Hence the name. When reading theory, one has the occasional misfortune to read a critic who seems to think that literary criticism merely consists of demonstrating how culture and art demonstrate the fabulousness of that critic's pet theory.
The easiest place to find this kind of thing is in the shallow, main-stream religious publications that try to shoe-horn Hollywood movies into a religious perspective. At last year's Comics Arts Conference, I heard a congenial, polite Catholic priest speak on the Spider-man and Daredevil films, claiming that because both films were about the 'battle between good and evil,' they were automatically Catholic. The reasoning (and I flatter it by calling it that) is that all morality derives from God, and Catholicism is, of course, the only religion that's accurate about God's law; therefore, anything to do with morality is Catholic.
Žižeck's analysis of The Matrix attempts to do essentially the same thing, except with Lacan. In fact, the whole book, Enjoy Your Symptom!, consists of either Žižeck praising films that 'demonstrate' Lacan, or condemning films that 'fail' to demonstrate Lacan. He even alters the facts, the events and depictions in the film, to make his praise/condemnation more dramatic. The book makes the elementary mistake of trying to make the evidence demonstrate the theory, which might prompt one to ask where, exactly, the theory came from.
The irony is that most theorists absolutely understand this principle. I've been reading Williams and Huyssen this week, with a side order of Todorov, and they all make their evidence plain. They even, often, go out of their way to point out that appealing to undemonstrated truths is precisely the definition of internalised ideology. Unfortunately, many junior academics (a group in which I include myself!) take the words of theorists to be like unto gospel, and merely look at the world as a convenient way to confirm those words. This problem is closely linked to the zealotry problem I discussed in Methodology 1.
So here's point #2: theory must be derived from evidence, not vice-versa.
In criticism of art, we must derive our methods from the experience of the art itself, which includes the social and political context, the genre formations, the industries that create the art, the history of the development of the medium, etc..
Posted by orion at July 26, 2006 2:19 PMA commenter left a message (below) that raised an important point. The message (above) used to contain a very short paragraph about Lacan and Catholicism that, unfortunately, absolutely did read as if I were entirely dismissing both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Catholicism as useful tools in literary criticism.
The paragraph was originally much longer and attempted, with more success than the one posted, to explain that I was trying to demonstrate one particular kind of bad scholarship, and that I picked both a secular and a religious theoretical perspective merely to point out that it's a mistake that is not specific to any one institution. However, after Syzygy's post, I tried to rewrite my original text, but found, instead, that I was merely distracting attention from my main point, so I decided to just axe the whole paragraph.
Syz, thanks for catching that! I hadn't realised that my final draft of the post read so differently than I had intended.
* * *
Dear Mr. Orion,
I find your theories about the irrelevance of both psychoanalytic theory and Catholicism to the study of literature absorbing, especially considering that you do not present any evidence to support your theory. I can't help but recall that literary analysis in the somewhat turgid and convoluted fashion we are so familiar with today began with learned and/or priestly castes interpreting the written word of God. Indeed, I would be willing to assert that for several hundred years the Catholic church was the single dominant institution of literary analysis in the occidental world.
Further, I would argue that the style of literary analysis that we call 'close reading' owes a tremendous debt to the psychoanalytical work of Sigmeund Freud. Lacan is one of a long chain of theorists who have close-read Freud himself in an attempt to further modify his elegant philosophical devices, such as trauma, repression, death-drive, etc. Surely you will recognize at least two of these terms as being absolutely essential to modern clinical psychoanalytic theory. There are critics, like for instance Josh Cohen, Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths University of London, who write that Lacanian psychoanalysis is "arguably the most widely practiced form of psychoanalysis today"--though this is not to say that it is not highly controversial in many respects (you might enjoy Cohen's introductory text, _How to Read Freud_.)
Freud himself pioneered a system of analysis based on close-reading fantasy structures in order to discern subterranean motives. Lacan applied the then ground-breaking theoretical apparatus of structural linguistics to Freud's tremendous body of work. I can scarcely think of a more appropriate body of theory with which to approach linguistically constructed fantasies--also known as novels (and, one would assume, comic books and films).
I do agree with you, though, as have many critics, that Zizek and Lacan (and Freud) may be criticized for advancing a theory that tends to lump the sum total of human thought into a somewhat rigid model that is chauvanistic (or, as has been said, into a model that perfectly encapsulates the modes of thought of a male narcissist), and deterministic. Still, Zizek does try on several occasions to work through this by insisting, in the Althusserian mode, that practice precedes ideology, or at least conditions ideology in a manner that outweighs intellectual disconfirmation. A certain materiality is invoked here that could quite possibly be seized upon to return the willing theorist to precisely the questions of production and distribution (Marxist questions, really, which are to some extent included in Zizek's epistomology) that Lacan would seem to lead away from.
Thank you for a pleasant read, and best of luck in your future endeavours.
-Syzygy
* * *
Posted by: Orion at July 26, 2006 11:43 PM