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.Ifyou have nothing better to do at a party you can always tryona literary critical analysis of it, of its styles and genres, discriminate itssignificant nuances or formalize its sign-systems.Such a 'text' can provequite as rich as one of the canonical works, and critical dissections of it quiteas ingenious as those of Shakespeare.So either literary criticism confessesthat it can handle parties just as well as it can Shakespeare, in which case itis in danger oflosing its identity along with its object; or it agrees that partiesmay be interestingly analysed provided that this is called something else:ethnomethodology or hermeneutical phenomenology, perhaps.Its own con-cern is with literature, because literature is more valuable and rewardingthan any of the other texts on which the critical discourse might operate.disadvantage of this claim is that it is plainly untrue: many films andworks of philosophy are considerably more valuable than much that isincluded in the 'literary canon'.It is not that they are valuable in differentways: they could present objects of value in the sense that criticism definesthat term.Their exclusion from what is studied is not because they are not'amenable' to the discourse: it is a question of the arbitrary authority of theliterary institution.Another reason why literary criticism cannot justify its self-limiting tocertain works by an appeal to their 'value' is that criticism is part of a literaryinstitution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place.It isnot only parties that need to be made into worthwhile literary objects bybeing treated in specific ways, but also Shakespeare.Shakespeare was notgreat literature lying conveniently to hand, which the literary institutionthen happily discovered: he is great literature because the institution consti-tutes him as such.This does not mean that he is not 'really' great literature- that it is just a matter of people's opinions about him - because there is nosuch thing as literature which is 'really' great, or 'really' anything, independ-ently of the ways in which that writing is treated within specific forms ofsocial and institutional life.There are an indefinite number of ways ofdiscussing Shakespeare, but not all of them count as literary critical.PerhapsShakespeare himself, his friends and actors, did not talk about his plays inways which we would regard as literary critical.Perhaps some of the mostinteresting statements which could be made about Shakespearian dramawould also not count as belonging to literary criticism.Literary criticism Conclusion: Political Criticism 177selects, processes, corrects and rewrites texts in accordance with certaininstitutionalized norms of the 'literary' - norms which are at any given timearguable, and always historically variable.For though I have said that criticaldiscourse has no determinate signified, there are certainly a great many waysof talking about literature which it excludes, and a great many discursivemoves and strategies which it disqualifies as invalid, illicit, non-critical,nonsense.Its apparent generosity at the level of the signified is matchedonly by its sectarian intolerance at the level of the signifier.Regional dialectsof the discourse, so to speak, are acknowledged sometimes tolerated,but you must not sound as though you are speaking another languagealtogether.To do so is to recognize in the sharpest way that critical discourseis power.To be on the inside of the discourse itself is to be blind to thispower, for what is more natural and non-dominative than to speak one's owntongue?The power of critical discourse moves on several levels.It is the power of'policing' language - of determining that certain statements must be ex-cluded because they do not conform to what is acceptably sayable.It is thepower of policing writing itself, classifying it into the 'literary' and 'non-literary', the enduringly great and the ephemerally popular.It is the powerof authority vis-a-visothers - the power-relations between those who defineand preserve the discourse, and those who are selectively admitted to it.It isthe power of certificating or non-certificating those who have been judged tospeak the discourse better or worse.Finally, it is a question of the power-relations between the literary-academic institution, where all of this occurs,and the ruling power-interests of society at large, whose ideological needswill be served and whose personnel will be reproduced by the preservationand controlled extension of the discourse in question.I have argued that the theoretically limitless extendibility of critical dis-course, the fact that it is only arbitrarily confined to 'literature', is or shouldbe a source of embarrassment to the custodians of the canon
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