Language

I am rereading Frances Ferguson's excellent early work, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977). I remember the following statement well, though, not only because it is the first, most concise articulation of a position that will run through the rest of Ferguson's work, but also because I have always thought it the most sensible and most demanding of any possible position. In other words, I have--when push comes to shove--always come back and stuck to the approach it outlines:

The recent re-examination of literary language which has flourished increasingly in criticism is an attempt to articulate the implication of the statement that all literature is necessary linguistic. Yet this very preoccupation with language, which heuristically substitutes an interest in linguistic process for an interest in literary content (mythic, thematic, psychological), can itself become a rehearsal of pat answers and artificially persistent mysteries when "language" is taken as an absolute. The paradox that language is both the most familiar and the ultimately unknown element in any individual's experience seems overwhelming until we recognize once again that literary texts not only postpone but also mock whatever éblouissement the paradox inspires. Thus, this study anchors itself in texts--not because the text has iconic absoluteness but because the text is there to be read, and the reading itself can alone demonstrate the legitimacy of speaking as though any literary work reveals a consciousness of language and a simultaneous consciousness of its erosion of a mythically exalted status for language.
-Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 2-3.

Remember this was said in 1977, at the height of what would be called, outside literature departments, "the linguistic turn." In other words it underscores what some people outside the discipline--as Tim Morton nicely puts it in a nice recent interview (and indeed Ferguson is talking about structuralism)--don't seem to understand in their (justified) backlash against postmodern excess (which it is misleading to heap on literature departments): language in some absolute sense was and is never, seriously, that big of a deal for most literary critics. Dealing mostly with words, sentences, meters, styles, plots, forms, genres, and other concrete things (over which we have an unparalleled, yet teachable mastery), what we know of languge is something abstract--not absolute. Absolutized, literary critics would never know what to do with it! How could we? The only people who did do this--those around de Man and some of the other star figures of yesteryear--were and are (and they merit this, though the suspicion is not always for the right reason) suspect throughout the discipline precisely for being so vague, and often treating the texts we read as props for something larger--and, let's just be frank, much less interesting. But Ferguson's suspicion towards the exaltation or absolutization of "language" is not the only thing or the main thing that I have found so useful here: the last sentence is in fact perhaps the most important, and is what makes the position both more positive and indeed most demanding, as I said above. What characterizes reading critically is this speaking "as though," which requires engagement with or a test of the text to be read--and not in any way that would (Wimsatt-like) absolutize this latter beyond the bounds of the test. What's more, to think of reading in this way is actually (like Ferguson does: the author of Solitude and the Sublime and Pornography, the Theory is certainly not anti-theory at all) to believe in and promote theorizing--not to reject it--for this is one way the "as though" can be refined (the "something larger" can be helpful and, depending on how it is developed, further concretize the often ambiguous operations involved in reading, though it is not really related to reading in the sense developed here--and indeed de Man can be extremely helpful). I might recall also a comment of one of my professors with which Ferguson's seems to resonate (and which I more and more agree with), even though he is looking backward at precisely the time she is writing this: as readers of literature, we never really were theorists but readers who hoped, who believed in, the possibility of theory--who were (and still are) in favor of having some theory.

Predicaments (and sophisms)

Last time, I said that de Man is not concerned with deconstruction. Rather, he is concerned with literature. Thus (using an excellent phrase from Frances Ferguson) de Man is not interested in engaging in deconstruction as much as he is interested in "verg[ing] on establishing a metaphysics of rhetoricity," (Solitude and the Sublime, 53, note 8; Rudolphe Gasché and John Guillory also make similar arguments).

Now, one could object: this is no mistake of de Man's. It is, in his view the task of criticism to set up a sort of metaphysics--which for him is a literary metaphysics, though a de Manian would contest this term, as we'll see--in which deconstruction can work. This is what de Man would be precisely getting at by saying, famously, that deconstruction is the grammatization of rhetoric--"criticism is the deconstruction of literature, the reduction to the rigors of grammar of rhetorical mystifications" (Allegories of Reading [AR], 17)--which enters into relationship with (or disrupts, or is disrupted by) a rhetorization of grammar (via its own blindness, deconstruction's displacement of what, precisely, "deconstruction was supposed to eliminate," AR, 17).

But to then claim that this produces deconstructive effects--that just doesn't seem to follow, or follows only through a series of sophisms. Don't get me wrong, it may produce "the systematic undoing of understanding" (AR, 301). And (as we just hinted a de Manian would say) it even might, thereby, merit being called something different than a metaphysics. But fundamentally, this undoing has no real connection to deconstruction. It just is pointlessly destructive.

One can then get de Man out of this predicament by saying that rhetoricity is understood as something extraliterary, and thus that de Man is actually closer to Derrida, or is deconstructing after all. In some sense it is a little naive to say that this is not at all what is involved in de Man's notion of rhetoric: tropes for him turn, materially, and thus never are able to be collected into a system (a system of tropes). In turn they disrupt language, insofar as this is considered a stable system of rhetoric.

But there are two reasons this doesn't quite work (Rudolph Gasché outlines them best, in that classic essay "Deconstruction as Criticism," once in Glyph, now in Inventions of Difference). First, if we accept this in full, it seems to undo the need for constructing a metaphysics, or some place for deconstruction. More significantly, this reading just isn't supported by what de Man says. The point is precisely that the outside of language here, the material here, is indeed linguistic, in that it can only be registered through language: as he famously says, "the resulting predicament is linguistic rather than ontological or hermeneutic" (AR, 300). Let's not read this too straightforwardly, now (even though the duplicities of de Man's writing encourage that we read it this way): the linguistic here is precisely what is "beyond" the ontological or hermeneutic, and therefore is really just a name for what is not yet determinately linguistic. But doesn't that precisely mean it is an ontological and/or hermeneutic problem? De Man treats it as if it is not so, and thereby gives linguistic contours to what really doesn't merit them.

Ultimately, a lot of this revolves around what, exactly, de Man understands "deconstruction" to mean. If this is an old question, I don't apologize for asking it again. I ask it again not because it is important to "get" deconstruction or anything, and separate the wheat from the chaff, thinking from sophism, important as these tasks are. It is rather because it is too easy to weigh de Man's destructiveness: when we begin to open up the de Man phenomenon into the cause of all of literary theory's problems--which we have been doing for a while now--we lose the sense of the limited nature of his proposals. Because they are so general, and polemical (and those, like Marc Redfield, who would chide critics of de Man for being too polemical fail to grasp just how polemical his own writing actually is: I would say it is fundamentally polemical, or more polemical than theoretical) we begin to believe that his theory's power is precisely what he says it is. We somehow think that, even though we think he's a sophist, certain concepts of his will, if they don't undo understanding, will use this process to undo all sorts of other things (Gerald Graff makes this mistake, I think, despite his cautious approach). In short, we don't see how puny such a destructive discourse really is. More pertinent to our issue here, we also don't see how little it had to do with deconstruction, in the end: granting it the power to inflect our understandings of decon, as Gasché famously does, is probably granting it too much. Thus, when I ask what deconstruction meant for de Man, I'm already presupposing that it is a misunderstanding, or (since I'm not even really concerned with a proper understanding of Derrida) a skewed take on it, a miniature version, or projection of what it is. And it is in this sense that we must again ask the question.

The answer is somewhat familiar, and yet, framed this way, also takes a new turn. Look at the quote above, from "Semiology and Rhetoric," that says deconstruction is "supposed to eliminate." What's not important is that this is a common misreading of deconstruction as destruction (which is itself a misread distinction when it is said to articulate a distinction between Derrida and Heidegger: Heidegger is, actually, mostly on the side of deconstruction). What's important is that "elimination" is a complicated process for de Man, involving many things--most notably, the process by which rhetoric is made into a grammar. This process has its own contours, distinct from any ideas that Derrida has. It involves, for example, a sort of unending effort. As a process, in other words, it seeks out every remaining bit of rhetoric and grammatizes it. It is in this way that it eliminates.

Considered as deconstruction, then, it says less about how de Man misread Derrida than what de Man thinks a process of grammatization involves. It is on these terms that de Man is mistaken, or at least singular enough that we can begin to judge the effects of his conceptions. For when he, at the same time, imputes to this continual, unending process the effects of Derridian deconstruction, like resisting metaphysics (see above, when we were pressured to take back our language about a "metaphysics of rhetoricity"), we can see just how huge the leap he makes actually is--in other words, we can understand just how much his terms are, at bottom, quite indistinct. More importantly, we understand more precisely how huge a leap someone who follows de Man, who thinks de Man is producing deconstructive effects, actually makes. This insight is not an insight into pedagogy or anything, but rather an insight into the nature of what a de Manian actually believes about literature, literary criticism, language, etc. etc.