The End(s) of “Naïve Reading”
Roland Barthes, Paris, 1979
It had to happen: one of my favorite bloggers (and good friend and colleague) Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is away on leave this year (and currently, I believe, in Germany?), blogged about the Pippin essay yesterday, more or less simultaneously with my post. I’m not going to read hers until after I finish this, for fear I’ll get demoralized: Kathleen is way smart. But you should certainly check it out after reading this, as I surely will: http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/on-the-impossibility-of-naive-reading/
So where was I? Ah yes, trying to articulate my small frustrations with Robert B. Pippin’s “In Defense of Naïve Reading,” New York Times, October 10. He opens the piece with a roll call of the books that mattered in the culture wars of the 1980s—The Closing of the American Mind, Cultural Literacy, Prof Scam, and Tenured Radicals. You’ll guess by the titles alone that I’m not crazy about all of these books, close-minded and culturally illiterate scamming tenured radical that I am. Neither does Pippin endorse them unconditionally—but he does say they had one salutary effect on public discourse during the decade, a quality he feels has disappeared entirely from contemporary debates: they “were at least a philosophical debate about values, about what an educated person should know, even about what college was for.” Um, no: no, they certainly were not. I’ll put E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy to one side, for it’s a rather odd bird: one of these things is not like the others, as they say on Sesame Street. And its intention, however misguided, isn’t really polemical, but practical. Hirsch was many things, but he wasn’t an ideologue.
But the other three: yeah, ideologues all. Which is just to say that Pippin’s description of the “philosophical debate” prompted by these books seems rather fanciful. I was in graduate school when those “debates” were raging; there wasn’t anything “philosophical” about them. We’ll give Pippin a pass in the case of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, who was a stalwart at the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago, where Pippin now teaches. Pippin arrived in the same year that Bloom passed away, so that they wouldn’t have worked together as colleagues; but we’ll generously assume that Pippin is unwilling to speak ill of a former colleague, and leave it at that.
Pippin also gets the 80s moment in literary and cultural theory wrong when he suggests that its “debaters tended to forget that the teaching of vernacular literature is quite a recent development in the long history of the university.” That some may sometimes have forgotten I’m in no position to refute: there’s a tendency in all polemic, of course, to throw inconvenient history out the window. But it’s important, I think, to get the history of the 80s culture war correct, too. Gerald Graff’s definitive Professing Literature: An Institutional History—which articulates precisely the context that Pippin craves—was published in 1987; and it relies in important ways on Richard Ohmann’s English in America: A Radical View of the Profession, which was published was back in 1976.
For one of my fundamental disagreements with Pippin I may get very little in the way of support. Part of his argument is that English is a relatively young discipline (born in the U.S. in the 1880s, according to Graff), so that we shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations about how advanced its methodology should be at this point. But for Pippin, sophistication is equated with coherence—which is to say, a sophisticated theory is a coherent theory, some kind of literary superstring theory. “We have not yet settled on the right or commonly agreed upon way to go about it,” Pippin writes.
Which suggests that we have different goals for literary theory, Pippin & I. In my ideal world, there would be no “right or commonly agreed upon way”: I’m a theoretical pluralist. Let a thousand methodologies bloom. I’m happiest when in the midst of a healthy literary debate about the meaning of a text; I can’t actually imagine a theory, or the Theory, that would make all the others unnecessary. I think the poet Jorie Graham’s got the right idea here: we can’t help but dream “the dream of the unified field,” but it’s not really where we want to live. Not really.
Finally, as to the notion of “naïve reading.” It looks something like this: Pippin argues that literature and the arts “can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third[-]person or more general formulation of such knowledge.” Though he’s argued in favor of “literary specialists . . . arriv[ing] at a theory of what they do,” and has scolded those on the right who wouldn’t concede the necessity of such reflection, here he seemingly does away with it. “It’s fine if you want to have your ‘theory,’” he says; “just keep it away from my copy of The Wings of the Dove.”
I’m running out of space, and your patience, dear reader. Quickly: no literary theorist utterly dismisses, as Pippin suggests, the pleasures of reading. Entire methodologies are dedicated to understanding it (reader-response criticism; phenomenology); and literary theory’s Wild Man, Roland Barthes, wrote brilliantly (in The Pleasure of the Text, as well as other places) about the nearly orgasmic pleasures of a good read. Indeed, his writing on the topic is so infectiously enthusiastic that it spurred Susan Sontag to write a kind of appendix/apprentice piece, the famous “Against Interpretation,” which ends on this rave-up note: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Hot stuff!
As he does so regularly in the essay, Pippin sets up something of a false dichotomy here: the innocent and unalloyed pleasures of “naïve reading” vs. the predations of literary and cultural theory, which he imagines as wanting to horn in on his private time with his books. (In this formulation, his argument starts to sound like the Tea Party diatribes against “Big Government.” Interesting.) “There is no particular reason,” Pippin writes, “to think that every aspect of the teaching of literature or film or art or all significant writing about the subject should be either an exemplification of how such a theory works or an introduction to what needs to be known in order to become a professor of such an enterprise.”
To which a well informed interlocutor can only respond: Well, of course there’s not. Indeed, no one thinks this. You need to calm down.
Pippin thus concludes with a spirited defense of the “naïve reading” that no one has, in fact, attacked: “If being happy to remain engrossed in the richness of such interpretive possibilities is ‘naïve,’ then so be it.” The scare quotes around “naïve” sound a strange note: for Pippin is the one who, earlier in the essay, coined the phrase (“Call this a plea for a place for ‘naïve reading’ . . . an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy”). The defensiveness of that gesture sends shock waves throughout the essay.
I don’t know a thing about Pippin’s political affiliations, if any. (In fact I know little about him in general, except for this essay and two top-ten movie lists he published in the UofC magazine.)
But I’m suspicious of your trying to impute some sort of Tea Party connection. That seems off the mark and unnecessary. I’m guessing that someone who’s spent his career dissecting German idealism, a ridiculously difficult body of thought to grapple with, would have much sympathy with a self-consciously anti-intellectual movement.
And indeed, I just looked at his list of publications and found this:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/06/tea_party_as_western_movie.html
He compares the tea party image of America to the mythology presented in Westerns and writes:
“But one way of saying what is misguided and dangerous about such a mythic self-image (the “real” America) is that this is all a facile, even a puerile understanding of these films (and so a facile understanding of what the United States faces as the problem of its union).”
Not exactly Christine O’Donnell.
I wouldn’t want you or anyone to take that one parenthetical aside more seriously than it was meant. And I don’t want to conflate “literary” with “real” politics: one can be a political liberal and a hermeneutical conservative: I know lots of ‘em. I think Pippin’s literary politics are retrograde, clearly; the Tea Party structural analogy was meant to underscore that, and nothing more. I don’t suspect he can see Russia from his house.
Well, I’m glad to hear that! I guess the remark sounded more serious to me than you intended it to. I’m not carrying any water for Pippin, just don’t want the brush to get too wide, if you know what I mean.
From my house, I can see the parking area in front of my house. Quite a view it is, too.
I agree that the Tea Party allusion was dubious and unnecessary. But then I’m sure you knew I would. (call it Quixotic if you will, but my ultimate goal is to cure Kevin of his unfortunate anti-conservative literary Tourette’s.)
Checked out the WaPo link Ken A. was kind enough to provide, but finished the piece quite certain Pippin hadn’t made his larger point. When he states broadly and pessimistically that:
“..,the first founding essentially failed. The great experiment didn’t work;” and maintains the Tea Party ethos is against the “transition from a state of lawlessness, ruthless self-interest, and terrifying uncertainty, the “state of nature,” to a political order, the rule of law and the surrender of one’s right to decide everything in one’s own case.” he risks being accused of the same “facile, even puerile” understanding of history and politics that he sees and decries in the Palin/TP crowd.
Whatever one thinks of it as an organization, the Tea Party’s foundational principles are not incongruent with political order and the rule of law. Nor is it promoting a retrograde anti-democratic agenda. To suggest otherwise will not place you in the same intellectual company as Christine O’Donnell – in fact, it may not take you much higher than the level of an Alvin Greene.