The destruction of rhetoric in the 18th century

The following is a speculative narrative, at once too general and too specific, repeating points others have made and not backing up whatever original claims it makes:

Addison quotes a French author in his "Pleasures of the Imagination" series in The Spectator. Fréard is talking about architecture, and the necessity of introducing "grandeur of manner" into buildings.

Addison explains this particular "grandeur" as what makes the dome of the Pantheon more impressive than a Gothic cathedral, even though the latter is larger: the general plannedness, or designedness of the structure is carried out across the large structure, while the cathedral is just large (indeed much larger) and supplemented by ornamentation. Design trumps bulk, or rather bulk is created where there is no design.

But there still remains the question of why the ornamentation (little figures and such) doesn't make up for the lack of planning, or why it doesn't signify design as much as the coffering of the Pantheon. Fréard says the following, which Addison quotes:

...that will have but a poor and mean effect where there is a redundancy of those smaller ornaments, which divide and scatter the angles of the sight into such a multitude of rays, so pressed together that the whole will appear but a confusion.
-The Spectator, #415 (Thursday, June 26, 1712)

In short, ornament is seen not as an addition anymore to something that is lacking. It is seen as adding to what is already a plenitude. This makes it into something that scatters: if the eye is already being directed, adding something else will direct away from what was the unadorned direction. Or even more accurately, it will pull the eye away while also pulling the eye away while also soliciting it to follow the original direction: the view is scattered because it is split.

Who would have thought ornament could be seen as something so violent, when just a century before, it was considered to only enhance beauty if not carried too far? The general line of thought here is to convert this into a point about rhetoric as well: what is usually characterized as the 18th century destruction of classical rhetoric, beginning with neoclassicism and ending with the reformation of the educational system and the creation of public schools (which no longer stressed the classics, but stressed the need for general intelligibility), is not so much a destruction as a transformation of its role, which centers on the devaluing of its ornamental role (it should be noted that this general characterization has already fallen apart with due attention to the transformation of political rhetoric surrounding the Civil War, and can even be pushed farther back to the late 16th century, when the use of classical rhetoric was at its peak (see the work of Walter Ong on the rise of the idea of information).

But in order to convert this into a point about rhetoric, one also has to consider how, a century before, even ornament in rhetoric was less ornamental than it appeared. It was generally seen as the structure given to argument--that is, design. And if this is so, well, what we're talking about is not so much a destruction as a return of rhetoric. But how could it return in such a different guise?

One answer comes from yet another art, situated between literature or verbal argument and architecture: painting. The 18th century increasingly saw both architecture and (what is often harder to even think about today) literature as similar to painting (though Addison actually tries to retain the primacy of architecture over painting: I think we can still see he succumbs to this rubric however, which is why I started with his remarks on the Pantheon etc.). This is a bit unreal to us, who are more used to seeing literature in particular in terms of cinema--if anything. So what roughly happens is that the design given to argument had to become more visible. And this meant seeing what were essential aspects of classical rhetoric, like tropes, as things that popped out of the discourse. This was helped by the classicists' tendency to categorize rhetorical figures, which could easily allow them to be abstracted out of the linguistic medium. While this abstraction was once seen as more natural, or more accurately as something to be naturalized or internalized by education and made into a skill, the increasing tendency to see the verbal medium like paint strokes made naturalizing them unnecessary (I am arguing this instead of the general argument that proceeds by seeing this conversion of rhetoric into ornament rather than skill as a product of declining standards of education or emphasis on more public goals--an argument that is, I think, either unnecessarily pessimistic or unnecessarily nostalgic, and at its worst either undemocratic or Luddite, and tends to turn this transformation we are tracing here back again into destruction). So while skill is reinterpreted as involving, not the deployment of internalized knowledge, but something more explicit--namely, the arrangement of ornament--it also made ornament more obtrusive, less transparent, since it did not proceed from some background intention or knowledge.

(One could also say that the process of proceeding-from-background-knowledge has changed as well, since in Locke it becomes association, not expression. The notion of memory, considered not as preconscious but non-conscious knowledge, then also becomes more important: this is what produces the division in Addison between primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination.)

The explicitness of design, then, naturally produces another movement to eliminate ornament as superfluous to that design. The neoclassicists held on to the notion somewhat, trying to play with ornament as arrangement. But the increasing explicitness seems to have also made the notion of design expand beyond what mere arrangement can produce. Or rather, arrangement itself transforms to become the arrangement elements that are both smaller and larger than anything resembling the size of the classical rhetorical unit (which was either small trope--a few words--or a large rhetorical plan--considered as the relation between a block of sentences and the preceding block). I would say that this is the point at which we get the vague early-mid 18th century notions of design like variety, novelty, and the picturesque, and then more concrete notions of design as animating authorial intention, like genius (in Young), the general (in Johnson), and imagination (in Coleridge's sense). But the whole point of my little history here is that it would be a mistake to see this as an all-out retreat from design, a complete forfeiture, as many people do who are either not schooled in the 18th century (particularly its middle), or give too much credence to the notion that rhetoric relies on skill, considered as implicit knowledge that is then deployed (that is, the educational argument). What has happened is that design now appears in units which simply have less relationship to traditional rhetorical units, and a different function--one that is much more in keeping with the idea that using language is painting. But this means that rhetoric, far from being destroyed, is actually still at work: it just appears as that part of the text which can be traced to an origin or function, or rather to what gets called a "whole." Rhetoric has not lost, but regained much of its functionality. The only thing different is that language, in which rhetoric takes place, has become a thicker medium, incorporating the visual in painting. Thus, if you don't exit language and consider the history of other art forms, this will of course appear as a destruction, a thinning out.

The critical in theory

I'm thinking the distinction between literary theory and critical theory is growing more and more useful. Despite the fact that it probably originated because Barnes & Noble had some weird shelf-space issues, I feel like we also know this difference intuitively.

This is not just because critical theory is something more like "theory for theory's sake" and literary theory "has literature as its object." In fact, I'd like to insist (and I think it needs to be insisted upon more and more in the years to come) that it matters less what object each has. What matters more is the difference in method, in the way each works, and what concerns are generally proper to its working.

Literary theory pulls the act of determining a text's meaning apart from the act of saying something about a text, or interpretation. Critical theory, on the other hand, invents useful concepts that saturate the concerns of the human sciences (philosophy, sociology, history, political theory) with politics. It is because of this that you see literary theory more in literature departments, and critical theory in architecture. It is also because of this that you see literary theory in architecture, and critical theory in literary theory.

Indeed, literary theory's political power is usually found in troubling this distinction, spilling into critical theory. Whether this happens when its concepts lose or gain their power is a real question. As literary theorists try to answer it more and more, or, to put it another way (to use the titular phrase of Jonathan Culler's excellent book), become concerned with the literary in theory, one of two things must happen: either the distinction between critical and literary theory will have to base itself more and more on the objects involved, or literary theory will have to assert its political power in other ways.

I hope things move in the latter direction, not because I think literary theory should become less political (that should be clear from what I've said), but because I think it should define itself less in terms of its object--that is, because I think it should become more methodical, or aware of itself as method.

Whether this means that the critical in theory will have to come into its own more, I don't know. It has, I think, had no problem in doing this over the years. But I think critical theorists should be more aware, at least, of the distinction, so that they aren't made aware of it in the way literary theorists have been.

Then again, maybe critical theorists have been made aware of it from the get go...

Giving up deconstruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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