A Critique of Pure "Situating"

Abstract

HE MATTER UNDER DISCUSSION was this: Must one situate oneself in order to engage in critical discussion? Two contrary views had emerged in my department-in the hallway, in the mailroom, and at colloquia (but not all at once, as the following account conveniently suggests). Although they might hold that their common interest was not germane to the argument that unfolded, the principal protagonists of both positions happened to be Renaissance specialists. insistence that we situate ourselves prior to critical discussion is only a said one critic (whom his opponent suspected of positivist leanings). You know that you are making a dismissive when you say that, said the other. It's a custom, only a custom, and so will pass. But one's thesis is a necessary outgrowth of the epistemological underpinnings of the critique presented. So when I say that it is necessary, I mean to do more than observe a vagary of critical taxonomy today. Morphology is not ladled on after the substance of an argument springs into being, came the rejoinder. If I recall correctly-I admit that I am paraphrasing now-his argument went something like this: The insistence that one must situate oneself in the conversation in order to engage in criticism amounts to a shift from footnote to text. It is as if the old pocket bibliography, in which, in the first footnote, a critic listed the major predecessor texts, were moved from footnote to introduction in an effort to justify the critical argument. This development represents more than a block/ move instruction to the critic's hard disk, for it involves a major expansion of the critical text. As long as the discussion was in the footnotes, the matter of situating the critique was limited, sometimes even ignored. Then New Historicism shifted the focus to the preconceptions and * I am grateful to Ralph Cohen for his incisive and helpful criticism of earlier drafts of this paper; although he cannot be held accountable for its faults, the argument in its present form owes much to him. My colleagues, Larry Wright, Mark Ravizza, Howard Wettstein, and Carol Bensick, allowed me to try portions of the argument out on them, and I am thankful for their encouragement.