Blindness, continued

Here's another (perhaps simpler) way to put what I was getting at a couple days ago concerning "The Rhetoric of Blindness."

De Man's criticism of Derrida is correct. Derrida, in Of Grammatology, ties the figural language in one or two passages in Rousseau's Essai, most famously the passage where early man calls other men giants, to a literal referent, fear (See Of Grammatology, 275-280: it is an extremely complex moment that needs to be reconstituted in full, not reduced to a paragraph or two as de Man does, and the most simplistic logic). For de Man, this involves a failure to recognize the figurativeness, the rhetoricity, of the figure Rousseau is talking about. But this criticism is only right from the perspective of someone who is invested in figural language as de Man, the literary critic, is. In other words, the criticism is only right from within the sphere of the literary, or is only right insofar as deconstruction will is seen as a discourse with effects and implications that are specifically (indeed, almost solely) literary. In other words, this is only right as long as you are going to speak of deconstruction as literary criticism, and deconstruction's effects as the effects of literary criticism when it encroaches on other discourses.

Why? Because figural language--or ultimately the rhetorical and fictional character of literary discourse that mobilizes figures--suspends reference, or rather requires reference to occur without a corresponding semantic effect, the production of a definitive meaning that you can say is true (or false) of the discourse. In short, it is what makes you talk about Elizabeth Bennett or Oliver Twist as real people, as entities with meanings, despite the fact you know them to be fictional, lacking any correspondence in reality--and what makes you wrong for doing so. Now, I'd be the first to insist on the unreality of these characters and the way that a metaphoric meaning, say, does not just take the place of a literal meaning. But I do so because this is what establishes a science of literature, or gives specificity to literary discourse as a discourse that is able to move past this complication and say something about the fictional or rhetorical discourse involved (in fact, it also allows me to situate a particular literary text historically, or refer it to reality, even more rigorously: when I actually do refer it to reality, I situate where the fiction takes place, instead of trying to talk about how literature refers to real events). I do it, that is, because this insistence on the undecidability of literary discourse with respect to its truth allows me to be more precise about the discourse that I analyze. I don't insist on this unreality because I believe it to be productive of the same thing that deconstruction brings about.

Deconstruction, in other words, is not the same thing as the insistence upon a difference between reference and meaning, or rather it doesn't assume this insistence will produce the entirety of what decontruction produces. Deconstruction might, when it approaches the province of literature, involve itself in this insistence (as Derrida does in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, in a reading of Blanchot), but (and this is even the case in Demeure), it does not have to respect this distinction between the figural/fictional and the referential in the way that de Man says it should.

For de Man putting forth the distinction involves eventually "isolating" rhetoric "from its epistemological function," ("Epistemology of Metaphor," 49), or that indecision between the true and the false, and does so such that the distinction itself, if pressed, then actually resists this isolation. But this resistance, as it were, need not come solely from this distinction. This is why Derrida continually tries to pull the word "trope" from de Man's discourse and use it differently, most notably as a turning (not only of phrase). Seen in this light, the criticism of de Man seems is not as concerned with deconstruction but with literature, and thus, instead of deconstructing, "verges on establishing a metaphysics of rhetoricity," as Frances Ferguson puts it (Solitude and the Sublime, 53, note 8).

This is at once to recognize the immense achievement of the de Manian appropriation of Derrida: it suddenly gives you a mode of achieving critical effects that align with the project of deconstruction which are specific to the study of literature. That is, they don't have to start using the same concepts as Derrida, and looking for dissemination in King Lear. This is the origin of the 1975 battle between Joseph Riddell and J. Hillis Miller (see the latter's review of the work of the former, "Deconstructing the Deconstructors," and the former's reply to the latter, "A Miller's Tale," in the summer and autumn issues of Diacritics). Both Riddell (who writes against de Man) and Miller (who writes for him) miss the point and refuse to recognize de Man's achievement.

At the same time, it is to recognize that these effects are indeed an appropriation that, as I said last time, get at the same thing as Derrida, but precisely by seeing it as the same thing, as something that is not (as it is for Derrida) a continual problem calling for different inflections, or rather (as it is not for Derrida) a problem that stabilizes itself quite easily. (However, I should say that sometimes, when de Man says "Derrida's thesis" is "precisely" "asserting the priority of language over that of presence," I have my doubts the same thing is even being got at, since this like a huge misreading of what Derrida is doing. See "The Rhetoric of Blindness," 119.)

This is what Gayatri Spivak was getting at when she said (in a class I attended, and probably in others) that Derrida is whoever you want him to be. If you are a psychoanalyst, he is a critic of Freud. If you are a critic of Mallarme, god save you, he is the best of those critics. It is an insightful comment because it lets you recognize there is a world of difference between this statement and what de Man himself says, which is that Derrida is blind, as a critic, to Rousseau's text and misunderstands it, while, at the same time, "Derrida's version of this misunderstanding comes closer than previous version to Rousseau's actual statement because it singles out the point of maximum blindness the area of greatest lucidity: the theory of rhetoric and its inevitable consequences" ("The Rhetoric of Blindness," 136). And it makes me revisit a statement of hers that I criticized a while ago but of which I now approve, if it is understood as applicable only within the problematic that I am here trying to sketch (as it is not always, I think, by Spivak):

The aspect of deconstructive practice that is best known in the United States is its tendency towards infinite regression. The aspect that interests me most, however, is the recognition, within deconstructive practice, of provisional and intractible starting points in any investigative effort...
-Gayatri Spivak, "Draupadi" in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 246.

It goes on to talk about these starting points as recognized "complicities" ("...intractible starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions...") and there I do believe my criticisms apply--in fact for the same reasons that I am outlining here with respect to de Man. Derrida at that point becomes a political thinker, or appropriated to political discourse as it is articulated in the project of critical theory, just as for de Man he becomes a literary critic or literary theorist. This fate of Derrida, to be appropriated--and most oddly now appropriated by philosophy--isn't so much because his ideas get perverted or misunderstood (indeed, as I'm saying, de Man is understanding them and getting at the same thing), it is just that what is continually a problem for Derrida keeps getting solved. Now, this doesn't mean it is unsolvable. It in fact means that efforts to assert it is unsolvable end up solving it--while for Derrida (most of the time: he too succumbs to this) they don't.

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).