being there?: literary criticism, localism, and local knowledge

DAVID SIMPSON

Being there?: literary criticism, localism, and local knowledge

In ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ Yeats articulated as an ideal future for his child what is surely one of the most powerful fantasies of modern life. He hoped that she might live like ’some green laurel/ Rooted in one dear perpetual place’.’ To image her thus as a ’flourishing hidden tree’ is to suggest that she cannot be transplanted without loss of identity and even life itself. Roots, for a tree, are more than a metaphor. As trees stay in one place, so they are free from individual self-consciousness and from cultural confusion. And for human beings, green shades make green thoughts. At least since Adam Smith proposed that the health of the capitalist economy depended upon the unencumbered movement of the labour force, the post-industrial pastoral has purveyed a compensatory image of stability by way of a conjunction of the rural and the domestic, happy families in fixed localities. Of course, there are complications. The desire for a still point in a turning world has always been countered by the urge for going some- where: it is a fine line between the tragic rhetoric of enforced exile and the picaresque desire to go a-roving. Moreover, we should not re+ the country life as one made up of comfortable localities - being there and staying there - as if there has never been any migration within the rural economy itself, as if coming and going were simply the result of some avoidable metropolitan contagion.

But then there has not been, for a number of centuries in the developed world, a rural economy independent of an urban economy. So that there is some discursive integrity, at least, to the localist ideal as a counterweight to the seemingly inexorable displacements that define most people’s notions of modern living. This has meant that the metaphoric charge of localism has been very much that of security and simplicity. To stay in one place is to learn all about it, to be completely a part of it, to be ecologically identified, and to have, as we might now say, a satisfying subject-position. The psychological collapse of a John Clare when relocated away from his parish is symptomatic of his times and also of the mythologies of our own. Some- times the mythologies are powerfully coincident with an economistic model of the real. This is so for the British miners who sense that relocation alone does not guarantee future employment, and that ’following the job’

4 Critical Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3

is merely a first stage in the complete destruction of both local community and job opportunity. It is so also for the Navaho of Big Mountain, Arizona, who see in relocation the loss of both locality and economic subsistence rather than an invitation to get rich and to participate in the great American dream of upward mobility.

The apostles of modernisation, like Adam Smith, have traditionally applauded the benefits of delocalisation, arguing that it is worth losing your roots to gain running water. And the critics of modernisation, like Yeats, have been equally traditional in their respect for local communities. Ironically, the attribution of ’community’ is often used, in the United States at least, to describe the most radically stressed of all the national subcultures - inner city blacks or reservation Indians are examples. This again is a double-edged language. On the one hand the rhetoric of community serves as a reactionary fantasy for outsiders, whereby those who have almost nothing are imaged as those who have what is ultimately most worth having. This notion visibly contributes to the continued ignoring of the hard needs of such subcultures. Who needs an education or a job when you have a grandmother on the reservation? On the other hand, this same rhetoric of community, in the mouths of those within the subculture, has undoubtedly contributed to a positive sense of empowerment, and has proven an enabling model very much worth pursuing. It is absolutely condescending for outsiders to assume that the traditionalist turn of, for example, the American Indian Movement (AIM) is politically reactionary; it is also inadequate to contend that this alone is the answer to all the problems in contemporary Native American cultures.

Localist rhetoric is, then, a complicated thing, and always asks to be assessed in relation to its specific applications and associations - reactionary, revolutionary, and sometimes both at different levels of analysis. Anglo-American and especially British literary criticism has had an abiding predilection for ethical and methodological localism. Literary critics have mostly prided themselves on being particular, and in speaking for particularity. Give them a theory or a general idea, and they will show you the individual exception, the one that does not so much make the rule as defy all rules. In the eighteenth century, where we may trace the origins of modern literary criticism, the emphasis upon individuality as typicality, in the characters of Shakespeare’s plays as in the English national character, functioned as an empowering or mystifying (take your pick) self-definition for a bourgeois readership that was increasingly formative of the national culture while remaining residually excluded from political power and even from the right to vote. To some degree this has to be read as a middle-class reaction against the conditions of its own class existence in a complex

Being there?: literary criticism, localism, and local knowledge 5

commercial culture based in social and geographical mobility and in a mastery of general ideas. John Locke, one of the great theorists of this new class configuration, scorned the particularist fantasy in describing the necessity of general ideas in the operations of language. He pronounced it impossible that ‘every particular Thing should have a distinct peculiar name’. The human mind cannot hold within it a distinct idea of every particular thing it encounters: ’every Bird, and Beast Men saw; every Tree, and Plant, that affected the Senses’. We cannot function this way in a complex world, where classification by type and general idea is essential: this is why ‘Men have never attempted to give Names to each Sheep in their Flock’, and so forth.*

Locke’s example is prophetically apt. For, of course, a name for every sheep is precisely what is promised in the pastoral ideal. The modernising generalities that characterise species designations in the utilitarian poetries of such as Dyer and Thomson - ’woolly breeders‘ and ’finny tribes’ - are countered by the local nominations of a Clare, who has perhaps the most microscopic denotations of any English poet - and by the acute nominations of a number of Wordsworthian estatesmen who have an eye for every tree and flower and for every minute change in the weather. These poets and protagonists operate by pointing out to us what would otherwise be unnoticed, and is of absolute significance: they perform the poetry of relocalisation.

In its twentieth-century incarnation in the universities, literary criticism has taken much of its energy from this localisation movement. At best, this has had a positive effect on the general configuration of the disciplines, and has served as a brake on the runaway potential of technologism and instrumentalism to operate entirely by general ideas unsupported by particular samplings. At worst, literary criticism’s commitment to minute particulars has provided its exponents with an anti-intellectual rhetoric of exceptionalism and an imaginary stick with which to beat the philosophers and the scientists. The notorious face-off between F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow in the early 1960s was a perfect example of the collapse of the one into the other. There was indeed something vapid, a sort of technologist utopianism, about Snow’s effort to bridge the gap between the ’two cultures’. And it came over as the rationale for a heady and scarcely controlled (for who could have controlled it?) period of postwar modernisation. But the powerful moral concern and moral ideal behind Snow’s argument could and should have been respected and addressed. Leavis failed remarkably in both respect and address when he attacked Snow in the name of ‘something with the livingness of the deepest vital instinct’.3 The debate confirmed, if it needed confirming, that the cosmopolitan ideal


was conformable only with science, and that the literary intellectual remained mired in a reactive localism and little Englandism. Various literary critics who have since - like Paul de Man or the structuralists - crossed the borders into the technological or theoretical, have been punished accord- ingly, and in the same mean spirit, by their kind.

I think that there is something of a revival of localist rhetoric in the terms in which postmodernity is often approved in our current debates. Here, the local and the particular are often identified as determining the only subject-positions that can be properly defined and ethically defended in a society whose fundamental fracturing are a sort of given. This is not the whole story, and I do not mean to invent some simple model of the postmodern only in order to assume the credit for refuting it. Indeed, the entire energy of its best theorists goes toward denying the credibility of such models. I will eventually explore, moreover, the clear differences between the Geertzian account of ’local knowledge’ and the residual ideology of localism I am discussing now. But that residual ideology is by no means absent from the present situation, so that it remains important to recognise and historicise it.

It is, as I have said, deeply English, and the analysis of that sort of thing is no less urgent now than it was during the French Revolution or the scramble for Africa. Burke opposed the French Revolution in the name of particularity and against theory - a theory that was revolutionary and, just as much to the point, French. British culture has always been very particular, and still takes pride in pricking the bubble of what E. P. Thompson likes to call ’grand theory’, with its generalist ambitions, by administering a strong dose of the ‘English idiom’, with its confidence that ’history knows no regular verb^'.^ The British, with their much touted common sense, think of themselves as too much in the world, and too conscious of the endless variety of the human, to fall under the spell of general ideas, whether Cartesian or Althusserian. Some, of course, take pride in the claim that they hate ideas altogether. The cult of common sense is less dominant in America, where there is a greater acceptance of professional- isation, but it is by no means uncommon, and it is especially strident at the moment among the educational neo-conservatives.

Being particular and localist may then mean being very traditional. I well remember the way in which the discipline of literary criticism was adver- tised to me at school and college: always between everyone else’s fixed approaches (historians, philosophers, political scientists), always correct- ing their reifications, always insisting on what Leavis and Williams both liked to call the ‘lived experience’, always returning us to particulars and insisting, moreover, that it was morally improper to be anywhere else.


General ideas could only lead to the Gulag, or at the very least to sociology. The reinvention or recirculation of particularity, whether as a postmodern antidote to the constraints of totalising methods or as a feminist celebration of the minuscule operating within and between the spaces of abstracted masculine ambitions, should then be a subject of some sceptical concern. We have at least to worry a bit about the compliance of these and related positions with the traditional literary critical functions, even if we remain committed to finding a positive use for new positions using the same vocabularies.

After the French Revolution (though not for the first time) localism in Britain came to be identified with an ideology of nationalism. The literary cult of (usually) English country life - a chosen village in a chosen vale - was circulated partly to counteract, again, the Jacobinical universality of grand theory. The English paraded themselves as most properly human precisely as they displaced abstract ideas in favour of lived relations in sparsely populated rural areas (or, in the mercantilist rather than the pastoral version, in thriving market towns). There were dissenting voices - one thinks of Hazlitt’s grumpy contention that ‘all country people hate each other’s - but the localist idiom stood fast even under such challenges. Cities were the scene of commerce, cosmopolitanism, and universalist ideas; in town and country there remained a place for individuality, independent subsistence, and particular judgments.6 The real England. This paradigm sponsored some fairly elaborate political-imaginative economies among such as Wordsworth, Goldsmith and Clare, but even in its complex embodiments it could not be other than francophobe and, of course, against theory. For it also carried an energetic class identity, appealing to the middle ranks exactly insofar as it was anti-aristocratic. Universality, disinterest and mobility, along with a good command of French - then as now the cognate signifiers of ’theory’ - were aristocratic attributes, even if they were not always facts of aristocratic life. The Whig nouueuux riches who were seen to be engrossing the English countryside throughout the eighteenth century were not locals and had no local ties, and their morals and literary tastes were as often French as English. They entertained Voltaire rather than Parson Adams.

We now tend to understand the French Revolution of 1789-92 as a bourgeois revolution. Perhaps that is why it pronounced only briefly the very ideal of universality that was traditionally the property of the aristocratic order it sought to displace. But in Britain there was not even this revolutionary deviation. Cosmopolitanism and grand theory appeared briefly in the early writings of Godwin and Wollstonecraft and Paine and reappeared in the still anti-localist (if finally more conformist) arguments of


the British utilitarians. But localism has remained a strong element in the rhetoric of British national identity, which has willingly made use of the occasional general idea but has never been comfortable with the universal truth.7 The most radically instrumentalist and effectively theoretical of all British politicians could package herself as a grocer’s girl from Grantham, and get away with it.

Localism, then, is a tradition with a chequered history, one calling for analysis rather than celebration. Mere celebration risks redefining what may be an imposed impotence as an ethical or analytical imperative. The psychopathology of divided labour is itself defined as getting things right on a small scale, and hoping for the best. So that to reproduce this com- pulsion as some kind of necessity may well be to enforce rather than to critique the conditions of our culture. (The more likely case is that some things are critiqued while others are reinforced.) It is definitely a condition of life within a complex ideological culture that our prohibitions wander strategically between ethics and epistemology, so that what we cannot know, or have great difficulty knowing, tends to be circulated as that which we should not know, and vice versa. It is too easy to say that we should not mistake an epistemological puzzle for an ethical imperative, when the whole apparatus of description is set up to confuse the two, and to deny us any position from which to make a secure distinction. This, after all, is one of the consequences of life within what Foucault memorably called the ’analytic of finitude’, which he identified as precisely consti- tutive of modernity, and which always subsumes within its logic of uncer- tainty any objectivist efforts at speclfying its own historicality.8 Nonetheless it seems important to preserve the prospect of a distinction between the ethical and the analytical if only as a means of preserving some model of a knowledge yet to come, a knowledge that may one day be believable if it is not now believable, and which may accompany (though I do not think it can alone generate) the very conditions of its own believability. (I am speaking here of another epistemic break, or a revolution, i.e. a dramatic change in the accepted modes of knowledge production.)

All of this is to say - and one has to lodge all the above reservations - that there may be a useful distinction to be made between the ethical and the analytical as varieties of localism, and I shall now briefly try to make it. Take the question of totality, which has been one of the cruxes in various definitions of the postmodern. In its reduced and popularised forms, post- modernist rhetoric says that we cannot know the wholes of which we are a part. All general analysis is inevitably stymied by the determinations of the particular. Either the individual or his or her subculture, or both, will effectively prescribe and limit all that we can see of the world, and all that


we can think. We are all, in other words, inexorably localised. To speak for others will always then be to misspeak, to offer ideology as if it were or could be knowledge.

Two consequences can be drawn from this assumption, and they characterise two kinds of postmodernism. One, the activist model, uses the unknowability of the remote to imply the knowability of the familiar, or at least its integrity (for one does not have to know oneself in order to deserve to be recognised). This can look like a version of traditional localism, wherein we have a name for each of our sheep. The other, a more sceptical and even passivist postmodernism, suggests that we cannot wholly belong to a part, and can thus make no claim to know either the remote or ourselves. These formulations are, analytically conceived, problems of knowledge, and as such are fully in the tradition of similar knowledge problems devolving from Cartesian philosophy. (The emphases and solutions, or pseudo-solutions, have of course differed.) But they tend to present themselves as ethical imperatives: we must not speak for others, for the remote, for the whole, because to do so can only be to reproduce ourselves as universals and to misspeak the critical localism (often called difference) of the other. This collapse of the distinction between the ethical and the epistemological is worth worrying about. To define totality and grand theory as epistemologically difficult (or even for the time being impossible) is not the same as saying that they are ethically improper. Totality is not by definition totalitarian, though it may sometimes in practice prove so. And the integrity of localism itself is hardly beyond question, constructed as it is, as I hope I have shown, in specific cultural-historical terms.

My suggestion is that the analytical problem is not the same as or one with the moral or political problem, within some seamless whole called ‘praxis’. Take Laclau and Mouffe, whose Hegemony and Socialist Strategy has served as a manifesto for postmodern post-Marxism. They call for an end to the ‘Jacobin imaginary’ of grand theory and an immersion in ’that infinite intertextuality of emancipatory discourses in which the plurality of the social takes ~ h a p e ’ . ~ I take this to advise not an abandoning of the effort to make connections, but certainly a putting aside of any desire for a total picture. But as soon as any connection is made, it leads to others, and then one faces again all the questions of mediation and totality that Laclau and Mouffe apparently want us to avoid. There is nothing by definition effective or ineffective about the opportunity to join any one of a thousand local alliances and grassroots campaigns. True, one does not have to operate from the position of knowledge in order to operate effectively; but neither can one assume that whatever denounces the position of knowledge is itself by definition positive or effective. Too often, the renunciation of that


position is a moral rather than an analytical gesture. And as such i’ can look like classic liberalism, and subsist as a reproduction in the cou culture of the terms which the presiding culture has devised to ersLie its own continuance. Again: to mistake an obligatory difficulty or even an impasse in knowledge-seeking for a moral virtue may well be critical category confusion. To endorse it may well be to reproduce rather than to critique the preconditions of life in late-capitalist first world countries whose burgeoning international and domestic underclasses remain more than ever unnoticed and unrepresented as long as those who speak are adamant about speaking only for themselves.

In practice, of course, the prevailing deployment of the rhetoric of ethics is at once localist and not-localist, according to specific perceptions of specific situations. The localism that defines our continuing retreat from the claims of Enlightenment rationalism exerts a positive appeal at such times as it is used to defend the rights of the oppressed, whether they be women, Navaho, or the residents of Love Canal. Similarly, universalism has tended to be invoked against localism when it is again a matter of defending the oppressed, for instance the victims of torture, genocide, or cliterodectomy. We do not, in other words, actually practise a rigid policy of localism: we do, in extreme situations, allow ourselves to speak for others. (Problems tend to occur in the borderline cases, or those which dramatise contests within our own culture, as in the case of the Gulf War debates about the anti-feminist cultures of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia: are they pardonable as alternative cultures or to be critiqued as reactionary in universalist terms?)

So much, then, for localism in its traditional ideological functions as a homing device, a language for imagining ourselves at home in a world in which so many feel homeless and all too many others really are homeless. I hope I have shown that there is no easy way to decide, as if by definition, that this language is either positive or negative, reactionary or progressive. But it has been relatively consistent in its descriptive functions throughout the modern period, in that it has claimed to affirm being in dear perpetual places of one kind or another.

With the recent literary-critical interest in the Geertzian paradigm of ‘local knowledge’, the rhetoric of locality means something rather different, and it is this syndrome I want now to explore. Literary criticism has turned to anthropology on at least two previous occasions for a different lease on life. Sir James Frazer and Claude Lhi-Strauss have both appeased for a while our constant collective search for a method. But each of these gratifications has been foundationalist. Each promised to provide a latent and real content to the manifest contingency of information, social and


literary. Through the rituals of sacrifice and renewal, and through the structures of kinship and the exchange of women, the social languages (including literature) could seem to be about something very real and very deep. We were, it seems, put back in touch with the real, and objective sense could be made of the language of appearances.

The ‘local knowledge’ that Clifford Geertz theorises does not offer the comforts of a foundational knowledge. On the contrary, his appeal among literary critics may well consist principally in his readiness to profess that anthropology, far from functioning as the scientific other, is itself largely and already literary. Geertz does a brilliant job of undermining the objectivist aspirations of localism. If we imagine the anthropologist as one who immerses him- or herself in a local culture, learns the language, becomes as one with the people, and learns the names of all the sheep, then we are in for a surprise (though it is no surprise if we are paid-up postmodernists). There is no total knowledge, and hence all knowledge is up for question- ing. There is no innocent perception: all observation is interaction, and changes the persons observed. Anthropology thus described is dialectical and unstable; we can no longer be sure what it tells us and about whom, even as we sense we are in the presence of some kind of difference and even one that may matter. If traditional localism held out the promise that strict localisation would produce totally sufficient knowledge, then Geertz takes us to remote places, immerses us totally, and shows us how little we have learned. Or does he?

Many of the exemplary Geertzian moves are made in his important essay of 1973, ’Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’. The title, borrowed from Gilbert Ryle, promises a kind of localist gratifi- cation, an immersion in detail and context to the point of, perhaps, completion: we will have been there, and fully experienced being there, as if we belonged. After all, thick description presumes thin description, which we will presumably avoid. But the key word is actually in the subtitle: interpretive. Ethnography is indeed thick description, but is also ’like trying to read . . . a manuscript’, one full of ‘ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations‘, and written in a foreign language.1° Other cultures are not open to inspection by a disinterested rational intelligence able to produce absolutely coherent models of how they function. ’Coherence’ is not the major test of the validity of cultural description, for coherence is the mark of ’a paranoid’s delusion or a swindler’s story’ (pp. 17-18). Ethnography can better be understood as ’guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses’ (p. 20). Its researches remain microscopic, committed to the interpretation of the small details. But - and here Geertz is forceful - it does not give up on


theory and theorisation. Geertz proposes a sceptical commitment to both theory and detail, to a totalisation of the local: we ’insinuate’ the theories we cannot firmly ‘state’ (p. 24). Cultural analysis is thus ’intrinsically in- complete’, and becomes more so the ’more deeply it goes’ (p. 29). In other words, the more you know the less you know. A place may be dear and effectively perpetual, but that does not mean it makes sense.

Ten years later, in 1983, Geertz published another influential volume of essays gathered under the title Local Knowledge. Here, he noted that the acceptance among social scientists of an inexact or ’literary’ methodology had now become rather common. Anthropology in particular has proved compatible with an emphasis on the ’ineluctably local’ and on limited knowledge claims:

Long one of the most homespun of disciplines, hostile to anything smacking of intellectual pretension and unnaturally proud of an outdoorsman image, anthropology has turned out, oddly enough, to have been preadapted to some of the most advanced varieties of modern opinion. The contextualist, antiformalist, relativizing tendencies of the bulk of that opinion, its turn toward examining the ways in which the world is talked about - depicted, charted, represented - rather than the way it intrinsically is, have been rather easily absorbed by adventurer scholars used to dealing with strange perceptions and stranger stories. They have, wonder of wonders, been speaking Wittgenstein all along.”

For himself, Geertz modestly proposes a method that seeks ’what generality it can by orchestrating contrasts rather than isolating regularities or abstracting types’ (p. 13). It is governed by analogy rather than necessity, and provides an orientation but never a foundation (p. 187). Just how this satisfies is, to me at least, not at all clear. As Geertz employs ideas ‘in a more or less handy way’ in a ’hermeneutic’ approach, he is anxious to avoid any assumption of objectivity, in the traditional sense. But what then does he produce, and how is it knowledge? He has been very convincingly taken to task for remaining too localist in his local knowledge, too indiffer- ent to the national and transnational pressures that make his apparently remote cultures into the cultures they are.I2 But even if this were not so, what kind of knowing is it to ’know’ in microscopic detail, always incom- plete, the apparent workings of another culture? Geertz says that the ’usefulness’ of these models is not as an objective guide to other cultures but as directions ‘toward some of the defining characteristics, however various and ill ordered, of what it is we want to grasp: a different sense of law’ (p. 187). Later he expands on the point of this in describing the point of ’bringing incommensurable perspectives on things, dissimilar ways of registering experiences and phasing lives, into conceptual proximity such


that, though our sense of their distinctiveness is not reduced (normally, it is deepened), they seem somehow less enigmatical than they do when they are looked at apart’ (p. 233).

Geertz’s project can be understood sympathetically as a response to the basic dilemma of anthropology - and indeed of other non-experimental disciplines - as John and Jean Comaroff have defined it:

An important moment of choice is now upon us. If we take our task to be an exercise in intersubjective transIation, in speaking for others and their point of view, our hubris will cause us no end of difficulties, moral and philosophical. And if we see it to lie in the formal analysis of social systems or cultural structures, statistically or logical1 conceived, we evade the issue of representation

Geertz artfully sidesteps the implications of this choice as well as of a clearly articulated (theorised) alternative by claiming simply that matters become ‘somehow less enigmatical’. One can sympathise with the instinct to do so, given that anthropology is among the most ethically fraught of all the disciplines, so that getting things wrong can seem to have real consequences. No literary critic need worry overmuch about the results of his or her bad reading, since the text remains potentially a blank space for new readings once the necessary demystifications are achieved. (This does not prevent us critics, of course, from invoking the rhetoric of absolute contamination when it suits us to do so.) The anthropologist, conversely, acquires existential responsibilities as soon as s/he dons the safari gear: the dialectic between observer and observed is unpredictable and indefinite.

Geertz’s rhetoric is, I think, uneasily positioned between the analytical and the ethical, in exactly the ways I described earlier as characterising the debate about knowledge within the orbit of the postmodern. Analytically, for something to seem less enigmatical must suppose either that there is some transcultural structure to human societies (unlikely, for Geertz) or that an act of familiarisation has taken place through inquiry itself which is not objectively founded but exists nonetheless as a kind of performative sense. This sense will be a kind of value, certainly for the anthropologist and perhaps (if the imbalance of power is not too great) for the subjects of his or her attentions. And it will be, presumably, some kind of cosmopolitan value, a tolerance of and sympathy for the way of life of an other who is incipiently similar in limited ways, always different in total context, and never exactly knowable along the line connecting the two. The point of it all becomes, in other words, ethical. The moral instrumentalism is clear even as the epistemological results are obscure. And at this precise point Geertz can seem to risk identification with that very traditional investment of literary criticism in obtruding the resolute particularities of human

and experience altogether. 17


nature as a corrective for an otherwise hegemonic technological rationalism. He tells us that ’the world is a various place . . . and much is to be gained, scientifically and otherwise, by confronting that grand actuality rather than wishing it away in a haze of forceless generalities and false comforts’ (p. 234). And he speaks of the achievement of seeing ourselves as ’a local example of the forms human life has locally taken’ as consisting in ’largeness of mind’ (p. 16). Geertz is far too nuanced a writer to allow himself the strident self-justifications of an F. R. Leavis, or to splutter forth the drearily conventional Anglo-American polemics against theory. But his position here is not unrelated to the traditional literary critical ethic of tolerance and largeness of mind. The difference is, of course, that with Geertz one learns it through travel and exposure to the other, and not through the narrower typologies of the national literature. And Geertz preserves for his procedure the status of a kind of science, as he applauds ’the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers’.l4 In this distinct sense he stands between Leavis and Snow, with the cosmopolitanism of the one and the localism of the other, as he stands between the languages and methods of literature and science as traditionally defined. The methods and the consequences of Geertz’s methods are at once literary and scientific. The urge for generality is not given up, but the complexity of the local is preserved as an encumbrance upon that urge. And what is produced is never general, even as it is by the very fact of ethnographic interaction always more than local.

The anti-foundational turn that Geertz gives to anthropology renders it then deeply compatible with the traditional anti-foundational predis- position of literary criticism (and arguably of American pragmatism). Perhaps all three now require examination as symptoms of the epistemological instability of a bourgeois society or of a national-political culture whose self-image as global controller and interpreter has taken something of a knock both economically and metaphysically. We no longer believe in ’white is right’ at exactly the historical moment at which such an ideology would be obviously out of line with the facts of global-economic life. (Of course there were always those who believed this; but it has lately become a relatively commonplace belief.) And this may be why the assumptions about the local have changed so radically in the current semantic climate. The literary critic Leah Marcus, writing in a series devoted to the same ‘New Historicism’ that declares such positive debts to Clifford Geertz, writes in favour of local knowledge and localisation as no longer the sign of a ’retrograde regionalism’, but as ’a suspension of our ruling method- ologies, insofar as that is possible, in favor of a more open and provisional stance toward what we read and the modes by which we interpret; it


should be a process of continual negotiation between our own place, to the extent that we are able to identify it, and the local places of the texts we read‘.’5

This formulation rehearses all the features of Geertzian method, and it also foregrounds all its problems. It is, again, principally effective as an ethical preference or commitment. Who could doubt that openness and continual negotiation mark the proper subject-position for operating non- destructively in our complex national and international culture? But the very things that make this a persuasive ethics render it an inadequate analytic model. Marcus’s qualifiers, ’insofar as that is possible’ and ‘to the extent that we are able to identify it’, signal analytical problems that if taken seriously must destroy not only the possibility for knowledge but also, incipiently, even the prospect of an ethics. As an analytic model, this, like Geertz, is ’weak’ theory: that is, it does not refute or refuse theory, but it renders it necessarily contestatory without fully facing up to the contes- tation. For how can we affirm knowledge or pursue theory in the face of all these qualifiers? If they are taken seriously, then there is no knowledge that can be known as such except performed knowledge, knowledge experienced as interaction in place and time, with no further claims to endurance.

For us now, this is where the problem must begin. There is no point in tedious reiteration of the propriety of continual negotiation unless some attention is given to what is being negotiated, by whom, and with what limits and potentials. If localism in its older forms has been evacuated, so that ’being there’ now calls up the realisation that there’s no there there, at least for us - or, to say the same thing in a different way, that the there is only there for a moment - then it is perhaps time to seek for a different kind of home, a home in theory, and in the general. This might look all too much like the return of the repressed, or perhaps like the non-future of an illusion. But it cannot be the same as it was. The home you go back to is never the home you left. The old localism and the new have one thing in common - they like to think small. Thinking big is a negative metaphor for the left under late capitalism - masculinist, engrossing, overambitious, self-deceiving and destructive. Geertz’s work does not protest against thinking big, but it does suggest that the only model for such thought is ethical and gestural (if powerfully so) rather than analytical. We can want and try and intend sympathy with the other, but we cannot know it. Geertz does make residual and limited use of the rhetoric of science, as if he is unwilling to give up completely on a totalising knowledge project. But he cannot - and one might better say that the conditions of our collective inquiry at the moment do not make it easy - produce that project. This may yet remain, despite all the persuasions otherwise, a serious task for us


now.16 I think that the absence of any such project contributes to the paucity of actual and conceptual response to all non-local crises, whether in the Balkans, in Somalia, or elsewhere. The nationalised military- economic cultures have no motive for response, and the first-world intellectual culture has no language for a response. But if we are to avoid replacing the affirmative pastoral of the old perpetual place with a merely relativised pastoral of ’doing minimum damage’ and having the world go its wider way, then it may be time to find a positive way to’think big, to look again for a home in the world.

Notes

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13

14 15

The Collected Poems of W . B. Yeats, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 213. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, corr. ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 409. F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow; and an Essay on Sir Charles Snow’s Rede Lecture, by Michael Yudkin (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 47. The Poverty of Theoy and Other Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 111, iii, 46. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto, J. M. Dent, 1930-34), 4: 122. It is interesting, nonetheless, to notice the rhetoric of localism or ‘neighbour- hood‘ applied by older or exiled residents of such cities as New York and Chicago to incarnate the world they think they have lost. For a related argument about the functions of English poetry in the modem period, see John Lucas, England and Englishness: ldeas of Nationhood in English Poety, 2688-2900 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: A n Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 312-18. Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 2, 5. Clifford Geertz, The lnterpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 10. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in lnterpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 4. See Vincent P. Pecora, ‘The Limits of Local Knowledge’, in ed. H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989),

John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1991), p. 12. The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 16. Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of California Press, 1988), p. 36.

pp. 243-76.


16 In a similar spirit John and Jean Comaroff speclfy the major problem of ethnography as analysing ’relations between fragments and fields’, re- commending a move away from ‘simple structures and local systems’ and a new contemplation of the problems raised by trying ’to forge units of analysis in unbounded social fields’. See Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, pp. 17, 31-2.

being there?: literary criticism, localism, and local knowledge

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