Of smaller and grander narratives

If the ‘language game’ of criticism dissolves under close inspection, if its ‘disciplinary matrix’ resists the use of intelligible criteria, if its general concepts work through destructive fragmentation while efforts to give it a general characterisation fade into useless banality, would it therefore make sense to abandon our interest in criticism as a form of practical reason and dismiss its value as a form of discourse? I shall argue the exact opposite and show the value implicit in its very localisation, the strength in immediacy, and in evanescence itself.

If we are to follow the consequences of what our cases have shown us, the attempts to formulate something which one could call a critical theory cannot be stated from within critical language; the synoptic understanding lies outside it. Whatever synoptic sense it employs is borrowed. One can see an effect of this in the later work of Kermode. Dealing with such concepts as ‘attention’, ‘history’ and ‘value’, he has tried to formulate an approach to these concepts from the ground in the critical cases that he discusses. And the critical language appropriate to those cases does not generate the level of generality to bring those concepts into effective use, or even to make their larger meaning intelligible. The approach is the opposite of that of Richards where the generality implicit in harmonious organisation of the psyche has its obvious if dubious scientific source, and synoptic effect.