Criticism should recover a work’s original clumsiness rather than its refined difficulty

Evidence

The very crudeness of its emergent philosophical generalizations is now to be grasped as a matter of honor and a title of glory: to begin from zero in the realm of thinking is not an achievement given to everyone. DeMan kept faith with Rousseau precisely in this aboriginal construction of the text itself; and it seems to me more productive to insist on the relationship between the difficulty of his own book and the stark simplicity of its newly forged thoughts than to evoke a hypersophisticated “thought of the other” so complex and subtle as to stand forever out of reach, and thereby to stimulate those feelings of textual envy which Harpham has identified in DeMan’s critics. To put it in another, more aesthetic, way, restoring the clumsiness of some initial thought process means returning to the act of thinking as praxis and stripping away the reifications that sediment around that act when it has become an object. Gertrude Stein liked to say that “every masterpiece came into the world with a measure of ugliness in it… It’s our business as critics to stand in front of it to recover its ugliness.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 488

Categorization

• XREF: The reification-as-sediment move connects directly to the reader’s core idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — the same dialectical gesture. — connects to: Genre criticism becomes a creative enterprise when freed from canonical rigidities — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3434; Dialectical criticism judges a work by how its strengths structurally require its weaknesses — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 682; Unpolished, in-process writing draws more response than polished work — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 174
• DEFINE: Defines what ‘restoring clumsiness’ means as praxis against reification — a workable definitional handle for the reader’s project.
• SEED: The Stein quote on ugliness could anchor an essay on how critics should read for the crude origin rather than the polished surface — applies directly to the parody/pastiche distinction as both are ‘ugliness’ of a kind.