GERALD GRAFF
567
geneous) as equally a set of rewritings rooted not in the play but in
our own social practices. Whether we choose to read
Hamlet
as an
autonomous entity to be contemplated strictly in terms of its intrin–
sic unity or as a universal statement about human nature or the
human condition, the very questions such readings leave out-ques–
tions of history and politics-will reveal something about our socio–
political dispositions.
It is just those questions about the social and political implica–
tions of interpretive practices that the "humanism" of literature
departments has tended not to ask, or has positively resisted any–
one's asking. Here may lie the real issue in the furor over literary
theory right now: not whether texts can be read with some greater or
lesser degree of reliability by competent readers, but what kinds of
social practices that conventional reading competence may covertly
support. After all, if linguistic norms are "fascist," then what is
properly at issue is not whether we
can
agree on what a text means
but whether we
ought
to.
If
the conventions that permit agreement to
occur perpetuate questionable social arrangements, then agreement
i undesirable even if possible. This may explain why textual leftists
dismiss as irrelevant the able proofs by humanist theorists that we
are often justified in assigning minimal determinacy to texts. Cogent
as these proofs may be, insofar as they fail
to
address the political
case against orthodox interpretive practices, they are easy to brush
aside. And when one considers how many humanists decline to
argue at all, but merely restate what they take to be verities, one can
sympathize with the exasperation of the textual leftists. Viewing lit–
erature and criticism as forms of power revives long-neglected ques–
tions, and it asks for an accounting of the humanities that it is simply
irresponsible to evade. Even when the accounting is done in a crude
way, there is then at least a chance that it can be refined and
extended.
Here, however, is the rub. Though attention to the politics of
criticism has been long overdue, and though solid sociohistorical
work is being done
(After the New Criticism
is a good example),
theorizing about the relations between politics and criticism remains
in a confused, overexcited state. It has proved easier to use words
like "power" and "history" as argument-stopping slogans than to
tackle the problems opened by such words. It has also proved easier
to engage in epistemological witch hunting against objectivist the–
ories than to analyze those theories in their concrete social circum-
