spring/summer 2017 170 Marta Baron-Milian Shamefaced Concepts c r i t i c s : Rita Felski Uses of Literature, Malden 2008. The various meanings of the peculiar term “manifesto” all This is an odd manifesto as manifestos go, neither refer primarily to public declarations formulated clearly and fish nor fowl, an awkward, ungainly creature that directly, revealing one’s stance. A manifesto uncovers, lays ill-fits its parentage. In one sense it conforms per- bare, reveals, displays, makes accessible, but no doubt the fectly to type: one-sided, skew-eyed, it harps on best word to define what it in fact engages in is “betrayal.” one thing, plays only one note, gives one half of the The authors of manifestos betray their own views, but also story. Writing a manifesto is a perfect excuse for betray the ones(s) to which they owe their allegiance – in taking cheap shots, attacking straw men, and tos- betraying the “new” vision, they thus betray what is “old” – sing babies out with the bathwater. Yet the manife- tradition. A manifesto is a public undertaking, binding one stos of the avant-garde were driven by the fury of to maintain a certain posture, to practice a certain form their againstness […] What follows is, in this sense, of action with certain effects on art or reality. The word an un-manifesto: a negation of a negation, an act most probably arose from the combination of the words of yea-saying not nay-saying, a thought experi- manus (hand) and festus (attack); a manifesto appears ment that seeks to advocate, not denigrate.”1 as a real struggle, postulating direct engagement and voluntary exposure to the personal danger of opposition Felski thus announces that in contrast to the avant- and to the threat issuing from what is being confronted. -garde manifest-writers who sought to “knock art off This aggressive, conflictual aspect throws a specific light its pedestal,” and whose methods have permeated li- on the nature of the manifesto, designated by that risky terary theory, she wishes to propose “a negation of a friction whose stakes are exceptionally serious: action, an negation,” an affirmative gesture, on whose foundation, attempt to change the state of things. according to her, the construction of a new and positive reading project will become possible. In her 2008 book Uses of Literature, recently translated into Polish as Literatura w użyciu (Literature in Use), Przemysław Czapliński once wrote that a literary Rita Felski declares her enthusiastic entry into this fray, manifesto is the “troubled conscience of literary studies”2 but already in the first sentences attempts to neutralize – as a genre that unambiguously and undeliberatively somewhat the risk associated with her endeavour. settles questions that literary scholarship is indisputably Introducing her manifesto / un-manifesto (“neither fish and for obvious reasons incapable of settling. Aiming nor fowl” in Felski’s words), she simultaneously lets to be ostentatiously unscientific, it formulates extremely it be understood that its conflictual aspect will be only simulated, and the “manifesto” itself, like the literature in the title, will appear in the role of a “manifesto in use.” The proof? We find it in the very first sentences of the text: 1 R. Felski: Uses of Literature, Malden 2008, p. 1. 2 P. Czapliński: “Manifest literacki jako tekst literaturoznawczy” (The Literary Manifesto as a Literary Studies Text) Pamiętnik Literacki 1992, no. 1, p. 74. critics | Marta Baron-Milian, Shamefaced Concepts “irresponsible,”3 unambiguous, severe judgments and to question the confidence of our own diagnostic postulates, which neither have to function as nor seek a authority, and to face up, once and for all, to the force solution. In this sense the opening confrontation of Felski’s of our attachments.”6 Nonetheless, it is hard to resist the literary scholarship project with the avant-garde gesture is conviction that for all its seductive power, Felski’s project surprising, appearing as it does to dream of committing is based on the naive dream of a return to a state of lost what literary studies have defined as the “sin,” proper to innocence. Though she herself would surely be cheered criticism, of evaluation, is surprising; but at the same time, by the imputation of naïveté. she defensively demurs before doing so by accident. The title of the Polish translation, Literature in Use, What Is Literary Theory Ashamed Of? immediately refers us to the lexicon of pragmatism, while Literature is not written for literary scholars. Though that the English original, Uses of Literature, tells us a great deal conviction is not formulated so explicitly in the book, there more about the content of the book than the Polish version, can be no doubt that it underpins Rita Felski’s reflections in which the heterogeneous nature of the act of reading, and could happily wave on the banner of her manifesto/ and of readers’ experience, when in fact its opposition to un-manifesto, because if Felski declares herself particularly the stereotypical homogenization of reading is what’s at strongly against something, it is the elite nature of literary stake in Felski’s entire project. The project relates above studies. For its part, that elite nature is founded on the all to readers’ search for literature’s various applications removal beyond the horizon of literary scholars’ research and uses, the varied motivations and purposes for which pursuits of the reading motivations and experiences of the people read, and finally, the varied forms of aesthetic non-professional reader, which appear to the perspective engagement with the text, in contrast with critical reading, of theory (in its various iterations) as particularly shameful. which does not leave room for them in the space of As Felski writes, “[t]hanks to the institutional entrenchment theory. There is no doubt that Felski would subscribe to of negative aesthetics, a spectrum of reader responses the statement by Ryszard Koziołek, in the book Dobrze has been ruled out of court in literary theory, deemed się myśli literaturą (Literature is Good to Think With), which shamefully naïve at best, and rationalist, reactionary, or has been so much discussed in recent months: “Literature 4 totalizing at worst.” The concept of negative aesthetics, should be used, if necessary even for holding up a cabinet which Felski uses interchangeably with the hermeneutics with a broken leg by means of books.”7 In fact, Felski of suspicion, becomes a true sacrificial lamb, burdened herself writes in similar terms, presenting words as “hand- by her with blame for that repudiation by literary studies, me-downs, well-worn tokens used by countless others the blindness to facts of theory’s thorough depreciation before us, the detritus of endless myths and movies […].”8 of “the heterogeneous, and politically variable, uses of It is not, however, the problem of the use of literature itself 5 literary texts in daily life,” forms of engaging with the text, that is the topic of her book, but the attempt to find out motivations to read or affects that accompany reading. what different purposes it can serve, what applications it She therefore asks whether there exists some kind of can have for readers, who here become precisely users, alternative to the specialist hermeneutics of suspicion, making use – depending on their needs – of the broadly attempting to oppose the scepticism and negation that diverse functions offered by literary texts. are so deeply rooted in literary theory with a peculiar kind of affirmation. As she postulates passionately in For a manifesto, however, Felski’s work defines its the introduction to her analysis: “When scepticism has adversaries with exceptional indefinition: their image gets become routinized, self-protective, even reassuring, it is washed out in the pursuit of new metaphors, only to time to become suspicious of our entrenched suspicions, next take on the shape of an opposition so extreme that 3 Ibid., p. 75. 4 Felski, Uses, p. 132. 5 Ibid., p. 13. 6 Ibid., p. 22. 7 R. Koziołek: Dobrze się myśli literaturą. Wydawnictwo Czarne. Wołowiec 2016, p. 16. 8 Felski, Uses, p. 31. 171 spring/summer 2017 172 it is impossible to maintain. In only a few pages, Felski affirmative and “dialogic.”12 And, above all, it submits the settles accounts with all of literary theory, dividing its hermeneutics of suspicion to its own suspicions. space into two leading trends, identified with two styles of reading, the theological and the ideological. In the first Regardless of the various doubts aroused especially by the case literature would allegedly be valued for its otherness generalities – developed at a fairly high level – of Rita Felski’s and the quality of being exceptional, while in the second polemic with literary theory, things only really begin to heat its relation to social reality would become its crucial up (and become highly engaging) when she begins pitilessly element. Let us begin, then, from the traditional (and, it enumerating the chief sins of academic reading, among must be admitted, very well-worn) opposition between which the biggest relates to the marginalization of the theory “the Scylla of political functionalism and the Charybdis of of reading and the political situation of reading. In this light, art for art’s sake […].”9 It is nonetheless hard to say why historians of literature take cover behind history and do not all ways of reading that question literature’s autonomy ask questions about the contemporary importance of the are accused by Felski of instrumentalization, political text, its potential participation in current social debates. In functionalism and the definition of literature as ideology, addition, the rhetoric imposed by theoreticians is alleged to which, in her view, means having “decided ahead of time have drowned out readerly reactions in general. Felski thus that literary works can be objects of knowledge but never exaggerates the antagonisms between reading specialists, 10 sources of knowledge.” Why should an approach to the who not only create a hierarchy in the world of literature study of literature (or art) within the perspective of the but also project the nature of the act of reading itself, and influence of external forces that violate the integrity of its “ordinary readers.” That distance is directly proportional to boundaries, one opposed to the belief in its autonomous the distance separating the lowly motives, pronounced to nature, constitute an unequivocal resignation from the be primitive by experts, that animate the “masses” from a cognitive function? And furthermore, why should belief “proper” reading, available to a handful of initiates. Felski in the causative power of literature, which can be a simultaneously lays bare the tremendous problem theory sphere of projected social change and a space of real has with the fact that literature can be evaluated for reasons public debate, eliminate its specific knowledge, being other than those recognized and accepted by theory itself. a kind of conglomerate of individual articulation and collective consciousness and artistic form? Why should Starting from there, Felski shows the necessity of freeing it depreciate such knowledge, instead of welcoming academic reading from the enclave of elitism that it has it as boon that certainly enhances the conditions for created itself. The point of departure for this gesture must the potential formation of artistic agency? Why should nonetheless be the perception of literary studies’ great every form of opposition to the vision of art’s autonomy oversight: everyday motives for reading, readers’ practices automatically “force an equivalence of textual structures and the political situation of reading. That leads us to the 11 with social structures”? Felski’s book does not provide need to break down the opposition between low and answers to these questions. At the same time, both sides high, popular and artistic, revealing the class-basednature of the dispute – drawn, it must be said, in what can only of the contempt with which elite readers treat “ordinary” be called a quite reductive vein – are accused by her, also readers. And this is undoubtedly the most interesting, somewhat traditionally, of reductionism, in order to then most important element of the plan developed in Uses of build her own project in the narrow middle ground, one Literature and the one most needed by literary theory itself. which, needless to say, is not so radical or so reductive; Felski thus writes her manifesto / un-manifesto, cutting nor is it in any way despotic, but rather “respectful,” herself off from the avant-garde sensibility which she claims marks most theoretical gestures, above all in terms of their drive to unmask universal, everyday practices and 9 Ibid., p. 9. 10 Ibid., p. 7. 11 Ibid., p. 8. aspirations to expose “false consciousness.” Instead she 12 Ibid., p. 7. critics | Marta Baron-Milian, Shamefaced Concepts takes as her guides – with no fear of the risk it entails – of literature does not boil down to either eliciting aesthetic “common sense” and intuition. As Felski declares, “My rapture or action in the sphere of power relations. It is argument is not a populist defense of folk reading over situated in other registers – to which academic literary scholarly interpretation, but an elucidation of how, in spite studies remain blind. of their patent differences, they share certain affective and cognitive parameters.”13 Felski takes philosophical Self-Discovery or Self-Deception? and simultaneously methodological inspiration from a The first of the crucial categories Felski uses to describe phenomenology of reading that “calls for an undogmatic reading practices is recognition, a process that joins 14 openness to a spectrum of literary responses […].” together cognitive function and affective charge and Dreading the accusation of ahistoricism, she nevertheless involves “finding yourself in the work,” i.e., what Dorian wades into a project of neophenomenology that unites Gray experienced when reading a book that was phenomenology with a historical and sociopolitical presumably Huysmans’s À rebours, recognizing in its perspective. hero his “prototype”, and nourishing the belief that the book was really about his own life, written out before he In her effort to implement the goals she has set herself, Rita came to live through it. On the one hand, recognition is Felski creates a real cabinet of curiosities in her book, in therefore a narcissistic allegorization, while on the other which a multitude of concepts despised by literary theory hand, it expresses an extremely unprofessional readerly are gathered together, generally speaking, those derided by naïveté, which is why Felski finds it so very interesting. the hermeneutics of suspicion, which undeniably becomes And thus for reasons exactly opposite to those for which 15 Proceeding it appeared as a functional category for twentieth century down this path, Felski distinguishes four categories theory, in which recognition serves exploration only to the within which she organizes her thought: recognition, extent that it is an erroneous or false recognition, revealing enchantment, knowledge and shock. These concepts, simultaneously the illusory character of self-knowledge she claims, “name quite ordinary structures of experience and the construction of a perpetually miscarried image that are also political, philosophical, and aesthetic of the self, who is doomed to experience non-identity the main adversary in Felski’s reflections. 16 These with its own self. The two key inspirations here are the four keywords define the various forms of engagement stories, reproduced in various forms in cultural studies, with reading, designating the axis of interaction between of the Lacanian mirror and the Althusserian policeman. reader and text. In these four concepts, she would have Felski, however, shows the paradox in which the us feel intimations of “the shadowy presence of some philosophical and literary scholarly critique of recognition venerable aesthetic categories”17 such as anagnorisis, becomes entangled: “If we are barred from achieving beauty, mimesis and the sublime, which she seeks to insight or self-understanding, how could we know that submit to revision, formulating the reasons why we read an act of misrecognition had taken place? The critique and the values based on which the nature and functions of recognition, in this respect, reveals an endemic failure of literature are defined, offering an answer diametrically to face up to the normative commitments underpinning opposed to the one that emerges from the main areas of its own premises […].”18 And here, it is hard to resist the literary studies. In Felski’s opinion, the most important task impression that the discussions undertaken by Felski concepts fanning out into complex histories.” begin and end at the surface level of the problem, and the rhythm of quick leaps between threads are determined 13 Ibid., p. 14. 14 Ibid., p. 18. 15 Felski further develops this thread in her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, devoted precisely to polemics with the demystificatory imperative that drives contemporary literary studies. See R. Felski: The Limits of Critique, Chicago 2015. 16 Felski, Uses of Literature, p. 17. 17 Ibid., p. 15. rather by pragmatic ends. Felski’s narrative in fact comes off much better when it is based on direct analysis and interpretation of works (she then frequently draws truly revelatory conclusions) than when it ascends into a high 18 Ibid., p. 28. 173 spring/summer 2017 174 level of generality. At that level, for example, we see her acknowledgement of difference or otherness, but also tendency to use the rather transparent category of “the the acknowledgement of its value. In the realm of identity, reader,” not anchored in reality and not subject to social, meanwhile, it relates to the acquisition of self-knowledge, economic, historical or geographical conditions (all the which is linked to the process of self-analysis. Felski more astonishing in the work of a scholar from a feminist shows, however, that those two meanings in no way school of literary criticism). Things are utterly different contradict each other, as they remain in the sphere of in the case of her concrete analyses – so it is difficult questions of identity. Recognition itself oscillates between to explain the asymmetry that arises between analyses “knowledge and acknowledgement, the epistemological and generalized judgments which cause the concepts and the ethical, the subjective and the social […].”20 invoked to lose their historical and social precision, becoming somehow homogeneous, abstracted from the It is difficult, nonetheless, to agree with Felski’s thesis that network of factors that determine them. “books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgement. Until very Felski attempts to capture the various forms that recently, for example, such deprivation stamped recognition can take – she points to self-intensification, the lives of women who desired other women.”21 Is relating to self-recognition in what is similar, and self- “recognition” and the attempt at identification really extension, the recognition of the self in experiences that what literature should have to offer people deprived are completely other to it. At the same time, the distance of public acknowledgement and excluded? Should its separating self-intensification from self-extension opens function not be situated in a completely different place? a broad set of problems that no doubt constitute an Recognition as Felski formulates it means that literature important and intriguing area for post-colonial studies becomes a form of inherently absurd substitution that the or economic literary criticism. It is difficult to speak of reader would temporarily feel obligated to find satisfying recognition as something permanent, graspable or since in any case there is no way to change reality. In structurally defined. We can instead speak of “the shock offering that kind of “miserable consolation,” assuaging of recognition.” The moment of recognition is an illusory longings, answering the desire for change with empty pinprick to subjectivity, whose nature is undeniably phantasms, literature positions itself outside of efforts to reductive. Literature is ascribed the function of “a influence reality, outside attempts to develop a project mediating role in this drama of self-formation” 19 when of real social intervention which might actually change we are let down by social and political forms of struggle the situation of the unacknowledged, might work in for recognition, acknowledgement, and inclusion in the opposition to exclusion. And though Felski writes that community, which reveal their inadequacy in confrontation the potential for recognition lies within literature precisely with exclusion and alienation. In this sense, according to because it is “a narrative, not a sociological screed,”22 Felski, art, by means of aesthetic experience, has the because it acts as fiction, because the encounter with power to provide a sense of identification and inclusion it is an aesthetic experience, it is hard not to agree with in the community. The tragedy of non-recognition is her but still harder to stifle the conviction that this is not simultaneously a tragedy of misunderstanding and of not where literature’s function should end. belonging. In this respect, recognition fuses in itself the personal and the public, becoming also a kind of social Disenchantment with Enchantment diagnosis (Felski analyses this fact very interestingly using The next part of the book could not exist without the example of the historical identification of women the belief that literature has seductive power, that it with the heroines of Ibsen’s dramas, indicating a crucial captivates with its charms, spellbinds, intoxicates but gender asymmetry in the space of reception). Recognition in the political sense means not only “maturity” and the 19 Ibid., p. 33. 20 Ibid., p. 49. 21 Ibid., p. 43. 22 Ibid., p. 44. critics | Marta Baron-Milian, Shamefaced Concepts also, as follows naturally from that, deceives. Literature criticized by scholars who point to both the affective enchants and disenchants simultaneously. The next of nature of modern process and their entanglement in the despised concepts invoked by Felski is precisely magical and mythical thinking. Curiously, the concept of enchantment, which she describes as “a term with enchantment conceals, in Felski’s view, a peculiar kind of precious little currency in literary theory, calling up blind spot that causes academic scholars to completely scenarios of old-school professors swooning in rapture dismiss this seductive and intoxicating aspect of literary over the delights of Romantic poetry. Contemporary or (perhaps especially) filmic work, displacing it beyond critics pride themselves on their power to disenchant, the area of reflection on reception and in the process to mercilessly direct laser-sharp beams of critique falsifying the image presented therein. The category of at every imaginable object. In Lyotard’s words, enchantment, as explored by Felski, though it appears “demystification is an endless task.”23 At the same time, similar to the concept of jouissance, is nonetheless inevitably linked with enchantment is the abandonment radically detached from it. As we read in Felski: of the distanced position that makes the critical gaze “[Jouissance] was a forbidding, highbrow, Parisian possible – that position is discarded on behalf of high- kind of pleasure, a transgressive frisson inspired by the intensity engagement, the renunciation of one’s own Marquis de Sade, not chanteuse Sade.”28 autonomy and self-control. Our capacity for thought, our predispositions, scepticism, causative agency and The myth of the siren song, particularly apposite to this any possibility of taking action then become irrelevant. narrative of enchantment, becomes for Adorno and Especially since, as the example of Emma Bovary Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment a sign of shows, what we are dealing with is often the “erotic the fulfilled desire for a “‘euphoric suspension of the self’ 24 In what […].”29 The nostalgic and unequivocally conservative she writes about both recognition and enchantment, concept of enchantment fixes the reader in a state however, Felski does not make use of the full potential of immobility in the form of a surrender to captivity at implicit in either affective criticism or somatic criticism, the hands of external forces, a relinquishment of one’s with its analysis of the body’s involvement in both the freedom and causative agency, a passive experience of creative act and the act of reception. pleasure which is inescapably allied with the free market undertow of aesthetic enchantment […].” mechanism of the production of needs. And it seems The anti-intellectualism of the concept of enchantment the most dangerous among the catalogue of concepts is, in fact, obvious and places it, as Felski declares, derided by literary scholarship and presented to us by dangerously close to the margins of secularized thought 25 Felski. in connection with the siren song of art: “Enchantment matters because one reason that people turn to works Deceived Knowledge of art is to be taken out of themselves, to be pulled into The third key reading motivation is, we are told, 26 an altered state of consciousness” ; “Enchantment in designated by the knowledge people seek out in this sense is the antithesis and enemy of criticism. To be texts, and the cognitive function of literature. The 27 questions “What does literature know?” or “What does Felski draws attention to the fact that Max Weber’s thesis literature not know?” present us with the concepts, enchanted is to […] lose one’s head and one’s wits […].” on modern disenchantment with the world, a thesis heavily overused by theory, of mimesis, truth and which has attained enormous popularity, is increasingly representation, through the prism of which Felski in Uses of Literature attempts to critically read the basic foundations of several theoretical schools. She presents 23 Ibid., p. 54. 24 Ibid., p. 53. 25 See ibid., p. 57. 28 Ibid., p. 60. 26 Ibid., p. 76. 29 27 Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 71; quoting Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford 2002, p. 26. 175 spring/summer 2017 176 the history of literary studies as an archive of conflicting on behalf of claims that “all forms of knowing are shaped metaphors for truth, on one side of which we find by [...] conventions of genre,”32 that “mimesis is by no appearance, illusion, delusion, shadow, and the big lie means limited to realism,”33 or that mimesis “is an act of falsification, and on the other, a fairy-like spectacle of creative imitation, not mindless copying,”34 and that of glass metaphors, the mirror, the window looking out metaphors can fulfil a cognitive function, resemble a on the world and its reflection. In the space between debate with an imaginary interlocutor? the two shores of this metaphorical archive, Felski takes on the fairly backbreaking task of attempting to look In focusing on an analysis of ways of conveying objects, “differently” at the problem of art’s referential obligations mainly in the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Felski attempts to and predispositions, at the distance between realism, show how literature can examine materiality and social the “reality effect,” and literature’s negative knowledge, interactions, on the one hand “taking us in” toward showing the history of thought on the truth of art as a imagined worlds, while on the other leading us toward 30 “chronicle of outgrown errors […].” The access point of referentiality. Felski tries to show literary knowledge as this part of the analysis is the formulation of the following having been constantly led astray, as an original and thesis: “Literature’s relationship to knowledge is not only fully entitled form of social knowledge (unlike Terry negative or adversarial; it can also expand, enlarge, or Eagleton, who defines it as an “analogue of knowledge” 31 re-order our sense of how things are.” This recognition, or “something like knowledge”) inseparably linked with undeniably a rather misty one, is superseded by the artistic form. Her diagnosis is very important, but the question that determines the actual direction of Felski’s author stops right at this point, not going any further polemic: the problem of the connection between any and not trying to define what exactly the unique nature type of literary knowledge and its form. Felski chooses of this literary knowledge is to be based on, how its as her opponents those whose view of the situation is full authorization can be justified, what makes it a different, i.e., who claim that when the purpose of the form of knowledge accessible to discourses of other text becomes the transmission of knowledge, formal systems, what proper significance artistic form has questions shift to the background. And once again, this for its shape, how the social production of literary stereotypically drawn, rather abstract opponent is not a knowledge takes place, what connection it has with flesh-and-blood opponent, lacking as it usually does a individual and collective experience, what sense it can name or a concrete textual form, but materializes only be socially useful, and especially, what exactly this as the sum of reported views that here serve pragmatic literary knowledge has to offer the reader – for he or she purposes (“uses of theory”?). This “faceless” opponent is, after all, the main focus of Felski’s book. We are here in its various incarnations is the hero of all parts of the undoubtedly witnessing a very suggestive and intriguing book and stirs the most doubts in it, because, to take rescue of literature from the depths of cognitive failures the example of her thoughts on cognitive function, do and referential disasters, but we do not in fact get we really find in the history of literary studies so many the long-awaited answer to the question of what its examples of an approach in which literary knowledge cognitive victories would involve. is supposed to be completely separate from its artistic form (from problems to do with genre, for example)? Let’s Talk About Shock Felski seems here to do battle with the long-discredited In the final part of the book, Felski examines the abilities idea of the autonomy, objectivity and detachment from of literary texts to shock or elicit outrage. At the same the contingencies of language of scholarly and scientific time, she opposes the position of what has been called judgments, and in truth it is hard not to see a hint of tilting ethical criticism, within which Martha Nussbaum and at windmills here. For does not strenuous argumentation 30 31 32 Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 82. 33 Ibid. Ibid., p. 83. 34 Ibid., p. 85 critics | Marta Baron-Milian, Shamefaced Concepts Wayne Booth have devised judgments on the particular Felski draws attention to the lack of justification for the kind of “friendly” relationship formed between the reader avant-garde rejection of the entire tradition as relating to and the book. As Felski argues, if, in our contemporary the might of patriarchal authority and a kind of legitimization world of blunted sensitivity, “the aura of revolution is now of the social order, where in fact, the transgressive and a styling and marketing advantage, if transgression is subversive potential of, for example, classical tragedy harnessed to the selling of sneakers and a cornucopia of contains, she finds, significantly greater, timeless power sexual perversions is only a mouse-click away, then surely to affect than is possible in the case of most avant-garde the project of the avant-garde is irrevocably exhausted. gestures. The aesthetic of shock, according to Felski, is Under such conditions, shock is irrevocably stripped not up to the tasks that the avant-garde ethos binds it 35 Thus, Felski to, and which are supposed primarily to boil down to a once again proposes to detach our grasp and definition correlation between individual or collective shock and the of shock from the avant-garde tradition, a project coming transformation of society. of any remaining shred of authenticity.” she deems irretrievably worn down, today no longer possessing any subversive or emancipatory potential and The aesthetic of shock is only superficially asocial in stripped of the ability to break down social and aesthetic nature, however, being determined in equal parts by taboos. The avant-garde artistic movements from the problems relating to class, race and gender issues. The early twentieth century, in Felski’s view, succeeded in fascination with ugliness in art, Felski claims, following “frenetically debunking mythologies and slaughtering all Bourdieu, reveals its fundamental character to be sacred cows except one: the authenticity of their own inescapably class-based, suited as it is to the sublimated antinomian stance.” Aggressive and extreme forms of tastes of the upper middle class. On the other hand, engagement aimed at bourgeois logic, representing she shows how literary provocation has historically been a powerful, instinctual cry, were supposed to act a male domain, representing a peculiar kind of attack like an electric shock, but it has unexpectedly been on stereotypical feminine prudishness. Even if it was a neutralized by the assimilation of what was avant-garde series of feminine figures who in fact became symbols into the mainstream, through the turning of what was of the bestial, the procreative, the corporeal and the ostentatiously anti-economic into a good investment. disgustingly natural. That is above all typical of the avantgarde and modernism. Felski, in her riveting analyses Where the shock-driven aspirations of the avant-garde (for example, of the work of Sara Kane) here provides to demolish and reformulate the social order ended up proof of the shift in contemporary culture, in keeping with disappointing, the art of shock in fact does, Felski claims, whose current a particular kind of aesthetic of shock has reveal its emancipatory and subversive properties, begun to dominate in women’s writing. Felski explains overcoming stereotypes and rules, when it foregoes that “[a]s a history of expectations about the nature of clearly defined social goals. Shock that tears down the femininity comes under intense stress, ever more female schemata of perception, but also the space and time in writers are turning toward an aesthetic of provocation which perception is happening, becomes, by virtue of its and perversity.”37 The shock, however, is being absorbed immediacy, “the antithesis of the blissful enfolding and by the capitalist trends of late modernity. In this sense, its voluptuous pleasure that we associate with enchantment. subversive nature has become suspect. It has ceased to Instead of being rocked and cradled, we find ourselves be an expression of rebellion and instead is a compromise ambushed and under assault.”36 with the free market, which – again, as in the case of enchantment, though also completely differently – found In showing the effects of shock using the example of in the aesthetic of shock a supremely good tool for classical tragedies (in particular Euripides’s Bacchae), satisfying the cravings and needs of the mass audience. 35 Ibid., p. 107. 36 Ibid., p. 113. 37 Ibid., p. 126. 177 spring/summer 2017 178 The Trouble with the Full-time Reader outside the elitism of literary studies are unquestionably In Uses of Literature, Rita Felski sketches out the the most intriguing, relevant, and utterly necessary part conditions in which a peculiar type of “complex of Felski’s project, she nevertheless fails to give voice to of diminishing returns” of the humanities and the those readers who are not full-time specialists. A full-time depreciation of both literature itself and reading has reader herself, she speaks in their name while speculating taken shape, becoming one of the main sources of on the subject of their motivations. We therefore do not apathy and discouragement among literary scholars, and get an image of how a part-time reader reads, but at best vice versa. As many reviewers have noted, Felski sees how a full-time reader reads on her day off, or after hours. a possible antidote for the existing state of affairs in the And that is, to a great extent, what the book is about. continuing efforts to build a bridge between theory and general knowledge and common sense, yet does not In this affirmation of reading, there are a few pieces of the place her complete trust in that solution. She repeatedly puzzle that appear still to be missing – a curtain of silence harmonizes with the voice of Antoine Compagnon, who falls on the fact that the influence of books on the reader in his chronicle of skirmishes in literary theory writes in is not always a good one, and that reading itself is class- the spirit of common sense: “The aim of theory is […] conditioned, generating class conditions and distinctions the defeat of common sense. It contests it, criticizes it, in terms of both the motivation and goals for reading as denounces it as a series of fallacies […] theory makes well as readerly reactions. On the one hand, then – and it seem indispensable to begin by freeing oneself from this is doubtless the most important gesture in Rita Felski’s these fallacies in order to talk about literature. But the entire project – she seeks to draw literature out of the resistance of common sense to theory is unimaginable. literary studies enclave, which establishes hierarchy and […] common sense never gives up, and theorists are tries to turn reading, and above all, understanding, into an obstinate. Having failed to settle their accounts with their elite activity. Felski focuses her attention on the egalitarian, bêtes noires once and for all, they become entangled.”38 everyday, universal aspect of reading, but at the same time promotes reading as an individual activity, serving Despite the promised affirmation that Felski attempts personal goals, and does not give adequate consideration to advance and oppose to the negation, critique and to collective reception, or, more importantly, the social suspicion she finds so intolerable, despite the fact that she impact of literature (to which she only pays attention, with wants to cheer up the so-called “common” or “ordinary” truly revelatory results, in her analysis of the reception of reader by the mere fact that literary studies have not Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler). And through this omission, her completely forgotten about him or her, Uses of Literature otherwise fascinating depiction of literature as a machine do not fill one with optimism. Despite the apologia for the for satisfying individual needs would appear to lose most. many possible uses and applications of literature, each The motivations for reading, enumerated and inspected by chapter seems underpinned by the belief that literature, Felski, correspond to the beloved tools of the free market when it all comes down to it, can achieve very little, has that have become the best way to ensure the profitability relatively low causative power, and is tasked not with of each publishing initiative: literature as product wants projecting change but rather gratifying the narcissistic to somehow shock, enchant or come out against the needs of the “ordinary” reader, for whom identification and narcissistic desire for identification while simultaneously enchantment are to replace what he lacks, becoming, for offering the individual greater self-knowledge and thereby example, a substitute for belonging to what he or she is, self-improvement. But those are not the uses of literature in a social sense, excluded from. So the claim goes: it is all that we would really have liked to consider. right, we don’t have much, but look, we might have had nothing at all! Even though the various attempts to move 38 A. Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosman, Princeton 2004, p. 193. Keywords | Abstract | Note on the Author ... critics | Marta Baron-Milian, Shamefaced Concepts KEYWORDS li terar y the or y use hermeneutics of suspicion affective criticism ae sthe t ic s o f re ce pt ion Abstract: This text represents an attempt to analyze the main premises of Rita Felski’s theoretical project presented in her book Uses of Literature, translated into Polish as Literatura w użyciu (Literature in Use). The American scholar’s reflections, focused on problems of reception aesthetic and constituting a polemic with the concept, crucial to contemporary literary theory, of the hermeneutics of suspicion and with critical theory, are here interpreted using the four concepts relied on by Felski in the book: recognition enchantment, knowledge and shock. They constitute various forms of readerly engagement with the text and various forms of use, of applications of literature in practices of everyday, non-specialist reading. This article identifies Felski’s attempt to disrupt the elitism of literary studies and their exclusionary stance toward non-professional readers as one of the most important elements in her project as put forth in the book. Note on the Author: Marta Baron-Milian works in the I. Opacki Department of Contemporary Literature at the University of Silesia and is the editor of the literary quarterly FA-art and the author of the books Grzebanie grzebania. Archeolog i grabarz w twórczości Jerzego Ficowskiego (The Burial of Burial. Archaeologist and Gravedigger in the Work of Jerzy Ficowski) and Wat plus Vat. Związki literatury i ekonomii w twórczości Aleksandra Wata (Wat + VAT. Connections Between Literature and Economics in the Work of Aleksandr Wat). She co-edited the book Teoria nad-interpretacją? (Theory through Overinterpretation?). | 179