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Sympathetic Reading
September 17, 2005    File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

Christopher Nealon, from "Camp Messianism":

... I think we're at an impasse in literary studies, on the way to which we have sacrificed the critical potential of appreciation and advocacy in favor of what has become a rote "problematization" of texts, and a sadly narrow practice of appreciation that is only able to find subversiveness to admire. But what if the texts we admire, even the politically engaged ones, turn out to be not subversive? What if their political efficacy has been evacuated or is pending? Ascribing performative success to these objects — to pick one of our favorite strategies of the last decade — and equating that capacity for performance with agency doesn't seem to do justice to the theoretical power of the idea of performativity, which I take not to lie in our applauding the aesthetic object's performance but in our not being able to pin down when the performance is finished. Crucial to the sympathetic reading practice I want to advocate is an understanding that critical acts are not discrete. To dismiss appreciative or content-driven readings of texts on the grounds that they are insufficiently politicized, insufficiently counterhegemonic, is to mistake the work of countering hegemony (if that's what we're doing) as individual work. When I read a text that interests me, especially for its political-affective comportment, my impulse, my critical impulse, is: pass it on. Highlight it as best you can, read against the grain, or with it where you can, and make sure others take a look. This is as true for texts that I find repulsive as for those I admire: I don't imagine myself, as a critic, judging by myself.

Posted by Jake Adam York at September 17, 2005 11:38 AM