Giving up deconstruction

When I said (albeit rather quickly as I was growing tired that night) de Man puts forth the notion that literature is singular, unique, privileged, irreducible in order to understand its relation to society as mediated, complex, rather than immediate and representative--when I said this, I might have also stressed that de Man's view constitutes more of a caution against the immediate than a definite, positive account of mediation. In other words, de Man's goal is not so much to outline exactly what the artwork qua singular is, as to use this definition of the artwork in order to make us resist that jump from the work to society. De Man is giving us a caution rather than some positive notion, resting in the supposed fact of literature's irreducibility.

To understand this in more detail, one only has to follow Frances Ferguson (in Solitude and the Sublime and in her numerous essays) and look at how de Man would view multiple interpretations of a literary work. When we have more than one interpretation, we have an instance where mediation and immediacy are able to be confused: we might take the multiplicity of interpretations as somehow indicative of the way society at large interprets simply because where there is more than one interpretation, you might have some sort of sociality taking place (as reader-response critics do). The legitimate question would then emerge of how such a social work is still singular, or implies certain processes of production.

But de Man, because he would rather caution us than provide us with positive notions, condemns such an approach as immediacy (or phenomenalism: see his essay on Iser, "Reading and History"). But this still leaves open the question of what to do with multiple interpretations. De Man therefore takes the opposite tack. That is, he considers the multiplicity of interpretations as a fact, before it considers it as an indicator that there may thereby be a sociality established by virtue of this multiplicity. It is, indeed, a fact of language itself--which I touched at in my previous post in the remarks on privileged language: each word has an indeterminate multiplicity of significations. It will of itself produce differing interpretations. In the text itself there are already multiple readers.

In other words, de Man rightly sees that there is a difference between more than one interpretation and a social consensus of some sort. In fact, this difference makes possible the thought that the multiplicity of interpretations might at times oppose sociality, might make sociality in certain situations impossible. This is nothing less than the New Critical innovation of I.A. Richards, who grasps that a certain lack of consensus in the way meaning is understood entails a completely different literary text gets perceived than the one we might presuppose is there: the difference between the two then becomes a limited indicator of how perception involves culture, and the text itself on the page becomes something that is, as text, not fixed. This, in other words, is something coming very close to that socially indicative, and yet singular, text that we were saying a positive account might imply. Ferguson points out (see "On the Number of Romanticisms," ELH 58 (1991)) that as New Criticism evolves (helped along primarily by Empson and Leavis) it becomes more and more willing to just insist on the difference between sociality and multiplicity in order to say that certain types of multiplicity, usually virtuous people or people with common sense, create good types of sociality (this is what, in Fish and also Iser, reader response criticism also moves towards). What started as an exception becomes an argument for exceptionalism. Now, de Manian deconstruction takes this exception and makes it the rule: the notion that multiple interpretations might in fact oppose the formation of some sociality or consensus becomes the notion that multiplicity never entails sociality. Multiplicity is, rather, a fact of language which the social must confront. Or, better put, multiplicity is that which must always be reduced in order to talk about the social, for multiplicity has become precisely singularity.

This is why Ferguson sees deconstruction as an empiricist or materialist skepticism: to talk about anything that we can derive from the multiplicity of interpretations is to remove ourselves from its being a fact, from the dispersed and material process of its production, and therefore to erase its singularity.

This might be enough for now, but I'd like to actually consider the larger implications of this view.

For to understand deconstruction as empiricist/materialist skepticism is to change the terms by which people often disagree with it--before or after becoming enormously frustrated with it. In short, it makes it possible to see that retreating from deconstruction is not a retreat.

Often people see that deconstruction lacks something, but instead of seeing that this lack is really not enough of a lack, as Ferguson suggests, they see it as the limit, the bottom, if we can make this even more of a spatial metaphor. I choose this language because many use it: "deconstruction gives us nothing positive, in the end," is a common way to put it. I myself have just used the language in talking about de Man. But the question arises, why are we supposing that all alternatives are positive, are plenitudes? Why do we think that alternatives do deconstruction get us moving again, but in the wrong direction, the direction of positivity? To give up deconstruction on this view is seen as a return to normalcy, say, rather than what Ferguson suggests it might be: a furthering of, a fidelity to deconstruction.

But we've skipped over what this lack exactly is. What do people see that it lacks? Put as clearly as such a limited space as this can allow, deconstruction lacks a more concrete focus on the creation of rules, principles, or classifications--in short provisional regulations--which, to use two such concepts or regulations created by Derrida (see his Rogues: Two Essays on Reason), would help distinguish unconditionality from sovereignty. This would relate (by separating them more) this act of distinguishing (what we awkwardly call deconstruction "in practice") to what the distinction names, but cannot bring about: the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty (which is "real" deconstruction, which of course no longer is simply deconstruction).

Here, I'd like to make an important distinction: these regulations are quite different than what de Man imputes to language. On this basis, I think one can differentiate between Derridian deconstruction and de Manian deconstruction (as one can also distinguish Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction from Derrida's). It's not a matter of style or even of approach, but of the status each give to the concepts they are dealing with. De Man's are distinct from Derrida's in two ways: 1) they aren't provisional, and 2) they aren't rules or regulations, but rather names (or, sometimes, classifications). And while Derrida uses names, these names at bottom function to regulate. In de Man they refer and disrupt reference, generating a particular type of performance. As is obvious from much of what I have written on the subject, I find the Derridian status (and excuse me for this inaccurate, but convenient, word) much more rigorous, and ultimately much more useful--not to mention clearer and more honest. But there are huge benefits to what de Man does as well.

The point, however, is that both these regulations seem to come out of nowhere. We lack, in other words, some stable way of creating them. This is what makes both Derrida and de Man seem extraordinarily subjective to people--and thereby what makes them say (despite Derrida's continual statements to the contrary) that deconstruction is a form of criticism or critique (in short, that it is destruction, in not even a Heideggerian sense).

Giving up deconstruction, then, is seen as a way to return to a space where rules can be created out in the open. But to see deconstruction as Ferguson sees it--and I have continually thought this important since I began to read her work some years ago--is begin to see this openness within deconstruction itself. This does not mean that deconstruction is thereby saved. It just makes deconstruction able to be furthered in some larger project.

More precisely, seeing deconstruction as empiricism or materialism places it on a sort of continuum where all the alternatives to it don't become different in kind--as is the case with the language of lack and plenitude--and thereby seem like they are retreating from anything. We don't have to give up deconstruction by focusing on the creation of rules. We just have to bring it to the other side of the continuum (or bring what in it is more on this other side, like certain aspects of the status, I think, that Derrida gives his regulations). As Ferguson says, that other side is, of course, formal idealism.