Blindness

De Man's famous essay, "The Rhetoric of Blindness" is, for me, about a very crucial deconstructive question: where does the deconstructor go in her or his analysis? Put in more correct terms--you can already see de Man misunderstanding or misconstruing it here, in a way that was crucial for the history of deconstruction--where is the site or place of inscription in which the overturning and displacement of a text (to use that classic formula of Derrida's from the interview "Positions" in the book that takes its name--Positions) takes place?

The answer, for Derrida, is not really an answer. Inscription takes place also in a text, in a place that is also displaced by the displacement, in a space that itself spaces itself out (though no longer as itself) if or when overturning comes to overturn the spacing of a text. But this is all fraught with inaccuracies of expression, if I can put it that way, and is ultimately quite problematic. That is, it is a problem, and chiefly a problem of when the overturning that I says comes to overturn the spacing of the text, indeed comes. It is a question of the coming of this other, what Derrida would later (in the lecture "Psyche: Invention of the Other," in another book that takes this for its name, though with one small difference--Psyche: Inventions of the Other) call the invention (in-venio) of the other.

De Man would simplify things, or rather solve the problem, deproblematize it once and for all in this essay--even though it might require a few revisions later. For him, the problem can be solved by saying the displacement of the site by displacement is the inevitable, not chance, outcome of an act of criticism or critique: deconstruction, in other words, becomes a criticism that itself can be (deconstructively) criticized. In short, the deconstructor is deconstructed as a critic would be criticized and thereby, de Man, claims (most outrageously) what Derrida calls text becomes literature--or that which inevitably escapes criticism.

This settles it. But it also doesn't. When Derrida opens up the problem of the invention of the other, when he calls what we were clalling overturning by a new name, isn't he merely restating the problem? "Invention" in other words, means merely the same thing: on the one hand, it is an act of constructing (inventing) an analysis, a critique, of setting up yourself as a deconstructor in relationship to what you will deconstruct. On the other hand, there is the problem of when, exactly, the coming of the other will come with respect to what you have invented, to your critique. De Man would then say there is no difference here, that this is just a repetition of the same problem. In other words, he would say that this lecture of Derrida's, which takes place twenty years later after the interview "Positions," is essentially the same problem, or has the same position. Or, rather, he would say that the problem is already solved.

What he--and the many, many others who think something similar--would fail to see would be precisely that Derrida, throughout his life, was overturning and displacing the problem of the overturning and displacement. And rather than this meaning that he operated in the same way, with the same problem, with the same positions (using that favorite figure of de Man's, the "irony of irony"), this would mean that he was reinscribing the problem along different lines, or reproblematizing it--not solving it. To think this would be to admit the chance that the two discourses were not inevitably the same, or rather to see that calling "overturning and displacement" "invention of the other" is not a naming of the same thing, or, more precisely, that the second phrase is not an outcome of the former, a development out of an inevitable residue of the first.

This is just to explicate a fine sentence I found recently, which goes like this: for Derrida, "[what] repeatedly institutes difference also acts to reify difference, so that the problem of trying to face [difference] continually reasserts itself as a problem" (Frances Ferguson, "Reading Heidegger: Paul De Man and Jacques Derrida," in boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 593-610). To reify difference is to begin to think that the chance here is just inevitable, or that the inevitable is always the same inevitability, and to reduce the problem. This is what de Man, in trying to ensure difference is never reified, does. That is, its not a question of de Man (and others) getting Derrida wrong, or not getting at the same thing . It is just that this thing, for Derrida, is never the same, is continually a problem.

Duplicities of deconstruction

Occasionally, Derrida will say something like the following, where he is speaking of the movement of deconstruction:

...No matter what their interest or their necessity may be today,the social sciences (notably those dealing with cultural or scientific and academic institutions) cannot, as such, claim to "objectify" a movement which, essentially, questions the philosophical, scientific, and institutional axiomatics of those same sciences.
-"Mnemosyne" in Memoires for Paul de Man, 15

To be understood, we have to take the statement ironically: the stress falls on the "as such" and on the quotations around the word objectify, and, instead of a brash assertion that deconstruction is impervious to the analysis of the social sciences, we get a statement that these social sciences will transform the nature of their claims and of their process of objectification insofar as they account for deconstruction. In other words, the statement is not "negative," it is, read ironically, quite "positive" (this is what people are getting at, in other words, when they say deconstruction is not negative, but is a hopeful endeavor, though this remains a little too simple, for reasons we'll see right now).

But at what point does this irony become duplicity?

Derrida, to his credit, after saying this goes on to elaborate on the nature of the movement, which buttresses the point regarding deconstruction's ability to transform the discourses that attempt to comprehend it, especially by objectification. He makes other statements, in other words, that rely upon the statement here qua ironized. This not only clarifies the original sentence, or teaches us how to take it, but also makes his discourse one of unfolding such bald statements wherever they appear. In short, he tempers and directs the brashness, so as help distinguish it from the radicality of his task (which here does indeed include a challenge to discourses that would unproblematically comprehend deconstruction).

By no means does he engage in this slow separation of the duplicity of a sentence from its irony all the time. But it is, I'd say, generally the way he works when he lets one of these statements fly.

Not so with Paul de Man. For de Man, duplicity is constantly mashed together with irony, so as to make us confuse the former for the latter. But let me elaborate on the distinction, first, since "duplicity" carries a reference to truth that does not seem relevant here.

By a duplicity, I don't entirely mean a lie. But I do mean that, in duplicity, one forgoes (or tries primarily to forgo) reference to a schema where truth is indeed at play. Such a scheme would be the Heideggerian one, which does not at all define the true merely as the correct (nor does it keep the question of truth out of art or fiction). What is important in duplicity is the mere construction of a double, of another meaning, that, before it references any schema, will make one meaning less able to be unproblematically apprehended. It does not, without elaboration, continue to disrupt a schema by calling into question its truth or falsity, as irony does. (In short, it confuses phenomenality with truth, which violently turns everything on its head.)

The distinction, then, between de Man and Derrida becomes more clear. It involves the trajectory of their statements, the way they are elaborated. De Man ends up at statements which are just assumed to be ironic, when they are often merely duplicitous. He even constructs a notion of irony that allows these statements to be assumed to be ironic (if it isn't clear from what I have said, I am using irony differently than de Man's definition--or rather, insisting on the use of this definition in a different way than he uses it). Derrida occasionally sinks from his generally ironic discourse into duplicity. But I would also stress that Derrida is also not continually ironic. His statements can be understood otherwise.

The difference can be seen in "The Rhetoric of Blindness." The essays acts as if it ironizes Derrida, but it merely makes him duplicitous--that is, trying to say something other than Rousseau has already said. This is duplicitous in itself, which is evident on its reliance on unfounded, duplicitous statements, like,

The only literal statement that says what it means to say is the assertion that there can be no literal statements.
-"The Rhetoric of Blindeness," in Blindness and Insight, 133.

No elaboration. Just another conclusion, which relies, at bottom, on duplicity (not irony), the fact that "Rousseau explicitly says the opposite" (notice how "explicit" has lost any connection with truth):

In the narrative rhetoric of Rousseau's text, this is what is meant by the chronological fiction that the "first" language had to be poetic language. Derrida, who sees Rousseau as a representational writer, has to show instead that his theory of metaphor is founded the priority of the literal over the metaphorical meaning, of the "sens propre" over the "sens figuré." And since Roussau explicitly says the opposite, Derrida has to interpret the chapter on metaphor as a moment of blindness in whcih Rousseau says the opposite of what he means to say.
-"The Rhetoric of Blindness," 133

This is all, apparently, necessitated--look at all the has tos--but it does not at all serve to elaborate, to push the duplicity into irony, as I have defined it above.

This is just one of the problems of this disturbing essay (which nevertheless opens up some interesting, if naive, questions about Derrida's inscription). De Man works to revise some of its conclusions in Allegories of Reading, most notably through increasing elaboration. That doesn't ever seem to get him to the point of irony, though.

But we might legitimately wonder whether deconstruction, even as "practiced" by Derrida, has a tie to this sort of duplicity. I'd say it has in the past, but there is no reason why it can't untie them in the future. Derrida's more forthright work gets rid of it pretty thoroughly (The Gift of Death, for example, but also "earlier" texts like Glas).

Postscript:

What, more precisely, do I mean by "elaboration?" Here is another "bald" statement of Derrida's, meant to be taken ironically (it is said "with a smile"). Watch what he does with it:

Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction. In this hypothesis, America would be the proper name of deconstruction in progress, its family name, its toponymy, its language and its place, its principle residence. And how could we define the United States today without integrating the following into the description: It is that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through all its power plays, reveals itself as being undeniably the most sensitive, receptive, or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstruction. Since such a space represents and stages, in this respect, the greatest concentration in the world, one could not define it without at least including this symptom (if we can even speak of symptoms) in its definition. In the war that rages over the subject of deconstruction, there is no front; there are no fronts. But if there were, they would all pass through the United States. They would define the lot, and, in truth, the partition of America. But we have learned from "Deconstruction" to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, "deconstruction" is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of deconstruction. Let us say instead...
-"Mnemosyne," 18 (it continues, with a nod precisely to de Man, but I'll stop here).

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.