were crazy to believe their own observations and reasoning, rather than succumbing to Mulvaney’s attempts at gaslighting—which, above all, consists of the denial of arguments from reason in favor of arguments from authority. While Mulvaney insists that Trump’s words mean whatever those in power say they mean, Wallace demonstrates their meaning depends on rationally articulable patterns, historical connotations and a social context larger than the will or caprice of the powerful.
Best and Marcus primarily use Frederic Jameson’s term, “symptomatic reading,” to identify the hegemonic method they seek to displace. It would be outside the scope of the present inquiry to attend closely to Jameson’s reading of Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts of symptom, which differs substantively from my own. But that analysis is also unnecessary here, because Best and Marcus do not use Jameson’s term to refer solely or specifically to his claims, instead employing it as an overarching title for a range of familiar literary-theoretical methodologies. Indeed, samples of all these approaches are included in Mitchell’s 1982 issue of Critical Inquiry—including some antagonistic and mutually exclusive strains of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, queer theory, and even New Critical “close reading.” As against what therefore amounts to almost the entirety of their disciplinary past, “surface reading” is presented as the coming hegemony, gradually and organically forming out of responses to their predecessors by many critics, including those their issue of Representations collects.
This superseding novelty of surface reading is thus presented as arising from a new political and cultural climate—as we have noted, in response to Bush’s blundering indifference to the values proper to a democratic republic. Best and Marcus imply that past political obfuscation looks sophisticated by comparison with the transparent lies and abuses of the Bush administration, which have rendered obsolete the sophisticated interpretive methods to which past generations turned in order to reveal political violence and oppression. The examples they cite are revealing enough to be worth quoting at length:
Those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found those demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet; the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as “mission accomplished.”25
On first reading, their principal claim seems inarguable, in part because it is a description of their own experience: They report finding their training in “demystifying protocols” unnecessary for the purpose of decoding the administration’s blatant cruelty, incompetence and deceit. But this observation about their own experience and judgments is then immediately generalized into a normative program for the discipline, producing a claim that is complexly problematic and even self-contradictory—indeed, one might say it is “symptomatic.”
Their argument can be read as symptomatic because its aporias indicate a procedure of self-universalization characteristic of privilege, which can also be discerned as a systemic pattern in the disciplines of literary studies. And because all asymmetrical binaries of privilege and disempowerment or centrality and marginalization are intersectional, this pattern implicates even those of us for whom some salient vectors of marginalization or oppression are definitive. In other words, because few if any of us are defined by the disempowered or marginalized terms of every conceivable binary, most if not all of us are conditioned by some vector of privilege. Unacknowledged and unaddressed issues of privilege have continued to undermine literary studies’ social significance since the canon and theory wars of the eighties. Symptomatic indication can therefore be read as a trope for the homology between systemic disciplinary difficulties and the four difficulties specific to this argument: First, Best and Marcus misrepresent the novelty of the Bush administration in claiming its policies as their occasion. Second, the ambiguous relation of their methodological arguments to their experience of the Bush years is consonant with their ambiguous views on interpretation’s relation to politics. Third, this ambiguity regarding the relation between interpretive act and political implication opens the way for an immediate universalization of their own privileged position. And fourth, confusion about the politics of interpretation manifests in inconsistent representations of their intellectual lineage.
While it would be easy to dismiss their response to the Bush administration as a rhetorical device, merely an occasion for their argument with no more than decorative significance, it is rather the primary premise offered in support of their conclusion that symptomatic reading is obsolete or outmoded. Without the political frame, readers might be tempted to view their call for a new methodological consensus as arising purely from their own personal preferences or goals. While nothing in principle prevents them from framing their arguments in that way, they do not, and instead they cite a shared experience of the Bush administration as a turning point in the interpretation of politics. Demystification, they imply, was necessary at some time in the past, but the events they cite have made it “superfluous” for scholarship and teaching—because information about state violence has been made widely available (e.g., images from Abu Ghraib), inequitable state neglect has been prominently featured in news media (e.g., coverage of Katrina), and the president has made claims that “many people” know to be deceptive (e.g., “mission accomplished”). But if we attend carefully to these claims, we find that none of these events mark the epochal shift their argument presumes. None of these names a novel development of the Bush era, and so it is difficult to understand how these events can be supposed to have convinced Best and Marcus that we were entering upon a newly unmystified, unveiled era in politics.
Despite their characterization, the images from Abu Ghraib were not in fact “immediately circulated.” While it is technically true that those images were available on the Internet earlier than most Americans became aware of them, it took approximately 10 months for those abuses to garner widespread media attention. By way of comparison, this is only a few months less than it took the media to give national attention to the Mỹ Lai Massacre decades earlier, and information about that event was also available before the media thematized it as a national issue.26 Abuses at Abu Ghraib did not therefore represent an effectively new experience of immediate exposure. Similarly, what Best and Marcus characterize as “real-time coverage” of the state neglect of African Americans after Hurricane Katrina can be compared to page one of the New York Times on May 4, 1963, which prominently features the previous day’s events under the headline “Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham.”27 There does not seem to be anything new, therefore, about real-time attention to such racist state abuses.28 And after “mission accomplished,” the lies of the Iraq War do not appear to have been “instantly recognized” as such by most Americans— at least not in any way that effectively undermined Bush’s majority of the popular vote in 2004, which improved upon his failure to secure a majority in 2000. Perhaps as they were writing in 2009, amidst historically low approval ratings for Bush and in the wake of Obama’s victory, Best and Marcus forgot that the 2004 election records popular approval for Bush after two of the three events they cite.
If the same kind of immediacy and transparency that Best and Marcus impute to the Bush years could also reasonably be imputed to earlier periods, then we cannot conclude that their views were formed in response to changing conditions. This is evidence that the Bush administration functions not as a provocation for their call to reject “demystifying protocols” but as a post hoc rationalization. There is nothing new about Bush’s disregard for international law, civil rights, equitable treatment or transparently responsive governance—all of which are consistent with Republican Party rhetoric and policy under the Nixon, Reagan and Trump administrations. In the same way, the skepticism professed by Best and Marcus regarding political engagement in literary studies is not new. Hostility toward democratic governance is consistent with skepticism about the efficacy or desirability of political engagement,
