was conceived of as such or not, by its end it was simply the most sustained and nuanced artistic indictment of the fundamental failures of the United States ever produced.

Breaking Bad, on the other hand, is not so clearly about anything. Certainly we can say that it too takes on capitalism and the American Dream, but I’d argue that the show is no way committed to any kind of real critique. And I’m sure someone so inclined could offer a more symptomatic reading of the show, but essentially such a reading would offer little more than the straight ahead version would. Suffice to say that the show doesn’t really have a thematic center in the way The Wire or even The Sopranos or Mad Men does. Such an observation could lead us to say that perhaps Breaking Bad is centrally inferior to these other series, but Breaking Bad does have another kind of center, even if it lacks a thematic one. The strength of Breaking Bad ultimately lies in the show’s character. That character, in my view, is the more or less single-minded pursuit of a visceral audience experience. 

What Breaking Bad does better than perhaps any show ever is put the audience through an experience. That experience (which I’ll say more about in a bit), a kind of gut-churning yet strangely delicious punishment, may seem at first to be a classic example of Aristotelian catharsis. I think such a characterization has some banal validity to it, but that it misses the fundamental point. That is to say that Breaking Bad does not operate on the logic of catharsis even though it trades in, and on, catharsis. Instead, the logic of the show is the experience of what is called in heavy metal parlance brutality. 

What is “brutality” in this context? Allow me to take a brief detour into death metal. Death metal is, I think it fair to say, taken seriously by just about no one who is not a death metal fan. The reasons for this are obvious: absurd vocals, childishly grotesque cover art, a general lack of melody (melodic death metal notwithstanding), lyrical obsession with violence, troglodytic looking band members, transgression for the sake of transgression. Indeed, the only scholarly work I’ve ever run across done on death metal is of the sociological “look at this subculture” variety, an approach both not very enlightening and also essentially condescending. Herein, though, I propose to take, if only for a moment, death metal on its own terms. 

What is the defining characteristic of death metal, its essence (essentia) if you will? Certainly like any other genre of cultural production, death metal has its generic rules and characteristics, which, it must be said, are often slavishly followed. We might say that a certain type of vocals (“the death grunt”), down tuned guitars, “blastbeats,” violent lyrics, etc. etc. make up some of these characteristics. But at its heart, in its essence, death metal must be brutal. A song can be brutal and not be death metal, but a song cannot be death metal unless it is brutal. 

So what is brutality? It’s not such an easy question to answer. It’s important to note that brutality is not about the violent imagery in either death metal lyrics or on the album covers. These paratexts, and lyrics are generally paratexts in death metal as they are indecipherable when sung and exist only as a supplement to the music, certainly can contribute to brutality but they cannot produce it. An Amy Grant record with a Cannibal Corpse cover is not brutal, nor is the melody to “When I’m Sixty Four” paired with the lyrics to “Immortal Rites.” Brutality resides in the music itself, then. But it is not reducible to a certain formula of chords, notes, time signatures, instruments, a style of singing, or distorted amplification, even if it relies on each of those. For example, of the so-called Big Four of thrash metal, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, all of which use essentially the same sonic palette, only Slayer is brutal. 

So if brutality isn’t about imagery, or even about a specific sound, what is it about? Brutality in death metal is a way of referring to an experience one has when listening. That experience is oppressive, gut wrenching, and exhausting. This exhaustion is the only true resemblance to the cathartic that brutality exhibits. One is happy in a strange way when the album, or even the song, is over. One has been through a difficult journey, one has been sonically abused, and there is relief when it stops. But this is no purgation, and the structure of death metal songs and albums have more in common in their pummeling intensity with the Theater of the Absurd’s rejection of plot and structure than they do with the dramatic unity of verse-chorus-verse pop music.  

But brutality is also, and there is no better word in English, delicious. And this deliciousness is key to defining brutality. An uninitiated listener can experience the effects laid out in the previous paragraph. Indeed for him or her if death metal is played at loud enough volumes, the experience may in fact be physically painful and disorienting. A death metal aficionado will have a richer experience, though: one that is negative, but not entirely so, because that negativity is tempered with a strange kind enjoyment—what I’ve called deliciousness. That enjoyment stems in part from familiarity, of course. A person who has never really listened to death metal will be likely be taken aback by it, while a familiarized listener will know what to expect by and large. But familiarity is not the only factor, and it is certainly the case that one can become familiar with death metal without ever coming to enjoy it. The unpleasantness may diminish over time, of course, but the non-fan will never have the full experience of brutality because he or she will miss out on this pleasure. Indeed, many partners of death metal fans have no doubt have firsthand knowledge of this phenomenon. 

Now, it is precisely this experience of brutality that is the central characteristic of Breaking Bad. Indeed, brutality, understood in this way as a specific kind of experience, is what Breaking Bad is about. It is worth our time, then, to address some conceptions of experience and how they might typify the experience of brutality I’ve discussed in death metal and Breaking Bad. Here I’ll make reference to a debate in some twentieth century German philosophy about two kinds of experience: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. 

Although neither inaugurated the debate, perhaps the most well-known discussions of this division can be found in Walter Benjamin’s “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Very roughly speaking, the word Erlebnis means something like a personal, subjective experience that occurs at a particular moment in time. In both Benjamin’s and Gadamer’s argument, this is the ahistorical, incommunicable experience of interiority so pervasive in modernity. The word came into use in German in the nineteenth century ostensibly to describe what was really a new understanding, and perhaps a new genus, of experience, or so the argument goes. Erfahrung, on the other hand, is the older German word for experience. Again, for both Benjamin and Gadamer this experience is one that is traditional and historical and thus communal and communicable. 

A useful illustration of the difference might be found in a gloss of Gadamer’s take on Hegel’s famous pronouncement from his Lectures on Aesthetics: “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” For Hegel, art has ended in the “romantic” (i.e. Christian) era precisely because in that era art becomes entirely the province of experience as Erlebnis. The experience of art become aesthetic and thus becomes entirely personal, subjective (in the sense that the subject is the adjudicator [think of Kant on beauty]), ahistorical, private and essentially incommunicable. It is this understanding of art on which we operate today. Classical art (the art of the Greeks), which Hegel considers to be the highest form of art, on the other hand allows for experience as Erfahrung. The experience of art enjoyed, supposedly, by the Greeks was one in which art was not cleaved off from spirit, society, tradition, and history. One did not go to a museum, look at an artwork, and have an experience (Erlebnis). Instead, the experience of art was always already communal and, following Charles Taylor, we might say “embedded” in society, history, religion, etc. 

So according to Benjamin, Erfahrung died along with the lyric poet and the storyteller and the aura, in modernity. It cannot return. Only Erlebnis remains. For Benjamin, this is not an entirely negative assessment. In “Some Motifs,” Benjamin yokes Erfahrung to remembrance, a voluntary reconstruction of the past that is historical only in the dead sense that it seeks to apply will, and perhaps a post-hoc telos, to the past. Erlebnis, in its radical ahistoricality and specific temporality, is involuntary and can “shock” us. Erlebnis has the potentiality of radical trauma, and Benjamin thinks that that traumatic potential is the only revolutionary hope. Erfahrung, then, is willed, safe and static (he uses the model of consciousness, e.g. the ego) while Erlebnis is dangerous and shocking (the model of the unconscious, e.g. the id). 

According to Gadamer, though, in modernity we have made the error of valorizing the interiority of the subject and thus we have lost our traditional understanding of experience as Ehfarung and gone down the dangerous path of Erlebnis. For Gadamer then, and in contradistinction to Benjamin, a proper re-grounding, a change in comportment to our horizons can bring us back to experience as Erfahrung. He does not see the radical potential of Erlebnis, nor would he endorse such if he did. 

So the question we come to is: How can we understand the experience of brutality in Breaking Bad, and perhaps death metal, on these models? We might say with Benjamin that only the non-fan of death metal could truly experience a shocking Erlebnis at its ugly hands. The very deliciousness I mentioned above would appear to be some way of recuperating the trauma, of consciously processing an unpleasant experience to remove its radicality. The same would go for Breaking Bad, and perhaps Benjamin would argue that Breaking Bad possesses no real ability to traumatize us, to evoke radical Erlebnis. Because unlike death metal, Breaking Bad is, in its style and genre, entirely familiar to most viewers. Unlike the shock of Erlebnis we might have when viewing a Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke film (although once you’ve seen one, the genuine Erlebnis may not be possible), Breaking Bad is always safe in its delicious brutality. That is, there is always the Ehfarung of genre to protect us from shock and trauma.

Or we might say with Gadamer that the Erlebnis of brutality in Breaking Bad is merely a thrill ride with no real substance. It’s a kick, as Jack Kerouac might have said, and that’s it. What’s worse is that that kick is fundamentally fleeting, subjective, private and thus deeply privative. All the Erlebnis of brutality does, Gadamer might argue, is turn us back into our selves by giving us an oddly sensual pleasure I called deliciousness, while at the same time engaging our inner sadists. Death metal, and the appreciation of it, I imagine Gadamer would think, is the logical end point of all this: the nihilism of subjectivism and aesthetics in its final form. 

What I want to argue though is that what the experience of delicious brutality in Breaking Bad, and in death metal, points to is a central incoherence in the division of Ehfarung and Erlebnis. In order for us to have the experience of brutality as I’ve typified it, we have to have a certain level of familiarity with generic conventions. We have to know what to expect and we have to know how to process what comes. This is experience as Ehfarung. When we do have that familiarity, the proper experience of Erlebnis becomes possible. That depth of that experience, though, cannot be exhausted by calling it Erlebnis, for it is both private and communal at the same time. It is private in the sense the experience of brutality is fundamentally an aesthetic one in the Kantian sense (albeit properly perverted). It is communal in the sense that in order to have this experience, we must take part in the project of human culture whether we are aware of it or not. This apparent Erlebnis is also both ahistorical and deeply historical. It is ahistorical in the sense that it is momentary, a passing inner state that gives us no real knowledge. At the same time, it is historical for the simple reason that it requires of us attunement to generic precedent, to the duration of genre if you will. In the case of brutality, then, and in Breaking Bad, Ehfarung serves as the ground for Erlebnis. What appears to be the worst kind of subjective aestheticism (to Gadamer) or a fundamentally de-radicalized willful grasping of what should irrupt from the unconscious (to Benjamin) actually shows that experience as Ehfarung and experience as Erlebnis are meaningless in isolation from each other. What we see instead is that they are interdependent conceptions with neither eclipsing the other and neither sufficing to typify the experience of brutality. 

Thus to the extent that Breaking Bad is about the experience of brutality, it is also about how Erlebnis and Ehfarung are perhaps less contradictory than they may appear.  

Me on Eagleton on Kant in _The Ideology of the Aesthetic_

I have a number of qualms with Eagleton's type of analysis in general*, but I do not begrudge him the idea that modern subjectivity is key for the rise of aesthetics. I would argue, however, that in the Kant chapter his argument is slipshod, imprecise, and too underdeveloped to support his claim. What I really want to look at it, though, is Eagleton's idea that the model of the aesthetic in Kant mirrors bourgeois hegemony.

For Eagleton, Kant's idea of the so-called universality of a judgment of the beautiful is key. Such a judgment is not tyrannical, since it does not coerce agreement, but is hegemonic because it requires a kind of individually, subjectively proffered agreement. That is, because of the indeterminacy of the judgment of beauty, there are no laws or concepts with which any rational being must concur. At the same time, the judgment of beauty seems to act in accordance with the determinate model which demands the agreement of any rational being.

This idea of demanding agreement is of course one of the central pillars of Kant's practical reason, i.e. the ability to act morally. Notably, moral action does not consist of judgment (thus the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment). Instead, proper moral action is structured by a priori moral principles. The reason for this, as Eagleton notes, centers on the "is/ought distinction." It is central for Kant that what we ought to do morally cannot be based on what is simply being done because what is being done is for Kant contingent and indeterminate (ad hoc) as it does not adhere to any higher (a priori) principles. What is, therefore, would seem to allow for what we can call a situational ethics, and situational ethics can lead us down a dangerous path. So, Kant must establish a priori and "universal" moral principles. Our freedom, or ability to act morally, consists in whether we realize and follow these dictates or not. Kant thinks that every person of sound mind has the ability to recognize these moral principles through their practical reason, but of course we may choose to act in accordance to these principles or not. This is our moral freedom.

Moral action for Kant is therefore what Albert Borgmann (following Aristotle) calls apodeictic. It is lawful, and "[i]f the laws and conditions are accepted as true and the rules of logical inference are followed, then the truth of the proposition that refers to the event to be explained cannot be refuted" (Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 20). In Kant's moral philosophy, then, proving a priori moral principles means that you essentially have no choice but to agree with them. You are not coerced to act in accordance with them, but you cannot refute the moral truth, so to act otherwise is basically willful perversion (a very unsatisfactory definition of moral freedom, we might add).

Now, in Eagleton's account, aesthetic judgment for Kant allows for a kind of personal freedom outside of the dictates of moral lawfulness. At the same time because a judgment of the beautiful appears to require assent from others, it "ensures between human subjects a spontaneous, immediate, non-coercive consensus" (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 98). It is precisely here that Eagleton is, I think, wrong.

As I mentioned in class, what interests Kan about the beautiful is the conditions of the possibility of the category of the beautiful. One of those conditions is that beauty, in an important way, is not in the eye of the beholder, or not only in the eye of the beholder. If it were, of course, judgments of beauty would simply be solipsistic and capricious, i.e. not judgments at all in any real sense of the word. Judgments of beauty ask for universal consent, but do not do so logically or apodeitically. Beauty is always indeterminate (i.e. not governed by laws), which is what allows for judgment in the first place. Moral action profoundly does not allow for judgment. Thus, aesthetic judgment is central to Kant's thinking in a way that we sometimes forget.

But when Kant (in my reading) says that a judgment of beauty requires assent, he avowedly does not mean that such a judgment receives assent. This is where Eagleton appears to misread. The judgment of beauty does want to develop consensus, but it does not do so by producing instantaneous assent. It acts as if it is an apodeictic proposition, but in fact it is not. Rather, the judgment of beauty is (to borrow from Borgmann again) a deictic proposition which is able "[t]o articulate something, i.e. to outline and highlight the crucial features of something" (25) and is able to offer a different kind of explanation than an apodeictic proposition is. The latter is a case of subsuming something a set of laws (or a priori principles) and following the chain, while the former seeks to articulate something of more than subjective significance that is not necessarily lawful.

The aesthetic judgment is not, at least for Kant, a negatively subjective one. That is why he is philosophically interested in it. It allows for dissent, for discussion, and though it wants consensus, it doesn't necessarily get it. It is thus nothing at all like hegemonic ideology in Eagleton's sense. Aesthetic judgment focuses on particularity, and its "universalism" is a formal and heuristic trait that rescues it from solipsism.** It is, as Hannah Arendt argues in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy***, the model upon which a kind of radical freedom not found elsewhere in Kant might be based. Arendt's engagement with the Eichmann trial led her to the Third Critique because, in her argument, Adolf Eichmann was incapable of judgment in any strong sense. What he could do, and did do, was subsume particulars under a set of rules and use those rules to determine the appropriate course of action.**** This is the apodeictic model, the model of Kant's metaphysics of morals. What the deictic model is at least capable of doing is both asking and answering questions about significance and meaning to ourselves and to others, and thus of providing criteria for a radically free judgment that is nonetheless not solipsistic. Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment, then, opens art for discussion and debate and, contra Eagleton, fundamentally allows for dissent and disagreement while only formally calling for universality.

On this argument, then, each art object has within it the potential for "universality" inasmuch as it can be considered beautiful; that is, beautiful in Kant's specific definition. It is certainly the case that one must live in a "modern" society for art to take on this aesthetic universality, as art becomes divorced from faith, spirituality, and cosmology only in modernity (C.f. R.G. Collingwood The Principles of Art & Giorgio Agamben The Man Without Content), so an art object cannot be transhistorically universal (again, this is for Kant).

As such, the idea of aesthetic universality can certainly be seen as a chauvinistic one, even when we make a clear distinction between an actual claim to universality (which I argue Eagleton does) as opposed to a formal one. Problems concerning nationalism, state art, blood and soil rhetoric, and art as ideology can still be found in claims of formal universality. What cannot be substantiated, at least in my reading, is that art and aesthetics are hegemonic (in Eagleton's sense) based on Kant's idea of universal assent to judgments of beauty.

The overall scope of what Eagleton is trying to argue—that Kant's notion of judgment of the beautiful provides for both the strong self-defining subject of modernity (a term of Charles Taylor's that I prefer immeasurably to Eagleton's never defined "bourgeois subject") in its stress on the individual judgment as well as for a larger community through a sensus communis in its so-called universality—strikes me as fundamentally correct. Hence art and aesthetics are one aspect of modern (capitalist, liberal, patriarchal, etc.) Western ideology in that they reinforce and articulate the modern subject.

But Eagleton goes wrong when he writes that Kant's aesthetic judgment works on the same model as ideological hegemony (as he does when presents Kant's moral law as equivalent to Marx's commodity form, a rather outrageous claim). Such a claim turns on the idea of an actual consensus being required by aesthetic judgment. In fact, Kant's idea of aesthetic judgment allows precisely for disagreement, argument, and rupture. That Kant can only find this radical freedom in the realm of judging artworks is, of course, deeply problematic in its own right.

*He, like many Marxist critics, is happy to historicize philosophers and submit their work to immanent critique (an important task, no doubt) while at the same time simply reciting from Marx as if Marxian concepts are plainly factual (e.g. the commodity form). More importantly, The Ideology of the Aesthetic suffers from a central problem that (I think) all Marxist/Marxian cultural criticism suffers, the anxiety of history and economics. A committed Marxist must believe that history and economics are the driving forces of human life, and the site of potential for liberatory praxis. So to study literature, or anything other than history and economics, is always going to present a theoretical problem. Eagleton’s book is essentially an apologia for studying literature and culture. In order to justify his work, he argues that the modern bourgeois subject is fundamentally an aesthetic subject. I have no problem with the idea that art and aesthetics as we know them cannot exist without the development of modernity and the modern subject. But to claim, as I think Eagleton does, that art and aesthetics are the defining feature of modern subjectivity seems to me merely a justification for studying art and culture when he knows that the weight of his central intellectual claims lie elsewhere. He also seems to conflate the sublime and beautiful in problematic ways at certain points, and he appears to confuse Kant’s philosophization (if I may coin a word) of certain phenomenological experiences (that of the beautiful and the sublime) with those experiences themselves, putting the cart before the horse if you will.

**Of course, we may not agree with Kant on this phenomenon.

***The lectures, which were to have become the third and final volume of The Life of the Mind entitled Judgment, are entirely concerned with the Critique of Judgment as Kant’s central text of political philosophy.

****Whether Arendt’s analysis is Eichmann is essentially correct is, of course, open for debate. I think her thoughts are germane to my argument here regardless.

Why I Haven’t Read Infinite Jest or Thoughts on the Occasion of David Foster Wallace’s Death.

David Foster Wallace's recent suicide has produced what is to me a surprising number of highly laudatory reflections on the man and his work. I'm not surprised that people who write about him loved his work, but I am a little surprised at the sheer volume of these reflections. For a writer who has not been particularly prominent on the cultural map for roughly a decade (though he never disappeared), his work seems to command a great deal of respect. No doubt this respect is well earned and appropriate, and I am not here to claim otherwise, although it seems a bit of stretch to me to call him a "great novelist" or "the most important novelist of his generation" (Boston Globe) since he wrote only two novels, one of which is not often read. Indeed, the bulk of his work (in pieces, not pages) has been short stories--and more recently—essays, while the bulk of his fame rests on his opus Infinite Jest. I have no opinion on whether he was a great novelist or not, since I haven't read more than a few sentences of his work, and therein lay my thoughts at this moment.

There are a variety of putative reasons that I never cracked Infinite Jest. Certainly its capaciousness contributed, although I am not typically terrified of long novels. Then too there are the footnotes, an affectation that I found more than a little ridiculous, although his footnoting addiction perhaps resembles my thought process more than I'd like to admit. But in actuality, there's only one real reason that I've not read Wallace. It is an unfair reason, one that blames the artifact for its artifice--to be sure--but I think it's worth discussing, particularly since it has largely been ignored in the recent considerations of Wallace's work. Infinite Jest suffered two related stigmas in my view. First, it was heavily marketed. Second, it was heavily marketed to a certain niche market, what was then called "alternative" culture.

The novel, through no fault of its own or of Wallace's, became kind of a cultural marker for alternative/slacker/Gen X-Y subculture, in the same way perhaps as Lollapalooza I-III attendance did. It was the chosen book for hipster douchebags to pretend they were reading in the coffee shop while they were picking up women. Posters for it were plastered all over downtown Seattle, and it was hailed by the target audience just as much as the critics as a novel of the "now" generation. Now, none of this is to say that it's not a great book, and again this reception is not Wallace's fault, and I know plenty of people who read the book, enjoyed it, thought about it, and didn't think of it as a signal moment in counter-culture of the 1990s. But I chafe at the thought of being told what defines me, and I was frankly tremendously annoyed by the book's omnipresence. I will have that orange and blue jacket with clouds on it burned into psyche for the rest of my life.

For me, and again this is unfair to the book itself, Infinite Jest belongs indelibly to the era of fashion designers selling plaid flannel shirts, the endless Time/Newsweek articles on Generation Y and "alternative culture," the beginning of the cult of tribal tattoos, etc. It always struck me as a book that developed a cult following not through word of mouth, but through marketing and its position as a symbol of status. This may be entirely false, and groundswell may well have driven the novel's marketing strategy, but I speak here only of my impressions, not of the facts of the matter which are unknown to me.

As a result of what I felt, and honestly still feel, was the cynical marketing of Infinite Jest and its historio-cultural place as a symbol for the mainstreaming of late '80s to mid '90s "alternative culture," I've always avoided it. I think probably enough time has passed that I can and should put this prejudice aside and read the damned thing. I intend to, some day. But I insist that we not forget that this particular book has a wealth of cultural baggage associated with it, whether Wallace meant it to or not. The marketing of this book, separate but yet inseparable from its existence, has meaning and resonance beyond the book itself, and it deserves very much to be brought to bear when we speak of Wallace's legacy. Wallace was no doubt a smart and talented man, and someday perhaps I will be able to offer an opinion of him as a writer. Until then, I will continue to insist that we not forget that he and his work were offered up as sacrifices to the disingenuousness of the culture machine which he apparently so reviled. This may be the nature of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction; it may be the inevitability of culture industry at work; it is certainly not the fault of the author or his work. Nonetheless, it marks a change in American sub or counter-culture; indeed it marks the end of "alternative" culture as a DIY development (of course some would argue it never was that, a view that can be supported, but which I think is flawed nevertheless) and its subsumption into the mainstream. It also in some ways shows the power of the (sub)cultural talisman, and perhaps its emptiness and the emptiness of its culture as the artifact absorbs the artwork. These moments, issues, and complications continue to be a central part of the impact of Infinite Jest and its author.

Sherman Alexie/Harlan Ellison

I was just thinking in the shower (which is where I do most of my thinking.... That's right, about 10 minutes a day) about why I don't really like Sherman Alexie's work very much, and it struck me that he and his work remind me a lot of Harlan Ellison. Both are smart-asses, both are arrogant, both excel at shorter work, both have very little faith (if any) in humanity.

Beyond this, both strike me as very "thin" writers. This is an aesthetic point, not an analytical one, but I think it is important. It's as if I want to like to them, as if I understand that they are "important" in some way, but I'd argue that neither are very interesting stylists, and more importantly that neither really has much richness or depth to what he does (or did). I might go as far as to argue that each writer's respective arrogance retards their work. That is, neither seems capable of understanding people other than themselves, and their work reflects this. They both strike me as a bit hollow at the core. I get the feeling from both of them that they are smart but not very deep thinkers, perhaps this is what bugs me about their work. Clever, yes, but kind of obvious, even cliched at times.

In June of this year, the Onion AV Club posted an interview with Ellison. This is the link to the second page of part two: http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/harlan_ellison_part_two/2 . In it you will find an anecdote of Ellison's regarding a Jesuit literary scholar's paper on an Ellison story. Ellison was in the audience and took the guy to task. This is nothing shocking for a writer to do, particularly one as irascible as Ellison. It reminds me a lot of something Alexie might do as well.

Now of course as a blossoming literary critic, you might think that my annoyance with this anecdote has to do with Ellison's attacks on academic criticism. But I am the first to admit that academic criticism is largely a load of BS (yes, mine too). Instead I want to focus on the fact that Ellison really has no idea what he's even talking about when he drops "deconstruction" in there. He hasn't even bothered to try to understand, nor to acknowledge that there are few if any Jesuit deconstructions out there (in fact, there are very few deconstructionists at all, I'd wager). Even more importantly, he totally ignores the vitally important open-endedness of literature by browbeating this scholar. Ellison wants his work to mean exactly what he wants it to mean; it's kind of the anti-Bob Dylan stance. But of course, no work does this. Let's bypass "sign/signifier" talk and just focus on interpretation. The very richness of art is that it allows, even encourages, idiosyncratic readings. Even if a work is meant to be dogmatic or pedantic, readings of it will always be unstable (NB: This is not, as it may first appear, a so-called postmodernist stance. It is, you might say, a hermeneutic stance, one that in this argument does not necessarily rely on history, and it is descriptive of what intellectuals do with intellectual traditions. Indeed, mainstream Anglo-American philosophy thrives on such a practice, cf. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12925). In Barthes-ian terms, I'd argue that both Ellison and Alexie dislike the idea of the "readerly" text. The problem here is two-fold. First, this makes the texts more about the authors than the texts (the thinness I mentioned above). Second, neither are particularly writerly writers in my view.

Back to the point at hand, although I have lots more to say about how these two might be very much reinforcing the culture that they critique in their literary practices, what this implies to me a lack of good faith intellectual effort, indeed a lack (dare I say it) of depth in both writers. This, I think, is the source of the thinness I find in their work.