Proliferations of Omniscience

Abstract

Proliferations of Omniscience A. C. Facundo (bio) The conception of the current moment as one of proliferation induces anxiety, because it threatens a phantasy of omniscience. The exponential speed and mass of the digital world threatens the scholar's projected capacity of seeing or knowing what others do not. So we've seen a surge, a proliferation as it were, in interpretive turns and burgeoning reading practices in an effort to keep up with an overwhelming sense of ever-accumulating information. And I am indeed contributing to that pile with my book, Oscillations of Literary Theory: the Paranoid Imperative and Queer Reparative, published in 2016. Sedgwick's now famous inauguration of the reparative turn in Touching Feeling has sparked many variations. We can characterize the reparative turn as a turn away from paranoid critique, which sees the world in an implacably negative light. Paranoia is associated closely with omniscience in its compulsive desire to know, its compulsive projection of knowledge into uncertainty. I think a cynical way of looking at critique would be that the more staggering its negativity, the more impressive the scholarship seems, and some scholars are trying to move away from this project of disenchantment. In queer theory, these two attitudes mark a split between the anti-social and the reparative: the former is associated with the psychoanalytic [End Page 7] drives and the latter with affect theory, and this debate is ongoing. Outside of queer theory, in literary studies more generally, Rita Felski's book Limits of Critique revises the hermeneutics of suspicion to theorize what she calls "postcritical reading": "What afflicts literary studies is not interpretation as such but the kudzu-like proliferation of a hyper-critical style of analysis that has crowded out alternative forms of life" (9). Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's article, "surface reading," introduces an approach to literature that repudiates depth and attempts accurate descriptions of literature, self-consciously limiting critical agency. These are only a couple of examples in an emerging debate, but we are seeing a split, I would say even an ideological split, between what we could roughly characterize as negative and positive, as this hermeneutical proliferation continues. My own book tries to synthesize both sides of split so that interpretive proliferation is integrated into a single reading strategy. I do take issue with the resistance to psychoanalysis both in surface reading and in the reparative turn in queer theory. Given the suspicion of critique in Felski's and Best and Marcus's work, they either directly or indirectly reject (a misreading of) psychoanalysis based on its application in the humanities that was common up until the late 1990s, in which psychoanalysis was heavily associated with "hidden depths," "unconscious contents," and "symptomatic reading." My own research on psychoanalysis understands the unconscious not as hidden in "depths," not as a repressed "content" or "meaning" which can be accessed through a "symptom," but something that unfolds in plain sight between self and other through the formal aspects of language—an unfolding that is the prerequisite to relational intimacy. Perhaps Sedgwick is right: negative hermeneutics like critique do not suffice in this proliferative world, but neither does doing away with omniscience altogether. As subject to failure as it is, omniscience is necessary to the process of reading. Omniscience can refer to a narrative perception that claims knowledge of past, present, and future events in both external world and inner lives of the characters. In psychoanalysis, omniscience comes from a phantasy of omnipotence, the idea that the triumphant baby has absolute power over the external world because he or she isn't yet fully differentiated from it. Melanie Klein explores the fantasy of omnipotence at length in her essay, "The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States." This fantasy is both the prerequisite for the development of social relations and a project doomed to failure, since omniscience can exist only as a fantasy. For me, the literary implication of psychoanalysis hinges less on the symptom than on the work of mourning. The reading practice I introduce in my book stretches [End Page 8] beyond symptomatic reading through a process that mourns—that lets go of—the proliferative "meanings" that textual "symptoms" might...