Amanda Anderson : The Way We Argue Now

ness is that it allows one to skirt the question of critical reflec­ tion. Since affect is typically presented in somatic and noncognitive terms, it often serves as a safe solution within a critical climate that has become suspicious not only of the perceived impersonality of abstract­ ness, but also of the forms of rationality that many of the abstract the­ ories themselves denounce. While the spectrum of work on affect is rich and closely allied to the topos of ethos that I will pursue here, it is also symptomatic of a larger inability to conceptualize the characterolog­ ical imagination of theory itself and to address how practitioners might reflectively realize, promote, and ultimately even render habitual those postures that best encompass its intellectual and ethicopolitical values. One particularly symptomatic example of the turn toward affect as an answer to the perceived abstraction and bluntness of theory can be found in Charles Altieri’s Postmodernisms Now.17 In his book, Altieri distin­ guishes between “what is living and what is dead” in postmodernism. As theory, Altieri contends, postmodernism is largely and deservedly dead. But in its imaginative aesthetic incarnations—in other words, as art— postmodernism is living. In Altieri’s view, it is only through the aesthetic— conceived as particularistic, existential, and nongeneralizable—that postmodernism can exorcise the demon of theoretical fetishism. And in­ terestingly, Altieri consistently singles out affect as the vivifying force, and primary indexical sign, of aesthetic life. Altieri usefully identifies a number of constraints in the postmodern theoretical imagination, and he is particularly impatient with the reductive hermeneutic imposed by overattention to identity politics. But it is also the case that he aims to create a sharp demarcation whereby theoretical ab­ straction simply fails to capture the more authentic enactments of artistic expression. Such a demarcation denies to theory the possibilities that he locates in the arts, whose aim is “not to offer theoretical solutions but to envision imaginative stances for living within and finessing and even build­ ing upon what we cannot resolve” (15). The Way We Argue Now insists that such stances already inhabit theory—with greater and lesser degrees of explicitness—and that arguments like Altieri’s distort and stereotype theory, thereby foreclosing an appreciation of the extent to which theory itself grapples with the issue of living enactment. And to the extent that theory values the reflective life, its own understandings of individual and collective practice are more comprehensively recognized if we can show how they project not only affective dimensions, but also ethical ones. 17 Charles Altieri, Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Page-number references will be made parenthetically in the text.