Cooling the Hot Mess of Power, or, What's literary about literary analysis?

In their post from last week, Zach and Bryan criticize Armstrong’s analysis of gender, discipline, and biopolitics in Jane Eyre for both “concomitantly ignor[ing] geographical displacement, race, temporality and history, class, and many other factors that are central to character-subjectivities” and for creating a “problematic and impossible” binary between the panoptic and the biopolitical. In the comments, I suggest that these two critiques derive from the same implicit question: Can we justify separating in theory categories that are inextricably enmeshed in practice? This question strikes me as astute – and incredibly frustrating.

Astute, because it latches on to the fact that analysis – despite works like Milian’s and Spillers’ that make a claim for intersectionality – is an unmarked method in literary and cultural study. “Analysis” - a term that Bryan and Zach avoid in their post - is derived from a Greek word meaning “loosen” or “dissolve,” and is defined in the OED as “the resolution or breaking up of a complex whole into its basic elements or constituent parts” (my emphasis). While analysis clearly serves a purpose in literary study, it strikes me that its utility receives few challenges or defenses. Even as intersectional work claims value based on its intersectionality, work that focuses on single constituent elements rarely seems to defend or contextualize its methodology. Why gender, but not race, class or ability? Why discipline rather than biopolitics?

Such questions are frustrating and difficult to answer. They seem, in fact, to point to something I was struggling with in pairing Armstrong with The Picture of Dorian Gray last week – namely, the fact that categories, including “gender” and the discursive categories of biopolitics, seem so inadequate for describing the actual complexity of characters. This led me to argue, weakly, that Dorian escapes the power-claims of discourse, although I now acknowledge the vast number of labels that could apply to him: drug user, debtor, sexual deviant, murderer. It’s not that Dorian can’t be categorized. It’s that no single category can represent him adequately – precisely the argument that Zach and Bryan use to challenge Armstrong’s gender-based analysis! Still, even as I acknowledge the power of Zach and Bryan’s critique, I want to stand up for the methodological utility of what Jenny elegantly calls “the charade of isolating identity vectors” by considering critically the work that results when theorists move away from analysis, towards synthesis, intersectionality, and irreducible complexity. 

In “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” Mel Chen theorizes toxicity across an impressive range of categories, touching on “vulnerability, safety, immunity” and how these are “racially and sexually instantiated,” moving on to a “queer analysis” of “the peculiar intimacies and alienations of heavy metal poisoning,” and ending with a theorizing of “animacy” and its effects on “subject-object dispositions” (265). While Chen’s own description makes this article appear anything but straightforwardly analytical, I would argue that analysis in fact constitutes the dominant form of the essay. Each titled section, beginning with “Lead as Toxic Asset,” focuses on a single and highly specific category or event, such as the “generalized narrative about the inherent health risk of Chinese products (to U.S. denizens)” (267). (The next section, “Tracking Lead,” focuses on the class implications of toxic toys.) 

Chen’s moments of category synthesis, such as the sentence that claims “[the white child’s] intellectual capacities must be assured to consolidate a futurity of heteronormative (white) masculinity, which is also to say that he must not be queer” (271), are the moments that struck many of us readers as difficult logical “jumps.” The largest jump is the one that instates Chen’s most powerful moment of synthesis, in which she announces her intention to “discuss toxicity as a condition, one too complex to imagine as a property of one or another individual or group” (272, my emphasis). This is the jump to the autobiographical section of the essay, the strangely literary section titled “Toxic Sensorium.” A sensorium is, according to Chen, “a complementary kind of knowledge production” (273),* one capable of depicting the combined effects of race, gender, ability, and queerness, not through analysis, but through mimetic description – through a mode, that is, that we closely align with literature rather than literary criticism.

In order to adequately depict the complex categorical intersections that we find in literature, Chen’s article suggests, we would have to create literature ourselves, or something very close to it: “a complementary kind of knowledge production,” where the knowledge being produced is not logical comprehension, but  “sympathetic ingestion” and “empathetic memory” (273). Are sympathy, ingestion, empathy and memory effects (or affects) we should work to produce through theory and criticism? Or can we defend what Bryan and Zach call the “simplicifation[s]” of analysis precisely because they are simplifications, because they aim to produce understanding and comprehension where an accurate depiction of complexity would produce only – “only” in the sense of “exclusively,” and not in the sense of “merely” – another mimetic representation of the world, another sensorium…another work of literature? 

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*The idea of a "sensorium" as a form of "knowledge production" meshes interestingly with the post about embodied knowledge that Aaron and I wrote a few weeks ago, and I wish I had space to dedicate to the intersection in this post!