Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

 
It's not a publication I greatly care for or regularly read, but I was struck by this article in First Things:

"The Platonic tradition in Christianity invests beauty with ontological significance, trusting it to reveal the unity and proportion of what really is. Our apprehension of beauty thus betokens a recognition of and ­submission to a reality that transcends us. And yet, if beauty can use art to express truth, art can also use beauty to create charming fabrications. As Jacques Maritain put it, art is capable of establishing "a world apart, closed, limited, absolute," an autonomous world that, at least for a moment, relieves us of the "ennui of living and willing." Instead of directing our attention beyond sensible beauty toward its supersensible source, art can fascinate us with beauty’s apparently self-sufficient presence; it can counterfeit being in lieu of revealing it... "Art is dangerous," as Iris Murdoch once put it, "chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it."

This helps explain why Western thinking about art has tended to oscillate between adulation and deep suspicion. "Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man," Dostoevsky had Mitya Karamazov declare, and the battle runs deep....

The closer one moved toward the present time, the more blatant and unabashed became the association of the artist with God. Thus Alexander Baumgarten, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, compared the poet to a god and likened his creation to "a world"... If the artist in the modern age emerges as a second god, his divinity tends to close itself off from reality in order to clear a space for art’s fabrications. As such, the artist tends to draw close to the demonic, which Kierkegaard astutely defined as freedom "shutting itself up" apart from the good. ("Myself am Hell," Milton’s Satan declares in a moment of startling self-insight.) If, as Paul Valéry put it, "the artist’s whole business is to make something out of nothing," then, unable to meet this demand, he will find himself wandering alone among the shadows cast by the world he forsook in order to salvage his freedom and creativity. ...

We do not need Nietzsche to tell us that the disintegration of the Platonic-Christian worldview, already begun in the late Middle Ages, is today a cultural given. Nor is it news that the shape of modernity—born, in large part, from man’s faith in the power of human ­reason and technology to remake the world in his own image—has made it increasingly difficult to hold the traditional view that ties beauty to being and truth, investing it with ontological significance. Modernity, the beneficiary of Descartes’ relocation of truth to the subject ( Cogito, ergo sum), implies the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and hence the isolation of beauty from being or truth....

The twentieth-century Welsh Catholic poet David Jones.. [thought that the real threat to the arts] was the modern world’s increasing submission to technocracy, to a thoroughly instrumental view of life that had no room for what Jones called the intransitive—for the freedom and disinterestedness traditionally thought the province of religious experience, on the one hand, and aesthetic experience, on the other."


And from a rather different perspective, Zadie Smith takes up a similar theme:

"All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked...

Critiques of this form by now amount to a long tradition in and of themselves. Beginning with what Alain Robbe-Grillet called "the destitution of the old myths of 'depth,'" they blossomed out into a phenomenology skeptical of Realism's metaphysical tendencies, demanding, with Husserl, that we eschew the transcendental, the metaphorical, and go "back to the things themselves!"; they peaked in that radical deconstructive doubt which questions the capacity of language itself to describe the world with accuracy. They all of them note the (often unexamined) credos upon which Realism is built: the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self... In an essay written half a century ago, Robbe-Grillet imagined a future for the novel in which objects would no longer "be merely the vague reflection of the hero's vague soul, the image of his torments, the shadow of his desires." He dreaded the "total and unique adjective, which attempt[s] to unite all the inner qualities, the entire hidden soul of things."... The received wisdom of literary history is that Finnegans Wake did not fundamentally disturb Realism's course as Duchamp's urinal disturbed Realism in the visual arts: the novel is made out of language, the smallest units of which still convey meaning, and so they will always carry the trace of the real. But if literary Realism survived the assault of Joyce, it retained the wound...

The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to Netherland, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what's new on the route to Remainder, that skewed side road where we greet Georges Perec, Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard. Friction, fear, and outright hatred spring up often between these two traditions—yet they have revealing points of connection. At their crossroads we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov. For though manifestos feed on rupture, artworks themselves bear the trace of their own continuity."


As Rorty felt, my prejudice has always been that there is no overarching intellectual framework that can reconcile 'Trotsky and the Orchids' in his example (or perhaps the diseased body of a dying prostitute and the second French empire in Zola's Nana; as Eliot put it, these things are a parable) or truth and beauty in this example. My preferences in literature and art has always tended to shun the monologic medieval world where art is for the most part subordinate to the transcendental. Conversely, I've always tended to prefer romanticism specifically for its elevation of the individual ego. Nonetheless, the principal tropes of romanticism and modern literature are heavily indebted to christianity. The role of the transcendental in Emerson or Wordsworth may not be specifically christian (hence the fact that Kerouac could write in a similar vein while casting it in buddhist terminology) but it is difficult to conceive of it without christianity. The concept of the romantic spot of time or epiphany is a moment of revelation in the christian sense whether it belongs to Wordsworth or Joyce. The romantic quest romance is prototypically a christian narrative of fall, damnation and redemption, at the very least a form of via negativa that inverts the standard christian eschatology, as in Lautreamont or Melmoth. As a picture this becomes more intermittent in the twentieth century; Derrida's concept of differance is in many respects kabbalistic, assuming an infinity of arcane meanings within a text; De Man's statement that a text possessed of all meanings is possessed of none marks an end to transcendental underpinnings to literature, leading to places like Forster's Marabar caves where all meanings seem equally valid and invalid. It only waited for the postmodernist suspicion of all meta-narratives to complete the final coup de grace. The examples of Kafka or Perec point to a conception of writing akin to Lyotard or De Man; raising the notion of hermeneutics only to dismiss it, dissolving all interpretation in the same way as the paintings in Life A User's Manual are returned to being a blank slate after the jigsaw has been reconstructed. In the case of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, the narrative is deflated to the viewpoint of a single observer (who nonetheless remains absent and never uses any personal pronoun, there by removing any element of authorial interpretation from the narration). As the narrative lacks any speculation at to the consciousness of the observed actors or as to events where the observer is absent, it is one of the most anti-metaphysical narratives written (although a repeated incident with a centipede being squashed does seem to be correlated to the putative death of one of the female protagonists in a car crash), although the refusal of access to the consciousness of the other does rather serve to emphasise the issue in a way that the realist novel does not.

In theory, this should represent a form of literature that matches my philosophical predilections. In practice, I often find the likes of Perec more devoid of jouissance than the conventional realist novel, with the reader's every response manipulated and controlled. Where Eliot or Dostoevsky wrote novels that are filled with competing, contradictory voices, this is often subdued in novels like those of Robbe-Grillet that are intended to do the opposite; Barthes claimed that "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text," reassembling the scenes presented and represented here in any number of orders.

To borrow Takashi Murakami's term, such works tend to be characterised by their flatness, something sublunary and lacking transcendent values. It's difficult not to find the sheer untidiness or 'deconstructability' of the realist novel rather more appealing; realism is after all ultimately a form of artifice, hence contrived conventions like the omniscient narrator. I have often wondered if there's such a thing as a novel that retains the polyphonic character of the realist novel without the transcendental assumptions behind it.

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posted by Richard 8:21 pm

Monday, May 12, 2008

 
Stanley Fish reinterprets Derrida:

"What was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the "I" facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the "I" and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many... both the "I" or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The "I" or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which "it" (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us. It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist "out there"; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

This may sound impossibly counterintuitive and annoyingly new-fangled, but it is nothing more or less than what Thomas Hobbes said 300 years before deconstruction was a thought in the mind of Derrida or Heidegger: "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things." Three centuries later, Richard Rorty made exactly the same point when he declared, "where there are no sentences, there is no truth … the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." Descriptions of the world are made by us, and we, in turn, are made by the categories of description that are the content of our perception. These are not categories we choose — were they not already installed there would be nothing that could do the choosing; it would make more sense (but not perfect sense) to say that they have chosen or colonized us. Both the "I" and the world it would know are functions of language. Or in Derrida’s famous and often vilified words: There is nothing outside the text. (More accurately, there is no outside-the-text.)

This is not the conclusion that would be reached either by French theory's detractors or by those American academics who embraced it. For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset's main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity — a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda — and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.

If "presences" — perspicuous and freestanding entities — are made by discursive forms that are inevitably angled and partial, the announcement that any one of them rests on exclusions it (necessarily) occludes cannot be the announcement of lack or error. No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one. Deconstruction's technique of always going deeper has no natural stopping place, leads to no truth or falsehood that could then become the basis of a program of reform. Only by arresting the questioning and freeze-framing what Derrida called the endless play of signifiers can one make deconstruction into a political engine, at which point it is no longer deconstruction, but just another position awaiting deconstruction. "Deconstruction thus contains within itself…an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement. In order to use it as a basis for subversion…the American solution was..to divert it…to split it off from itself." American academics "forced deconstruction against itself to produce a political 'supplement' and in so doing substituted for "Derrida's patient philological deconstruction" a "bellicose drama.""


While Fish's account of Derrida's 'negative theology' is quite coherent I'm less than convinced that it's an especially accurate summary of what Derrida had intended. In some senses it would be more valid to argue that Derrida intended a revaluation of all values, overturning logocentric western hierarchies, rather than simply a pragmatist redescription of the linguistic turn (particularly since an alteration of our understanding of how the world is described does change the world perhaps rather more than Fish is suggesting - his pragmatist account of the philosophy of science being a rather telling case in point). The extension of this to the feminist concept of phallogocentrism, with its influence on Cixous, Irrigaray and, indeed, Butler, introduces an explicitly political element into his work. Derrida certainly felt deconstruction to have political implications in his later stress on a form of Kantian idealism that stated justice to be the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible. In that sense, Fish is introducing a criticism of Derrida more than his American interpreters. I seem to recall Rorty wondering why should we think that the abandonment of Platonic ideas and strivings would have important ramifications for the rest of culture and questioning why Derrida insisted that science has been constrained by 'metaphysical bonds that have borne on its definition and movement from its beginning.' Instead Rorty preferred to cite the likes of Popper and Dewey to argue that the natural sciences have done a lot to loosen those bonds, and to make possible a post-metaphysical culture.

Update: a piece arguing that Derrida's ideas of differance can be empirically tested and found wanting:

"Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated."


I've always regarded Derrida as a Hume in need of a Kant to refute him; while Derrida's logic is robust there remains the gnawing sense that we empirically already know that language functions in far more straightforward and unambiguous terms than he suggests (as with Tarski's meta-analyses of language and their use to map the hermeneutic possibilities of even texts like Ulysses). Nonetheless, I'm not sure that the above approach is necessarily the best way to determine the 'valency quotient' of any given text; response to characterisation is a fairly narrow aspect of the response to the text as a whole. Assuming the above study relates to Jane Austen it also seems important to note that texts like The Outsider, Querelle of Brest or Correction would prove a father more difficult proposition.

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posted by Richard 7:48 pm

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

 
In the unlikely event that I have regular readers, some of them might happen to recall that one of my obscure passions is the early twentieth century literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin:

"Just as Bakhtin's work is among other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed....

It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism...

Pechey argues persuasively that Bakhtin was out to rewrite the history of modernity. Epistemology yields to aesthetics, as the abstract reason of the Enlightenment is replaced by the sensuous particularity of art. A brutally instrumental rationality makes way for a form of communicative reason. The falsely autonomous subject of the modern age is overturned by the dialogical self. In all these ways, the aesthetic in the modern age becomes the repository of lost or sidelined forms of knowledge."


Eagleton's review does an excellent task of highlighting what I found so appealing in Bakhtin; his defence of the untidy, unfinished and chaotic, that which defies order and system. Nonetheless, for all of the comparisons evinced here Bakhtin's work contains no assumption that there is nothing outside language, pertains largely to the formal and linguistic properties of the novel and lacks any metaphysical critique of meta-narratives. One can draw some parallels with Derrida, viewing differance and dialogism as being spiritually akin concepts but any such parallel is necessarily rather strained. The figure Bakhtin does remind me of isn't so much Derrida but Sartre. Both Bakhtin and Sartre were drawn in many respects to Marxism as a philosophy (albeit with Sartre far more committed to it than the man who was to die in one Stalin's gulags). In the former case, Bakhtin's work treats of the novel in materialistic terms as a product of specific cultural, historical and social forces as much as the linguistic ones Eagleton highlights. His work nonetheless treats of the ways in which these forces combine to ensure that the novel is, to purloin a phrase, condemned to be free or, to use Bakhtin's phrase, to be dialogic. Similarly, Sartre's work struggles to yoke together the heterogenous elements of existentialism and communism, of how freedom could gear itself to the social conditions it found itself in. The polyphonic novel was naturally the ideal vehicle for Sartre to manifest those ideas, utilising concepts like the cutups and multiple viewpoints that he had borrowed from Dos Passos but which also bore a distinct resemblance to Bakhtinian dialogism.

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posted by Richard 6:54 pm

Saturday, February 04, 2006

 
Somewhat belatedly, I wanted to write about the recent Valve seminar on Graphs Maps and Trees, which has been described as offering a qunatitative approach to literary history, based on documenting the history of differing genres (analysing all tests from a given period rather than solely the canonical ones) through 'distance reading' rather than close reading. This piece seemed particularly striking to me:

"In this piece, Moretti addresses the problem that the clues in the Sherlock Holmes stories are not decodable by the reader—whereas today the decodability of clues is “the First Commandment of detective fiction.” “Conan Doyle gets so many things right,” writes Moretti, so how is it that he can “lose his touch” at the last minute? Moretti eventually concludes that the unintelligibility of the clues is a deliberate means of emphasizing Holmes’s omniscience: if the reader could decode the clues, Holmes would no longer be a superman. Conan Doyle, in short, misuses clues “because part of him wants to.”

In “Trees,” Moretti passes over the “wants to” element—presumably to underscore the element of randomness. But I think he had it right the first time. Science is necessary but not sufficient for Holmes’s genius. After all, Dr. Watson is a good scientist, and conscientiously uses the “deductive method,” only to arrive, time and again, at the wrong conclusion—as the reader is guaranteed to do. Holmes’s use of clues strikes an incredibly delicate balance: the mystery is always solved using rational rules, but this doesn’t mean the solution is available to just anyone. Holmes is essentially aristocratic: things come to him effortlessly that never come to others at all.

Perhaps the Holmes stories are not half-baked versions of the “correct” mystery story, but a different kind of mystery story, wherein the nondecodability of clues is not a bug, but a feature. Conan Doyle was writing during the conquest of England by industry and rationalism; perhaps his readers wanted stories about the kinds of magic that are possible within the constraints of science. Holmes categorically rejects the supernatural, not in order to show that the new, rational rules preclude magic, but in order to show that you can still have magic even if you play by the rules. Decodable clues came a “generation” later, with Agatha Christie and the first World War, and became more rigorous after the second—by which time readers wanted to be reminded that the world was still rational."


This isn't really especially radical and is indeed particularly reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin's account of heteroglossia and its consequences in the polyphonic aspects of the novel. If criticism and comparison are two tools that can be used to interpret the text, then surely the above comparisons throw light into questions like Christie's social conservatism or the role of the gothic and supernatural in Doyle. Such examples of how genres are interpreted and redefined are surely not all that unusual; the case of how Langland rewrote sections of Piers Plowman in response to radical authors appropriating elements of the text seems to offer a particular concrete example.

With all that said, what does tend to concern me about Graphs, Maps and Trees somewhat is the attempt to quantify elements of literary history across large periods of time and distance; firstly because genres are rarely especially stable (and individual texts are rarely confined to single examples of any genre) and their classification somewhat arbitrary. Even with a defined morphology, it seems difficult to define why certain genres succeed and other do not. After all, literary history is riddled with examples of authors that failed to catch the popular imagination and were only to be acclaimed later; such models might work well with Doyle and Christie but what about authors like Bernhard, Pessoa and Kafka who remain even now largely acclaimed through critical endorsement than popular success (and who were very far from being even remotely representative of the bulk of work published in their lifetime)? Moretti's model seems to work well for popular genres but I'm not quite so sure it works so well otherwise.

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posted by Richard 6:28 pm

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

 
An interesting piece on American hostility to French theoretical ideas, over at the Borderlands Journal:

"However, regardless of its trapping, French theory, has had a powerful influence on American thought for more than twenty-five years. French theory galvanized the European side of American philosophy in a way that not even the Frankfurt school had been able to accomplish after the war. Philosophers like Habermas (who was always more popular with analytic than with continental philosophers), and Marcuse, were still far too connected to traditional Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist philosophy, to achieve the level of popularity that thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard, came to enjoy in this country—even if at times, for all the wrong reasons. Explicit in the philosophy of the Frankfurt school was a 19th century Hegelian faith in Reason. No such faith exists, or existed from the outset, in French theory. In fact, one can easily interpret French theory as a response to the despotism of Reason, and the fascistic social, economic, and psychic structures—micro and macro—to which it gave birth. Hence, the American-French series of the questioning of reason....

Claire Parnet says in Dialogues (with Deleuze) that perhaps one of the reasons why Americans never really developed a cultural institution of philosophy is because they never felt a need for it—for philosophical systems. For Americans "philosophical" thought found its way into literature instead, literature being a much more rhizomal and less arborescent form of thinking (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 30). Compare Rimbaud's "drunken" voyage to Whitman's walk through "leaves of grass", and it becomes a question of the relation between surface and depth. In the end Rimbaud had to escape to the desert, to reach an exterior that had been there for the American poet all along."


It's hardly novel to suggest that the differences between a empiricist and analytic 'Anglosphere' and a metaphysical and sceptical continent account for the controversial status of 'theory' in Britain and America. For myself, I've long suspected that Anglo-American irritation with French theory was largely attributable to the fact that culture remained a domain where France retained its position as the central player, in spite of American pre-eminence everywhere else. As Perry Anderson has argued:

"The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing... Sartre refused a Nobel Prize in 1964, but after him no French writer ever gained the same public authority, at home or abroad. The Nouveau Roman remained a more restricted phenomenon, of limited appeal within France itself, and less overseas. Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought, at the altar of literature. It was the products of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle's reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity. It was in these years that Levi-Strauss became the world's most celebrated anthropologist; Braudel established himself as its most influential historian; Barthes became its most distinctive literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist."


The problem, as Anderson notes, is that such pre-eminence cannot be sustained independently of a wider status in political and economic spheres that France simply lacked. Forms of economic, social and cultural capital could not be regarded independently. In Derrida's later works he responded to Fukuyama's 'End of History' idea by suggesting that the notion of capitalism as the only possible social system represented a denial of plurality; nonetheless critiques of Western political, economic and philosophical structures often began to seem disconnected with contemporary events and to remain situated within a post-war context. To take the example of Foucault in particular, his work represents a fundamental challenge to Enlightenment assumptions but, as I wrote earlier, is deeply questionable when one considers its wider implications.

I've long pondered to what extent views of theoretical approaches to literature might be different, if the centre of such movements had been St Petersburg and not Paris. During the nineteen thirties the Soviet Union proved an extraordinarily fertile ground for what we would now term theory through writers like Bakhtin, Shklovsky and Voloshinov. A writer like Bakhtin sought to challenge assumptions about singular, unambiguous interpretations of language as much as Derrida did, but lacked any wider metaphysical critique. Originating within literary studies rather than philosophy, it seems to me that the Russian theorists remain more relevant to literary theory than their French counterparts.

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posted by Richard 7:57 pm

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

 
Of all the comments made about Jacques Derrida of late, the most apposite was made by AS Byatt; "He wrote with immense ad hoc wit and had no interest in creating a system, but his followers did create a system and sought to deconstruct everything." Like Nietzsche, Derrida was more than capable of containing multitudes, something evidenced by his refusal to define deconstruction. His writing tended to suggest that the meaning of language could only be understood in relation to language itself, to an endless play of differance, either obfuscating the notion of a referent beyond language or making the idea of an other beyond language ever more important (making it clear to understand why Habermas called Derrida a Jewish mystic). This was not so much a matter of inconsistency (though I doubt that Derrida was ever especially concerned about criticisms of that ilk), but as a matter of refusing to deny the plurality of meanings. This also applied to his political and ethical observations, where he stressed the need for pluralism, thereby enabling him to support Habermas' declaration of European values (presumably for reasons not dissimilar to Popper's advocacy of the open society).

However, it should be recalled that Derrida wrote at a time when literature had lost its place at the apex of French culture, displaced to a large extent by the writing of figures like Derrida. Like Hietszche or Kierkegaard he was as much a writer as a philosopher. As this recent London Review of Books article put it:

"Viewed comparatively, the striking feature of the human sciences and philosophy that counted in this period was the extent to which they came to be written increasingly as virtuoso exercises of style, drawing on the resources and licences of artistic rather than academic forms. Lacan's Ecrits, closer to Mallarmé than Freud in their syntax, or Derrida's Glas, with its double-columned interlacing of Genet and Hegel, represent extreme forms of this strategy. But Foucault's oracular gestures, mingling echoes of Artaud and Bossuet, Lévi-Strauss's Wagnerian constructions, Barthes's eclectic coquetries, belong to the same register."


Update: Needless to add, many of the comments on Derrida have been hostile. More often that not they tend to deal with postmodernist concepts of meta-narratives in relation to politics and ethics rather than deconstruction. As an example, Johann Hari wrote:

"There are, he said, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no sense, only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative. "


As I've written before, such arguments concerning the universality of ethical and political concepts (typically highly culturally specific ones) tend to put the cart before the philosophical horse; assuming that since such concepts are deemed necessary it follows that a philosophical justification is also necessary. Moreover, the argument concerning the Enlightenment also greatly interests me; surely one of the central characteristics of the Enlightenment is the way in which it produced and assimilated its opposites; Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and indeed Derrida. The implication persistently seems to be that Enlightenment concepts are unable to withstand the plurality that supposedly underpins them. The idea of an Enlightenment heritage is always assumed to be considerably more fragile than actually appears to be the case. Beyond that, there is the further question of what we actually mean by terms like 'the Englightenment;' such things can hardly be seen as homogenous concepts and much of Enlightenment thought was deconstructive; consider Hume's views on reason, for example. Finally, there is the question of whether the Enlightenment was quite the unalloyed good Hari takes it to be; there is an argument to be had that Enlightenment concepts formed the backbones of some of the worst totalitarian disasters of the twentieth century.

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posted by Richard 6:53 pm

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

 
A rather odd article from Elaine Showalter, reviewing Terry Eagleton's latest cultural theory treatise;

"Eagleton linked the rise of theory to revolutionary social change, political militancy, and global struggle... Doing cultural theory (using politics, culture, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in equal measure)... [But] Even Eagleton, in the preface to the second edition of Literary Theory in 1996, conceded that with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s, and the revelations of the Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man's hidden Nazi collaborationist past, the wind had gone out of theory's radical sails."


It's an odd criticism. The term theory covers a multitude of sins; reception theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism and Marxism, to name some of the principal components. It is the last of these that largely describes Eagleton's position and it is certainly true that his work has increasingly suffered from what William Gibson described as the predicament where "everything capitalism said about communism was true. As was everything communism said about capitalism." But that is hardly unique to literary theory and it seems a little unfair to single Eagleton out for criticism on that score.

The greater difficulty was always that Marxism had a rather uneasy relationship with the other components mentioned above. Deconstruction of a text can produce meanings amenable to conservative viewpoints as easily as it can produce meanings amenable to the feminist and Marxist critics that flirted with deconstruction. Eagleton himself furnishes a further example, that Lyotard's postmodernist conception of meta-narratives invalidates the Marxist progressive emancipation. Showalter herself furnishes further examples; that Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis are implicated in the kinds of ideologies deplored by feminism. This rather uncertain ground led onwards to other problems; in particular, the encroachment of cultural theory into the territory of more established and formalised disciplines such as sociology (or for that matter, philosophy or political theory), where its assumption that cultural artefacts were both entirely representative of their culture and indeed deterministic of it seemed more than a little uncertain.

The great shame is that theory did perform a valuable function. The earlier new criticism had treated literature as if it were contained within a hermetically sealed environment, dealing only with the text and the language in it. The result was that literature failed to connect with anything, becoming a set of arid exercises, such as Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. If nothing else, theory did re-connect literature with something else, allowing rich new meanings to be seen within works of literature (albeit through a feminist or marxist lens). The regret is that theory was never formalised (reception theory in particular was something that could have been studied in much more scientific terms) into something that was either more closely imbricated with philosophy or history and instead sought to change itself into something that foolishly tried to compete with other disciplines instead.

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posted by Richard 10:37 pm