The description of Byron

I won’t describe; description is my forte. (Don Juan, V.52)

On August 6, 1809, having just landed at Gibraltar, Byron picked up a golden pen (a gift from his old Harrow headmaster upon his departure from England four weeks prior) and began a letter home, relating his journey with John Cam Hobhouse through Portugal and Spain. Recounting his itinerary, he comes to their three-day residence in Seville: “Seville is a fine town, and the Sierra Morena, part of which we crossed, a very sufficient mountain.” He pauses in the middle of the description, however; the pen stops. Then: “—but damn description, it is always disgusting.”
The tourist reluctant to describe—particularly reluctant to describe scenery—is a role Byron adopts throughout much of the tour that would produce the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Teasing glimpses of “cloudless skies, and lovely landscapes” are given, then left unelaborated through a performance of conformity with a mysterious imperative to relate all in full later: “—But I must reserve all account of my adventures till we meet;” “—But why should I say more of these things? …Has not Hobby got a journal?;”“—But I will not describe, no, you must be satisfied with simple detail till my return, and then we will unfold the floodgates of Colloquoy.” It seems that Byron must be faithful to immediate and private experience at the expense of description—accounts will be related when later all can be recollected in tranquility. And though he hypocritically ends up describing vividly anyway, the effect of performing this lack of speech, of halting the pen, secures that immediacy by denigrating its representation. It promises through aphasia that a plenitude of private experience must disrupt any of its possible repetitions in description: to continue describing would be to only approach experience with disgusting signifiers that make a mockery of its bounty. And so without any description given, any proof of his having been in a place, we believe Byron has experienced that place to the fullest.
The maintenance of this posture throughout the tour seems to contradict much of our understanding of Byron’s descriptive practice, however. That is, from the reception of Childe Harold in 1812 to recent analyses by those like Phillip W. Martin, Jerome McGann, Richard Cronin, and Jane Stabler, Byron is conceived to be tenaciously faithful to immediate experience precisely through describing, not by deploying the suggestive mechanism of refusing to describe.
Rather than a virtuoso in sustaining a posture that consistently renders silence the signifier of experience, Byron is understood as a master in directing his descriptions towards the eclipsing of any silences or representative inadequacies possible in a private representation, marshalling the described into performing nothing less than the totality of experience in a place by opening up and sacrificing its private character to history. A thousand Venetian years superadd themselves to his merely private utterance on the Bridge of Sighs, and as he describes the hills of Spain those hills append the totality of experience they contain to what would have been a necessarily inadequate and disgusting representation of them:

On yon long, level plain, at distance crown’d
With crags, whereon those Moorish turrets rest,
Wide scatter’d hoof-marks dint the wounded ground;
And, scath’d by fire, the green sward’s darken’d vest
Tells that the foe was Andalusia’s guest:
Here was the camp, the watch flame, and the host,
Here the bold peasant storm’d the dragon’s nest… (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I.49)

The private representation of the mountains becomes more than private when that mountain is represented so as to embody the scars of the battle there between the French, Spanish, and British in 1809. The effect is what McGann argues famously in The Romantic Ideology and elsewhere—that Byron, ultimately, has no traditionally “greater Romantic” lyric voice within lyric poem: Byron’s private voice is sacrificed to a paradoxically historical lyric voice (“[Byron’s] Romantic subjectivity, whether reflexive or impassioned, regularly defines itself in spectacular terms. Studying and brooding upon themselves, Romantic poets produce cosmic theatricals from the dramas they write about their own lives, feelings, and experiences. In the lyrics of Wordsworth and much Romantic poetry, however, this ‘poetry of experience,’ as it has been called, typically erases or sets aside its political and historical currencies… Byron’s lyrical procedures are quite different in that they regularly draw upon a complex set of political social and world-historical mediations.” McGann, “Byron’s Lyric Poetry” 210-11 in The Cambridge Companion to Byron; cf. also The Romantic Ideology,123-125, 131-136). But the return McGann emphasizes is that Byron achieves a greater representation than a lyric Byron ever could. He can participate in an economy of experience where, even in the absence of any invocation of a Muse, merely walking by Parnassus can be asserted as equal in value to that invocation:

Of, thou! In Hellas deem’d of heav’nly birth,
Muse! Form’d or fabled at the minstrel’s will!
Since sham’d full oft by later lyres on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
Yet there I’ve wandered by thy vaunted rill;
Yes! Sigh’d o’er Delphi’s long-deserted shrine,
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still... (I.1)

Martin and, more recently, Stephen Cheeke, elaborate how what would have been the representative emptiness of the refusal to invoke (that is, Byron’s resultant silence) is filled by a reference to Byron’s experience of the historical spot and is therefore able to be exchanged (via “Yet”) with even a successful invocation. Since any invocation would be condemned as a representation to some distance from experience, the reference to Byron’s experience alone secures, in its promise of a more than personal representation issuing from that experience, its equivalence in value. Martin and Cheeke’s elaboration thus clarifies the conditions necessary for the exchange of the lyric and historic that McGann outlines, and renders his historical economy also touristic: the opening up of the private into the historical occurs precisely because they both conjoin in a specific place that could be visited, experienced, and potentially represented lyrically—Byron in a way must utter from the Bridge of Sighs in order for those years to expand around him. The operation of this touristic/historical economy is thus asserted to be the motor of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Byron’s first significant poem in which he develops this technique—and Byron’s descriptive practice in general: “at the center of his entire achievement,” Phillip Martin asserts, “lies the illusion that a wealth of worldly experience, or at least a huge capacity for worldly experience, provides him with the essential qualifications of a great poet.” The illusion achieved in collapsing of representative distance through a private plenitude of historical experience in a place, renders Byron, as Cheeke calls him, the “brilliantly individual amanuensis to whom the European landscape is dictating its histories.”
But what would it mean to assert that Byron could only accomplish this by simultaneously deploying the mechanism of maintaining silence we have seen him act out on his tour? What would it mean to assert that Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage adopts both postures of the descriptive poet and the poet who refuses to describe?
(To be continued...)

"A sort of ignorance"

Freud has much to say about the way physicians approached their patients before psychoanalysis. What might not be clear is that in these little remarks he is hinting that the practice of psychoanalysis, as well as a good portion of the theory itself, derive precisely from an effort to combat this way of approach. Freud essentially objects to the way of treating patients as if giving them information will immediately allow them a choice in the matter of their illness. In this, he rejects much of the practices constituting Western medicine fundamentally: even though Western medicine might come to the same conclusion about a patient's inability to handle the illness, it will treat the moment in which this happens as a derivative case. For Freud, the point is thinking this case without thinking it as derivative.
Thus this rejection on his part also necessitates a theoretical rejection of what it presupposes: an idea of what the patient does not know as the subconscious, as merely "a sort of ignorance" (see below) that the patient, if he is informed by the physician, can master by himself. In short, the theoretical intervention that Freud makes here is to really install alterity back into a conception of what the patient does not know: a sort of foreignness to the subject's ability to choose, to think rationally, to be conscious that is not just merely a derivation of this conscious activity. The unconscious is totally other than a rational, conscious subject: thus, it doesn't make sense merely to tell this subject information about that other, as if one could integrate the alterity within consciousness. What is at issue is comporting yourself to its absoluteness, its being totally different, its precise inability to be appropriated into conscious action.
This, at least, is the path of the thought, from practice into theory. We can see all this in the amazing little paper on "'Wild' Psychoanalysis:"

It is a long superseded idea, and one derived from superficial appearances, that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger. The analogy goes even further than its immediate application; for informing the patient of his unconscious regularly results in an intensification of the conflict in him and an exacerbation of his troubles.
Since, however, psycho-analysis cannot dispense with giving this information, it lays down that this shall not be done before two conditions have been fulfilled. First, the patient must, through preparation, himself have reached the neighbourhood of what he has repressed, and secondly, he must have formed a sufficient attachment (transference) to the physician for his emotional relationship to him to make a fresh flight impossible.
Only when these conditions have been fulfilled is it possible to recognize and to master the resistances which have led to the repression and the ignorance.
-"'Wild' Psycho-analysis," in the Standard Edition, XI. My italics.

The problem, however, is whether even this comporting towards the alterity is itself supposing too much, reducing that alterity, in short, to something that can be comported to. What if the alterity is more radical than that? What if the unconscious is more unconscious than psychoanalysis supposes? Freud himself knew this was a possibility, and wrestled with the problem constantly. However, as I've said before, on the side of Derrida (whose thought this is), these moments need to be retrieved from his thinking: they aren't obvious, simply because this possibility was not totally clear to Freud at the time (and because it demands an even greater dismantling of all Western practices, period). For Freud at the time it was enough begin to ask of Western medicine that it overcome or at least modify its particular notion of the subject's agency in an illness.

Post-interpretation

Quentin Skinner, the brilliant and extremely charming historian at Cambridge, has just delivered a neat lecture that pretty much explains what I was trying to get at a while ago: how Foucault would reply, frustrated, to Derrida. Rehearsing many of Derrida's arguments, marrying them with nice, clear analytic language, Skinner in "Is It Still Possible to Interpret Texts?" (The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 89, Issue 3, Date: June 2008) tries to ask if we can interpret anything anymore: in short, what the use of hermeneutics is in a post-hermeneutic world, a world subjected to the Derridian critique.
His only mistake--but it is a really, really crucial one (and I think I was making it too until recently)--might be thinking that Derrida, and not Foucault, is really trying to kill off hermeneutics. Derrida wants to use hermeneutics at that point where it collapses: that is, use it otherwise. So describing him as someone who levies a critique against hermeneutics is way off the mark.
Why? Derrida, precisely by not simply criticizing hermeneutics, produces something more by way of hermeneutics. Where I am going in my series on Ricoeur, Derrida, Bentham and hermeneutics is precisely to this point. It isn't by escaping hermeneutics that Derrida escapes hermeneutics: this is the simple and yet annoyingly impossible thought that counts here, and what makes any effort to recall what he says as the main propositions or theses in a critique--as is going on a lot in Oxbridge, it seems, recently, as if Derrida were Kant--well, this is what makes this a misrepresentation of Derrida's position. What has to be thought is precisely how his thought is a series (if one could group them) of a-theses that have their place not a critique, but a dismantling or deconstruction of hermeneutics, as he so thoroughly tried to explain in his seminars in the 70's and in The Post Card, especially. So at issue is not just a problem regarding how his theses are interpreted, but a problem in regarding the status of what Derrida wrote: in short, he's not simply a philosopher, and his critical acts, therefore, are not those of a philosophical critique--that is, a critique like Foucault's.
However, moving in the direction of post-interpretative description of the Foucauldian sort that Skinner advocates here most certainly helps bring the particular Derridian contribution to this problem more to the fore. I most definitely think it is a better direction for interpretation generally. The question Derrida asks, however, is whether this will only produce more of the same. Is post-interpretation still interpretation? Is it really something that would be otherwise-than-interpretation? It might have a higher probability of being so, yes. But one can't fall back on this reason all the time. Still, we get what is crucial, yet again, from Skinner: a sense of the "kinds of histories" that would result from this endeavor.