Reading and society

A literal and thematic reading that takes at face value assertions of the text at their word would [...] satisfy a desire all the more tempting since it is paradoxical: the desire for a secluded reading that satisfies the ethical demands of action more effectively than actual deeds. Such a reading is put into question if one takes the rhetorical structure of a text into account.
-Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 67.

This extraordinary statement, uttered (according to the very logic of the passage itself) as if de Man did not care at all about its effects, sums up one of the most important and most dangerous aspects of de Man's position. It insists that there is no royal road from the statement of a critic concerning a particular text to the culture and society, to the the world of action, from which such a text emerges. At the same time, it insists, weakly and defensively through hyperbole and polemic, that the only place reading occurs is in a world "secluded" from action, or isn't "real" action (it is so slight that it might almost be worthless). We find, as is typical of de Man (and many of his followers), a radical conceptual innovation forwarding intellectual work with the most conservative, humanist sense of the place and purpose of that work ultimately forwarding anti-intellectualism (which is by no means opposed to radicalism, or the appearance of a progressive, liberatory agenda).

How? Because we don't take away the helpful notion that what we have been thinking is a connection between criticism and society is really more complex (the royal road doesn't exist), but that there is no link between criticism and society except by a rhetorical reading that continually insists on its distance from society (the royal road doesn't exist)--that if we act in a way that almost insists on our seclusion (but really is acting with due respect for language) we will in fact become less secluded (as John Guillory puts it, we "apprehend the secret mechamism of causality in the realm of the social without ever transgressing the decorum of literary study," a study that is contained and specific in its focus--see Cultural Capital, 237).

For doesn't the "rhetorical reading" here end up in the unnecessary (though dramatic) position of maintaining that the only place society would end up actually imposing itself on the text is through the reader? While this helpfully puts the burden of connecting criticism to society more on the critic than on the text such that, if we held something like this position, we would be less able to assume a remark about a text immediately is a remark about culture--while it does all this, it quite obviously goes too far, because it has no useful way to actually consider how a certain cultural product is indeed produced by society and ends up as representative of it, as having a genuinely social meaning.

To put it a different way: if the text ends up having a social meaning, for de Man, the critic will have put it there. This is half right and half wrong. A text might have a social meaning or reference that the critic didn't put into it, and to point that out isn't supposing that you are performing an action "more effectively than actual deeds." But--and this is my reason for belaboring this simple point--this doesn't have to mean, as the de Manian would object, that when one is pointing out that social meaning, one is pointing out something in the text that refers to society. It might precisely mean that the act of pointing that out is also a social act. This possibility de Man jettisons from the get go, and makes the act of criticism for him a resolutely individual process. Frankly there's no reason to assume that. The social act is just something which de Man cannot quite fathom.

To give him his due, I don't think semiology, which de Man is precisely constructing rhetorical reading to combat here, really forms a viable notion of this either--as one can see in Barthes. This might also go for much cultural criticism. But certain projects with definite ties to culture and society, like feminism and queer studies, seem precisely to get at this sort of act. Historicism makes some inroads into this area as well. However, it is sociological (though it gets a little too mired in the act of revealing the presence of social acts) and structuralist criticism that seems to have most explicitly grasped this "half and half" notion, by thinking about the social nature of the critical activity. And de Man has very little to say about these.

Predicaments (and sophisms)

Last time, I said that de Man is not concerned with deconstruction. Rather, he is concerned with literature. Thus (using an excellent phrase from Frances Ferguson) de Man is not interested in engaging in deconstruction as much as he is interested in "verg[ing] on establishing a metaphysics of rhetoricity," (Solitude and the Sublime, 53, note 8; Rudolphe Gasché and John Guillory also make similar arguments).

Now, one could object: this is no mistake of de Man's. It is, in his view the task of criticism to set up a sort of metaphysics--which for him is a literary metaphysics, though a de Manian would contest this term, as we'll see--in which deconstruction can work. This is what de Man would be precisely getting at by saying, famously, that deconstruction is the grammatization of rhetoric--"criticism is the deconstruction of literature, the reduction to the rigors of grammar of rhetorical mystifications" (Allegories of Reading [AR], 17)--which enters into relationship with (or disrupts, or is disrupted by) a rhetorization of grammar (via its own blindness, deconstruction's displacement of what, precisely, "deconstruction was supposed to eliminate," AR, 17).

But to then claim that this produces deconstructive effects--that just doesn't seem to follow, or follows only through a series of sophisms. Don't get me wrong, it may produce "the systematic undoing of understanding" (AR, 301). And (as we just hinted a de Manian would say) it even might, thereby, merit being called something different than a metaphysics. But fundamentally, this undoing has no real connection to deconstruction. It just is pointlessly destructive.

One can then get de Man out of this predicament by saying that rhetoricity is understood as something extraliterary, and thus that de Man is actually closer to Derrida, or is deconstructing after all. In some sense it is a little naive to say that this is not at all what is involved in de Man's notion of rhetoric: tropes for him turn, materially, and thus never are able to be collected into a system (a system of tropes). In turn they disrupt language, insofar as this is considered a stable system of rhetoric.

But there are two reasons this doesn't quite work (Rudolph Gasché outlines them best, in that classic essay "Deconstruction as Criticism," once in Glyph, now in Inventions of Difference). First, if we accept this in full, it seems to undo the need for constructing a metaphysics, or some place for deconstruction. More significantly, this reading just isn't supported by what de Man says. The point is precisely that the outside of language here, the material here, is indeed linguistic, in that it can only be registered through language: as he famously says, "the resulting predicament is linguistic rather than ontological or hermeneutic" (AR, 300). Let's not read this too straightforwardly, now (even though the duplicities of de Man's writing encourage that we read it this way): the linguistic here is precisely what is "beyond" the ontological or hermeneutic, and therefore is really just a name for what is not yet determinately linguistic. But doesn't that precisely mean it is an ontological and/or hermeneutic problem? De Man treats it as if it is not so, and thereby gives linguistic contours to what really doesn't merit them.

Ultimately, a lot of this revolves around what, exactly, de Man understands "deconstruction" to mean. If this is an old question, I don't apologize for asking it again. I ask it again not because it is important to "get" deconstruction or anything, and separate the wheat from the chaff, thinking from sophism, important as these tasks are. It is rather because it is too easy to weigh de Man's destructiveness: when we begin to open up the de Man phenomenon into the cause of all of literary theory's problems--which we have been doing for a while now--we lose the sense of the limited nature of his proposals. Because they are so general, and polemical (and those, like Marc Redfield, who would chide critics of de Man for being too polemical fail to grasp just how polemical his own writing actually is: I would say it is fundamentally polemical, or more polemical than theoretical) we begin to believe that his theory's power is precisely what he says it is. We somehow think that, even though we think he's a sophist, certain concepts of his will, if they don't undo understanding, will use this process to undo all sorts of other things (Gerald Graff makes this mistake, I think, despite his cautious approach). In short, we don't see how puny such a destructive discourse really is. More pertinent to our issue here, we also don't see how little it had to do with deconstruction, in the end: granting it the power to inflect our understandings of decon, as Gasché famously does, is probably granting it too much. Thus, when I ask what deconstruction meant for de Man, I'm already presupposing that it is a misunderstanding, or (since I'm not even really concerned with a proper understanding of Derrida) a skewed take on it, a miniature version, or projection of what it is. And it is in this sense that we must again ask the question.

The answer is somewhat familiar, and yet, framed this way, also takes a new turn. Look at the quote above, from "Semiology and Rhetoric," that says deconstruction is "supposed to eliminate." What's not important is that this is a common misreading of deconstruction as destruction (which is itself a misread distinction when it is said to articulate a distinction between Derrida and Heidegger: Heidegger is, actually, mostly on the side of deconstruction). What's important is that "elimination" is a complicated process for de Man, involving many things--most notably, the process by which rhetoric is made into a grammar. This process has its own contours, distinct from any ideas that Derrida has. It involves, for example, a sort of unending effort. As a process, in other words, it seeks out every remaining bit of rhetoric and grammatizes it. It is in this way that it eliminates.

Considered as deconstruction, then, it says less about how de Man misread Derrida than what de Man thinks a process of grammatization involves. It is on these terms that de Man is mistaken, or at least singular enough that we can begin to judge the effects of his conceptions. For when he, at the same time, imputes to this continual, unending process the effects of Derridian deconstruction, like resisting metaphysics (see above, when we were pressured to take back our language about a "metaphysics of rhetoricity"), we can see just how huge the leap he makes actually is--in other words, we can understand just how much his terms are, at bottom, quite indistinct. More importantly, we understand more precisely how huge a leap someone who follows de Man, who thinks de Man is producing deconstructive effects, actually makes. This insight is not an insight into pedagogy or anything, but rather an insight into the nature of what a de Manian actually believes about literature, literary criticism, language, etc. etc.

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.