Jun 28, 2025
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“As a critical scholar, I contend that this busyness around claiming and refusing identity markers has oftentimes led to critical scholarship doing more work that ultimately recenters colonial projects of categorizing rather than generating spaces beyond. Critique is necessary for noting the contours of colonial logics but it is insufficient for imagining into existence praxes that decolonize.”
-- Leigh Patel, Decolonizing Educational Research
Track of the Day; 23/7/17
Why Theory - Gang of Four, 1981
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_jQr84BBaM
oh GOD and also this passage from Writing in Society where williams is talking about critical theory:
By my educational history I belong to these developments, and in those terms respect them. But in my full social history I continue to look at them, in turn, with the eyes of a stranger. What I see then is not only what they have achieved but their own deep forms. I can feel the bracing cold of their inherent distances and impersonalities and yet have to go on saying that they are indeed ice-cold. I see, practically and theoretically, the estranging consequences of the general assumption...that the systems of human signs are generated within the systems themselves and that to think otherwise is a humanist error. There is then a paradox: that these systems, as systemic analysis reveals them, have great explanatory power, but that the form and language of their explanations are at a quite exceptional distance from the lives and relationships they address, so that what is reaching furthest into our common life has the mode of a stranger, even the profession of a stranger.
My position is that it is not up to us [intellectuals] to propose. As soon as one 'proposes'—one proposes a vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have effects of domination. What we have to present are instruments and tools that people might find useful. By forming groups specifically to make these analyses, to wage these struggles, by using these instruments or others: this is how, in the end, possibilities open up. But if the intellectual starts playing once again the role that he has played for a hundred and fifty years—that of prophet in relation to what 'must be,' to what 'must take place'—these effects of domination will return and we shall have other ideologies, functioning in the same way.
Michel Foucault, 'Confinement, psychiatry, prison,’ in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984
some writing on woolf, imaginative life, and reading as a social practice
some of this might be pretty “feminist lit studies 101,” but it’s meant as a kind of rough sketch to open a chapter that will delve more deeply into what’s happening to literary study in the 1930s, as the discipline is being consolidated and professionalized within higher institutions of learning in Britain. some brief context: prior to the 1930s, English studies was taught primarily in women’s and working-men’s colleges, because it was considered a “soft” subject fit for students of lesser intelligence. in the 1930s and after, primarily through the work of the Leavises and the Scrutiny circle, English reinvents itself as a rigorous, professionalized meta-discipline and installs itself at the heart of a prestigious liberal arts education. This effort involves, among other things, cultivating a detached, impersonal critical sensibility (a kind of forerunner of what we now refer to as critique) and developing a set of easily teachable interpretive practices that “train” students to value certain types of literature over others.
So: Woolf is trying both to describe these changes as they are taking place in the 1930s, and she is also trying to push back against them – trying to preserve space for other ways of thinking about what reading is for and what literature can do in our lives. She is trying to articulate interpretive frameworks that aren’t premised on securing the reader a kind of professional “mastery” or critical authority, but are instead premised in the idea that reading, writing, and imaginative engagement are vitally important to the flourishing of a more tolerant, more just democratic society. She is also trying to argue that these emerging forms of critical authority might look new or innovative, or might even seem to make lit study more accessible on face, but that in fact they are continuous with older, exclusionary cultural hierarchies, and they help maintain and reproduce those exclusions.
*
the good of literature: Woolf is concerned with the vital importance of imaginative life; the need to cultivate, nurture, nourish the life of the imagination, and to see that life as equally vital to our thriving For Woolf, the good of literature is not just that it teaches us morals or laws—a utilitarian framework for valuing literature—or that it allows us to advance socially or economically, but because reading is a form of emotional sustenance: it sustains us, it elevates us, it opens us up to new experiences, it humanizes us, it allows us to explore what it means to be a thinking, living, breathing being in the world. Literature can teach us to think critically too, and to be better citizens of a democracy, but it does so by making us more empathetic, curious people who are receptive to new experiences and are not threatened by difference.
but literature is also in & of the world - our imaginative worlds are not utopias. for Woolf, any of these idealistic ideas about what literature can do for us or what purposes it can serve in our lives must be combined with the understanding that 1) literature is a human creation, and 2) the systems and institutions we develop to teach literature, or to transmit cultural knowledge, are human creations too, meaning that they are shaped by the political, economic, and social inequities that structure human society. We do not all read the same way; we do not all write the same way; and the ways in which we read and write are shaped by the material circumstances of our lives, by the histories we bring to the reading encounter.
Woolf’s essays explore these shaping influences at length—A Room of One’s Own is centrally concerned with understanding the ways in which the political and economic subjugation of women has distorted or hemmed in women’s imaginative lives, and disrupted or prevented the formation of a “tradition” of women’s writing. Woolf surveys the absence of books by women writers on the library shelves, noting that women are one of the most studied creatures in literature and yet are rarely afforded the opportunity to produce knowledge about their own lives. She explores the ways in which women are barred from receiving an education (or are afforded a “lesser” education); are kept in a state of economic privation or burdened with domestic responsibilities that leave them little time or energy to write; are mocked or scorned or even beaten for daring to write or wanting to publish; and then, when and if they do write in spite of these obstacles, are taken to task for writing about superficial or trivial subjects (because, as she notes, women do not go to war, women do not conquer foreign lands, women do not make political deals or perform acts of great heroism for their country – all the subjects that “great literature” is supposed to be concerned with).
In the British Library scene in Room: the female narrator is sitting at a reading table next to a young male student researcher, reading works about women by male authors, which have been brought to her by male librarians who serve as custodians of the cultural wealth of the British empire—a cultural wealth that is produced & maintained by the material wealth of the class of men who founded it—and which helps secure & reproduce that material wealth by ensuring that knowledge, culture, etc., remains in the guardianship of that educated male elite. The female narrator’s reaction is, first, to feel wholly overwhelmed, on the verge of meltdown, but as she begins to describe that feeling of near-meltdown, the feeling of helplessness is gradually transmuted into a simmering rage—a rage she has no vocabulary to articulate, let alone an outlet to express it; a rage she describes in intensely visceral, bodily terms: a rage registered in her body, a rage connected to & experienced through a body that is unwelcome—a body that, through glances and looks and remarks from others, is made continually conscious of its not-belonging, its wrongness, its out-of-placeness (Ahmed, the sea of whiteness).] (There’s so much packed into that scene—and I don’t even have time to unpack it all here.)
reading is a social practice. In scenes like the one described above, Woolf emphasizes, again and again, that reading is not an individual pursuit but a social practice, entangled in a whole other host of social practices. The actual act of silently scanning a text or taking in the words written on a page may be an individual act, but reading is so much more than that—interpretation always takes place in a place, in a historically specific context. Woolf draws our attention again and again to the place of reading, so we can understand that interpretation always takes place in a specific location, performed by a specific body – and those bodies are shaped/oriented by those economic and social realities, located within a field of relations to other readers, other texts, other histories. Each reader brings their history to the text with them; each reader, engaging with a work of literature, has a specific, unique angle of vision onto the text. There are as many ways of reading as there are readers, even if there are perhaps patterns, commonalities, points of overlap between readers who share similar histories, who bring those histories to the act of reading a text. It makes no sense to say all women read/write like this in an essentialist sense, i.e., to suggest that women are “naturally” inclined to write about certain subjects, or to notice certain things. Rather, if women writers have thus far tended to write in a particular way, it is because many of those women have shared common or overlapping experiences, or have been positioned in similar ways to the literary tradition.
imaginative life is not “private,” but takes place in the world. Woolf deliberately challenges a public/private distinction framework for thinking about reading here. The notion of “privacy” or “private acts of reading” constructs an inner/outer distinction; it implies (or constructs) the reader as a self-contained subject who makes sense of a text privately, internally, and then turns outward to an external world to use or share that knowledge. It also constructs the idea that our imaginative lives are individual, private, cut off from the internal selves of others—again, the idea that imaginative life takes place in a circumscribed zone inside our heads, and only makes contact with the outer world if we choose to communicate it in speech or writing to others. Woolf’s own terms contribute to this misunderstanding, I think—the “room of one’s own” is often interpreted as Woolf arguing that writing can only happen in private, individual spaces. And Woolf herself sometimes seems to struggle to figure out what she means by this—her unsuccessful efforts to achieve some “marriage between granite and rainbow” in The Pargiters, for instance, may suggest that, to some extent, she saw material reality and imaginative life as neatly divided from each other, impossible to synthesize, at least in literature.
But I think that it is more useful to set aside the public/private distinction, and to argue that for Woolf, reading and writing—I use the term “imaginative engagement” or “practices of imaginative engagement” to capture both and also to capture the things that aren’t neatly contained by either—were always social activities. They were social in the sense that they were shaped by social realities—there is no act of reading, no act of writing, that takes place in a vacuum, or in the abstract; there is no generalizable definition of interpretation, because every reader brings to the act of reading a different set of values and expectations, shaped by a different set of circumstances, experiences, realities. Imaginative life does not take place “bounded in a nutshell,” to borrow Hamlet’s phrase, contained safely within the circle of our skulls; it is coextensive with, and structured by, material reality, material histories.
And it’s not just that our private acts of reading are either constrained or facilitated by our level of education, or our political status, or some other aspect of our social environment—it’s that our practices of imaginative life also structure and consolidate our social environments. For Woolf, the way that we read and write—and indeed the whole structure of our imaginative lives, the way we conceptualize the relationship between our affective lives and our lived realities, is part of the way in which material structures are consolidated, maintained, and reproduced. This is such a crucial point for Woolf! It is crucial to not just stop at “our material circumstances structure our interpretive practices,” but to understand that our interpretive practices also structure our material circumstances—the way we are taught to read, the way we are taught to think about what reading and writing can do.
And this, I think, is why Woolf becomes so increasingly preoccupied with education (something I will return to later in the chapter). Crucially, though: Woolf’s literary humanism, her belief in the vitality and importance of imaginative life, is not a naive humanism. Her idealism is tempered by that keenly felt understanding of the fact that humanism has not made good on its promises, and can only hope to make good on those promises or ideals if it is committed also to understanding, describing, and eventually dismantling existing systems of inequity.
one of my absolute favorite quotes from ahmed’s living a feminist life (which i do not have in front of me at the moment so I must paraphrase) is that part where she talks about how feminist theory is often what brings us into the classroom, but it should also be what drives us from it, back out into the world.
also i really liked this description of that Institutionalizing English Literature book’s purpose:
The fear that presently emanates from the possibility of English studies redirecting its primary focus to include works and approaches that are non-traditional is alarming only to those who are indifferent to its long and complex history, particularly in light of the fact that works and approaches we now call ‘traditional’ are, in large measure, less than one hundred years old. The discipline’s origins depend upon the historical process, and its continuing existence is inconceivable outside history. It is an item of history, not an evolutionary totality. (Institutionalizing English Literature 15)
which in non-academic language basically means that ideas about the Canon and the Literary Tradition and How One Should Read are actually not these timeless, set-in-stone ideals but have always been contested and open to debate, and that understanding the histories of those debates can help us make space in the academy for texts, experiences, and practices of reading that have been labeled bad, wrong, or otherwise unworthy of serious study. and it reminds me of one of my favorite Foucault quotes of all time, from this interview where the interviewer asks him what the role of the critic is, and he responds:
My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.
that quote is always one of my touchstones, one of the things I return to when I am suffering a crisis in my sense of purpose as a scholar, or in the endeavor of scholarship more generally. it reminds me that my work as a scholar, esp as a scholar of women’s and queer studies, should be geared towards helping people understand that they are freer than they feel – that the things we sometimes feel are just “the way things are” actually have a long, contested history, and that understanding how those institutions/norms/whatever took shape can give us important resources for refiguring them. and THAT reminds me of this toni morrison quote i see reblogged on here a lot, which is another one of my touchstones:
I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.' (x)
