[Many] critics in the Chinese diaspora [including myself] … are deeply confused by others who ask, at the end of long procedures of interpretive insight and readerly care, what good these procedures do if they don’t lead to direct political action. It’s a jarring question for people who have experienced politics as harm. Putting action downstream of literature vexes even those committed to revolutionary futures who believe that the transformative power of literature grows in relation to its indeterminacy — the when, where, and how of transformation. Whether this belief comes from systematic training or from habit and instinct, I and others with similar cultural backgrounds see in literary criticism a preclusive function as much as an enabling one. One version of this belief is that literary criticism occupies readers in proportion to the difficulty of the object of study and thus potentially keeps these same readers from either experiencing or committing harm. Another version of this belief is that the study of literature offers you many chances to trace causality, many chances to precisely understand the forces that compel and trap us so as to recognize them when they come again.
Against the accusation of uselessness literary criticism can claim to teach the skill of inferential deduction: What had to happen for this kind of thought to be possible? What has to be true so that this other thing can be true? In the existence of accurate discernment we can deduce a certain amount of justice in the world, configured even if briefly to allow felicitous discernment to take place. The person who practices discernment will not find that it translates into a normative ethics, a prescription for what one ought to do or how one ought to live, but they may learn over and over again that under certain conditions everyone has recourse to it. To practice discernment is free, in the sense that the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo meant it in his 1988 PhD dissertation “Aesthetics and Human Freedom.” Liu, a literary critic of international renown before his longer stint, beginning in 1989, as a human rights activist, served four prison terms in China, totaling seventeen years, for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests and the Charter 08 movement; he was still in custody when he died in 2017. The untranslated “Aesthetics and Human Freedom” expresses an idea that has long linked Chinese human rights activism to autonomous literary criticism: aesthetics means the free exercise of objective judgment on subjective experiences, which are necessarily finite.
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[Literary critical disambiguation] stops short of enactment in real life, where a person can be subject to punishment or disciplinary action. It’s not that discernment makes no difference in literary critical writing, or makes nothing happen, it’s that whatever cashing in can be done of this discernment has already been done, and that literature, and literary criticism, is it.
The net effect of these acts of attentive, intelligent reading might be politically quietist, in the sense that Hannah Arendt describes in “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Arendt’s startling insight in this lecture is that the ethics of thinking — What good does thinking do? Does it engender righteous action? — remains unintelligible and, in a way, irrelevant, until we are tested by circumstance. The “faculty of judgment,” which is itself liberated by thinking, “may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for [herself], in the rare moments when the chips are down.” When the social order remains intact, “thinking as such does society little good. It does not create values, it will not find out, once and for all, what ‘the good’ is, and it does not confirm but rather dissolves accepted rules of conduct.” Imminent harm changes its valence: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.” Accordingly, the procedures of discernment and judgment have no natural alliance to social order or to politics, which itself has no natural alliance to the good. Let me then extend the same logic to similar procedures found in literature and used by literary criticism. When the chips are down, these tools are useful for recognizing, at the bare minimum, what is being done to you, and to those around you, as it’s being done. It may even, as Arendt suggests, hold off catastrophes, at least for a little longer.
