Theorising Textual Subjects: Agency and Oppression (Literature, Culture, Theory)

233 Pages·1997·2.86 MB·English

by  Meili Steele

This book addresses the central crisis in critical theory today: how to
theorize the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and a
dialogical agent. By engaging with a wide range of leading political,
philosophical, and critical thinkers - Jameson, Habermas, Lyotard,
Maclntyre, Rorty, Taylor, Benhabib, and West are all critiqued - Meili
Steele proposes linking language with human agency in order to develop
an alternative textual and ethical theory of the subject. Steele shows how
constructivist theories fail to account for the ethical implications of the
supposed contingency of all contexts, and how dialogical theorists fail to
acknowledge the insight of postmodern critiques. Developing this theory
through readings of texts that address issues of identity politics, race, and
feminist theory, Steele illustrates that we do not have to choose between
an idealized and a demonized modernity. This book maps new ways of
confronting the problem of how politics and ethics are deployed in
imaginative narratives.
Literature, Culture, Theory 21
Theorizing textual subjects
Literature, Culture, Theory 21
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General editors
RICHARD MACKSEY, The Johns Hopkins University
and MICHAEL SPRINKER, State University ofNetv York at Stony Brook
The Cambridge Literature, Culture, Theory Series is dedicated to theoretical
studies in the human sciences that have literature and culture as their
object of enquiry. Acknowledging the contemporary expansion of cultural
studies and the redefinitions of literature that this has entailed, the series
includes not only original works of literary theory but also monographs
and essay collections on topics and seminal figures from the long history
of theoretical speculation on the arts and human communication generally.
The concept of theory embraced in the series is broad, including not only
the classical disciplines of poetics and rhetoric, but also those of aesthetics,
linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and other cognate sciences that
have inflected the systematic study of literature during the past half century.
Selected series titles
The subject of modernity ANTHONY J. CASCARDI
Introduction to literary hermeneutics PETER SZONDI
Anti-mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock TOM COHEN
Mikhail Bakhtin: between phenomenology and Marxism
MICHAEL F. BERNARD-DONALS
Theories of mimesis ARNIE MELBERG
Poetry, space, landscape: toward a new theory CHRIS FITTER
The object of literature PIERRE MACHEREY
(translated from the French by David Macey)
Rhetoric, sophistry, pragmatism edited by STEVEN MAILLOUX
Derrida and autobiography ROBERT SMITH
Kenneth Burke: rhetoric, subjectivity, postmodernism
ROBERT WESS
Rhetoric and culture in Lacan GILBERT CHAITIN
Paratexts: thresholds of interpretation GERARD GENETTE
(translated from the French by jane Lewiri)
Theorizing textual subjects
Agency and oppression
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MEILI STEELE
University of South Carolina
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1997
First published 1997
Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Steele, Meili, 1949-
Theorizing textual subjects: agency and oppression/Meili Steele.
p. cm. - (Literature, culture, theory: 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o 521 57185 5 (hardback). - ISBN O 521 57679 2 (paperback)
1. Criticism. 2. Critical theory. I. Title. II. Series.
PN98.S6S75 1997
8oi'.95-dc2o 96-26944 CIP
ISBN o 521 57185 5 hardback
ISBN 0 521 57679 2 paperback
VN
Contents
Acknowledgmen ts viii
Introduction
l
1 Stories of oppression and appeals to freedom
15
2 Language, ethics, and subjectivity in the
liberal/communitarian debate 62
3 Theorizing narratives of agency and subjection 108
4 Truth, beauty, and goodness in James's The
Ambassadors 150
5 The subject of democracy in the work of
Ralph Ellison 176
Conclusion 204
Bibliography 210
Index 224
Vll
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Acknowledgments
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Earlier versions of parts of this book appeared in the following
journals: Boundary 2, Praxis International, Comparative Literature,
New Literary History and Philosophy Today.
In addition to my anonymous readers at Cambridge University
Press, many people have read sections of the manuscript at
different points during its composition and offered valuable
suggestions. I want to name them: Amittai Avi-Ram, Carol
Bernstein, Martin Donougho, Robert Dostal, Bill Edmiston, Robert
Gooding-Williams, Michael Halberstam, Jane Hedley, Frank
Kermode, Omar Lughod, John McGowan, Xavier Nicholas, Alfred
Nordmann, Gerald Prince, Larry Rhu, Stephen Salkever, and Bill
Thesing. Greg Jay read an early draft of the first three chapters and
helped me clarify my ideas considerably. My daughter Laura
Lane-Steele has contributed so much to this book, even though she
hasn't read it. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner Cassie
Premo who has given my work and my life extraordinary
attention throughout the long development of the project.
Vlll
Introduction
Most recent studies of the ethics and politics of literary theory
focus on the polemical issues of literary value, multiculturalism, or
canons.1 The assumption of this book is that these questions
cannot be fruitfully posed until we examine the theoretical
commitments that drive discussions of textual politics. The
commitments that I will address concern the relationships among
language, subjectivity, and ethics. The influence of these commit-
ments in contemporary debate can be seen in two assumptions
made by most literary theory: (i) since any positive theory of the
good life (good book) is necessarily ethnocentric, we should
concern ourselves only with the political values of justice and
negative freedom (freedom from social structures); (2) since the
subject is a decentered site where social and linguistic forces
converge, there can be no constructing ethical subject but only a
constructed political subject. This is, of course, a simplification of
the many positions I will examine in detail, but it captures enough
of the problem for me to put the goals of this book on the table right
away: to show how theory has boxed us into these unproductive
positions and then to develop a way around the double impasse so
that we can enrich the way we theorize textual value and read
literary works. We do not need to decide what the canon is or what
a good book is but rather to understand what is crippling our
critical dialogue and how to find the resources to improve it.
The ethical/political dilemmas of literary theory can be seen in a
conference on liberal education at the University of North Carolina.
In one camp, there are conservatives, such as Allan Bloom, Lynne
Cheney, and William Bennett, who attack the diversification of the
curriculum because it ignores the need for "common ground,"
1 The bibliography on canons and value is staggering. My concern is with the
philosophical vocabulary in which value is theorized rather than with canon
formation.
Theorizing textual subjects
because it politicizes aesthetic issues, or because it leads to
relativism. In the other camp, are those who form what Henry
Louis Gates calls the "cultural Left" - that is, "that uneasy, shifting
set of alliances formed by feminist critics, critics of so-called
'minority' discourse, and Marxist and poststructuralist critics
generally, the Rainbow Coalition of contemporary critical theory"
("The Master's Pieces," p. 95).2 The conservatives' attacks on the
canon and the so-called "politicization" of the humanities make
easy targets for the "cultural Left," which can point to examples of
oppression and exclusion or to the inevitable political dimension
in educational issues; however, the cultural Left's apparent unity
masks its failure to address the question of what positive norms or
guidelines should inform deliberation about education. This
question brings out the emptiness of the word "Left" here, since it
puts Stanley Fish with Michel Foucault. This vacuous alliance is
made possible only by manifestly antidemocratic agendas, such as
Bloom's and Bennett's. These agendas permit everyone to subscribe
to different forms of a hermeneutics of suspicion that merely
attack previous theories of cultural value with an unsituated
appeal to justice and difference. A brief look at the remarks of three
members of this Rainbow Coalition at the conference - Stanley
Fish, Henry Louis Gates, and Gerald Graff - will highlight these
problems.
In "The Common Touch, or, One Size Fits All," Fish shows how
conservatives have made a fundamental epistemological error,
not just a political one. Fish's essay aims to explode the myth of the
common ground and shows how it is a "contested category":
"Difference cannot be managed by measuring it against the
common because the shape of the common is itself differential" (p.
247). Hence, he can point out that Lynne Cheney's writings result
in "the marginalization and suppression of other traditions," that
they "would arrest the play of democratic forces in order to reify
as transcendent a particular and uncommon stage of cultural
history" (p. 260). However, he never describes what political
deliberation will look like once we have accepted this truth;
instead, he leaves us with the dangerous platitude that everything
is political: "Politics can neitherbe avoided nor embraced ... [T]he
political - the inescapability of partisan, angled seeing - is what
2 There are other positions in this collection that do not fit this schema, such as
Richard Rorty's "Two Cheers for the Cultural Left."