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?

Why Derrida? Why Grammatology?

I've been rereading Grammatology over this summer and it's left me with some need to revisit 1) why Derrida has interested me, and 2) why Of Grammatology has interested critics in the US.
If you'll permit the first autobiographical reflection, let me begin by saying I never really understood what he was saying until about a year ago, and I only did so because I just kept reading as much of him as I could. So the question really is why I continued to read him when I didn't really understand what he was getting at?
I was introduced to him in a class on theory--like many students, I think. I was initially very resistant to things that he was saying, being more Kantian and Hegelian in spirit, and more interested  generally in philosophy of mind. But what turned me on about him was spending a lot of time with a few essays of his--and writing papers on them. What was so great was that he was extremely rewarding if you read him closely and tried to piece together what he was saying. Some might call this his "play on words" or whatever, but what was really interesting to me was the high rationalism at work in the construction of his sentences: like any good novel, you can really get a lot by working through them. This made me less resistant.
As I took more and more classes in philosophy, which I was pursuing at the same time, I began to see that this sentence-level aspect of the way Derrida wrote was neat, but ultimately less interesting to me than the way he worked with the philosophical tradition. As I personally became more interested in phenomenology as I was pursuing philosophy of mind, I found he plugged himself quite thoroughly into that sphere. But this did not make me reduce him to this tradition--as some are too quick to do. I gathered that there was a particular intellectual field that was very diverse and yet very coherent that was orienting his discourse, of which phenomenology was a major part. And I began to piece this field together. In short, the tradition of French philosophy from Canguilhem on became an interest to me.
But at the same time, I just kept reading Derrida. And what was interesting to me then was his way of reconstructing other works: in short, I found that Derrida was actually an amazing teacher in his written work. He would have to reconstruct the entire logic of a discourse, and what this produced was actually a really neat way of introduction into a particular way of thinking about whatever he was talking about. Most might presume that the reconstruction would have to be skewed or distorted, but usually Derrida is also reconstructing how the field he is working in is thinking about the particular issues. Side comments and little aphoristic remarks are what allow you to grasp this. Indeed, they are unintelligible, but what was striking to me was not that they are unintelligible because they play with words or whatever: they are unintelligible in their content, because they presuppose an entire set of arguments and indeed a point of view in looking at whatever text you are considering. In short, I liked his patience--not because it produced rigor, but because it was symptomatic of that field in which he worked. A good example of what I mean is his discussion of Freud and the mystic writing pad in Writing and Difference. There he tackles Freud's 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, which many people in France were rediscovering at the time. He reconstructs the logic of this Project, and in doing so allows you to see what people are talking about then. But at the same time, he gives you a take on it--and all of this happens before he really begins to fiddle with what is going on. These little reconstructions and set ups--the way he poses the problems, were really neat to me, and what kept me going even though I didn't understand where the hell he was going with them.
Thus, a lot of emphasis upon the key words Derrida gives critical theory (trace, etc.) was completely lost for me, and mostly willingly--this was a healthy sort of ascesis that actually helped me not to use much of what Derrida said in my work on literature. It also kept me from immediately using him in my work in philosophy: my concern with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and others seemed to have its own impetus. And yet, as this reconstruction of mine makes clear, one can see that both these interests--in literature and philosophy--often take their cue from Derrida, or orient themselves around trying to figure out what he was about. At a certain time, then, it all started to pay off in the form of more and more interconnections, and I really got a sense of where he was coming from--in other words, the field was reconstructed. What was made clear, however, was that Derrida was more at home as a thinker within the tradition of philosophy than in critical theory and the study of literature--I found most people who talked about him there were really too far away from the study of literature at the same time as they were horrible at philosophy. However, his spirit was more within these other spheres, precisely because they addressed questions (gender, for example) that were escaping philosophy (although I know now that in certain spheres--like ethics--they weren't and aren't).
If I had to do it all over again, I think a quicker way of understanding him would be just to go to France and work in their philosophy departments. But I don't like the way they work as much as the Americans, as odd as we are, and so I think I would have lost a lot. Quicker wouldn't necessarily be better, I guess.
But all this brings me back to Grammatology--my second point. I read this first, I think, after some of the short essays that first introduced me to Derrida. And reading it then, sort of passively looking for those points of orientation I spoke about above rather than for the definitions of things like trace and differance, on the one hand, or the overall argument, on the other--reading it then and in this way was something that actually made the book much more coherent to me, I find.
Reading it now, the thing seems pretty crazy. Huge, sprawling, disconnected, extremely radical, the work is much less clear about the key concepts of differance and trace than Speech and Phenomena, and at the same time is so massive in its force and its demands upon thinking generally that it isn't clear where its argument most hits at other than the entire philosophical tradition--something that is done more economically, I think, in Dissemination and certain essays in Margins of Philosophy (e.g. "The Pit and the Pyramid," "Ousia and Grammê," or "The Ends of Man"--take your pick). So it isn't clear to me why people turned to it and still turn to it to understand Derrida.
And yet, I somewhat understand it if I focus on the analysis of Rousseau, which is quite simply just brilliant. However, this is so massive and, again, sprawling, that I don't know if it has the same effect now as it would when it first came out--that is, when there was a certain consolidated understanding of Rousseau as, well, merely contradictory (not focused upon and determined by something like a supplement). Better now to tell someone to pick up Speech and Phenomena, again if they want to begin to see what Derrida is about. In other words, Grammatology is all about extending to the utmost what is accomplished in the analysis of Husserl, because it actually grasps the hugeness of the consequences of that analysis in Speech and Phenomena.
What are these consequences? Simply put, that a phenomenology of text would be impossible. And, in fact, more than impossible: it would require, if one did not just back down in front of it, a total revolution of phenomenology, where the concern with essence upon which it is founded has to be completely evacuated. Phenomenology would have to proceed without phenomenology, then. Text becomes a privileged phenomenon, then, within the tradition, because it disrupts it completely, as well (and here is where Rousseau comes in) as anywhere there is a concern with essence.
In a way, though, you need to understand the basic thesis before you can grasp these consequences extended throughout Rousseau and (in the beginning of the book) Levi-Strauss. And--here is what I really think--the first part of the book does not totally introduce you to them as clearly as other parts of Derrida, notably Speech and Phenomena.
That said, it is clear that what really is great about this book is how you see the "method" of analysis take shape--and I think this is why it was and is so popular as a sort of introduction or primer. What is also remarkable is the repetitiveness of the analysis: like Dissemination, what we get is a focus upon the logic of the supplement at every moment it seems to come up in the discourse. And yet, unlike Dissemination, we get more of a setup that inserts this work of focusing within the current discourse: the long discussion of the economy of pity, etc. with Starobinski et. al. is very odd, actually, because it doesn't clearly do what it seems it wants to do. This is a double task: 1) reconstruct Rousseau's discourse and 2) reconstruct our way of reacting to this discourse as indicative of our current (that is, at the time of Grammatology) way of looking at what threatens to revolutionize our philosophical moment. If one focuses on the effort of reading to do this, one really sort of mistakes what Derrida is doing here--quite simply because it is too much setup and makes the real reading have to account for too much. In other words, this is too external to the task.
Where Derrida is really reading is when he is describing the supplement and showing how it always can be explained two ways. In other words, the whole effort of peeling back what Rousseau describes--which is the supplement--from what he declares--which is either that the supplement is bad or good in a particular case. Here the "method" is happening, and one sees how you have to go about it. You have to try and enter the protocols of the text, as Spivak often tells her students. This sort of vague phrase means really that you have to reconstruct a logic that the supplement, which functions as the center of this logic, its anchor, will have to disrupt. Getting a handle on this disruption means moving back and forth between logics, trying to make the structure of the disruption--differance--appear in how it leaves a trace in all those logics--or rather how all those logics become not logics but traces. In short, you do not just point out where differance is operative, where what Rousseau declares is different from what he describes. This is to say Rousseau thinks something "without thinking it." Rather, you show how the description is coextensive with the declaration--that is, you show that differance is coextensive with the articulation of the discourse itself. This is what Derrida means in the following:

It does not suffice to say that Rousseau thinks the supplement without thinking it, that he does not match his saying and his meaning, his descriptions and his declarations. One must still organize this separation and this contradiction.
-Of Grammatology, 245.

And this organization in fact exceeds what it organizes, as Derrida goes on to say. In the end, reading Grammatology, you really begin to see how this work of analysis functions--or at least what it would require. I personally think Dissemination ("Plato's Pharmacy") shows it more purely or at least more cleanly, but as it is, Grammatology remains a great example of this method or work--which is of course not a method and, as a working, an unworking.
But back to Rousseau: why this work is so amazing is not necessarily because it can account for things we that merely seem oddly contradictory in Rousseau ("I am the least vain of anyone," he says somewhere in the first book of the Confessions and remains for me the greatest, most hilarious example) as I might have suggested a bit earlier, but because this account proceeds in the way it does. Quite simply, it shows that Rousseau is a modern thinker of phusis, growth and generation. And at the same time it shows that this thought of growth is not possible for the moderns--a thought that in fact makes it possible that the ancients never really thought it either. Nature, that amazing force in Rousseau, is so conflicted that this becomes absolutely clear: however, its remains conflicted not because it is pure, but because it always has to articulate itself. In other words, because it is impossible, and impossible in such a way that it is the only thing that makes the discourse of Rousseau in its totality possible. Hegel, Marx, Freud, whoever--these thinkers might have very crucial parts of their discourse governed in this way by impossibility, but no one has it so totally and so crucially articulated it as Rousseau.
I could go on, but all I wanted to do was bring out both my reasons for reading Derrida and my reasons from shying away from various aspects of Grammatology as an introduction to Derrida--with the requisite highlighting of what is indeed important about it, which I think is not what we usually hear. We usually hear all this stuff about text and writing, but this is only the first part of the work (which I think many simply are content with reading, after which they put the book down). But all this is outlined in Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference. What is unique and important about Grammatology is that it works out the way that this problem of writing and text diffuses itself or allows discourses to be determined by it. Thus, it is appropriately wild and sprawling and odd--it has to exhaustively show discourse as trace. But this I think needs to be now seen as its virtue more than the simple thesis about grammatology as a positive science. If one wants this, one should look at a more pure, more clean analysis of Derrida's.
In other words, the sprawling, exhaustive aspect of the analysis here (the fact that it accounts for so much in Rousseau, not as much the aspect of the analysis that deals with inserting it into a current debate on Rousseau) has to be looked at as its odd core--its dispersion as its coherence, in a nutshell--because it is the most interesting working out of a way to talk about that impossibility: it is the work of analysis and reading when it is directed at what is impossible to analyze and read. In short, I think looking at it as less a finished work than a work in progress, a work of reading in progress, is necessary to appreciate it and indeed appreciate its genius. Looking for ideas like trace and differance needs to be done elsewhere. The analysis of Levi-Strauss should be looked at more in this manner too--and less as an attack or a condemnation of modern Rousseauism. But I might speak about this later--I've shied away from Levi-Strauss here so as to keep things simple and reconstruct my main thoughts about the book and my relationship to it.

Specters of communism

(Thanks to comments from Grant, I revised a lot of this post--see his comments below for some good insights. It is basically an attempt to extend certain frustrations of Fredric Jameson in his essay "How Not to Historicize Theory" to the way the events of the last few weeks were covered in the news. Postscript: the general thrust of this article aligns vigorously with Jiri Pehe's August 24th article on the Prague Spring which everyone should read: there Pehe says "I suspect that our lasting reluctance to discuss the period [of the Prague Spring] openly is, more than anything else, a sign that the trauma of communism is still very much alive today, despite the last 19 years that democracy has had to take root.")
Bill Keller said the following in the Times a couple days ago:

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.
If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

This seems completely backwards in so many ways (even in referring by proxy to Fukuyama, who himself has backed away from that thesis for a long time now), but it comes down to the following for me: if we in America think this summer in particular heralds the return of giant post-Communist powers, as Keller says, it is only because here in America we never quite found a way to deal with their passing away.
Now, indeed, Keller himself seems to argue this when he says,

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

And yet, he doesn't because he puts it in all the wrong terms: precisely the terms of return that I am speaking about. And this misses everything important.
In fact the verbal slip here is indicative: somehow Keller relegates "the beginning" of the end of the Soviets to the category of "end," discounting it as "a beginning," a beginning that was greater than that of an end. In other words, we have the beginning of the end, and then we have the end as a beginning, as a beginning that exceeds any beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire is not really a beginning, even though Keller must still call it only a beginning.
And what does this real beginning, the beginning that exceeds any mere beginning of the end, bring about or begin? In short, resentment. The end of Communism was the beginning of the very indirect, passive aggressive resentment of the West instead of the Cold War's more direct and clear combat with it. And this is the real problem with Keller's analysis, what makes him miss the point entirely: he characterizes Russia as a country that has suffered a particular pseudo-psychological defeat that has been seeting under the surface all these years to resurge in a sort of nationalist aggression like we see now in Georgia. This is why, as he says, 1989 was a real "beginning"--and why saying this is something different than saying that in our "victory" over Communism we have not learned how to cope with its passing (my personal thesis).
Why is this so mistaken? Because it presupposes a sort of psychodynamic or communal-consciousness model of the operation of the state and its people that was probably only valid for thinking about the actions of Nazi Germany--if it is even valid there. Thus, he says the fall of the wall and the disbanding of the USSR did the following:

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Very nice, but this is also the way we talked about Bosnia, which, as we will see, is mistaken for the same reason: it moves quickly between an idea of nationalism or community and the idea of totalitarian psychological frenzy, without making clear what allows for the jump across between the two. Furthermore, it seems only to apply to the states of Eastern Europe and anything resembling a Communist or post-Communist society. It is as if, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, it couldn't happen here. In short, one could call it the logic of the losers. But doesn't this betray the fact that it is merely a way of bolstering the idea that we were and still are (despite all signs to the contrary) the winners? Something seething under the surface, the inner core of a repressed Communism: this is what, for Keller, motivates the action and the nationalism going on in Russia now. Similarly, China is seen--though Keller only moves towards this somewhat--quite similarly, since it has supposedly given up its real hardcore Communist core and embraced capitalism.
And as I began to indicate, what the idea of the return of Communism qua failed-resentful-post-Communism does is, however, more important than whether any of this actually really corresponds to the reality of the situation. This idea covers up the extremely pressing issue of dealing with the "minor-league monsters" which Keller dismisses here but are very much a problem of globalization in the wake of the fall of Communism--indeed despite what Paul Krugman maintains. These monsters aren't just hiccups in the process of globalization and--here is the flipside--neither are they the the fallout of the collapse of any major government that would challenge that of the West.
As I suggested earlier, one would need to see how we dealt with the Bosnian War (and Rwanda, and, now Darfur--though I'll confine myself to Bosnia) as the template for precisely how this work of covering up the real problem proceeds. What was so horrible about Bosnia was the similarity to a large scale nationalism working on such a small scale, and yet so effectively: this obviously came to a head in the unbelievable work of ethnic cleansing. (I should note that a great movie on Heidegger, The Ister, makes certain connections between Serbian nationalism and Nazism that are very well thought out and well depicted.) Indeed, we still can't really seem to cope with this sort of nationalism that we find now with Serbians, particularly in their reaction to the arrest of someone so unbelievably evil as Radovan Karadzic. What produces it? We must work here at the level of more minute and precise forces than those Keller seems to naively posit are at work. In other words, we must not be taken in, as Keller is, and so many are, by the size of the nations and the movements involved (the hugeness of China, in particular). At this huge level, the forces needed to unify a movement just fall into all the old categories of propaganda that now seem so extremely irrelevant: is it really the case that Serbs hate other ethnicities because people tell them? Adorno already in his time gives extremely good reasons why this is a bad way of putting the problem (cf. "Education after Auschwitz").
Now, our ignorance in the face of these problems is precisely not what is addressed by the policy we took in Bosnia. That is, this is not because there is no way to address this level of the micro-forces, it is just that our models of action, which stem from the policy of aid and international peacekeeping which were honed in Bosnia, and which devolved into full out war, precisely avoid them. What is needed is a new way of dealing with the spread of globalization and the destabilization that post-Communist or post-authoritarian regimes introduce into it as this spread occurs. Aid has the tendency, it seems to me, to merely compensate for this destabilization and restabilize, but it allows what is problematic--which is precisely not solely economic, nor cultural, but political through and through--to fester anyway. That is, the problem is a political problem, located at the foundation of the political union that constitutes these post-Communist states, and in some cases, can be ethnic. But it is a problem not of seeing these ethnic interests a s things that are psychological--rather one must think them as the thing that unifies the notion of political action. And again not in the sense of propoganda: rather we are dealing with the idea that politics is founded on a notion of a living body of a certain type, and a sort of filiation or purity between its members: in this sense it is very much ethnic, though not in a cultural way. This takes me into further territory, which is too complicated and confusing for me now. I'll wrap this up.
One thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter--one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it by trying to shift certain aspects of it (those that allowed these politico-ethnic regions to somewhat unify under Communism, if they did unify) into areas like culture, separate from the economy or from the operation of the political sphere in these countries as such. The key is to see that Communism does not return into our thinking as a big massive, homogenous albeit weakened force, like we often depict China and how Keller tries to get us to think about Russia (it is homogeneously resentful): we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally (or rather, ethnic-politically) determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Fredric Jameson's insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists that this is still actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.