A Defence of Criticism as Paraphrase: Rorty’s Ironist as Arnold’s Disinterested Critic Redivivus

1A Defence of Criticism as Paraphrase: Rorty’s Ironist as Arnold’s Disinterested Critic Redivivus

Revised from “Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law,” Philosophy and Literature 19 (October1995) 261-75.      (Excerpted as “Do Critics Create” in The Wilson Quarterly XX Spring 1996 139-40.)

Richard Rorty has found a large cross-disciplinary academic audience for his argument that philosophy ought to abandon its self-appointed role as a foundational disciplineand adopt the “ironic” and “conversational” practices of literary criticism. Explicitly invoking early pragmatism – which argued that philosophy should join the natural sciences and regard itself as “the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making”(Pragmatism 129).    Rorty argues that philosophers should now abandon the natural sciences, and become “edifiers” and “ironist theorists” on the model of literary criticism.    (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Chapter 8 and Contingency 97-8).

Rorty’s pragmatism amounts to the claim that philosophyought to wind up and put away its long preoccupation with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology and abandon the pretence of deductive rigour so as to become “dialectical.” This newly reformed philosophy would, as Rorty puts it, “play off vocabularies against one another, rather than merely ... infer propositions from one another” (Contingency, 78).    Rorty's belief in philosophy as a form of conversation may owe less to American pragmatism, however, than to Continental hermeneutics (particularly Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method).11 Nevertheless, I intend to take him at his word, and apply the fundamental tenet of pragmatism to his own theorizing. I take the following remark by William James as definitional of American pragmatism:

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What practical difference would it make to any oneif this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced,then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a disputeis serious, we ought to be able to show    some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right (Pragmatism 26).

In the light of this pragmatic principal, most philosophical and literary theories make little, if any, practical difference to the practice of literary criticism. Nonetheless,    philosophy and theory can certainly displace, occlude, or banish literary criticism as it has ithas been practised for the past 399 years or so.      The whole issue turns on what is meant by the term, “literary criticism.” Rorty assumes that criticism is an interpretive activity, and that nothing further need be said.    Certainly interpretation is the core activity of literary criticism, but it hardly sufficiently well formulated to serve as a model upon which philosophy could reform itself.

Rorty’s proposed reformation of philosophy on the modelof literary criticism has been embraced by many literary critics as a friendly takeover.    His position is essentially an updated and domesticated version of Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.    Gadamer, a student of Martin Heidegger, has attempted to reinvent German hermeneutics along phenomenological lines so as to make interpretation foundational for all of the knowledge industries. With respect to his paternalistic attitude toward literary criticism, Rorty is very much within a philosophical tradition of foundationalism that begins, as far as literary criticism is concerned, with Plato’s Ion. Whereas Plato argued that literary criticism is a misguided or unworthy form of discourse, Rorty turns it into an approved variety of philosophical discourse. But he can achieve this end only by occluding (through

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misrepresentation) the praxis of literary criticism as it ishas been constituted both within and without the academy.

Rorty’s Gadamer-inspired project of “edification” through the reform of philosophy as “conversation” was firstproposed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (360 & 371) and has subsequently been refined in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where it becomes the Nietzschean project of “making the bestselves for ourselves that we can” (80). This goal is said tobe achieved through literary criticism, which he describes as “the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another” (78-9). Such an idea is enormously flattering to literary critics, and, not surprisingly, has garnered Rorty many admirers in literature departments. But it rests upon ahighly selective characterization of literary criticism – a characterization which conforms roughly to New Critical and Deconstructive practice, though not to longer-standing critical practices.

Rorty ignores literary criticism’s long standing self-definition as the re-interpretation or re-description of object texts. Instead, he assumes that the practice of Harold Bloom, in which both “creative” and critical discourse are regarded as varieties of usurpation or “misprision,” is standard. Rorty speaks of “literary discourse” as a single entity which includes novels, poems, plays, analyses, paraphrases, plot summaries, evaluations, and all varieties of “readings.” In short, he erases the magic line separating imaginative discourse from critical discourse. Arguably, the institution of literary criticism is constituted by that magic line, even though it has becomecommon in the last thirty years or so for literary critics to discuss critical or philosophical texts just as they would imaginative texts.   

And Rorty appeals to that habit: “It is a familiar factthat the term ‘literary criticism’ has been stretched further and further in the course of our century.” Ultimately, he claims, having been extended “to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and

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revolutionary manifestos” (Contingency 81.)    This account is a serious misrepresentation of the way literary criticismwas practised in 1989, when Contingenc, irony, and solidarity was published.    Certainly literary critics invoked discourse of all sorts in their “criticism” of literary works.    But their attention to those works was not “critical,” but “descriptive.”    Such studies as Arthur O.    Lovejoy’s TheGreat Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1960) and The Elizabethan World Picture (1961) by E.    M.    W.    Tillyard certainly discussed such a range of subjects as Rorty lists,but the purpose of those studies was not to criticize the extra-literary works they discussed, but rather to contextualize the literary works of the Elizabethan period, toprovide those who would criticize/interpret Shakespeare or Donne with the relevant intellectual/cultural context.    Such activity was entirely within the old hermeneutic tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey (a tradition Gadamersought to reform).

For Rorty, the published work of Harold Bloom and of Marcel Proust are equally instances of literary discourse. Pace Bloom, literary criticism – from Euhemerus and Strabo to Cleanth Brooks and Northrop Frye – has characteristicallystriven to socialize the unsocial discourse of literature, to make the unfamiliar familiar, and the wild domestic. Rorty himself speaks in these terms when discussing argumentation, contradiction, and Kuhnian paradigm shifts interms of vocabulary change (Contingency 10-22).    He describes the work of the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist equally as instituting “new vocabularies.” In other words, for Rorty, the difference between Ptolemaic andCopernican astronomy is a matter of labels, essentially a difference of style as in the difference between Neo-classical and Romantic literature, of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy.   

Within the profession of academic literary study the question of the critic’s proper role – whether she is sapient sutler to the artist, or an autonomous creator of

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parallel texts    – generates a lot of heat, because dominance and privilege are at issue. For centuries it had been considered a moral duty for criticism to concede dominance and privilege to the object texts – the poems, plays, and novels.    Late twentieth century critical theory, whether Bloom’s, de Man’s, Derrida’s, Foucault’s, orStanley Fish’s, breaches that constraint, handing dominance and privilege to critical commentary. Rorty buys into that ttrend – without, so far as I can make out, much arrière pensé –and has been instrumental in advancing it among literary critics.

The reason Rorty regards literary criticism as a suitable paradigm for all academic discourse is that criticism is the only academic discipline which conforms to the sceptical axiom that grounds all of Rorty’s thinking; tohis    belief that “we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of howthings are which it is the duty of philosophers to spell outin language” (Contingency 21).    He does not invoke Derrida to support this dogma, but presumably he means it to be roughly equivalent, insofar as it has implications for literary criticism and interpretation are concerned, to Derrida's famous remark: “There is nothing outside of the text” (of grammatology.158). (Rorty's formulation, however, carefully avoids the ontological implications that Derrida’sinvites.) If literary critics are experts at playing off vocabularies against one another, it is just because ex hypothesi poems, novels, and plays institute their own vocabularies, and critics ineluctably bring their own as well.

Rorty sees Derrida as a late exponent of what he calls the “second” philosophical tradition:

The first tradition thinks of truth as a vertical relationship between representations and what is represented. The second tradition thinks of truth horizontally– as the culminating reinterpretation of

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our predecessors’ reinterpretation of their predecessors’ reinterpretation. . . . This tradition does not ask how representations are related to non-representations, but how representations can be seen ashanging together.    (“Philosophy as a kind of Writing”143)

The “second tradition” belongs to Continental philosophy, but in Rorty’s hands becomes a Gaddamerian hermeneutic stripped of its Heideggerean mysticism.

North American literary critics have eagerly embraced Rorty’s notion that all discourse is a commentary on previous discourse.    And since the doctrine that each literary text instantiates a unique vocabulary is a surviving axiom of New Criticism, the corollary is readily granted by most contemporary critics: to engage in a “conversation” with a text is to suppress (at least provisionally) one’s own vocabulary.    Such a modest and tolerant practice is promoted by Rorty to a practice antithetical to the philosophical project of establishing a final or canonical vocabulary into which all meaningful discourse could be paraphrased (especially Mirror .293-4).

In Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature the critic is said to bean “ironist” capable of a benign “double talk,” or mimicry. She is “willing to refrain from epistemology – from thinkingthat there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put – and . . . willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into ... [her] own.”    This is the hermeneutic activity, Rorty says, of “imitating models ... of phronesis rather than epistemon” – that is, of thought or opinion (phronesis) rather than knowledge (epistemon) (318 & 319).

Viewed in this light, Rorty’s project is a mirror imageof that presented in Matthew Arnold’s 1864 essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present time.”    Where Arnold chose high seriousness as the hallmark of value, Rorty chooses its near contrary: ironic playfulness; where Arnold

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saw the literary critic as a judicious gatherer and promulgator of “the best that has been thought and said,” Rorty sees her as an impressionist provisionally adopting the “final vocabulary” of Hegel, Kierkegaard or Nieztsche (CIS 79).    For both men the project of literary criticism is to enlarge the psyche of the critic, and of her readers: “What we want to know is whether to adopt those images [projected by Hegel, etc.] – to recreate ourselves, in wholeor in part in these peoples’ images” (CIS 79-80).22    And Arnold’s “disinterested” critic is a precursor of Rorty’s “ironist,” in that he enjoys and practices “a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake,” without commitment to belief or disbelief.    Rorty, a philosopher, seems totally unaware of his literary critical precursor.33

The analogy should not be pushed too far, however. For Rorty the approved critics, philosophers and artists are allNietzschean “ironists” who invent themselves, rather than actors who adopt a mask. Rorty’s literary practitioner – whether critic or author – is thus endowed with the Enlightenment virtue of knowledge, the pragmatic virtue of “know how,” and the Romantic virtue of self-creation. It is little wonder that he admires her so much, or that literary critics have embraced the characterization.

In Contingency, irony, and solidarity Rorty replaced his early model of mimicry with the notion of a change of “vocabularies,” bringing him closer to William James, who inthe 1904 essay, “Humanism and Truth” observed    that “reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for ‘truth’ in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old”(The Meaning of Truth    65).    To this Rorty has added a Kuhnian (or Humboldtian) notion of the incommensurability of“vocabularies.” Instead of assimilation and variation on theDarwinian model explicit in James’s pragmatism; in Rorty’s “ironism” there is the    polyvalency or ambiguity characteristic of an equally explicit hermeneutic model.   

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If what Rorty means by “literary criticism” is a mediation between vocabularies, then his conception of literary criticism fits its institutional instantiation better than James’ does.

To show the specifics of Rorty’s position, it might be well to pause for a moment to consider another recent philosopher’s formulation of the literary critical enterprise. In “Reinterpreting Interpretation,” Joseph Margolis sketches a theory that would seem to conform more closely to the standard literary critical practice of granting dominance and privilege to the object text.    LikeRorty, Margolis thinks of criticism as interpretation, but he goes on to define interpretation in a non-Rortyan way as the paraphrase of vague or opaque expression in a more perspicuous one. On this model the task of critical theory would be to provide a means by which various commentaries’ competing claims to the truth and accuracy of their paraphrase of the object text could be adjudicated.    By contrast, Rorty is entirely uninterested in the problem of adjudication between competing interpretations.    His ironist revels in diversity.

For Margolis, however, there are “only two sorts of pertinent theories of interpretation.” The first sort “holdsthat interpretation is practised on relatively stable, antecedently specifiable referents of some sort, and that the requisite account identifies the practice by which distributed claims about them are responsibly assigned truth-like values of some sort”    (“Reinterpreting Interpretation” 237).    In short, the object text, say Macbeth, is assigned a status independent of its interpretation by a given reader or readers. He cites MonroeBeardsley and New Critical practice to illustrate this classof theories.

The other class of theory “holds that interpretation isa productive practice by which an entire ‘world’ . . . is aptly and actually first constituted . . .” (“ReinterpretingInterpretation” 237). He cites Barthes, Derrida, and

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Deconstruction to illustrate this class of theories. From such a starting point Margolis reaches the “startling finding that artworks or texts may be assigned infinitely many interpretations and may enter into infinitely many histories” (248).

Clearly Rorty’s notion of criticism is of the latter class.    His claim for the propitiousness of literary criticism as a model for all academic discourse is grounded on his sceptical denial of the possibility of an appeal to arealm external to discourse for validation or invalidation of an interpretation.    The denial of such an appeal had already been institutionalized within literary criticism by the New Critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the principle of “aesthetic autonomy.”44 And surely it is appropriate for literary criticism, since – even for the most hard-nosed positivist –    fictional discourse by definition has no transcendent or external referents.

The absence of a referent permits criticism to regard its activity as a purely semiotic process,. That is to say, the assignment of meanings (whether latent, figural, disencrypted, occluded, or esoteric) to a discourse (whethermanifest, literal, encrypted, obscure, or exoteric) must be achieved without recourse to empirical, historical, biographical or other realms of information external to the text. Within such a system, interpretation is achieved ideally by fully specified procedures of substitution and combination, hermetically sealing the critical activity fromany corruption by non-systematic, contextual, or contingent factors. For this reason semiosis can be thought of as a “positive” critical practice.

If it were not for his stress on novelty, Rorty’s view of critical practice as the generation of a novel vocabularycould be thought of as a semiotic theory. For, although to think of texts as encrypted is to licence arbitrary features, it is also to privilege convention or system over novelty. If we think of the alphabet as a paradigmatic semiotic

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system, it is evident that the play of novelty must be restricted to variations on a theme, as with various fonts: Dutch 801; Verdant; Arial Black; Baskerville Old Face; Harlow Soki Italic; and so forth.    Typography does not permit the free invention that Rorty's ironist claims as the critic’s right and duty.    So Rorty’s iterpetive “game” is not semiosis.

    To return to Margolis, in “Reinterpreting Interpretation” he also sees criticism as a fundamentally hermeneutic or interpretive activity, but he defines interpretation in a non-Rortyan way – as the paraphrase of vague or opaque expression by a more perspicuous expression.On this model the task of critical theory would be to providemeans by which adjudication between the competing claims of various commentaries to truth and accuracy of paraphrase could be achieved. (Of course, Rorty is uninterested in the problem of adjudication between competing interpretations. His ironist revels in diversity.)

As noted above, Margolis’ complaint that a Rorytian style of criticism permits an infinite variety of interpretations is not startling for a literary critic – or even novel. William James made the same point in an 1884 paper read before the Aristotelian Society    casually remarking that “few would hesitate to admit that there are as many different Ivanhoes as there are different minds cognizant of the story” (Meaning of Truth 27). This “startling”conclusion is one that New Criticism happily accepted and institutionalized in the properties of ambiguity, irony, andparadox. Literary criticism has seldom torn its hair over the difficulty of constraining interpretations of texts.    On the contrary, it has more often revelled in that delicious possibility. The leading problem for literary criticism has been the difficulty of legitimating to societyat large its role of socializing the unsocial discourse of artworks. To this extent, then, Rorty’s ironism is closer tomainstream critical practice in the twentieth century than

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is Margolis’ critic who responsibly assigns truth-like values to literary texts – just like a Diltheyan hermeneut.

Although Rorty’s ironism is close to mainstream critical practice as it was in the mid-to-late twentieth century, it raises the question of whether the ironic critic, revelling in the admitted multivocity of imaginativeliterature, does not occlude the work she discusses – as opposed to explicating it. This problem for commentary was noticed already by Socrates who asked the rhapsode, Ion, to choose between admitting either that    he was himself an artist inventing what he only pretended to discover in Homer(and therefore a fraud), or that he was “channeling” Homer, and therefore out of his mind, possessed by Homer. Ion rather lightly chose to be considered out of his mind, and many iterations of    literary criticism have subtly endorsed    his choice many times since, by insisting that literary meaning is somehow outside, beyond, or beside scientific and logical discourse.

I.    A.    Richard’s influential bifurcation of language into two “uses” is a well-known, and influential variation on Ion’s position: “A statement may be used for the sake of the reference, true or false, which it causes.    This is the scientific use of language, but it may also be usedfor the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude producedby the reference it occasions.    This is the emotive use of language.”    (Principles of Literary Criticism 211).    He fine tuned this view of two varieties of language use in, The Meaning of Meaning    his collaboration with C.    K.    Ogden,(contemporaneous with Principles), removing the implication that the aesthetic reader and writer are only emoting:

Instead therefore of an antithesis of prose and poetry we may substitute that of symbolic and emotive uses of language. In strict symbolic language the emotional effects of the words whether direct or indirect are irrelevant to their employment, in evocative language on the other hand all the means by which attitudes,

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moods, desires, feelings, emotions can be verbally incited in an audience are concerned (The Meaning of Meaning 194.    My emphasis).

Since it is only the emotions aroused by the aesthetic (“emotive”) use of language that are relevant to aesthetic appreciation, the proper posture of the reader of poetry must be to put himself in a sort of trance in which the truth or falsity, coherence or incoherence of    the poem’s “references” and “arguments” are irrelevant so long as    the “references” of the words arouse emotions!55

Current literary theory and Rorty have both – true to the Nietzschean project of turning Plato on his head – have chosen the other horn of Socrates’ dilemma, being content toregard critics as the originators of an autonomous discourseonly occasioned by the object discourse – say the Odyssey or Macbeth.    It escapes the horns of Ion’s dilemma by reducing the object text to a stimulus or prompt that set inplay the critic’s autonomous discourse.    And there is nothing irrational or absurd in such a    model of critical commentary as a sort of “rap” on a theme derived from the Odyssey or Macbeth..    However it does rob criticism of any social function other than entertainment (or career advancement).

Margolis is useful on this dilemma because he outlines a bifurcation of critical practice into two broad theoretical classes, discriminated on the grounds of the secondarity or the autonomy of the critical discourse; the former are interpretive theories properly so called, and thelatter, “productive” theories. However, it is not clear thatproductive theories – to which Rorty's ironist must belong –can be considered to be critical theories at all, for they treat the object discourse as nothing more than a stimulus prompting to the production of “interpretations.”

It might be more helpful to sort interpretive theories into positive and relativistic ones. Positive theories conform to the paradigm of paraphrase, and relativistic theories to the paradigm of translation.    By “paraphrase”

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I mean an intra-lingual re-expression in an alternate vocabulary whose objective is to articulate the sense of theobject discourse, but which rephrases and re-contextualizes it for heuristic purposes. Such a model is “positive” in assuming that sense or meaning is to some degree isolable from expression and context – whether context is understood as the generating cognitive framework native to the author, the embracing framework of the language or notational system, or the cognitive framework native to the paraphraserand her audience.

On the paraphrase model, interpretation is in truth a species of commentary; it is unnecessary and radically redundant – in contrast to interlingual translation. The reader of a paraphrase is expected to return to the paraphrased text with an improved understanding. The reader of a translation, in contrast, is normally incapable of understanding the originating foreign language text – otherwise she would read the work in the original language. As I conceive it, then, literary criticism inescapably belongs to the paraphrase class – otherwise we would read Shakespeare criticism instead of Shakespeare’s plays, just as most of us read translations of Homer instead of the Greek text. Perhaps the purest form os such criticism is exemplified by John Livingstone Lowes’ 1927 tracing of the sources of Coleridge’s poetry in The road to Xanadu : A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Houghton Mifflin 1927).

On my argument those species of interpretation which donot lead back to the object text – even if intra-lingual – are arguably not literary criticism but something else, for which we have no conventional label. They can be profitably compared to the art of translation, however. In translation one cognitive framework (the original language) is replaced by another (the substituted language). Translation “occludes” the originating or object discourse because typically the readers of the translation are incapable of interpreting the original and do not use the translation as an heuristic guide to it. Consider the case of simultaneous

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translation as practised at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Delegates listen to the translation through earphones and do not hear the speeches in their original languages, which are thus effectively occluded.    It is true that scholarly translations are often printed together with the original text, thereby becoming a species of commentary. But it is more typical, I think, for a reader tochoose a translation of the Iliad because she cannot read Greek, rendering the parallel Greek text useless.

A translation is conceded to be only an approximation of the original because no two languages map perfectly on one another, but a paraphrase ought to be able to exhaust the meaning potential of the object text – at least in principle. Paraphrase, then, is the positive unfolding or articulation of the meaning latent in the object text through a supplementation of its expression. Translation, onthe other hand, does not supplement the object text, but displaces it. Because it is a displacement, translation is restricted to a magnitude roughly equivalent to the object text. No such constraint is placed upon paraphrase. Commentaries on works of literature, in cases of lyric poemsespecially, quite commonly exceed the object text in magnitude by a factor of ten or twenty. No such licence is granted to translations. Moreover, translations cannot quotethe object text, but must in every case substitute the translator’s language for the object text’s language. Of course, we may have multiple translations, and any translation can be treated as a commentary by bilingual readers.    But however many translations of the Iliad I may read, none can be understood by me as a commentary on the Iliad because I cannot read Homer’s Greek. They are, for me, just versions of the Iliad. As compared to the positivity of paraphrase, translations are radically relative.

There are even more radical – and inescapable – groundsfor thinking that translations occlude their originals. If (with Humboldt, Edward Sapir and George Steiner) we think oflanguages as descriptions of the world, then presumably no

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two natural languages will be inter-translatable with precision in every detail. Given the constraint on magnitude, it follows that no translation can capture the entire meaning of the object text. Since on this theory all languages are more or less perspicuous descriptions of the same world, on the other hand, a translation can preserve anadequate overlap of meaning with its object text. The opposing view of translation denies this. If (with William James, Nelson Goodman, and Rorty) we think that languages construct worlds, and that each language constructs a world unique to itself, then there is no world transcendent of language to which it must be adequate. On this theory, thereis little reason to expect any overlap between the world constructed by a translation and that constructed by its object text. In short, translations are in principle autonomous of that which they translate – a strange result, I think.

To recapitulate: paraphrase supplements an unfamiliar and opaque discourse by a familiar or transparent one; translation displaces a Greek, French etc. text by an English,German, etc. text. A second “world” supervenes – as in the paradigm shift between a Cartesian mechanical world of colliding objects and a Newtonian world of inert matter and disembodied forces. Such a Kuhnian presumption of the “incommensurability” of two discourses renders paraphrase theoretically preposterous. Translation becomes the only possible model for “reading.”    On the translation model literary criticism requires the critic to be a bilingual capable of    “thinking” in two or more paradigms.    Of course, such individuals certainly exist, and some are literary critics. Rorty is not troubled by such an outcome. Although he does not explicitly make the point, he , endows the “ironist” critic with the capability of thinking in two or more paradigms simultaneously. The critic becomes an intra-lingual “translator” whose discourse displaces the object textmuch as the simultaneous translator's voice displaces the

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foreign speaker's voice at the UN.    Rorty speaks of “vocabularies” instead of “languages,” but for Rorty the difference between witchcraft and medicine, astrology and astronomy can only be a difference of vocabulary since he forbids any appeal to an “outside of language.” By “vocabulary” he means different lexical sets within a language –    what literary critics call “diction,” and linguists call “jargon” – as in the special vocabularies of mathematics, physics, pigeon fancying, architecture, etc.   

Since literary interpretation (unlike translation) is typically a case where both the object discourse and the interpreting discourse have historically been accessible to all readers of the language in question, it would seem – again – that paraphrase would be more suitable prototype than translation for literary criticism. Not only does literary criticism normally lead back to the object text, italso displays judgements about the text and seeks to justify them. Translation normally does not engage either in displayor justification.

Of course it is precisely the model of specialized jargons that has become the model for literary criticism of the postmodern variety. That such is the case was exposed bythe case of the physicist, Alan Sokal’s foray into literary criticism. He submitted an article entitled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to the literary journal, Social Text. It was accepted and published in the Spring/Summer    issue of 1996.    Sokal subsequently revealed in an article in Lingua Franca that the article was a spoof on the allegedly incomprehensible jargon of certain varieties of literary criticism. He described his modus operandus as follows:

I quote some controversial philosophical pronouncementsof Heisenberg and Bohr, and assert (without argument) that quantum physics is profoundly consonant with “postmodernist epistemology”.    Next, I assemble a pastiche – Derrida and general relativity, Lacan and

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topology, Irigaray and quantum gravity – held together by vague rhetoric about “nonlinearity,” “flux” and “interconnectedness.” Finally, I jump (again without argument) to the assertion that “postmodern science” has abolished the concept of objective reality. Nowherein all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and baldassertions. (“A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies”) 66

In short, his article was deliberate gibberish. The editors of Social Text, were, of course scandalized at such a breach of polite behaviour, but had no answer for their acceptance of an article that was essentially gibberish, beyond the claim that they condescendingly and charitably agreed to publish a rather lame article on literary criticism by a physicist.    In their account of the affair,Fashionable Nonsense, Sokal and his co-author, Jean Bricmont explain that Sokal was motivated by his distress that “The deliberately obscure discourses of postmodernism, and the intellectual dishonesty they engender, poisons a part of intellectual life and strengthens the facile anti-intellectualism that is already all too widespread in the general public” (207).    However, in 1989 Rorty was untroubled by such possibilities.

Paraphrase and translation are more useful analogues for the varieties of literary critical theory than Rorty’s translation and mimicry or Margolis’s interpretive and productive practices. After all, critical discourse rarely mimics poems, plays, and novels, and when it does so – as inPope's Essay on Criticism or Dryden’s “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy” – the mimicry is of externalities (rhyme, metre, character, setting, and incident) rather than substance.    Literary criticism is far more prone to mimic the substance (and sometimes the externalities as well) of religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology, mythology, anthropology, linguistics, political theory and so forth. My point of

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departure is that criticism is fundamentally a form of discourse whose object is another text.

And it makes no difference to my argument if only linguistic strings count as texts, or if “everything is a text.”    All that this latter formula really means is that “everything counts as discourse and is a candidate for interpretation.” Criticism must be discourse about an objectdiscourse – as opposed to discourse about events (history), about phenomena (the natural sciences) about society (the social sciences), about ideas (philosophy) or about ideal objects (mathematics).    Of course all academic disciplinesengage in criticism as well as in their primary function.   The primary function of literary discourse is discourse about imaginative discourse.    Literary theory, as a sub-class, is discourse about “literary discourse.”    (The current description of a certain stye of literary critical discourse as “theoretical” is simply obfuscation.)

Since there is a considerable overlap in the practice of different modes of criticism, critics may adopt one or the other model without much pain or discomfort. The New Critic or structuralist needs to make only modest adjustments to switch to deconstructive, reader response, ornew-historical modes. The practice of literary criticism is much less dependent on interpretive theory than is commonly supposed, and even interpretive theory itself is only tangentially related to philosophy (understood, pace Rorty, as that discourse on logical, epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical questions). If the foregoing is true, it follows that Rorty’s project is ideological rather than pragmatic in the philosophical sense.    Moreover, his project to reform philosophy on the model of literary criticism turns out to be instead the displacement of literarycriticism by philosophical discourse about literature.

In order to clarify what is at issue, I propose the following taxonomy of interpretive theories and their corresponding critical theories. The taxonomy I suggest rests on the bifurcation introduced above of interpretive

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theories into relativistic ones founded on the paradigm of translation, and positive one founded on the paradigm of paraphrase. Each is split into two classes.

(1) Since relativistic theories are context sensitive, they divide according to their bias towards the context of origin or of reception. I call reception-biased theories impressionistic. (1a) Aesthetic, didactic, and reader response criticism all belong to this class. (1b) Origin-biased theories, by contrast, I call historicist. Hermeneutic, philological, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive criticism all belong to this class. (Marxist and psychoanalytic criticism are hybrid practices, which combine context dependence with context independence by the device of systematizing and universalizing the role of originating context – according, respectively, to class structure, infantile experiences, or a collective unconscious.)

(2) Positive theories are context-independent, and divide into two subgroups on the basis of whether they favour the text or the interpreter. (2a) Text-biased theories regard interpretation as a form ofdecoding or disencrypting. Allegorical, structuralist, (and once again) psychoanalytic and, Marxist criticism all belongto this class. (2b) Interpreter-biased, or “insight,” theories stress the interpreter’s role in discovering meanings that, while implicit in the text, are inaccessible to decoding, and alsoto the unworthy or incompetent. On this theory the result ofinterpretation is an insight or revelation prompted by the text, but which he text does not contain. New criticism, symbolism, and phenomenology belong to this class. Deconstruction might be classed as a sceptical parody of insight criticism.

Fully articulated critical theories, it must be acknowledged, do not sort cleanly into classes of interpretive theories – and, of course, critical practice is

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even more eclectic. Most critical theories are hybrids, mixing translation and paraphrase.    Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretive theories are themselves hybrids,even before they are transported into literary critical practice. Aristotle’s Poetics is a hybrid. When Aristotle analyses representation on the criteria of medium, matter, and manner, his theory is positive, but catharsis obviously belongs to a relativistic -- indeed impressionistic -- theory since it postulates an effect upon the audience..

With the aid of this typology, one can see that the opposition of New Criticism and Deconstruction is not a consequence of their dependence on contrary interpretive theories. Both are impressionistic, and both admit any or all of aesthetic, emotive, moralistic, or didactic readerly responses. Their differences are axiological, not theoretical. Approved New Critical responses are characterized by balance, caritas, tolerance, renovation, andenlightenment. Approved Deconstructive responses are characterized by asymmetry, disdain, arrogance, revolution, and disillusion. In neither case is there any principled limit or constraint on the number of legitimate responses (a.k.a. interpretations).    Instead there is a antecedent and global requirement that to win approval critical responses must have the requisite features of one of the modes. It is time to turn back to Rorty. For him (to adopt theterms we have been discussing) no positive interpretive theory of any kind is possible – whether a theory of insightor of decoding. For Rorty “truth is a property of sentences,since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths” (Contingency 21).    On such a view there can be no appeal by an interpreter to a realm that transcends the text. (In this respect it is an intrinsic theory like new criticism.)

Decoding and insight theories, by contrast, are both grounded upon the assumption that sense can be preserved

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across notational or discursive systems. Rorty's strong Whorffian denial of a prelinguistic consciousness, coupled with his pragmatic nominalism rules out any possibility of asense or significance transcendent of instantiation in language, and consequently rules out all varieties of positive interpretation. His position is commensurate with translation theories, which postulate that interpretation and expression are reciprocal competencies requiring no grounding in a realm external to the interlocution. While positive theories assume that the output of interpretation is knowledge, translation theories assume that the output is understanding. And this finding is what one would expect, knowing that Rorty’s starting point was Hans Georg Gadamer'sphilosophical hermeneutics.

To this extent Rorty is right to see literary criticismas a discourse that remains possible after the end of philosophy – that is, after logic, epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics. Even though nothing can be known, much can be understood. We can understand chess, Joyce’s Ulysses, or Swedenborg’s cosmology without thereby knowing anything about the world.

If this taxonomy of interpretive theory is correct, then the output of critical or interpretive practice cannot be predicted from the interpretive theory to which the practice appeals for legitimation. Still less can it be predicted from the particular epistemological, ontological, or metaphysical beliefs on which the interpretive theory is grounded. On this point, Rorty and I are in agreement. He says that being good at literary criticism is like being able to ride a bicycle or play the flute: “Some people have a knack for it, and others will always be rather clumsy at it -- but doing it is not facilitated or hindered by ‘philosophical discoveries’ about, for example, the nature of language, any more than bicycle riding is helped or hindered by discoveries about the nature of energy” (Contingency Note 33, p.134). In Rorty’s view, then, critics,like artists, simply possess a knack – a practical skill.

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But Rorty does not tell us what that skill is. Like Ionthe Rortyan critic knows nothing. Can we assume that she understands something? Is this what “having a knack” means? Hesays it is a knack for the playing off of “vocabularies against one another –    whatever that might mean (Contingency 78-9).    It cannot mean that critics are able to paraphrase the unfamiliar vocabulary of the artist into afamiliar vocabulary while saving the sense, for Rorty deniesthat there is any sense transcending linguistic instantiation. The Rortyan critic must be an individual whose competence in several incommensurable vocabularies renders her capable of generating parallel discourses in a variety of “languages.”    She seems thus to be a translator, a polymath, who “has read more books” and is therefore less likely to “get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book” (Contingency 80-1). She is a Whorffian or Humboldtian voyager in strange linguistic lands.

As I have already observed, Rorty's view of the institution of criticism ends up being surprisingly similar to that articulated by Matthew Arnold a century earlier in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Much as Rorty proposes literary criticism as a substitute for scientific empiricism (a dogmain which many intellectuals of our day have lost faith), Arnold proposed literature as a substitute for Christianity (a dogma in which many    intellectuals of his day had lost faith). Whereas Arnold thought of literature as a kind of clearing-house, gathering “the best that has been thought and said” from all varieties of discourse, Rorty simply classifies discourse into two groups: the familiar or hackneyed, and the novel or surprising. He speaks of books “whose range of purpose [is] presently statable within some familiar, widely used, final vocabulary” and those whose purpose is to work out “a new final vocabulary” (Contingency 143).77 Rorty's relativism is manifest in this statement.   He substitutes irony for Arnold's disinterestedness, but forboth men the ideal critic is an open-minded or disinterestedgatherer of flowers in the cultural garden.. Arnold’s

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disinterested critic had no axe to grind, no interest clouding his judgement; Rorty’s ironist is fluent in many vocabularies or belief systems, without commitment to any.  But unlike, Arnold’s critic, the ironist makes no judgementsabout which    “vocabulary” is best or worst.

Despite its similarity to at least one view in the critical tradition, however, literary criticism as it is presently constituted cannot carry out Rorty’s project to substitute the ironist’s understanding for the epistemologist’s knowledge.    Even if we accept his idealization of critical practice, it is not clear how the littérateur or littératrice comes into possession of these multiple vocabularies. Rorty seems to think that literary types are naturals like multilinguals – persons, that is, with a knackfor acquiring “vocabularies.” The prototype would be someonelike George Steiner, who describes himself as growing up speaking French, German, and English, and reports: “I have no recollection whatever of a first language. So far as I amaware, I possess equal currency in English, French, and German. What I can speak, write, or read of other languages has come later and retains a ‘feel’ of conscious acquisition”(After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation 115). If I am right to characterize Rorty’s critic as a naturally “multilingual” broker between vocabularies, Rorty has not shown us the way out of Ion’s dilemma. He has merely embraced one horn. His critic presents her own understandingas somehow arising from Homer’s, or Dante’s, or Shakespeare’s.    Like Ion, then, she is either a fortunate freak of nature, or a polymath with a knack for disguise.

The postmodern critic might be comfortable with such a characterization, but the New Critic would not be. He pridedhimself on being a sensitive recording instrument whose readings were innocent of any “extrinsic,” distorting information – especially of theoretical networks or filters.Nor does it fit the hermeneutic critic who steeps herself inthe “epistemés” (to use Foucault’s word) of the culture or period she studies so as to recover the original sense of

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those alien discourses. Even though we may all be under someuniversal moral, metaphysical, or epistemic obligation to doas Rorty says we do, it is clear that Rorty's proposed revision of philosophy on the model of literary criticism can be just as perspicuously described as a revision of literary criticism on the model of continental insight philosophy. In short the putative inversion of the relationsof dominance and privilege between literary and philosophical discourse advertised by Rorty does not stand up to scrutiny.    He remains a philosopher laying down the law for literature on the model of Aristotle and Kant.

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Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. of grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 1974.Gadamer, Hans Georg.    Philosophical Apprenticeships. trans. Robert R. Sullivan Cambridge, Mass.    MIT Press 1985. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “On The Origins of Philosophical Hermeneutics” (1977) in Philosophical Apprenticeships 177-93.James. William. Pragmatism. [1907] Indianapolis: Hackett 1981.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Meaning of Truth, [1909]    Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P 1970 . Ogden, C.    K.    & I.    A.    Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.    New York: Harcourt Brace & World [1923] 8th edition.Margolis, Joseph.    “Reinterpreting Interpretation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (Summer 1989) 237-52. Michelfelder, Diane P. & Palmer, Richard E. Dialogue & Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Albany:State University of New York Press 1989.Richards, I.    A. Principles of Literary Criticism. [1924] London: Routledge & Kegan Paul1967.Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979.. . . . . . . . . . . .    “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing:An Essay on Derrida.” New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 1, Literary Hermeneutics. (Autumn, 1978) 141-160.. . . . . . . . . . . .      Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989 pp. 97-8.. . . . . . . . . . . .    “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in The Revival of Pragmatism ed. .

Dickstein. Morris Durham: Duke UP 1998.    21-36. Reprinted in The Rorty Reader.    ed. Christopher J. 

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Voparil & Richard J.    Bernstein.    Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2010 111-121.

Sokal Alan D. “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies” Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, pp. 62-64.. . . . . . . . . . . . & Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador 1998. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, London: OUP 1975.   

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END NOTES

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11. Important aspects of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature amount to paraphrase in English of the argument of Hans Georg Gadamer’s Warheit und Methode (1960).22. Compare Gadamer: “ For who we are is something unfulfillable, anever new undertaking and an ever new defeat. Anyone who wishes to understand his or her being is confronted by the simple unintelligibility of death.” ( “Letter to Dalmayr” in Dialogue & Deconstruction 97.) The second sentence is not a sentiment Rorty would express, but the first is entirely appropriate to Rorty’s posture. 33. Arnold is not discussed in Contingency, and the 1998 essay, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” mentions Arnold’s notion of substituting poetry for religion only as a starting point for a dismissal of the idea. Rorty does not acknowledge the similarity between his project to substitute criticism for philosophy and Arnold’s to substitute poetry for religion.44. See Stephen Davies, “Beardsley and the Autonomy of the Work of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 63 (Spring, 2005) 179-183. 55. I have placed “references” in scare quotes because Richards’ notion of standard linguistic meaning is positivistic. On that view linguistic meaning arises from a link between words and things, actions or properties in the world. Such a view is in strong contrast to the Saussurea view that “significance” arises from systematic relations between words within language. Richards’ behaviourist view of the way literature functions makes no sense froma Saussurea view of language function.66. So far as I know Rorty did not enter this controversy. For a recent defence (unpersuasive in my view) of Social Text’s judgment see Michael Bérubé “The Science Wars Redux.” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Issue #19, Winter 2011. 77. Rorty’s emphasis on “vocabulary” and his odd antipathy for Scholasticism derive directly from Gadamer: “there has always been scholasticism – ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary. It follows philosophy like a shadow, and it is almost impossible to determine the status of an attempt at thinking in terms of how far it is able to break out of the petrifaction of handed-down philosophical language” (Philosophical Apprenticeships 190. My emphasis).