The Politics of Literary Criticism

I think Professor Said's discussion has demonstrated a necessity to understand the relationships between criticism and other activities. And I don't want to suggest, in concentrating on the encounter between critic and poem, that there are a set of internal relations within the activity of criticism which must be described before one can talk about these connections to other things. Rather, my reason for emphasizing this particular relation, between critic and poem, has to do with the fact that it is too often conceived as having little to do with power or authority: because it is thought to rise above the problems of commitment, social awareness and so forth into a realm of pure description or pure scholarship; because it is understood as never quite getting to any real crisis of political awareness or never becoming any real political action; or perhaps most insidiously, as Said has shown, because one exaggerates the political relevance of methodological procedures at the expense of ignoring the actual interstices of a complex experience. Perhaps the most obvious support for my contention inheres in the institutionalized opposition between artist and critic, to the extent

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