COMO CITAR:

Zenha, Miguel. «Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment». Forma de Vida, 2021. https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2021.0059 .



DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2021.0059

Miguel Zenha*

(Versão em português / Portuguese translation)

Rita Felski’s new book puts in place what The Limits of Critique had requested, that is, a less counterintuitive, secluded, and priggish way of addressing art. Since for Felski critique has led us to forget “why (…) works of art matter” (p.1), we must stress the diverse sorts of connections—attachments—between individuals, individuals and works of art, and hence ways of interpreting. In other words, Hooked is not about what art is but about what art can do. Accordingly, Felski offers “an aesthetic that is premised on relation rather than separation, on attachment rather than autonomy” (viii), which elects as target “an ethos of critical aloofness” (x). To that extent, attachment “is a matter not just of feeling (…) but of intellectual, ethical, or institutional ties” (idem).

Artworks matter “because they create, or co-create, enduring ties” (p. 1). In order to map those ties, Felski comes up with three attachment devices: “attunement”, “identification”, and “interpretation”. “[T]o become attuned is to be drawn into a responsive relation—to experience an affinity that is impossible to ignore yet often hard to categorize. Being attuned is not primarily an issue of representation, of the ‘aboutness’ of the work of art, but its presence” (p. 41). Felski details the idea saying that “attunement is not a specific affect but a state of affectedness (…) not a feeling-about but a feeling-with: a relation that is more than the sum of its parts” (p. 42), being this “affectedness” a synonym of interest. Right after that statement, we find an explanation of the utmost importance of “the present”, whose relevance lies in the fact that “it is only in the present (…) that the volatility of value becomes visible” (p. 46). As an ultimate test for both attachment and an artwork’s longevity, the present, which is much more complex and wider than a mere “now”, encompasses “aesthetic time”, “agency” and “presence”. Aesthetic time appends different speeds: it either can be a road to Damascus—“a moment of conversion” (p. 57) notedly, but not only, in the case of pictures—or the result of “slowness”—“a process of unlearning, not the drip-drip of habituation but the coming view of something new” (p. 60). The absence of an a priori speedometer derives from a pressing complexity in “agency”. Since artworks lie on “consent and participation of humans”, we are before a “distributed agency” (p. 64), that is, a challenging and erratic cause-effect relation. Lastly, here “presence” overflies meaning-focused questions, since it does not prescribe the ontological gap between language and world that purely technical or linguistic readings allegedly tend to do. 

For its part, “identification” is beyond will: it is the alreadiness of being-in-the-world. From identification, we ought to begin distinguishing “overpolitizing and overpsychologizing” (p. 81) in order to clear the way to the four “strands of identification”: “alignment”, “empathy”, “allegiance” and “recognition”. “Alignment” and “empathy” are the least significant: the former being just the equivalent of “‘focalization’ in narrative theory” (p. 94), and the latter generally consisting in an unreliable stance if faced on its own. On the other hand, “allegiance”—exemplified by Thelma and Louise—concerns “how ethical or political values—that is, acts of evaluating—draw audiences closer to some figures rather than others” (p. 96). Felski adds that “acts of identifying, while they can be emotional, even passionate, are also reflexive: they are informed by beliefs, ideals, and values. It is a matter not just of feeling but of thinking” (p. 98). Hence, identification is more levelled and vivid than flimsy “direct imitation” (p. 99) since we are before an interpretive interchange, via causes or reasons, with ruling effects.

Finally, “recognition” seems trickier due to its specificity regarding language and literature. In fact, the selectiveness of recognition—“one recognizes oneself in certain characters rather than in others”—is anchored in the deeper “experience of coming to know: of being struck by some kind of insight about the self” (p. 101). And this experience allows for a particular way towards self-knowledge: “[a]s I recognize myself in another, I may also see something new in myself, and I may be startled or discomfited by what I see” (idem). Seeking to clarify this view, Felski resorts to Thomas Bernhard. At stake is “rethinking certain commonplaces about identification”, since Bernhard’s “relentless negativity of his writing” and his “repetitive, relentless, incantatory” language (p. 102) would at first induce anything but identification. Yet, “identification does not depend on literary realism or mimetic accuracy; truth can also lie in excess and exaggeration” (p. 103). And this is why “identification-as-recognition, then, but not via any kind of obvious matching” (idem) is key inasmuch as it stresses the importance of medium or materiality. Specifically, Felski’s attachment with Bernhard, due to the fact that “the force of his language lies in conveying a certain attitude”, which cannot “focus on language alone” (p. 104), is “both personal (character-based) and transpersonal (a linguistic-aesthetic relation)” (p. 105). Thus language, while switched off from any autotelic nature whatsoever, remains nevertheless significant in enabling attachments.

The topic is renewed with “ironic identification”, inserted in recognition. Ironic identification stands for “an identification that is premised or based on irony. That is to say, a sense of estrangement and disassociation is the connecting tissue that binds character and reader” (p. 111), i.e., a particular combination of allegiance and recognition arising from that rugged agency. Still, we are witnessing once again the crucial role of a medium via a novel, The Stranger, a too pivotal example to be unintentional. Camus’ “laconic and pared back prose” allied with his “narrative technique” makes “a sense of recognition (…) less as a matter of what is said than how it is said” (p.113). However, for Felski “[t]he import of ironic identification, moreover, reaches well beyond The Stranger and literary modernism into the intellectual culture of the present-day humanities” (p. 114). As identification-rules, recognition and irony allow establishing the idea according to which it is “via presumption of shared estrangement that intellectual, interpersonal, and institutional ties are forged” (idem).

These “institutional ties” are actually the focus of “interpreting”: “how are they [aesthetic experiences] relevant to the library or the classroom?” (p. 121). On the table are the links between the pairing literary studies–“lay response”. The query is whether pedagogy is able to handle the tumultuous interplay between “attachment” and “consumerist mind-set”, being the latter an implication of “the corporatization of higher education” (p. 126). For Felski, interpretation as the making of new vocabulary layers is a cornerstone as long as we envisage artworks “as a source of knowledge and a means of acknowledgment” (p. 127). We should, then, handle the problem thinking about “scale”, and it is here that “action-network theory” (ANT) seems the answer. As a major functional scheme, for ANT, “everything counts” in interpretation: education, age, memories, the moment and the place of reading, “charisma”, “psychosexual patterns of attraction” (p. 135) and so on. But we face two problems now. In the first place, Felski roots the need for ANT on the premise according to which we still live in an over-technical criticism (i.e., critique) period. When Felski talks derogatorily about critique, New Criticism—and sometimes deconstruction—is the stance to avoid. However, it is fairly apparent that New Criticism lost its prominence too long ago, a fact partially weakening Felski’s diagnosis.

Yet, in the second place, ANT—when applied to interpretation—has an intrinsic inefficiency, namely, a uselessness stemming from its bias; in other words from a perspective grounded in non-inferential intelligibility. Felski argues that “many kinds of opinion can be hazarded in the classroom, but they must be routed via the text, which is shown to contain them or at least relate to them” and, one must be aware that a classroom is already a “work-net”, an “impure” one, actually (p. 156). Thus, “the distinctiveness of literature”, i.e., its particular stances of mediated “receptivity” require a “midlevel perspective” (p. 144); and that is to say that ANT, a promise in The Limits of Critique is now, at most, a walking stick. That is why ANT is virtually absent in the chapters on attunement and identification, with the notion of “Umwelt” as the sole exception when identification is discussed. But even “Umwelt” seems not that decisive. As a more fluid notion than “context”, “Umwelt” is considerably inoperable regarding language’s peculiarity, since “flat ontology”—ANT’s trademark—seeks to replace mediation for non-inferential mechanisms. In other words, the way toward knowledge professed by ANT is in fact an immediate or pure presence. Hence, ANT has a way towards intelligibility seemingly irreconcilable even with a “midlevel” view, which cannot but adjudicate identification via (mediated) recognition; in a word, ANT disregards the “transpersonal” element. Although a thorough analysis on ANT would overstep this brief review, we must nevertheless highlight that it is Felski who, in the end, and despite herself, draws attention to potential pitfalls when ANT is exported to literary studies and confronted with hermeneutics.

Therefore, the above-mentioned “source of knowledge and a means of acknowledgment” arises, as Felski says, from Stanley Cavell. In fact, the knowledge–acknowledgment stance is probably Hooked’s core, and Cavell is especially appropriate to better understand Felski’s ideas. Those “state of affectedness”, “feeling-with”, “recognition” and reflexiveness are, I believe, affiliated with Cavell’s “aversive thinking”. As a way of life, aversive thinking reinforces the deep affinities between self and world knowledge. Furthermore, as for Cavell knowledge is not epistemologically robust enough by itself, we need acknowledgment as a surcharge. Yet, due to the influence of Heidegger, in aversive thinking, the interaction between I and we is less unruffled because more inward and skeptical than in Felski’s attachments—and this is also why for Felski the Heideggerian “mood”, despite its value, needs counterparts.

In fact, we must bear in mind that Felski’s claim (according to which the influence of over-technical criticism is undeniable) is wide enough to tackle “linguistic turn” approaches as well as, among others, cultural studies or queer theory. Whence decoding interpretation is not a “linguistic” criticism exclusive, since political dogmatism is always lurking: “[a]esthetic attachments can spill out into the political sphere: but to judge them solely in such terms is to submit them to a narrow and impoverished calculus” (p. 119). Interpretation, since it is also language, is neither a tragedy nor a jackpot but a facticity within which we live. Literature’s “distinctiveness” stems from the fact that novels or poems are also language on language, which is not the same as claiming that all criticism must consist only on grammatical or semiological procedures. When interpreting a text, we are, among other things, with and within other texts, words, tropes, beliefs, intentions, moods, education, individuals, settings, all preventing self-interpreting realms. Therefore, “origin” and “nature”, apart from misleading, are neither decisive nor self-sufficient concepts: artworks are made of webs of references and non-mediated utterances are a delusion insofar as that would entail something like a first text or a last interpretation. Thus, I believe the ontological gap indictment in Felski’s analysis—a reference to those authors who argue at length on logocentrism, presence and language meaning—is accurate regarding, at best, critics like I. A. Richards, William Wimsatt or Northrop Frye.

Since according to Hooked art’s aim is beyond itself, though mediated because transpersonal, Felski is actually advocating a hermeneutic phenomenology, on which Ricoeur’s slice—a well-known influence in Felski—is pronounced but ticklish because he grants language a great deal of importance—or perhaps the same ends up happening with Felski, a tendency she nevertheless tries to avoid to some extent both in Uses of Literature and The Limits of Critique, by endorsing a lukewarm distance from Ricoeur’s view as a whole. Still, due to the “distributed agency”, the medium, especially language, does not stand under perfect intentional control. Thus, attachments are intuitive and non-optional investments in others: the we perspective outweighs the I one, so Hooked does not uphold artworks as pinnacles of aesthetic experiences. In other words, as sharp intersubjective manifestations, attachments are notably accurate, bringing aesthetics, hermeneutics, epistemology and pedagogy together. So Hooked posits the following implications: art can be good and entail cognitive gains, but there are no a priori guarantees for that; art users are fundamental; disinterest is incompatible with interpretation; reasons and causes are embedded in interpretation; artworks’ materiality matters; works of art are mostly worth for their effects; art has attachments for an end, which abide outside art itself; any attachment is the outcome of mediation.

Through and towards knowledge, Hooked’s purpose is to render intelligible and close some particular ways of interpreting, since interpretation is an event towards nearness. Yet, every interpretive approach, be it deconstruction, postcolonial studies or historicism, must bear in mind that it can—and must—interact but, like or as critique, they have limits too. So, before the dynamics of literary criticism of the twentieth century, Hooked ensures a proceeding methodological position since it does not coerce its plea towards an alleged groundbreaking perspective. Neither does it make a blank slate of all previous critical frameworks. In effect, we are dealing with a series of corrections quite aware of their surroundings, aiming at an aggregating redirection. As we have extra messmates with particular orders helping the (not that recent) burial of snooty or reputed conclusive critical theories, we are in need of updates: self-indulgence, “aloofness” or too technical criticism are indeed lagged and inoperable. Nevertheless, taking these attachments as fiddling versions of sentimentality, confession or therapy would be a slip; quite the contrary, they are demanding hermeneutic commitments whose aim is loosening the (usually contrived) hurdles between individuals and works of art.

 

  • PhD candidate funded by FCT (SFRH/BD/143281/2019). Program of Literary Theory, University of Lisbon. Email: miguel17@edu.ulisboa.pt

REFERÊNCIA:

Felski, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020.