Part 3 Derrida and Experience The experience, the passion of language and writing… Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature We are scientific because we lack subtlety. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 02:17:26PM via free access Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 02:17:26PM via free access The Empirical Turn I like to play with words but experience is what is most important. Walter Benn Michaels Walter Benn Michaels made the above statement during a recent visit to Poland to mark the release of the Polish translation of his book The Shape of the Signifier. While the comment was made casually and somewhat ironically in reference to a different and undoubtedly more serious topic, it continues to reverberate in my mind, because these words reflect the changes that have recently taken place in literary studies in the US and other countries. The turn towards experience, seen by literary scholars as both a badly needed and relatively unexplored field of research, is undoubtedly part of the broader, continuing poststructuralist trans- formation in the humanities. The empirical turn is essentially a deliberate and unapologetic renouncement of the scientific approach, objectivity, universality, and comprehensive systemic constructs, i.e. a moving away from everything that modern theory has instilled in literary studies. In its place, the humanities, and thus literary studies, have embraced anthropological and cultural perspectives, making literary theory ‘human’ once again. Ryszard Nycz points to this change in an essay tellingly titled ‘From Modern Theory to the Poetics of Experience’ [‘Od teorii nowoczesnej do poetyki doświadczenia’]: since the 1970s changes in literary studies have been mainly stimulated by a number of diverse tendencies which grew out of opposition to the doctrinal claims of modern theory. […] We now refer to these tendencies as the anthropological and cultural turn. [KT2 31] Indeed, after the long reign of ‘strong’ theories, after deconstruction, after the ethical and political turn, after repeated conceptual tumult and other ‘turns’ in modern literary studies, we are now experiencing a growing interest in previ- ously neglected (‘unscientific’) topics such as ‘feeling’, ‘corporeality’, ‘the senses, ‘shame’, ‘revulsion’, ‘pleasure’, ‘sexuality’, ‘desire’ and many others that have unex- pectedly (especially for theory itself) found their way into the dictionary of lit- erary theory. ‘Experience’ is another such topic. It is a term broad enough to include all the above-mentioned phenomena, but one which offers a completely Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 02:17:26PM via free access 316 The Empirical Turn new perspective on literature and culture. This perspective has invigorated lit- erary theory, because, as Nycz rightly points out, theory has displayed a ‘ten- dency to intellectualize its object’ for far too long [KT2 33], mainly because of its desire to find for the scientific study of literature (and the humanities) the equivalent of the methodological dogma of the so-called closed system that has brought so much benefit to the natural sciences. [KT2 34] As a result, however, ‘the ethical, sensual, affective, and experiential perspec- tive’ was marginalized or suppressed [KT2 33]. But as scholars grew weary of dogmatic models and theoretical formulas that were distant from (literary and real-life) practices, a yearning for change arose, a desire to rediscover these mar- ginalized, yet crucial aspects of literature. By both establishing its own autonomy and assuming the autonomy of art and literature, modern theory had distanced itself from everything that could threaten it, thereby walling itself off from his- tory, culture, society, visuality, materiality, and, above all, from the body, senses, emotions, gender, and sexuality. These walls were first breached by poststruc- turalism, which attacked the monolith of ‘strong theory’, and in doing so, made a significant contribution to a revival in scholarly interest in the writing and reading of literature. The early poststructuralists’ successors restored the lost connection between literature and its external (social and political) contexts. Neopragmatism (for obvious reasons) strengthened the value of practice and broadened the horizons of philosophy and literary studies. This included Richard Rorty’s call for a return to ‘sentimentality’ and the emotional treatment of litera- ture, and Stanley Fish’s notion of ‘affective stylistics’. In the now-famous ‘Against Theory’589 debate, in which Benn Michaels argued against ‘strong’ versions of theory, neopragmatist and deconstruction scholars initiated a turn away from interpretation as the validation of results, opening up room for a new perspective on literature (and reading), which now ceased to be conceived of as a ‘vessel of meaning’ and became instead a ‘vessel of experience’ or a practice that produces experience. Neopragmatism and deconstruction proposed seeing language as ‘the organ of propositional perception’, which, as the American neopragmatist philosopher Donald Davidson observed, was no longer a mental tool, but a tool of perception for ‘seeing sights and hearing sounds’.590 Post-psychoanalytic scholars, especially those interested in the theories of Freud, Lacan, Barthes, and 589 Sparked by the publication of S. Knapp and W. B. Michaels’ article ‘Against Theory’ in Critical Inquiry 1982, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 723–742. 590 Nycz also mentions this [KT2 44]. Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 02:17:26PM via free access The Empirical Turn 317 Kristeva, also made a significant ‘empirical’ contribution to literary studies. This was particularly true in terms of sexuality, which in Kristeva’s theory is seen as a constant series of interventions by ‘the semiotic’ (the bodily and the sensual) in the ‘symbolic’ (the intelligible). The popularity of post-Lacanian concepts in the following phase of poststructuralism made it possible to introduce the ‘trauma’, ‘desire’ and (sexual) ‘pleasure’ experienced during reading (as described by Barthes) into literary discourse on ‘eventalization.’ Feminism(s) (especially so-called ‘corporeal feminism’), gender studies, and queer theory also played a significant role in opening up the ‘scientific’ study of literature to the problems of corporeality, sexuality, and gender. All of the tendencies mentioned above, and many others, were joined in their resistance to the dogmatism of modern theory, and sought not only to make theory more ‘sensitive’ to diverse cultural practices, but also to present it with a fresh anthropological perspective. A new understanding of the various entities participating in cultural practices also played an important role in this process. Early postmodernism and poststructuralism alongside various cultural (ethical, political, feminist, gender, queer, post-psychoanalytical, performance and even somatic) trends questioned the modern Cartesian subject, advancing instead the notion of a historically-grounded, culturally-variable, desire-driven, and gendered ‘humanized’ entity, in which the mind, the senses, and the body were united. Performativity further strengthened such a notion: it placed emphasis on ‘agency’ as an important aspect of the subjective relationship with the world and defined art in terms of experience. As a consequence of these changes, the ethical and political turn, the performative turn, and numerous other turns, a new sem- inal turn loomed on the horizon. It can be called the ‘turn towards experience’ or simply ‘the empirical turn.’ Ryszard Nycz thus describes its consequences: it seems that we are thus, with no regrets, moving away from autonomous literature (art) towards culturally produced, experienced, and legitimized literature (art); ‘nobody’s’ perspective is giving way to ‘somebody’s’ personal perspective, a priori theory is being replaced by practical theory. [KT2 35] Theory and literary are turning toward ‘practice’ (as Michel Foucault put it591) and expanding into new territories. They are undergoing fundamental changes, which may revive them and re-establish the bond with experience that was sev- ered by modern theory. 591 I am referring here to Foucault’s famous ‘oxymoron’ ‘theory is practice’. Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 02:17:26PM via free access Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/24/2021 02:17:26PM via free access Life after Theory We are trying to reinvent invention itself, another invention, or rather an invention of the other that would come through the economy of the same. Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’ Attempting to re-establish a bond between literary studies/philosophy and ‘the lifeworld’592 might seem like a challenging task, but everything now indicates (fortunately) that there is no turning back from this path. This is not a question of recycling old, familiar existentialist catchphrases akin to ‘existence precedes essence’, although echoes of such slogans reverberate in this ‘revival of life (in) theory’ as well. Experience, as one of the key categories in humanities discourse, poses new challenges and requires a new language of description, one that would fundamentally change the concept of literature, no longer conceived of as a ‘vessel of meaning’, but, as Benn Michaels writes in The Shape of the Signifier, as an