GERALD GRAFF
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versive force to the argument that interpretation has no absolute
foundation. The possibility of objectivity is merely an enabling
assumption that makes intellectual activity possible, not a guarantee
of infallibility. What we take to be an objective interpretation in any
particular instance is always potentially revisable. But it doesn't fol–
low that objectivity is a fiction that we could somehow decide to
trade in for some alternate fiction. Nor does it follow that we can
practice ideological criticism without making implicit claims of
objectivity.
Take those feminists, for example, who have challenged our cul–
ture's conception of male and female , or those critics who have chal–
lenged the postromantic opposition between "literature" as a special
mode of discourse and nonliterature. The process of questioning
these received definitions has had to appeal to established criteria of
judgment and established notions about what counts as reality. The
attempt to redefine "male" and "female," for example, appeals to
alleged realities concerning the actual differences or lack of differ–
ences between men and women, or to the historically variable char–
acter of the relations of the sexes. To say that a system of classifica–
tion is ethnocentric makes sense only with reference to a system
assumed to be less so. ("Ethnocentric as compared to what?" is
always a relevant question.) The fact that the reality and the history
against which we criticize sexism or ethnocentrism are only
"alleged," that they can be posited on ly within a textual vocabu lary,
doesn't discredit the point that any critique of established classifica–
tions of reality and history depends on classifications that remain in
place.
What I've been calling textual leftism and its hermeneutics of
power deserves credit for reopening the question of the social func–
tion of literature and criticism at a moment when" humanism" has
been content to let the question languish. But if humanists fail to
open the question at all, their current challengers tend to close it too
quickly, eager as they are
to
see parallels between linguistic and
social constraints and to leap to conclusions about what epistemolo–
gies are subversive or reactionary. Textual radicalism does draw
attention to the hierarchies and power relations encoded in the clas–
sifications of language, but, insofar as it does so effectively, it retreats
to
conventions of truth and coherence employed by more familiar
critical vocabularies. Evidently there is more than one way of posing
the question of literature and politics, more than one way of putting
received categories in question.
