This appears to be a group of scholars reflecting on Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). The group: Sarah Beckwith (Duke University), William Collins Donahue (University of Notre Dame), Henry Staten (University of Washington), Theo Davis (Northeastern University ), Oren Izenberg (University of California, Irvine), Yi-Ping Ong (Johns Hopkins University), Davis Smith-Brecheisen (University of Illinois, Chicago), Rob Chodat (Boston University) and Toril Moi (Duke University). They are writing in Nonsite.org, May 3, 2019.
“To read a text isn’t to discover new facts about it,” says Moi, “it is to figure out what it has to say to us.” Understanding, meaning as use, responsiveness, responsibility, acknowledgement, the precision and inheritance of language: these are Toril Moi’s concerns in her refreshing, vitally important, generative book, a book that has the capacity to liberate us from language as a prison-house, and challenges and invites us into our own responsibility in words, as writers, readers, theorists, and critics. Moi wants us to wake up to the complexities of our inheritance of and use of language as if to invite us to exercise some stiffened and inflexible muscles to find greater, more various strengths and capacities. This is what makes this book such an exhilarating challenge and invitation at a time when literary studies seems to veer between the false allure of scientism (neurohumanities, “digital” humanities) and a fierce, entrenched moralism (which I take to be a stance which by-passes one’s own responses) and the professionalized credentializing, which sometimes appears to measure rather than judge academic work, all of which might break a graduate student’s spirit before she gets the chance to find her intellectual companions, and stand in the way of why she might ever have loved reading, thinking, and writing in the first place.
Moi finds a revolution in our thinking about language in ordinary language philosophy, which she takes to be the lineage of Austin and especially Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell who has done so much to make these philosophers available; she also explains why and how the revolution of Wittgenstein’s thinking has not been received by literary studies. This might be because of the success of a previous generation of thinkers such as Marcuse and Gellner in attacking Wittgenstein’s putative conservatism (a hard to dislodge reading of Wittgenstein’s descriptive, non -prescriptive philosophy), or more latterly because literary studies has been gripped by a pervasive picture of language as representation, all the more tenacious because unrecognized. In this sense Moi’s work joins that of French philosopher (and translator of Cavell’s work) Sandra Laugier, who has recently said that Cavell’s work on Austin and Wittgenstein has been “the only work of contemporary philosophy to carry the project of ordinary language philosophy through to its end,” and Cora Diamond in tracing out a new realism not tied to empiricism or metaphysics, this time for the unwieldy and amorphous field of literary studies.
Acknowledgment as a mode of reading:
Acknowledgement does not exclude knowledge, it necessarily involves it, and is a form of it, for the opposite of acknowledgement is not knowledge but avoidance, so it is a mode in which we know, but now not on the narrow terms of epistemology since certain evidence is not to be had in the sphere of knowing each other (skepticism was right about that). Moi’s development of the idea of reading as acknowledgement (chap. 9) is thus a rich deployment of this central idea in Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy. There is no reason, for example, that a reading of a text should not and indeed often must deploy knowledge about a whole range of things in connection with it, from technical lay out to reception history, to aspects of social context and history, but if reading is to be a practice of acknowledgement it will want to move through the articulated responses of the critic at hand. Wittgenstein says that we learn language in apprenticing ourselves into the world of what the elders in our lives say and do (how they act) in relation to each other and us and with the things of the world. It is a major part of Wittgenstein’s teaching especially as understood by Cavell that reference must pass through expression. So a major part of Moi’s focus in this section lies in thinking of the text at hand, the text we might be reading, as action and expression. As critics we will need to think about what we stake ourselves on in our claims about any particular text under analysis, what we have seen, what noticed, and why it is significant for us, and perhaps for others. As Moi says this will involve trusting our own experience and our experience might at the same time need educating. Finding the right words (for which we love good writers) will sometimes mean finding the community who reads and understands them, something not known in advance. Moi’s book is written in the hope and risk that she will find that community of readers.
Pardon me if I slip into high polemical mode and ride one of my favorite hobby horses, but I would argue that a major consequence of a critical practice centered on meaning is a refusal to acknowledge form as anything other than a conceptual ploy to assert textual independence. On the evidence of actual critical practice, meaning-centered criticism has little interest in describing and analyzing the formal features of a text in any but the most superficial fashion. The idea of form deployed in meaning-centered criticism is an idea about meaning, not about form-in-itself.
On the idea that “To read a text [...] is to figure out what it has to say to us”, see my post, Why Did Interpretive Criticism Take Hold?
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