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New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 4, Autumn 2011, pp. 573-591
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DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2011.0045

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 “Context Stinks!”
Rita Felski

M
y title is a none-too-subtle provocation, though not, I
should point out, a self-authored one. What word could be
more ubiquitous in literary and cultural studies: more ear-
nestly invoked, more diligently defended, more devoutly kowtowed
to? The once commonplace but now risible notion of “the work itself”
has been endlessly dissected, dismembered, and dispatched into New
Critical oblivion. Context is not optional. There are, to be sure, end-
less disputes between various subfields and splinter groups about what
counts as a legitimate context: Marxist critics take umbrage at New
Historicist anecdotes and styles of social description; queer theorists
take issue with feminist explanations that assume a bipolar gender
world. Context is, in this sense, an endlessly contested concept, subject
to often rancorous rehashing and occasional bursts of sectarian sniper
fire. But who, in their right mind—apart from a few die-hard aesthetes
mumbling into their sherry glasses—could feasibly take issue with the
idea of context as such?
“Context stinks” is, in fact, a double quotation: my title channels Bruno
Latour, who is in turn citing architect Rem Koolhaas.1 But to what end?
Latour, after all, is one of the most visible proponents of science studies,
a field that has scuttled the idea of science as a single-minded pursuit of
truth by documenting, in exhaustive detail, its social embedding and its
contamination by worldly factors. Meanwhile my own work owes much
to feminist historicism as well as a cultural studies methodology that
sees contextualization as the quintessential virtue. Larry Grossberg’s
statement, “for cultural studies context is everything and everything is
contextual,” succinctly summarizes the most heartfelt convictions of the
field.2 What lies, then, behind this abrupt excoriation of contemporary
literary and cultural studies’ favorite word?
The history of literary theory, admittedly, yields up a litany of com-
plaints against contextualization, ranging from the Russian Formalist
case for the autonomous development of literary form to Gadamer’s
insistence that the work of art is not just a historical artifact, but is newly
actualized and brought to life in the hermeneutic encounter. More

New Literary History, 2011, 42: 573–591

574 new literary history

recently, deconstructive thinkers have vigorously assailed any notion of

history or context as a stable ground and warned against the perils of an
overcontextualization that wreaks violence on the distinctiveness of the
literary object. That such arguments have done little to stop the current
historicist tide stems, I hypothesize, from two main reasons. First, they
sometimes rely on a division between “exceptional texts” that exceed
their historical moment and “conventional” or “stereotypical” texts that
remain determined by it, reinstating a high/low culture dichotomy that
has come to seem ever less persuasive to many scholars. And second, the
repudiation of context can result in a rarefied focus on poetic language,
form, and textuality far removed from the messy, mundane, empirical
details of how and why we read. That a questioning of context, done
differently, might allow for a greater attention to such details is one of
the counterintuitive claims of this essay. “Context,” to continue with
Latour, “is simply a way of stopping the description when you are tired
or too lazy to go on.”3
My own second thoughts about context are tied to a larger inquiry
into the role of critical reading in the recent history of literary studies.
The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is the name usually bestowed on this
technique of reading texts against the grain and between the lines, of
cataloging their omissions and laying bare their contradictions, of rub-
bing in what they fail to know and cannot represent. While suspicion
can manifest itself in multiple ways, in the current intellectual climate
it often pivots on a fealty to the clarifying power of historical context.
What the literary text does not see, in this line of thought, are the larger
circumstances that shape and sustain it and that are drawn into the light
by the corrective force of the critic’s own vigilant gaze. The critic probes
for meanings inaccessible to authors as well as ordinary readers, and
exposes the text’s complicity in social conditions that it seeks to deny
or disavow. Context, as the ampler, more expansive reference point, will
invariably trump the claims of the individual text, knowing it far better
than it can ever know itself.
Against the grain of such critical historicism, I want to articulate and
defend two related propositions: 1) that history is not a box—that con-
ventional models of historicizing and contextualizing prove deficient in
accounting for the transtemporal movement and affective resonance of
particular texts—and 2) that in doing better justice to this transtemporal
impact, we might usefully think of texts as “nonhuman actors”—a claim
that, as we’ll see, requires us to revise prevailing views about the heroic,
self-propelling, or oppositional nature of agency and to ponder the links
between agency and attachment. Bruno Latour’s recent work serves as a
partial inspiration for what follows: less its explication of specific works
“context stinks!” 575

of literature—a subject on which Latour has so far said little—than its

canny provocation to our entrenched ways of thinking about texts and
time, things and persons, action and interaction. Highlighting the vari-
ous relays between mood and method, Latour’s exuberance of idiom
blasts away the cobwebs of critique and shakes up a ubiquitous academic
ethos of detachment, negativity, and doubt. Suspicious reading, I’ve
argued elsewhere, is not just an intellectual exercise, but a distinctive
disposition or sensibility that is infused with a mélange of affective and
attitudinal components. Experimenting with other modes of reading and
reasoning will require us not only to think differently but also, perhaps,
to feel differently.4

History is Not a Box

After several decades of historically oriented scholarship, critics are

turning anew to questions of aesthetics, beauty, and form, citing the fail-
ings of a historicism that treats works of art only as cultural symptoms
of their own moment, as moribund matter buried in the past. Yet this
new aestheticism conspicuously fails to answer the question of how texts
resonate across time. Focusing on formal devices or the phenomenology
of aesthetic experience, it brackets rather than resolves the problem
of temporality. We cannot close our eyes to the historicity of artworks,
and yet we sorely need alternatives to seeing them as transcendentally
timeless on the one hand, and imprisoned in their moment of origin
on the other.
This paucity of temporal frameworks can be contrasted to the rich
resources available for conceptualizing space. Postcolonial studies, es-
pecially, has transformed our ways of thinking about how ideas, texts,
and images migrate and mutate. Challenging notions of the discrete,
self-contained spaces of nation or ethnicity, scholars have developed
a language of translation, creolization, syncreticism, and global flows.
Similar models might help us explore the complexities of temporal
transmission. Why is it that we can feel solicited, button-holed, stirred
up, by words that were drafted eons ago? How do texts that are inert
in one historical moment become newly revealing, eye-opening, even
life-transforming, in another? And how do such moments of transtem-
poral connection call into question the progress narratives that drive
conventional political histories and the rhetoric of artistic innovation?
Postcolonial studies, to be sure, troubles our models of time as well
as space, messing up the tidiness of periodizing categories, elucidating
the ways in which historical schemata often prop up the complacency
576 new literary history

of a West-centered viewpoint. The task of “provincializing Europe,” in

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-known phrase, invites us to rethink, from the
ground up, how we historicize and contextualize, and to what end. A
similar restiveness with historicism is beginning to make itself felt across
the spectrum of literary studies. Though we cannot as yet speak of a
posthistoricist school, a multitude of minor mutinies and small-scale
revolts are underway, triggered by scholars mulling the question of
“time after history.” Queer theorists call for an “unhistoricism” open to
the affinities between earlier times and our own that does not blanch
at proximity and anachronism. Scholars of the Renaissance are reclaim-
ing the term “presentist” as a badge of honor rather than a dismissive
jibe, unabashedly confessing their interest in the present-day relevance
rather than historical resonance of Shakespeare’s plays. Literary critics
advertise their conversion to the iconoclastic work of Michel Serres, who
urges us to think of time not as an arrow, but as an undulating snake
or even a crumpled handkerchief. And in the background, of course,
hovers the beatific figure of Walter Benjamin, the patron saint of all
those wary of periodizing schemes, chronological containment, and
progressive histories.5
What are the consequences of this temporal turbulence for literary
and cultural studies? The singular disadvantage of the “context concept”
is that it inveigles us into endless reiterations of the same dichotomies:
text versus context, word versus world, literature versus society and
history, internalist versus externalist explanations of works of art. Lit-
erary studies seems doomed to swing between these two ends of the
pendulum, with opposing sides endless and fruitlessly rehashing the
same arguments. “How absurdly naïve and idealistic, you are!” cry the
contextualizers. “Your myopic focus on the words on the page blinds
you to the inescapable impact of social and ideological forces!” “How
reductive and ham-fisted you are!” scold the formalists; “sermonize about
social energies or patriarchal ideologies until you turn blue in the face,
but your theories of context remain utterly tone-deaf to what makes a
painting a painting, a poem a poem!” There are different historicisms
and many types of politics, to be sure, but the task of doing justice to
the distinctiveness and specificity of artworks remains a recurring thorn
in their flesh. Sartre’s well-known quip that Valéry was a petit-bourgeois
intellectual but that not every petit-bourgeois intellectual was Valéry
retains much of its power to sting. And yet we also know perfectly well
that artworks are not heaven sent, that they do not glide like angels
over earthly terrain, that they cannot help getting their shoes wet and
their hands dirty. How can we do justice to both their singularity and
their worldliness?
“context stinks!” 577

One of the main obstacles lies in the prevailing picture of context as a

kind of box or container in which individual texts are encased and held
fast. The critic assigns to this box a list of attributes—economic structure,
political ideology, cultural mentality—in order to finesse the details of
how these attributes are echoed, modified, or undermined by a specific
work of art. The macrolevel of sociohistorical context holds the cards,
calls the tune, and specifies the rules of the game; the individual text, as
a microunit encased within a larger whole, can only react or respond to
these preestablished conditions. History, in this light, consists of a verti-
cal pile of neatly stacked boxes—what we call periods—each of which
surrounds, sustains, and subsumes a microculture. Understanding a text
means clarifying the details of its placement in the box, highlighting
the correlations, causalities, or homologies between text-as-object and
context-as-container.
To be sure, New Historicism has struggled mightily against the iron grip
of the text/context distinction. Testifying, in an oft-cited phrase, to the
historicity of texts and the textuality of history, it muddies and muddles
the boundaries between word and world. Works of art no longer loom
like mighty monuments against a historical backdrop that is materially
determining but semiotically inert. Instead, history itself is revealed as
a buzzing multiplicity of texts—explorers’ diaries, court records, child-
rearing manuals, government documents, newspaper editorials—whose
circulation underwrites the transmission of social energies. By the same
token, the literary work does not transcend these humdrum circum-
stances, but remains haplessly and hopelessly entangled in fine-meshed
filaments of power, one more social text among others.
And yet, while a key text of New Historicism famously proclaimed a
desire to speak with the dead, most of the work produced under this
rubric remains closer to diagnosis than dialogue, generating the sense of
an unbridgeable distance between past texts and present lives, between
“then” and “now.” Historicism serves as the functional equivalent of
cultural relativism, quarantining difference, denying relatedness, and
suspending—or less kindly, evading—the question of why past texts still
matter and how they speak to us now. Of course, it has become a theo-
retical commonplace that we cannot ever know the past as it really was,
that history is always, at least in part, the history of the present. And in
their introductions, preambles, and afterwords, scholars often testify to
their present-day passions and volunteer their political commitments. Yet
these avowals rarely translate into transhistorical methodologies or the
tracing of cross-temporal networks; rather, the literary object remains
trapped in the conditions that preside over the moment of its birth, its
meaning determined in relation to texts and objects of the same moment,
578 new literary history

indelibly stamped as an early modern, eighteenth-century, or Victorian

artifact. This is the domain of what Wai Chee Dimock calls “synchronic
historicism,” in which phenomena are related only to phenomena in
the same slice of time.6 We are inculcated, in the name of history, into
a remarkably static model of meaning, where texts are corralled amidst
long-gone contexts and obsolete intertexts, incarcerated in the past,
with no hope of parole.
For Latour, by contrast, there is no historical box and indeed no soci-
ety, if we mean by this term a distinctive, bounded totality governed by
a predetermined set of structures and functions. Society does not stand
behind, and covertly control, human practices, as if it were ontologi-
cally distinct from these practices, akin to a shadowy, all-seeing, puppet
master. Rather, the social just is the act and the fact of association, the
coming together of phenomena to create multiple assemblages, affini-
ties, and networks. It exists only in its instantiations, in the sometimes
foreseeable, sometimes unpredictable ways in which ideas, texts, images,
people, and objects couple and uncouple, attach and break apart. To
do actor-network theory is not to soar like an eagle, gazing down dis-
passionately at the distant multitudes below, but to trudge like an ANT,
marveling at the intricate ecologies and diverse micro-organisms that lie
hidden amongst thick blades of grass. It is to slow down at each step, to
forego theoretical shortcuts and to attend to the words of our fellow ac-
tors rather than overriding them—and overwriting them—with our own.
The social, in other words, is not a preformed being but a doing, not a
hidden entity underlying the realm of appearance, but the ongoing con-
nections, disconnections, and reconnections between countless actors.
These interconnections are temporal as well as spatial; woven out of
threads criss-crossing through time, they connect us to what comes be-
fore, enmeshing us in extended webs of obligation and influence. Time
is not a tidy sequence of partitioned units, but a profusion of whirlpools
and rapids, eddies and flows, in which objects, ideas, images, and texts
from different moments swirl, tumble, and collide in ever-changing
combinations and constellations. New actors jostle alongside those with
thousand-year histories; inventions and innovations exist alongside the
very traditions they excoriate; the “past is not surpassed but revisited,
repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted, and
reshuffled.”7 The trick is to think temporal interdependency without
telos, movement without supersession: pastness is part of who we are,
not an archaic residue, a regressive force, a source of nostalgia, or a
return of the repressed. Latour’s notorious assertion that we have never
been modern does not dispute the fact that our lives differ from those
of medieval peasants or Renaissance courtiers, but insists that these dif-
“context stinks!” 579

ferences can be absurdly overdrawn, thanks to our fondness for fables

of rationalization, the disenchantment of the world, the sundering of
subjects from objects, the radicalism of modern critique, and other
testimonies to our own exceptional status.
Along similar lines, Jonathan Gil Harris takes issue with what he calls
a “national sovereignty model of time” that is endemic in literary and
cultural studies. Period, in other words, serves much the same function
as nation; we assign texts and objects to a single moment of origin in
much the same way as we tether them to a single place of birth. Both
period and nation serve as a natural boundary, determining authority,
and last court of appeal. The literary work can only be a citizen of only
one historical period and one set of social relations; border guards work
overtime and any movement across period boundaries is heavily policed.
The past remains a foreign country, alien and inscrutable, its strange-
ness repeatedly underscored. “What do we do,” Harris wonders, “with
things that cross temporal borders—things that are illegal immigrants,
double agents, or holders of multiple passports? How might such border
crossings change our understanding of temporality?”8 Cross-temporal
networks mess up the tidiness of our periodizing schemes, forcing us
to acknowledge affinity and proximity alongside difference, to grapple
with the coevalness and connectedness of past and present.
This line of thought obviously jars with a Foucauldian model of criti-
cism that conceives of the past as a series of disjunctive epistemes, that
encourages the critic to scrutinize the exotic attitudes of earlier times
with a scrupulous, self-denying dispassion. Instead of absolute temporal
difference and distance, we have a messy hotchpotch and rich confusion,
a spillage across period boundaries in which we are thoroughly impli-
cated in the historical phenomena we describe. Actor-network theory is
equally bemused by a modernist vision of time as a rupture that liberates
us off from a benighted past. Not only is the classic model of revolu-
tion rendered incoherent by the ubiquity of cross-temporal networks,
but so is the ethos of the vanguard—those anointed few, who by dint
of their intellectual training, political convictions, or artistic sensibility
propel themselves out of the mists of confusion and bad faith in which
others are immersed. History is not moving forward and none of us are
leading the way.
Why, in short, are we persuaded that we know more than the texts
that precede us? The advantage of our hindsight is compensated for by
their robustness, resilience, and continuing resonance. Their temporal-
ity is dynamic, not fixed or frozen; they speak to, but also beyond, their
own moment, anticipating future affinities and conjuring up not yet
imaginable connections. In a lucid reckoning with historicism, Jennifer
580 new literary history

Fleissner invites us to read nineteenth-century novels as living thought

rather than embodiments of past cultural work, as voices that speak
back to our own explanatory frameworks and classificatory schemes.9
Context does not automatically or inevitably trump text, because the
very question of what counts as context, and the cogency of our causal
and explanatory schemes, may be anticipated, explored, queried, rela-
tivized, expanded, or reimagined in the words we read (and not just
“disrupted,” as vulgarized versions of deconstruction would have it). The
detachment of historical explanation is ruffled, even rattled, once we
recognize that past texts have things to say on questions that matter to
us, including the status of historical understanding itself.
This busy afterlife of the literary artifact refutes our efforts to box it
into a moment of origin, to lock it up in a temporal container. To be
sure, the moment of a text’s birth places constraints on theme, form,
or genre: we look in vain for signs of modernist spleen in Attic verse,
for Dadaist decoupage in eighteenth-century landscapes. And yet these
constraints do not rule out possibilities of transtemporal connection
and comparison, allowing Karl Heinz Bohrer, for example, to expand
on the multiple affinities between Baudelairean verse and Greek tragedy
across the chasm of historical difference.10 Texts are objects that do a lot
of traveling; moving across time, they run into new semantic networks,
new ways of imputing meaning. What Dimock calls resonance is a text’s
capacity to signify across time, to trigger unexpected echoes in new places.
Dimock, to be sure, does not expound on the role of institutions in
influencing literary longevity. That certain texts survive, and others do
not, is not just a matter of particular texts resonating with individual
readers, but also of structures of gate-keeping and evaluation, of selection
and omission. These screening processes, enacted daily in discussions
over what to publish, where to allot marketing dollars, or how to revise
the undergraduate curriculum, enable some works to circulate widely
while overlooking others. From this point of view, transtemporal mo-
bility is at least partly related to institutional inertia. Citations generate
more citations; graduate students teach the texts they were themselves
taught; canons—whether of fiction or of theory—reproduce themselves
over time. Indeed, even as new texts filter into the classroom and ways
of reading gradually shift over time, it is difficult to imagine how educa-
tion might proceed without a base level of continuity, repetition, and
transmission of prior knowledge. But this is only to reinforce what I take
to be Latour’s fundamental points: that we cannot, by sheer act of will,
cut ourselves off from the influence of the past and that the impact of
artworks—an argument I will turn to shortly—depends on their social
embedding rather than being opposed to it.
“context stinks!” 581

Arguments about what counts as “real” context, moreover, spill well

beyond the boundaries of theoretical disputes into the humdrum re-
alities of what and how we teach. In English departments, especially,
identification with period remains the defining marker of professional
expertise, announced in the books that are footnoted, the conferences
attended, the courses taught, the jobs advertised. Everything conspires
to reinforce the idea that the original historical meaning of a text is its
salient meaning and to devalue the credentials of scholars who wander
across several periods rather than settling down in one. “The period,”
declares Bruce Robbins, “. . . should perhaps be seen as a sort of pseudo-
anthropocentric norm that has been adopted for a long time out of
laziness. It is one level of magnification among others, no less valid
than any other, but also no less arbitrary.”11 Robbins proposes “genre”
as an equally salient category around which to organize the teaching
of literature, one that is much more hospitable to theorizing transtem-
poral connections, repetitions, and translations. There is, in short, no
compelling intellectual or practical reason why original context should
remain the final authority and the last court of appeal.

Artworks as Non-Human Actors

Much of what I’ve proposed so far seems quite consonant with

Birmingham-style cultural studies and its model of articulation theory.
In both cases, we see a wariness of theoretical shortcuts, a dissatisfac-
tion with the model of explanation-as-reduction, and a sharply honed
skepticism about any essential relation between aesthetics and politics,
between formal and social structures. Cultural studies, moreover, puts the
act of reception at the heart of its model of culture. In principle, if not
always in practice, it encourages a polytemporal view of textual meaning
as actively remade over time by new audiences, muting the force of a
single moment of production in order to address the many moments of
reception. In this light, the performance of Macbeth in early seventeenth-
century London boasts no special priority or privilege compared to the
play’s many afterlives on the stages of New York or New Delhi, Sydney
or Singapore. Doesn’t this openness to the multitemporality of texts
resolve—in one fell swoop—the difficulties I have identified? Shouldn’t
we fervently embrace this newly pluralized and capacious contextualism
rather than continuing to harp, carp, and complain?
The difficulty of context, I propose, lies not just in its traditional bias
toward historical origins, but also in the tacit beliefs about agency, cau-
sality, and control that steer acts of contextualization, in cultural studies
582 new literary history

as elsewhere. Context is often wielded in punitive fashion to deprive the

artwork of agency, to evacuate it of influence or impact, rendering it
a puny, enfeebled, impoverished thing. We inflate context, in short, in
order to deflate text; while newly magnified social conditions dispose
and determine, the artwork flickers and grows dim. Why are the pro-
ducers or recipients of culture afforded such exceptional powers and
the individual text afforded little or none? How much light do such
theories shed on why people are willing to drive five hundred miles to
hear a band playing a certain song, or spend years in graduate school
puzzling over a single novel? The terminology of “cultural capital,” “the
hegemonic media industry,” or “interpretive communities” goes only so
far in clarifying why it is this particular tune that plays over and over
in our heads, why it is Virginia Woolf alone who becomes an object of
obsession. We explicate the puzzle of our attachments by invoking veiled
determinations and covert social interests, while paying scant attention
to the ways in which texts may solicit our affections, court our emotions,
and feed our obsessions.
Of course, the siren calls of Mrs Dalloway or “Brown Eyed Girl” do not
echo in a void; no explanation of their appeal can omit the high-school
clique that finally convinced you of the genius of Van Morrison; the ambi-
tious parents whose rapturous praise of your second-grade assignments
propelled you toward graduate school; the vocabularies propagated by
Critical Inquiry or Rolling Stone that gave you a language through which
to articulate and justify your obsession. But what exactly do we gain by
stripping down the number of agents and influences at play, by boosting
the plenipotentiary power of “context” at the expense of “text” in the
name of some final reduction? Why do we need to downplay the role
of artworks in enabling their own survival, to overlook the multifarious
ways in which they weasel themselves into our hearts and minds, their
dexterity in generating attachments?
Perhaps Latour’s idea of the nonhuman actor can clear a path.
What, first of all, are nonhuman actors? Speedbumps, microbes, mugs,
ships, baboons, newspapers, unreliable narrators, soap, silk dresses,
strawberries, floor plans, telescopes, lists, paintings, cats, can openers.
To describe these radically disparate phenomena as actors is not at all
to impute intentions, desires, or purposes to inanimate objects nor
to ignore the salient differences between things, animals, texts, and
people. An actor, in this schema, is anything that modifies a state of
affairs by making a difference.12 Nonhuman actors do not determine
reality or single-handedly make things happen—let us steer well clear
of technological or textual determinism. And yet, as Latour points out,
there are “many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer
“context stinks!” 583

inexistence,” between being the sole source of an action and being ut-
terly inert and without influence.13 The “actor” in actor-network theory
is not a self-authorizing subject, an independent agent who summons
up actions and orchestrates events. Rather, actors only become actors
via their relations with other phenomena, as mediators and translators
linked in extended constellations of cause and effect.
Nonhuman actors, then, help to modify states of affairs; they are par-
ticipants in chains of events; they help shape outcomes and influence
actions. To acknowledge the input of such actors is to circumvent, as far
as possible, polarities of subject and object, nature and culture, word and
world, to place people, animals, texts, and things on the same ontologi-
cal footing and to acknowledge their interdependence. Speed bumps
cannot prevent you from gunning your car down a suburban street, but
their presence makes such behavior far less likely. The literary device
of the unreliable narrator can always be overlooked or misunderstood,
but it has nevertheless schooled countless readers to read against the
grain and between the lines. The salience of speed bumps or story-telling
techniques derives from their distinctive properties, their nonsubstitut-
able qualities—all of which go by the board if they are dissolved into
a larger theory of the social, seen only as bearers of predetermined
functions. If a single cause is used to explain a thousand different ef-
fects, we are left no wiser about the distinctiveness of these effects. To
treat the relationship between silk and nylon merely as an allegory for
divisions between upper and lower-class taste, as Latour comments in a
tacit dig at Bourdieu, is to reduce these phenomena to illustrations of
an already established scheme, to bypass the indefinite yet fundamental
nuances of color, texture, shimmer, and feel that inspire attachments
to one fabric or the other.14 Silk and nylon, in other words, are not pas-
sive intermediaries but active mediators; they are not just channels for
conveying predetermined meanings, but configure and refigure these
meanings in specific ways.
What would it mean for literary and cultural studies to acknowledge
poems and paintings, fictional characters and narrative devices, as ac-
tors?15 How might our thinking change? Clearly, the bogeyman in the
closet is aesthetic idealism, the fear that acknowledging the agency of
texts will tip us into the abyss of a retrograde religion of art and allow a
thousand Blooms to flower. If we start talking about the power of art to
make us think and feel differently, can the language of transcendence
and the timeless canon be far behind? “Every sculpture, painting, haute
cuisine dish, techno-rave and novel,” remarks Latour, “has been explained
to nothingness by the social factors ‘hidden behind’ them. . . . And here
again, as always, some people, infuriated by the barbarous irreverence
584 new literary history

of ‘social explanations,’ come forth and defend the ‘inner sanctity’ of

the work against barbarians.”16 From the standpoint of actor-network
theory, as we are starting to see, neither perspective holds water. The
glory of the “text” is not to be defended by rescuing it from the slaver-
ing jaws of “context.” There is no zero-sum game in which one side
must be conclusively crushed so that the other can triumph. We are no
longer held captive by the vision—sentimental and blood-stirring, but
hopelessly off-target!—of a no-holds-barred battle between David and
Goliath in which poems and paintings valiantly resist the social order,
or, if we lean toward melancholy, are co-opted by the nefarious forces
that surround them.
Our viewpoint, then, is rather different: that art’s autonomy—if by
autonomy we mean its distinctiveness and specialness—does not rule
out connectedness but is the very reason that connections are forged
and sustained. There never was an isolated self-contained aesthetic
object to begin with, because any such object would have long since
sunk into a black hole of oblivion rather than coming to our attention.
Artworks can only survive and thrive by making friends, creating allies,
attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts.
If they are not to fade quickly from view, they must persuade people to
hang them on walls, watch them in movie theaters, purchase them on
Amazon, dissect them in reviews, debate them with their friends. These
networks of alliances, relations, and translations are just as vital to the
life of experimental art as to blockbuster fiction, even if the networks
vary in kind and what counts as success looks radically different.
The number and breadth of these networks prove far more salient
to a text’s survival than matters of ideological agreement. If you’re an
unrepentant avantgardist creating installations out of soiled diapers and
statues of the Virgin Mary, your allies are not just the respectful review
in the pages of ArtForum, but the conservative pundit who invokes your
example to lambast the state of contemporary art, amping up its visibil-
ity and talked-aboutness and generating a flurry of commentary, a slot
on National Public Radio, and, a few years down the road, an edited
collection of essays. Romantic visions of solitary subversion make it easy
to forget that rupture vanishes without trace if it is not registered and
acknowledged, that is to say, made the object of new attachments, con-
nections, and translations between actors. Artworks must be sociable to
survive, whatever their attitude to “society.” Or, more pithily: no nega-
tion without relation.
An indispensable element of this sociability—whatever other factors
come into play—is a work’s dexterity in attracting readers or viewers, in
soliciting and sustaining attachments. When we join an endlessly snak-
“context stinks!” 585

ing line at the movie theater, when we devour page after page of James
Joyce or James Patterson deep into the night, it is because a certain
text—rather than countless possible others—matters to us in some way.
Of course, how it matters will differ, and modes of appreciation as well as
vocabularies of interpretation vary widely; the “questions for discussion”
appended to the typical book club novel may trigger howls of mirth in
an English Department faculty lounge. But no fan, no enthusiast, no
aficionado—whatever their education or class background—is indifferent
to the specialness of the texts they admire. And it is here that critical
vocabularies with their emphasis on exemplarity and abstraction, on the
logic of “the” realist novel, or women’s poetry, or Hollywood movies offer
little traction in explaining practices of discrimination within such generic
groupings, our marked preference for certain texts over others and the
intensity and passion with which such discriminations are often made.
“If you are listening to what people are saying,” remarks Latour, “they
will explain at length how and why they are deeply attached, moved, af-
fected by the works of art which ‘make them’ feel things.”17 Latour’s work
is, among other things, a sustained polemic against the modern urge to
purify: to separate rationality from emotion, to safeguard critique from
faith, to distinguish fact from fetish. In this light, the experience of the
artwork—like Latour’s examples of religious language or love talk—is
not just a matter of conveying information but also of experiencing
transformation.18 The significance of a text is not exhausted by what it
reveals or conceals about the social conditions that surround it. Rather,
it is also a matter of what it makes possible in the viewer or reader—what
kind of emotions it elicits, what perceptual changes it triggers, what
affective bonds it calls into being. What would it mean to do justice to
these responses rather than treating them as naïve, rudimentary, or de-
fective? To be less shame-faced about being shaken or stirred, absorbed
or enchanted? To forge a language of attachment as intellectually robust
and refined as our rhetoric of detachment?
One possible consequence of ANT for the classroom, then, is a per-
spective less censorious of ordinary experiences of reading, including
their stubborn persistence in the margins of professional criticism. It is
no longer a matter of looking through such experiences to the hidden
laws that determine them, but of looking squarely at them, in order to
investigate the mysteries of what is in plain sight. Of course, feelings
have histories and individual sensations of sublimity or self-loss connect
up to larger pictures and cultural frames, but underscoring the social
construction of emotion is often a matter of announcing the critic’s
own detachment and immunity from the illusions of others. Could we
conceivably come to terms with the implications of our attachments to
586 new literary history

particular objects? Can we wean ourselves of the longstanding impulse to

discount or empty out such attachments in order to discover, yet again,
the subterranean structures that determine them?
This impulse has a tendency to reassert itself in even the most sophis-
ticated renderings of reception. For example, Tony Bennett’s well-known
concept of the “reading formation” strives to mediate between internalist
and externalist theories of meaning, between text-centered theories of
reader response and the reductiveness of conventional sociological expla-
nation. Instead, Bennett draws attention to the “discursive and intertex-
tual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading.”19
How we respond to works of art, in other words, is governed neither by
the internal structures of the text nor by the raw social demographics of
race, gender, or class, but by the cultural frameworks and interpretative
vocabularies we have unconsciously absorbed. Indeed, this idea of the
reading formation captures crucial aspects of mediation, underscored
by Bennett’s insistence that meaning is inherently relational and texts
exist only in their use. Repudiating any notion of the “text itself” as the
last gasp of Kantian idealism, Bennett stoutly declares that texts have no
existence “prior to or independently of the varying ‘reading formations’
in which they have been constituted as objects-to-be read.”20
Yet the use of the passive voice and the choice of noun (“objects-to-
read”) is revealing, underscoring a view of texts as acted upon rather
than acting. Films and novels dissolve into the cultural assumptions
and interpretative frameworks of their audiences; as described here by
Bennett, they seem to possess no independent existence, no distinctive
properties, no force, or presence of their own. We fumble to account for
the often unforeseen impact of texts: the song on the radio that unex-
pectedly reduces you to tears; the horror movie gorefest that continues
to haunt your dreams; the novel that finally persuaded you to take up
Buddhism or to get divorced. As in Stanley Fish’s discussion of interpreta-
tive communities, the text is reduced to a blank screen on which groups
of readers project their preexisting ideas and beliefs. In consequence,
we are hard-pressed to explain why any text should matter more than
any other, why we register the differences between individual texts so
strongly, or how we can be aroused, disturbed, surprised, or brought to
act by such texts in ways that we did not expect and may find it hard to
explain. As Bennett himself admits, context trumps and transcends text.
And yet, if Bennett’s contexts are themselves textual—namely critical
vocabularies and interpretative frameworks—it is hard to see why this
should be the case, why these frameworks should have exclusive power
to determine meaning, while films and novels are afforded none. Why
freeze a single relationship between figure and ground, object and
“context stinks!” 587

frame, why not acknowledge that works of art can function as vehicles
of knowing as well as objects to be known, why not make room for a
multiplicity of mediators? While we indisputably learn to read literary
texts by internalizing particular interpretative vocabularies, by the same
token we learn to read and make sense of our lives by referencing
fictional or imaginary worlds. What counts as text and what serves as
frame is more mutable and fluid than Bennett allows; works of art oc-
cupy both categories rather than only one; they are not just objects to
be interpreted, but also reference points and guides to interpretation,
in both predictable and less foreseeable ways.
In fact, Bennett’s own critical practice is more flexible than some of
his theoretical pronouncements might suggest. Evacuating fictional texts
of agency would drastically impede the task that Bennett sets himself
in a coauthored book with Janet Woollacott: clarifying why the James
Bond novels and films swept to worldwide success, why they became
participants in so many networks, attracting ever more intermediaries,
generating ever more attachments, until the entire globe seemed satu-
rated with Bond films, paperbacks, advertisements, posters, t-shirts, toys,
and paraphernalia. The Bond phenomenon was indisputably shaped
by the vagaries of reception; Ian Fleming’s novels, we discover, were
associated with a tradition of hard-boiled crime fiction in the United
States, while piggybacking on the popularity of the imperial spy thriller
in the United Kingdom. But such explanations alone do not clarify why
this particular series of novels marched toward world-wide visibility and
prominence while countless others works of spy fiction languished like
wallflowers in the cut-price piles and remainder bins. What was it about
the James Bond novels in particular that attracted so many allies, fans,
enthusiasts, fantasists, translators, dreamers, advertisers, entrepreneurs,
and parodists? Surely their presence made a difference; they attracted
co-actors; they helped make things happen.
The Latourian model of the nonhuman actor, moreover, presumes
no necessary measure of scale, size, or complexity. It includes not only
individual novels or films, but also characters, plot devices, cinematog-
raphy, literary styles, and other formal devices that travel beyond the
boundaries of their home texts to attract allies, generate attachments,
trigger translations, and inspire copies, spin-offs, and clones. We are far
removed, in other words, from an aestheticism in which art works are
chastely sequestered from the worldly hustle and bustle, their individual
parts relating only to each other. The appeal of Fleming’s texts, as Ben-
nett and Woolacott plausibly hypothesize, had much to do with their
creation of a charismatic protagonist who moved easily into multiple
media, times, and spaces, and proved adaptable to the interests and
588 new literary history

emotions of different audiences. Characters from more rarefied milieus

can be just as lively, triggering new connections as they travel across
place and time: think of the worldwide enactment of Bloomsday or the
afterlife of Emma Bovary as a still resonant touchstone for a particular
kind of reader.
Most fictional characters, of course, are born only to expire with an
almost unseemly haste. In “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Franco
Moretti conjures up the desolate expanses of the literary graveyard: even
while some works prove remarkably energetic, leapfrogging across time
and space, the vast majority is soon lost from sight—ninety-nine and a
half percent, according to Moretti, even within the relatively restrained
publishing milieu of Victorian England. Why do some texts survive and
so many vanish? For Moretti, the answer lies in the force of form. Trac-
ing the evolution of detective fiction, he argues that the invention of
a formal device—namely the technique of the clue—helps explain the
durability of Sherlock Holmes and the rapid obsolescence of most of
his fictional peers.21 The clue, in other words, functioned as an actor, in
Latour’s terms, and the reasons for the survival of Holmes were neither
arbitrary nor purely ideological (if Arthur Conan Doyle was an apologist
for patriarchal rationality, so were many of his compatriots whose works
vanished without trace). Whether our sample consists of Renaissance
plays, modernist poems, or Hollywood blockbusters, some examples will
prove more mobile, portable, and adaptable to the interests of different
audiences than others.
And yet the social make-up, buying power, and beliefs of audiences
also remain more central to the equation than Moretti seems ready to
concede. A text’s formal properties, after all, cannot single-handedly
decide or determine its cross-temporal reach, which also pivots on the
vagaries and contingencies of its relations with many other actors—hu-
mans, other texts, institutions. Literary works go in and out of vogue;
what was once indispensable come to seem obsolete and old-hat, while
works overlooked on their first publication can acquire an energetic,
even frenetic, afterlife. The reasons for these shifts are thematic and
political as well as formal; that Hemingway’s stock has gone down, while
Kate Chopin steadily accumulates visibility and prestige, is hardly a mat-
ter explicable by literary devices alone. Texts do not act by themselves,
but only in tandem with countless other, often unpredictable, co-actors.

Conclusion

Digesting the implications of this idea demands, I’ve been suggest-

ing, a swerve away from more familiar ways of apportioning agency and
“context stinks!” 589

power via a text/context distinction. Of course, one possibility would be

redefine this distinction rather than abandon it, revising the concept
of context in order to render it more fragrant. And yet the remorseless
pressure of context’s prior usage, I wager, is likely to coax us back into
the familiar mindset of container versus contained, of coercion versus
resistance. In this regard, the preceding pages have looked askance at the
conviction that the texts we study are permanently engaged in coercing,
mystifying, and hoodwinking their readers. In such scenarios, texts are
munificently awarded supermanlike powers with the one hand, only to
have them immediately whisked away with the other. A novel is charged
and found guilty of manufacturing docile bourgeois subjects but this jaw-
dropping achievement—how remarkable, if true!—turns out to be the
mere reflex of systems of power steering the action behind the scenes,
occult forces that fully determine without themselves being determined.
In such a scenario, texts turn out to be passive intermediaries rather
than active mediators, servile henchmen and bully boys entirely at the
beck and call of their shadowy, omnipotent, and all-seeing masters.22
The insufficiencies of this scenario, however, should not drive us into
the arms of an equally favored idiom of subversion, resistance, nega-
tion, transgression, and rupture. Literary works, I’ve been arguing, are
not actors in this rugged, individualist sense, not lonely rebels pitted
against the implacable forces of the contextual status quo. If they make
a difference, they do so only as co-actors and codependents, enmeshed
in a motley array of attachments and associations. They gain strength
and vitality from their alliances; “emancipation,” remarks Latour, “does
not mean ‘freed from bonds’, but well-attached.”23 Theory’s affinity for
a modernist rhetoric of marginality and negativity prevents us from
seeing that a text’s sociability—that is, its embedding in numerous
networks and its reliance on multiple mediators—is not an attrition,
diminution, or co-option of its agency, but the very precondition of it.
The works that we study and teach—including the most antinomian
texts of Beckett or Blanchot, Brecht or Butler—could never have come
to our attention without the input of countless co-actors: publishers,
advertisers, critics, prize committees, reviews, word-of-mouth recom-
mendations, departmental decisions, old syllabi, new syllabi, textbooks
and anthologies, changing critical tastes and scholarly vocabularies, and
last, but not least, the desires and attachments of ourselves and our
students. Some of these mediators, to be sure, will prove more helpful,
desirable, generous, or respectful of their object than others, but the
fact of mediation is not a regrettable lapse into complicity or collusion
but a fundamental precondition of being known. Unbought, unread,
uncriticized, untaught, these literary and critical texts would languish
in limbo, forever invisible and impotent.
590 new literary history

Meanwhile, our conventional models of context take these multidirec-

tional linkages and cast them into coffinlike containers called periods.
Instead of swarms of actors moving toward each other, we imagine an
immobile textual object enclosed within an all-determining contextual
frame. Frozen in time and in space, the literary work is deprived of the
very mobility that forms the precondition of our own experience of it.
Impaled on the pin of our historical categories and coordinates, it exists
only as an object-to-be-explained rather than a fellow actor and cocre-
ator of relations, attitudes, and attachments. Of course, everything that
has been said so far underscores the impossibility of simply abolishing,
overcoming, or cancelling out the categories of our own intellectual
history. The context concept is itself an actor, one that has enjoyed a
remarkable long and successful run. But if we put context temporarily
in abeyance, as we surely can, if we orient ourselves to ask other kinds
of questions and to puzzle over other kinds of problems, how might
our thinking change?

University of Virginia

NOTES

1 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 148.
2 Lawrence Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), 255.
3 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 148.
4 Rita Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” Poetics Today 32, no. 2 (2011): 215–34.
5 See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA
120, no. 5 (2005): 1608–17; Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities:
A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 177–95; Hugh Grady and Terence
Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2006); Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval
Identity Machines (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jennifer Summit and
David Wallace, “Rethinking Periodization,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37,
no. 3 (2007), Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); John Bowen, “Time for Victorian Studies?” Journal of
Victorian Culture 14, no. 2 (2009): 282–93; Ed Cohen, “Confessions of a Pseudo-Victorianist,
Or How I fell Ass-Backwards and Landed in a Period (a Screed),” Victorian Literature and
Culture, 27, no. 2 (1999): 487–94.
6 Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1061. For an
interesting recent example of cross-temporal comparison, see Lauren M. E. Goodlad,
“Trollopian ‘Foreign Policy’: Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism in the Mid-Victorian Global
Imaginary,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 437–54.
7 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
1993), 75.
8 Harris, Untimely Matter, 2.
9 Jennifer Fleissner, “Is Feminism a Historicism?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21,
no. 1 (2002): 45–66.
“context stinks!” 591

10 Karl Heinz Bohrer, “The Tragic: A Question of Art, not Philosophy of History,” New
Literary History 41, no. 1 (2010): 35–51.
11 Bruce Robbins, “Afterword,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1650.
12 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 71.
13 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 72.
14 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 40.
15 A separate model of the agency of artworks—though with intriguing parallels—is
developed by Alfred Gell in Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998). See also Eduardo de la Fuente’s pertinent discussion, drawing on both Gell
and Latour, in “The Artwork Made Me Do It: Introduction to the New Sociology of Art,”
Thesis Eleven 103, no. 1 (2010): 3–9.
16 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 236.
17 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 236.
18 My thinking on this issue has benefited from Thom Dancer’s paper “Between Knowl-
edge and Belief: J. M. Coetzee, Gilles Deleuze and the Present of Reading” and Cristina
Vischer Bruns, Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What it Means for Teaching
(New York: Continuum, 2011).
19 Tony Bennett, “Texts in History: The Determination of Readings and their Texts,”
The Journal of the Mid-West Modern Language Association 18, no. 1 (1985): 7.
20 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular
Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987), 64.
21 Franco Moretti, “The Slaughter House of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61,
no. 1 (2000): 207–27.
22 I should point out that rejecting this scenario does not prevent us from objecting to
what a text is saying, on political or any other grounds, only from buttressing our claims
by relying on a particular ontology of fiction or a theology of power.
23 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 21.