A structure of fragments

If one has tried to place the intensity of the particular perception, the localisation of its operation, in that single move at the heart of critical reasoning, this is not to lose one's sense that the critic does inevitably operate in a larger perspective and see those individual moves as part of a tissue of relationships, a cumulative process that calls for a further description. One has seen how theory acts as a purveyor of such descriptions as a way of placing coordinates through which the larger view takes shape. But this now requires me to take further the connections between such coordinates and the effective operation of the particular ‘move’ or sequence of them. For the abandonment of the ‘grand explanation’ in the sense that Kristeva wished to employ it, indeed to employ a sequence of them to place the revolution in a comprehensive view of the world, does not mean that we cease to see the world in larger ways, only that the determinate role in such an overview has vanished. The legacy is a series of fragments which to varying degrees imply something larger of which it actually appropriates only that corner where an impingement has its vivid presence.

We can find some measure of the effect of this if we return to one of our earlier cases, to reconsider the placing of ‘the romantic view of the world’ in the concept-free mode of reasoning that Leavis evokes to define the critical operation, and in the more precisely formulated conceptual structures of a Kristeva or a Bloom.