Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From

Criticism, Summer, 2003 by Steve Newman

Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From by David Simpson. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xii 290. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

David Simpson knows that he has assigned himself a difficult task. By writing a book about "situatedness" he courts the danger of writing "a book about everything" (4). For "situatedness" carries with it "nothing less than the entire predicament of being in the world" (9)--the questions of how the various biological and social contexts we occupy do or do not determine who we are, what we think, and what we do. One of Simpson's aids in organizing this huge subject is the "azza sentence" (41-47), a familiar act of preemptive self-definition such as: "As a post-colonial feminist ethnographer, I ... ". The speaker of the azza sentence combines a necessary humility with a residual claim of authority: Because no one can claim a transcendent position, those who use the azza acknowledge that their authority emerges from a particular, limited position that shapes who they are and bounds what they know. But within that realm their authority is credible. While honoring the progressive impulse behind the azza and rejecting nostalgia for objective knowledge, Simpson relentlessly exposes the appeal to situatedness as a symptom rather than a solution to the epistemological and political crises that dog us.

In this effort, he devotes a chapter each to law, sociology, literature, and philosophy, moving without pomposity or clotted prose from Clarence Darrow's defense of Leopold and Loeb to John Stuart Mill's conflicted wish for a probabilistic social science and individual liberty to Sartre's uneasy intertwining of biography and philosophy in his studies of Flaubert and Stalin. Along with remarkable erudition, wit is another of the book's many strengths. See, for instance, his pithy summary of Seyla Benhabib's recourse to dialogue within radically situated communities as a way of avoiding Cartesian individualism while preserving individual agency and rationalism: "'We are, therefore, I think'" (203).

What links all of these cases is what Simpson calls an "aporia" of situatedness. Situatedness promises knowledge but in practice leaves us in a cloud of unknowing about our place in the world. This is because we have certain knowledge neither about the degree to which various forces may be shaping us nor how individual agency can be squared with these determinations. So although the rise of the azza sentence may register our wish for a life free of the difficulties of knowing in a world without master narratives (204), it is merely a wish. The ubiquity of this desire suggests an instability in the entity who is both the effect and the justification of our political and economic systems--"his majesty the subject" (9). That instability, in turn, may betoken some profound change on the horizon.

Up to this point, it's a persuasive account, and that is saying a great deal. But Simpson is less satisfying when specifying the nature of this stress and the change it portends. The problem can be traced to how Simpson presents a discourse featured in Simpson's previous book as well as in this one--literature. In The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (1995), he interrogated the turn by philosophy, anthorpology, and other discourses toward anecdote, autobiography, and other literary modes. Although he tended in that book to present literature primarily as a signifier of cultural capital, he also allowed that "literature has never quite managed to set itself off from the demotic narratives that provide its not-so-binary antagonists" (see The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 18). In Situatedness, however, literature is revealed as merely one of many vehicles for the aporia of situatedness and thus "may have no more or less to teach us than other forms of inquiry" (144). His "bold statement" is that literature's "purpose, consciously or otherwise, has been the cultivation of aporia," for it "represents situatedness while sidestepping or denying the urge to solve or factor it out in exact or limiting terms" (142; 121).

But the readings that result from this claim seem less than bold. To cite two instances, the interpretation of Robinson Crusoe seems little more than an elegant restatement of the hoary "individual-vs-society" structure and the assertion that The Prelude cannot account for the self because it is always deferred by the writing of the self seems little more than a basic post-structuralism Simpson exceeded in his own earlier works, like Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979).

The more serious problem is that Simpson's approach flattens the pasts, presents, and potential futures of different discourses. This is perhaps to be expected in a book emphasizing a phenomenon larger than any particular discourse. Still, this treatment of literature works against his stated goal of figuring out how we might think past the knot of situatedness. Doesn't it matter that, in comparison to literary theory or sociology, literature has been permeated and even perforated by forms of knowledge and value that may provide different takes on "situatedness"--say, in the Songs of Blake or "the Sorrow Songs" in W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk? Doesn't it make sense to highlight the fact that literature underscores aporia while tort law simply denies it and the phenomenology of Husserl seeks to solve it too quickly?