The Brooklyn Rail

You are feeling sick, so you head to the doctor. The doctor subjects you to a barrage of tests, using an impressive array of sophisticated diagnostic instruments. Eventually the results come back, and you ask what’s up. Doctor: “I have difficult news. You have a bad case of capitalism.” You: “Oh no! What’s the treatment?” Doctor: “Not so fast: you also have patriarchy and white supremacy.” You: “Gah! This is terrible. What’s the treatment?” Doctor: “I’m afraid there is more. You have heteronormativity—at first we thought it was phallogocentrism, but we were wrong.” The doctor continues. Colonialism, ableism, cisnormativity: the sophisticated diagnostic instruments have detected much. You [urgently]: “Doctor, this is awful. Please tell me: what’s the treatment?” Doctor [proudly]: “I’m afraid we don’t perform treatments here. But we sure diagnosed the hell out of this.”

“Always historicize” is a good, deep slogan for cultural diagnosis on the left, but it tells us very little about what to do once the test results are in. This weakness was less significant in the 1980s, when Fredric Jameson formulated the slogan, than it is today. For the last generation or so, much artistic, literary, and cultural criticism has contented itself with “historicizing” in the simplified sense of “writing history.” To the extent that those historicizing have understood their project in political terms, they have usually understood it as a diagnostic practice that helps guide political action taken elsewhere, often by others—by activists or politicians, say. There is nothing wrong with this, but to my mind it is not the only, nor the most effective, thing our critical institutions could be doing. Writing history is of course important: we are historical beings. But the histories we write are of limited use unless we can bring them to bear as part of an active attempt to transform our collective situation. The latter is what we most need today.

An anecdote: not long ago I heard a senior literary scholar announce that the primary question in life is “what really happened?” This is a mistake, and a sign of how completely the institutional demand to “write history” has come to determine many parts of professorial subjectivity, at least within literary studies. “What really happened?” is an important question, but it is best considered secondary. It strikes me that in secular modernity, at least, the only truly primary question—primary because unavoidable—is “what shall we do now?” or (to give it a more properly political slant) “What Is To Be Done?” It is only as part of an active attempt to answer this primary question that we arrive at important secondary questions such as “What is our present situation?”; “How did this situation develop?”; “What forces are still active within it?”; and “What is our best chance of making our lives better, starting from here?” “Historicizing,” both in the simplified sense of writing history, and in the deeper sense of discovering how past lines of force determine present realities, helps one to answer some of these secondary questions, but not all of them. Moreover, by itself it cannot answer the primary question of what is to be done.

I hope it is clear that my point is not that the political diagnoses arrived at by criticism on the left have been wrong. Far from it: my point is that we critics need to find systematic ways to act on these diagnoses. Acting on our diagnoses means more than simply handing them over to others—activists, politicians, “consumers,” “concerned citizens,” ourselves in any of these capacities—in the hope that we might help to guide political action taken elsewhere. Rather, it involves building critical—and more broadly cultural—institutions capable of cultivating deeper forms of subjectivity and collectivity right here on the cultural front. Clearly the cultural front cannot be considered in isolation: action against, say, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy—just to take the first three I mentioned—must be carried out on the economic, political, and cultural fronts simultaneously if it is to have any hope of succeeding. But the cultural front still has its importance, and there the more specific practices of artistic, literary, and cultural criticism have their importance, too. Criticism will be better able to play its part if it can find systematic ways to act on its diagnoses. “Always historicize” is a helpful slogan in many ways, but it helps us very little with that.