Reading and society

A literal and thematic reading that takes at face value assertions of the text at their word would [...] satisfy a desire all the more tempting since it is paradoxical: the desire for a secluded reading that satisfies the ethical demands of action more effectively than actual deeds. Such a reading is put into question if one takes the rhetorical structure of a text into account.
-Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 67.

This extraordinary statement, uttered (according to the very logic of the passage itself) as if de Man did not care at all about its effects, sums up one of the most important and most dangerous aspects of de Man's position. It insists that there is no royal road from the statement of a critic concerning a particular text to the culture and society, to the the world of action, from which such a text emerges. At the same time, it insists, weakly and defensively through hyperbole and polemic, that the only place reading occurs is in a world "secluded" from action, or isn't "real" action (it is so slight that it might almost be worthless). We find, as is typical of de Man (and many of his followers), a radical conceptual innovation forwarding intellectual work with the most conservative, humanist sense of the place and purpose of that work ultimately forwarding anti-intellectualism (which is by no means opposed to radicalism, or the appearance of a progressive, liberatory agenda).

How? Because we don't take away the helpful notion that what we have been thinking is a connection between criticism and society is really more complex (the royal road doesn't exist), but that there is no link between criticism and society except by a rhetorical reading that continually insists on its distance from society (the royal road doesn't exist)--that if we act in a way that almost insists on our seclusion (but really is acting with due respect for language) we will in fact become less secluded (as John Guillory puts it, we "apprehend the secret mechamism of causality in the realm of the social without ever transgressing the decorum of literary study," a study that is contained and specific in its focus--see Cultural Capital, 237).

For doesn't the "rhetorical reading" here end up in the unnecessary (though dramatic) position of maintaining that the only place society would end up actually imposing itself on the text is through the reader? While this helpfully puts the burden of connecting criticism to society more on the critic than on the text such that, if we held something like this position, we would be less able to assume a remark about a text immediately is a remark about culture--while it does all this, it quite obviously goes too far, because it has no useful way to actually consider how a certain cultural product is indeed produced by society and ends up as representative of it, as having a genuinely social meaning.

To put it a different way: if the text ends up having a social meaning, for de Man, the critic will have put it there. This is half right and half wrong. A text might have a social meaning or reference that the critic didn't put into it, and to point that out isn't supposing that you are performing an action "more effectively than actual deeds." But--and this is my reason for belaboring this simple point--this doesn't have to mean, as the de Manian would object, that when one is pointing out that social meaning, one is pointing out something in the text that refers to society. It might precisely mean that the act of pointing that out is also a social act. This possibility de Man jettisons from the get go, and makes the act of criticism for him a resolutely individual process. Frankly there's no reason to assume that. The social act is just something which de Man cannot quite fathom.

To give him his due, I don't think semiology, which de Man is precisely constructing rhetorical reading to combat here, really forms a viable notion of this either--as one can see in Barthes. This might also go for much cultural criticism. But certain projects with definite ties to culture and society, like feminism and queer studies, seem precisely to get at this sort of act. Historicism makes some inroads into this area as well. However, it is sociological (though it gets a little too mired in the act of revealing the presence of social acts) and structuralist criticism that seems to have most explicitly grasped this "half and half" notion, by thinking about the social nature of the critical activity. And de Man has very little to say about these.