Yes China is an economic power. So is Japan and the Netherlands. With out a deep sea navy and significantly more troop transports, China is only a regional military power. Don’t worry they are actively working on both limitations.

I also think that historical role of connoisseurship in turning art into a type of capital shouldn’t be underestimated; I don’t think that kind of criticism is politically neutral, given that the fundamental goal is that you should know how much a given art object is worth, which tends to reduce to `how much would it be worth at auction’, or possibly `how much should it be worth at auction’? (Clearly not ideologically empty questions to ask.)

Yes, certainly. But remember where this thread started out: with the question of whether criticism was necessarily political “through and through”; that is, whether judgments about “relative levels of aesthetic quality” were possible, never mind useful. All I’ve been arguing for is the possible relative autonomy of aesthetic criticism. And of course I’ve also been asserting, without arguing, that that kind of criticism can be pretty interesting too.

But don’t you think that would miss some interesting information—if I wanted to learn about Orwell’s futurism, or about the role of the novel in British society, or the connections between the modern SF novel and the British Left, or—, which are all surely legitimate areas of literary criticism?

I just think that purely formal criticism is quite limited.

I don’t, by the way, think that only politically Left criticism can be good criticism; I could imagine very good Tory criticism or Catholic criticism, and I certainly don’t think that political criticism in the sense of making everything about the bourgeoisie or the Republicans or the patriarchy is good criticism.

There are lots of interesting arguments about relative merit in literary criticism that don’t seem, to me at least, to have much of anything to do with politics. How good a poet is Shelley? Is Daniel Deronda better without Daniel Deronda? Is Dostoevsky a genius, as most of us think, or a hack, as Nabokov thought? Are Henry James’s final novels a supreme achievement or a dreadful mistake?

“Personal frivolous taste”—you’re not suggesting some necessary correspondence between these two adjectives, are you?

You’re right, no doubt, about Mapplethorpe. I suppose I was out of my depth.

A consistent disciple of Bourdieu might say that such hierarchic comparison make sense only in an autonomous field (or in a relative formulation, that the more the field is autonomous, the more theses comparisons make sense). The way I see it, literature is a not very autonomous field, so that if you want to compare two novels, and if you don’t want to give the impression your judgment ultimately rests upon matters of personal frivolous taste, you’ll have first to establish some kind of autonomous foundations establishing the value of your criteria, and in doing so you almost inescapably bump into political considerations (if only political considerations within academia).

This is why, for instance, the choice of the Nobel prize in literature is invariably criticized, whereas the Nobel prize in physics very rarely so, and the Fields medal has never been (to the best of my knowledge).

But if my (or rather Bourdieu’s) approach is correct, then there is hope, as it could be that the field of literature is getting more and more autonomous. I would say (but I wouldn’t really know, being too far from this field myself) that the efforts of homosexual, women, cultural, you-name-it studies have had on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it a positive influence towards more autonomy.

I think that good formalist criticism is important, but it has the weakness of tending to universalise particular political views under the cover of a supposedly objective methodology, and it is especially weak when discussing objects produced outside the native culture, or discussing ways in which objects participate in the culture generally, which is an important area of criticism. Especially, I think a purely formal apolitical analysis of artists like Jacques Louis David or Orwell is utterly inane, and likewise a purely formal analysis of say, Primitivism.

Further, anybody who doesn’t think Mapplethorpe is a good photographer is applying more than just formal apolitical criteria.

• In the broad sense.

Considering that they hold about a trillion $ of U.S. bonds, I’m reminded of the riddle, “What do you have when you hold two little green balls in your hand?” Answer: “Kermit’s undivided attention.”

Hard to be the ‘Great Satan’ if your number 2-8.

Well, they can be the Great Asmodeus, or Great Beelzebub. Hell hath its hierarchies.

GK - I’ll maintain that Walzer was actively intellectually dishonest in this exchange (I don’t know what George thinks, beyond what he has written, and don’t think it fair to ask him). It isn’t that George wins the debate on points; it’s that there is one person who is interested in having an actual debate here, and one person who is not. I will be writing more on this I hope soon.

As someone who dropped out of a Ph.D. English program, my answer is, “no, unfortunately not.” I went to grad school hoping to learn the technical skill of studying how literature works. A big, naive mistake.

My personal, prejudiced theory is that many people prefer politicizing literature because they would rather talk about politics than about literature. It also has the advantage of being easier. You don’t have to read the entire book (indeed, a professor can conduct a two-hour seminar without once opening the assigned text), and everyone already thinks himself knowledgeable about politics.

Agree or disagree with what Paul de Man thought English departments should be doing, I think it’s hard to disagree with his characterization of them as “large organizations in the service of everything except their own subject matter.”

But you have to understand genre to discuss formal considerations, and you have to place the works in context to read them correctly, no? (Duccio/Giotto has to also consider Siena/Florence and the role of the Madonna and so on.)

Also, I wouldn’t say there’s no interest, just not as much interest as in a broader discussion. Who’d win Mongols or Romans is interesting, just not what I expect military historians to spend a great deal of time on.