Cite Richly, Cite Carefully

Before the workshop, Mathelinda invited participants to submit critical quotations which were important for their own research. At the end of the workshop, she asked those in the room to create their own montage out of the quotations, beginning: ‘A critical experiment is…’

My montage shares a mood with Anne Carson’s reflections, in Decreations, on the responsibilities involved in citation. ‘What is a quote?’ she asks. ‘A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.’ Here are two differently slippery versions of that skating.

i.

A critical experiment is ‘an unabashed commitment’^[1] to ‘seeing with fresh eyes’^[2] words composed by another. ‘[F]resh eyes’ are liberated from the fantasy of objectivity (which is ‘impossible and undesirable’^[3]); they are ‘minor forms’^[4] with the capacity to ‘sometimes disrup[t] or rerout[e] major ones’.^[5] ‘[F]resh eyes’ belong to an individual self – this is undeniable – but their anchoring does not have to mean that they are ‘imprisoned in their moment of origin’,^[6] because they can anticipate, create, and grow beyond. The critical self brings both ‘hard-shell charismatic defences’ (declaring its own skills, justifying its claims to the material) ‘and affective openings’,^[7] honouring ‘the experience of reading’^[8] even when it pretends to interpretative clarity. There is always a risk in this recruitment of another’s words: ‘will they bore or will they shock?’^[9] What if that ‘inexhaustible nature of the murmur’^[10] which captivated in its near-silence was never meant to be spoken at full volume in the first place? A critical experiment is a dangerous play with the responsibilities of the critic.

ii.

A critical experiment is ‘one way to’^[11] re-see a word / world: ‘to guess’^[12] what might be interesting to another. It introduces – or, it does not deceive itself about – a critical self ‘susceptible to’^[13] affinities, exclusions, disruptions, celebrations. ‘We sorely need’^[14] to redefine ‘the quest’^[15] of critical inquiry, to behave ‘as if imagination’^[16] can bring understanding, to expose ‘the assumptions’^[17] of self that slog beneath written actions and reactions. A critical experiment ‘carves out a piece’^[18] of those daily motions, yet its partiality is ‘not a shortcoming’:^[19] rather, something which ‘illuminates’^[20] in its own anticipatory, contradictory ways. There is always a risk in this recruitment of another’s words, as if we might find out ‘how quiet’^[21] knowledge is at the moment when we really need to know. A critical experiment lets us ‘happen into’^[22] a new version of a word / world.

^[1] Doug Battersby, Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, Feeling, and the Novel Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 13.

^[2] Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, College English, 34.1 (1972), 18.

^[3] Heather Love, Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, ‘Building a Better Description’, Representations, 135 (2016), 13.

^[4] Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Hierarchy, Rhythm, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 18.

^[5] Ibid., p. 18.

^[6] Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 154.

^[7] Lauren Berlant, ‘Humorless, Serious, Critical’, MLA 17, p. 6.

^[8] Battersby, p. 13.

^[9] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 22.

^[10] Andre Breton, ‘Le Manifeste Du Surréalisme (1924)’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 30.

^[11] Heather Love, Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, 13.

^[12] Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 389.

^[13] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 370.

^[14] Felski, p. 154.

^[15] Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 4.

^[16] Cynthia Ozick, ‘Science and Letters: God’s Work – And Ours’, The New York Times (September 27, 1987), 3.

^[17] Rich, 18.

^[18] Spivak, p. 370.

^[19] Claire Messud, ‘Ways of Seeing: Review of Brian Dillon’s Affinities’, The New York Times (April 25, 2023).

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Ali Smith, There But For The (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011), p. 229.

^[22] Sedgwick, p. 22.