Leitch, Vincent. Deconstructive Criticism: an Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1981.
(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. - T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Sacred Food
It is more of a job to interpret interpretations than to interpret things. . . . - Montaigne, "Of Experience," Essays
Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code. - Fredric Jameson, Preface, The Political Unconscious
The really difficult task is, as always, the hermeneutic one: to understand understanding through the detour of the writing/reading experience. Detour is meant ironically, for there is no other way. -Geoffrey Hartman. "Past and Present," Criticism in the Wilderness
The hermeneutic project which postulates a true sense of the text is disqualified under this regime. Reading is from the horizon of the meaning or truth of being, liberated from the values of the product's production or the present's presence. Whereupon the question of style is immediately unloosed as a question of writing. - Jacques Derrida, "The Gaze of Oedipus," Spurs
In Part III we shall survey specific deconstructive readings (Of Grammatology, S/Z, Glas), particular strategies of interpretation (Derrida's split writing, de Man's misreading, Miller's lateral dance, Deleuze's and Guattari's schizoanalysis), and certain tactics and conceptions of critical writing (Yale-school allegory, Barthes' fragmentation, Derrida's double posture, Hartman's ercarilcenrids). Our threefold purpose in Part III is to examine some significant works of deconstructive criticism, to characterize important maneuvers in deconstructive reading, and to explain several influential new forms and notions of critical writing. One of these aims. usually dominates in each section, although the others almost continuously surface. At the end we shall offer the reader a convenient review and summary of the interpretive modes and styles of all the central figures discussed throughout Deconstructive Criticism, starting with Saussure, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss.
168
Marking the Supplement
Among the many early texts published by Jacques Derrida, a handful stand out by virtue of their apparent impact on the subsequent history and direction of deconstruction. In this group are "Freud and the Scene of Writing" (1966), "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1967), Of Grammatology (1967), "Differance" (1968), "La Double seance" (1970) and "Positions" [Interview] (1971). It is impossible at this writing to assess the wider effects of later writings. This selected list of early published texts omits some of my own favorites, and it is quite obviously open to present doubt and future hindsight. Nevertheless, the importance of the Grammatology seems beyond question. In this section we shall examine Derrida's reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology.
Why the Grammatology? Among other reasons, the project of Paul de Man initially defines itself in relation to Of Grammatology as it swerves from Derrida toward the distinctive theories of rhetoricity, the self-deconstructing text, and misreading. When we take up de Man's project in the third section, we shall discuss these formulations. With its severe critiques of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss and with its dramatic questioning of structuralism and logocentrism, Of Grammatology may be imagined to initiate the poststructuralist era. Of course, Saussure's own earlier quest for anagrams and Levi-Strauss' wily tactics of bricolage adumbrate passages beyond strictly structuralist work. Rather than consider again these prophetic forerunners, discussed in detail in Part I and reviewed later at the end of Part III. we now look into the latter half of the Grammatology, which offers a close deconstructive reading of Rousseau, particularly his Essay on the Origin of Languages. In the development of deconstruction, this reading serves as exemplar.
170
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
For convenience we may think of the Grammatology as a divided text. The first half presents broad theoretical speculations on the logocentric systematics. The second scrutinizes this metaphysical configuration in the work of Rousseau. The determining links between these two divisions involve the general issues of reading and writing (ecriture). In the Preface, Derrida stresses that the problems of critical reading "are at all times related to the guiding intention of this book. My interpretation of Rousseau's text follows implicitly the propositions ventured in Part 1; propositions that demand that reading should free itself, at least in its axis, from the classical categories of history-not only from the categories of the history of ideas and the history of literature but also, and perhaps above all, from the categories of the history of philosophy" (lxxxix). Throughout Of Grammatology Derrida develops innovative strategies for reading which we shall investigate here and codify in the next section. The problematic of writing, as we know, calls into play time, differance, and space, and it questions the traditional values of sign, truth, and presence. The work of Rousseau is chosen since, more than any other between the late Renaissance and the early Modernist period. it organizes an energetic defense of phonocentric and logocentric notions about writing. In isolating and tracking the specific operations of the supplement in Rousseau's text, Derrida initiates a strategy of analysis destined to distinguish the project of deconstruction.
What is the supplement? Many writers and philosophers throughout our history posit or employ the opposition "nature/culture." According to the traditional account, archaic man, living in an innocent and blissful state of nature, comes upon a danger or in sufficiency of one sort or another, bringing about a need or desire for community. In the evolution of man from nature into society, the latter stage of existence is pictured as an addition to the original happy state of nature. In other words, culture supplements nature.
Before too long culture comes to take the place of nature. Culture, then, functions as a supplement in two ways: it adds on and it substitutes. At the same time it is potentially both detrimental and beneficial.
MARKING THE SUPPLEMENT
171
Significantly, the structure of the nature culture opposition repeats itself in other traditional oppositions: for example, health/disease, purity/contamination, good/evil, object/representation, animality/humanity, and speech/writing. Temporal priority distinguishes the first term in each pair; the second entity comes as a supplement to the first. In the case of speech/writing, for instance, the conventional explanation relates how writing comes late in the history of man, arriving as a double-edged supplement that offers gains and losses to man. It protects yet menaces. Traditionally, the first term in each opposition constitutes the privileged or better state or entity. Nature over culture.
But Derrida suggests that nature untouched by the force of supplementarity possesses no truth-value: there is no original un-supplemented nature - only a desire for it or a myth creating it. Inverting the nature/culture opposition and thus overturning this metaphysically pure idea, Derrida notes the emergence of an undecidable concept (the supplement), tracing its pervasive operations throughout the text of Rousseau. The effect is to deconstruct nature and culture, showing that culture does not supplement nature but that it is always already a supplemented entity.
Since the concept "nature" is in question. we may write it, then cross it out, yet keep both it and- the deletion, indicating the equivocal status of the term. Following Heidegger, Derrida occasionally employs this strategy of crossing out but keeping a word-of putting it under erasure ("sous rature"). In questioning one or another notion of "natural origin" or of "unsupplemented purity," Derrida frequently invokes the always already structure. Essentially, the always already works to insert the supplement into any seemingly simple or pure metaphysical conceptualization.
When Rousseau describes an event or phenomenon, he invariably ends up relying on the supplement. Although nature is declared to be self-sufficient, it needs and drags in culture. Education, for instance, aids the insufficiencies of the untrained intellect: there is a lack in natural man, which instruction and learning overcome. Masturbation, considered as a supplement to normal sex, assists people in compensating for dearth. Writing fulfills a similar role, making up for the limitations of speech. Typically, Rousseau is ambiguous about the numerous supplements that infiltrate his texts.
172
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
On the one hand, for example, he openly deplores education, masturbation, and writing; on the other hand, he himself is a self-proclaimed educator (Emile), master masturbator (Confessions), and ambitious writer (La Nouvelle Heloise). At length Derrida exposes an intricate chain of supplements at work in Rousseau's discourse. He illustrates Rousseau's persistent ambivalence and, more importantly, his insistent reliance on the logic of supplementarity.
Derrida reveals that the apparent addition/substitution of the supplement actually constitutes the seemingly unsupplemented entity. Thus sex and masturbation both depend on an imagined sexual object, on an unconsummated desire, and on a sense of self and other. Consciousness of self and other sets up the possibility of masturbation and sex. Often enough, masturbation precedes "normal" sex. In what sense. then, is such activity an addition? A fall from "normal" plenitude? Is it not a most nature practice? Writing and speech both require the possibility of articulation of marking. Is not the possibility of writing (ecriture) the necessary condition of speech? Intelligence, "natural" or "cultivated," presumes the ability to learn by oneself and from others. Do we not observe that education-the potential and actual process of taking in and organizing information-that education characterizes the mode of being of natural man? It operates at the "origin."
Supplementarity names the condition of humanity. Or, more precisely, the operation of the supplement is a precondition of man. All that man is is constituted by the force of supplementarity. The supplement, if you will. is an essential accident or an originary accessory. The possibility of society, education, speech, sex, and humanity are, strictly speaking, supplementary possibilities. So too arc economics, politics, and history. The logic and economy of supplementarity demonstrate that the outside and the belated are really the inside and the primordial. In the state of "nature," the supplement has always already started. 'Nothing is uncontaminated by supplementarity. In a manner of speaking, m3n's departure from "nature" toward culture is instantaneous and interminable.
A mishmash of formulations on the supplement, cut from the Grammatology, brings us nearer to sighting its "relation" to to nature:
MARKING THE SUPPLEMENT 173
the supplement comes naturally to put itself in Nature's place. (149)
It is the strange essence of the supplement not to have essentiality: it may always not have taken place. Moreover, literally, it has never taken place: it is never present, here and now. If it were, it would not be what it is, a supplement, taking and keeping the place of the other. (314)
Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood. . . . (244)
If we consider the concept of animality not in its content of understanding or misunderstanding but in its specific formation, we shall see that it must locate a moment of life which knows nothing of symbol, substitution, lack and supplementary addition. . . . A life that has not yet broached the play of supplementarity and which at the same time has not yet let itself be violated by it: a life without differance. . . . (242)
The same is here called supplement, another name for differance. (150)
Blindness to the supplement is the law. And especially blindness to its concept. . . . The supplement has no sense and is given to no intuition. (149)
The supplement is maddening because it is neither presence nor absence. . . . (154)
the indifferent process of supplementarity has always already ...presence. . . . (163)
supplementarity, which is neither a presence nor an absence. is neither a substance nor an essence of man. It is precisely the play of presence and absence, the opening of this play that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend. (244)
Rousseau is not alone in being caught in the graphic of supplementarity. All meaning and therefore all discourse is caught there, particularly and by a singular rum, the discourse of metaphysics. . . . (246)
Writing will appear to us more and more as another name for this structure of supplementarity. (245)
174
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
This graphic of supplementarity is the origin of languages. . . . (235)
Through this sequence of supplements a necessity is announced: that of an infinite chain. ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations. . . . (157)
This dozen pieces, a baker's dozen, comments already on the supplement. It adds one layer of alteration - my cutting through ellipses. If you yourself design a form or meaning from all this, you will inevitably compensate me and heap on one or more layers. My supplement instigates yours and so on. An infinite chain describes the structure of supplementarity. In commenting on this string of citations, which themselves bear a supplementary relation to one another, we supplement this already several times supplemented ensemble. There is no escape, obviously, from supplem1entarity. Thus the pure entity, the uncontaminated thing, the immediate presence, the pristine object and the undivided origin come forth necessarily as fictions under pressure from an infiltrating chain of supplements, which appear at or in all moments of "primordial" g_. Ensemble is a model for supplementarity.
The most disturbing aspect of the supplement is its lack of substance and essentiality: it cannot be touched. tasted. heard. sm1c1led. seen or intuited; it cannot be thought within the logocentric systematics. As such it exhibits kinship with the trace with differance, and with écriture. It too is an undecidable. To understand such undecidables, now numbering about three dozen in Derrida's canon. we may think of them as nonsynonymic substitutions of differance. keeping in mind that none of these concepts overlaps any other. Like differance - the trace, écriture, dissemination, spacing, iterability, border, and supplement remain distinct.
Outside the grasp of classical metaphysics. the supplcm1ent operates, unacclaim1cd, in the texts of writers and philosophers. Derrida marks it in Husserl and Levi-Strauss as well as in Rousseau. Significantly, this undecidable escapes any appropriation into the binary oppositions of philosophy and literature, yet it dwells amidst such oppositions, resisting and disorganizing them while refusing inclusion as a third term. The supplement disrupts Rousseau's text; he describes it without declaring it; he dwells within its necessity.
MARKING THE SUPPLEMENT
175
When Derrida urges that "reading should free itself, at least in its axis, from the classical categories of history," he recommends that logocentric concepts, like nature, speech, animality, presence, being, origin. self. and truth, not serve as unquestioned supporting structures or stable centers for thematic, historical. psychological. or philosophical analysis. In his own study, he is able to show a regulated system of contradictions running through Rousseau's text. This particular reading could not happen using unexamined traditional categories and practices. The supplement is a production of deconstruction-which in a certain way operates outside the thinking of the logocentric epoch.
From time to time in the Grammatology Derrida turns from critical analysis to metacritical advice and speculation. Taken together, these moments, which generate a theoretical ensemble on reading, offer insights into the practices and problematics of early deconstruction. From the vantage of the 1980s, Of Grammatology appears in some ways a ... Among other examples of this critical strand are the instances of Derrida arguing at length and with care about the dating of Rousseau's Origine matter of interest mainly to Rousseau scholars - and quibbling in his notes with other scholarly works on Rousseau. The most important conserving aspect of Derrida's whole enterprise is his dedication to working laboriously and scrupulously within the closure of the logocentric systematics. As part of this endeavor. he admits and promotes the values of careful reading, particularly in the phenomenological and structuralist modes. At the same time he seeks progress beyond such traditionalist practices. Generally speaking. this double strategy suggests using the resources of tradition so as to dramatize its closure and to begin its breakdown. For Derrida such a procedure is necessary; it is not a matter of choice. Using the terms of "Structure. Sign, and Play." we can say that deconstruction practices two interpretations of interpretation. It aims to decipher the stable truths of a work, employing conventional "passive" tactics of reading; and it seeks to question and subvert such truths in an active production of enigmatic undecidables.
176
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Significantly, undecidables emerge from within deciphered texts; they are not alien importations. Thus the materials for deconstruction reside within the tradition. In other words, the text offers itself to deconstruction quite naturally. Derrida's rigorous reading of Rousseau presses home this point. So it is that the revolution of deconstruction requires as much conventional work as messianic daring. The quick fix and the sudden escape are the mirages of the misguided and the reckless who set out forgetful of historical necessities. Their blindness (mis)leads them. About the role of conventional commentary Derrida insists:
"To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is trot easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything" (158). Deconstructive reading. respecting traditional criticism. neither supersedes its object (the text) nor plays fast and loose with it. Rather the text undergoes conscientious scrutiny. Of the limitations of the old reading Derrida observes: but this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened. a reading" (158). In the past, critical reading worked within and with the elements of the logocentric system, foregoing its own potentially corrosive powers of criticism by repeating endless variations on given precepts. Fine-tuning the myriad mechanisms of logocentrism. traditional commentary never opened these precepts to criticism. In the past, as Derrida construes it, reading was more often refinement of the given than inquiry into founding mechanisms. After admitting the values of traditional criticism and suggesting their limited though indispensable role in deconstruction, Derrida reviews the theory of textuality. This conjunction is no accident. He points out that deconstruction first assumes a theory of language (textuality). then initiates a reading. Thus methodological considerations "are closely dependent on general propositions that we have elaborated above; as regards the absence of the referent or the transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text" (158).
MARKING THE SUPPLEMENT 177
The point is that deconstructive reading not only questions the old commentary's refined repetition or doubling of the work, but also refuses the traditional violation of the text that links it to an outside. No connection exists between "real" biographical events, "authentic" history and phenomena, "actual" metaphysical entities, and the text at hand. Deconstruction stays within the text because there is nothing else: biography, history, and metaphysics are always already written. Written into the (inter)text.
Deconstructive reading neither escapes nor avoids biography. history, and metaphysics. Its target texts cohabit with them. Historical totalities of all kinds and philosophical structures of all orders organize, envelop, and blend within the text by virtue of the already-thereness of language and culture. Every reading dredges up and carries off an "unformed mass of roots, soil, and sediments of all sorts" (161). But these elements never touch ground; they are always already written. The text to be desedimented resides among numerous eras, and reading must resign itself to the fact of such intertextuality.
What about the author? about Rousseau? Derrida frequently stresses that Rousseau describes the supplement, which disrupts and undermines his text, but he doesn't declare it. It is a blind spot in his writing. Broadly speaking, a writer works in a linguistic and cultural system which his own discourse cannot completely dominate. Up to a point he goes along with the constituted codes. Deconstructive reading, therefore, "must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses" (158). The intention of the author, conscious or unconscious, does not guide Derridean deconstruction. Often enough, a strand of thought, left undeveloped in an author's text, provides Derrida with material to deconstruct a pattern of concepts or a textual system. The author is a name.
The formula for deconstructive reading is: repeat and undermine. The conventional repetition of the text, minutely and laboriously accomplished, establishes the foothold of deconstruction within the resources of the text and the tradition.
178
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The subversion of the text, predicated on the rich possibilities of textuality and intertextuality, makes insecure the seemingly stable text and tradition through the production. of undecidables. "It is certainly a production," stresses Derrida, because I do not simply duplicate [repeat] what Rousseau thought of this relationship [between the supplement and the metaphysical systematics].
The concept of the supplement is a sort of blind spot in Rousseau's text. . . . But the production, if it attempts to make the not-seen accessible to sight, does not leave the text. . .. It is contained in the transformation of the language it designates, in the regulated exchanges between Rousseau and history. We know that these exchanges only take place by way of the language and the text. . . . (163-64)
Deconstruction is production. It is not self-effacing repetition or doubling commentary, although it uses such methods along the way. It always works within the text and the intertext. But there it produces the imperceptible: the trace of-the supplement, for example.
The production itself of deconstruction is necessarily a text. And each such work of critical writing contains its own blind spot. Aporia is an accepted aspect of the deconstructive enterprise. Every deconstruction opens itself to further deconstruction (24, 64), Implicitly. the final production of a deconstructive reading can never be final; it is rather a finale subject to a new erasure.
Split Writing or Producing Undecidables
At the conclusion of "The Ends of Man," a conference presentation delivered in America during the fall of 1968, Jacques Derrida outlines various options for deconstructing the logocentric systematics. He notes that this system regularly transforms transgressions into "false sorties." And he observes that we have, from the inside, where we are, two potential strategies. First, deconstruction can attempt its work without changing ground and by repeating the original problematics, using against the system its own resources. (This approximates Heidegger's strategy of destruction.). Second, deconstruction can change ground and abruptly step outside, affirming total discontinuity and difference. The danger of the first strategy is to confirm and consolidate, in an ever more secure and profound manner, that which is being challenged. With the second the risk is to re-situate the new ground on the older one, remaining even more naively and blindly within the logocentric enclosure, notably through the insistence and agency of (old) language.
Whatever the risks and dangers, the necessity of a "change of ground" cannot be dismissed. Derrida recommends that both forms of "deconstruction" be employed. "A new writing must weave and intertwine the two motifs. That is, several languages must be spoken and several texts produced at the same time" (205). He closes his reflection with the suggestion that "it is perhaps a change of style that we need" (206).
Not long after this time, Derrida and other French deconstructors initiate a new writing, as in La Dissemination and Glas and S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text. Looking back from the 1980s, the deconstructive texts of the 1960s seem stylistically conservative. Derrida's Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, all written in the 1960s, rely for the most part on conventional modes of scholarly writing and organization.
180
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION.
In later sections we shall sample some of the new writings, which aim to transform the terrain from within and from without. And to fashion a new style. Published in the autumn of 1971, Derrida's interview with J. L. Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, titled "Positions," presents his most economical and lucid account of the strategies of deconstructive reading. Its codification below assumes familiarity with the previous section of our text.
The place where a reader notices a displacement or reversal in a textual chain or system often constitutes the site of a philosophical or thematic opposition. Disclosing such a crevice, the deconstructor systematically and tenaciously inverts the opposition to reveal the actual hierarchical relation of the ...ous terms. At this point she steadfastly disallows any reconstitution, sublimation, or synthesis (any Hegelian Aufgebung) of opposing terms. This strategic inversion and stubborn expose produce an unexpected gap, forcing the emergence of a new concept, which nameless mark neither neutralizes nor reforms the old opposition. Rather, it functions as a disorganizing structural force that invisibly inhabits and transgresses the opposition somewhat like the Unconscious of Freud, which secretly dwells amidst the subconscious and conscious domains of each person's psyche. The purpose of the deconstructor is to produce such undecidables and to track their insistent operations throughout the text. In this work the critic docs not track literary or metaphysical theme since the new concept is always subtracted from, then added to, them.
The split nature of deconstruction. its double service. consists of deliberately reducing traditional oppositions and labeling the mysterious and disorienting play of hitherto invisible concepts that reside unnamed in the gap between opposing terms. (Between "nature" and "culture," for example dwells the supplement.) In this double gesture, deconstruction avoids simply defusing oppositions or reforming them; in other words, deconstruction actively resists the inclusion of the new concept into the old dichotomy. Yet, since deconstruction works with language, it cannot escape such re-appropriation; finally its productions, in turn, fall prey to further deconstruction. As analysis, deconstruction is interminable.
SPLIT WRITING
181
Deconstruction exceeds the limits established by traditional hermeneutics. It does not reproduce or recreate through the effaced doubling of commentary or interpretation the conscious or intentional meaning made by the writer in interaction with her world and time. Since there is nothing beyond text, deconstruction works always from inside. Yet this labor is not interpretation or commentary inscribed by critics who serve as transparent mediums - purveyors of truth; it is production of hidden and miragelike "semiological" structures that reveal the radical and prolific play of differance in texts. (The old reading celebrates identity.)
Deconstruction is the free, systematic, and painstaking practice of erasure and split writing. Without end. All the while the old never disappears under the new reading and writing. Transformation suggests death, but signals rebirth.
The deconstructive intervention into a particular text or into the wider discourse of a discipline is, to a certain extent. historically determined. Thus the standpoint of the deconstructor is never simply a free choice; it exists as an historical possibility. (The incision of deconstruction. which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators - beginnings, holds. levers, etc.- in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a "subject." (POS, 82)
Though parenthetical, this rel1urk deserves the emphasis here of last place. For too often Derridean deconstruction shows up in other representations as an extreme Nietzschean lawlessness of reading and writing outside all bounds of history and tradition. Between the two interpretations of interpretation announced in "Structure, Sign, and Play," there can be no effective choice. Despite his ambiguity in this most influential early essay, Derrida almost everywhere else urges both interpretations. Nevertheless, the radical misreading of Derrida, championing a single-minded
182
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Nietzschean program for joyous freeplay, has become canonical in some quarters. (For tactical purposes we celebrated this project at the close of chapter 2.) For Derrida the deconstructor's entry into a textual field never occurs from an absolute elsewhere (an outside) nor from just anywhere (any inside); it often starts at a given point of weakness in the discourse. But in every case its determination exceeds the will or wisdom of the subject, who comes into the field at a particular moment or conjunction of development and history. His personal engagement then is neither an instance of absolute beginning nor an issue of choice. The scene of breakthrough is always already inscribed in a chain of historical oppositions and determinations. Freedom has to be c__ and !EL<!nal not simply assumed. Split writing operates with history. And against.
Allegory and (Mis)Reading
Paul de Man's highly influential theory of rhetoricity follows from his obsessions with reading. He insists in the 'Foreword to Blindness and Insight that "prior to theorizing about literary language, one has to become aware of the complexities of reading" (viii). In the Preface to Allegories of Reading he reveals that he started the book as a historical study and ended up with a theory of reading: "I had to shift from historical definition to the problematics of reading" (ix). The difficulties of reading precipitate and direct de Man's theories of language, literature, and criticism. "What emerges is a process of reading in which rhetorics is a discipline." 'ining of trope and persuasion or - which is not quite the same thing - of cognition ":t;_!l_LE_fo,_m_..!iy'e_ language" (AR, ix). The vertiginous aberrations characteristic of literary language are productions of critical reading. To grasp de Man's deconstructive project is to understand his experiences of reading, which generate particular ideas of rhetoricity and misreading as well as specific notions of the literary text as self-deconstructive and critical writing as allegorical. Let us disentangle this knotted pattern.
To open our examination of de Man's theory of critical writing, we begin with an inordinately dense passage taken from an essay on Nietzsche's "Rhetoric of Tropes." When he reads a literary text, de Man makes several discoveries:
The wisdom of the text is self-destructive. . . but this self-destruction - its infinitel[y dialectics or] successive rhetorical reversals which, by the endless repetition of the same figure, keep it suspended between truth and the death of this truth. A threat of immediate destruction, stating itself as a figure of speech, thus becomes the permanent repetition of this threat. Since this repetition is a temporal event, it can be narrated sequentially, but' what it narrates, the subject matter of the story, is itself mere figure. A non-referential. repetitive text narrates the story of a literally destructive but nontragic linguistic event. We could call this rhetorical mode. . . allegory. (AR, 115-16)
184
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The dramatic states of "suspension" and "repetition" announce the impossibility of reading the necessary unreadability of the text. Reading uncovers and confronts a language that vacillates uncontrollably between the presentism of deferential meaning and the rhetorical subversion of that promise. rru_ll is permanently threatened. A disruptive tropological language endlessly repeats the threat. Whatever wisdom the language of the text offers is undermined through a continuous slide or displacement from figure to substitute figure. A process of tropic reversals, seeming linguistic misfortunes, marks the experience of reading. However disorienting, this experience can be related - told. Critical writing is, in fact, narration of reading experience. As story, the critical text itself relies unavoidably on figurative language; it repeats the confusions between figural and referential dimensions; it remains suspended. while spread across a diachronic narrative, between truth and the death of truth. The rhetorical mode of critical writing, a textual plot of another text's tale, a figure of a figure, is called for. In de Man's view, "the allegorical mode is accounted for in the description of all language as figural and in the necessarily diachronic structure of the reflection that reveals this insight" (BI, 135). To the extent that critical narrative is diachronic and figural (fictitious), it is allegorical.
For de Man critical writing can never be simply description, repetition. identification, or representation of a literary text. Between the critical and the literary text a space for difference or trope intervenes. The only accurate way for criticism to describe, repeat, represent. or be identical with a poem would be to recopy it. Criticism deviates from the text. (Moreover, the text deviates from itself.) Even paraphrase, the mainstay of the critical faith, has for its actual purpose "to blur, confound, and hide discontinuities and disruptions in the homogeneity of its own discourse." 4
As it relates (to) the poem, critical writing manifests itself as a distinct and distant sequence of images, an allegory, of reading. Since all language is rhetorical, it appears inevitable that literature assume no priority over criticism or vice versa.
ALLEGORY AND (MIS)READING
185
The precise way to make this point is to say: literary language is characterized by rhetoricity and, accordingly, any language in any text is "literary" to the extent that it is rhetorical. "Literature as well as criticism - the difference between them being delusive - is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language. . ." (AR, 19; my italics). Any prior or absolute distinction between literature and criticism partakes of delusion because "the criterion of literary specificity does not depend on the greater or lesser discursiveness of the mode but on the degree of consistent rhetoricity of the language" (BI, 137 11). Thus critical writing always stays caught up and suspended within its own linguistic play of truth and falsehood. Criticism is (allegorical) text.
De Man formulates his experiences of unreadability into a theory of meaning. The elucidation of misreading touches near the heart of his enterprise: "we reach the conclusion that the determining characteristic of literary language is indeed figurality. in the somewhat wider sense of rhetoricity, but that, far from constituting an objective basis for literary study, rhetoric implies the persistent threat of misreading." 5 But de Man puts this observation yet more directly: "the specificity of literary language resides in the possibility of misreading and misinterpretation" (ULL, 1 84). In other words, if it ruled out or refused all misreading whatsoever, a text would not be literary. A text is literary to the degree that it permits and encourages misreading. Consequently, any criticism or interpretation that aims to achieve "controlled" or "correct" readings is seriously deluded.
Because misreading is a necessary and inevitable constituent of literary criticism, the history of criticism constitutes itself as a systematic narrative of error. To give two examples, Rousseau and Nietzsche have been misread throughout critical history. In particular, "the established tradition of Rousseau interpretation . . . stands in dire need of deconstruction" (BI, 139). Here we "perceive the grounds for a new critical project: to revise the traditions of Rousseau and Nietzsche interpretation, which is what de Man initiates in the essays of Allegories of Reading.
186
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Straightforwardly, de Man generalizes his overall conception of misreading as he considers Nietzsche: "Perhaps we have not yet begun to read him properly. In the case of major authors, this is never a simple task. There are likely to be long periods of continual misinterpretation." And "As long as we are not sufficiently aware of this, we risk to produce the wrong kind of misreading. For there can be more or less valid misreadings. . , . ", If misreading is a constituent of "literary" texts, then, paradoxically, the extent or range of misreadings of a text certify its literariness. Indeed, "By a good misreading. I mean a text that produces another text, which can itself be shown to be an interesting misreading, a text which engenders additional texts" ("NTR," 51). To sum up, all interpretation, given the rhetoricity of language, is misreading:
When a text is densely rhetorical. it will generate numerous misreadings. Any critical reading that tries to contain the inevitable misreadings itself affirms the inevitability of misreading in spite of its very desire to circumscribe the random play of grammatical structures and the dizzying aberrations of rhetorical figures. Necessarily, the critical readings of an author or of a text exist in the mode of error.
This theory of misreading is applicable in all cases, though de Man's demonstrations have been mainly with major critics in his early essays collected in Blindness and Insight and primarily with Rousseau and Nietzsche in his later studies gathered in Allegories of Reading. For these latter authors themselves the operation of the misreading phenomenon is likewise inevitable. Of Rousseau, de Man notes: just as any other reader, he is bound to misread his text . . . The error is not within the reader; language itself dissociates the cognition from the act Die Sprache-[] . . ." (AR, 277). In short, any reading by an author (as well as by a critic) is ultimately unable to control or delimit the text. The phenomenon of misreading can never be contained or erased. .
One recurrent manifestation or version of misreading is of particular interest to de Man during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through examination of selected leading critics (Lukacs, Binswanger, Blanchot, Poulet. and Derrida), he reveals that each critic unwittingly manifests a discrepancy between his explicit theories of literature and his actual interpretations.
187
Paradoxically, these critics "seem to thrive on it and owe their best insights to the assumptions these insights disprove" (BI, ix). This blindness/insight pattern is "a constitutive characteristic of literary language in general" (BI, ix). The basic point is that both literary and critical texts exhibit the m1isreading experience. Texts are unreadable for both the author and the critic of the text. Neither the author nor the critic can "read" his own or anyone else's text.
When de Man declares that "There is no need to deconstruct Rousseau; the established tradition of Rousseau interpretation, however, stands in dire need of deconstruction" (BI, 139), the implication is that Rousseau himself is enlightened. "On the question of rhetoric, on the nature of figural language, Rousseau was not deluded and said what he meant to say" (BI, 135). Yet we must refine this early formulation in light of later reading experiences, Given the random operation of grammar as a determining element in the rhetoricity of language, the possibility of the author's total enlightenment or control is relinquished: just as any other reader, he is bound to misread his text. . . ." In de Man's deconstructive project the conception of the text as self-deconstructing ultimately subsumes the phenomenon of the author as self-deconstructor: "A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode. . . . Poetic writing is the most advanced and refined mode of deconstruction . . ." (AR, 17). In essence, literary texts deconstruct themselves; they are always already deconstructed whether the author (or critic) realizes it or not. Each author, to be sure, exhibits individual degrees of understanding and awareness about the unsettling rhetoricity of language. Nevertheless, an author is finally never free to hem in the randomness of grammar, the play of figures, and the aberrations of semantic references.
3
For de Man the cognitive elements of literary texts reside in the language, not in the author. (When de Man writes his criticism, the "agent" occasionally disappears from his sentences: language displaces author.) The issue, therefore, of whether the author is or is not blinded by language is, in a sense, irrelevant. To the degree that a literary text reveals or acknowledges the rhetoricity of its mode, it affirms the inevitability of misreading.
ALLEGORY AND (MIS)READING
188
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
"It knows and asserts that it will be misunderstood. It tells the story, the allegory of its misunderstanding. . ." (BI, 136). For example, Rousseau's fictional as well as his discursive writings are allegories of (non)signification or of unreadability, allegories of the deconstruction and the reintroduction of metaphorical models" (AR, 257). We discover here that the mode of allegory characterizes both secondary works and primary texts. (Allegory is not a consequence of authorial intention.) And again, criticism emerges as the story of a story told in a figurative language about figurative language. Thus the traditional critical demand for meaning or truth, suspended by de Man, gives way to redoubled unreadability. And deconstruction becomes the deconstruction of a deconstruction. Oddly, the only force that lightens this abysmal labyrinth of writing and (mis)reading is the lure, the promise, of truth. De Man never renounces referentiality; he problematizes it, undermines it, explodes it - yet prescribes it.
Among all the deconstructive close readers, de Man pays least attention to intertextuality. Rarely does he focus on the pressing influences of forerunners or on the determining cultural forces operating upon or in texts. He does sometimes highlight the past and current critical responses to texts. Such critical heritages always need to be cleared away, and they are often scorched by implication. if not directly. So tangled up does de Man get in the epistemological abysses of figurative play that he never quite arrives at history. He tells us in the opening lines of Allegories of Reading that the complexities of reading keep him from history. 7 He suspects that Derrida's historical notion of "logocentrism" is a fiction - a productive narrative frame for reading (BI, 137-39).
This absence of intertextual materials and determinants distinguishes de Man's critical writing, as does his labyrinthine wanderings amid figural turns and returns. The blind alley is almost the whole of the diminished truth for him. Deconstruction insists on performing what cannot be performed reading texts. Necessarily, then, allegory aptly characterizes critical (mis)reading and writing. Meanwhile, the historical dimension rests on the back burner.
Actually, though, de Man does not believe in history. Or, to be more accurate, de Man regards history writing as fiction.
ALLEGORY AND (MIS)READING
189
The stark conclusion to his essay in the Yale manifesto warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence" (D&C, 69). Such total discontinuity or randomness, introduced earlier through grammar into the theory of language (rhetoricity), now disrupts and disallows any history. That we recuperate and integrate things and events in historical (and aesthetic) systems does not deny the fallaciousness of all such fabricated communities; it merely affirms a necessity. Significantly, this necessity results from language: the making of continuities is not our doing as subjects; we ourselves are its products. "No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words" (D&C, 68).
Critical reading, like the making of history, is monumentalization. Randomness is brought to order. Language is the agent. We are bystanders. Allegory triumphs. "Reading as disfiguration" - as activity that accepts randomness - "to the very extent that it resists history", turns out to be historically more reliable than the products of historical archeology" (D&C, 69). Though perhaps too self-consciously paradoxical, this statement justifies and explains de Man's critical practice. To read closely in the deconstructive or disfigurative manner produces more reliable history than the history of historicists and archeologists, who champion carefully forged lies of order and continuity. While de Man never deliberately gets to history (in the old sense), he does so inevitably through the work of disfiguration.
The Lateral Dance
In spite of the bewildering array of possibilities in literary methodology, the methods available may "…be reduced to two distinctly different sorts. One kind includes all those methods whose presuppositions arc in one way or another what I would call "metaphysical." The other kind includes those methods which hypothesize that in literature, for reasons which are intrinsic to language itself, metaphysical presuppositions are, necessarily. both affirmed and subverted."
-J. Hillis Miller
For J. Hil1is Miller there exists two types of critical interpretation - the metaphysical and the deconstructive. Since they can not be synthesized, one must choose between them. After choosing deconstruction in the late 1960s, Miller proceeds to read texts under the avowed influence of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. In his practice, he employs their theories of misreading and split writing. though he uniformly favors rhetorical analysis over the production of undecidables. Generally speaking. Miller relics on the notions of the self-deconstructing text and the allegorical modality of critical writing. Let us explore in some detail Miller's forthright formulations on critical reading. his interpretive strategies for breaking down the logocentric systematics, and his project's difference from those of de Man and Derrida.
For Miller all interpretation is misinterpretation. To read is to connect elements and construct patterns out of the diffuse materials in a writing. As a reader works through the chain of words in a text, he or she imposes meaning in an act of willed mastery. Texts ( are unreadable-or undecidable-in that they allow a host of potential misreadings. To reduce a text to a correct or single homogeneous reading is to restrain the free play of its elements.
THE LATERAL DANCE
191
"This docs not mean," emphasizes Miller, "that the narrator or the reader is free to give the narrative any meaning he wishes, but that the pattern is subject to 'free play,' is formally 'undecidable.' Meaning emerges from a reciprocal act in which interpreter and what is interpreted both contribute to the making or the finding of a pattern. . . . " 9 Consequently, "there are obviously strong and weak critical misreadings, more or less vital ones" ("DO," 24). But always misreadings because an interpretation can neither reach the "original" meaning of a text. nor contain all the potential readings. There can never be "objective" interpretation-only more or less vital misreadings.
One of Miller's tactics in reading a text is to trace the meaning of a key word back to its etymological "roots." In so doing, he shifts the apparent stability of the master term out of a closed system and into an ongoing bifurcating labyrinth. The effect of such semantic dissemination is to deracinate the text, revealing the inexhaustible possibilities for interpretation and the futility of logical and dialectical orderings. After he reads an exemplary poem, he concludes: "Such a poem is incapable of being encompassed in a single logical formulation. It calls forth potentially endless commentaries, each one of which, like this essay, can only formulate and reformulate its mise en abyme." 10
How does a literary critic read a text? "The reader is forced then to shift sideways again seeking to find somewhere else in the poem the solid ground of that figure, seeking, and failing or falling, and seeking again" ("SR." I 8). The creation of a critical reading is the production of a failure. Trying to ground her interpretation in some element of the text, the critic always discovers the collapse of the ground into the free play of figure. She is compelled, then, to move down the chain of words, seeking a still point, which-in time-gives way again to the play of figure. Thus the reader moves on, once again, to find another more stable foundation: "The reader must then seek the literal base elsewhere, in a constant lateral transfer with no resting place in the unequivocally literal, the mimetic. the 'exact rock,' cured at last" ("SR." 19). Miller characterizes the productions of such reading acts as mises en abyme, and he depicts the process of reading itself as lateral dance.
192
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The name of this incessant movement from one displaced figural point to another is allegory. "Story-telling, the putting into language of man's 'experience' of his life, is in its writing or reading a hiatus in that experience. Narrative is the allegorizing along a temporal line of this perpetual displacement from immediacy" ("AT." 72). The theory of allegory, borrowed from de Man, insists on the crucial role of difference and spacing in all reading and writing. All experiences of critical reading and writing differ from their objects and from themselves as they take form in narration.
This slippage results from insistent temporality and rhetoricity (or textuality). In place of the "same" is difference, of presence, absence. The possibility of a safe critical discourse. a metalanguage, above or beyond time or rhetoric, secure from allegory, is denied.
When he reads a novel by Thomas Hardy, Miller gives full voice to his general theory of the lateral dance (here I connate three important paragraphs):
Each passage is a node, a point of intersection or focus, on which converge lines leading from many other passages in the novel and ultimately including them all. No passage has any particular priority over the others, in the sense of being more important or as being the "origin" or "end" of the others. . . . Moreover. the chains of connection or of repetition that converge on a given passage arc extremely complex and diverse in nature, and no one of these chains has archeological or interpretative priority over the others.
The reader can only thread his way from one element to another, interpreting each as best he can in terms of the others. It is possible to distinguish chains of connection that are material elements in the text. . . . None of these chains. however, has priority over the others as the true explanation of the meaning of the novel. Each is a permutation of the others rather than a distinct realm of discourse. . . .
. . . The reader must exclude a lateral JailerP interpretation to explicate any given passage, without ever reaching - in this sideways movement, any passage that is chief, original, or originating, a sovereign principle of explanation. ("FR." 58-59; my italics)
The metaphor of the dance reveals for us the moves in the act of interpretation. Insofar as a text is a spatialized tapestry of myriad interlocking threads (for example, words, images, characters, themes), it is constituted as level, meaning that no spot or passage can rise above any other, Nothing may be privileged: there can be no origin, no end, no focus, no priority element, no sovereign principle.
THE LATERAL DANCE
193
To the extent that a text is a temporal chain of interwoven elements, the reader can only transfer elements from one sequence to another, stopping now and then-at will-to confer meaning through an arbitrary act of interpretation. There can be no "true" explanation or meaning of the text-only more or less vital patterns of textual connections. Thus, the dance of deconstruction is structured, like all dance, as repetition, yet such repetition is ultimately liberated and hollowed out by difference. The parallel here with contemporary dancing is remarkably strong: after the waltz we have the swinger's solo; and at the disco the music never stops, the dancers merely walk off when they've had enough.
For some American critics, unhappy about recent developments in critical and literary theory, Miller serves as the model, a fall guy or point man, for the school of deconstruction. Seemingly, he undermines traditional ideas and beliefs about language, literature, truth, meaning, consciousness. and interpretation. In effect, he assumes the' role of unrelenting destroyer-of nihilistic magician-who dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the Western tradition. Everything he touches soon appears tom. Nothing is ever finally darned, or choreographed for coherence, or foregrounded as (only) magical illusion. Miller, a relentless rift-maker, refuses any apparent repair and rampages onward, dancing, spell-casting, destroying all. As though he were a wizard, he appears in the guise of a bull-deconstructor loose in the china shop of Western tradition.
But, of course, this portrait is a distorted image. Miller understands himself and the great tradition otherwise. The so-called 'deconstruction of metaphysics' has always been a part of metaphysics, a shadow within its light, for example in the self-subversion of Plato in The Sophist. "All texts contain both the traditional materials of metaphysics and the subversion of these materials. "This subversion is wrought into the conceptual words, the figures, and the myths of the Occident as the shadow in its light. . . . " 11 As an important consequence, "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself" ("SR II," 3[]).
194
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Miller pictures himself as moving always into this land of shadows, seeking to go beyond the blinding light to the dark underside of history in order to nuke the ever-present darkness visible in the texts of the tradition.13 Accordingly, the deconstructive critic plays the old role of handmaiden to the text, though the maiden is now a shady fairy godmother wielding apparently boundless negativizing powers.
While the subversion of logocentric metaphysics has always been a part of the tradition, "the putting in question of metaphysics has taken a novel turn in modern times with new concepts of language, new ideas of structure, and new notions of interpretation" ("SH," 98). The shadow-men of our tradition are known, if not loved. "One knows the familiar litany of the names of these doubters, underminers of the Occidental tradition in its economic and political theory, in its ethical and ontological notions, in its concept of human psychology, and in its theory of language: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure" ("TO," 8). We can add to this tradition many other practitioners of "deconstruction" from earlier eras and from our own time. In Miller's novel view such subversives are not revolutionaries, "Rather than the notion of revolution one needs the more enigmatic concept of repetition (repetition as displacement or decentering) to describe the effect of these writers on the culture to which, like all of us. they belong. By resurrection, rearrangement, re-emphasis, or reversal of old materials they have made a difference" ("TO." 8). The tradition of difference within our culture, as Miller depicts it. appears a consenting force, which ultimately renews and preserves the culture by retrieving repressed materials, This archeological thrust of deconstruction, initiated earlier with Derrida. is too rarely recognized or admitted. Thus does an imaginary bull metamorphose
into a fox who raids the resources, circumspectly precipitating rearrangement of the old guard.
For Miller, as for Derrida, there can be no escape outside the tradition. Alternative schemes inevitably turn out to be modified versions of ancestral metaphysics, The protean power of the logocentric systematic to re-form itself results because "our languages contain no terms, no concepts, and no metaphors which are not inextricably implicated in the patterns of metaphysical thinking" ("TO," 10).
THE LATERAL DANCE
195
There is no effort in Miller's project to step abruptly outside the historical enclosure. The breakdown of the system occurs from the inside. Such a deconstructive enterprise is possible because language embodies "a clash of incompatibles which grates, twists, or bifurcates the mind. . ." and because it already incarnates "the immense anacoluthon of Western literature, philosophy, and history as a whole'" CABW," 56). The system contains the materials for its own subversion.
3
What, in summary, are the means and ends of deconstruction in Miller's project? .
[I] Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth. The critic feels his way from figure to figure, from concept to concept, from mythical motif to mythical motif, in a repetition which is in no sense a parody. It employs, nevertheless, the subversive power present in even the most exact and unironical doubling. [2] The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building. [3] The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated that ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text bur a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. (USR II," 34 I)
This passage, a compact depiction of Miller's deconstructive procedures, explains three matters plainly: the means, the ends, and the effects of his deconstructive criticism. To begin with, the deconstructive interpreter carefully traces and repeats certain elements in the text, which may include the figures, the concepts, or the motifs in a work, As he repeats the selected elements, the critic unleashes the disruptive powers inherent in all repetition. In other words, the critic through seemingly innocent repetition foregrounds and sets in motion the operations of difference, calling into playa disorienting chain of substitutions and displacements that ultimately destabilize and decenter the text. Since he cannot repeat all textual elements, the deconstructor must find and employ that element or those few which will undermine most effectively the whole text.
196
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
In the work of deconstruction, the critic comes upon his materials only in the text; consequently, the deconstruction of the text is discovered to be already underway before the intervention of the critic. "The critic cannot by any means get outside the text, escape from the blind alleys of language he finds in the work ("SR II," 33 I).
Still. the project has not yet been fully disclosed. The deconstructor does not simply enter a work with an attentive eye for the loose thread or the alogical element that will decenter the entire text; he intends beforehand to reverse the traditional hierarchies that constitute the ground of the text. The underlying program of split writing precedes the actual productions of deconstructive misreading. "'Deconstruction' as a procedure of interpreting the texts of our tradition," reveals Miller. His not simply a teasing out of the traces of that dialogical heterogeneity. . . . Deconstruction rather attempts to reverse the implicit hierarchy within the terms in which the dialogical has been defined. It attempts to define the monological, the logocentric, as a derived effect of the dialogical rather than as the noble affirmation of which the dialogical is a disturbance. a secondary shadow in the originating light" ("ABW," 59-60). The role of the deconstructor as shadowman reemerges in the end: the project of deconstruction for Miller is to redefine Tradition by putting the "tradition of difference" in place of the dominant "tradition of metaphysics." In the short run, the deconstructive critical project works to widen the rift between the two traditions as a way to demonstrate the repression of the outlived tradition while challenging the misguided caretaking of the canonized tradition. Ultimately, the practice of deconstructive analysis has for its goal the deconstruction not only of individual texts but also of the general system of traditional metaphysics. Yet "deconstructive discourse can never reach a clarity which is not vulnerable to being deconstructed in its turn" ("DO," 30).
Or, in Miller's words front the Yale manifesto, "the 'deconstructive' reading can by no means free itself from the metaphysical reading it means to contest" (D&C, 225). Unable to go beyond language, the deconstructor is compelled to use the concepts and figures of the metaphysical tradition. Thus he cannot construct a trope-free critical discourse; neither can he get to an undifferentiated literal bottom in the texts he reads. Impasse, endpoint, allegory, aporia. The outside is only an alluring illusion.
THE LATERAL DANCE
197
With his abiding concern for coping with logocentrism and for employing the energies of differance, Miller bears almost no resemblance to de Man. His regular insistence on the self-deconstructive and allegorical structures of writing and his obsession with tracking figural oscillations distinguish his methods from Derrida's. In other words, Miller's enterprise, an original blend, differs markedly from his two colleagues'. Unlike de Man, he stays ever attentive to and involved with history. For him critical reading by nature is archeological activity. There can be no back burner for history. Unlike Derrida, Miller denies the attractive illusion and paradoxical necessity of a revolutionary "change of ground." In effect, he does not believe in split writing. Or his disbelief vacillates. The logocentric systematics, embodying its nihilistic shadow, carries within itself the resources for deconstruction. The monstrous future, the coming new paradigm, the nonlogocentric and apocalyptic outside-which playa role in Derrida's early vision of deconstruction-hold no place in Miller's program. He proclaims no new day, implies no messianic hope, propounds no monstrous future.
The hysterical and radical Nietzschean joy, characteristic of much early French deconstruction, suggestive of revolutionary endeavors, appears infrequently in Miller's works; when it does, the manic tone veers toward depression and the radical edge gets blunted. "Deconstruction attempts to resist the totalizing and totalitarian tendencies of criticism. It attempts to resist its own tendencies to come to rest in some sense of mastery over the work. "It resists these in the name of an uneasy joy of interpretation, beyond nihilism, always in movement, a going beyond which remains in place. . ." (D&C, 252-53). The joy of a beyond, of the inconceivable yet promising outside, makes Miller "uneasy"; for him any "beyond" is already "in place" inside. Repetition replaces revolution. Deconstruction has always been with us. Plato did it in The Sophist. That's history. No going beyond it.
From Codes to Lexias or Packets of Notation
In its English translation, Roland Barthes' 51 Z boasts a sweeping dust jacket assessment by Susan Sontag: "51Z demonstrates once again that Roland Barthes is the most inventive, elegant, and intelligent of contemporary literary critics." And it bears a prefatory Note by Richard Howard, which concludes provocatively: "Barthes's essay is the most useful, the most intimate, and the most suggestive book I have ever read about why I have ever read a book." Finally, Howard himself begins by citing some laudatory comments on S/Z from a British reviewer. Quite simply, S/Z (1970) is one of the most celebrated masterworks of contemporary criticism. Often it serves as the model of practical structuralist analysis. More recently, it has been regarded as something of an early "deconstructive" text that pushes past various limitations of structuralism. Our commentary furthers this view.
Taking Sarrasine, a little-known Balzac novella of roughly 13,000 words, Barthes performs an innovative analysis of approximately 75,000 words. In effect, he saturates an apparently humdrum realistic talc in a fecund reading. His commentary functions on four levels. First, 561 lexias (variable units of reading) are etched out and examined consecutively for connotative significance. Second, five codes-the cultural, hermeneutic, symbolic, semic: and proairetic (narrative) - are regularly invoked to orient and organize the numerous unfolding connotations of the lexias. Third, ninety-three causeries, reflecting sometimes on the lexias and codes and sometimes on m0re general literary and critical matters, are deployed much like conventional book sections. And, fourth, two appendices, one a chronological list of action sequences and the other a topic outline keyed to the causeries, are offered in a gesture, a sketch, of summation.
FROM CODES TO LEXIAS
199
Of these analytical strata, the structuralist one of codes frequently provokes the most admiration. The lexias in this understanding serve as "codemes"; the appendices as backup tabular notes and data sources; and the brief expositions as elucidations and essayistic extensions of the codes.
Barthes rather obviously plays with the codes from the outset. He uses them yet subverts them. It's a case of double writing. Having defined each code once, Barthes redefines them to suggest their "function":
there will be no other codes throughout the story but these five, and each and every lexia will fall under one of these five codes. Let us sum them up in order of their appearance, without trying to put than in any order of importance. Under the hermeneutic code, we list the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in. suspense, and finally disclosed (these terms will not always occur, they will often be repeated; they will not appear in any fixed order). As for the semes, we merely indicate them - without, in other words, trying either to link them to a character (or a place or an object) or to arrange them in some order so that they form a single thematic grouping; we allow them the instability, the dispersion, characteristic of motes of dust, flickers of meaning. Moreover, we shall refrain from structuring the symbolic grouping; this is the place for multivalance and for reversibility; the main task is always to demonstrate that this field can be entered from any number of points, thereby making [craft] and secrecy problematic. Actions (terms of the proairetic code) an fall into various sequences which should be indicated merely by listing them, since the proairetic sequence is never more than the result of an artifice of reading. . . . Lastly, the cultural codes are references to a science or a body of knowledge; in drawing attention to them, we merely indicate the type of knowledge (physical. physiological, medial, psychological, literary, historial, etc.) referred to, without going so far as to construct (or reconstruct) the culture they express. (19-20; my italics)
At the outset Barthes founds a set of totalizing codes, telling us that each and every lexia will attach to one code, but at the same time he refuses to organize the elements of the codes.' The result is a critical narrative portioning out materials into five "homogeneous" heaps. But the ensembles are neither ordered nor structured.
200
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
They are deposited. Instead of revealing the deep frame or law of the text, the codes actually point up the textual or already written nature of the lexic materials: the codes establish textuality and intertextuality - not deep structure. Barthes is clear:
if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network. . . . (20)
They [the coded elements] are so many fragments of something that has always been already read. seen, done, experienced: the code is the wake of that already. Referring to what has been written, i.e.. to the Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), it makes the text into a prospectus of this Book. (20-21)
.
The codes tear out, collect, and tag miniscule tufts of the cultural intertext. In the target text everything is always already written so that the analysis of the book necessarily partakes of the greater archival Book. The book and its codes arc inevitably shards and bits of this other Text. Unity of any sort docs not come to bear.
When we consider that Barthes' observations pertain to a text by Balzac, we grasp the historical import of his reading. Barthes deconstructs realism by undermining the old concepts of mimesis, authorship, and reading as well as the conventional notions of aesthetic Jon", meaning, and style.)
Barthes dallies with the codes. He works with them only up to a point. They function economically in the process of simcmration: they aid the reading activity. But they arc not allowed to build structure. The ludic motion of the reading, not the law of the tale, is Barthes' game. He wants to produce, to write, to disseminate the text, not consume it, not determine it: not close it. No matter how plural the text, whether triumphantly or parsimoniously so, the interpretive ideal orients reading toward triumphant dissemination. Excess of meaning rather than truth is the goal.
FROM CODES TO LEXIAS
201
What of the lexias? Their deliberate arbitrariness and overabundance constitute and deconstitute the codes. "We shall therefore star the text, separating, in the manner of a minor earthquake, the blocks of signification. . . into a series of brief, contiguous fragments. . . . This cutting up, admittedly, will be arbitrary in the extreme. . ." (13). The critical text itself necessarily becomes diced into bits. Each of the 561 lexias receives a paragraph. Each of the ninety-three causeries also gets a paragraph. Four modes of type alternate to keep the levels of analysis visually distinct.
Despite such apparent clarity and organization, "each lexia does not aim at establishing the truth of the text (its profound, strategic structure), but its plurality (however parsimonious); the units of meaning (the connotations), strung out separately. for each lexia, will not then be regrouped, provided with a metameaning . . ," (14). Grouping and metanaming, functions of structural coding, are refused. Truth is renounced. The cracks of the quake are foregrounded, Straightforwardly, the overall style and strategy of interpretation are admitted and accurately depicted. The commentary, based on the affirmation of the plural, cannot therefore work with "respect" to the text; the tutor text will ceaselessly be broken, interrupted without any regard for its natural divisions (syntactical, rhetorical, anecdotic); inventory, explanation, and digression may deter any observation of suspense. may even separate verb and complement, noun and attribute; the work of the commentary, once it is separated from any ideology of totality, consists precisely in manhandling the text, interrupting it. (15)
This account of commentary centers on the lexia-the agent of interruption, the force of breakage. Unlike the codes, which systematize and unify, the lexias, the series of arbitrary pieces displayed step-by-step, effect slow-motion decomposition and forcefully institute re-reading as play. For the peculiar consequence of Barthes' lexia cutting is that the entire Balzac text is (re)cited word-by-word over the course of the commentary. Nothing is omitted. But everything is interrupted-shattered.
The deployment of the lexias depends on a strategic theory of semantic notation - of connotation and denotation. By arbitrary definition each lexia carries at most three or four meanings. A lexia, then, may be a few words or a string of sentences: the determining factor is the external limit on meanings or quantity of notation.
202
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Generally speaking, we think of a word as having both a definite meaning, which we can locate in a dictionary, and an expanded (yet limited) meaning. which we can determine by context. Barthes turns this old formulation around. For him denotation is the last connotation. When the play of meanings closes, when connotation is regulated. denotation emerges. Most reading, in Barthes' view, works through connotation toward denotation. That is to say, reading seeks truth, objectivity, law. Whether in the name of denotation or connotation, this quest for the stable center provokes Barthes' derision. Yet, strategically speaking, the old concept of connotation allows for some plurality of meaning and, therefore, it promises some tactical returns for contemporary critical reading. Among other things, connotation possesses the power to relate meaning to other anterior and exterior sites of meaning; it refuses to fix itself anywhere (recourse to the dictionary is not sufficient); it disrupts univocal communication; and it permits restricted dissemination. As a tool, then, connotation opens access to the limited "plural texts" (the classics) of our tradition. Admittedly, it is inadequate to the modern limit-text - say Finnegan's Wake - where licentious dissemination creates a different order of reading. Using connotation, the plural of the classic text can be produced in reading. As a device, connotation has value. Denotation. its unavoidable other, must therefore be maintained in a theatrics, an illusion, of truth.
Both codes and lexias package meaning. They are sculpted systems of notation useful in interpretation. In its innovative drift from codes to lexias, from totalization to fragmentation, S/Z furthers the drive beyond structuralism to "deconstruction." The reading of the text, its manhandling, happens on the level of lexias. Nevertheless, both codes and lexias arbitrarily and artificially frame units of meaning so that, despite mounting breakdown, such conveniences of order find a place in critical writing. By refusing to structure the codes and to formalize the lexias, Barthes undermines his own constructions. In short, he works with and against the resources of critical tradition. His is a double gesture.
What we call "causeries," Richard Howard labels "divagations." Both terms designate the ninety-three wandering discussions or mini-essays which chronologically precede the readings of patches of lexias and the assignings of code names.
FROM CODES TO LEXIAS
203
These "essays" serve various peculiar functions. They force the grouping or apportionment of lexias. Still, some of the divagations come before no collections of lexias; others precede anthologies of two dozen or more lexias. In brief, the causeries may gather and comment on many, a few, or none of the lexias. There exists no necessary connection between lexias (and their codes) and the incidences (and topics) of the causeries. Effectively, such wandering or randomness destabilizes yet energizes the critical text. Since many, the majority, of the divagations present penetrating and startling observations and insights, the pleasures of reading them amply compensate for the uncertainty of their status. Hellbent for order, any reader can filter: these numerous reflections for recurring themes and other comforting regularities. Potentially, they proffer order. One can fashion a well-made text from S/Z. The surplus of the text, produced by the numerous "uncertain" causeries, transgresses the canons of coherence. Barthes attaches a lengthy and detailed Summary of Contents, promising to bring order to his excessive reflections. But his six dozen categories and subcategories only reduplicate the already twisted strands of surplus. Combined with the fragmentation of the lexias and the subversion of the codes, the dalliance of the divagations tends toward the fractured writing characteristic of later French deconstruction.
Just as Barthes' theory of the plural or disseminated text connects with his formulations on reading, so his polyphonic reading relates to his theory of critical writing. These lines of thought come together in several passages of S/Z:
In fact, the meaning of a text can be nothing' but the plurality of its systems, its infinite (circular) "transcribability": one system transcribes another, but. reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no "primary," "natural," "national," "mother'" critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual; there is no entrance language or exit language. . . . (120)
this is in fact the function of writing: to make ridiculous, to annul the power (the intimidation) of one language over another, to dissolve any metalanguage as soon as it is constituted: (98)
The language of critical writing, transcribing the plurality of meanings in a text, partakes of the language of the text-of the
204
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
system of language. Critical language is neither inferior nor superior to "literary" language. There can be no privileged (meta)language, providing a sure way into or out of the text. Writing works to level the violence and eminence of any special language. All language is polyglot, with nowhere an isle of purity beyond the reach of contamination and mongrelization. Critical writing, a practice of transcription, emerges from the immense dictionary of all language. As such, it is fragmentary and heterogeneous borrowing.
In L'Empire des Senses (1970), Barthes admires the Japanese custom of attending to wrapping while disregarding contents. The surface of the present, not its hidden gift, elicits appreciation. The preparations and the requisites of meaning, ritual and arbitrary, hold more interest and importance than the impatient possession of its truth. Whether the volume is ultimately empty or overfull seems less pressing than that its packaging be enjoyed. The writing of S/Z celebrates this non-Western tradition. Thus the lexia, a haiku of criticism. a delicacy of S/Z, is less violent manhandling than frail handiwork in miniature. A package of notation. Without hidden truth. A ritual of reading. Bonsai cultivated. 15
Of Spaced Columns and Supplementary Fonts
mais la deconstruction n 'est pas une operation critique, le critique est son objet; la déconstruction porte toujours. a un moment ou a un autre, sur la confiance faite a l'instance critique. critico-theorique c'est-à-dire décidante. a la possibilité ultime du décidable; la déconstruction est déconstruction de la dogmatique critique. . . . 16
[but deconstruction is not a critical operation, the critical is its object; deconstruction always bears, at one moment or another, on the confidence given the critical, critico-theoretical, that is to say, deciding authority, the ultimate possibility of the decidable; deconstruction is deconstruction of critical dogmatics. . . . ] - Jacques Derrida
At one- moment or another deconstruction turns on criticism and on itself. It becomes metacritical scorching of critical confidence. The decidable melts down into the undecidable. A chain reaction sets off relentless decompositions here. there, then seemingly everywhere. Textual dispersion results. Security falters.
Offered during a conversation on Glas (1974), this observation or reminder by Jacques Derrida characterizes an important aspect of deconstruction-an aspect that, in particular, destabilizes the work of critical reading in Glas. Glas bears to critical discourse a relation like that which Finnegan's Wake holds with the novel. Excesses of innumerable sorts court unreadability. It is difficult, then, to say we have "read" Glas; the relationship is more one of "getting to know you" than "you're mine." Let us pursue such knowledge in an initial embrace.
Glas literally monumentalizes split writing Two columns run continuously down each page and throughout the book.
206
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
A space clearly separates the left and the right columns. The left column concerns Hegel, the father, philosophy, the status of knowledge and the psychology of the family. The right dwells on Genet, the m0ther, literature, the ways of sex and the effects of castration. Fragmented and chaotic, both texts forbid access, although gradually the left seems almost coherent and focused when measured against the scattered and capricious right. On one side, the text reflects upon Mind; on the other side upon Body. The eagle and the flower symbolize these respective domains. Less simply, the book, seeming a parodic scan of the bicameral mind, shuttles between a barely tolerable neurosis and a progressive schizophrenia, Or, to toss out still another model, Glas moves between the Whole of Hegel's Absolute Knowledge and the Part of Genet's Fetishized Objects.
To thematize, symbolize, or so model Glas is to court sure reduction, The uncomforting fact is that within each column numerous stolen citations, puns, themes, styles, and variable units of composition disrupt the reading. For example. conventional paragraphs get part of their middles shifted to make room for other invading paragraphs. Such incisions regularly interrupt each column. The enigmas of how to read these new spaces of writing present themselves on the opening pages and throughout the text. (This difficulty was posed earlier by Lympan in Nar.._es,) To accommodate Derrida's sumptuous "compositions." various type sizes and styles continually decorate and alter the page. Visually. these supplementary fonts consecrate the poetics of fracture in evidence amidst the most radical enterprises of contemporary critical writing, What S/Z starts, Glas finishes. Derrida somberly realizes but playfully accepts the sacrifice of readability. His double posture is strategic and theatrical. Our operation of reading, a castrating procedure, perhaps provokes his tactical divisions:
Si j'écris deux textes a la fois, vous ne pourrez pas me chaffer. Si je delinearise, j'érige. Mais en même temps, je divise mon acte et mon désire. Je marque la division et vous échappent toujours, je simule sans cesse et ne jouis nulle part. Je me châtre moi-même - je me reste ainsi - et je joue; jouir, Enfin presque.
OF SPACED COLUMNS
(Ah!) tu es imprenable (eh bien) reste.
Entrave, donc, deux fois.
Car si mon texte est (était) imprenable. il ne retenu. Qui serait puni, dans cette économique de l'indécidable? Mais si je linearise, si je me mets en ligne et crois-niaiserie - n'écrire qu'un texte a la fois, cela revient au même et il faut encore compeer avec le coût de la marge. Je gagne et perds a tous les cas mon dard.
207
sera(it) pas pus, un double posture. Double postulation. Contradiction en soi de deux désirs inconciliables. Je lui donne ici. accuse dans ma langue. le titre de DOUBLE BANDE. le (la, les) mettant pratiquement en forme et en joue.
(If I write two texts at once, you cannot castrate me. However much I delinearize, I erect, At the same time, I divide my act and my desire. I-show off the division and always escape you, I sham without intermission and come nowhere. I castrate myself - I hold myself thus - and I "play at coming." Well. almost,
(Ah!) you are impregnable (well) holding
Checked. then, twice.
For if my text is (were) impregnable, it will (would) not be taken, nor held, Who would be punished in this economy double posture. Double of the undecidable? But if I lineate, if I set going postulation. Contradic
a line and believe nonsense
I am writing only lion in-itself of two irreconcilable desires. I
one text at a time, It amounts to the same thin
gothoput d present I ere. im e
and it is still necessary to reckon with the cost of in my language, the style the margin. I gain and lose in each case my forked of DOUBLE BAND.
actually putting it (them) on gue. d.1] Into form an into play.
208
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The spaced columns forbid any identity between Hegel and Genet. Everything divides them. They are not related or regulated through balances, equalities, oppositions, or inversions. It's a twofold band. Impregnable. Their implied relations stay undecidable. The two texts go separate ways. Yet telling conjunctions "happen" from time to time. (The Last Supper is discussed opposite the above citation.) The constant temptation to align these pillars under some common dome. to link the two, in a chiasmal pattern, for instance, vexes old modes of interpretation and subverts them through unrelenting division. Derrida refuses to harmonize his design. Sometimes the twin texts admit a parallel or resemblance. Such aleatory effects sustain the illusion of and search for unity. Glas has and eats its dadaistic cake. The spaces and fissures within and between the columns deal up a deluge of differences.
The first sentence of Glas asks: "quoi du reste aujourd'hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, d'un Hegel?" (what remains today, for us, now, of a Hegel?). The final sentence, a fragment, seems an answer: "Aujourd'hui, ici, maintenant, le debris de" (Today, here, now, the debris on. And. in fact, Glas 'generates an overwhelming sense of richness gone bad. of surplus turned into debris, of exhaustion made final. of the here and now (full presence) become empty. At the same time it everywhere interrupts its entropic patterns and melancholy undertones. manhandling concepts. words and texts licentiously and gaily. The intimacy of the effort makes the project seem a familiar affair. Between Hegel (the father) and Genet (the mother). Derrida (the son) resists obedience and silence (castration) in a kind of sprouting decelebration (independence) of parentage. This grim ritual of resistance becomes at once a bacchic revel and a defensive incorporation. Genet as well as Hegel, badly abused, becomes enthroned in a dark chamber. A crypt.
What remains after such deconstruction? To such a "quoi du reste" Derrida replies not "je ne sais quoi" but Glas. A doubled self-consuming production whose modes exceed the debris and the abyss of previous deconstructions. A supplement to personal and cultural history. 18 Such supplementarity extends to and. constitutes mind and body, father and mother, philosophy and literature, knowledge and sex, the family and castration-the two
OF SPACED COLUMNS
209
texts of Glas. All cross one another. All are undecidable. All disseminate. Strange hybrid formulations come to mind.
The gl of glas rings out across Derrida's joycean writing. Caught deep in his throat, it mimics the sound tolled by the death knell (glas). It separates (glosc) and joins (glu). As glace, it is icing on the cake and flaw in the gem, mirror and window. Like gleet, the gl nukes up bodily discharges like phlegm and mucus (glaire).
Overall, a sure cry (ecrieure comme glapir et glatir): The effect of Derrida's verbal play here is to foreground the materiality or physicality of language: language's wicked asemia and wit, generating relentless disruptive surfaces, continually surpass the reader and the author. More than the excess of themes, or the surplus of interruptions, or the multiplying bifurcation of compositional units, this textual play of signifiers presses home the interminable qualities of writing and analysis. Or rather, it arrests-and checks any passage beyond language.
In several analyses and assessments of Derrida's book, Geoffrey Hartman, a Yale critic, has cast Glas as a precarious limit-text, which jeopardizes the fundamental stakes of criticism:
It is not only hard to say whether Glas is "criticism" or "philosophy" or "literature." it is hard to affirm that it is a book. Glas raises the specter of texts so tangled, contaminated. displaced, deceptive that the idea of a single or original author fades. . . .' 19
The result for our time may be a factional split between simplifying types of reading that call themselves humanistic and indefinitizing kinds that can themselves scientific. The fate of reading is in the balance. 20
The notions of author and book, now inadequate, give way under the extremist critical (inter)text - tangled, contaminated, displaced, deceptive. The categories criticism, philosophy, and literature collapse; borders are overrun. Traditional forms of critical discourse dissolve. The promise of deconstruction is fulfilled for now with Glas. For Hartman, like Miller, a choice forces itself upon criticism: a simplifying humanism versus an indefinitizing deconstruction. The future of critical reading and writing hang in the balance. G/as is a forceful summa. While Miller chooses deconstruction, Hartman chances a poise of balance.
210
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
There are several ways to decipher his "The fate of reading is in the balance." It is characteristic of Hartman to pun on his strategy. In this, he resembles Derrida more than all other deconstructors. Wordsmith, worried, Hartman realizes that Glas is the moment when deconstruction turns on criticism and deconstructs its limits and its substance.
Divagation on the Analytics of Desire
As poststructuralism develops and expands from the late 1960s on, deconstruction appears to occupy an ever more distinctive place within this general movement. Its theories of language and text, in particular, increasingly distinguish it from other poststructuralist projects. While Foucault, for example, shifts gradually from discourse toward power as theoretical foundation and focus, Derrida and other deconstructors specify more fully and more boldly the scope of textuality and the (de)formations of differance and rhetoricity. One noteworthy current within the broad movement of poststructuralism explores the possibilities and potentialities of desire as a foundation for a project of criticism. Among those whose works relate, more or less centrally, to such an enterprise are Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Like power for Foucault, desire for some poststructuralists emerges as a mysterious and disruptive, all-pervading productive force of libido. It is an "undecidable," occupying a space analogous to differance in Derridean deconstructive theory. As Guattari portrays it, "desire is everything that exists before the opposition between subject and object, before representation and production. " 21 And he follows up, declaring "Desire is not informed, informing; it's not information or content. Desire is not something that deforms, but that disconnects, changes, modifies, organizes other forms, and then abandons them" (69).
Significantly, desire manifests itself not just in textual forms, but in psychological, social, and institutional formations. Through and beyond discourse, it changes, modifies, and organizes the world and, consequently, it produces inevitable political effects which call for a vigilant political criticism. Such criticism begins by setting desire free from the timid constraints of traditional psychoanalytical theory.
212
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
As a result, the poststructuralist analytics of desire, mostly an affair of French criticism thus far, tends toward a critique of psychoanalysis and toward a committed political criticism, all the while exceeding the strictly textual project of deconstruction.
Under pressure from theorists of desire and power, deconstructors sometimes assign to their textual enterprise powers and potentialities for "real world" praxis and political impact. Such avowals insist, nevertheless, on the fundamental role of textual work. In the late 1970s Derrida, for instance, writes:
la necessite d'une deconstruction. Selon la conséquence de sa logique, de s'attaque non seulement a l'édification interne, a un fois sémantique et formelle, des philosophèmes, mais a ce qu'on lui assignerait a tort comme son logement externe, ses conditions d'exercice extrinsèques: les formes historiques de sa pédagogie, les structures sociales, économiques ou politiques de ceux institution pédagogique. C'est parce qu'elle touche a des structures solides a des institutions "materiales," et non seulement a des discours ou a des représentations signifiantes, que la déconstruction se distingue toujours d'une analyse ou d'une "critique." 22
[the necessity of a deconstruction. According to the consequence of its logic, it makes an attack not only upon the internal construction, both semantic and formal, of philosophemes, but upon what one would assign to it wrongly as its external place, its extrinsic circumstances of use: the historical forms of its pedagogy, the social, economic, or political structures of this pedagogical institution. It's because it meddles with solid structures. with "material" institutions, and not solely with discourses or with signifying representations, that deconstruction is always distinct from an analysis or a "critique. "]
Deconstruction does meddle with social structures and cultural institutions in its attacks on the philosophical formations of culture, Yet such disturbances are not external to textual analysis, Economic, educational, and political institutionalization grow out of cultural practices established in philosophical systems-which constitute the "materials" of deconstructive work. Early and late deconstruction works within and against traditional metaphysical formations, scrutinizing such cultural resources and forms for a project of interrogating and breaching established borders.
One of the most important and influential of French poststructuralist works on desire is Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's
THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE
213
Anti-Oedipus (1972). Boisterous and bizarre, this challenging book begins" to have an impact on American poststructuralism during the late 1970s. Fredric Jameson, in particular, explores and employs its theories productively. 23 Others should follow. With its overriding aim of establishing a new mode of analysis - schizoanalysis - Anti-Oedipus solicits our interest, for it presents strategies of reading different from, though analogous to, certain key stages of deconstruction, In order to contrast the strategies of schizoanalysis with deconstruction, we shall first review an ensemble . of topics necessary for a working familiarity with the project of Deleuze and Guattari, Proceeding indirectly, we shall start by discussing the related conceptualizations of the libido,. the Unconscious, and schizophrenia and will then examine the linked theories of Oedipus, social-libidinal production. and capitalism, After that we shall conclude with a contrast of the schizoanalytic and deconstructive projects, focusing on the matter of interpretive strategy.
Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction-a whole scouring of the unconscious. a complete curettage. - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Deleuze's and Guattari's Ami-Oedipus scours old notions about the inside and the outside of existence, about psychological and sociological domains, offering new understandings of the Unconscious and the social body, promoting visions of revolutionary psychological formations and new earths to inhabit. Along the way the book dethrones conventional psychoanalysis and Marxism and develops a new analytics provocatively and self-consciously named schizoanalysis.
During the course of development of human societies, three distinct forms of culture emerge: primitive (tribal), barbarian (despotic), and "civilized" (capitalistic). Each exhibits different modes of libidinal activity, economic production, political grouping, familial patterning, and linguistic practice. Capitalism, now about two centuries old, alters or breaks the old forms and modes of culture, yet sometimes it returns, in extreme moments, to barbaric
214
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
and primitive ideas and usages. Within this overall historical frame. Anti-Oedipus focuses upon contemporary capitalist culture. situating it for clarification and understanding amid the older cultural formations.
In particular. the cultural understanding and sanctioned application of libidinal energy undergo changes during the course of history. Generated in the Unconscious, the disruptive productions of desire experience social codings and overcodings. A system of rules and axioms regulate desire. Desire itself, a disjunctive flow, attaches to and invests the social body through its loves and sexuality. It functions as a machine and as production. linking the Unconscious to the social field. The libido is machinelike in the sense that it consists of flows and breaks. Just as the mouth breaks the flows of air and milk, the penis the flows of urine and sperm. and the anus the flows of feces, so the various desiring machines cut into the flows of libidinal energy. Such mechanisms are "machines in the strict sense, because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles. associative flows and partial objects, inducing-always at a distance-transverse connections. inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunctions, thereby producing selections, detachments, and remainders. . ." (287). All these processes are means of production. Desire is production. This machinic production invests the social field and elicits coding.
Desiring machines and productions operate on a molecular. not molar, level. The particles or elements carried in the flow or, better yet, flow-break of desire are partial objects. The smallest constituent units of the Unconscious, molecules of desiring chains in flux, partial objects enter into ephemeral relations and combinations without ever constituting totalities or unities. "We live today in the age of partial objects. bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue. are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. . ." (42).
THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE
215
The autonomy of partial objects, the most minimal and trace-like elements of the Unconscious, corpuscles or waves constituting a libidinous flow-break, generates and insures a free play of particles in which multiplicity and fragmentation, not unity or totality, form heterogeneous conjunctions and inclusive disjunctions. Such aleatory combinations and fabrications are always selective and incomplete. Machinic connections, powerful and intense, continuously produce and proliferate free multiplicities because, despite every break or interruption, the flows never cease.
When the Unconscious attaches to or invests a social field, it mobilizes an interplay of overinvestments, counterinvestments, and disinvestments. All these oscillations happen between two extreme poles. One extreme involves large aggregates or molar structures that subordinate molecules while the other includes micro-multiplicities or partial objects which subvert structures:
The two poles are defined. The One by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of power or selective sovereignty; the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power. The One by these molar structured aggregates that crush singularities, select them. and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics; the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations. The One by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the flows, constrict them. turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system. in such a way as to produce the images that come to fin the field of immanence peculiar to this system or this aggregate; the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialized flows. inventing their own nonfigurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wal1 or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiring-production. And to summarize al1 the preceding determinations: the One is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject groups. (366-67)
Unconscious libidinal investments tend toward one or another pole: the paranoiac or the schizophrenic. A chain of oppositions distinguishes these two extremes: aggregates/singularities, structures/elements, territorializations/deterritorializations, limits/flows, enslavement/escape, power/overthrow, coding/decoding, molar/ molecular. Given these two interpretations, the Unconscious
216
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
emerges as either primarily expressive or productive. In one instance, it establishes totalities and representations-a complete theater. In the other, it inaugurates multiplicities and flowbreaks - a megafactory. As psychological processes rather than clinical illnesses, paranoia and schizophrenia mark the outer limits of unconscious desire and its social investments.
Anti-Oedipus argues that schizophrenia, the process of the production of desire and of desiring-machines, constitutes the becoming of reality. This pure flow of existence is subjugated through structures, codes, systems, and axioms. It undergoes territorializations and totalizations. The continuous flow-breaks of the Unconscious, the productions of the libidinal economy, experience artificial limitations and enslavements. Social forms and illnesses result. .. Each of these forms has schizophrenia as a foundation; schizophrenia as a process is the only universal" (136). As an illness or entity, schizophrenia describes a point of arrest, a formation of repression, a stop in the flux. As a process of becooling. however, schizophrenia designates the microproduction of desire, the flow-break of partial objects, the powerful investing of the social field. The real is schizophrenia-the only universal.
The stroll of the schizo, his glorious wandering. engenders a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming apart, its decoding. When his flows cross over to deterritorialization and produce a new land, it is for him a simple finding, a finished design. The schizo, a deconstructed subject, produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing. a flux that overcomes barriers and codes. a name that no longer designates any ego whatever.
He has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad" (131). The schizo holds out positive promise. He is the revolutionary, the authentic figure, for our age.
Anti-Oedipus promotes new understandings of desire, the Unconscious, and schizophrenia while arguing against traditional psychoanalytic notions. It criticizes relentlessly the interpretation of the Unconscious established by Freud.
THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE
217
For Deleuze and Guattari the partial objects in the Unconscious do not represent parental figures or family relations. The molecular Unconscious is not aware of persons; it does not symbolize or represent anything or anyone. The elements of the Unconscious precede and are never reducible to Oedipal figures or myths. Freudian psychoanalysis crushes the productive Unconscious, delimiting explosive desires and schiz-flows, circumscribing all libidinous elements, imposing mythical forms that express and represent family members. Psychoanalysis orders the Unconscious, turning it into a theater, a classical Greek theater-not even a contemporary surrealistic stage. At this scene stand papa, mamma. and baby. The wild, disruptive, and powerful forces of desire are compressed into a domestic drama-the family romance. The narrowness of this formulation, the Oedipal triangle, insures potent repression of desire and of schizophrenic processes - a repression embodied in the practices of psychoanalysis.
Throughout Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari rage against the imperialism of the Oedipal family. As paranoiac symbol of law and order, it provokes satiric jabs. As hermeneutic counter, it inspires bitter diatribes. The Oedipal family territorializes and codes desiring productions. Oedipus, a transcendental signifier ruling over all unconscious processes, warrants analytical order and intelligibility, insuring hermeneutic meaning and significance. Psychoanalysis everywhere deploys this interpretive scene to stage truth. The cure is directed. Neurosis is managed. But psychosis, a vast uncapped energetics, refuses direction, churning beyond the tiny theater of papa-and-mamma, demonstrating the impoverished repertoire of Freudian properties.
The libido invests the social field in its economic, political, historical, and- cultural determinations. "There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring-machines that inhabit them on a small scale" (340). Desire is constitutive of a social field; it invades and invests the forces and means of production. From the moment there is social production there is desiring production. And vice versa. Investment in the social field precedes and encompasses that in the familial.
218
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The family is determined - not determining. Thus the Unconscious, the materialist Unconscious, unlike the idealist and ideological version of Freud, suffers the family as a molar aggregate or secondary formation. Oedipus makes a late and unfortunate appearance.
The social machine produces flows of goods and services, women and children, soldiers and weapons, herds and seeds, powers and policies. information and records, production and consumption. The three social machines - primitive, barbaric, and ch_d societies - exhibit different configurations of these flows.
Picturing each socius as an ornamented body, Deleuze and Guattari observe:
The first is the underlying territorial machine. which consists in coding the flows on the full body of the earth. The second is the transcendent imperial machine. which consists in overcoding the flows on the full body of the despot or his apparatus. the Urstaat. . . . The third is the modem immanent machine. which consists in decoding the flows on the full body of c.1pit.1l-money. . . . (261)
A fourth formation. a universal potentiality haunting each society, is named: the clinical schizophrenic cosmic "body without organs." This socius effects a complete decoding of flows and a thorough deterritorialization. To resist it, each social machine erects codes and territorializations. Limits are set. Capitalism, in particular. most nearly approaching schizophrenization, invokes archaic reterritorializations and recodings, making use, for instance. of the Urstaat and the family, the dictator and the police: The dominant axiomatic of modern capitalist societies is cxdwll.f!c 1'_1/u(. Everything has a price so everything flows. s This liquefaction of reality, a delirious flowing, cuts across every barrier, threatening to decode and deterritorialize all. Reactionary forms and r4_noiJc practices, therefore, rise up and ward off this horrendous threat. Nevertheless, the central dynamic of the capitalist social machine drives flows beyond all codes and territories.
Capitalism and psychoanalysis. Both discover and tap an activity of production in general and without distinction. This production exceeds representation. The decoded and deterritorialized flows of labor and of libido, both conceived of as subjective and absolute. follow the processes of schizophrenia, But schiz-flows and schiz-productions mark an absolute limit; capitalism and psychoanalysis, as social institutions, form relative limits.
THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE
219
Employing archaic and paranoiac forms, both institutions recode and reterritorialize flows and productions for the social body. Private property and the privatized family, unrelated to the processes of schizophrenia, emerge as essential repressions, as factitious reterritorializations. Constructed on the ruins of primitive and barbaric societies, both institutions invoke territorial and mythic representations in their own service. The pernicious connections between labor and private property, on the one hand, and libido and the privatized family, on the other, are artificial, though axiomatic.
Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari regard the complicity between psychoanalysis and capitalism not as a parallel formation of equal forces, but as a relationship of part to whole. Psychoanalysis belongs to capitalism; it constitutes one part of a larger social machine. Psychoanalysis serves capitalism. Rather than fostering liberation, psychoanalysis furthers the work of modern capitalist repression, employing the family as its all-encompassing framework. Flows outside this system or frame are neither acknowledged nor permitted. Asylums, coded territories, sequester exceptions. Oedipus turns the hearth into a cell. The family, privatized, brings desire into line with the requirements of the social machine.
Oedipus is a tool of the capitalist machine. The Oedipal family serves as the locus of all social determinations. Social images apply strictly to the family. Subjugated, the subject comes to the psychoanalyst already oedipalized. Oedipus assumes shape in the family, not on the analyst's couch. Psychoanalysis does not invent Oedipus. It reenforces this sociopsychic repression. Oedipus His the ultimate private and subjugated territoriality of European man" (102). Deleuze and Guattari are vehemently anti-Oedipus.
3
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari promulgate four theses for the project of schizoanalysis. First, libidinal investment is social. Second, specific investments may be either unconscious or preconscious and class-determined. Third, libidinal investments of the social field have primacy over all familial investments. And,
220
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
fourth, social-libidinal investments approach paranoiac or schizophrenic poles. The underlying principle is that desire joins up with society: the Unconscious is a psycho-social factory. Where psychoanalysis avoids economic. political, and cultural factors and where Marxism leaves out libidinal matters, schizoanalysis intervenes, demonstrating that such Freudian and Marxist omissions aid and abet capitalist practices. Anti-Oedipus promotes, therefore, a wide-reaching concept of production: all production is always already desiring-production and social production. Anything that circumvents or circumscribes this order of production gets taken to task in a radical destructive operation. The project of schizoanalysis. deconstructive in tone and character, forcefully renounces traditional psychoanalytic and Marxist modes of interpretation. It abjures structuralism, particularly the lacanian variety. It openly deplores all hermeneutics. It aims to liberate the flow-breaks of desire. It is Barthesian. To let the libidinal schiz-flows breach all borders and 'barriers. It is Derridean. To unleash molecular forces so as to undo all molar formations. It is Foucaultian. To set revolution going. It is telquelian. To celebrate the num1inous energies of existence in a joyous activity of free play. It is Nietzschean.
The inherently functionalist strategies of schizoanalysis aill1 at. revolution; its reading practices further this general project. "For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine. a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force" (106). Schizoanalysis ignores the primitive signified and the despotic signifier. focusing instead on the "civilized" schiz-si_rr (a minimal unit of desiring flow-break). The ultimate mission of liberation supersedes both the ancient sober search for truth and the contemporary luxurious dissemination of meaning; rather it seeks the mad exploitation of libidinal productions for future revolutionary ends. Schizoanalysis exceeds contemporary deconstruction. More than a textual practice, it is a militant and dedicated political praxis.
THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE
221
The ideal schizoanalytic reader who simply stops being afraid of becoming mad; who quests after singularities, flows. overthrows, decodings, deterritorializations and new lands; who then remains solitary, free, irresponsible, joyous, independent, satisfied, and nameless-this new reader is the schizo. His activity let's the revolutionary machine, the literary machine and the analytical machine become parts of one another. Ravaged, the text is left behind for the revolution. Significantly, potential perversions jeopardize the schizoanalytic project. Clouds 100m over the new land. The dark old social body reforms and resists:
Previously we distinguished two poles of delirium, one as the molecular schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as the paranoiac molar investment. But the perverted pole is equally opposed to the schizophrenic pole, just as the reconstitution of territorialities is opposed to the movement of deterritorialization. And if perversion in the narrowest sense of the word performs a certain very specific type of reterritorialization within the artifice, perversion in the broad sense comprises all the types of reterritorializations, not merely artificial, but also exotic. archaic, residual, private. etc. . . . In short, there is no deterritorialization of the: Nous of schizophrenic desire that is accompanied by global or local reterritorializations, reterritorializations that always reconstitute shores of representation. What is more, the force and the obstinacy of a deterritorialization can only be evaluated through the types of reterritorialization that represent it; the one is the reverse side of the other. (315-16; my italics)
We arc all little dogs. we need circuits, and we need to be taken for walks. Even those best able to disconnect. to unplug themselves, enter into connections of desiring-machines that re-form little earths. (315)
There is no escape from aggregates, structures, codes, (re)territorializations and other such molar formations. We need such circuits, connections, and representations. We are little dogs. Any schizoid escape from such perverted or paranoiac necessary formations must proceed through these artificial and exotic, archaic and grandiose creations. To attain deterritorialized realms, the schizoanalytic operation must work through reterritorialized - perverted - representations. The ultimate quest for schiz-flows. trace-like "signifying" units, molecules of libidinal and social production, must proceed in an activity of reversal-a vigorous quarrying of the hidden underside of representation. But .always representation. Textual work cannot be circumvented.
222
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Despite what Deleuze and Guattari declare, the mining of the text for valuable and radiant gists-this penetration of the discursive surface for unconscious molecular materials-is an archeological and textual endeavor. The text is excavated. Below or beyond the text lies the goal: a miniscule, yet throbbing, quantum of lift-energy! But there is no outside-the-text. The perverse text blocks the way. The \\ray to where? The libido? The socius? The Unconscious? What outside? "Representation" seals the text off from the "outside."
Representation remains for schizoanalysis the essential means to its ends. Yet the problematics of (mis)reading through representations elicit little response from Deleuze and Guattari. The rhetoricity and materiality of representational language, its stickiness and its liquefaction, receive hardly any attention. In renouncing the signifier for the schiz-flow, schizoanalysis circumvents textuality and its enigmas, but they return, doglike, to pester and threaten the enterprise.
While Ami-Oedipus nowhere comments directly on deconstruction. it views its practice of reading the "signifier" as a late form of despotism, attached unwittingly -and paradoxically to the Law and the State (the hermeneutic enterprise), a grim energetics of death, a distortion of desire onto the Law as death. Hermeneutics. and deconstruction are both agents of the repressive State.
Occasionally it still happens that the young dogs will call for a return to the despotic signifier, without exegesis or interpretation, while the law. however, 'w.m5 to explain what it signifies. to assert .n independence of its signified. . . ; For the dogs. . . want desire to be firmly wedded to the law in the pure detachment and elevation of the death instinct, rather than to hear, it is true. hypocritical doctors explain what it all means. But all that-the development of the democratic signified or the wrapping of the despotic signifier-nevertheless forms part of the same question, sometimes opened and sometimes barred, the same extended abstraction, a repressive machinery that always moves us away from the desiring-machines. For there has never been but one State. The question "What is the use of that?" fades more and more, and disappears in the fog of pessimism, of nihilism. Nada, Nada! (213-14)
THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE
223
Despotism, pessimism, nihilism. Law and death. The State. All repressive elements of deconstruction, which moves away from desiring-machines. The question, the strategic question of schizoanalytic functionalism- "What is the use of that?" -poses itself
insistently. We know the answer: deconstruction inhibits the revolution; it should foment. And yet Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text and Derrida's Glas, orgasmic Gongorian texts working beyond Oedipus and the family, answer with a writing more radical than Anti-Oedipus-a libidinal poetics more nearly superseding representation. "Anti-Oedipus, n admits Deleuze, "cannot be said to be rid of all the formal apparatus of knowledge: surely it still belongs to the University. . . . "_6 To the extent that it never questions its own confident metalanguage, its self-assured hierarchical set of values, its precipitous dismissal of the textual free play of the signifier, schizoanalysis falls just that short of a deconstructive project and remains caught up in a problematics of representation. The difficulties of reading and the pleasures of misreading rarely emerge amidst this headlong rush to breach the borders of cultural forms and institutions. The analytics of desire must pass through the circuits of textuality-where grammar and rhetoric, spacing and trace lie in wait. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate more dramatically than most contemporary theorists the inevitable difficulties and pitfalls of overleaping the ensemble of problematics opened to view by deconstruction. There is no getting around text; sooner or later it comes to haunt every project.
On Metacriticism and Creative Criticism
One tendency of deconstruction is toward a poetics of fracture.
The well-m3de sentence, for instance, undergoes assault. Other larger units of composition and organization provoke strategies of decomposition. The coherence of the essay and the book and their logical sequences of development give way. Techniques of fragmentation and disfiguration, pioneered by modern and post modem artists, aid the deconstructor to dismantle his own critical work and its orders. The numerous bits and aleatory conjunctions of S/Z and the double broken-columns and expository discontinuities of Glas serve as exemplars. The massive hodgepodge of "letters," arranged chronologically, of Derrida's "Envois" in La Carte postale and the mishmash of "figures." arranged alphabetically, of Barthes' "Fragments" of M Loper's Discourse (1977) offer further instances of fracture. Textuality invades critical production. The free play of the signifier migrates to and decenters critical readings and writings. We recall Foucault's radical program1, his strategy, for writing history: employ parodic exaggerations, multiply discontinuities, and institute tactical stupidities. The text of the scholar renounces order, objectivity, and truth; it denies any solid or secure. any nontextual. language - any metalanguage; it accepts and embraces the condition of language. De Man and Miller designate this status of critical (and literary) discourse allegory. The scholar's text, a production of a deconstructed subject, sometimes of a libidinous "hysteric, to disseminates meaning beyond truth or totalization. It is the birth of a frolicsome "science, to a playful "hermeneutics" of indeterminacy, reminiscent of Nietzsche's most visionary and aphoristic moments. Criticism catches up with and surpasses avant-garde literature. perhaps.
OF METACRITICISM
225
If the first half or two-thirds of the twentieth century seems an Age of Criticism, then the latter part appears an Age of Metacriticism. In place of the critical scrutiny of "literary" works, we witness the exploration and production of "critical" texts as "literary" creations. Within the field of textuality, no division exists between these two, orders of critical text or analysis. Thus to examine S/Z, Glas, or Anti-Oedipus is no different and no less valuable than to explore Sarrasine, The Balcony, or Gradira. And maybe such work is now m0re important. In both critical operations the old matters of style, genre, theme, and content can be made to apply. More importantly, the new problematics concerning the processes of reading, the activities of free play, the effects of intertextuality and the practices of writing bear equivalent pertinence. Literature, criticism, metacriticism-all partake of language. All share the same resources.
One impulse of deconstruction is toward a practice of metacriticism. Derrida's early critique of Levi-Strauss, an extremely influential endeavor, serves as a model. So too does his notorious work on Lacan. De Man's essays on major critics in Blindness and Insight particularly his study of Derrida's Grammatology, exhibit this same tendency of criticism to become metacriticism. Several of Miller's most important and well-known works (his essays on Poulet, Riddel, and Abrams) confirm the impulse, as do Riddel's texts on Heidegger, Derrida, and Miller. In a curious turn, Barthes' metacritical works playfully examine his own texts and past critical notions. Parts of The Pleasure of the Text and Roland Barthes constitute special models of a metacritical endeavor. To the extent that such m0mCnts leave behind particular critical texts and take up specific issues of critical theory, they qualify as "theoretical metacriticism." Derrida on Lacan's reading of Poe and de Man on Derrida's analysis of Rousseau would classify here as "practical metacriticsm." Within this emerging domain or contemporary discourse, a third force, "historical metacriticism," seems likely to develop. Hayden White's works, Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse, come to mind as possible examples.
Metacriticism may focus on any number of issues and topics. Studies exist, for instance, of the epistemology of reading, the psychology of readers, the rhetoric of critical language, the forms or genres of critical writing, the history of such genres, the psychoanalysis of specific critics, and the ideology of particular critical practices. Apparently, all the old subjects and types of criticism can be carried over to a project of metacriticism.
226
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
In our time the metacritical impulse shows up in many nondeconstructive activities and fields. In literary studies, for instance, Georges Poulet's often anthologized "Phenomenology of Reading" (1969), which presents critiques of six important French critics, exhibits a version of phenomenological metacriticism. And Fredric Jameson's "Metacommentary" (1971), winner of the prestigious Parker Award from the Modern Language Association, displays a Marxist program for metacriticism. One could multiply important examples. The point, an obvious one, is that "deconstructive metacriticism" takes part in a larger. cultural enterprise. It neither initiates nor encompasses this discourse. It docs, though, offer some interesting works in the field: those, for instance, by Derrida, de Man, Miller, Riddel, Barthes, and others. To suggest the interest of such work, we shall look at the project of Geoffrey Hartman, who practices a highly visible variety of contemporary metacriticism. To conclude this section, we shall suggest a possible formalization of the metacritical stance.
In each of his essay collections, Beyond Formalism (1970), The Fate of Reading (1975). and Criticism in the Wilderness (1980), Geoffrey Hartman includes a half-dozen metacritical texts. His plain metacritical interests arc in the status of criticism as reading and in the forms of criticist11 as writing. Significantly, Glas dominates Hartman's more recent speculations; it occupies a singular position as an extremist limit-text; it haunts him and, in part, directs his speculations. And too a phantom form of reductive New Criticism spooks and sensitizes all his metacritical theorizing.
Hartman senses two extreme tendencies in modern criticism. On the one hand, the work of the scholar-critic tends to restrict itself to the scrupulous elucidation of particular texts. It defines literature in reductive formal terms and limits its work to narrow fields of specialization. It becomes a trade in which the practicing critic operates as a retainer of technological society. Inevitably, this criticism overvalues the literary work as a miracle of universal truth. On the other hand, the work of the philosopher-critic regards the literary text as a moment on the way to absolute thinking or higher knowledge. A lover of wisdom, restless and dialectical, the philosopher-critic undervalues literature, leaving it behind in his
OF METACRITICISM
227
Faustian quest (CV, 214-25). Since the days of Matthew Arnold, Anglo-American criticism continuously. defines and refines itself as scholarship. The last "philosopher-critic" in this tradition is probably Coleridge. European hermeneutics, particularly a certain French and German strain, develops and partially maintains criticism as philosophy. Hartman would like to see a mixing of these traditions or critical modes. An arrangement between Common Sense and Sky Writing. Like Miller, Bloom, and de Man, fellow Yale critics, Hartman is something of a "practical" critic, who aims to keep the text always at the center of critical activity, yet he deplores the timidity and adulation characteristic of the scholar-critic. For Hartman one objective of American deconstruction is to effect an historical rapprochement of the two dangerous tendencies in criticism.
The two types of critics practice different kinds of reading. The scholar-reader, using a direct approach, applies good sense and natural wit to explicate his significant texts while the philosopher-reader, using a mediated approach, employs historical or intertextual knowledge to understand all cultural constructs (D&C, 187). The first approach irritates Hartman, and he often debunks the humble reader:
He subdues himself to commentary on work or writer, is effusive about the integrity of the text, and feels exalted by exhibiting art's controlled. fully organized energy of imagination. What passion yet what objectivity! What range yet what unity! What consistency of theme and style! 28
The second approach worries Hartman, and he sometimes sketches the faults of the extremist contemporary philosopher-interpreter:
Books or pictures are but fixed explosives, moments in a process of dissemination, and comparable to winged words, legendary acts, or endless sketches, zettel, and calders. His own text legacy, insofar as it exists, evokes a restless and aspiring dialectic. Ideally, of course, nothing would remain, except in the form of a self-consuming labor of thought. (CW, 217)
228
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
While he frequently lambastes the ahistoricism as well as the humility of the first mode (which he sometimes calls "practical criticism"), Hartman occasionally laments the atextualism and "free play" of the second type, which in its most recent form gives up its search for a supreme Dialectic in favor of a negative hermeneutics of fragmentation and parody (CW, 226-49). One criticism simplifies and the other indefinitizes.
No American deconstructor remains as concerned with critical writing as Hartman. The major goal of his critique is to undermine the plain style of Arnoldian or Anglo-American criticism. Basically, Hartman condemns the separation made between creative writing, which is always highly valued, and critical writing, which is typically debased. Such partition of the creative and critical spirit denies for criticism the full resources of the literary tradition. A "creative critic," for instance, seems unthinkable. The critic must serve the master creative text. Put down, the critic pretends or believes that his writing is commentary rather than artwork. Hartman wants criticism to effect a mutual domination or interchange able supremacy with creative writing. 29 In particular. the cool and literate style. free of fantasy and fiction, must go and with it the bureaucratic discrimination of functions between literature and criticism.
Hartman regards the critical essay as a distinct genre that is part of the history of prose. Against the Arnoldian tendency to diminish the creative aspects and to expand the service functions of the form. Hartman advertises the energetic advances made by contemporary critics. particularly Derrida. In a seminal essay aptly
entitled "Crossing Over: Literary Commentary as Literature" (1976), Hartman sums up his goal this way:
literary commentary may cross the line and become as demanding as literature: it is an unpredictable or unstable "genre" that cannot be subordinated, a priori, to its referential or commentating function. Commentary certainly remains one of the defining features. . . . But the perspectival power of criticism, . . must be such that the critical essay should not be considered :1 supplement to something else. . . . (A] reversal must be possible whereby this "secondary" piece of writing turns out to be "primary." ("CO." 265; rpt. in CJV, 201)
Today literary criticism is creating a literature of its own-without jeopardizing fiction, poetry, or drama. The potential powers of critical writing, perhaps in self-conscious reaction to repressive
OF METACRITICISM 229
historical reductions, must be realized in a creative resurgence so that ultimately the work of criticism will be as much an event in the history of literature as the work., of art is in the history \of criticism (CIV, 215).
Hartman subverts conventional habits of critical reading and writing, recommending more playful and creative practices for literary criticism. Fascinated by psychoanalysis, he urges self-analysis and careful examination upon the sophisticated critic, At the same time he maintains his long-standing ties with the phenomenological tradition, He refuses to sacrifice the subject and his intentionality. to accept unlimited free play and the Gongorian text, to make of history a playful and portable context. He seeks revision-not revolution.
For Hartman the Derridean deconstruction of the logocentric tradition, its substitution of undecidables for the old hierarchies. appears unacceptable. "The m3in achievement of the older criticism . . . is that it revives in us the sense of hierarchy: the tremendous effort it takes to order and subordinate, so that even if that effort (called civilization) leads to repression or to a self-disturbing rather than settled happiness, it remains. . . heroic. . . ." 30 While he wants creative criticism. Hartman still draws a line, "I am unhappy with certain, let us call them unisex, experiments in critical writing-which weaken the task of interpretation by spicing it up with parafictional devices. , ." (CJV, 218). In the Preface to the Yale manifesto, Hartman admits that he, like Bloom. is barely a deconstructionist and that, on occasion, he writes against deconstruction. He both admires and dreads Glas, for it raises a fearful specter of unreadable critical texts and a dehierarchized civilization, yet it holds out the alluring promise of a new and productive creative writing and reading for criticism.
2
The metacritical speculations of Hartman present a peculiar. yet telling, scene, We witness the resources of tradition being turned against tradition. At the same time a dread of the consequences and a stubborn courage lead to revision and maintenance of tradition. A 'possibility of fracture is glimpsed and courted, a new interpretation and a new writing appear as apparitions, but the vision produces anxiety and moderation. The "split writing" of
230
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Hartman refuses to renounce the old hierarchies of the logocentric epoch so that: a deep split is never actually effected. Hartman emerges as a voyeur of the border, who watches or imagines crossover and warns of dangers. Still, the borders between literature and criticism and between theory and practice collapse. Poetics and hermeneutics infiltrate one another. Hierarchies get leveled, if not reversed or destroyed. Metacritical subversion is facilitated, however resisted. Hartman advances the cause of deconstruction.
Early in The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes wonders "How can we read criticism?" He answers:
Only one way: since I am here a second-degree reader, I must shift my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of this critical pleasure a sure way to miss it - I can make myself its voyeur: I observe clandestinely the pleasure of Others. I enter perversion; the commentary then becomes in my eyes a text. a fiction. a fissured envelope. (17)
There are two dynamics of metacriticism, First, the metacritic casts himself as voyeur, observing from a distance the activities of another critic. This distance engenders a certain generic fascination-always a function of deliberative dissociation and intimate interest. In other words, metacriticism, whether finally loving or angry, cool or hot, depends on a peculiar involvement, a hesitant intimacy and a certain hauteur, an ambivalent detachment. Second. the metacritic constitutes the primary critical work as a construct. a fragmented entity, a text. Its parts solicit his attention, Aspects. levels, and local effects generate admiration or disgust. Indifference never surfaces. Inevitably, the activity of metacriticism appears as perversion, Other guises arc only covers.
In its engagements and activities, metacriticism seems no different than criticism and literature, Our description of the metacritic characterizes the critic and the poet as well. While we may detect a progressive falling-off as we move from poetry to criticism to metacriticism, this pattern depends on an initial privileging of poetry over criticism and criticism over metacriticism. Why not declare each domain equally worthy? Or proclaim metacriticism more valuable than criticism or literature?
OF METACRITICISM
231
One's understanding and appreciation of criticism, literature, and life might very well be increased more by a metacritical work than by any critical text or poem, It is conceivable and quite possible that a text by Derrida can be for us more profound, profitable and enjoyable than any essay by Arnold or novel by Dickens, Perhaps: Glas is dearer to us today than Natural Supernaturalism or Gravity's Rainbow.
Modalities of the Edge or Summing Critical Reading/Writing
Is anyone surprised that all readers must join this visionary company of prophets and rhetoricians? The structure of interpretation repeats itself c...y. We all stand precariously before the edge of the Greek encampment. fronting the species of error under the sign, "Who but we members of this visionary company"? There are three answers. Taken from our first Prologue, the epigraph refers to certain figures in the Iliad: ca_as, reckless Hector" the Olympian narrator, and perhaps blind Homer. They appear as t_ of readers, sharing a common predicament The company also includes all interpreters. You and I and the others. The careful, the courageous, the elected, the myopic. . . . Lastly. the "visionary company," cited at this strategic place in our text, incorporates the specific band of figures previously hustled into service. This ragtag group of interpreters recalls Saussure, ... Levi-Strauss, Derrida, de Man, Miller, Heidegger, Spanos, Riddel, Barthes, White, Foucault, Bloom, Hartman. and Deleuze and Guattari. Al cu nd rhetorician.
Scattered across Parts I, II, and III, the observations on our many visionary readers and writers will be rehearsed here as a convenient summary and conclusion to our survey of contemporary theories and practices of critical reading and writing. To start let us return to Saussure at the scene of the edge.
There are two Saussures: the scientist who mapped out semiology and the eccentric critic grams.. The one publicly lectures on linguistics; the other secretly devours ancient poetry to pieces. We move from structuralism and jump beyond it to-what? Proto-deconstruction perhaps. Suppose we do not unify these endeavors?
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE 232
We leave this compelling flisennt into1ty intact. Saussure's ...grams suggest the indeterminacies in poetic texts and dispersed possibilities futeri. He scribbles his voluminous findings down in fragmentary notes. In this way he appears a prophet of our time. The s_ he a _ isolated and linked other such variables. M ti at range limits of IJ1WWing-f_Q!t_n-..njmlc.s.. This marginalizing, a borderline activity, makes Saussure edgy. Perhaps he's in error. He cannot decide the status of his interpretations, Nevertheless, the insistence of such letters is remarkable. This practice of reading and, writing, both formal operations, heralds something past the science of the semei...
For Lacan the pt_DAing of the Jlnc.O)1 scientist a writing system ca tw ge, requires rhetorical exegesis. Q_re_u)l-wQcle, which follows the laws of the signifier. Like Saussure's syllable, T _r:m 's c:;ig_r, is en, related to other signifying materials ID.9.. t_ a strange ktion- Manifested through inscrpth.tation this deciph_cuys must npn iD_.. The Lacanian analyst, however, ultimately ,-,':r_s to the fact that precisely the traumatic nonmeaning susts an_m. Lacan presents his odd findings in elliptical occasional papers and seminar transcripts riddled with flaws. These stammerings of a careless visionary confer a power upon metonymy, metaphor, and other rhetorical &_ tQauhe othepvii_cptic .9ree_s d_ee. Interpreting the modes of ecraocr signifier, Lacan breaches the borders of traditional analysis and occupies a precarious edge.. He bears with s.$__o t_J.y._s-S!-f no_\!l__--and s_a£_ed stl}e.
Levi-Strauss is both scientist and bricoleur. As a tq_or_t Pi structuralism. he propounds a quasi-mathematical methods of interpretation. We get three-di_c:;;c)__rap s, c.ns of homologous constituent units, detailed formulas, and ri_8._out ratios. Yet his famous reading of the Oedipus myth, which he promotes as exemplary, reveals the work of an accomplished fixer, who uses anything at hand to get results. This Greek myth flushes out some limiting prr(}r<:. :.1t)d Levi-Strauss, u_s I d_.eyfulness and_bud) terism a!J..bLheart this science.
234 STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Widely celebrated as the premier prophet of structuralism. Levi-Strauss' most potent visionary powers emerge in his role as shaman. Beyond science. he edges toward curative myth-making himself. His prose turns to music. His score orchestrates strange hidden meanings. The mytheme, contentless sign, manipulated magically, dredges up buried laws out of the Unconscious. As an interpreter of the logic of faith, Levi-Strauss exhibits extraordinary faith in the wisdom of the savage mind; he allows himself to cut up and reassemble ruthlessly hundreds and hundreds of myths in order to get at this lost resource.
Saussure, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, like the ancient figures of our first Prologue, occupy positions on the edge. Before them arc empty '"signs" waiting to be read. Whether isolated syllable, floating signifier, or single mytheme, the sign takes on meaning or signification in an act of interpretation: the emptiness is filled. The filler is rhetoric; the activity is prophecy. The gaps between the sign and the meanings exhibit spaces for error. All manner of arts and sciences seek to manage: cover over, or reduce the troubles at the edge. To control the spaces for error necessarily requires presumptuousness and boldness. just as the venture of an interpretation demands soothsaying and troping. What proves interesting and significant through all these motions arc the different m0dalities of the edge.
We come first upon undiscovered poetic subcodes of scattered, yet meaningful, syllables; second, primary signifiers, lodged in the Unconscious. psychically charged; and. third. tiny bits of narrative or custom, mythemes or gustemes, sedimented within revealing cultural texts and practices. The many forms of the alluring sign create sights to behold and decipher. We view, in fact, a captivating triad of methods of interpretation. We discover a way of reading poetry in which separate syllables-not words, phrases, or sentences-arc scrupulously examined and checked against other syllables in order to retrieve a secret stratum of meaning; a practice of psycho-rhetorical analysis that formalizes unconscious processes as tropic operations, seeking ultimately a better psychotherapy; and a method of analyzing myths and other cultural materials which tabulates, crosslists, and proportions miniscule pieces of information so as to determine the megastructures of the universal human mind.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
235
In addition, we find a peculiar panoply of different forms and styles of critical writing. Predictably, there Occur arguments replete with syllogisms, references to various authoritative ancients and modems, and scientific formulas and demonstrations. Less predictably, there surfaces an inchoate style of productive omission: fragments. discontinuities, and ellipses accompany broken-off observations, partial formulas, and inexhaustible objects of study. The fact of the incomplete and of the untotalizable generates a poetics of fracture.
Just as these modems each suggest distinctive modes of reading and writing, so too do the exemplary ancient characters out of the Iliad, We return to the original scene at the edge, Relying on the cultural conventions of the bird sign, Polydamas reads the awesome eagle as an omen from the gods. While he expresses reservations, he casts himself as a substitute for the absent soothsayer: his discourse then relies on inspired analogy. Like Polydamas, the narrator admits uncertainty, yet he persists in unfolding his memorial narrative of the old heroic days assured of divine guidance: his text employs the evocative powers of apostrophe.
Lastly, Hector decides to interpret the eagle as a "natural sign," not an omen; his bird signifies nothing. Having received from Zeus earlier assurance. delivered by the messenger Iris, Hector grows confident that his "natural" interpretation is correct: to construct his truth he uses authoritative allusion. Implicitly or explicitly, each interpreter claims special powers and each relies on figurative language. The activity of interpretation produces prophetic reading and ornamental discourse. To interpret a sign, to venture a reading - to be on the mythical edge - is to play seer and rhetor. As they stand before the edge of the Greek encampment, the Trojan heroes reveal the structure of interpretation. Though uncertain at first, they fill a space and risk error; they read signs and inscribe tropes.
When Derrida offers his reading of Saussure, he focuses on the scientific program for semiology. not on the quest for anagrams. He casts himself as the visionary father of a new science-grammatology. Openly, he revises Saussure's rhetoric, substituting his
236
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
own writing for the voice of the master. The sign is interpreted anew; the ...ramme, no doubt a more archaic Greek root than Saussure's semeiotl, covers the spaces of .the forerunner's error. The scene of the edge opens up as the enclosure of the logocentric systematics is gradually exposed. While displacing Saussure. Derrida develops an unmerciful hyperbole: the first structuralist emerges as a fall guy for the entire tradition spanning from Plato and Aristotle to Lacan and Levi-Strauss. Like the others in our. visionary company, Derrida practices prophecy and rhetoric.
Confronting the sign, Derrida initiates innovative modes of writing and interpretation. (His writing, often imitated, sometimes suggests and licenses a practice of fractured discourse, which at the moment appears to be one of the most influential new styles of critical prose of the early space-age period,) The sign in Derrida's eye is more disturbing and peculiar than any Greek eagle (omen or not) with a snake writhing in its talons, than any complex of isolated Greek or Roman syllables scattered across the grave text of an ancient poem, than any floating signifier caged in the cellar of the psyche, or than any empty my theme, awaiting others, all tucked in the crevices of a composite myth. The trace, imperceptible yet primal, highly charged while negative, inhabits everything, not just visions, poems, psyches, and myths. Everything, Still, it is invisible; we may know it only by its disruptive and transgressive effects. Seemingly subatomic, the trace is generically intractable, unnatural, and untrackable. Such tnah is no stranger to fiction.
As his critics unfailingly point out, Derrida's main edge in the activity of criticism is transgression, which is a way of saying that deconstruction characteristically presumes and battens on prior constructions. It is a negative enterprise. The theory of the trace, a profoundly negativizing notion, more an idea of antimatter than matter, sins against common sense and patience. But it provides Derrida continuing access to the edge. Interpretation is inherently transgressive.
In his analysis of Lacan 's hermeneutics of the floating signifier, Derrida uncovers a complicity between the, kernel signifier and the signification of the phallus. In Derrida's view, Lacan systematically keys his analyses of signifiers to the deeply veiled phallus.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
237
The truth of the signifier rests in a stable signified because Lacan centers his interpretations on the hidden phallus, Derrida labels his project "phallocentric," which means that his work partakes of logocentrism. The phallus instances logos revealed. More than any other signifier, the phallus occupies a privileged position in Lacanian analysis. It is a "transcendental signifier" to which others refer and below which others float. It centers and regulates the processes of interpretation.
In Derrida's reading, Levi-Strauss, like Lacan, relies on one transcendental signifier or another to center and organize his analyses. The potential floating or free play of the signifier, characterized as unstable and disruptive process, is domesticated and managed through application of a m3tchless signifier, In place of free play reigns the center. Play is limited and structures are established in deference to and harmony with a dominant signifier.
Interpretation imposes centered Structure to delimit the free play of signifiers. Even though he employs these logocentric procedures to unify his myths, Levi-Strauss admits in the Overture to the Mythologiques that such unity "is a phenomenon of the imagination, resulting from the attempt at interpretation; and its function is to endow the myth with synthetic form and to prevent its disintegration. . . ."
For Derrida there are two interpretations of interpretation. One seeks to decipher and establish a stable center or truth, which escapes the transgressive activities of play and of the signifier. The other affirms play and the lawless signifier. It abjures transcendence. Lacan and Levi-Strauss, caught between the two-between logocentrism and deconstruction-carry Out nostalgic and guilty projects. Derrida promotes a joyous and free interpretation of the signifier, which neither demands nor provides truth or center, escape or transcendence. Where logocentric hermeneutics centers, deconstruction decenters. Instead of restricted play and filled spaces, deconstruction desires radical free play and exorbitantly overfilled spaces, aiming to subvert regulated and filtered interpretation. While traditional interpretation tries to check or hide the inescapable errors at the edge. Derridean reading attempts to draw out and cash in on this potential proliferation (dissemination). It wants to keep the interpretive crisis at the edge continuously on the edge.
238
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
It intends, not to avoid the uncertainty, soothsaying, and troping that accompany interpretation, but to multiply and continue these operations openly and energetically. Derrida joins the visionary company with a notable vengeance.
The idea of the trace, an undecidable concept, is a match for deconstructive interpretation. Unlike Saussure's syllable, Lacan's signifier and Levi-Strauss' mytheme, it ultimately disrupts rather than unifies, producing an ongoing decentering and free play while discrediting any transcendent meaning or structural coding. Its power source is a permanent charge of differance; as such, the error under the sign is permanently figured in (spacing) rather than filtered out. Once again, we envision interpretation as an inherently prophetic and rhetorical activity, carried out under an indefinite and threatening sign, enacted amidst unavoidable dangers at the edge. The characteristic caution of Polydamas creates a weak guess; the assurance of Hector a costly mistake; and the humble prayers of the Homeric narrator an obvious fiction. The more fully the edge is overcome, the bigger the error. Truth comes, if at all, by chance and in retrospect.
The major text of Derrida in the Yale manifesto. a severely. fractured reading of a Blanchot story, superimposed upon an absent Shelley poem, linked to another Blanchot tale, and set atop a second and different, yet intertwining, text. which comments upon a peculiar array of issues. including translation, academic politics, and itself-this doubled, heterogeneous text raises the problematic, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, of the border. (It is the question of differance: set in a new and restricted frame. As he examines this particular structure, Derrida explodes the narrow frame and overruns all borders.) Derrida's dominant endeavor in the main text is to perform a new type of comparative reading of two texts. To effect this interpretation, he must transgress traditional rules and beliefs of literary criticism, which prescribe relations between different texts and oeuvres and designate procedures for comparison and analysis. In effect, Derrida must breach well-defined borders. He does so in his readings, and he theorizes about it. It is a strange and difficult. gnarled text-as our syntax hints. Here as elsewhere Derrida's critical writing, like that of other contemporaries, tends toward a poetics and practice of fracture.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
239
On the level of the work, more than the isolated sentence or paragraph, he is, at his most distinctive, one of the leading practitioners of the dispersed and provocative critical discourse. The text of the Yale manifesto explodes numerous frames, and the reading of it offers a burden of dissemination.
3
His critics tell us that there are two Heideggers: the ontologist of the 1920s and the early 1930S and the poetician of the mid 1930s and after. In the early period, the days of Being and Time, Heidegger contributed powerfully to hermeneutic theory. In fact, his sections on interpretation in Being and Time probably constitute the finest material on the subject in our century. At the same time his intense readings of poetic texts now surface ever more frequently as classics, however quirky, of literary criticism. This latter mode of textual interpretation is what interests us.
Understood as destructive interpretation, Heidegger's readings work to free texts of reified perspectives and canonical commentaries so as to establish an existential intimacy with each text, which allows the truth of Being preserved there to emerge anew. The activities of interpretation and critical writing conjure and rekindle the primordial energies of Being in a process of dramatized disclosure. Such performances of unconcealing, of the happening of truth, seek to enact the original rapture and illumination of authentic poetry. Upon this operation of unconcealing, Heidegger confers the Greek word for "truth "-aleitheia.
For Heidegger the poetic text inaugurates and incarnates Being and thinking. The sign is by nature ontological and epistemological as well as linguistic. Interpretation performs the truth of Being and thinking through, with and in the signs of discourse. At the outset the sign is filled, perhaps overfil1ed. And the distance between the sign and the interpreter collapses in an unparalleled mystical intimacy. The spaces of' error dissolve in this double oneness. Ironically, Heidegger is widely regarded as a most visionary and prophetic interpreter, and his critical discourse is most admired for its performative rhetoric. No doubt, Heidegger is a prophet and rhetorician, but not simply for the reasons conventionally advanced.
240
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The phenomenology of the sign, an overripe fruit, founds a whole structure of centers and unities and an entire set of restrictions on floating and free play. The merciless introduction of difference into this scaled edifice creates opening 'effects, which offer for view spaces for error. Some difference exists between a black mark on white paper and Being itself, and some space intervenes between what a written mark designates and the thing or idea itself The difficulties that such differences inaugurate remain buried in Heidegger's most powerful critical readings and writings. The got-up tone of wonder and the strategy of astonishment which characterize Heidegger's exegetical works put on exhibit a transfiguring soothsayer and word-smith, who stands at an edge and in error, both transcended in Oneness, which only grandiose figuring can create. Heidegger's troping of his poet's tropes marks a doubling that mocks his Oneness. Reading takes two, which nukes a difference. Such vision exacerbates, not extinguishes, the edge. The logos, the incantated word, no longer brings transcendence-only double trouble.
In our time, Being becomes the deconstructed self; the poetic text a network of differential traces; interpretation an activity of exploding meaning beyond truth toward joyous dissemination; and critical discourse a deviating and differentiating process of troping. Stability gives way to vertigo; identities to differences; unities to multiplicities; the center to infinite centers (or to no privileged centers); ontology to philosophy of language; epistemology to rhetoric; mysticism to demystification; intimacy to space; poetry to textuality; the full to the empty; aletheia to freeplay; the correct to the erroneous; hermeneutics to deconstruction; the One to-not the Many-the Infinite. Heidegger is defunct. Only destruction preserves him now.
Preserving the early work of Heidegger, Spanos effects a hybrid destructive hermeneutics under pressure from the deconstructive criticism of Derrida and de Man. When he reads texts, Spanos tracks the disclosures of being and thinking in an explorative and inexhaustible process conceived as inevitable misreading. Interpretation is a ceaseless yet saving activity in the openness of time and the nothingness of existence.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
241
The ground of literature and its deciphering, of its primordial saying and interested hearing, is the happening and revelation of being (truth), which unfold through the nothing of being. The sign (legein), radically temporal, precludes any definitive manifestation of being. Where Heidegger covers over the spaces of interpretation, Spanos exposes them partially to view.
The gap between the interpreter and the sign, bridged through the existential care and interest of the reader, retains its dangers and its openness against the intimacy of reading. Under the sign the trouble at the edge is restored. Yet the sign, in the hands of Spanos' poet, maintains a univocity and purity-an absence of differences, especially intertextual ones-that repeat themselves in the anxious grips of the reader. The rhetoric of critical discourse, like that of poetry, is transparent; no spaces 100m in the activity of writing. Interpreters emerge as admitted prophets, but not as proclaimed rhetoricians. Transcendence and truth, perhaps compromised yet conserved, offer unfractured meaning and consolation, a center of hope, to the anxious subject.
Managing the spaces of interpretation and surviving the anxieties at the edge require a strength of vision and rhetoric that only a Promethean subject can muster. As interpreter, Bloom displays this heroic power in himself and in his poets. The true source of such power is harnessed in the demonic theory of misprision. All interpretation is inherently misinterpretation. Hermeneutic spaces generate errors. But all can be managed by mapping.
In Bloom, there are two main strata of reading: the newcomer reads the precursor; the critic reads the poet. While he directs his speculations at the first level, Bloom employs his findings on the second. To read a poem is to confront images, which embody psychic defenses and rhetorical figures in a dialectical pattern of revisions. This structure of misprision, mapped in a six-fold process of ratios, appears in many of the best poems of the post Enlightenment epoch. When Bloom reads such poems, he ferrets out these six phases. Each stage marks out a formation of meaning.
Meaning comes in unstable moments of poetic and critical misinterpretation. The critical decipherment compounds the poetic errancy. In other words, when the sign-an amalgam of image, defense, trope, and revision-undergoes interpretation, it experiences continuing processes of distortion.
242
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The condition of the edge attains notable status with Bloom, particularly as he systematizes the structure of errors that occurs there. A most curious prophet and rhetorician, Bloom classifies the languages of error under the sign. Yet he avoids - explicitly systematizing critical errors, preferring to imply that these recapitulate poetic ones.
In place of an intimacy between reader and text, Bloom gives us strife-ridden misprision. Behind this activity lies the affective will of the poet and of the critic to triumph over oblivion and enter into the canon of permanent literary figures. Misreading comes about through psychological defense effected by the inherently abysmal structures of tropes. Significantly, misinterpretations and disseminated meanings emanate from the unconscious will of the strong subject and his necessary distortions of the sign. The Promethean subject's psyche, more than the sign, accounts for the errors at the edge. The subject, though partially deconstructed, occupies a transcendental position in Bloom's theory and practice. Everything comes from him and everything returns to him. Signs are filled with/by his unconscious yet willful misprisions.
Destructive criticism1 seeks to free the text from canonical interpretations and prescribed cultural perspectives. It intends to establish an immediate and emotional relationship between the reader and text. Heidegger, Spanos, and Bloom (in part) work in this antithetical mode. (In practice, the actual encrustations of received opinions, which form part of each text's intertext, are often --destroyed" through avoidance or implication rather than through direct and painstaking destruction.) As we move from Heidegger to Spanos to Bloom, the role of the poet's and reader's will (or intentionality) remains central, while the importance of misreading increases. Significantly, the sign, rarely stressed, stays overfull: it bears a fullness of meaning and truth about existence. However dispersed through the activities of misreading, the sign. offers learning or wisdOIl1. The playful "nihilism" of deconstruction, which renounces meaning or multiplies it toward parodic infinity, shows in comparison the hermeneutic conservatism of destruction, which celebrates meaning. In deconstruction, misreading results from the mechanisms of the sign, while in' destruction it emerges as a function of intentional being.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
243
Critical writing for destruction is performance - a display and staging of the advent of truth by the anxious subject; for deconstruction interpretive discourse is a fractured production of the aberration or free play of tire' signifier. The dispersed deconstructive reader, if reconstructed through inference, appears frenetic, sure, and playful. One finds little actual fear and trembling in Derrida or de Man, Barthes or Riddel.
One of the notable differences between American and French de construction concerns the modes of critical writing. Whereas Derrida and Barthes, for instance, sometimes present fragmented and playful discourses, particularly from 1970 on, de Man, Miller, and Riddel - by comparison-offer well-made and conventional texts. Handling the problematic of metalanguage seems much more pressing and important to the French. While proclaiming the free play of textuality, the American deconstructors practice traditional styles of discourse; the French attempt a11 manner of fractured styles. In the age of the text is it desirable or even possible to avoid or ignore the disruptive play of textuality in critical writing itself? Is there a special language (a metalanguage) of criticism, different from that of literature, free of rhetoricity or textuality? In theory, de Man, Miller, and Riddel say "No, there is only one language."
But de Man would say that literary language is typically more aberrant or rhetorical than critical language. It is, for him, a matter of degree, not kind. Riddel finds this unsatisfactory. More than the others, he writes a textual or stereographic style of discourse.
Nevertheless, American deconstruction keeps pretty much within the boundaries of narrowly prescribed "good taste." Hartman documents this conservatism. Of the major critics only Bloom experiments with new forms of critical writing, and his few efforts are actually quite modest, though apparently "outrageous" by the most severe of native standards. And only Hartman theorizes about alternate modes of critical writing. In the 1980s American deconstruction may begin to overrun these borders.
Given the structure of the sign, situated as it is amid unstable and divisive grammatical, rhetorical, and referential strata, interpretation with de Man tends to produce extravagant and dizzying effects of referential aberration. Linguistic predicaments and rhetorical discontinuities proliferate, powered by the relentless forces of grammar.
244
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Since referentiality is an effect of grammar and rhetoric, and since they play havoc with reference, the possibility for the emergence of meaning or truth is suspended. Strictly speaking, texts are unreadable. Literal interpretation is a dream. All interpretation. given the rhetoricity of language, is misreading. When a text is densely rhetorical, it will generate numerous and interesting misreadings. Necessarily, interpretations of a text exist in the mode of error. This status affects authors as well as critics. All readers misread. Language, not the subject, accounts for the phenomena of misreading.
Before Bloom's work appeared, de Man published materials on the theory of misreading. Bloom evidently got the idea from de Man. Nevertheless, their notions of misreading arc quite different. With de Man. misreading is a constitutive function of language and with Bloom it is a consequence of psychological provenance. Bloom. of course. develops a remarkable typology. his Map of Misprision. to chart the varieties and mechanisms of misreading. He is the most thorough cartographer yet of this interpretive domain. His tv1ap also offers a hermeneutic tool to decipher and delimit the extravagances of misreading. Dc Man shows no inclination to check or erase the exorbitant and aberrant results of misreading; he seeks primarily to produce such errors in excruciating detail.
Just as de Man positions the act of interpretation at the edge. where critical prophesying and troping generate unavoidable errors in an incomplete though inevitable closure. so too docs Miller locate the reading activity amidst the dangers at the edge. Synthesizing de Iv1an's theory of rhetoricity and Derrida's notion of differance. Miller derives a concept of the sign in which a literal/figurative polarity disrupts reference and in which every sign is differentiated, differed, and deferred from its object and itself. The sign unfolds through an uncontrollable movement of substitutions and differences. The gaps splitting the sign constitute a structure of abysmal spaces that makes room for endless interpretations (misreadings). In critical reading. the stability of language gives way to flights of meaning. Truth slips away. Or rather truth.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
which is illusory from the start because language is inherently rhetorical, appears pointless as an all-encompassing critical goal. Both de Man and Miller emphasize that a deconstructive reading can itself be deconstructed. Such reversal results from the unrelenting and insistent operations of rhetoricity. No criticism escapes the disruptions created by the play of grammatical, rhetorical, and referential strata in language. Still, each demystified reading clarifies, even though the number of such potential clarifications approaches infinity. Critical writing, like literature, partakes of textuality, only less so.
Significantly, de Man and Miller find that a deconstructive reading can recover from a text evidence of pre-existent deconstruction. A text may admit its Own complex crossings amid referential and figural dimensions. In this case, the author mayor may not consciously anticipate the critic. Writers are frequently mystified about their own texts.
Early on Riddel finds formulations to complain about in Yale deconstruction. In particular, he regards the theory of the "self deconstructing text" with suspicion, sensing that it restricts the open and endless. joyous interpretation early celebrated by Derrida. In addition, such a notion privileges literary language over critical discourse, and it restores the old function of the author (as genius). The implicit valorization of literature and devaluation of criticism divides the theory of écriture, assigning a higher ontological value to literary writing and limiting critical writing and reading to secondary status.
Working out his later deconstructive project, Riddel develops a concept of the sign indebted mostly to Derrida - not de Man. In his view, the signifier is by nature intertextual. To turn this around, intertextuality invades the text at the level of the signifier or chain of signifiers. The shifting crevices at work in the sign effectively multiply the spaces and potential errors for interpretation. Thus misreading, the necessary errancy of every reading, happens less as a singular result of clashing synchronic strata and more as a consequence of disruptive diachronic traces undermining from within the possible coherence of the sign. Under these circumstances, any interpretation is a venture in foolhardy soothsaying and redoubled rhetoric.
246
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
The spaces of interpretation generate numerous errors. We return, yet again, to the troubling scene at the edge. Riddel. descended from the Old English "hriddel." pierces and perforates. shifts and separates. The interpretation of the text necessarily scatters and provisionally collects materials. Curiously, the intertextual traces, insisted upon by Riddel, install in the sign an already (mis)interpreted layer of potential signification. The irony is that this notion renders the text partially self-deconstructed. The Vale critics don't have a lock on this idea-only a first right.
To the extent that deconstruction celebrates dissemination over truth, explosion and fragmentation over unity and coherence, undecidable spaces over prudent closures. playfulness and hysteria over care and rationality, and misreading over reading, it opposes tr3dition31 hermeneutics. Deconstruction shows less interest in refining a rigorous method or science of interpretation than in developing strategies and tactics to subvert such secure procedures and techniques of reading. Thus "deconstructive hermeneutics" and "deconstructive interpretation," phrases used in this book, are paradoxical and misleading conjunctions. Yet. in the history of hermeneutics spanning from Talmudic and Hellenistic scholars up to our time, we can find antithetical theorists and groups, like Gnostics and Kabbalists. who serve as forerunners of deconstruction. In other words. deconstruction may be a freak offshoot 11,;,1,;11 the long history of hermeneutics. Or it may be, as many deconstructors believe, radically opposed to all hermeneutics. Can geneu\hermeneutics contain deconstruction? Deconstructors think not.
As he moves from structuralism to deconstruction. Barthes renounces the search for truth and the science of codes in favor of the joys of dissemination and the free play of the signifier. Over the period of his involvement his readings and writings become ever more self-consciously rhetorical and visionary and more suggestively fractured and playful. In the initial phase. the days of the Tel Quel group. Barthes theorizes about textuality and dissemination. but calls for controls on ideological grounds.
Rather than practice the infinite deferment of the signified, Barthes
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
247
wants to operate a tactics of the slide, aiming to keep deconstruction effective for the sociopolitical battle of meanings being waged in Western bourgeois societies. To foreclose the signified and liberate the signifier totally is to refuse all meaning. Such a strategy gives up political praxis in favor of petit-bourgeois self-indulgence. The most productive reading is that which generates volumes of meanings-not the complete explosion and consequent death of meaning.
In the later phase Barthes relaxes controls, letting go for the joys and pleasures of radical dissemination. Such revolutionary reading, conceived in the early days as the long-range goal of progressive ideology, celebrates the erotic gratifications of reading acts. The inherent spaces and slips of interpretation emerge as alluring depths and edges for orgasmic bliss. And interpretation becomes hallucination and fantasy-more than mere prophecy. Readers co-write the texts they read. With the death of the author and the birth of the text comes a new age of the licentious and hysterical reader. Critical writing, formerly analytical and coherent, becomes playfully fragmented. The rhetoric of criticism undergoes the spasms of erotic vision. The dangers at the edge provide deep pleasures of liberation for the libidinous reader-writer.
Although Foucault denies that his project is interpretive, we can extrapolate out of his works a certain practice for reading texts. (Such a derivative enterprise has been underway since the mid 1970s.) Within its own era, each text is produced, distributed, and interpreted in accordance with a system of epistemic regularities. When reactivated in a later period, the text must pass through an analogous archival systematics. The interpretation of a work, like its production, is prescribed: cultural rules determine who can read with authority, what can then be said, how it can be said, what counts as true and reasonable, what constitutes falsehood and foolishness, and what is meant and what not. Just as the signifiers composing a text emerge out of, through, and back into a cultural matrix, so the reading of a text unfolds within an epistemic network. The activity of reading is tied into a controlling social machinery, which allocates and arbitrates all knowledge and power.
248
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
While Foucault may seem to recommend a historical-cultural or contextual practice of interpretation, he actually suggests an antithetical project. He is sceptical and critical of institutionalized modes of behavior because they serve in a "game" of socio-political control and manipulation. With J_c'Jcal(lg}' Foucault recommends a radical program for critical reading and writing: exaggerate and parody conventional critical modes; collapse all boundaries and use multiple. discontinuous, and nonsynthesizable means to "read" all texts: renounce the will-to-knowledge and the passion for truth-embrace "stupidity."
Foucault's visionary project offers a "deconstructive" mode of reading that breaks open the spaces of interpretation and liberates the coded signifier. At this scene of the edge critical writing and reading become heterogeneous, parodic, and carnivalesque. Ideologically motivated, the critic, a dispersed subject, playing the clown and idiot. champions error so as to undermine the rules of the culture, which assign her a fixed role in the controlled exchanges of knowledge and power.
With the gradual acceptance and institutionalization of deconstruction. the ideological project to disrupt and subvert the machinery of Western culture-a French enterprise not generally admitted by American deconstructors - gets co-opted and diluted. We may expect more extreme plans of liberation. Wilder writing and reading. And we may anticipate growing regularization and systematization. That the writing of this book was funded by the government is evidence enough of such ongoing processes. The book itself and this section testify further to a cert2in program of codification and assimilation. What is to be done?
6
In an attempt to break down the particular constraints of traditional psychoanalysis and political theory. Deleuze and Guattari promote a wild program in a polished and measured prose. Their theory of the schiz-sign. which merges the sign with the libido and the social body, serves to ground a politicized project for reading aimed toward "free play" and "dissemination" - toward deterritorialization of all molar formations and structures. In the work of reading, the smooth representational (or reterritorialized) text often resists the violence and disruption of the schizoanalyst, who must then seek other texts where intensities flow for him.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE 249
In this way inert texts are left behind or dismissed as the revolutionary reader moves on in search of intensities. Schizo-reading does not seek meaning or truth and does not attempt scrupulous interpretation or painstaking deconstruction; rather it celebrates and promotes reading as simultaneous libidinal, social, and political activity; and it favors textual intervention on molecular or fragmented levels and sites. Emphasizing and extending the contemporary "discovery" of unassimilable partial objects, the schizoreader glorifies gaps, cracks, and spaces. In its most intense moments, the project of schizoanalysis wants to refuse interpretation - its coverings, closures, and tropes, its readings and writings. With a guiding commitment to revolution, schizoanalysis produces radical and prophetic texts, all the while using conventional signs and traditional grammar. As such, it is caught up in an old practice of language and interpretation, a textual systematics of signs and visions, which it ironically revives and continues as it works toward destruction.
Very much like Deleuze and Guattari. Hayden White researches a productive Unconscious where he uncovers fundamental linguistic elements, which bear an ideological and ethical as well as a narrative and aesthetic charge. For White, however. such minill1al units of language already carry a specific hermeneutic potential, which is inescapably activated in textual work. Every production is highly regulated in both its molar and its molecular stages of formation. Since interpretation is situated in a preconscious domain, it cannot be denied or refused. But, like Deleuze and Guattari, White writes his texts in a carefully poised and balanced, classical style: the floating of the signifier is checked by a metalanguage confident of effective representation. Style does not crack.
Relying on smooth and safe language, Deleuze, Guattari, and White avoid questioning their own texts and lead us to believe in the accuracy and truthfulness of their representations. All this occurs as the whole traditional system of representation undergoes ideological inquisition, emerging in Deleuze and Guattari's work as a paranoid or perverted molar formation and in White's enterprise as a highly limited structural machine replete with specifiable political, aesthetic, and ethical components.
250
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Beneath the prophetic aspirations of their separate projects, Deleuze and Guattari and White operate a protected language. a medium of truth and accuracy. Such a procedure revives the old theatrical strategy of parabasis. The dramatic play of language is momentarily stopped so that plain and honest speaking can occur. An illusion, this classical scene. which conventionally unfolds at the edge of the stage. does not interrupt the progress of the play; it is a deliberate deceptive moment in the overall production; it happens on stage as a regular part of the dramatic presentation. Our three contemporary visionaries rely, knowingly or not, on ancient Greek rhetoric: they employ a "special language" used for the staging of plain and true speaking. within the general movement of comedy.
Amidst a carnival atmosphere, the serious moment, early coded into Greek writing, aims to get our attention. Still, it never escapes the hazards of interpretive work, of language functions; it only pretends to.
7
Moving beyond the mythical scene of the edge. snipped from the center of the Iliad, and beyond the numerous modalities of the edge. snapped to order here from the various sections of Parts I, II, and III, we ponder the possibility that there is only always interpretation. All facts. figures. and formulas. all runes. readings. and writings. all fashions, fictions. and fantasies. all customs. conventions. and codes. and all laws, loves. and lives are interpretations. To the extent that everything is constructed and assembled, conceived and arranged, cut up and aligned-to just such an extent-everything partakes of interpretation. The writing/reading activity creeps into, contours, and creates all that we know and experience. There is nothing other than interpretation.
The term often used by deconstructors to name the impasse of interpretation. the end point of critical reading and writing, is aporia. To the Greeks this meant "no way out." Unable to get beyond signs, locked in language (ecriture) , the interpreter confronts the irreducible free play of differance and figure. Since there is neither an undifferentiated nor a literal bottom or ground, the activity of interpretation is endless. There is no way out.
MODALITIES OF THE EDGE
251
The "experience of aporia takes many forms. The fact, for \ example, that every text lends itself to deconstruction and to further deconstruction. with nowhere any end in sight, generates a structure of aporia. So too does the insight that no escape outside the logocentric enclosure is possible since the interpreter must use the concepts and figures of the Western metaphysical tradition. And the experience of the unavailability to discourse of a literal bottom or undifferentiated ground leads to a version of aporia. There's no \\ray out. Interpretation is endless.
We can't live with and we can't live without borders, cuts and lines. We can't submit to but we must use contexts. Conceptions and arrangements. We can't control yet we must deploy meanings. Constructions and assemblages. Impasse. Aporia. Neither this nor that. We can't interpret (in the logocentric sense), nor can we interpret (in the cybernetic sense of totalized megareadings). We can only always endlessly misinterpret (in the deconstructive sense). Early in the day Derrida conceived end1ess (mis)interpretation as "joyous." A happy multiplication of cuts and arrangements toward infinity. That we are all continuously on edge at the edge now goes without saying; it is our whole way of being there the modality of the edge-which concerns deconstruction. Perhaps the last ethical impulse of this criticism.
To provoke wonder, we end where much deconstruction starts. Snippets out of the piecemeal notes and aphorisms of Nietzsche's The Jt'i/l to Pouler, Book Three. This mode of interpretation and of writing prefigures contemporary deconstruction.
"There arc only facts"-I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. (# 481) to be able to read off a text without interposing an interpretation is the last-developed form of "inner experience"-perhaps one that is hardly possible- (# 479)
"Ends and means" "Cause and effect"
"Subject and object"
"Acting and suffering" "Thing-in-itself and appearance"
as interpretations (not as facts) and to what extent perhaps necessary interpretations? (as required for "preservation") all in the sense of a will to power. (# 589)
Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. (# 48,1)
The history of Nietzsche's fundamental role in deconstruction remains to be written. As first in our line, he deserves the emphasis of last place.
252
STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Post Script
In Latin concludere means "to shut up. " Peace and quiet. Constriction. Confinement. Guarded silence. Ludere means "to play." Inside this final sign, then, lies a game, a finishing lure, another possibility, a further clue, a lasting con. The word admits, though disguises, the truth about conclusions: they stop textual play. Conclusions serve as guardrails-as protection. A conclusion typically promotes unified closure and ordered coherence. The end of the text either repeats the initial thesis with a difference, or repackages the main points within tight borders, or enacts a last deduction as a final supplement. A conclusion renders up results, passes judgments, reduces details, effects settlement, shuts down play.
Deconstruction regularly questions coherence, unity, order, closure. It undermines the taming of difference, the tightening of borders, and the logic of last supplements. It assaults conclusions. Perhaps too clever and fussy, such a treatment of conclusion typifies a recurring strategy of deconstruction. Often deconstruction interrogates some seemingly unimportant item-a word, an isolated letter, a title, a phrase, a printing error, a piece of punctuation-in order to break down a concept, passage, or text. The deconstructor emerges as a peculiar connoisseur who stops at the insignificant, gazes erotically at its surface, and lets exaggerated wonder be.cc?gie everything. Through such indolent and intimate hesitation comes corrosive and ghostly understanding. The deconstructor assumes a mind of winter, an estrangement from tradition, effecting an antithetical stance and vision. Danger lies that way and the sorrow of negative knowledge. Still, to enjoy such activity, to relish its freedom, seems less a perversity now than an unexpected salvation. "I do not 'concentrate,'" says Derrida, "either exclusively or primarily on those points that appear to be the most 'important,' 'central,' 'crucial.' Rather, I deconcentrate, (Hermeneutics) Semiotics) and Deconstruction
In the history of contemporary deconstruction the great year is unquestionably 1967 when Jacques Derrida, the main figure in the movement, published his Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference. Among other things, these texts show Derrida unleashing powerful critiques of phenomenology and structuralism. Saussure and Levi-Strauss, like Husserl and occasionally Heidegger, came in for subversive reassessment. At the same time Nietzsche .and Freud undergo inchoate revaluation and emerge in a new and positive light. As deconstruction spreads during the late 1960s and early 1970S in France, England. and America. the Derridean critiques of structuralism and phenomenology take on canonical status while the improved stocks of psychoanalysis and Nietzsche studies continue to attract further energetic investment, By 1972, when Derrida published Positions, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination, deconstruction had attained widespread, ..I often reluctant, recognition as the newest avant-garde intellectual m0vement in France and America. It remained steadfastly post-structuralist and postphenomenological. And it seemed still Freudian and decidedly Nietzschean, In France it was vaguely Marxist, although not in Derrida's hands; in America, it was non-Marxist, if not silently anti-Marxist.
As these developments unfolded, structuralism itself was being transformed into semiology or, if you prefer, semiotics. By the middle 1970s it became clear that semiotics was a global discipline, a new megascience, with ambitions Faustian enough to encompass Hermeneutics, Semiotics, and Deconstruction not by the fine arts and social sciences but also several areas of the natural and physical sciences.
was presented at a meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature: held in conjunction with the Convention of the Modern Language Association in 1980.
260
APPENDIXES
Meanwhile, hermeneutics, long ago cast as a minor branch of bible studies, expanded its purview, reaching out to take in all ways and means of interpretive activity and theory. No doubt, Heidegger's dramatic shifting of hermeneutic theory from epistemo/ontological grounds from I, Ocrstchcll to Vers(c!1cll /as a ction of Seit) facilitated this transformation and expansion of hermeneutics. If one wanted to play the prophet, one could predict a new flourishing of research into general hermeneutics.
It will be interesting to see in all this "progress" is how semics and hermeneutics cut up and divide the ground. At cert fundamental points they, of course, share similar interests and goals. (The problematic of language is a crucial case in point.)
On wonder if, in the distant future. semiotics will remain structure at heart while hermeneutics will preserve its methodologicality with phenomenology? We cannot know. Semiotics may encompass hermeneutics. Or vice versa. Or they may be defunct like alchemy.
In case, deconstruction could be absorbed by either or both of these tram disciplines. Possibly a generation from now deconstruction will register as a minor, perverse offshoot of a larger enterprise. What is deconstruction? Does it, like semiotics and hermeneutics, possess an object or field of objects for study? Docs it trace or favor identifiable methods and goals of inquiry? The answers may be yes and no. One mode of deconstruction--an ap...ly constricted and utilitarian one--focuses on texts, on ways of reading texts and comprehending textual signification.
Wright fancifully identify such a practice as "deconstructive hermeneutics." In addition, we can uncover certain instances of a ...constructive semiotics too, that is, of a practice of tracking and chmg a priori modes or grounds of textual organization and signification. Yet such facile conjoinings of deconstruction with hermeneutics or with semiotics seem willfully paradoxical. After all deconstruction vaguely at the outset and more forcefully now, posed itself in fundamental, if opaque, opposition to the arts and sciences of hermeneutics and semiotics.
APPENDIXES
261
In an interview published in March 1977 in Digraplze, Derrida characterizes deconstruction, observing" deconstruction is not a critical operation, the critical is its object; deconstruction always! bears, at one moment or another, on the confidence given the: : critical, critico-theoretical, that is to say, deciding authority. . . ."
What strikes us here is Derrida's little phrase "at one moment or another." Sooner or later, we learn, deconstruction turns on every critical reading or theoretical construction. When a decision is made. Then authority emerges, when theory or criticism operate, then deconstruction questions. . . . It looks at every or any boundary, frame, margin, inscription, border. It examines the instances of decision: it investigates deciding authority. As soon as it does so, it becomes subversive. Mainly, it exhibits over and over how all borders, rules, concepts, structures-how all creations and constructions - suppress primordial difference in favor of dubious identity. To uncover the infinite varieties of such suppression constitutes the dominant project of Derridean deconstruction.
When deconstruction looks at semiotics, it immediately takes up the theory of the sign. It questions the self-identity of signifier and signified and the self-presence of the speaking subject and the voiced sign. Derrida's work on Saussure and Levi-Strauss early sets this pattern. When deconstruction considers hermeneutics, it again problematizes the concepts of the sign and of presence as wel1 as a number of other founding notions. A deconstructive inquiry into hermeneutics or into semiotics would focus on fundamental ideas of language, self, author, reader, text, interpretation, history, meaning, context, and critical writing. Other topics could obviously be added to the list.
Ultimately, deconstruction effects revision of traditional thinking. Bein Sein becomes the deconstructed self, the text becomes a field of difference... !ltialt!: _ce_ interpretation an activity of exploding ...meaning beyond truth toward dissemination, and critical discourse a deviating and differentiating process of supplemental troping. Stability gives way to vertigo; identities to differences; unities to fragmentations; the center-to infinite centers (or to no privileged centers); ontology to philosophy of language; epistemology to rhetoric; presence to absence; literature to textuality; aletheia to
262
APPENDIXES
free play; correctness to errancy; hermeneutics and semiotics to deconstruction. In this transformation, hermeneutics and semiotics - as self-assured sciences, as useful arts of exegesis, or as deliberate textual cartographics - appear to be approachable dreams disguising impossible wishes.
In the late 1970s American deconstruction starts to fear its "progress" and "success." There is worry that deconstruction is becoming predictable and rigid that it is now a method. The recipe for Derridean deconstruction is: take any traditional concept or established formulation invert its set of hierarchical terms, and subject them to fragmentation in an insistent principle of difference. After unhinging the elements in any structure or textual system toward radical free play, stand back and sift the rubble for hidden or unexpected formations, ...tout these special findings as outlawed truths. (Hence the infamous supplement of the Grammatology). Mix all of this work with dashes of erotic lyricism and with apocalyptic intimations. Packaged within this quick codification - this easy parody - lies a rigid formulation of deconstruction as well as an anxious realization of the present crisis of deconstruction, No longer busy being born, deconstruction is busy. dying. Or so it may now seem.
On the horizon of deconstruction looms a new stage now being born. It could spread further-to semiotics and hermeneutics. Let us designate it the "Era of the Libidinous Critical Text." Up till now the textual surface of the critical work has been largely undisturbed. However free and speculative, the critical text comes to us nicely coherent. carefully developed, and altogether unified. Invariably, it unfolds along an orderly temporal line. which is to say it plies the narrative path. Even the most structuralist of studies, the most spatial and synchronic of inquiries. presents a chronological story. It is somehow emplotted. This undisturbed state of affairs cannot or may not continue long. The critical text is beginning to break up. Everything we have learned about "literary" textuality forces itself upon "critical" textuality. We can expect that the new essay on Finnegan's Wake or the Cantos will itself be paronomasial and chaotic. (At the same time it may have mythic understructure.) The borders between the "literary" text and the "critical" text arc giving way. And provocative texts on
APPENDIXES
263
critical texts are springing up everywhere. The critical object and its modes of analysis and style are shifting-as the "nature" and force of textuality come clearer. Significantly, the quest for "meaning," a function of desire, is erupting into or giving way. to an indistinct desiring analytics. Faintly, criticism is becoming. libidinal: a self-indulgent, yet earnest, joy of reading and writing. One supposes that our orderly paradigm of the universe - the last in a succession of world pictures, is ending now: Older modes of explanation - whether providential or scientific, whether predicated on a master plan or an enriched model of cause-effect seem at an end. Even the more recent fie_history and ecosystem paradigms appear inadequate. Randomization and chance appear the mgsLfi.Lm. Our texts, literary, critical, and otherwise, proclaim a new era. Our disciplines, including semiotics and hermeneutics, seem last-ditch efforts to institute and protect order: and meaning. It is no surprise that the Soviet Union continues as' a leader in semiotic studies and that traditional religious scholarship still champions hermeneutics, say what you will. But the epoch of order and meaning is being forced to face an emerging era of discontinuity and desiring activity. One expects that semiotics and hermeneutics. as disciplines, will grow and grow as conditions "worsen." They represent the last "best" hope of a passing epoch. One also imagines that both disciplines will be transformed by isolated visionaries to accommodate the monstrous coming era. This way hope lies.