“Given that all meaning is essentially added on, the goal of any reading must be to produce meaning; and more meaning can be produced by allowing one’s own pleasure-oriented or politically-oriented desires to engage, openly and consciously, with the text. Those who claim to ‘respect’ the text are merely less open and conscious about the role of their own desires. Even a strategic wrenching of the text, or a reading against the grain of the text’s explicit message, is no more than a logical continuation of what readers already do.
The empowerment of the reader is simultaneously the empowerment of the critic, who stands in as the reader’s representative. The relation of critic to text is no longer that of knower to known. Producing meanings on the text’s own level, the critic operates as a doer rather than a knower – and certainly not a detached or impartial knower. The critic is involved alongside the Postmodernist writer in fighting exactly the same battle against the same conservative forces in literature and politics. If the text does not explicitly subvert established assumptions, then the critic takes over the task on its behalf. In this respect too, critical and creative activity become almost indistinguishable.
By helping to produce political meanings, the theorist or critic can hope to make a particular kind of intervention in her/his own social reality. In the Postmodernist period, grand blueprints for future states of society have vanished from the agenda. Grand blueprints must be formulated from a position wholly detached from one’s own society – and we no longer believe in the possibility of such detachment. Instead, the new politics relies upon small leverage-points which be used to initiate a widening destabilization from within. Literary texts are precisely such leverage-points. Although literature may occupy a relatively tiny space in the totally system of contemporary society, literary theorists and critics can lay claim to a crucial political role – the kind once claimed by political philosophers and political scientists.”
Harland, Richard, “Epilogue: Into the Postmodern Period,” Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes. Pgs 242 – 243. (I have no more citation info to offer, always photocopy copyrights page!).
