Lately, mainstream media outlets have opted to cut to the chase in their cueing the fear of loss of meaningful distinctions necessary to the binding of communities with the more concisely phrased “fear of godless disorder.” Yet, is this latest appropriation of the moral relativism argument more than what it appears to be, i.e., an unavowable fear of loss of advantage unfairly gotten and maintained? And is this concern over an apparent erosion of class privilege anything other than a narrative twist on the leggy abstraction it has always been? Worth considering is whether something else can be fashioned this time around, something closer to a hermeneutics of eccentricity that I imagine someone like Shakespeare would have been more interested to defend.

The term refers to common measures mediating human relations that aren’t premised on injustice, corruption, or criminality while nonetheless allowing for interpretations that may be tinged by things such as individual prejudices and private taste, personal judgements that can’t be accounted for, or shared empathies and antipathies.

The phrase is not unrelated to and may even be the obverse of something called “hermeneutical injustice” whose scope for the most part has been restricted to women’s rights issues and the study of marginalized groups. Its recent etymology includes Gayatri Spivak’s “epistemic injustice” that led to formulation of the phrase, ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ in reference to Third World proletariats.

Wikipedia defines hermeneutical injustice as the exclusion of certain groups from “equal participation in the institutions and industries devoted to making sense of, describing, and explaining human experiences.” The lives of such groups are said to be “less intelligible” in that their experiences “do not fit any concepts known to them” or to others due to historical exclusion from those very activities that “shape which concepts become well known.”

Whereas the traditional remedy has been a call for greater inclusion, there are cases in which inclusion does little to bring about what John Berger has called “a transformation of intolerable conditions in the world,” i.e., knowledge of “the full measure of the truth” about the degree of exploitation, enslavement, and intensity of suffering among two-thirds of the world, “even by those who suffered it” (Understanding a Photograph, 1967, 2013, 7).

Why it is that inclusion isn’t always redemptive was put forward more fully by the late Edward Said in his 1982 essay, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community”:

You have to pass through certain rules of accreditation, you must learn the rules, you must speak the language, you must master the idioms and you must accept the authorities of the field – determined in many of the same ways – to which you contribute. In this view of things, expertise is partially determined by how well an individual learns the rules of the game, so to speak…Elsewhere I have taken the admittedly aggressive position that Orientalists, area-studies experts, journalists and foreign-policy specialists are not always sensitive to the dangers of self-quotation, endless repetition, and received ideas that their fields encourage, for reasons that have more to do with politics and ideology than with any ‘outside’ reality. (from Hal Foster, ed., 1998, 163)

Said employed the Gramscian notion of hegemony on the basis of which reasoning, if true, means that the power to produce not only things themselves but the agency to produce them (or not produce them) will be in the hands of concentrated pockets of power or in any case will inevitably tend toward this.

After Vico, Said placed human ingenuity and spirit in the secular as opposed to the divine world, an important distinction that would allow for individual inventiveness in the reading of texts rather than their being beholden to easy refrains:

“A heterogeneity of human involvement is therefore equivalent to a heterogeneity of results, as well as of interpretive skills and techniques. There is no center, no inertly given and accepted authority, no fixed barriers ordering human history, even though authority, order and distinction exist” (167).

To say that Said’s positions in the intellectual community generated opposition is an understatement. Opinions tended to align with those of people like influential Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson who, that same year, delivered a lecture striking out the possibility of aesthetic uniqueness in individual subjects today, an assessment that, within the confines of the lecture, is fueled by a non-clinical diagnosis of certain people (not all of them, certainly) having lost the ability to tell time. How this happened and what it entails is all very mumbo jumbo and, in any case, Benjamin said it earlier and better in his 1936 work “The Storyteller.”

In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1982) Jameson declares that individual eccentricity is no longer possible today, relegating it into the modern past when people “believed in language.” Today, all that’s possible is an “explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms” (Foster 130). The rejection of “a linguistic norm” has made it so that ‘each group comes to speak a curious private language of its own, each profession develops its private code or idiolect, and “finally each individual comes to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else” (131).

In order to save the great modern works of the past from dissolution, Jameson practically arrogates universal human qualities such as “the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body” (131). He claims an ‘organic link’ between the modernist aesthetic and the “conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style” (131). Then he effects to expel all of this from postmodern discourse with claims that “individualism as such” has come to an end; “the old individual or individualist subject is ‘dead’; even that the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism is ideological” (131). Jameson writes, “…nobody has that kind of unique private world and style to express any longer” (132).

It’s not entirely clear in that lecture (which is not to say it’s not in there somewhere) whether Jameson is including in all those who are excluded “today” from individual uniqueness the previously excluded two-thirds of humanity that John Berger referenced but, if there must be exclusions and marginalizations for there to be the academic concept “hermeneutical injustice,” perhaps it’s not impossible to reclaim the same criteria to coincide with conditions producing hermeneutical eccentricity, the latter possibly approaching yet ultimately being irreducible to the “cult of pure difference” that Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton dismissed as “strictly unthinkable.”

Eagleton considered the possibility of anarchy-inducing indifferentism via his 1996 analysis of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, specifically whether too merciful an application of the law could lead to this. Eagleton does not say that he selected this play for the “hermeneutical dilemma” it dramatizes, but it does suggest that Shakespeare himself was preoccupied by the question of at what point personal expression slides into loss of shareable meaning (40).

Eagleton defines the comparative nature of law in “its attempt to apply the same general principles to widely different conditions. One law for one group and another law for another is commonly felt to be objectionable: it can lead to privilege, which literally means ‘private law’” (36).

The problem would seem to be that the formal, abstract character of the law is both necessary and reifying. It is necessary if social cohesion is to be sustained, since the law mediates diverse situations to each other by subsuming them under stable principles. Yet in doing so it threatens to erase what is specific about those situations, homogenizing vital differences as an inflexibly levelling force.

The alternative to this would seem to be purely ad hoc, context-bound judgements of the Portia kind, bending general norms to fit particular instances. But this approach lands you in a kind of indifferentism ironically close to the one you were seeking to escape: by giving free reign to the signifier it would appear to license any interpretation you like, processing and permutating the evidence to confirm a given theory. Anarchy and authoritarianism are not, after all, the binary opposites they seem… (42)

Eagleton’s argument involves the running of a parallel between the paradoxical nature of law and that of language itself in order to say that the preservation of Law doesn’t mean a blanket denial of subjectivity but rather the exercise of creative interpretation which may, where unavoidable, transgress the general framework of limitations seeking to contain it.

“It is a paradoxical fact about all language that it is at once entirely general and irreducibly particular…The paradox, then, is that actual speech or writing subverts the very generality of the structure which brings it into being” (34).

The subversion, despite its ultimate submission, points up the partial nature of Venetian law in its unequal application as dramatized, objectionable for the reasons Eagleton effectively lays out. Elsewhere in his essay, the paradox “is that to preserve the structure of the law you must transgress what it actually says” and even if “there is nothing false” about a reading in itself, a “too true interpretation,” one that is “too crassly literal,” is “ironically a flagrant distortion” (37).

With the Eagleton essay, as much as you try to make it say that transgressions are acceptable as long as they fall within the general framework, there doesn’t appear to be a decisive event in the text itself to settle the question. A couple of times it seems a clear solution is attainable without upsetting the apple cart. He does say what’s needed is an application of the law that bridges the gap between the general character of law and unique individual contexts (36). And he says the possible undermining of the structure of the law may be avoided if we hold to its spirit, i.e. “judgements should be realistic and commensensical, not narrowly technical or pedantic” (36). Yet this play of the spirit of the law soon becomes “hermeneutical errancy, the final consequence of which might be political anarchy,” by which Venetian law is “induced” to “partly undo itself,” being pressed toward “self-contradiction” (38). Not long after, Freudian melancholy is brought in to diagnose Venetian profit-based society as careening down the path of self-destruction.

But neither the capitalist critique, nor the constant commentary condemning anti-Semitism are all that helpful in thinking about the hermeneutical dilemma the play poses, between the use of ‘fanciful metaphor’ and ‘flatly literal’ interpretation of texts (42). To be sure, the nature of the bond Shylock is after wouldn’t possess any less of what Eagleton calls its ‘bizarrely gratuitous’ aspect if it sprang from one of Venice’s own. The bond itself, he notes elsewhere, “is so excessive of all customary measure as to mean nothing” (44). And if this inexplicable excess is itself beyond all reason, it may share an underlying parity of excess with the coldly calculating, all-too-predictable rationale of Bassanio, whose self-interest makes a farce of the “inestimability of love” he claims to possess. Eagleton maintains this higher love which costs nothing is “just the other side of the commercial coin: the bourgeoisie have always pretended that sex transcends utility, at the very moment they debase it to a commodity” (45).

Compared with what past commentators have done with this play, Eagleton’s perspectives for the most part satisfy. Yet there remains a sticking point in which at least one other view, by the late Peter Alexander, might have concluded Eagleton’s reading constitutes a ‘distortion’ of Shakespeare’s intentions; a “hypercritical reading” suggestive of “modern aberrations” (Introduction, The Merchant of Venice, in Collins Tudor Shakespeare, 1951, 1965, 418). While Alexander concedes “the medieval type of story in which a Jew might figure as the villain would not have seemed in any way unnatural to Shakespeare’s audience,” he goes on to note:

Shylock’s role is indicated by Shakespeare’s source and dictated by his part in the action. He is not meant to be a good man who puts the Christians to shame; he is at the end an obstacle in the way of happiness and peace and has to be removed. But as a man who takes up a challenge flung at him by those who treat him as an enemy and has to play a lone hand he naturally holds our attention and makes us feel his passion. (418)

And later, “The lines on which Shakespeare has developed his original show that he had no intention of representing Bassanio as a sponger because he borrowed money from Antonio” (418).

The Eagleton essay illustrates a case in which transgression doesn’t fit squarely within or end up affirming general principles where those principles are corrupted. Where it does affirm, this serves only to re-instantiate corrupted general principles. With respect to the second outcome I wouldn’t say this type of transgression carries out ‘hermeneutical justice’ since it amounts to limiting transgression to those who are within the law and its institutions, permitting transgressions in its defense. Similar like-minded conclusions are encouraged, i.e. the essay in the way that it’s framed doesn’t allow for the thinking of ‘mercy’ and ‘impersonal’ together. It’s because the author has already attached mercy to class law and defined it as contingent on privilege, to some sense of corruption, i.e. not impersonal. Finally, the essay does nothing to discourage fear of a loss of advantage unfairly gotten, which is the lasting impression left once Antonio comes precariously close to this loss. We are left only to witness the unreasonable excess to reclaim and to restore this imagined threat, which is probably even less pleasant where power imbalances have prevailed uncontested long enough to have transformed the beneficiaries into naturally virtuous persons.

Ultimately, if the Eagleton essay doesn’t take us where we want to go in arguing for the possibility of an aesthetics of hermeneutical eccentricity, it’s because his analysis moves within and is in that sense beholden to a Marxist lens that is itself bound to a classic mechanical world view in which parts of the natural physical world are held to an absolute time. As with the response to Newtonian mechanics, the less destructive move would be to turn away from this model and its accommodating of any backwards directed desire for vengeance.

The intention here is not to freak out Slavoj Zizek any more than he appears to be; Zizek who once said that he becomes nervous whenever he has to argue all over again the immorality of rape. It’s simply to call attention to a particular use of the moral relativist argument that arises from time to time for increasingly obvious reasons of control and domination. Moreover, if this must take place in an aesthetic space that is “depoliticized with a vengeance,” as Said put it, then the positing of an aesthetic of eccentricity would allow for productive differentiations of that space rather than to try to render it smooth, with one nostalgic eye looking back to a hazy, unrecoverable modern past.

Said didn’t say that all knowledge is esoteric and subjective any more than he conceded there could be objectivity in knowledge about human society. Yet I tend to trust Said’s assessment of Malek Alloula as trustworthy in the latter’s conscious re-enactment and re-inscribing of images of harem women in early 20^th century Algeria on the basis of his own unique understanding of their fragmented history, which history Alloula shares. The example by which Said closed his essay is effective in demonstrating the possibility that the root of the charge levied against relativism lies rather in the search for large, all-embracing answers that reduce individual differences as part of a universalizing habit. There is no one single method. Crucial distinctions must be observed.

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