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The Culture of CriticismAuthor(s): Geoffrey H. HartmanSource: PMLA, Vol. 99, No. 3, Centennial Issue (May, 1984), pp. 371-397Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462215 .

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GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN

The Cultureof CriticismFOR THOSE who approach literary studieswith literarysensitivity, an immediate prob-lem arises. They cannot overlook style, theirown or that of others. Throughtheir concern withliterature they have become aware that under-standing is a mediated activity and that style is anindex of how the writer deals with the conscious-ness of mediation. Style is not cognitive only; itis also recognitive, a signal betraying the writer'srelation, or sometimes the relation of a type ofdiscourse, to a historical and social world. To saythat of course words are a form of life is notenough: words at this level of style intend a state-ment about life itself in relation to words, and inparticularto literatureas a value-laden act. Thus,even without fully understandingit, one is alertedby a similarity in the opening of these two essays:TheRightReverend ather n God,LancelotBishopofWinchester, iedon September 6th, 1626.Duringhislifetimehe enjoyeda distinguished eputation or theexcellence of his sermons, for the conduct of hisdiocese,forhisability n controversy isplayed gainstCardinalBellarmine,nd for thedecorum nddevotionof his private ife. (Eliot,Lancelot13)Oneafternoon,WalterBenjaminwassitting nside theCafe desDeuxMagots n SaintGermain esPrOswhenhe was struckwith compellingforce by the idea ofdrawinga diagramof his life, and knew at the samemomentexactlyhow it was to be done. He drewthediagram,and with utterly ypical ll-luck ost it againa yearor two later.Thediagram,not surprisingly, asa labyrinth. (Eagleton,Pref.)Each of these paragraphs,written more than fiftyyears apart, suggests a desired intimacy with thenow distant Lebenswelt of its hero. Both evoke alost concreteness, the fullness of a life in history,even though that life might have been a mortalfailure. Eliot writes about it from the edge ofmimicry, Eagleton with a directness approachingparody.

Thinking about the similarity,one is tempted toask whetherthe Marxist critic does not sharewiththe critic struggling for a postreligious faith a

wishful sense of parousia. Was there,or will therebe, an era in which mind and act, knowledge andreality,are not dissociated? What emerges, in anycase, is expressedin terms of the historical imag-ination; and it hovers about the issue of ap-propriation:whether a past or estrangedmode ofexistence (also of discourse) is recoverable.At the risk of making too much of a presenta-tional device, let me follow up this hunch. We re-main, today, in the era of historicism broughtabout by so many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars and by speculative philosophiesof history associated with Vico, Herder, andMichelet. Moreover,we have graduallybecome in-terestednot only in the great turning points of in-dividual or collective existence (birth, careerchoice, marriage, death; kings, priests, diplomatichistory, inventions, revolutions)but also in every-day life: its diplomacy, ideology, accidents, junc-tures. Eagleton is quite sparingof such details, ex-cept when he polemicizes against academic proj-ects that always take place indoors and know lit-tle about the collective world:Meyerhold . . occupying wholetownto produceaplayto celebratehethirdanniversaryf the Bolshevikrevolution,witha castof 15,000,realgunsand a realbattleship.Or . . . ErwinPiscator n the 1920sat theSPDtheatren Berlin,whereyoumight indhimdirect-ing a playin whichBrechthada hand,withmusicbyEisleror Weill, ilm-effectsby Grosz,stagedesignsbyMoholy-Nagy,Otto Dix or John Heartfield. (94)Such "moments," Eagleton claims, are para-digmatic; typical of what academic "narratives"forget when they fail to reinsert iteraryworks intoculturaland political life. YetEagleton'shistoricalvignettes sound like voice-overs in a propagandadocumentary.Preciselybecause historicismwas so successful,and gave us all those propernames and dates, thecontemporary mind staggers a little under thedetail. For other reasons, too, a "New LiteraryHistory" begins to organize itself and tries for aless positive narrative form. Eagleton has not

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The Culture of Criticismfound it, despitethe throwawayquality,sometimesrisingto caricaturepitch, of his prose.But he doesexpand Benjamin's resonant idea of the energy(especially the repressedvulgar energy) of a mo-ment or an epoch breaking out of reified time toredeem itself from manipulation-to make itselfpresent in a form that discomfits progressiveschemes. Benjamin paradoxically places hope inthat rising up of the historical memory, ratherthan in an abstractlyhappy future. My purpose isnot to describe his thought exactly;rather,I wantto suggest that we too remain within historicism,reacting to the expanded horizon of fact it hasbrought about, now integrating by an impossibleembrace and now violently throwing off theburden of multiplying and fragmenting per-spectives.Reading back, on this centenary, one hundredyears, we would come upon Wilhelm Dilthey'sIn-troduction to the Humanities (Einleitung in dieGeisteswissenschaften). Here too we are madeaware of a certain style. In his 1883prefaceto thework, Dilthey announces his intention to link up"a historicalwith a systematic procedure, n orderto solve the question of the philosophical founda-tion of the humanities with the highest degree ofcertainty" (1: xv). That is quite a mouthful, andindicates an acknowledged quest for wholenessamid the profusion of data and schemes thathistoricism has generated. The historical portionof his book, Dilthey says, would determine theplace ("geschichtlicheOrt") of particulartheories,preparing n this way the systematictask of layingdown ("Grundlegung" "Begriinding") anepistemological foundation. Dilthey's connec-tivism joins ideas and metaphors that thoseruminants Heidegger and Derrida will chew on;we are in the presence of a grand style, madegrander still by German syntax and compoundwords. Todayit all seems like an elegant variationof cliches from the history of ideas, intending toteach us that the concept of uniformity postulatedby the Enlightenment is inadequate to themanifold energies,the historical and psychologicalspecificity of our vital (willing, feeling, represent-ing) nature. "In the veins of the knowing subject,constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant, thereflows not real blood but the diluted essence ofReason as pure mentation" (1: xviii).YetDilthey, of course, is not to be dismissed, ashis later influence on German intellectual historyand on thinkerslike Ortega y Gasset suggests. We

may question his style, but the dilemma he ex-presses, and struggles to resolve, remains ours. Ifwe are to value the will to knowledge that has un-covered these many different forms of life, wemust find for them some coherence, even aunitary aspect. Dilthey believed that not only atypological ordering(in particular,of world views)but a more foundational analysis could occur. Itwould revealthe totality and interrelatedness(histerms) of life and explain how we can intuit theworld of others: the historical world.'In this very period Nietzsche was developinguntimely thoughts on knowledge. He felt it hadrun out of control and was jeopardizingthe idealof a balance of faculties. "The philosopher showsthe highest dignity, when he concentrates-tames-into unity the limitlesswill to knowledge"(Philosophenbuch 48/49). "Humanity," he alsowrites, "has knowledge as a beautiful way to doitself in" (120/121). Written between 1872 and1875, immediately after The Birth of Tragedy,these observations give the other side of theknowledgeexplosion Dilthey tried to organizeintoinnocence.

The question is indeed what role knowledgeplays, and whether it will throw light on itself-on its own place in human history. If scholarshipand specializationcontinue to reign, can a culturegrow from them? Nietzsche doubted it; hethought learningwas a substitute for religion,andthat it would go the way of religion. Yet forDilthey a Lebensphilosophie drawn from themoral sciences(the earlyterm for human sciences,or "Geisteswissenschaften") was an imperative.That is why hermeneutics became a centralcon-cern: if historical knowledge was to become per-sonal knowledge, then hermeneutics would haveto show that understandingothers, and the histor-ical past, was possible.

The problematicplace of "history" as a higher,because unifying, form of knowledge is suggestedby a comparison that takes us from the 1880s tothe present. In a preface to Allegories of Reading(1979) Paul de Man tells us he wanted to writehistory but ended up with "reading" as his sub-ject. "I had to shift from historical definition tothe problematicsof reading" (ix). What does thisdisplacementmean? Dilthey too deferssomething.At the end of his preface he mentions he haspostponed completing his biography of Schleier-macher because "ultimate questions of philos-ophy" had to be resolved before he could con-

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Geoffrey H. Hartmantinue his exposition and critique.What is an "ultimate question" for de Man?Dilthey's move upward to a philosophical her-meneutics ("Aufbau") is replaced by "reading"("Abbau"). Dilthey's idealism invests history witha hopeful unity that keeps breaking down. DeMan's interest in rhetoric undoes standard prin-ciples of canonicity, or of period definition, andsuggests that a foundation for humanistic studiescannot now be found.In a sense, then, de Man too had to clarify aphilosophical question, but for him it was thequestion of philosophy itself, its presumptionvis-a-vis literature.Philosophy, whether of historyor of language, is itself a form of rhetoric.Reading tests the claim that a language ofknowledge exists that is more rigorous thanliterary language-more aware, at least, ofrhetorical figures in their duplicity, their inter-twined cognitive and persuasive aspects. The veryseparation of philosophy and literatureinto self-contained disciplines is challenged by de Man'skind of reading. Literature(a term that includesliterary studies) is said to be as preoccupied asphilosophy is with the "fallacy of unmediated ex-pression." Yetbecause literature s less pretentiousin claimingto overcome this obstacle, it is also lessdeceiving.Dilthey appears certain of the ultimate in-telligibility of world and text. De Man's cautioustitle, Allegories of Reading, not only implies thatall interpretation has some divination in it-thateven in its modern and secular form it has anunacknowledged, though negative, affinity tofigural allegory2-but also suggests, more radi-cally, that our very desire for intelligibilitydiscloses something that continues to resist it, astubborn, gratuitous remainder that cannot beresolved but only described as "literary,""linguistic," "figural." In Kant and Hegel toothere is a moment when the conceptualizingreason meets that check. Though readingwants tomake the text readable, it never produces morethan an "allegory" of this desire.Ultimately de Man's title is a kenning forliterature tself as a body of works that cannot besystematized by scientific types of analysis (logic,grammar, structural metagrammar, holisticschemes). Any type of reading that tries to doaway with itself or, obversely, to substitute itselffor the work is in error,for either way it seeks anintuitive or unmediated relation. Yetreadingmust

seek that relation if it aims to understand.Reading is and is not understanding,therefore.Inthis sense literary works are always already"readings": the forestructure of criticism, to usea term from Heidegger. Literature would not ex-ist if there were a purer sort of understanding-of the soul in words or of words in the soul (ab-solute words, inscribed on the "tablets of theheart").De Man's emphasis on reading rather than onunderstanding helps us to see the change that hasoccurred since Dilthey. The change takes placewithin hermeneutics, defined by Schleiermacheras a "philological discipline." Dilthey, Schleier-macher'smost influential interpreter,emphasizesphilosophy over philology. He describes mainlyhis precursor'sattempt to free hermeneutics fromits regional base in theology and law. Interpreta-tion theory had to find a valid foundation, onethat would be independentof such regionalor ap-plied contexts. As a general hermeneutics itbecomes philosophical and produces an under-standing of understanding, a disclosure of "thefacts of consciousness" ("Tatsachendes Bewusst-seins"). An emancipatedphilosophical hermeneu-tics also allows all oral and written expression tofall under one rule of explication, so that thedistinction between sacred and secular, literaryand nonliterary, classic and nonclassic woulddisappear as an a priori frame, though not ofcourse as an empirical datum with generic andsocial features. Only a general science of under-standing will unify the humanities and providethem with a philosophically valid foundation.As often happens in intellectual history, therecoveryof earliermanuscriptsreversesa directionof inquiry. Dilthey knew only a late version ofSchleiermacher'sHermeneutik (1838); it was nottill 1959 that all the relevant versions wereassembled, under the sponsorship of Hans-GeorgGadamer. The expanded corpus allows us to seean oscillation in Schleiermacher's thinking. Heseeks to honor the "technical" (psychological)and the "grammatical" sides of interpretation.Alternatively, he distinguishes the part that"divination" plays in understanding an authorfrom the part played by the words themselves,whose grammar and context must be studied ob-jectively. Divination is complete when we haveforgotten the words; grammatical study is com-plete when we have forgotten the writer of thewords. Schleiermacher ries to see hermeneuticsas

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The Culture of Criticisma combinatory art of the two modes. They shouldwork reciprocally ("Wechselwirkung"). But hecannot make up his mind which mode is higherand which lower:sometimes hermeneuticsproperis identified with divination, but then statementsare made that give primacy to understanding a"whole" that is said to be language itself."Language," an early manuscriptdeclares,"is allthat may be presupposed in hermeneutics, or allthat can be found."How can hermeneutics unify the humanitieswhen it cannot unify itself? No wonder Diltheyhas to take time off to clarify ultimate philo-sophical problems. By choosing the word"reading,"de Man moves away from the effort tofound the humanitieson interpretation heory. Hereconstitutes the subject of literarystudies as lan-guage-language, not as an abstracted or objec-tified entity, but as it produces reading. Readingconstructs models of intelligibilitythat it can alsodeconstruct. All such "allegories of reading" areshadow functions that sustain a mind seeking tocontrol mutability. There is no absolute knowl-edge to be separated out and systematized: con-cepts always present themselves, if at all, in lin-guistic form. The claim "I understandlanguage"is the largest a thinker can make, as is also clearfrom Wittgenstein's Investigations or fromValery's praise of Mallarme, that he usedlanguage as if he had invented it.

Schleiermacherprovidesonly one of the framesfor recent literary studies. Saussure and Freudhave been more influential, precisely becausephilology (in the case of Saussure)and the cultureof philology (in the case of Freud)wereconvertedto nonantiquarianand intensely practicaluses. Inboth there is uncertainty about the historical ormaterial basis of signification, but this onlystimulates a new description of the way meaningcomes about: Saussureexplainshow sound shapesbecome signifying words, Freud how dreamthoughts become conscious, and thus inter-pretable.Saussure's work is so important, for literarystudies also, because it suspends the two favoriteareas of Dilthey: it does not touch psychology,and it circumvents, though it acknowledges,history. Already in the notebooks Saussure sug-gests that when we deal with what is "in" words,we are still dealing with words, rather than with

a preverbal intention. What stands behind theesoteric verses he analyzes is not a "sujetcreateur" but a "mot inducteur."3 He lays thebasis for a text-production heory, which must ad-vance from phonemes to the word, the phrase,thesentence, and then the whole we call a text.Yethis greatestcontribution is his definition ofthe conceptual factor that links signifier (theacoustical word)to signified (the referentialword).He found that the linkage, though conceptual,was also conventional or arbitrary:no intrinsicreason or genetic-historical("diachronic")processcould be held to motivate it. The linkage took ef-fect only within a "diacritical"frameworkof dif-ferences betweenwords, regulatedat everylevelbylanguage itself in its synchronic or systematicaspect.The idea of a linguistic system obviously leadsto the idea of a literary system.4 I want to em-phasize, however,a comparison with Freud, sincea great deal of theory in the last twenty yearshascome out of an alliance of semiotics andpsychoanalysis. This should be a surprise, sinceFreud'sinterest is in psychology, or "divination,"while Saussure's is in "grammar," or the systemof language. Though Freudadvances in the samedirection as Saussure when he rejects essentialistconceptions of meaning, which explain dreamsymbols accordingto a fixed (archetypal)numberof "keys," he also holds that a dream cannot beunderstood without furtheraccess to the mind ofthe dreamer,that is, to the dreamer'sassociations;and this situation is mobile indeed. Meaningscanbe assigned to a particular symbol or dream, yeteach sequence remains indeterminate, as if the"dream anguage"were a sentence without closurethat keeps us in the grip of the penultimate.Yet is the relation between dreams and mean-ing more problematic than that between wordsand meaning, if we start at the acoustic, in-trapoetic level ratherthan at the level of standardlanguage? Like Saussure in his notebooks, weoften see, or hear, words within words andbecome fascinated with ghostly "matrices" and"mannequins" that live anagrammaticallywithinhermetic kinds of language. Saussure abandonedthis area because it was too chancy. The relationbetween verses and their inner word (usually a"sacredname")was not subjectto strongverifica-tion: two words or names might suggest them-selves, and the whole issue became a game whoserules were difficult to set. Yet we glimpse, here, a

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Geoffrey H. Hartmanproblem strictly analogous to dream interpreta-tion: how to relate indeterminacy and overdeter-mination. This will be a crucial task for mosttheories of linguistic meaning, as for theories ofpoetic meaning.Freud, moreover,though he professes ignoranceconcerning the material in the unconscious (im-ages seem more primal than words, yet images areoften a rebustranslatableinto words), brings thatmaterial into the domain of "word presentation"by an associative method ("free association") thatis basically verbal. The difference between un-conscious and conscious thought is preciselywordpresentation(see, e.g., The Ego and the Id, ch. 2).Where consciousness is, there is language; theobverse is not so clear. It seems that languageallows dream thoughts to enter a preconsciousand so retrievablestage, even if the structure oflanguage (its syntax or rhetoric)cannot be provedto subsist in the unconscious. Jacques Lacan,however,applying Saussure,seeks a semiotic, ver-bally active view of the unconscious. Both Freudand Saussure,in any case, contribute to a renewalof scientific interest in linguistic process as it af-fects everyaspect of human life, from slips of thetongue to complex literary works, from psycho-babble to mythology.

The historian Marc Bloch once said what manyhave felt about times, such as antiquity, for whichthere are relativelyfew sources: "One could profitfrom the fact that the documents were lacking."In the contemporaryperiod, after the philologicaldiscoveries of two centuries, there are so manydocuments that, as in my own essay, the problemof choice, of representative ampling, becomes op-pressive. The history of poetry overwhelms thepoetry of history; whereas during the lean yearsof historical researcha single text, even line, mightbe used significantly, it is not so today, as Peguyremarks in Clio, "That a line, that a word shouldilluminate a world." Clio is made to say, "that,allow me to tell you, is a technique of art, andsuch artistic techniques in the modern world are,precisely, what I am forbidden to use."Yet without them how can this wealth ofmaterials be mastered,even provisionally?Historywriting today is a form of criticism, of reasoned,artisticchoice. Everyhistory of criticismhas to in-clude itself as an act of criticism. Howeverscrupulouslycomprehensivea Wellekis, his exclu-

sions may prove as telling as his inclusions.5 Weadmire a history like his for being more than achronological repertoryor catalogue raisonne. YetFoucault has delineated the arbitrarythough veryreal divisions in the history of discourse, on suchcleavagelines as true and false, mad and sane; andHayden White has studied the "metahistorical,"that is, the rhetorically or tropically determined,order of such grand historical syntheses as JacobBurckhardt's,which already shows the burgeon-ing impact of historicism and philology.6I have mentioned that Nietzsche, at this time,was awareof the cultural and political aspects ofthis immense broadening of the horizon ofknowledge. There are adumbrations in him of awill to power over texts. It is by no means a powerexercised, as in contemporary regimes, throughfalsification. A text becomes, rather,a dangerousfield of forces that struggle in the authorfor thework. Readers too have to recognizein themselvesa will to power,or at least to knowledge,and musteither achieve an empirical equilibrium or estab-lish themselveson terrafirma by means of theory.We are surprisinglyclose to an aristocratictype ofreader-responsebetter:reader-responsibility)doc-trine. Peguy's Clio-although one has to be onguard with her, since she represents the pagansoul-cannot see history as more than a randomaccumulation. The scandal for her is that nohistory exists, only temporality in its unachievedform. Everything s done and undone in time, andthe act of reading reveals that scandal most ar-ticulately. For each reader is an author in thesense of auctor, an augmentor who helps to"achieve" the work but who may also spoil ordisestablish it. Reading, she repeats often, is"l'acte commun, l'operation commune du lisantet du lu"; it is "literally a cooperation, an in-timate, inwardcollaboration . . . thus a discon-certing responsibility."Are we all becoming pagan again, this timethrough excessof learning?It would be interestingto view Walter Pater in this light, as well as thewave of impressionist critics who flourished inFranceand England from the end of the last cen-tury to World War i. They deal with the rise ofscience and scientific philology in their own way.For them reading is a mode of forgetting as wellas remembering:a cleansing of perceptualpowersthat were blocked by needless learning, and arenewalof that learning through particular pass-ing moments, which only the crystallinemagic of

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The Culture of Criticismart might fix in all their texture.Wellek'sHistoryof Modern Criticism-magisterial, hygienic,ency-clopedic-represents a swing back. Combating thesustaineddilettantism of Saintsbury,whose careerbegan exactly a century ago and whose flood ofbooks, including a History of Criticism andLiterary Taste, shows a settled English tendencyto mingle aesthetic appreciationand connoisseur-ship, Wellek conceives of criticism as a unifiedsubject, at least since around 1750.Yet in a review of Wellek, Erich Auerbach,while praising the extraordinary fullness andusefulness of the work, objects that it leaves outtoo much and is not genuinely unified (Gesam-melte Aufsatze 354-63). Criticism, he points out,is bound up not only with aesthetics and remarkson the other arts (which Wellekoften respects)butalso with modes of historical research andphilology (which Wellek treatsonly occasionally).The history of criticism, in short, should includethe history of scholarship. Moreover, literarycriticism is crisscrossed by too many themes andvectors: any "history," therefore,becomes rathera multifaceted referencework, unless the authorcan indeed find one dominant event or motif.This perspectival fullness, which is both a causeand a result of historicism, Auerbach identifiessubversively as the very problem defeatingWellek's History. Perspectivism is held back("tamed," Nietzsche might say) by the retentiveauthority of classical paradigms and the conceptof the fundamental unity of human nature. Butit breaks through in the second half of the eigh-teenth century (just where Wellek's accountbegins) as a Copernican revolutiongraduallyper-vading our entire consciousness.Auerbach helps us to realize that by the timethe MLA was founded historical perspectivismhad triumphed, despite the emergence of newforms of classicism or pseudoclassicism,especiallyin the guise of "national universals" raciallyoriented ideologies that argued the purity anduniversality of a particular national tradition.Auerbachretains,like Curtius and Spitzer,a clearsense of Europe as a potentially unified areastudy; after World War i this faded, and his lateessay "Philology of World Literature" goesbeyond Goethe to announce that "Our philo-logical homeland is the earth;it cannot be the na-tion any longer" (Gesammelte Aufsatze 310).Yet Romance philology had given Auerbach asense of criticism's holistic shape, for a time at

least. "The field I represent,Romance Philology,"he writes, "is one of the smaller branches on thetree of romantic historicism, which experienced,if only in passing, Romania as a meaningfultotality [Sinnganzes]"(GesammelteAufsatze 223).That small branch proved to be a golden bough.Scholars of German or English rarely saw theirprovinceas a Sinnganzes. In Germany,duringtheNazi era, a virulent nationalism tried to imposea false unity on the culture by purging its debt toall but the Nordic heritage. Curtius' EuropeanLiterature and the Latin Middle Ages was an actof spiritual resistance, repossessing Goethe as aEuropean and affirming Germania'skinship withRomania.

In England the literary tradition was, at thebeginning, more discontinuous: philology hadfewer materials to study and soon became "criti-cism"-a word generallyreservedon the Continentfor belletristicreviewsand essays.Evenwhen, withF. R. Leavis' championing of the Cambridge"School of English," a unified sense of a moderncanon developed, the notion of "living English"was concreteonly in spirit. It did not benefit fromthat massive, ramified researchinto all aspects ofliteraryand colloquial language which character-ized such mastersof Romancephilology as Meyer-Lubke, Menendez Pidal, FerdinandBrunot, KarlVossler, and others.7 Their work, cresting in themore focused literarystudies of Curtius, Spitzer,and Auerbach, covered all aspects of linguisticreality, from court to city, from learnedjargon tothe lingua del pane, from nursery to stock ex-change, from the foyer to the demimonde of cafesociety and theater.

German scholarship,intense and self-protective,was a "cultureof learning" that provedunable toresista political takeover n the 1930s.After Hitlerseized power, many important scholars left, orwere forced to leave, and they benefited highereducation in both England and the United States.Yet, after World War i, French and English uni-versities had already begun to turn against theGermanic tradition in philology. (The Germanuniversities, together with the Sorbonne, werefamous-or infamous-for their Ph.D. require-ments.)8Cambridge founded a school of Englishthat separated off "antiquarian" philologicalscholarship, and this became the model formodern English studies once the New Criticism

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Geoffrey H. Hartmantook hold. In America a gradual reform move-ment modified "philology for philology's sake,"experimentedwith a core curriculumin the liberalarts, accepted Croce's emphasis on the expressiveunity of all artifacts,and gravitated owardFrenchacademics like Cazamian, who saw historicalstudies as merely auxiliary to a criticism thatwelded data into a "central intuition" about theidee generatrice of the work.9 In the later 1930s,then, both graduate and undergraduate studiesbegan to be affected by the influx of refugeescholars, polyhistors who carried with them abroad and sophisticated knowledge of Europeanculture.The American academy had been deeply splitfrom early on between an extreme medievalismand an extremeantiprofessionalism.It retained anarchaicsystem of lectures and ritualized examina-tions at the same time as it continued the genteeltradition. Into the 1930s the college remained aworld apart, as if real thought or professedlearning would unbalance undergraduates nsteadof fitting them for extramuralcareers. It imitatedOxbridge and fended off the graduate school'sphilological curriculum. Frenchculture played itspart as a guide to urbane conversation. Andespecially entre deux guerres it was not theuniversities at all but the journals and magazinesthat spread what literary culture there was.Randolph Bourne's comments on the under-graduate, drawn partly from experiences atColumbia around 1910,and Malcolm Cowley'sonHarvard around 1916 converge in an importantway. Bourne said that American students lackedphilosophy or, rather,that they never got beyond"a sporting philosophy, the good old Anglo-Saxon conviction that life is essentially a gamewhose significance lies in terms of winning orlosing." This left the undergraduatein "a sort ofPeter Pan condition . . . instead of anticipatinghis graduate or professional study or his activelife."10Cowley saw a costume drama being actedout, in which students were taught to "regardculture as a veneer,a badge of class distinction-as something assumed like a suit of clothes or anOxford accent . . . "(33). In literarystudies twomain currents, humanist and aesthete, thoughopposed to each other, suggested an unrealmilieu"in which the productiveforcesof society werere-gardedas something alien to poetry and learning"(35-36). This dissociation from native groundswas completed by the students' experienceon the

European front in WorldWari. Cowley'sdescrip-tion of the "Lost Generation" and its "specta-torial attitude" remains powerful. "School andcollege had uprooted us in spirit; now we werephysically uprooted, hundreds of us, millions,plucked from our own soil as if by a clamshellbucketand dumped, scatteredamong strangepeo-ple. All our roots were dead now, even the Anglo-Saxon tradition of our literary ancestors ..."(46)."IA famous page in Henry James's book onHawthorne had remarked he presencein Englandand the absence in America of public institutionsto support a writer'sneedy imagination. Thoughthere were more "items of high civilization" in1916 than in Hawthorne's time, it is clear thatCowley's generation felt a lack of "texture inAmerican life," to repeat James. A renewedsearch for cultural emplacement and native rootsbegan. Mencken'sThe American Language(1919),Van Wyck Brooks's concept of a "usable past,"Cowley's "exile's return" and idea of a worker'sculture, and, above all, Bourne'sclear-eyedunder-standing that "ideas and knowledge about socialrelations and human institutions are to count asurgently in our struggle with the future as anymathematical or mechanical formulas did in thedevelopment of our present"12-these amountedto more than nationalism. The very idea of a cul-ture of criticism was involved, a revision ofArnold's views as powerful as that effected laterby Leavis. Cultural studies, Bourne thought,would revive a line of national classics (Thoreau,Whitman, Mark Twain)not "taintedby sweetnessand light," and this would help to inaugurate acriticism of American institutional life. The "tex-ture" of that life was too thin; it had no real phi-losophy behind it, and very little community.Arnold's idea of culture, Bourne charged, hadbecome a quantitative matter, an excuse for theacquisition of more foreign art. That was allwrong, for the important thing was to "shut our-selves in with our own genius" and to end "thatold division which 'culture' made between thechosen people and the gentiles." Bourne's pro-gram for achieving this remained very general.The little magazines wereto play a role, becoming"voices for these new communities of sentiment"(History 26).13 t was indeed a culture of journal-ism, not yet a culture of criticism, that arose inthe 1920s and 1930s. For the best essays were notdirectly social or America-centered if we think of

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The Culture of Criticismsuch critiques of European literature as EdmundWilson's Axel's Castle and its antiphon, To theFinland Station. These books are much weightierthan Wilson's mingling of memoir and criticismwhen it comes to American subjects. The criticalmemoir, however,so finely practicedby Bourne inthe small magazines or the New Republic, wouldbecome a tradition in America, from WaldoFrank to Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe.Why did a Marxistor sociological criticismnotdevelop after World War I in America? CharlesBeard had published his economic interpretationof the Constitution in 1913.Veblen'srelatedworkhad produced four significant books by 1918.Norwas the period between the wars unproductive:Van Wyck Brooks, in his earlier phase, saw anddenounced the cleavage between the businessworld and the world of culture that drove Amer-ican writers and intellectuals into a state of alien-ation; Waldo Frank wrote three books onAmerica that gained much esteem and which stillseem remarkablystrong analyses,based in part onhis knowledge of Europe, in part on Spanish-American sympathies; Granville Hicks's bitinglyclear The Great Traditionorderedwriterssince theCivil Waraccording to their engagement with theclass struggleand capitalistAmerica;and KennethBurkemixed his own philosophicaland anthropo-logical brew as if he were defying Prohibition.Thinkerslike LewisMumford tackled the problemof galloping urbanization from more than anarchitecturalpoint of view, as did the SouthernAgrarians.One can look at the matter the other wayaround: how did a strong Marxist-inspiredschoolof thought evolve in Europe, especially inGermany? It is clear that the situation of theGerman intellectual differed considerably fromthat of the American intellectual.Until the demiseof the WeimarRepublicthe issue of socialism (ofthe right or the left) was rife; one could hardlyavoid it. Moreover, after the founding of theFrankfurt Institute for Social Research, some in-tellectuals gained financial as well as moral sup-port. All this ended, of course, shortly afterHitler's seizure of power. But enough time hadbeen given to develop common themes and dis-putes that went on even after Adorno,Horkheimer, and others were forced into exile.In America there was no such effective umbrellaorganization;therewereintenseintellectualfriend-ships, but institutional support came mainly from

journals like the New Republic and precariousparty affiliations. The tendency to journalism,moreover, diffused as well as energized: theFrankfurtSchool, though it had better universityconnections, was not subordinate to academicpolicy and produced unaccommodated studiesboth scholarly and contemporary. It would benaive, moreover, o underestimate he anti-intellec-tual and jingoistic currentsonce America enteredthe war in 1916. After Beard resigned hisColumbia University post in protest against thedismissal of two professors, the New YorkTimespublished an editorial with the following blatantsentiments: "Columbia . . . is better for Profes-sor Beard'sresignation.Some yearsago ProfessorBeardpublisheda book . . . no professorshouldhave written, since it was grossly unscientific.. . . It was the fruit of that school of thoughtand teaching . . . borrowed from Germany,which denies to man . . . the capacity of noblestriving. . . ."14 Marxist thinking would becaught in the net of anti-German feelings; it hadno firm base in or outside the university;it reliedon the hit-and-runmethods of weeklyjournalism.Above all there was a danger of substitutingpropaganda for thought. No doubt this wasequally true in Europe; but on the ContinentMarxism gradually acquired a strong philosoph-ical base. Max Weber lectured on historical ma-terialism at the Universityof Vienna in 1918;andby 1930 French thinkers, whatever their patrioticfeelings, were once more seriously engaged withGerman philosophy. But American thought, if Imay generalize,had still to come to its philosophy,through Veblen,Beard, Dewey,Peirce,and others.It was precariously ntrospective;and with the riseof propagandathere was no institutional counter-poise. "When politics fill the sky," Bourne wrotein a letter,"the lid is most serenelyclamped downon philosophical introspection. .... In thiscountry I can think of no intellectual effort out-side Veblen's that has not been propaganda"(World 319-20).15The rejection of the "new orthodoxy" ofpropaganda,as Bourne also calls it, went togetherwith a desireto find-by introspection-what cul-ture, what classicism, there was. When Bournewrites that "culture is not an acquired familiaritywith things outside, but an inner and constantlyoperating taste, a fresh and responsive power ofdiscrimination, and the insistent judging ofeverything that comes to our minds and senses"

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Geoffrey H. Hartman(History 37), we understand that there are not toomany things outside. The American situation, ina way, was the opposite of the European, wherehistorical study had increased the burden of thepast. Perhaps a native Marxism, or sociology ofknowledge, was too much to hope for.16But thegreatestproblem was to find a center from whichdiffusion would occur; and this center could onlybe the university. It was not until it made analliance with the universitythat the New Criticismwas influential in America. Yet to "incorporate"criticism, to make it a university subject, seems tomove it away again from Bourne's ideal of abroad "community of sentiment" unless theuniversity has indeed become the nearest thingextant to a democratic institution, a republic ofletters. Even so the sense that the university ismiddle class and that formal higher educationcannot produce a culture of criticism leads usback to the question whether such a culture canever be, or whether academic criticism is not atone and the same time auxiliary to culture andcorrosive of it. "The revolutionary world iscoming out into the classic" was the hope Bourneexpressed, as he looked beyond Arnold. Trilling,also looking beyond Arnold-through Freud, andafter yet another World War-seemed more pes-simistic. He wonderedabout a drive so destructiveor disestablishing that revolutionary turmoil wasonly its symptom. Wasthe end freedom from themiddle class or freedom from society itself?

Arnold associated culture with diffusion: "apassion for diffusing, for making prevail, forcarrying from one end of society to the other thebest knowledge, the best ideas." The "great menof culture," he said, would "divest knowledge ofall that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract,professional, exclusive." We are to humanizeknowledge,"to make it efficient outside the cliqueof the cultivated and the learned" (113).No betterdefinition has been given of what a modern edu-cation might achieve. Yet the passion Arnold at-tributed to the bearers of culture could as easilybe characteristic of great missionaries. They too(in principle) spreadsweetnessand light. By trans-fusing the one passion into the other, Arnold be-comes the saint of secularization.The limits of such culturalevangelismare clear.It is eleemosynaryrather than radical: the utopianenergiesin religionor political thought are filteredout. They are made to gravitate to the side of

anarchyratherthan culture. This may seem ironicin 1984, the year GeorgeOrwellchose for his anti-utopia, when our concern is for the totalitarianrather than anarchic consequences of utopianthinking. When culture is threatened moreby vio-lent schemes of order than by disorder (althoughthe two may be joined by a vicious dialectic),thencultural theory becomes "critical" in the sense ofbeing methodically suspicious of the limitsimposed on imaginative activity by officiallysanctioned modes of speaking and writing.Arnold simplified both the Bible and the secu-lar canon for the sake of a humanized knowledge.What will remain of religion, he declaredfamously, is its poetry; and he meant by poetry amuse that was the opposite of harsh. Yet bothpoetry and the Bible contain difficult elementsthat the enlightenedmind tries to explain away.Inits supernaturalor historical strangeness, and inour attemptsto come to terms with that, the Biblemay even be the preeminent literarycase. For thestudy of literature has to accomplish two thingsat once: it must acknowledge the otherness of atext, and it must accommodate that otherness.This double process of familiarization and defa-miliarization depends for its particulars on thesituation of the interpreter: which side of theprocess one feels compelled to emphasize.

Many texts are, of course, only too obviouslystumbling stones for the intellect, or have beenmade such by a priestly appropriation. As an in-heritorof Arnold's, Northrop Fryeconsiders it hislife's work to bring the Bible back into the pos-session of all. To demythologize a Bible-inspiredwriter like Blake,without denying either the forceor the intelligibility of myth, is the cultural task(see esp. Fearful Symmetry). Another equallystrong inheritor of Arnold's, Lionel Trilling, wasalso devoted to using literature as a guide to theliberal imagination. Yet he became uneasy aboutthe tendencytowardaccommodation, especiallyinthe academy. He therefore pondered the wish inthe artist, but also in seminal thinkers like Freud,to get "beyond culture" (see esp. "On the Teach-ing of Modern Literature").That wish is paradoxicalenough, since we can-not slough off culture any more than we can thebody. One clear result, however, s that the notionof subculturetransforms itself into that of an ad-versary culture.'7Another clear result is a newfocus on Rousseau, not as a supposed primitivistbut as a sophisticated modernist who deprives us

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The Culture of Criticismof the solace of equating freedom with eithernature or culture. The wish to go beyond cultureis, in any case, not only modern. There havealways been real or imaginary journeys in searchof the Other; Claude Levi-Strauss's TristesTropiques (1955) continues both More's Utopiaand Diderot's Voyage de Bougainville, whileTodorov's recent Conquete de l'Ameriquerehearses a sad and significant "American"history not unlike the "Eastern" history,deformed by mythic desires, that Said's Oriental-ism takes to task.For Hegel the expulsion from Eden was alreadya self-inspired alienation, even if the Biblerepresented it as imposed and distanced it intomyth. It was the necessary consequence of ourdesire for a more intimate knowledge of whateverexists or can be made to exist. Yet if the societalbond has tightened its grip, a modern and acutestage of rebellion may have been reached. Going"beyond culture" becomes more than resisting adominant ideology. It suggests the abandonmentof all mediations, the radicalism of "liberty ordeath," an opposition (almost mechanical) in thename of renewal or revolution.We stand here on treacherous ground. Howmany sins have been committed in the name ofrevitalizingculturethrough repristination?ArthurKoestler writes:From the psychologist's point of view, there is littledifference between a revolutionaryand a traditionalistfaith . . . All true faith involves a revolt against thebeliever's social environment, and the projection intothe future of an ideal derived from the remote past. AllUtopias are fed from the sources of mythology; thesocial engineer's blueprints are merely revisededitionsof the ancient text. (16)

On a more innocent level, the appeal of theword "Renaissance" continues to schematizeliteraryhistories as a succession of convention andrevolt, decadence and revival,unity and fall fromunity ("dissociation").18It does not matter whatthe decadent stage of a culture is called: Spengler(well known to Frye) chose "civilization." F. R.Leavis' earliest pamphlet bears the title MassCivilization and Minority Culture (1930; rpt. inEducation and the University).What does matteris seeing the connection between political and lit-erary theory while keeping the two apart. When"minority" recursin Kafka: Pour une litterature

mineure, by Deleuze and Guattari, it has ex-changed its elitist connotation for an eloquent fanof antielitist meanings, but it continues to expressthe writer's war against the dominant tongue ofhis culture-in which he cannot, yet must, per-form. "A gypsy literature which ha[s] stolen theGerman child out of its cradle and in great hasteput it throughsome kind of training,for someonehas to dance on the tightrope" is how Kafkahimself, in a letter to Max Brod, describes hisdiscontent arising from within a civilized or-asDeleuze and Guattari prefer- "territorialized"language (qtd. in "What Is a Minor Literature?"28, n. 2).19The kind of thing that worries these writers didnot concern Arnold. Culture for him was highculture;and the idea that it might oppress ratherthan enlighten the uncultured classes-that itmight prevent he unfolding of popular or vernac-ular energies-was not an issue. One could not gobeyond cultureexcepttowardanarchy.If anythingthreatenedculture from within, it was philistinism,parochialism, and-most insidiously-the criticalspirit itself. The function of criticism was, in asense, to make that spirit "organic"again (thoughthe term comes from Saint-Simon) by taking usbeyond the negative or transitional stage of"Wanderingbetweentwo worlds, one dead, / Theother powerless to be born" (Stanzas from theGrande Chartreuse). As in Saint-Simon's"productive" philosophy, a new society shouldemerge from the "critical," that is, postrevolu-tionary phase of history, which had dissolvedreceived opinion and established structures.Yet even in Arnold the issue of revolutionarychange has begun to shift toward assessing whatis involved in diffusing culture and educating allclasses. Thereis a sense of energiesto be released,and a countersense of mediations and forms ofknowledge that might block rather than facilitatethat aim. Education and culture are benefits thatmove into a more ambivalent position vis-a-visboth social reform and revolutionary politics. Onthe whole this ambivalence is "subjective." Ittakes the form of desiring an original, orunmediated, relation, jeopardized by the veryprogress of civilized society. In America and onthe Continent this desire is more overt than inEngland. We glimpse it in various AmericanAdams: in Thoreau's and Emerson's wish to breakthrough to an autonomous individuality or anautochthonous culture; in Whitman's "barbaric

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Geoffrey H. Hartmanyawp." We glimpse it in Nietzsche's anti-philosophy and in such Yoda figures asZarathustra. Veils, figures, mediations, illusionsare crucial to Nietzsche, but they only expose thegroundless ground, the abyss, that is bridgedthrough art. Our own time's breakthrough men-tality finds its strongest image in Thomas Mann'sDoctor Faustus, based on Goethe's Magian mythalso inspiring Spengler's Decline of the West.

We cannot look back a hundred years withoutlooking back further.Then it becomes clear thata new class marker adds itself to the old. Learn-ing now alienates the learned classes (whatevertheir social status) from the illiterate classes butalso, to a degree, from themselves. "Over-civilization" becomes an issue. Faust's complaintat the beginning of Goethe's play, about the life-inhibiting effects of book knowledge, is enlargedand made socially significant by Nietzsche's attackon Gelehrtenkultur. 20But how does a growing consciousness of thisalienation feed back into the tradition of scholar-ship that helped to produce it?We find, first of all, anti-self-consciousnesstheories that suggest that learningcan make itselforganic again-through becoming, for example,poetry ("the breath and finer spirit of allknowledge," says Wordsworth). Art is felt to bemore, not less, important now that science andscholarship grow exponentially. What Arnoldnames culture is, similarly, life-integrated ratherthan life-disturbing; it leads to a necessary"criticism of life." Scholarship, at the same time,becomes more archaeological, or genetic, seekingnot only (as it had always done) origins but thepoint in history where logos and archecoincide toyield "Knowledge not purchased by the loss ofpower" (Wordsworth).Something like a recoveredAdamic language, in fact.This secular fundamentalism arises in the placeof (yet not always displacing)religious fundamen-talisms. According to Derrida, all perspectivesderived from it involve a blindness towardlanguage. Language never was and never can befoundational:wherelanguage is, foundations havemoved. The shift into words, into that temporalspacing, is radical and ongoing. Words have nocenter at which they become logos, The Word.Derrida thereforesays that his critique is directedat "logocentricity."

Now very few philosophies of life set out tomake words into a fundamentalist tool. We arenot talking about propaganda or religious proc-lamation. We are talking about a more generaland pervasivereactionto divisive multiple optionsas our knowledge of mediation grows, nourishedby historicism and increased hermeneutic skills.Some years ago I wrote a book called TheUnmediated Vision, which traced the attempt ofpoets since Wordsworth o gain a more directviewof life than was allowed by culture. "The modernpoet has committed himself to the task ofunderstandingexperience n its immediacy.He hasneglected the armature of the priest-the precau-tionary wisdom of tradition-and often, the in-culcated respect for literary models" (164). Theresult of this heroic and impossible task was aparadox. The poet came to know the need formediation all the more strongly. He saw himself,in fact, as a mediator of a special kind. He would"live the lack of mediation."

My double emphasis, on embodiment (thedirect, sensuous intuition of reality) and on thelack of authentic mediation, exhibits that blind-ness to language of which Derrida speaks. Yet inboth respectsI was more a phenomenologist thana fundamentalist. The "concrete aesthetics" ofGaston Bachelard, except for his use of selectedbeauties rather than whole poems, might haveseduced me. For Bachelard focused on basic sen-sory orientations and elemental images. He subtlydecomposed, by a method learned from science,the prey into the shadow-Abschattungen,nuances.To preservean image (such as "the flame of acandle") despite its changeable, nymphlikeessence, Bachelard pursued a happy kind ofpsychoanalysis.21Freud thought that the function(distinct from the meaning) of dreams was toallow us to continue sleeping; and images, or theevocative names Bachelardutters on their behalf,applying his immense verbal culture, support astate he identifies with reverie. This is a con-templative yet productive state of mind, whichrecallsthings in their duree ratherthan in abstractor administered time.

Phenomenology is not of one kind, of course.Bachelardstands closer to Husserl than to Hegel.The main thrust of both, however,is understoodto be a return to things-to a therapeutic im-mediacy that is drawn out of the very process ofmediation and no longer reifies consciousness.

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The Culture of CriticismRecently the theory of intertextuality seems tohave doomed phenomenologicalcriticismby view-ing all mediations as irreducible and essentiallyverbal.They arethe shadow thrown by man's ownintellect. For literature his means there is no hors

texte but rather a rhetorical debt that cannot becanceled and must be borne as patiently ascapitalist bankers tolerate what the Third Worldowes. The returnto things is alwaysreallya returnto a text. We relive-that is, rewrite-words alwaysalready uttered, texts always already written.It is difficult, however, to gauge the intrinsicvalue of a text when the originative value,associated with an individual author (a"subject"), fades into a play of pretexts.The shiftfrom source study (genetic-historical) tointertextualstudy (structural-synchronic),which Icomment on later, gives us both more and lesscontrol over the burden of mediations: more,because there is the promise of a method ofanalysis good for all cultures;less, because we aretaken out of the one culture without beinginserted into one other. Every other cultureis notonly equally "near to God" (historicism) butequally far from the interpreter or observer. Ahomogenizingor flatteningout occursthat signalsto Erich Auerbachthe end (in the real world too)of national diversity and cultural heterogeneity.Auerbach, in Mimesis, sees the common and theelemental emerging once more; they seem toaugur the dissolution of the dynamic, colorfulpast of the Westernnations whose changing senseof reality he has just delineated. The theory ofarchetypes,certainly,whether applied to literaturefrom a Jungian perspective, in which they areelemental psychic determinants, or from theperspective of Northrop Frye, in which they areprinciples of structurerevealingthe "total form"of human culturalachievement or desire,supportsAuerbach'sperception from within the history ofscholarship.22There is a return to elementals (inBachelardas well); but there remains the problemof how to prevent this from becoming anti-intellectual and destructive, from turning in thename of truth against the method that disclosedit. Such a turn is present, at least potentially, evenin Benjamin, who glimpsed the struggleAuerbachso vividly depicts. The taking into consciousnessand the representationof what it means to be his-torical are falsified, in Benjamin's eyes, by therepressive weight of the official story, whatever

European nation we deal with. A gulf opens,therefore, between culture and social reality, asBenjamin too tries to go beyond culture torecover, by a sort of delayed archaeologicalexplosion, the story of the victim, the barbarismon which every cultural monument is built, theunacknowledged suffering and labor of the lowerclasses (Illuminations 256-60). That is the onemediation always omitted. Benjamin seems to ar-gue that the French Revolution failedto transformeither life or letters-or that what it achieved hasto be done again, perhaps again and again.Moved, like so many contemporarythinkers,by a"hermeneuticsof suspicion" (Ricoeur), he rangesintelligibility on the side of plausibility,as if evenintelligibilityweresuspect;this approachof coursethickens Benjamin's style and impedes standardcommunication. A complex prose tries to point tosignificanceshidden by force majeureor linkedtoa base of repressedpassions.

Though the intertextualmethod is as pedagogicas explication de texte, and more consistent in itsspecific literaryemphasis, it does not make clearwhy a certain signifying practicehas force as wellas significance.The issue involves the receptionoflanguage: as we speak it in an immediate context,and as a written code extended in time like awork's interpretive history. It is an issue thatmotivates speech-act theory and also reader-response criticism-from the reception aestheticsof the School of Konstanz, to the psychologicalversion developed from the "community" of theAmerican classroom, to Stanley Fish's work oninterpretivecommunities generally,and to FrankKermode's on the inevitability of paradigms andinstitutions that help fix meaning.23Here I wantto follow briefly two academic critics who acceptintertextuality but use it very differently.Theorists interested in the alliance of signifi-cance and force often understand the latter aspower and give the whole issue a political orpsychopolitical twist.24 Harold Bloom maps theechoing presence of poet in poet and transformstextual space into an agon, an internalizedpowerplay.25That space is wrested by the living fromthe dead; more precisely,a special oedipal theoryof conflict, between father (precursor poet) andson (ephebe), helps Bloom to delineate six modesof resolution called "revisionary ratios"-whereratio is a figure of failed adequation. The later

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Geoffrey H. Hartmanpoet, accordingto Bloom, can neverlive up to theprecursor, and Blake is doomed to be less thanMilton. Yet a poet's only chance to be among thegreats is to engage with prior and overshadowinggreatness. This idea parallels the "embarrassmentof tradition" thesis of W. J. Bate; both points ofview are concerned with the making of the mod-ern artist and reflect an era in which art couldsuccumb to learning, to that increased burden ofmediations.

Bloom's version of intertextualityjoins force tosignificance through a special theory of the poeticpersonality. Yet for an intertextualistlike MichaelRiffaterre, the poem is purely a medium, thesuperconductor of a collective discourse. WhereBloom's uncannyear finds precursorechoes every-where, Riffaterre analyzes every striking expres-sion as the transformation of a cliche. Creativityis measured as the deviation (ecart stylistique)from a norm, which Riffaterre calls a "matrix"and which his unusual learning (at times he is theGrand Larousse himself) finds in the environingsociolect of topoi and tropisms. A double deter-minism characterizesart and impressesus with itsinexorable logic. The artifact is systemic, everynegative (deviant)term becoming positive (norma-tive) by the end; that positive,moreover, s a socialcliche the poet has elaborated,not canceled. Forcejoins signification through this fatality ofmeaning; in an unforeseen and strangely sterilesense the common language is "illustrated." YetBloom too has his-less banal-fatality. He seesEnglish verse as a diminishing thing because ofthe burden of textual mediation, but also becausethe presence of greatness drives young imagina-tions to a self-deceiving denial of mediatedness.Artistic autonomy is as much an illusion in Bloomas it is in Riffaterre. Bloom admires, however,thepersonal wager sustaining that denial. Though heoutrightly labels the denial a lie (there is nounmediated creativity), it is the generative orfounding lie of fiction.Riffaterre'stheory and Bloom's are connectedthrough their strong disclosure of the intertextualsituation of the writer. Riffaterrestressesit as theprerequisite or intelligibility,Bloom as the prereq-uisite for an originality that must survive withinand against it. Riffaterre in context (which in-cludes Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, MichelFoucault, and Paul de Man) reacts, like T. S.Eliot, to naive versions of Romantic originality.Bloom could reply that such impersonality theo-

ries are simply the old classicism writ large. Yetboth theories comment intrinsicallyon the artist'sdrive "beyond culture." Riffaterre is nothing ifnot methodical in showing that the artist alwaysdeviates into sense. For Bloom, the deviation isthe meaning. A text is basically devious becausethe artist's will to originality deceives the con-sciousness of indebtedness; that will triumphsonly at the cost of self-deception, or forgetfulnessof the Other. We are back to Nietzsche's conceptof culture guilt and the catastrophic need fordisburdenment arising from it.26Now scholarship is an especially "heavy" partof culture, so that the question of how to handleit must surface. It is here that Derrida's view oflanguage is noteworthy.His close analysis of bothliterary and philosophical texts shows thatlanguage is a "deconstructive"medium that servesto disseminate whatever s "heavy"by substitutingitself. It dispels what Hegel called "the pathos ofsubstance," as if to say, My yoke is light. Such"lightness" (also evoked by Roland Barthes's"pleasure of the text") technically derives fromthe self-referentialityof language. To understandhow language works has ethical implications.Such divisive or deadly polarities as fundamental-ism and nihilism (the one a panic reaction to theother) become less terrifying, though they do notdisappear. Not a particular philosophy but lin-guistic action itself will sublimate them. In thisrespect, deconstruction is a happy discipline, afrohliche Wissenschaft, and remains close tophenomenology.My attempt to translate from one tradition(Continental) to the other (Anglo-American) mayproduce a misunderstanding. To transpose Der-rida's thought (as it extends Nietzsche, Husserl,and Heidegger) into an English text-milieu raisesa question of style-of critical style. My para-graphsare perforcea mixture of technical phrasesand impressionistic metaphors. They do littlejustice to the rigorous play of terms in Derrida.Moreover, English criticism since I. A. Richardshas made great efforts to free itself of impres-sionism, so that it would be unfair to resurrectthat discredited mode. It is therefore best toaffirm at this point that Derrida's philosophicalcriticism is exact and learned. It is a form ofscholarship,but it is also reflectiveabout the rela-tion of scholarship to culture, about the problemof field specialization ("philosophy," "criticism,""political science") and the division into faculties

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The Culture of Criticismthat seemed to Schiller a culturalwounding quitecomparable to the Fall (see esp. sixth letter).

This review of scholarship has turned intoremarks on the relation of criticismto culture. Nowonder! Is not criticism the place where theconflict betweencultureand scholarshipis workedout? How scholarly should cultured persons be?And how technical their styles of writing, or eventheir life-styles?Such questions overflow the boundary of thehistory of taste, although they are important tocourtesy books, and figure largely in discussionsof social ideals from the courtier to the modern"gentleman-scholar." We are only just emergingfrom a period when the amateur tradition pre-vailed in literarystudies-even while considerablescholarship was taking place. Criticism may usescholarship against culture, but it may also usecultural ideals against scholarship. I want torefocus the issue to emphasize the relation of cul-ture to what may offend it-in particular, tolearning, mainly science and scholarship,but alsothe deliberate recourse to "terms of art."27Culture and learning are matters that surfacetogether in Nietzsche. This contemporary ofArnold's turns from philology to philosophy inorder to oppose the "Gelehrtenkultur"("pedantculture") around him; it is interesting, of course,that he was also Dilthey's contemporaryat Basel.Nietzsche particularly fears that a pedant culturewill combine with an "American"type of demo-cratic leveling (shades of Leavis!) and producethoughtless displays of erudition instead ofconcentratedand sublime works of philosophy orart. It is less the populace that is the target ofNietzsche's elitism than the class he knows best:learned professors whose unbridled drive forknowledge ("Erkanntnistrieb") is truly a bar-barism. Culture controlsmajor human drives,andphilosophy's specific task is breaking in theintellect. For this it has to mobilize art, whichNietzsche describes by a word that means un-tapped as well as immense ("unerh6rte Kunst-krafte"). The philosopher tames the monstrouspathos of truth: without him the drive towardab-solute knowledge would become frenzied andanarchic.While Arnold's culture, then, consists of"ideas" that can be "diffused," Nietzsche'sculture is linked to a heroic concept of philosophy

as well as art, to works of intellect like Hegel'sand Schopenhauer's. Classical balance orproportion-cultural sanity-is a sublimeachievement, not a social compromise.This brief comparison can be moralized.Recentemphatic efforts to reconnect literary studies tohistory and politics may be drawingtheir animusfrom ignorance of the theory of culture, which is(as in Raymond Williams) the best way into thesubject. Literarycriticism should not be divorcedfrom the history of scholarship or from theoriesof culture,which areoften indebtedto scholarship.More particularly, we see that "philosophy"plays differentroles-and may indeed be differentthings-in Germanyand in England. In Germany,and to an extentin Frenchand Continentalcircles,philosophy is philology raised to a higher power.It remains a depository of the classicist ideal,which maintains a sense of the unity of knowl-edge and the universality of culture, despite thepressuresof nationalism and the influx of a trulyenormous freight of historical and linguisticscholarship. So Dilthey, in his ambitious attemptto unify the humanities, is drawn back to theunion, or at least the cross-pollination,of all sortsof learningin the GermanRomantics. The aim ofRomantic philosophy fully correspondsto that ofclassical unity, but "unity" now moves closer to"totality":what Lovejoydescribesas the Chain ofBeing in its temporalized plenitude.Philosophy is,in the main, "identity philosophy," and it pro-ceeds by a "spiritualchemistry"that resynthesizeslearning into culture-a culture Arnold takes forgranted (though it must escape "the clique of thelearned and cultivated") but that Nietzsche, likeGoethe, considers a prize to be struggled for and,at times, a grand and necessary illusion.English philosophy, like everything English,championscommon sense and remainsstubbornlyuntechnical. Except for Coleridge's lively andunconsummated efforts, it does not try to makea disparate and expanding knowledge cohere bya monumental synthesis. English culture isstrangely self-assured, as if Shakespeareand Co.had finished that work. In their wake the Englishlanguage has magic in its web. "The colour andrichnessof the EuropeanRenaissance,"RaymondWilliams writes, "interacted with the vigour andrealism of the popular tradition to create whollynew national forms" (Long Revolution 251).Herder,sensitive to the impoverishing ravagesonGerman culture exertedby French neoclassicism,

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Geoffrey H. Hartmanpraises Shakespeare for having created avernacular literature that kept learned andpopular traditions in touch with each other-through what Erich Auerbach, in his fineShakespeare chapter in Mimesis, calls"Stilmischung." Philosophy is made superfluousby English and may even be harmful to theachieved organic texture of the language.So closely is the language identified with theculture that we can talk today of "the rise ofEnglish" and know it refers to English studies.The battle, moreover, concerning the place of"theory" in contemporary criticism makes sensebecause of the bifurcationI have described,whichassigns philosophy a differentrole in each culture.The change of terms-from philosophy to theory-reflects mainly the move away from "identityphilosophy" towardits obverse:"criticaltheory,"or a philosophy of difference, which accepts dia-lectics when supported by historical fact butrejects the possibility of a Hegelian synthesis.Instead of a progressiveand reconciling logic, wehave Theodor Adorno's "negative dialectics";instead of a theory of meaning depending onprimitive roots (origins) and their derivations, wehave semiotics and structuralism, with their"diacritical" understanding of the workings oflanguage.The relations among culture, scholarship, andcriticism-how they strengthen or oppose oneanother-is a problemthat engages the best mindsin literarystudies, today as well as a hundredyearsago, and even as far back as the Romantics. Theproblem is posed in various terms, and it wouldbe premature to claim that these terms do notmatter. But when we read F. R. Leavis' obser-vation that whoever takes education seriouslytoday "will inevitablyfind himself thinking of theproblemas one of resistingthe bent of civilizationin our time-of trying to move against thestream" (16), we realize that Trilling's "beyondculture" has affinities with Leavis' "beyond civi-lization" and that both connect with the overt"critical theory" of Adorno and the FrankfurtSchool. YetEnglish style is marked by a distrustof speculative systems or abstractthought, whichoften manifests its peculiar energy by creatingtechnical terms. To use a concept from the verydiscourse English tradition rejects, these termsmay "reify" a thinking they intend to liberate.There are many ways in which such reificationmay block literarystudies. For E. P. Thompson it

indicates the "poverty of theory" that has nevercaught up with an extraordinarysocial achieve-ment, the making or self-making of the Englishworking class. Theory is still superstructurethinking, with "enormous condescension" towardthe English artisan. I. A. Richards had to over-come impressionismwithout falling into a profes-sionalism that would again interpose a set ofspecial terms. He tried to get literarystudies backto the texts and away from any vicarious substi-tute for the experienceof those texts. For him theenemy was not philosophy (his commonsensicallywritten Philosophy of Rhetoric is one of his mostinterestingworks) but a tradition-if one may callit such-of high-class gossip; the genteel thoughinformed conversation of don and amateurexemplified by the endless volumes of GeorgeSaintsbury-though Saintsbury, it should beadded, was delightfully unpedantic, and soimportant to his own era. Richards changedacademic criticism into "discourse"--Blackmurwill nicely say "the discourse of the amateur"-by increasing the voltage of principled thoughtand resolutelydirectingit towardprimarysources.Leavis went further: wary of science, or what itdoes to our language,wary of learningtoo for thesame reason, he rejected all technical philosoph-ical thought. He did not deny that the more tacitmanner he adopted had its own rationale, but heheld that its extroversionwould be harmful. Theright tradition was already there, if complexly so;a critic simply allowed it to continue, to flow onin its own path, despite a growing corps of socialengineers.It is admirable with what consistency LeavisrepresentsEnglish cultureas the naturewe shouldfollow. The idea of what Coleridge called the"clerisy"is full-blownto him, but now it is totallythe university, not the church, that quickens andconcentrates "the cultural sensibility in whichtradition has its effective continuance." We can-not tell from such a sentence where centralauthority lies, whetherin the individualsensibilityor in tradition or in both; indeed, that generousindeterminacy s for Leavisthe best guide to a crit-icism of life at the present.

In the last twenty yearsa shift has occurredthatobliges us to look at nontacit "philosophicalcriticism." This shift is overdue, for even if wediscount the prestigeof philosophy in ContinentalEurope, we cannot neglect any longer (1) the

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The Culture of Criticismemergence of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s(and its emigre presencein America in the 1940s);(2) the impact of German philosophy on Frenchthought, from Kant and Hegel through Husserland Heidegger;(3) the growth of Marxist-inspiredcriticism among eminent academic philosophers,but also among literary personalitieslike Lukacs,Benjamin, and Bakhtin; (4) the influence of psy-choanalysis and semiotics; and (5) our own nativemutterings, especially in Blackmur, Ransom, andKenneth Burke. It is often remarkable how theyanticipate burdensthat are returningfrom abroadwith exotic appeal.The shift threatens the decorum of the conver-sational style, with its avoidance of explicitlearning or technical terms, and which goes backto the ideal of the "honest man" (honnetehomme) in France and to the essays of Addisonand Steele in England. It may be that this stylecan be restored, that the new philosophy, whichputs all in doubt, will be absorbed into a prose asremarkablyfree of jargon as before. But for themoment I want to emphasize what the shiftinvolves.

Before it took place, the main task of scholar-ship was to reconstruct a work or a period in itsown terms, so that there would be no prejudg-ment, or we would become aware,by this process,of our own basic presuppositions. In this way,sensibility and judgment might be trained, andhistorical study would not be antiquarian.28Literary scholarship could and did include thequestion of the relevance of a recoveredpast tocontemporaryculture.Historicism and hermeneu-tics cooperated in this venture of reconstruction,which assumed a unity in the object of study thatwas findable because it had been expressedin theoriginal tongue and could be expressedonce morein a later tongue.

The shift has to do with a sense that recon-struction is not only harder than we thought butbased on insufficiently analyzed preconceptions.They concern the fit or correspondence betweenlanguage and meaning. Croce's identification ofexpression and intuition-which seemed to em-phasize the presence of meaning-now seems tosay the obverse: we have, indeed, the expressionbut where is the meaning? Language is so muchpart of what is meant that we cannot turn it insideout to reveal some core truth. It may even makethat kind of "essentialist" search for embodiedmeanings harder, as if only the linguistic veils

existed and did not lead to an Isis-like presencebehind them. This perception can also be statedquasi-technically: it is often said that literarylanguage displays a polysemy, or an excess of thesignifier over the signified. The unity of the work,in any case, often described as "organic"as ifwords grew naturally from some clear and priorintent-is questioned.A brief example can make this issue less ab-stract. The thesis that Satan is the hero ofParadise Lost (Milton, Blake averred,was of theDevil's party without knowing it) suggests thateven the most structuredwork may contain imper-fectly reconciled elements. Unity lovers can arguethat Satan's sympathetic prominence is a flaw ordramatic ploy that does not last beyond book 2.But those who tolerate contradiction or breaks inthe code will respond quite differently. Satan orwhateverhe represents(and whereverthat comesfrom) grabs the poet, in the way characters aresaid to take over the author and run the novel.This makes the author a medium, not only amanager; and what comes through, perhaps de-spite the author, is suprapersonal:here, an invol-untary sympathywith the opposition and perhapswith the oppositional as such.Our questioning of the unity of the work of artis not so modern as it seems. It imports an oldermode of study into a new context. Throughoutthe nineteenth century the prestige area for phi-lology was ballad, folk song, and other forms ofvernacular oral literature. When philological re-search extended to the Bible, Higher Criticism wasborn, and instead of a unity of inspiration orcomposition, a multiplicityof "sources"emerged,held together by an anonymous process ofcompilation.The sense that authors are compilers ratherthan creators is strong at present. It has broughtabout a sophisticated renewal of interest inmedieval literature. Literary theory marriesphilology!29 Not quite; yet there is a sort ofcourtshipmotivatedby the wish (never quite dead)to create an "objective"or "impersonal" art, thevernacular substitute for a lost classicism-withthe added advantage that this art is not patricianbut a "poetry of the people."The ideological factor is not unimportant.MaxErnst claims that surrealism helped to destroy"the fairy-tale of the artist's creativity . ..western culture'slast superstition." Deleuze andGuattari, defining Kafka'soppositional language

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Geoffrey H. Hartmanas an instance of minority literature, soundstrangelylike the brothersGrimm when they extolthe communal origin of a poetry (ballad andepos) that "sings itself." Literature,we hear,is nota "literature of masters" but "the affair of thepeople. . . . There is no subject: there are onlycollective arrangements of utterance" (Kafka32-33). Between Grimm and Guattari the crucialscholarly event was Propp's analysis of folktales:it came out of an older philological tradition andrecognizes theories of folk or communal origin,"emphatic,"as Gummeresays, "against all poeticindividuality" (introd.). Yet by eschewing thequestion of origins, Propp institutes narratology,today the most flourishing field in literarystudies.It is hard to think of the structuralapproachwith-out Propp and ironic that his study of popularmaterials founded a poetics of narrative broadenough to include the sophistication of aProust.30

By questioning the unity of the work of art, weare not "battering the object" (Wimsatt) butquestioning that object's ultimate origin in asubject-in the well-defended or enclosed individ-ual. "Points have we all of us within our souls /Where all stand single," Wordsworth wrote ofearly and near traumatic experiences; yet thesingle point through which we try to define awork, a personality,or an epoch keeps decenteringitself. This reference point, a sort of impossiblenunc stans, may always have to be posited, evenif its status is called into question or described aspurely theoretical. We can gain a glimpse of itinsofar as it is ideological (see Paul de Man'sstudy of Husserl and Levi-Strauss in Blindnessand Insight 3-19); yet it does seem to be aconstructivenecessity (a point zero)rather than animmanent or ontological proprium. As such, itleads us to acknowledge the fictive or figurativeelement in all areas of human thought, not in artalone.

Yet it should be clear how far we are-intheory-from Leo Spitzer's attempt to discoverthrough an author's style his or her spiritual"etymon" or from Georges Poulet's "cogito,"another point from which, as from an unmediatedorigin, the imagined world of a writer projects.3'Let me honor in passing these strong humanisticthinkers, at the edge of the shift being described,who did so much to show what we lose by it.Deconstruction has made us cautious aboutpostulating a topos noetos (mind place), or logo-

centric vantage point, from which everythingwould appear whole and clarified.32Some princi-ple of holistic analysis may be unavoidable; andGeorg Lukacs, after contrasting Greek harmony,expressed by the epic, with modern fragmentation,expressed by the novel (Theory of the Novel),displaced the holistic emphasis toward a utopianspherein History and Class Consciousness, wherehe uses it to criticize the reified, alienatedcharacter of capitalistic societies. Lukacs lateragreedthat his postulate was "idealistic";yet it isinteresting that this Winckelmannian andHegelian notion of the balance of spiritand bodyor part and whole in Greek culture still finds asubtle extension in ErichAuerbach's famous essayon Odysseus' scar (Mimesis 3-23). Not tillDerrida do we find a sustained dehellenizing cri-tique of the holistic attitude in contemporarythought.33In Derrida language as concept, but also as asignifying practice, is mobilized against thelogos-not only because the logos was oftenreduced to a neoclassical principle of me'sure,ormerely rational proportion, so that literature iscalled on to save imagination from abstraction,but chiefly because the logos was misrepresentedin the opposite direction as the Incarnate Word,whose virtue communicates itself to the literaryicon. Yet literature s not a fuller language, one inwhich figures begin to come true. To deconstructis to disclose, in philosophical as well as literarywriting, that "fallacy of unmediated expression"(de Man). There is no resting or referencepointinside or outside language on which to set the Ar-chimedean lever that would control the system.

Poulet and Spitzer both taught at JohnsHopkins in the 1950s (with J. Hillis Miller andJean Starobinski as younger colleagues); and itwas Johns Hopkins in addition to Yalethat, by areaction not uncommon in these matters, spear-headed the critique of logocentric literarythought. (The collections edited by Ehrmann andby Macksey and Donato situate that reaction.)The 1960s, before they became politically adven-turous, were a period of accelerating intellectualferment; and though American scholars werenotattuned to theory, they struggled in theirpracticeto modify the dominance of incarnationist viewsof symbol and metaphorand Anglican versionsofliterary history. These histories accepted Eliot's

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The Culture of Criticismview of a seventeenth-centurydissociation of sen-sibility and described with awe and relisheighteenth-century battles against dullness,coarseness, and the rise of Romanticism.From the perspectiveof 1984, such infighting ismore than a revaluingof Romanticism. It showshow difficult it is to give up fundamentalistaspirations. The compromises that guard againstrelativismin literature arenumerous and creative.Casuistic studies appear centeringon the problemof "belief" in art, just as at a later stage "inten-tion" replaces belief as the sticking point. Buteven in the midst of the New Critical idolatry ofthe metaphysicalsand of the poetry of wit (whichwas said to "test" belief), FrederickPottle insistedon historical "shifts of sensibility" that made theabsolute privileging of a period or a styleunscholarly. Northrop Frye also wished to riseabove value judgments that combated relativismand the fearedencroachment of mass culture. Hecalls most such judgments leisure-class gossip,"the literary chit-chat which makes the reputa-tions of poets boom and crash on an imaginarystock-exchange" (Anatomy 18). Acknowledgingthat "value judgments are founded on the studyof literature,"he adds that "the study of literaturecan never be founded on value-judgments" andevolves "a systematiccriticismas distinct from thehistory of taste" (20, 10).A hard look at Frye (abstracting him fromother contexts in which his wit and generosityplace him) suggests that he is influenced equallyby two ideals. One is Arnold'sculturalevangelism;the other is the intelligibility and teachability ofscience. It is the latter that interests us at thisjuncture. G. M. Hopkins calls rhetoric theteachable part of literature, and Frye's effort tostretchAristotelianpoetics until it covers "the ver-bal universe" extends not only the work of theCambridge anthropologists but also that of thenew rhetorical studies associated with such dif-ferentscholarly personalitiesas William Empson,Kenneth Burke, Edgar Stoll, Ruth Wallerstein,Rosamund Tuve, and Walter Ong. The work ofEuropean scholars from Eduard Norden to E. R.Curtius and Heinrich Lausberg should also bementioned. The list could easily swell out of pro-portion. Togetherwith the rise of Czech and Rus-sian formalism(see Erlich), this wave of rhetorica

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