After Suspicion
Author(s): Rita Felski
Source: Profession , 2009, (2009), pp. 28-35
Published by: Modern Language Association
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After Suspicion
RITA FELSKI
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I tell a roomful of students that myth is cul
ture masquerading as nature and that signifiers beget ever more signifiers
in the prison house of language. Postmodernism just is the cultural logic
of late capitalism, and the documents of civilization turn out to be syn
onymous with the documents of barbarism. The Orient, we surmise, does
not exist, even as the discourse of orientalism cranks out endless proofs
of its essential and unchanging nature. And sexual identity, far from be
ing the truth of the self, is forged by a cultural imperative to confess so
deeply ingrained that we no longer see it as the effect of a power that
constrains us.
To teach a survey course in literary theory is to induct one's students
in techniques of suspicious interpretation, to train them to read between
the lines and against the grain. In some of the essays we read, suspicion
slices into a text like a scalpel to expose its complicity with the logic of
imperialism or heteronormativity; in other essays, it is ratcheted up to a
higher-order skepticism that calls the feasibility of truth into question and
that hammers home the contingency and ungroundedness of our beliefs.
But the animating spirit of our inquiry is the conviction that appearances
deceive and that texts do not willingly surrender their secrets. Instead of
being emblazoned in the words on the page, meaning lies beneath or to
the side of these words, encrypted in what the literary work cannot or
will not say, in its eloquent stuttering and recalcitrant silences. Disdain
The author is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia. A ver
sion of this paper was presented at the 2008 MLA convention in San Francisco.
PROFESSION 2009 28
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RITA FELSKI ||| 29
ing the obvious in order to probe the infinite mysteries of the unsaid, the
hermeneutics of suspicion promotes a sensibility that prides itself on its
uncompromising wariness and hypervigilance.
To be sure, not every author on the syllabus is equally intent on outfox
ing literary texts by pouncing on their contradictions and deciphering their
ideological inscriptions. My students ponder Theodor Adorno's proposi
tion that the seemingly solipsistic works of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beck
ett, in the very dissonance and brokenness of their form, hold out a fragile
promise of human freedom. My students encounter, in Helene Cixous's
poetic and polyphonic prose, a vertiginous torrent of words that seeks
to shake up thought and to imagine the yet unknown. And in grappling
with deconstruction, they absorb some basic lessons about the pitfalls of
masterful interpretation and the ways in which texts elude or escape the
analytic grids we press upon them. Our repertoire of theoretical examples
includes many injunctions to respect the otherness of texts, to attend to the
aesthetic and figurative dimensions of language, to conceive of works of
art as sources of illumination or insurrection rather than as documents to
be diagnosed and found wanting. The current surge of interest in literary
ethics speaks directly to this question, advocating a style of reading that
can do justice to a text's singularity and strangeness instead of trying to
shoehorn it into a predetermined conceptual frame.
And yet suspicion is not so much dissipated in this second set of argu
ments as it is displaced. The literary text is lauded for its staunch resistance
to ordinary language and thought, its subversion of idees fixes and idees
recues. We do not need to be suspicious of the text, in other words, because
the text is already doing all the work of suspicion for us. It anticipates and
outstrips our critical vigilance through its skills in undermining the self
evident, estranging familiar structures of experience, thwarting the banal
ity or obtuseness of everyday beliefs. We prize its wariness of closure, its
disarming of thought, its giddy dislocations of causality and coherence.
The literary text performs a metacommentary on the traps of interpreta
tion, a canny reading of its own possible readings, a knowing anticipation
and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders. Critic and work are
thus bound together in an alliance of mutual mistrust vis-a-vis congealed
forms of language and thought. Suspicion sustains and reproduces itself in
a reflexive distrust of common knowledge and an emphasis on the chasm
that separates scholarly and lay interpretation.
What else could we teach our students besides critical reading? The be
musement likely to greet such a question speaks to the entrenched nature
of a scholarly habitus, the ubiquity of a particular form of intellectual life.
As Michael Warner points out, the slogan of critical reading has colonized
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30 III AFTER SUSPICION
literary studies with exceptional efficiency, thanks to its success in syn
chronizing the practice of scholarship with the exercise of skepticism. In
the theory classroom, especially, intellectual rigor is equated with deft acts
of defamiliarization, rebuttals of evident or obvious meanings, rehears
als of the self-undermining and self-questioning movements of language.
Becoming a critical reader means moving from attachment to detachment
and indeed to disenchantment, undergoing not just an intellectual but also
a sentimental education. The only alternative to such a process of askesis,
it seems, is remaining stalled in the role of an uncritical reader, hardly a
plausible or attractive educational goal.
Thanks to this institutionally mandated division of reading practices,
my students often learn to disparage their previous responses to texts as
naive, rudimentary, even embarrassing. Such responses are not easily or
efficiently excised, but they are driven out of sight and mind in the theory
classroom, screened by shinier, sexier, more charismatic vocabularies. By
and large, my students are intrigued by these vocabularies; they relish a
challenge to their commonsense assumptions; they grapple heroically with
puzzling and counterintuitive ideas; they ventriloquize and sometimes take
to heart various idioms of critique and countercritique. And yet there comes
a point when many of them?especially those who do not see themselves
as professors in the making?turn away. They do so, I believe, not because
of any inherent distaste for theory but because the theories they encounter
are so excruciatingly tongue-tied about why literary texts matter, offering
only a critical deflation of the reasons rather than a searching engagement
with them. To be sure, the readings in feminist, African American, and
queer theory appeal to the commitments of some of my students, yet even
here the vocabularies at their disposal fail to clarify key discriminations in
their responses, to shed light on why a student may be entranced by the
work of one feminist poet and left entirely indifferent by another.
Cultural studies often proves the most popular unit of the semester, not
only because my students can flaunt their superior knowledge of rap music
or reality TV but also because of their patent relief at finally encounter
ing a vigorous defense of everyday aesthetic pleasure. And yet the anthro
pological gaze that cultural studies directs at the enthusiasm of romance
novel readers and Star Trek fans reinforces the sense of an unbridgeable
chasm between acts of reading inside and outside the classroom. Such an
insistence on the radical differences between interpretative communities
disallows the possibility of overlapping modes of reading and shared cog
nitive and affective parameters. While this emphasis on incommensurable
modes of reception is often justified by invoking Pierre Bourdieu, new so
ciological work is challenging his findings and his reduction of individual
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RITA FELSKI ||| 31
to class tastes and is documenting the blurring and intermingling of cul
tural tastes, modes of appreciation, and regimes of yalue (Lahire). In this
context, the protocols of scholarly criticism may owe more to everyday
pleasures, mundane motives, and habits of thought than we like to admit.
My own turn to what I call neophenomenology springs from a desire to
build better bridges between theory and common sense, between academic
criticism and ordinary reading, by delving into the mysteries of our many
sided attachments to texts. Such an approach pivots on our first-person
implication and involvement in what we read, calling on us to clarify how
and why particular texts matter to us. Its orientation is toward meaning
rather than truth or the demystification of truth, toward examining the
intricate play of perception, interpretation, and affective orientation that
constitutes aesthetic response. Yet because consciousness is always inten
tional, that is to say consciousness of something, it also draws our atten
tion to the stylistic and narrative devices that shape aesthetic experience.
Neophenomenology is phenomenology after the linguistic turn, cognizant
that cultural mediation renders consciousness neither self-contained nor
self-evident. It declines to quarantine personhood from the pressures of
context, to bracket the historical and cultural factors that shape interpreta
tion. What it borrows from phenomenology is the willingness to be patient
rather than impatient, to describe rather than prescribe, to look carefully
at rather than through appearances, to respect rather than to reject what
is in plain view. It presumes, in other words, the irreducible complexity of
everyday structures of experience.
Such an orientation has clear affinities with the burgeoning interest in
affect. One of the distinguishing marks of works of art, after all, is their
ability to inspire intense responses, inchoate emotions, quasi-visceral pas
sions, working and worming their way into our minds and bodies. Art is the
quintessential mood-altering substance. Broaching questions of aesthetic
emotion virtually guarantees surges of animation and spirited engagement
in the classroom, as I've often found in discussions of the sublime, perhaps
the only affective response to have gained a dose of critical respect. Yet
a wide spectrum of responses remains unexamined and unaccounted for:
trance-like states of immersion or absorption in literature's virtual worlds;
surges of sympathy or mistrust, affinity or alienation, triggered by particu
lar formal devices; the suddenness with which we can fall in love with, or
feel ourselves addressed by, an author's style; less auspicious, but all too
frequent, sensations of fretfulness, irritation, or boredom. Our students
have hardly begun to reflect on the multilayered interplay of affect and
expectation, of habitual schemata, cultural training, and idiosyncrasies of
individual histories, that shapes what and how they read.
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32 HI AFTER SUSPICION
As such phrasing suggests, affect cannot be separated from interpreta
tion. Aesthetic raptures and intensities are triggered not just by subliminal
reactions to signifiers but also by what such signifiers represent and how
they hook up to imaginative, ethical, cultural, and sociopolitical lifeworlds.
An investigation of the modality of recognition, for example, allows stu
dents to analyze how and why they feel themselves addressed by particular
novels, films, or plays. A certain amount of spadework may be needed to
dislodge well-worn phrases about such texts to get at the truth of students'
experience. Yet the standard theoretical response?demoting any instance
of recognition to an example of misrecognition?proves no less formulaic,
while conspicuously failing to do justice to a pervasive and many-sided
structure of response. More fruitful intellectual options come to mind:
turning to novels that represent and think through processes of readerly
recognition, analyzing how formal devices encourage or attenuate such
processes, exploring the deeper philosophical implications of recognition
as both knowing again and knowing anew, weighing up the consequences
of such knowing as it operates within or across temporal and cultural
divides.
To be sure, such approaches carry a modicum of risk. Some students
will need reminding that their devotion to Jane Austen or their passion
for Jonathan Frantzen is a puzzle for investigation, not a cause for self
congratulation. Phenomenology seeks to make the familiar newly sur
prising through the scrupulousness of its attention, exposing the strange
ness of the self-evident. It calls not for complacency or confession but
for strenuous reflection on how aesthetic devices speak to and help shape
selves. Such reflection reaches outward to the world as well as inward to
the text, asking how reader response is shaped by educational training or
social circumstance, how structures of feeling and interpretative registers
are modulated across space and time. Yet the starting point is a deep sense
of curiosity about the nature of our aesthetic attachments, as worthy of
sustained and sophisticated investigation. Such an approach offers unique
opportunities, as well as risks, in allowing students to reflect on rather than
repress their engagement in what they read.
The nature of such engagement, it must be said, is not predetermined,
self-evident, or unchanging. One hoped-for consequence of a literary
education is that students acquire new attachments, affinities, interpreta
tive repertoires. Such pedagogic dislocations and transformations often
spring from works that initially baffle or frustrate their readers or that
speak to them across a chasm of historical or cultural difference. Taking
student response seriously does not mean underwriting catch-all calls for
relevance that underestimate the power of texts to redefine what counts
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RITA FELSKI ||| 33
as individually salient. Our goal is not to cater indiscriminately to student
preferences but to shake up and reconfigure such preferences, introducing
not only new texts but other ways of engaging them.
Yet this process is poorly characterized as a shift from uncritical to criti
cal reading, as if literary training were a rarefied intellectual and analytic
pursuit purged of all prejudice and passion. I've argued elsewhere that
modes of enchantment imbue scholarly as well as popular reading, that
our institutionally mandated styles of argument often screen murkier and
messier involvements (Felski). We can be taken hold of, possessed, invaded
by a text in a way that we cannot fully control or explain and in a manner
that fails to jibe with public postures of ironic dispassion or disciplinary
detachment. James Joyce enthusiasts are no less obsessive and monoma
niacal than Star Trek fans, and experiences of absorption and self-loss are
not the exclusive property of swooning adolescents.
What, then, comes after suspicion? Six more weeks of classroom in
struction, another twelve sessions devoted to alternate styles of interpreta
tion and aesthetic response. Every syllabus constitutes an argument, and
I'm no longer convinced by my old reading list, by a repertoire of ideas
that still resonate individually but that no longer add up to a compelling or
comprehensive whole. Suspicion remains an indispensable sensibility and
reading strategy in the classroom; students need to learn to read against
the grain, to question received wisdoms, to learn the fundamentals of criti
cal interpretation. The canon of theory remains newly challenging, and
newly necessary, for each batch of students that wanders into my class
room. Indeed, a hermeneutics of suspicion, far from being the consequence
of political correctness run wild, is a style of reading deeply implicated in
the history of literary form, with its panoply of self-deceiving narrators,
conflicting viewpoints, and metafictional devices that train readers to tread
warily and read skeptically. And while distrustful of pleasure, suspicious
reading generates its own pleasures: a sense of prowess in ingenious meth
ods of interpretation, appreciation of the economy and elegance of par
ticular explanatory patterns, the intellectual satisfaction of a heightened or
sharpened understanding.
Elevated to the governing principle of literary studies, however, suspi
cion solidifies into a sensibility and set of disciplinary norms no less doc
trinaire than the fastidious aestheticism and canon worship it sought to
replace. Critique needs to be supplemented by generosity, pessimism by
hope, negative aesthetics by a sustained reckoning with the communica
tive, expressive, and world-disclosing aspects of art. My revised course,
then, will feature a new structure and a new title. While retaining many
of my previous readings, I plan to teach them slightly differently, to frame
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34 III AFTER SUSPICION
them as not only political or philosophical arguments but also specific
styles of interpretation shaped by institutional, intellectual, and in some
cases vernacular histories. And these readings will be juxtaposed against,
and placed in conversation with, alternative frameworks: classic texts such
as Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" and Eve Sedgwick on the limits
of paranoid reading; Suzanne Keen on empathy and Martha Nussbaum
on sympathy; both Marie-Laure Ryan and Charles Bernstein on the rela
tions between absorption and literary form; Stephen Greenblatt on won
der; Janice Radway on middle-brow reading and Deidre Lynch on the cult
of Austen; Wayne Koestenbaum on opera queens; Henry Jenkins on the
emotional punch of popular culture; Elizabeth Long on reading as col
lective action. The heterogeneity of these perspectives is self-evident, but
they share a willingness to push beyond regimes of suspicious reading, a
conviction that aesthetic engagement does not have to mean intellectual
naivete or political complacency.
Beyond critical and uncritical reading lies a third option: what is some
times described as postcritical reading. I prefer to call it reflective read
ing. Reflective reading harnesses the intellectual and theoretical curiosity
associated with critique to develop more compelling and comprehensive
accounts of why texts matter to us. It assumes that literature's relation to
worldly knowledge is not only suspicious, subversive, or adversarial, that
it can also amplify and replenish our sense of how things are. It attends
to the depth, intensity, and power of our attachments and does not see
scholarly reading as requiring a shedding of such attachments. It offers, in
other words, a more dialogic and capacious vision of theory, one that can
do better justice to the energies and enthusiasms that drive our students to
literary studies in the first place.
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RITAFELSKI ||| 35
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