Patrick Colm Hogan: The Politics of Interpretation: Ideology, Professionalism, and the Study of Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 15, Number 2, October 1991.
Don Quixote ‘proves’ the existence of his chivalric heroes by imagining their faces. Academia today provides safe haven for many such knights of woeful countenance, unhappy warriors whose political battle-cry, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it!’ echoes harmlessly from distant, unmoved windmills.
Patrick Colm Hogan seeks a literary criticism guided by political principles “closer to the political concerns of real human life” (viii). He aims not at the ‘deconstruction’ or the ‘construction’ of political-literary ‘theories.’ Poorly disguised assertions of arbitrary will and politically correct attitudinizing fail to impress him. As a man of the ‘Left,’ he sees that the political victory and moral legitimacy of the ‘Left’ require the congruence of its doctrines and insights with the real world. To change the world, one must understand it.
In Hogan’s view, political criticism should combine evaluation of ideological aims, beliefs, and actions, the examination of how literary works foster these, and an answer to the perennial question, Cui bono?—the examination of what interests or “power relations” the inculcation of a given ideology “might serve” (30). Deconstructionism and some forms of feminist criticism impede these activities by condemning “logical inference and empirical investigation” as “patriarchal and repressive” (31). “A denial of the Principle of Non-Contradiction makes all of one’s claims into dogma, brooking no dispute” (35), ending with the substitution of “intimidation for dialectic” (49). This kind of criticism is political in the worst sense: partisan in tone and substance, coercive in spirit—in a word, tyrannical.
Against Derrida, Hogan observes that definition need not entail oppressive hierarchies, that “logocentrism” has no necessary historical connection to “phallocentricism.” “Clearly, the ordinary guarded and skeptical methods of rational enquiry—so disparaged by deconstructionists—are far more germane to forging an anti-Leninist and anti-Stalinist left, especially if these are combined with a Kantian ethics which grants to individuals their rights as ends in themselves” (86).
Against certain varieties of feminism, Hogan questions the attempt to make womanhood prior to a woman’s individuality, as when “women are encouraged not to develop their own capacities, but the putative capacities of their gender-essence” (98). Even as Voltaire twitted earlier philosophers for defining a tree by its ‘treeness,’ Hogan rejects claims that, say, Simone de Beauvoir could be adequately defined or explained by ‘femaleness.’ No empirical or logical evidence sustains such claims, which are little more than the photographic negatives of long-existing stereotypes, valorized to serve the interests or, more accurately to caress the vanity of new photographers.
To subvert ideologies of domination ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ Hogan urges empirical and dialectical criticism along with action to “dismantle all those structures which establish or reinforce” ideology, including such institutions as religion, the state, and capitalism (171). In academia this would require “a massive anarchist or libertarian restructuring of the university” (193), including the abolition of such “feudal, guild structures” as academic departments (176). Tenure, tuition, and the exploitation of teaching assistants and part-time instructors would also need to go. He offers amusing remarks about the influence of the commercial ethos on literary scholars, each generation of whom makes work for itself, “creates a demand,” by seizing upon new theories of interpretation. “It all has to be done over!” I heard one literary feminist exult; just so.
Hogan is a sane man. It is helpful to have his leftist and feminist critique of certain surreal elements of the lit-crit ‘Left.’ I admire his common sense, lucidity, and civic courage. He himself, however, departs from realism from time to time. From the book’s dedication to the Nicaraguan revolutionaries (all too many of whom turned out to be self-serving farceurs) to the concluding pipe dreams about an “Anarchist University,” there is here more than a touch of what Marxists rightly deride as utopian socialism. David Hume’s sound remark on other-worldly men of his day speaks even more pointedly to this-worldly activist-utopians of our own: “A delicate sense of morals, especially when attended with a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of the world, and to make him consider the common course of human affairs with too much indignation.”
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