Subtextual Criticism Challenge: Epilogue

You should read this article first, as it gives this epilogue its context.
I should also note that some of the views expressed in this essay are no longer accurate representations of my position. See The Question Concerning Watchability for an exposition of my current position.

While I undertook the challenge in a spirit of amusement, I do think there is a serious point to be gleaned from it. This was by no means an ulterior motive of mine, but rather a derivative of my basic attitude towards the recent fashion in literature and film studies departments in the academies.

Since Freud, New Criticism, and finally Foucault--who drove the nail into the proverbial coffin--the death of the author has been declared complete. Freud paved the way, because he believed the author's subconscious workings more important than his conscious ones. So, for Freud, though Hamlet may be about many things, what is interesting is how it centers upon the relationship of a son to his mother and stepfather, and how this expresses Freud's various theories of the subconscious.

The problem with this is obvious. Freud invented psychoanalysis, so he already knows all of his psychoanalytic theories. If he assumes all there is to be gained by literature is psychoanalytic insight, what can he, the man who made it all up anyway, possibly have to gain from literature? So is it from the standpoint of any ideology: if you read everything into it, you're only reflecting your own thoughts back to yourself when you read--you're not learning, not improving yourself.
Come New Criticism, the emphasis shifts from the author, or the text as an expression of the author, to the text is a pure artifact. This is where notions like, "The text has a life of its own," come from. Obviously that expression is just a metaphor, since a text is not alive. The expression just means that once the text is created, its connection to its author is no more privileged than its connection to any other human being.

This conceit, also, has a fairly obvious flaw. The text's relationship to the author is one of creating mind to created object. It's an output-to-product function. The text's relationship to other readers is not creative in the least. It's a product-to-input function. This is very like conversation, where one person expresses something, another hears and understands it, and is then free to make one's own response. How ridiculous it would be in a conversation were one to declare, "Well, your words have a life of their own, so I'll analyze what you've just said in the way that feels right for me, then I'll get back to you." Art, as an expressive medium, is indeed conversational in form. To participate in the conversation fruitfully, an attitude of respect for one another is required.

Finally, Foucault took some notes from Hegel and Heidegger, adding in the notion that the ideas of human beings--what they consider to be true or false, beautiful or ugly, right or wrong--are not Platonic truths eternally one way or the other, but rather the products of historical forces beyond our control. "Truth is a function of power," argued Foucault. The dominant group, such as white, European culture in USA, is responsible for what gets considered knowledge or truth (science, e.g.), as well as for standards of beauty (the literary and cinematic classics, e.g.). This isn't a conscious decision, of course, but merely a product of history, which moves one group into power with its cultural ideas, etc..

In conjunction with the previous two points, Foucault's theories made possible all the ideological (or subtextual) criticism of the academies today. No author is believed to be thinking for himself. He's just a mouthpiece out of which flows all the subconscious motivations of his biological being and his socio-cultural, ideological milieu. Dickens didn't write to express his deep sentiments and tell an entertaining tale, he rather subconsciously wrote to reenforce patriarchal, European dominance and maybe in response to some anal fixation.

It seems like no woman leaves the academy unspoiled by feminism these days. It's a real Invasion of the Mind Snatchers. They don't think for themselves. They absorb the feminism, justify it as well as they can, and then dronelike set to reading their pre-learned theories into everything they find. Same with the psychoanalysts, the Marxists, the queer studies people, etc.. It never occurs to them that it might be embarrassing to claim a text is about something it clearly isn't; it doesn't occur to them because they've had it drilled into their heads that their view is more important as the text author's and anyone who says otherwise belongs to the old, Patriarchal, European ideology that had dominated aesthetics for so long.

Indeed, this very message of mine will be so interpreted by one of them. But what happens to the human-ness of communication, of art? What makes art human is that it's two people communicating. You can never know too many people. But life is short. With great books and great movies, you can really meet new, great people. You can learn what of their deepest selves they are expressing on the page, in the only way they could express it. However, you can also do what our ideologically-oriented f(r)iends do and look for the unconscious motivations in it all. Doing so, you remove the human element. The author is no longer a human expressing himself, the text is an artifact that is a product of socio-historical forces out of human control; read into it whatever you like, as long as it works, because it's pretty much an empty vessel. This way, you don't get to know of or learn from other humans, you never encounter them--you merely scrutinize their thoughts and words like cold, causeless artifacts, with no significance, no human connection. That's intellectual masturbation, not criticism. Or to clarify, such attempts at criticism are in fact exercises of theory and can help elucidate the theory to others who are interested in the theory, but is uninteresting for anyone trying to understand the work allegedy being critiqued.

So, what I have done in this subtextual criticism challenge is show just how ridiculous these theories are. It's not a reductio ad absurdum, of course; but the results are pretty damn absurd, aren't they?