How the other half lives

In an unexpected show of ALSC magnanimity, Jonathan Goodwin, a blogger at the Literary Organ, asks us to suspend our prejudices—“our”?—and read the Winter 2004 edition of Social Text, on the theme “Global Cities of the South.”

I’m not able to read along—I can’t follow the link to Social Text at Project MUSE, since I’m not connected to a university that pays for the service—but Goodwin’s glosses on the articles are intriguing (if maybe a bit condescending). His preview of one I’d like to read:

Teleopoiesis, “reaching toward the distant other by the patient power of the imagination, a curious kind of identity politics, where one crosses identity, as a result of migration or exile,” is described in Gayatri Spivak’s “Harlem”.

Now, I’m a big fan of blog posts that summarize articles found elsewhere—Jodi at i cite, for example, has shown that the synopsis can be a fun and lively form of post—but something about Goodwin’s essay strikes me as strange. (Extra credit for anyone who can say what.)

Consider Goodwin’s conclusion:

Social Text is, because of the controversy I alluded to earlier, frequently used as an unread example of what must be wrong with today’s cultural/literary studies. The next time you feel the urge to do so, I counsel you to read an issue of what you’re about to condemn. See what you can use.

See what you can use—a noble Emersonian thesis, though maybe less so if it is deployed in an advertisement for a text that asks us to reach “toward the distant other by the patient power of the imagination.”

Emerson teaches that “the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul,” but the activity of whose soul ought we to be interested in here? The literary-organic reader’s? Or, as Spivak suggests, the soul of the other? It would seem superficially that reading with “the patient power of the imagination” is pretty much incompatible with mining a text for something to use. (John—do your New Labour and show me that a third way is possible here!) (If I were to launch my own ideologically driven literary website, I might think it wiser to reverse the literary-organic formula and take the value of Spivak for granted while asking you to check out William Empson to “see what you can use.”)

See what you can use—what resonance does this have here? See what you can buy up cheap and repackage? See what slums you can gentrify? See whom you can cram into the galley of your ship? Quaeritur.

And what is the shape of the chamber whose acoustics ring so suspiciously? To sound out the dimensions of the space in which these literary-organic echoes take form, let us consider one blogger’s response to an article discussed in Goodwin’s post:

What then explains the tortured phenomenological phraseologies? The desire to possess a technical vocabulary, I’d contend, and it’s the impulse to piggy-back on fields literary scholars (present editors excluded) aren’t trained in that bothers me about much of what’s published by English professors in Social Text. Anthropologists writing about anthropology with a recognizably anthropological idiom I can handle. English professors variously adopting the technical idioms of whatever discipline informs this, that or the other particular claim drives me to, up and around the walls.

Again, extra credit to any reader who can say what’s wrong with this.

A provisional answer: riffing on material from fields you aren’t trained in—(“Stay on message: training confers legitimacy”)—belongs to English studies because using language figuratively belongs to language. Criticism, like literature, lives through the production of metaphor, and the specialized vocabularies of other disciplines—(“Stay on message: mental life divides into disciplines”)—provide an endlessly rich source of new figures. There I go—I guess I'm saying “see what you can use!”

But it might matter what or whom you’re using, and to what end.