John Guillory is famous (in certain circles) for his use of the concepts “cultural capital” and “social capital” to take whacks at literary scholars and their pretensions. God knows pretensions always need a good whack, but it makes me nervous when people emphasize sociopolitical concepts like that at the expense of the esthetic (which is always in danger, because it has no obvious utility). At any rate, Dan Sinykin has a good Nation review (archived) of Guillory’s new book On Close Reading:
“What is close reading?” a professor asked us on the first day of a seminar on modern American poetry. I could see that he was needling us, deflating our presumptions. We all pretended that we knew what close reading meant. We not only talked about it but we did it. We knew it when we saw it, and we knew when it was done badly—but what it was, in the end, we couldn’t exactly say. You might think it strange for literature students to be incapable of describing a core practice of their field, but we weren’t alone.
In his slim new volume, On Close Reading, John Guillory sets out to explain what close reading is and “why it has been so difficult to define” by way of a fascinating anthropology of reading that makes available new arguments in defense of the practice. At first glance, the book might appear to be an addendum to Guillory’s 40-plus-year project to clarify what literary study achieves—and, pointedly, what it doesn’t. But On Close Reading is more than that: It helps to clarify the stakes involved in reading to begin with, even if we might quarrel with its conclusions.
After a summary of Guillory’s earlier work, Sinykin continues:
On Close Reading, then, reads like a postscript, a bit that Guillory couldn’t fit into his previous book. But though it is slim, On Close Reading is not slight. In it, Guillory situates close reading in a wide historical, political, and sociological context. Exegetes and interpreters have “read closely”—which is not the same, he argues, as “closely read”—for millennia, from biblical commentators to the “philological and textual” critics of the Renaissance to hermeneuts in the German tradition of Schleiermacher and Gadamer to French practitioners of explication de texte. But in the early 20th century, groups of scholars in England and the United States sought to provide a newly rigorous basis for interpretation, changing how professionals in the Anglophone world read (and still read) today.
(Note that no Russians are mentioned, and a Google Books search shows that Guillory ignores the formalists and their immensely influential version of close reading, but that is, sadly, only to be expected in the Anglophone world of walled-off scholarship. But to continue…)
It’s a familiar enough story that Guillory largely takes it for granted. Close reading emerged in England in the 1920s among “practical critics” like I.A. Richards and William Empson at Cambridge University, and shortly thereafter in the United States among “New Critics” like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. But while Richards and Empson were progressives, most of the New Critics were conservatives, even reactionaries, profoundly influenced by T.S. Eliot’s indictment of modernity and his reevaluation of the canon (demoting John Milton, for example, while elevating John Donne). Key founders of the New Criticism had belonged to the so-called Southern Agrarians, who published a manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930, in which they rejected industrial modernity and romanticized the Old South, espousing white supremacy. (In later years, Warren revised his position, publishing a book of interviews with civil rights activists.)
New Criticism dominated the US academy from the 1940s to the ’60s. Language and form took precedence over history and politics. A New Critic focused on short passages in a literary work to show how it used ambiguity, irony, and paradox to express its ideas and accomplish an organic whole.
At the time, the New Critics did not call what they were doing close reading. Drawing on an extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography compiled by Scott Newstok—a gift to the discipline that accompanies the text of On Close Reading—Guillory demonstrates that the term gained currency in the late 1960s, right as the New Criticism fell out of favor, and was used by its enemies to describe its method. Ever since then, we’ve been debating whether close reading was corrupted by the bad politics of some its earliest practitioners. Yet even if the term started as something of a pejorative, close reading itself quickly became the core practice of the discipline. Few literature scholars today would call themselves New Critics, but almost all are close readers.
In On Close Reading, Guillory contributes to the debate by asking the following questions: What have we inherited from close reading’s conservative and sometimes reactionary origins? Does close reading attune us to literary form to the exclusion of history? Can scholars say it is a formalist practice with suspect baggage but then use it to make historicist and progressive—even radical—arguments?
Guillory aims to answer these questions by attempting something that has proved stubbornly elusive: to define close reading itself. Drawing from the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his student André Leroi-Gourhan, Guillory argues that close reading is a “cultural technique” more than anything else, a “set of methodical actions that accomplish specific ends, that alter something in our environment or in ourselves.” His point in using such technical language is to situate close reading as a kind of reading and to make clear that reading is a long-standing practice of the human animal that belongs to the same category as “swimming, dancing, riding a bicycle, even tying shoelaces.”
Seen in this way, close reading, like these other cultural practices, “has no ideological or political implications whatsoever.” Fredric Jameson and Edward Said performed close readings just as Harold Bloom and Allen Tate did. Close reading is simply “a technique of reading that makes an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation.” It entails nothing more than showing one’s work. “We might be tempted to say of ‘showing the work of reading,’ ‘Is that all?’” Guillory writes. “Yes, that is all.” And if that is all—if close reading is nothing more than transforming quotes into evidence to explain how one reaches a certain conclusion about the text—then the technique is not predisposed to formalist analysis and can as easily be put to work (as it routinely is, despite how scholars still talk about it) for historicist ends. One might use close reading to reveal the formal logic behind how Jane Austen creates her characters, just as one might use it to demonstrate how the classicist orderliness of Austen’s novels depends on the slave trade in Antigua and the history of the British Empire.
But, Guillory hastens to note, there is a different kind of politics in close reading: “The distribution of techniques almost always has political causes and consequences.” Against those who foreground close reading’s ideological content, Guillory prioritizes its function in the institutional context of the school. The New Critics, he argues, developed close reading less to disseminate conservative nostalgia for preindustrial organicism and more to shore up the cultural capital of a university education in literary study during a time of mass literacy with a technique designed to analyze particularly difficult literary texts, especially those of the high modernists and the metaphysical poets. Knowing how to close-read became an expression of one’s training in higher education, a relatively rare form of reading that endows one with a high level of cultural capital. By transforming quotations into evidence for claims that can undergo peer review and become scholarship, close reading served the New Critics “as the basis for asserting criticism as a specialized knowledge”—a desideratum demanded by the modern research university. […]
Seen through Guillory’s argument, close reading is invaluable. By defining reading as a cultural technique and by framing it anthropologically, Guillory challenges our familiarity with it; most of us learn to read at a such a young age that we have forgotten how difficult it is to master “even at the simplest level.” In the 1920s, I.A. Richards conducted an experiment in his Cambridge classroom, sending students home to annotate poems from which he’d removed the author’s name. He discovered that although his students were otherwise quite talented, they often failed at basic comprehension, let alone interpretation.
To address this now shockingly visible problem, Richards and his colleagues and heirs—from Empson and Warren to Helen Vendler—developed close reading. Our misapprehension about the simplicity of reading offers an opportunity for literary scholars to make a case for ourselves: Because reading is actually difficult, we need experts to teach and specialize in it.
But Guillory’s minimal definition—close reading entails merely showing one’s work, making “an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation”—produces inadvertent consequences that undercut such a case. For one, it might misinform prospective close readers. A close reading is not an accurate representation of one’s reading process: The work one shows—and one does show a curated selection of that work—is, in accomplished close readings, highly crafted and designed for persuasion through argumentation and inductive reasoning. Guillory’s neglect of argument is a crucial elision.
Guillory privileges close reading as an epistemological practice: Critics interpret texts to add to our store of knowledge. But in so doing, he makes another elision, here of aesthetics. Epistemology is, after all, only half of what makes a close reading work. Paul Fleming recently argued that “the insight of a close reading is inextricable from its aesthetic effect; the reading itself must also be a work of art…. Like Kant’s ‘aesthetic idea,’ the beautiful close reading gives you more to think about than would seem to be contained in a few short passages.” If we focus only on how close reading serves as a means for knowledge, we miss this beauty, and so we miss the appeal, for many, of close reading.
Hear, hear! (Via chavenet’s MetaFilter post; the comment thread provides a vivid example of the kind of thing that made me stop interacting at MeFi: “who cares whether the practices of the New Criticism can be used to make progressive arguments? Are there people who sincerely believe that critics using the techniques of New Criticism will be able to persuade people to adopt progressive views? What on earth is the hope here? Are we really supposed to take literary criticism of any kind as an instrument of emancipation?” To which I say: oh, fuck off.)
Addendum. Scott Newstok has sent me a link to his very handy Close Reading Archive:
This archive was compiled in conjunction with John Guillory’s book On Close Reading, in which my print bibliography documents some key moments in the still-unfolding history of close reading—from its tentative origins to the recent flood of scholarship on the subject.
In aggregate, this archive corroborates that the phrase “close reading” has remained in contentious circulation for nearly a century. Constructed on the principle of quotation rather than narration, the archive recovers a tacit discourse that is happening in, below, and through all sorts of other arguments.
As you explore the archive, you might find yourself surprised by the sheer volume of writing on this topic, which has steadily increased since the 1970s, apparently unaffected by shifting disciplinary tides. Patterns begin to emerge: early comments about close reading tend to stem from outside the university, while contemporary scholars increasingly attempt to establish the genealogy of the practice.
Thanks, Scott!
If we focus only on how close reading serves as a means for knowledge, we miss this beauty, and so we miss the appeal, for many, of close reading.
It has been over half a century since Elias Rivers, Paul Olson, Harry Sieber et al. at Johns Hopkins steered me to Northrup Frye and Anatomy of Criticism. If memory is accurate, Frye, with his centripetal/structural and centrifugal/aesthetic view of criticism insisted on the importance of both.
The faculty of the Romance Language Department valued Frye, and “close reading of text” as genuine literary investigation, as opposed to their erstwhile colleagues, de Man and Derrida and their deconstructionist efforts.
Public flogging for people who create this kind of terminology.
Nominative determinism: “veil maker”.
Ha!
When I was at school we had to do things called close tests, which were not the same as either reading closely or closely reading. I think.
Wikipedia calls them cloze tests: “A cloze test (also cloze deletion test or occlusion test) is an exercise, test, or assessment in which a portion of text is masked and the participant is asked to fill in the masked portion of text.” Is that what you’re talking about?
OED says “Shortening of closure n.”; first citation:
Interesting. And peculiar. I obviously don’t remember seeing it written down!
The one in my higher Spanish exam was all about a velo, which most of us thought was a bicycle – we were quite surprised when we got round to looking it up afterwards and discovered it was a veil. It didn’t stop us putting fairly sensible answers in, so whether that makes the test pointless or merely adaptable I don’t know!
And peculiar.
Yes, a very odd choice of spelling!
I think both Allen Tate and Harold Bloom would have been quite surprised to find their names linked to each other as if they were peas-in-a-pod factional allies. The academic reviewer is admittedly a young whippersnapper who was not even old enough to buy beer legally (in the U.S.) at any point in the 20th century, but one feels as if one is being served a reductive-to-clueless narrative about the history of 20th century literary criticism. Unless, of course, one accepts the perhaps-reactionary allegation that the most important thing to know about the other two they are contrasted to (Jameson and Said) was that J & S may have been fundamentally uninterested in literature qua literature (as opposed to literature as raw material for some bullshit political polemic), in which I case I suppose Tate and Bloom would have agreed that whatever their manifold other differences and disagreements they were both on the side of thinking literature qua literature to be something worth enjoying. And likewise neither would have been inclined to disagree with the notion that the supposed “cultural capital” associated with being able to speak intelligently about a poem was in fact something that students should be willing to pay universities cash money for the chance to obtain.
J.W. Brewer said much of what I wanted to say, but better.
My only remaining comment is about Jane Austen. Close reading of Mansfield Park will reveal that she had no understanding of the economics of British estates. Slave plantations exist only as plot devices to remove people from the scene, with the the physical, temporal, and monetary scales involved being brushed over and irrelevant. They are in no way fundamental to the plot; they are merely present because they seemed ordinary to Austen at the time of her writing.
“AI Overview”, which Google thinks we should start our days with instead of a morning prayer, gives this quote when asked about “close reading”:
“Close reading is a detailed analysis of a text, focusing on specific elements like word choice, syntax, and structure to understand its meaning, according to Wikipedia and Haverd College. It goes beyond comprehension to interpretation and analysis, helping readers move from literal to inferential understanding, as explained by We Are Teachers and Oregon State University.”
I ended up reading the full review, not closely, and by the end of it the author replaces a call to socialist revolution with a call for close reading (in his, not Guillory’s, definition). Very subversive.
See the Addendum for a useful Close Reading Archive.
Does the name Austen/Austin tell us anything about how the aw-gis-TEEN/aw-GUS-tin question from another thread was answered a few centuries ago? It’s easier for me to see a path from aw-gis-TEEN.
It’s even easier if you stress the first syllable, as 1) would be expected of English given how old the name is there and 2) actually happens in German.
I for one have never heard aw-gis-TEEN, either for the saint or the city in Florida.
I assume Rodger C would accept AW-gis-teen, while allowing for noticeable secondary stress on the “teen” syllable (modulo whether “gis” is the best way to show a schwa in the second syllable)?
@Jen in Edinburgh
My father tells that in his high school French exam (this would’ve probably been in ’56) there was something about a piéton, and some had diligently translated how a python should always look left and right before crossing the street.
the physical, temporal, and monetary scales involved being brushed over and irrelevant. They are in no way fundamental to the plot; they are merely present because they seemed ordinary to Austen at the time of her writing
this, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of hinge point where the imperatives of the conservative project of classical New Criticism (glide on by the slavery – it’s not important to the internal mechanics of the novel!) and of a mechanistic marxian approach (ignore the slavery except insofar as you can critique/dismiss austen for being inattentive to the economics) both fail as ways of understanding texts. which is why the combination of close reading and historical/contextual criticism that jameson, said, delany, sedgwick, and others exemplify is so important: the williamsian “no analysis but through the text itself” principle*, plus recognizing that a text in isolation can be made to mean anything and so can mean nothing.
to my eye what’s important about the omnipresence of the plantation in austen (…, brontë, et al) is precisely that it’s so ordinary, and what’s interesting in looking at it is examining (through close reading) what the texts do and don’t know about it as they take it for granted, and what that means for the flow of a book or a genre (in terms of plot, of emotional dynamics, of what humanness and englishness encompass and exclude). which is why to me Wide Sargasso Sea is such a fascinating piece of close reading, as well as a fine novel in itself. i could say something similar about, say, domestic work in van vechten and mckay’s harlem novels, which know and don’t know rather different but overlapping things about it.
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* which is what i take to define “close reading” as an enterprise: the idea that what a text is is the specific patterning of its writing, down to the level of words (sonically as well as semantically), and that meaningful criticism has to address that patterning directly, rather than dealing with form only at the level of character and plot.
Every text is poetry?
No, but every text can be written in a more or less poetic way (cf Jakobson)
down to the level of words (sonically as well as semantically)
Heck, sometimes down to letters, punctuation, and layout.
There is of course a risk of what you might call “overly close reading,” where turning up the magnification on the microscope when peering at trivial details causes noise to be misperceived as signal, and exegesis turns into eisegesis and pareidolia.
@JWB: it seems to me that overfitting is always a risk when building models, rather than a specific issue with close reading
Ever since then, we’ve been debating whether close reading was corrupted by the bad politics of some its earliest practitioners
The evil twin of this is the equally stupid idea that if you’re a proper socialist you really ought to have a downmarket taste in the arts.
More broadly, that your ideology should shape your sense of what happens in the world, rather than the converse.
It’s weird in the arts, but more damaging in journalism and politics. Here’s an example from an article I read yesterday, where ideology apparently dictated “This never happens, so admitting it happened this once isn’t worth the damage to our ideological position. Better not to prosecute the crime.”
I know of failure to prosecute two other situations like this in different states – one in which I took part in the investigation, and the prosecutor wouldn’t even follow up on a confession. But “it never happens.”
There is of course a risk of what you might call “overly close reading,” where turning up the magnification on the microscope when peering at trivial details causes noise to be misperceived as signal, and exegesis turns into eisegesis and pareidolia.
Cf. “Shadows in the Water: Overreading (in) the Renaissance,” what sounds like an interesting talk by Elizabeth Swann.
Guillory may not talk about the so-called Russian Formalists, but Sinykin’s review does carry on the other Russian tradition (dating to the Stalin era) of talking about “formalism” as assumed to be an Obviously Bad Thing, such that he’s at pains to argue that close reading can be decoupled from formalism. It is possible of course that he’s granting for the sake of argument the presumed anti-formalist prejudices of the readership of magazine in which he’s publishing the review (to avoid getting bogged down in a collateral dispute) rather than personally endorsing the Stalinist condemnation of formalism.
What on earth are you on about? He never uses the word “formalism” once and gives no evidence of even being aware of “the Stalinist condemnation of formalism”; he uses “formalist” twice, in the following contexts:
Do some close reading of your own and explain to me how he’s “talking about ‘formalism’ as assumed to be an Obviously Bad Thing.” On the face of it, you seem to be importing your own hair-trigger suspicions of academic presumed leftists (aka pointy-headed intellectuals).
The deliberate contrasting of “formalist” with “progressive — even radical” is a pretty clear signal that “formalist” is understood as coming with inherent or at least presumptive political baggage unlikely to appeal to the Nation’s readership. Similarly, specifically aligning “historicist” with the latter two positive-valence adjectives, using an “and” rather than an “or,” if we’re doing close reading. Why not just treat formalist-v-historicist as its own methodological tension/contrast that doesn’t neatly or necessarily map onto politics? Perhaps because that’s not the Party Line, comrade.
Admittedly, Sinykin’s penultimate paragraph where he seems positively inclined toward aesthetic experience as an autonomous human pursuit may be in some tension with some editions of the Party Line.
The most stunning part, in a culture-shocked way, is that there doesn’t seem to be a court that immediately orders the election to be repeated.
@David Marjanović: There just isn’t any mechanism, legislative or judicial, for re-running elections in America.
I know that’s the case at the federal level and in some (most?) states, but I’ve read of rerun elections somewhere in the US.
FWIW, here’s another vote-fraud guilty plea obtained last year in the same part of the country by the same federal prosecutor’s office, back when a different administration and political party had its appointees in the senior positions. Perhaps the political sensitivities were different, of course. https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/montgomery-county-man-pleads-guilty-election-fraud-offenses
Distinctive features of local speech in this part of Pennsylvania (Delaware County alias “Delco”) were much in the news four years ago when the English actress Kate Winslet attracted positive attention for doing a surprisingly credible Delco accent while starring in the tv miniseries “Mare of Easttown.” So of course what I’m now curious about is the extent to which the US-born children of the Bangladeshi-immigrant population are exhibiting that accent.
Yes, there are exceptions, enabled by specific state or local legislation. However, they are far from the norm, and without preexisting provisions for such in a given jurisdiction, there is nothing in the remit of the courts to permit an election to be redone
I don’t understand why that article gives numbers of votes for the primary but not for the general election, which was the one with the fraud. There were 107 votes for Tayub and 56 write-ins. Would other countries invalidate an election because of fraudulent votes if those votes weren’t enough to change the winner and if the winner wasn’t involved in the fraud? It seems like that would penalize the innocent winner.
The colorful vagaries of small-fry municipal politics in Delco reminded me of the time back when I was a kid in the Seventies when the borough government of Marcus Hook, Pa. (at the other end of the county and right up against the state line that I lived close to on the other side) became de facto controlled for a few years by the local chapter of the Pagan’s Motorcycle Club, until they were turfed out of power by a crusading young mayor who was the uncle of a kid I went to school with at the time, with the mayor then using that success as the springboard to a fairly lengthy tenure as a Congressman.
I am pleased to learn via googling, btw, that the U.S. Department of Justice has now decided to respect the non-standard apostrophe usage of the Pagan’s when issuing press releases about convicting their members. As witness this from just a few days ago and quite a bit further west: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/three-pagans-motorcycle-club-members-pleaded-guilty-armed-assaults-against-rivals
(Ah, I missed that.) Probably only if there was no reason to suspect there could have been even more fraud that wasn’t detected. Austria’s latest presidential runoff election was repeated because there was enough sloppiness – no evidence of fraud, nor even accusations of such, just cases of ballot envelopes being opened too early and/or with too few people in the room, that kind of thing – that it was possible the wrong candidate could have won if enough of the sloppiness involved malice.
I don’t know how many countries would go as far as Romania, which just repeated its latest presidential election because there was a huge Russian propaganda effort before the election – nothing wrong with any ballot or the counting thereof. (The runoff is yet to come.)
One practical problem is that you typically want to sort out the results of an election and come to finality (which could in principle be concluding “hey this is a hopeless mess, let’s just do it again” rather than declaring a definitive winner) within a matter of days or at most weeks after the election, with thus comparatively little time to investigate and adjudicate any significantly complex or disputed questions of fact with a high degree of confidence that you’ve definitely gotten it right. The Millbourne timeline of criminal charges not being brought until 2025 for hanky-panky that occurred back in 2021 may be rather leisurely, but it allowed plenty of time for evidence to be amassed that apparently the defendants decided they would have no hope of successfully challenging or explaining away at trial. I was mildly surprised to learn that some of the miscreants who won their own elections in 2021 are still in office, but it looks like the borough council has staggered four-year terms so half the membership is up for election every two years, and maybe it’s better than the miscreants having been up for reelection in 2023 with a criminal investigation perhaps lurking quietly in the background but not having reached any particular denouement.
@DM, the runoff in Romania happened on May 18 innit? And the candidate who doesn’t like Putin won, which will hopefully be good for the country. Reportedly, it was met with some relief in the bigger EU partners.
Also relief in the smaller EU partners. Simion, the “pro-Putin” candidate is just a pretty nasty fascist all around, the kind of person who sees Antonescu as a hero. Needless to say, he had the full backing of the Trump administration, who still has not congratulated Dan on his victory, last I checked.
One language note – Simion announced late in his campaign that he would ban primary education in any other language than Romanian. This naturally went over very badly in the 3 majority Hungarian speaking counties in Transylvania, and that may have given Dan the edge.
The Magyar-heavy counties were pretty much the only ones where Simion did not finish first in the first round.
*facepalm* Yes, the runoff was on Sunday and went as described.
I didn’t know that. That’s just stupid of him.
A stupid fascist — who’d have thought?
I know, right?
Why not just treat formalist-v-historicist as its own methodological tension/contrast that doesn’t neatly or necessarily map onto politics?
I think, Sinykin had a different approach. He seems to work under the assumption that “close reading” was developed specifically within formalist approach to literary studies and politically conservative movement. Now he tries to extricate close reading from these connections and say that if you are more historically inclined and on a leftist or radical side, you can use it with no more difficulty.
David, a number of elections have been re-run for fraud, including mayor’s races in Miami, FL, and the much smaller East Chicago, IN. And a Congressional race was re-run about 8 years ago in North Carolina.
We debated whether to seek a court ruling overturning the election in the first case I investigated. The relevant contest was close. We didn’t have absolute evidence that the fraudulent ballots changed the outcome, but it was suggestive, and my understanding is that the judge in East Chicago reversed that election on the basis that it wasn’t clear who would have won. My office ultimately shied away from doing so. There was a belief that a campaign should challenge, rather than our office doing so.
Note that the article reflects what was charged – a failed mail ballot scheme, but not the other situations, one of which we had a confession in (real voter resident outside the village, given a way to register from a fake address during early voting), and several others of which seemed pretty clear cut.
The evidence from suspicious mail ballot applications suggested that at least two campaigns were involved, but we weren’t able to determine who had accepted the ballots from the second campaign.
But the evidence to me implied a practice of longstanding that had forced others to think “we can’t win if we don’t adopt those tactics.” This kind of undercut the idea that a campaign would challenge the election – there were actually three factions, and we had clear links to only two, but it’s possible nobody had clean hands, and not clear how anyone with clean hands would have known to challenge.
We had also placed observers in precincts in this village during the relevant election, and a series of people (I forget, but more than 5 less than 15) came in who, when asked their name and address, pulled out pieces of paper to look at. We asked our observers to challenge them, and all decided not to contest the challenge. If one walked away, I might have feared we had deterred a genuine voter. But when more than a half dozen did so without anyone saying “WTF! I am who I say I am and it’s my right to vote!” it was clear that we had broken up another attempt. So we experienced attacks all three forms of voting — mail, precinct and early voting in the same small town.
There was a sense that our single conviction would deter future problems. I was always dubious of that. It seemed more likely to shape future attacks away from the failed method.
JWB wrote:
>The Millbourne timeline of criminal charges not being brought until 2025 for hanky-panky that occurred back in 2021 may be rather leisurely, but it allowed plenty of time for evidence to be amassed
Well, no. Actually, the local investigator admitted he was getting pressure not to prosecute. That delayed the case for it’s unclear how long, but something over a year. It was only after Tayub’s mento brought the evidence to the FBI that the Feds reinvigorated the case, and then the embarrassed local prosecutor got back into motion. The timeline was still long, but nothing like 4 years.
>There were 107 votes for Tayub and 56 write-ins.
You’ve provided only the election day totals. There were actually 165 for Tayub and 138 for write-in. Write-in did very well in the mail balloting, yielding an overall margin of 27 rather than 51.
This doesn’t invalidate your underlying point, since I think Tayub, the winner, was the victim of the fraud ring. So there wasn’t anything to overturn. But it makes clear that the fraud made a close contest out of one that should not have been.
Why not just treat formalist-v-historicist as its own methodological tension/contrast that doesn’t neatly or necessarily map onto politics?
(saying nothing about sinykin or guillory) sure, that’s a methodological contrast that has its own dynamics – if you look at it from a purely formalist perspective. once you allow some historicism into the conversation, some pretty clear correlations appear that say things about who uses, and especially who argues for, a pure formalism, and who uses, and especially who argues for, history and context being part of even a centrally formalist approach.
To cut and paste somewhat lazily from wiki on historicism:
“These ideas can be interpreted variously. The Right Hegelians, working from Hegel’s opinions about the organicism and historically determined nature of human societies, interpreted Hegel’s historicism as a justification of the unique destiny of national groups and the importance of stability and institutions. Hegel’s conception of human societies as entities greater than the individuals who constitute them influenced nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and its twentieth-century excesses. The Young Hegelians, by contrast, interpreted Hegel’s thoughts on societies influenced by social conflict for a doctrine of social progress, and attempted to manipulate these forces to cause various results. Karl Marx’s doctrine of ‘historical inevitabilities’ and historical materialism is one of the more influential reactions to this part of Hegel’s thought.”
Something for everyone!
The Poverty of Historicism is one of those books that I vaguely feel I ought to read, while knowing that I absolutely never will.
Expanding on JWB’s point:
I don’t think progressivism actually entails historicism. (In fact, I can make this statement more or less vacuously true by exploiting the vagueness of the term “progressive.”)
More concretely: you don’t have to be a Marxist to be a lefty (despite what the current American regime keeps spewing on the subject.)
And most certainly, historicism does not entail progressivism.
So using “historicist” as if it was more or less synonomous with “progressive” is, at best, sloppy writing, and, at worst, shows a deep confusion of thought on the part of the writer.
o, i’m certainly not arguing for progressivism – or for progressivism as correlating with historicism! progressivism (in its Inevitable Stages version*) is central to the un-if-not-anti-historicist formalism of the mechanistic marxian** criticism i sniped at earlier – and part of why i disagree with it politically as well as finding it unsatisfying as a mode of reading.
also, i don’t think any kind of right-side-up hegelianism is or can be historicist. as much as i can get cranky about the old mole, i deeply appreciate what he did by flipping g.w.f. over – which was precisely to make it possible for parts of hegel’s method to be incorporated into historicist approaches by shaking the prioritization of the abstract out of his pockets and throwing it out. historicism depends on materialism (in the technical ‘not-Idealist’ sense); otherwise it’s just fiction with historical characteristics (or, more accurately, myth-making***).
i think historicizing/contextualizing as a core element of critical methodology correlates with criticism that is interested in, and oriented towards, liberatory projects aiming to affect the concrete realities and improve the concrete possibilities of people’s lives (including the concrete realities and possibilities of people’s imaginative, intellectual, and affective lives). that’s a correlation that maps (imperfectly, of course, maps not being territories, but i do think necessarily) onto specific parts of the political landscape. but that mapping certainly doesn’t fall along a progressive/conservative border – which in this era of accelerationism no longer aligns particularly with a left/right line, if it ever really did.
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* also found in less secularized forms, especially among liberals, as the Long, Bent Arc of [Redemptive] History.
** i use “-ian” to label its distance from marx’s concrete methods, not to imply a lack of orthodoxy.
*** which is a perfectly valid, lovely, and important form of cultural work – i do it myself! it’s just not about history, and distinguishing the two projects is important.
It was Sinykin I was sniping at, not you (you probably didn’t think I was, but I thought I’d say so anyway …)
i think historicizing/contextualizing as a core element of critical methodology correlates with criticism that is interested in, and oriented towards, liberatory projects anchored in affecting the concrete realities and improving the concrete possibilities of people’s lives (including the concrete realities and possibilities of people’s imaginative, intellectual, and affective lives)
I agree with that, though I wouldn’t quite equate contextualising with historicising. But I must admit that the insight that our ways of life – and thought – are very much determined by our economic situation (as opposed to vice versa, the archetypal American myth) is something we owe (in practice) to that notorious historicist Marx.