A critic’s explanatory framework can collapse into mere textual evidence

Evidence

This articulation is misleadingly neat and final; in reality, it merely triggers the homological or analogizing process, which will quickly spread to a variety of other areas. Nor is it clear that the “structure” here identified and named — the “self” — has anything in common with the concept from which Greenblatt set out: this Humean self is already philosophically discredited and annulled from the outset; we see the bottom through it in advance; whatever sham stability it devises will have to come from outside, from other instances and resources, that are eventually identified as a “level” not mentioned in this passage, namely, forms of property. Another way of saying this is that it is not at all clear that Michaels is here guided by an abstract problematic of the self. One could argue just as plausibly that the language of self here simply designates another crucial piece of textual evidence of raw material, namely, the books of William James, whose Principles of Psychology are as basic to The Gold Standard as anything by Dreiser, Norris, Hawthorne, Wharton, and the rest. In that case, notions of “self” fall from solutions or explanatory frameworks to the status of textual problems, exhibits among many others, whose conceptual language no longer has any privilege. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 443

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Collapsing theory into narrative destroys the critical distance rational critique requires — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 371; Pure text-based qualitative analysis collapses when it lacks resistance from wider evidence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1958; Deconstruction questions the investigator’s authority without disabling action — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1738 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Collapsing theory into narrative destroys the critical distance rational critique requires — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 371; Pure text-based qualitative analysis collapses when it lacks resistance from wider evidence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1958; Deconstruction questions the investigator’s authority without disabling action — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1738 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Dissenting critique corrects method but spares the system’s epistemic foundations #complicates (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 339