Simile

Just ran across one of my favorite similes from Virgil, at the beginning of Book VIII of the Aeneid. But I should say something about similes in general first, because they are very strange things. This is especially true when they take the extended "epic" form, which I actually think is the purest. Now, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise: the epic simile provides a comparison which does not so much compare as narrate another story in miniature, and when they are not annoying for taking us away from the action, they vex our attempts to make sense of them, as they force even best interpretations to turn towards the awkwardness of allegory.

But many of these reasons come from a sense of the rhetorical canon (it doesn't have to be even an explicit rhetoric) that subordinates the simile to metaphor. Never mind the fact that this tendency often comes from the modern sense of metaphor as a function rather than a--for lack of a better word (the traditional "trope" having been coopted by de Man et. al.) I'll just say an artifice--which tends to justify itself with references the psyche empirically understood. Whether these take place in studies that present the empirical psyche straightforwardly as such (in a marriage of psychology and poetics that begins with I.A. Richards), or studies that veil it in a pseudo-phenomenological garb of anxiety and trauma (in a deconstructivism or late-Lacanianism), such view is problematic--not because empiricism provides its foundation, or because the reference is too psychological, but because such it sees the place where the psyche meets rhetoric as language, which is thereby both kept obscure and granted too much power (it becomes Language). This, by the way, is why this sense of metaphor as a function is really only helpful in structuralist poetics, which interprets the psyche psychoanalytically (as in Barthes) or with a genuine phenomenological intent (Ricoeur often, or the more un-de-Manian aspects of Derrida). Situating the link in a linguistic system which, made up as it is of signs, is able to be studied (that is, neither undifferentiated or wrapped in the mystery of infinite differentiation), these stay true to the real aim of the functional sense of metaphor, best outlined by Jakobson: to recover rhetoric by recovering its explanatory power, which means making it more economical (two tropes, which are brought into closer relationship to schemes) so as to restore some sense of the urgency of debates over typology (it will matter again whether the instance in question is an instance of metaphor or not).

But never mind all that: the point is that everything that makes us subordinate simile to a metaphoric function doesn't help us when it comes time to actually get a sense of the purpose of the simile. Here, it is more helpful to turn things around and say as Pope once did that a metaphor is really just a little simile: this junks all the deeper things we have learned about metaphor, and reduces them to the comparative purpose of the simile, but it gives us a perspective that doesn't take this comparative purpose for granted. More significantly, it changes the relationship between metaphor and simile from one of explicitness (when we think of simile subordinated, we often say that it is just a more explicit metaphor: we are apt to explain it as a metaphor that just "has" like or as) to one of size: we thereby understand the comparison accomplished by the "littler" simile as something more like a short illustration, and the comparison of the actual simile as something elaboration. There is something disgusting to modern ears in this, because it comes close to the late-19th century finishing-school sense of such tropes as ornaments that make everyday speech more noble, decorated, and serve to puff it up. But comparison as elaboration is something different than comparison as ornamentation, and it gives us some sense of the essential role that earlier generations felt such tropes played. For they did not have such a disgusting sense that proper speech should be utterly unornamented, devoid of anything but the most rudimentary grammatical connections and the plainest, most dumbed-down meaning: they did not have the sense that meaning was utterly opposed to the means that expressed it (a sense which is only exacerbated by weak attempts to dissolve this opposition and make everything "linguistic," like those of the empirical/postmodern theories I mentioned above--which is why I complain about them).

If we view the simile then in this light, we understand more its relationship to narrative. Perhaps we even see it see it as a modification of the storytelling impulse itself, a modification which seeks to put the fictional aspect of stories to good use: it seeks to find what in fiction compares or elaborates reality, and uses it to work up a fiction already being elaborated. Such a role might actually bring it more in line with a different, lyric impulse, which does not oppose fiction and reality but sets them side by side: the simile might be lyric trying to tell a story, in other words, or narrative trying to return to its similar lyric-like--sorry for the similes--lack of opposition to reality (considered as something different from history, which is mimetically duplicated--more on this in a moment). This view of similes can perhaps most be opposed to view that has to make sense of them as allegory, relating the components together into a hard lump which, in its self-consistency, opposes itself holistically, at one go, to whatever is being compared: maybe it is even the trope that is the very antidote to allegory itself, being always closer (even in its more condensed, illustrative moments) to something like a parable.

Of course, what challenges such a view is the mimetic function that is most explicit in a simile. But what if we rethought mimesis in our rethinking of this very explicitness above, though we did so in a (supposedly--I'd say seemingly but that's what is precisely in question) different connection? Elaboration, like fiction itself, surely involves mimesis, but is not therefore an elaboration of anything that would bring it into opposition to reality, or, as was often said in the height of a celebration of postmodernity, undermine reality (for similar--sorry again--perspectives on check out the writings of Paul Fry and Michael Wood: Fry has been advancing this "realist" view since the 80's). Once we admit the fact that fiction, with mimesis at its center driving it on, is not as opposed to reality as it is to history (the weird internal timeframe of literature, which you can sit down and slip back into at any time, is an index of this--which does not, for all that, make literature itself something ahistorical), we begin to see how tropes that involve it, that mobilize it, might actually be the stuff of literature that is most in connection with the real.

This probably requires a bit more thought (how does literature's non-opposition to the real differ from its elements? how does a novelistic fiction's elaboration of reality differ from lyric's, which is obviously more direct? and how much is rhetoric fictional, especially when it is used in "non-fictional" [a pejorative term, that brings fiction back into opposition with reality qua history] discourses?). But in the meantime, it certainly shows you why I grant the epic simile primacy, as something like the "model" of all similes, and explains as well perhaps the most fascinating thing about epic similes (and perhaps all similes, then): their amazing translatability. Because from a practical perspective they serve to elaborate first and foremost (or tend to open up into something more than illustration), they gain a certain freedom from the selection of words that tends to modify illustrations (metaphors) more. They differ, of course, from translation to translation, but are wonderfully portable.

Perhaps I'll give you an example with the following simile, to which I finally come:

quae Laomedontius heros
cuncta uidens magno curarum fluctuat aestu,
atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc
in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat,
sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen aenis
sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae
omnia peruolitat late loca, iamque sub auras
erigitur summique ferit laquearia tecti.
-Book VIII.18-25

Meanwhile the heir
of great Laomedon, who knew full well
the whole wide land astir, was vexed and tossed
in troubled seas of care. This way and that
his swift thoughts flew, and scanned with like dismay
each partial peril or the general storm.
Thus the vexed waters at a fountain's brim,
smitten by sunshine or the silver sphere
of a reflected moon, send forth a beam
of flickering light that leaps from wall to wall,
or, skyward lifted in ethereal flight,
glances along some rich-wrought, vaulted dome.
-Theodore Williams' (pretty literal) translation.

While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war,
The Trojan, floating in a flood of care,
Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare.
This way and that he turns his anxious mind;
Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd;
Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part,
And gives no rest to his distracted heart.
So, when the sun by day, or moon by night,
Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light,
The glitt'ring species here and there divide,
And cast their dubious beams from side to side;
Now on the walls, now on the pavement play,
And to the ceiling flash the glaring day.
'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep
The birds of air, and fishes of the deep,
And beasts, and mortal men.
-Dryden's translation (I include three more lines because I think Dryden is doing a balancing act of some sort between night and day which nicely takes off from Virgil.)

I'll add other translations as I hunt them down.

Suspicion and restoration

Ricoeur's De l'Interpretation (translated as Freud and Philosophy), is famous for introducing a distinction between hermeneutics of suspicion--whose practitioners are the three bad boys of Western civilization: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--and a restorative hermeneutics or hermeneutics of recollection. The goal of the book is not to oppose one to the other, but to take the latter, with which he aligns both faith and phenomenology (specifically in the phenomenology of religion, the object of which is the sacred--the essence of ritual, belief, and culture), and have it pass through the former. This is not because faith is inadequate, but because the hermeneutic tradition "is at variance with itself" (27), or has already split between the two, and thus has something perhaps to bring to suspicion.

How has it split? The Aristotelian problem of semantics understands the sentence as "saying something of something," or declaring something about being, understood already as meaningful and needing clarification or rather elucidation, proclamation. Such a stance recognizes that "real meanings are indirect" because "I attain things only by attributing a meaning to a meaning" (23). Clarification here primarily revolves around circumscribing the possibility for error, for attributing meaning in a false way. But it never presumes error can be overcome: Aristotle says in the Metaphysics that "being is said in several ways" (23). However, it does not directly attempt to take up the complete range of meanings itself. This is the task of the second branch of the hermeneutic tradition. Here, we have the sentence as Scripture, introduced by the Christian community (there is a notable absence of the Rabbinical tradition in Ricoeur's account) and then as text (via the "book of nature"), as something articulated in many ways and only able to be reduced because it unfolds according to specific forms (like allegory and analogy). These must be understood in themselves to allow the sentence to be understood. In this view, the falsity of a sentence becomes not only a covering up of the true, but the creation of a new direction which leads one astray from the truth and back into the plurality of meaning--that is, the replacement of an intelligible text not with a more intelligible text (which is the goal of this criticism), but a less intelligible text. Thus the process of unfolding meaning is an attempt to get past lying and towards the authoritative version of something.

Ricoeur's goal is not, then, to reunite the hermeneutic field through some "general hermeneutics," some "universal canon for exegesis" (27; we might see Gadamer trying something like this), but rather to make this "conflict of interpretations" work for philosophy, or resolve a more total "crisis of reflection"--something I won't really get into now but is quite interesting in itself and ultimately necessary for understanding the whole of this famous distinction between the suspicious and the restorative.

Now, Freud has both the suspicious and the restorative elements in him. He always pushes his theory, though, towards the suspicious. But certain elements escape this. Ricoeur recognizes these elements lie in the connections Freud makes to culture in order to give a the psyche and its mechanisms some recognizably anthropological basis. As far as the psyche is concerned, Freud asserts we can do without them. But in his texts, they function as more than mere hypotheses. Oedipus, for example, isn't just some sort of empty structure that happens to have been represented in literature. Freud has recourse to it because it has enough thickness to give a certain character to the psychic mechanisms.

Ricoeur pushes hard on these "symbols," as he calls them, and the results are amazing: the view of Freud that he comes up with eventually accounts for so much that remains embarrassing and unexplained in early psychoanalysis, and which subsequent theories have had to scramble to make more rigorous (or more confusing). The symbolic (which we should distinguish from the Lacanian symbolic) pops up not just in these "literary" references, but in the most basic elements of the Freudian approach. Ricoeur sees even the move between the economic and the topographical as a negotiation of the symbolic--indeed this is his central concern, since such a move constitutes, for Freud, the dream-work itself, and thus (when it is itself worked upon) the process of the interpretation of dreams.

One can't convey just how novel, and how refreshing, Ricoeur's approach is. The economic/topographical distinction is of immense importance, and is too often bypassed as simply the relationship of two unconnected regions, one of which can always be reduced to the terms of the other. Ricoeur makes the distinction the center of his reading, and by connecting the 1895 "Sketch for a Scientific Psychology" to the Interpretation of Dreams, patiently shows how the solely economic considerations of the former are developed into the topographical considerations in the latter. It is through the notion that the economic constitutes a discourse of force, and the second a discourse of meaning, that we return to the distinction between a hermeneutics of suspicion and restoration. For what Freud does is interpret the second discourse in terms of the first, continually. In other words, meaning will always be seen as having its origin in force, never in another meaning. Or, more accurately, when meaning has its origin in another meaning, this process will always be seen as itself originating in the movement of forces. And it is in this way that the dream work itself will be seen as something in need of unworking, demystifying--in short, will require a hermeneutics of suspicion.

To interpret is to displace the origin of meaning to another region. The topography, at least in its static and properly topographical from, will be the pictorial representation of this movement of interpretation from the apparent meaning towards another locality of meaning. But even at this first level it is impossible to look upon Deutung as a simple relation between ciphered and deciphered discourse; it is not enough to say that the unconscious is another discourse, and unintelligible discourse. In its transposition or distortion (Verstellung) of the manifest content into the latent content, interpretation uncovers another distortion, that of desires into images...
-Freud and Philosophy, 91-2

Thus, we get a mixed discourse, which tends to conceive the unconscious as the proper object of suspicion, even as it forces meaning, the object of a restorative hermeneutic, into its service:

To say that a dream is the fulfillment of a repressed wish is to put together two notions which belong to different orders: fulfillment (Erfüllung), which belongs to the discourse of meaning (as attested by Husserl's use of the term), and repression (Verdrängung), which belongs to the discourse of force. The notion of Verstellung, which combines the two universes of discourse, expresses the fusion of these two concepts, for a disguise is a type of manifestation and, at the same time, a distortion that alters that manifestation: it is the violence done to the meaning. Thus the relation of the hidden to the shown in the notion of disguise requires a deformation, a disfiguration, which can only be stated as a compromise of forces.
-Freud and Philosophy, 92

But when Freud looks at things like typical dreams (dreams of being naked, etc.), or when he finds that certain objects or figures typically represent certain desires, he is left confused: he has to express some larger economic principle underlying these symbols. What Ricoeur does is pose the question of why indeed the dream process in its entirety has to be seen as opposed to such symbolic manifestations. For in them, what we find is a sort of relationship to otherness that is opaque and cannot easily be demystified: one has to foist upon them a certain amount of mystification which is ultimately not present in them--merely because they have already been worked upon elsewhere. They can only have their essence specified--this is what the phenomenology of religion does, for example, with symbols. And this is why the latter is a hermeneutic of restoration. It deals with meaning not by seeing in it a distortion of its own real meaning--its own authoritative truth--but rather the expression of a more general plurivocal essence that allows for all sorts of meanings, all sorts of aspects to be grasped (through the fact that their meaning is not manifest, or rather is also present somewhere other than in their manifestation, their immediate meaning). Ricoeur then proposes to reintroduce this dimension within analysis, not to undo the Freudian contribution, but to bend it back to accommodate the full range of possible meanings. I'll have to stop here, but this hopefully can serve at least as a little sketch of the whole project.

On Latour and Sedgwick

(I have been rewriting this over the last few days, adding a bit to the end especially, so I am reposting it.)

The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts.
-Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"

Latour has been a guiding light for many people looking for a way to transform critical theory (that is, to give it more specificity) and bring it out of the morass of heavy ideological/cultural critique that was so prevalent in the last twenty or more years. (I should say he hasn't only been influential in critical theory, but also in the regular activities of various fields, like philosophy.)

I won't recapitulate his more recent (and not so recent) arguments about associations and things. Suffice it to say that many people find his critique of critique insightful because it stresses adding to the reality of whatever is being studied rather than undermining it, or searching for its conditions of possibility. (Latour is quick to say that phenomenology does something similar, but still goes the wrong way: I'd totally agree to the first part, the fact that phenomenology adds reality, as the main reason one gets interested in phenomenology in the first place.)

His parallel in literary studies and literary theory has to be the late Eve Sedgwick, whose paper on paranoid reading and reparative reading has become increasingly popular over the years as the Latourian critique of critique has hit home more and more.

Unfortunately, both reparative reading and positive or realist criticism (as I'll call it), remain too close to 1) a shift merely in attitude, not of method and 2) the creation of new objects, not tools. I'll admit Latour is, to my mind, much more productive of tools, and so the criticism of him here is a bit less harsh. But when he says something such as the above statement (that we need somehow to condition ourselves to act positively) what he is doing is turning a question about method, indeed about the creation of tools, into something indistinct, something which the critic can either have or not, a property that is assumed to be too self-evident. Sedgwick is horrible on this front: the reparative reading, which does not suspect its text, which does not try to undermine it in order to prove a point, which does not try and look for contradictions but which, well, it's hard to say what it actually does... perhaps inflect it in a different way (I try to extract something good out of it in this later post)... well, this reparative reading (whatever it is), remains more a banner or sign which one can pin to one's analysis without having to make any methodological concessions or innovations at all, without citing differently, without writing differently, and fundamentally without thinking differently. It involves the worst of what theory does: it announces a methodological change without at all making this change, or, perhaps more accurately (and more perversely), announces a methodological change and turns methodology into an evaluation of the announcement.

While Latour shies away from such a perspective by the creation of a particular level at which his analysis will move, and both he and Sedgwick generally escape these criticisms because of the insightfulness and innovation of their work (in short, because of their sophistication), it isn't hard to see their statements producing a sort of criticism or critique that merely replaces the disasters of recent theory with other disasters. Before I say what these disasters actually are--for all of recent theory and all of the new theory aren't themselves disasters--let me say that this criticism would be, basically, feel-good criticism overconfident in the actuality of its object (though the diffuseness of Latour's object again keeps him from being so overconfident--not so for simpler associations), or a criticism that values individual judgment insofar as it is confident of its contributions and its grasp of rich areas of investigation. One can look at various philosophical realists (championing, like Latour, their pre-criticality) glimpse, at times, this sort of confidence that says now, we're not only getting at the real things, but also that our attitude, our willingness to add to the reality of things, assures us that we get at the reality of things--a field that I should say is less subject to this particular feel-goodery, however, because it has to pay attention to its method, or its way of inquiry, and so can't totally be assured of much. One can certainly look at literary criticism, however, and see that the turn to two areas in particular, affect and aesthetics, while they also respond to other necessities in the field (the return of aesthetics is a very much needed return, though the question is how much it ever really died off), also exhibits a certain Sedgwickian self-satisfaction--by which I mean less of a focus on method and on explicitly looking at how interpretation will proceed, in favor of creating a new object of inquiry with the old tools by the sheer force of one's individual grasp of the real (one can see both aesthetics and affect return in this way in Sianne Ngai's overrated, but sometimes insightful, Ugly Feelings).

What both here rely on is some notion that previous acts of criticism or critique somehow don't really display the qualities they attribute to a reparative or realist criticism. And this, this dismissal of the previous as too critical, is precisely the disaster of old critical theory that new critical theory would repeat. When Latour says, for example,

Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained, then you realize too that the so-called weak objects, those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism, were never mere projections on an empty screen either...

in short implying that once you see your object as a richness rather than a mask, a fetish (Marx's sense), you begin to see the world of objects itself as things, as richnesses, as the real, which cannot serve as some ground with which to undermine the former set of objects--when Latour says this, how can he seriously think that previous theory and previous critique in general did not operate this way? I agree, there was a period when all you got was the social and the ideological. But good critique works this way pretty much whatever the situation.

Interestingly, Latour (along with Sedgwick) don't seem to really get at the problem--a problem literary theory (and not critical theory) has dealt with for a while. When they say that exposing the social or ideological conditions of possibility of an object has gone on too long, and that we need to care and protect our objects by adding to their reality, they're still assuming that there is some social or cultural connection between the individual critic's work and the societal effect of such exposure or protection. Yes, I agree with Latour: if you add to the reality of the object, you won't get such crazy things happening, probably, as the sociological critique of science hoisted on its own petard by crazy Republicans saying global warming isn't a fact, or inanely claiming that affirmative action is itself racist--thereby enlightening the enlightenment, or bringing down the idols that are the results of the process of bringing down the idols, a critique meant to advance learning, not impede it. But then again you might also still have these things happening, because fundamentally the way the public picks up these habits is not through the results of research but through instruction. That is, if they pick them up at all: frankly, it doesn't seem to me at all clear that academic work has much connection to the society whose products it unmasks. Or, because this borders on sounding unduly pessimistic, I should say that this connection is very very mediated, through all sorts of complexities (teaching, and I'd like to add method, are two of the more direct connections still available--the first direct because it is still immediate, the second because it has mediated, the connection, installed itself in a symbolic field or discourse and triangulated itself--to use a term from Frederic Jameson's "cognitive mapping"--in some way). Just adopting another attitude supposes that the power to point out the object, along with the object's being produced by society, is enough to guarantee that the resulting statement will be in some sense about a societal object. In philosophy, the same maneuver will allow one to talk about real or natural objects, "bypassing society," because they are produced by nature (or man controlling nature).

On this point, one is reminded of that dictum of Fredric Jameson: "In matters of art, and particularly of artistic perception [...] it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty." It strikes me that both Latour and Sedgwick want to resolve difficulties, even if they aren't entirely dealing with artistic perception but interpretation more generally (with critical perception in general). We might also follow Jameson, who, in the essay from which I extract this remark (the famous "Metacommentary"), points toward Paul Ricoeur and his distinction between a negative and positive hermeneutic. The idea of a positive hermeneutic which would oppose a sort of demystifying critique (the negative hermeneutic) might be more helpful in the long run than Latour's realism (though it could be supplemented with the work on objects and things), and certainly, I think, is more helpful than Sedgwick's reparative reading (who cites Ricoeur only to, in effect, bypass him and replace his powerful notion with a hazy one). Why? Because, unlike reparative realism (as we might call it) Ricoeur links the positive hermeneutic to a search for an origin. In other words, the positive hermeneutic is not just a shift away from demystification, but is an effect of an effort to restore a forgotten meaning. In this respect, it points towards a goal (it is the explicit search for origin, though not as ground), that brings about a method, a process, or at the very least installs the work of criticism within a certain field that requires elaboration, systematic extension, which the conception of criticism as merely additive (ironically) does not do and, frankly, isn't interested in doing (since all that is required is the blank assertion that by adding one is immanent to the process of extension itself--and indeed perhaps what criticism does is think long and hard about the distinction between addition and elaboration).

The mechanical hermeneut attacks!, part 2

I concluded the last post with the following:

...We are left with two questions regarding aspects of this second conception of Derrida. First, what is a hermeneutics of suspicion? Second, is the point where reading is understood as mechanical that very point where one can resist a hermeneutics of suspicion?

I pursue these questions here. I will be moving towards an explication of the following, the result of which will set up a discussion of suspicion proper in post number 2.5:

For the phenomenology of religion, symbols are the manifestation of the sensible--in imagination, gesture, feeling--of a further reality, the expression of a depth which both shows and hides itself. What psychoanalysis encounters primarily as the distortion of elementary meanings connected with wishes or desires, the phenomenology of religion encounters primarily as the manifestation of a depth, or, to use the word immediately, leaving for later a discussion of its content and validity, the revelation of the sacred.
-Freud and Philosophy, 7

What is a hermeneutics of suspicion? Ricoeur introduces this term in opposition to a hermeneutic project he advocates--that of a hermeneutics of revelation or restoration--so will obviously have to reconstitute how this opposition is introduced. However, we must not cease to overlook the following fact in doing so: this opposition is immensely articulated, and cannot just be used wherever and whenever. Even Eve Sedgwick, in reformulating this opposition as "paranoid reading" and "reparative reading," sometimes succumbs to the ease with which such a distinction can be applied. It is a sign of just how complex establishing this difference is that Freud, who in an exemplary manner perches himself upon it according to Ricoeur, would merit several hundred pages of analysis: one constantly alternates between or stands on both sides of the difference, and so finding it and separating out what is suspicious from what is restorative requires looking again and again at a particular discourse. It never means resting content with labeling a thinker as generally suspicious or not.
For what is crucial is that this opposition is descriptive for Ricoeur first and foremost: despite his advocacy for a hermeneutics of restoration, he does not deny that a hermeneutics of suspicion is an extremely enlightening and often very necessary hermeneutic. This is why he distinguishes suspicion from skepticism: skepticism has less necessity historically than suspicion, if it has it at all. For one can be skeptical at any time with what needs to be interpreted, while one only remains suspicious if one is provoked by something within what is read. We will return more to this distinction momentarily, but it is clear from this that any proscriptive function of the fundamental distinction between the two hermeneutics comes after we understand its descriptive function: if this were not the case, Ricoeur would be equating suspicion and skepticism (that is, denying all determinateness to the object of suspicion), which would contradict his own notions about what constitutes suspicion. Thus, Ricoeur's characterization of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as practitioners of a hermeneutics of suspicion is not so much a grouping of various thinkers and/or readers under the heading of "suspicious" in order to dismiss (at least) their approach and (at most) them themselves and their followers, as announcing a necessity we can see both in the intellectual affinity of these interpreters (whether it be in their metaphysics, their ethics, their teachers, their specialties, the positions of their opponents, etc.) in history.
Noting this, we can begin by outlining this restorative hermeneutics of Ricoeur. It has its urgency in the status of our thinking about language. More and more, he says, we believe that language determines what can be done in the world. At the least, it is clear that language is crucial in determining what can be thought. Now, there is a particular region of language that becomes crucial in deciding whether and/or how this determination will proceed, and to what extent: the region where what is said has a double meaning. We say "double" instead of simply "more than one" to ward off the conclusion that Ricoeur means an area of language where meaning is just generally vague: what Ricoeur is getting at is that there is a region of language where two (or more) meanings have a claim to being meaningful in a genuine way, each to the exclusion of the other (or others). He calls what falls into this region "symbols," and it is clear that it is solely with symbols that interpretation must deal. For if meaning is not double in this way, if a phrase has a singular source of genuineness, even if it is not clear it will not provoke a decision among possibilities as to where it crucially gets its meaning from and thus to what this meaning should properly apply. Indeed, one can always dispute how something said should get applied or mean. But only when the meaning gets its character from the disputation itself, such that what is disputed over is not merely two or more meanings but two or more forms of the way meaning will be constituted, so that the entire work in question must be determined by the way one deals with this dispute--only then does a symbol appear and only then, when a symbol appears, is an interpretation needed. In other words, there is a general order in which a discourse proceeds to mean, and when we encounter the possibility of multiple orders we encounter a symbol--that is, no longer normal discourse, which usually only has one order. Tone provides a good illustration: when something sarcastic is written, for example (that is, when we cannot hear how it is uttered), we suddenly have the possibility of shifting the orders in which the sentence means, because the singular nature of the way the discourse was proceeding has split. Here interpretation is confronted with a symbol. Or, to use another, more hilarious (but actually more accurate) example, say I see a sign in the south of Boston, as I did the other day: "Chinese Spaghetti Factory." Here it isn't a tone that is really at issue--a whole register of discourse is not in play--but the effects are just as total or determinative, and therefore require a decision. For we can obviously take this sign in two ways, depending on the emphasis we lend the writing: looking at the sign, we either see a Chinese Spaghetti Factory, or a Chinese Spaghetti Factory. That is, either the sign designates a factory where Chinese people make spaghetti--that is, the classic pasta that we might find in Italy--or it designates a factory where a random group of workers from all sorts of backgrounds make Chinese spaghetti--that is, something like the noodles we might find in China. The last interpretation is a bit of a reach, but we see at least that the possibility is there, since what is at play in the sign is not just the register of the discourse but the whole possibility each word in the sentence has to mean, when their senses are combined and taken together. In other words, the function of this utterance as a symbol (which should be more condensed: they do not usually have the form of a phrase but a word, like "evil"--here I am just trying to illustrate) makes many linguistic elements other than the symbol proper shift in their signification--because what gets decided upon is a whole way things can come to mean (which is larger or more encompassing than any particular instance of meaning). The word "Factory," which seems pretty external to the symbol, is a good indication of this: even if it is external to the symbol, its meaning is bound up in the decision that is made with respect to it. The factory taken in the first sense, with the emphasis upon Spaghetti and not on Chinese, gives us an indication that the factory is a spaghetti factory foremost--and not a Chinese-owned factory, which is what would be designated if the emphasis would alternate. In other words, the factory shifts between being a factory defined by what it makes and a factory defined in terms of its ownership. In looking at the symbol, then, I have to decide about more than the right way to read the sentence; I am deciding not just the way a few words should signify. I am also deciding between two possibilities anything in the sentence--even if other words should be added onto it later--has of meaning.. Again, this is to come down on more than just the correctness of a statement or even the context (to a certain, but significant, extent): what has double meanings can be wrongly expressed or invalid or absurd (I have refrained from mentioning the possibility the sign allows: a factory that makes pasta out of people from China!?!).
But now we come to something important. When a symbol is encountered and interpretation of it begins, how should we conceive of the work that is done to bring one sense about instead of another? We must note that this is ultimately the question that leads Ricoeur to the distinction between restorative and suspicious hermeneutics, because it suggests how this work can occur in a particular direction--one which must lie beside other possible ones. However, we are now only tracking the way that a restorative hermeneutics proceeds along, and must confine the question's power to this particular sphere. How should we conceive of the effort a restorative hermeneutics uses to bring one sense out of a symbol rather than another? In what does this work of decision between senses consist? To answer a bit schematically, it consists in entering into the multiple meanings or senses and isolating one as that which is authoritative and originary. In short, one decides between senses on the basis of originariness. Now, this does not mean (of course) that one hears in the words that sense which came first, or even entirely that sense which most deeply resounds in the words and which makes the others possible. The former is too reductive of originariness, the second, not necessarily most significant when it comes down to a criterion for choosing and the work needed to be done. Rather, the sense that is originary is that sense from which all other meanings become deviations in some respect. If we isolate one sense, and if the others can be explained in terms of it, it will be more encompassing and thus more primary (in a non-chronological way).
We will elaborate on this in the following, but now we reach the most crucial question: what does this work in turn determine the mode of that which is to be interpreted--the symbol? How does the symbol function for this work? In a hermeneutics that seeks to recover or restore the originary and primordial, the symbol becomes a manifestation of the originary. In other words, the set of words that has a double meaning has its double meaning because of the originary sense. The crucial thing here, however, is not that the meaning springs from, as it were, the originary sense, but that it gets its doubleness--it appears as something (say, a set of words) that, if we look into it, can be said in another very determinate way--it gets this double appearance from out of that sense (among the others) that is originary. The originariness itself brings about a doubleness. It is in this way that the doubleness manifests or reveals the originary. Revelation: this is seeing the doubled constitution of symbols as due to what in this doubleness has (the symbol's, and thus as well as the doubleness' own) originary sense. It is thus that the work of recovery proceeds: it recovers what is originary and asserts it as the origin of what it manifests. Ricoeur used a wonderful expression late in his life to give some sense of this, and though it was formulated with regard to a larger and more encompassing object (art in general), it can apply here: he speaks of "a species with one single individual." Here, finding what is originary is finding what makes the individual a species--and thus what makes any particular manifestation the manifestation of some more original more unified general sense. But (and here is the real point of the expression) this occurs in such a way that there is nothing other than an individual to make the species out of--there is no other thing in which the species instantiates itself except the manifestation. That is, unless the species deviates from being this particular species. In symbols, this deviation does occur (there are two meanings that manifest themselves), and so the work of asserting that it is indeed a deviation (it has its source only in one--that is, a species) has to be undertaken.
Now that we somewhat understand what a hermeneutics that recovers is, we can see what suspicion is. It has to do both with that criterion with which it makes its interpretive decisions about the symbol, and with what applying this criterion presupposes about the modality of the symbol itself. (I'll proceed to this in the next post.)

The mechanical hermeneut attacks!, part 1.5

This second post (or, rather, this bridge to the second post), as promised will discuss Ricoeur. But this does not mean it will not have a relation to the first. I ended this first post with an idea: instead of tracing the way recourse to the figure or concept of the machine is achieved throughout history (i.e. its genesis), focusing upon the strategic aspect of this recourse (i.e. its structure) could give us something of importance when considering Derrida and his reading.
As I tried to indicate, this strategy is in play in what I said in the last post:

we must so thoroughly understand close reading as contradictory if it is not also mechanical or cursory reading, that we understand how we contradict ourselves if we are not also understanding, conversely, that this machine itself produces rigor.

Before looking at the moment where the strategy itself is operative here, I should recall what I mean. I mean simply that in thinking about Derrida we have to understand recourse to the figure of the reading machine is, at some point, occasioned by the fact that only this recourse is what gives us both reading and the machine as we already know them. In other words, I mean to say that reading, even as we think of it proceeding naturally, is already mechanical; and yet that the machine is what at some point escapes its mechanicity and reads. (For ease, I'll subsequently refer to the whole of we have to understand here as the reading machine.)
Now, if this is clear, we can see that the strategic aspect of my approach to Derrida appears in this sentence as what takes all this and inflects it in a particular direction. It is clear that this element is the particular usage of "must." For while what I am getting at is the sort of interdependence of our seeing how reading can be accomplished like a machine and our seeing how reading is what happens when the machine breaks down or exceeds its being a machine--while this interdependence exists in understanding the reading machine, what the word "must" in the quote does is to establish the priority of seeing reading become mechanical (i.e. hypothesizing a machine that reads) over that of seeing the machine exceed itself (i.e. hypothesize how the machine breaks down). In short, the strategy lies in how we must understand reading in (or as) a machine, in order to understand the machine in (or as) reading.
In the last post I justified this priority--and thus this strategy itself--on the grounds that it emphasized a particular resistance of Derrida to pragmatism: doing things this way hit home that there was a history (the genesis of the concept of the machine which we referred to above) which a certain way of looking at the problem of the reading machine and Derrida in general would have to deal with before it could even think about this problem being overcome. That is, this strategy opens up to a history, and resists pragmatism because it does not simply try to deal with (in order to dispense with, conquer, or generally appropriate) what it has discovered (that reading should be seen as a reading machine). And what this history only further hits home is that any "overcoming" is impossible here: the attempt to try and anticipate how to think the reading machine (including being resigned to its resistance to being anticipated--i.e. fatalism) cannot be actually engaged in or even begun. The anticipation of it has to simply occur.
Now, there is a resistance to pragmatism here, but of course it does not escape being merely pragmatic on some level--if only because it too (even if not fatalistic) would constitute some anticipation of the reading machine and its problems (the quotation I made last time from page 84 of Grammatology goes on to confirm this). This means that the priority we have established is at some level more arbitrary (or--what is more accurate--prejudiced) than genuinely strategic.
But there is a better justification, one which I have employed more often recently and that I wanted to elaborate upon precisely because it is not as arbitrary. Or, perhaps, it is slightly more hospitable. I have said that conceiving of Derrida first as the thinker of the machine that reads (rather than the converse), even if it perhaps fetishizes the technical and mechanical a bit, resists thinking of him as a practitioner of a hermeneutics of suspicion. In other words, reading like Derrida with this conception in mind would resist becoming this suspicious hermeneutics. If this were the case, the arbitrariness would become more developed or refined (at least) as the particular resistance offered would indeed be mechanical: it would not issue from the simple essentiality of the mechanical in contradistinction from the natural (as might be assumed in my first justification), but issue from some complex way that the mechanical functions as a figure in the context of our hermeneutics and elsewhere. The strategy would be closer to justification (and hospitality) because it would bring itself within proximity to the only real justification of strategy: to lack any justification except carrying itself across a distance or difference between its own situation and into a situation where strategy in general must be rethought.
But, before we can conclude this, we are left with two questions regarding aspects of this second conception of Derrida. First, what is a hermeneutics of suspicion? Second, is the point where reading is understood as mechanical that very point where one can resist a hermeneutics of suspicion?

The mechanical hermeneut attacks!, part 1

Three posts will move somewhat quickly from an explanation of the reasons behind a suggestion regarding Derrida's mode of reading I made a while ago (which will make up the concerns of this first post here), to a discussion of Ricoeur and the hermeneutic strategies of of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (post 2), to a consideration of the mechanical hermeneut or reading machine that is, I confess, more appropriately identified with Jeremy Bentham than Derrida (post 3).
I confess this because my suggestion to consider Derrida as a reading machine (for this is what it was), even if it was only for the purposes of orienting oneself towards him, was somewhat unjustified and risked being very misleading. I think about it as an overemphasis, one that forced things in a particular direction so as to avoid another route that was clearly (to me) worse. This other route was, as any reader of the blog in the past few months knows, that of considering Derrida a close reader, a reader that spends a lengthy amount of time with a work, gets incredibly intimate with it, and with unbelievable rigor reveals all its ins and outs, its meanings and attempts at meaning; in other words, as one who generally sees his task as submitting philosophical texts to literary analysis. Instead, I said that Derrida might be considered first and foremost a sort of distant reader, a computer, a person indexing words like "pharmakon," someone who skims, who reads quickly, who needs a Cliffnotes to really get anything we consider meaningful; in short, as someone who resisted and escaped hermeneutics, not by being even more and more rigorous, but by falling back into meaningless, repetitive, mechanical calculation. As if he considered texts as documents to be searched, or as math problems to be solved.
My aim was to show that this was just as valid a way of approaching Derrida as the other because it is just as untenable--it requires just as much interruption in its application to Derrida in order to be able to apply. In fact--and to show this is the more radical aim--this reveals that the first approach, despite all its mystification of the act of reading (primarily by asserting that it resists science and reason, thereby securing its power for the humanities only--an old thesis that Gadamer radicalizes and that Foucault, in The Order of Things, destroys) is the same thing as the second, mechanical approach. But this is only so if it is also the case that the second approach is the same thing as the first: mechanical reading must somehow be close. In short, as I often said as I suggested all this, duplicating a formula from Margins of Philosophy that I have explicated elsewhere, the reading machine must break down for it to work: reading mechanically or cursorily has to be, at some point, close reading. (In this explication, I say: "If there is a machine that works, in order to be working it must at some point not even be that working that it is.")
This all means that what needs to be stressed is that the mechanical or mechanist understanding of reading is strategic, and thus only pragmatic at a certain point: it tries to combat how, at this moment in the history of reading, and in America, I should say, for I can only speak with any authority of events here where I am--here and now cursory, mechanical reading has not been understood. In other words, Derrida's reading, which is just as cursory as close, has always only been understood as close reading--albeit qualified as more intense, more intimate, than the average close reading. Thus, we very much need to understand precisely how far we are contradicting ourselves when we characterize his reading in particular and any reading more generally as good because it is rigorous. We need to understand that this is contradictory because what would seem to be, despite an entire tradition of notions of rigor, most rigorous would have to be a program, a formula, a mechanical procedure. This leads us to what needs to be thought, since it has never been conceived as such, though always presupposed: what would this mechanical rigor actually look like? Thus, what is necessary is that we begin to hypothesize a machine that would do something like reading, and work out its operation in all its aspects.
Getting a feel for this first problem, however, requires that we must get to the point that we are emphasizing now, the second or supplementary problem--the problem that indeed makes our understanding a misunderstanding if we leave it out: we must so thoroughly understand close reading as contradictory if it is not also mechanical or cursory reading, that we understand how we contradict ourselves without also thinking, conversely, that this machine itself produces closeness. In other words, if we conceive rigor as such, and indeed conceive it as a machine, we must then also show how this machine breaks down to become something like intimate, non-distant reading.
Now, the strategy lies in asserting this: we cannot get to this second problem without getting to the former--even if we somehow understand this latter problem first. This is the strategic element of our emphasis on the mechanical: we must get a handle on how this contradiction--viewed from the side of close reading being confronted with its own cursory double, the machine--currently only appears to us as a a danger, as a threat to our concept of rigor. In short, we must understand how, as Derrida says famously in the exergue to Grammatology, "the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger." More radically, we must understand what Derrida means in the following, after he has just recapitulated Leroi-Gourhan's description of the emergence of writing:

In all these descriptions, it is difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the technê, of orientation in general.
-Of Grammatology, 84-5.

That is, we must understand how, in order to acclimate oneself to what is required by our anticipation of this future, in order to describe it so it can be understood, the recourse to a mechanical language and the thinking of a purely mechanical act of reading--while never able to be justified--is on some level oddly necessary. Necessary not because it allows some pragmatic form of acclimation, something that would allow us to anticipate anticipation, to practice it--and this is crucial--but because it keeps hitting home the impossibility of acclimation, of anticipation. In short, the necessity lies in how this act of working out a interpretative machine somehow works to retrieve the possibility of absoluteness in the absolute danger of which Derrida speaks--that is, what cannot be anticipated. Derrida will later call this possibility hospitality, and its structure is the same as that breaking down which is required for a reading machine to work (that is, the opening up of our second aspect of our question).
Now, at least, it is clear that the danger appears to our close reading because it is possible that in the future rigor in reading might indeed be ensured mechanically, via indexing or cataloguing and search-engine type algorithms. But if we look through history, indeed similar forms of this same danger appear--we are always on this horizon where rigor can be ensured mechanically or by technology. In other words, the reading machine is continually considered throughout history as what produces cursory readings--which, as we remarked above, is a completely unjustified characterization. But rather than tracing the genesis and structure of this characterization, which is what would be required to get some sense of the necessity we are talking about, we might expand upon it as a strategy. This is an act of expansion which requires going more into depth about what a machine is and does.
To lead us into the next post, we can at least begin to think of what a machine that would interpret could look like, and how it could indeed be rigorous despite our worries and the historical characterization of it as sloppy. Searle's famous Chinese-room argument actually provides a good illustration of this very point, emphasizing it albeit indirectly (because, of course, its concerns lie elsewhere): what makes interpretation (in the example, a complex act of translation) conscious or human is not the same thing as what makes proficient and even rigorous interpretation. The output from the room may be excellent without being able to be sure whether it came from a human or a machine. And while this is a problem for certain notions of consciousness, it isn't for certain notions of interpretation. Or is it? And how? We will pick this up again in the next post.