Another One Bites the Valve

• You're welcome over here, LB.  • They fuck you up, your mum and dad  • The best drink to have with Adorno (via).  • Picture the billionaires playing football.  • Worst. "Song." Ever.  • A Few Bad Apples (via).  • Chomsky gets his apology.

• Congratulations to Pierre Joris.  • Holy Maurice Blanchot!

• Long Sunday finds its niche.  • Image courtesy of here. • And Michael Benton has a new project.

• Walter Benn Michaels:

The advantage of mark over utterance and over sign is thus that people can without disagreement give the same mark different meanings.
Hence Derrida, transforming different interpretations of the same text into different uses of the same mark, makes disagreement impossible from the start.  And hence deconstruction emerges as a technology of identity, resolving differences of opinion (about what a text means) by turning them into differences of subject position (about what to make a mark mean).  Its critique of the subject – its insistence that no one can control the meaning of an utterance – amounts from this perspective to nothing more than a reminder that there are, after all, other subjects.  Because "one always risks meaning something other than what one thinks one utters," Butler says, "one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one's utterance, what conflict of interpretation may well arise and how best to adjudicate that difference" (87).  Insofar as the risk Butler describes is the risk of misinterpretation, then it must be true that everyone always takes it – there can be no way to guarantee that you will be understood, and the only alternative to being understood is being misunderstood.  Which is just to say that there are often conflicting beliefs about the meaning of an utterance and, when there are, at least one of them must be mistaken.  But the risk that the other will misunderstand your utterance is not the same as the risk that the other will make your utterance mean something different.  And the risk that the other will make your utterance mean something different is a risk that no one ever runs.  The other can't possibly make your utterance mean something different because when your utterance is made to mean something different, it isn't your utterance any more – it just looks and sounds a lot like yours.  So the transformation of interpretation into resignification is only made possible by the transformation of the sign into the signifier, the utterance into the mark....The deconstructive commitment to the materiality of the signifier is linked in principle to a valorization of the subject position that makes the question of identity (both the reader's and the writer's) primary.  And the "force of the performative," precisely because it goes "beyond all question of truth or meaning," will be to replace the understanding appropriate to the sign with the effect appropriate to the mark, to imagine a world in which what the text means will be entirely subsumed by what it does.  (Shape of the Signifier, 65-66)

Discuss.

nb.  A Bérubé primer (from yesteryear):

...you would think, from reading the posts of the past month, that no one questioned people like Derrida until John Searle came along.  That sounds strange to me, because when I read the 1985 Against Theory volume inspired by Walter Benn Michaels’ and Steven Knapp’s bizarrely reductive argument for a form of intentionalism that even intentionalists don’t recognize, I came across Richard Rorty writing about how “Derrida looks bad whenever he attempts argument on his opponents’ turf; those are the passages in which he becomes a patsy for John Searle” (135).  I don’t know why this doesn’t count when Rorty says it, but it should.  Or is it that, for some people, Rorty is too identified with the Theory camp?  And likewise, I’ve gotten the impression once or twice that people imagine that all this Theory arrived to say nothing more complicated than “the sign is multivalent,” to which the Theory-detractors can, of course, reply, “yes, we knew that already.” Well, we knew that too, and we knew you knew it; even Robert Plant knew it, when he wrote, in On Certainty, “you know sometimes words have two meanings.” I’ll get back to this at the very end of this post, folks, but for now let it suffice to say that the devil is in the details: the real fun lies in finding out just how multivalent that sign can be, and what its multivalences can mean in various contexts.  The current anti-Theory camp is quite right not to call for a return to a prelapsarian past or a faux-naif future (this just in: sign not multivalent after all!). But there’s more to theory than a little ambiguity here and a little undecidability there, and again, the important thing lies in learning how “multivalence” and “multiaccentuality” (V. N. Volosinov’s term, not mine) actually work. The second side issue is more important, and I think was best represented by Sean McCann's complaint that some of the TE discussion was deflected onto the institutional status of theory rather than the merits of specific theories.  Sean acknowledges that this was understandable and not entirely regrettable, either; but I still think the complaint misrecognizes its occasion. TE’s publication is a response (as the editors say) not to theory but to its institutionalization in the form of the Norton, and it was meant to provide critiques of theories and theorists that the Norton does not.  In other words, the discussion was always already institutional, which is why I considered it entirely within bounds to point out (at the very outset, in response to Mark Bauerlein’s Butterflies and Wheels essay) that some of Theory got a free pass 20-30 years ago precisely because it seemed to be associated with the most exciting and prolific people in the humanities, whereas the anti-Theory crew seemed to be composed chiefly of cranks and curmudgeons...(more)

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Why are they biting the valve? Do they want what's in the pipe?

Also, the WBM passage cited confirms my opinion of last night that he reads Derrida seriously:

http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2005/11/walter_benn_mic.html

That said, that passage doesn't do justice to WBM's argument: it needs to be contextualized alongside his discussion of De Man.

[Scagonetti]

Your OS and the network protocol doesn't have a problem reading "post"

[Adam Kotsko]

Most of the interesting things about human life cannot be usefully translated into formal logic or computer programs. Or if they can, it's up to the "formal logic fundamentalists" to prove it.

It seems to me that Derrida goes to great lengths to show that if the meaning of the text cannot be controlled, it cannot be controlled _in a very specific way_. There are _specific_ slippages in each of the texts that he analyzes. And one could certainly read his passion for ambiguous words and polyvalent coinages as precisely an attempt to control what is going on in his texts -- to give one the impression that the work of deconstruction has already been done on his own texts, such that you don't even need to bother attempting it.

The idea that Derrida is advoacting some kind of boundless arbitrarity is simply ridiculous -- even moreso the idea that he is an advocate of "identity politics," a movement that needs to just fucking die already.

[Matt]

Word to Adam.

WBM seems to read D just a wee bit simplistically (perhaps following Rorty? I don't know). But this book came out last year, really?

Obviously, erm, disagreement is still possible, and the 'mark' does not subsume everything in a pure totalitarian performativity, one that forever exchanges understanding for "effects." Those would seem like pretty tired insinuations to me. But I need to read more.

Dunno, Scott. Honestly a lot of LB's comments in that thread (and elsewhere) struck me as rather dead-on. But I was only skimming, you know, and perhaps somewhat predisposed to pick a side, as seemed the offer..You write, of WBM:

"In academia, he is considered Anti-Christ by the Theory crowd..."

Could someone give an example of this crowd, please?

[Charles]

I can think of at least three different insinuations for the title. They are each funny.

[Scagonetti]

--most code-- say C++--was of course designed and defined ostensively but works fine within a given context).

[ben wolfson]

most code-- say C++--was of course designed and defined ostensively but works fine within a given context

Now, there are a number of possible interpretations of this statement, and none of them really makes senseto the point that I'd say none of them is even a plausible interpretation. The one most nearly approaching plausibility, given the use of the name of a language, is that C++, the language, was designed and defined ostensively. However, this makes no sense. Not only was it not designed ostensively (how could it have been, since something new was coming into existence?), its ANSI/ISO definition certainly didn't proceed by pointing to a bunch of things that were C++. For one thing, the language semantics changed in the process of standardization. It's certainly possible that in some cases the committee would have been able to point to a particular compiler and say that what it did was the right behavior, but when they were defining new behaviors, they couldn't do that. Or when something was left implementation-dependent; that's basically a disavowal of the possibility of ostensively demonstrating the correct behavior. Of course, the "given context" remark doesn't make much sense here.

Another possibility is that you mean code written in C++. I suppose one could speak of black-box reverse engineering as designing a program by ostention: you take down the behaviors of a given program, and hand them over to someone else, and say, make me a program that does this.

[ben wolfson]

Since y'all apparently strip comments of HTML, there are some words that are run together in my comment above. Em dashes were supposed to intervene.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Adam, one of the things that must be said about WBM is that he's a literary scholar, not a philosopher; thus, his criticisms of De Man and Derrida emerge from that discourse. I think the amorphous quality of "theory/Theory/THEORY!!!" leads to much talking at cross-purposes. WBM demonstrates why, as literary scholars, certain deconstructive ideas are unsound...which is why I said that if you read that passage outside of its De Manian context, your impression of WBM would be skewed. He's talking about the implications of the De Manian (i.e. "deconstructive," not necessarily "Derridian") idea of the materiality of the signifier, and demonstrating that, if applied rigorously, it precludes all interpretations in a way that even Derrida wouldn't find tenable. In other words, your point about Derrida being, essentially, a "close reader" who sees in texts implications their authors missed reiterates WBM's critique: for Rousseau's texts to deconstruct themselves, they must present a series of identifiable claims to be countered by the deconstructive reading. Those claims must be attributed and attributable to Rousseau, lest we end up saying that one interpretation invalidates another interpretation. Derrida's interested in how a particular claim structure undermines itself, and WBM builds his case against the materiality of the signifier on those grounds.

To reiterate: Adam, your complaint about WBM hitching Derridian thought to the star of identitarian politics is misguided; WBM criticizes the identitarian appropriation of Derridian thought. In short, I don't think it's right to criticize him for attacking the same illegitimate appropriation you attack...esp. when he does so for the same reasons you criticize him for doing so. In other words, I think all you philosophical types are defending on principle what WBM attacks in practice. (This should be a prelude to a response to the post on the Weblog on Butler, but another time.)

Matt, I've seen Derrida and WBM argue (both on a panel and at dinner afterwards), and I can assure you that Derrida didn't think WBM simplified his arguments. (Sorry, that sounds like pulling rank, but watching WBM and Derrida discuss the merits of deconstruction is one of the seminal events of my intellectual development--those two are brains, I tell you, BRAINS!) By which I mean, since Derrida took WBM's criticisms seriously (as did Spivak, and all the other contributors to the Against Theory anthology), I think it best if we do too. Because, much as I respect you and Adam and put the bicycle pump I apply to my own self-worth, we can't spit in the direction of Derrida or WBM without the whole world laughing at us. People wonder why I'm humble, and I always tell them the same thing: I'VE BEEN HUMBLED.

As for the crowd, well, this isn't one of those things that gets published (except by scholars of the stature of Jameson), but I can assure you that in my department, the reaction to WBM's talk and seminar here was, shall we say, "violent." (Full disclosure: because my advisor is one of WBM's students, I was WBM's slave when he was here. Driving him to and from the airport, picking him up at the hotel, &c.) People in English departments (and, to be fair, I shouldn't generalize) talk about WBM as if "Against Theory" meant "against theorizing" or they see him as someone schooled in deconstructive thought...and 99% of them take the title of his essay at face value and "pffft" him. Yes, I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I think y'all know me well enough by now to trust what I say about the composition of English departments.

P.S. LB and I are friends, so I know he hasn't filed for divorce from the Valve. And while I know that me and, well, everyone else disagree about the merits of McCann's thought, I want to reiterate that Sean's a devoted scholar, a rigorous and honest researcher, and someone who, had I three wishes, I would wish to be in the same intellectual class as...I just think, as Kenneth keeps on telling me, that the medium's wonking the message here...

[Adam Kotsko]

I don't see how it's supposed to be incoherent to say that a deconstructive reading depends on what we might call a "normal" reading whereby we attribute intentions to a particular author, etc. It's obvious -- that's what he is in fact doing. I don't think Derrida is making claims that somehow disallow him from doing that -- then there's also the "guardrail of traditional criticism" and all that.

This might not work as a response to what you've said.

[Adam Kotsko]

Can't the spam testing thing leave behind a cookie or something? It's late at night -- I want sweets.

[Adam Kotsko]

Alright, apparently it does.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

If "you" is "me" and not "The Drool," then I don't think it directly responds to what I've said. I don't think the Derridian assumption, or WBM's application of it, incoherent. That said, I think WBM's defense of it a significat ancillary addendum to the Derridian argument. To say that an undermined argument implies the existence of an originary argument to be undermined doesn't discredit Derrida's project so much as challenge it...which is what I think anyone who seriously studies Derrida's life-work should do.

I feel obliged to note that my reading of both Derrida and WBM is heavily informed by the study of Critical Inquiry I did this past summer prior to writing my evaluation of the Theory's Empire anthology...and that, as I wrote, I thought the tenor of the debate in the late '70s far more expansive than most of what we see today. By which I mean, WBM and Derrida brandished arguments in the '70s, whereas thems that learned from them beat each other senseless with orthodoxy now.

Again, I want to reiterate that I'm not saying any of this dismissively; I want to encourage discussion, not choke it off...and I hope that my tedious repetition of said point makes my intentions annoyingly clear.

[Charles]

Scott, thanks for the comments and the anecdotes.

I agree that even the 70s were sometimes better than what we often have today. And maybe now it's time for something else?

[Matt]

Scott, point taken about humility. In my defense I might state: this is also just a blog.

I notice that practically the entire WBM book is available through that link to Google Print, er, BookSearch!, if more context is desired.

[Ray Davis]

I don't like to repeat myself (except by supplying a URL), to respond to flamers, or to issue "Me too" posts and comments. I don't have the time, and if I did have the time, I don't have the inclination, and if I did have the inclination, I've had enough experience to realize that it would make me unhappy. So I usually don't show up in those Sean McCann threads.

But I do always seek out Luther-7's comments, because I find them intelligent, well-written, informative, and agreeable. I'm very glad to hear that they won't disappear entirely.

(By the way, is s/he really the seventh Luther Blissett, or is the name his/her tribute to the original seventh?)

[Charles]

(As a side note on "Scagnatti" see here:

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/you_must_try_again_till_you_get_it_right/#3447 )

[Matt]

Sorry, I don't mean to be proud, or rude, but would someone please care to flesh this out a bit for me? WBM:

"To put the point in an implausible (but nonetheless, I will try to show, accurate) form, it means that if you hold, say, Judith Butler's views on resignification, you will also be required to hold, say, George W. Bush's views on terrorism – and, scarier still, if you hold Bush's views on terrorism, you must hold Butler's view of resignification. The position, then, that you take about whether those eight-six blank pages should count as part of the text will generate other positions – not only on terrorism but also on more obviously literary questions like whether texts have more than one meaning, as well as on more generally social questions like whether it is important that we should (or whether it is true that we can) remember historical events like slavery and the Holocaust. And, to turn things around, the position you hold on the significance of the Holocaust will generate a position on whether the eighty-six blank pages must count as part of Thomas Shepard's Autobiography...

"...the experience of a speech act and the interpretation of it have always been and will always be overlapping but not identical entities. On the other hand, the privileging of the experience, which is to say the widespread effort to redescribe the interpretation as the experience [!] and, in effect (as I will argue), to get rid of the notion of interpretation altogether [!!?] is a historical phenomenon. And the fact that this theoretical argument (or, as it seems to me, mistake) has been accompanied by a proliferation of novels (like Morrison's Beloved or Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead) that not only repeat the privileging of experience over belief [!] but seek to extend it to the possibility of our experiencing (rather than learning about) [!] things that never actually happened [!] to us is also a historical phenomenon...[?]" (The Shape of the Signifier, pp.13-14, 2004, see link above)

Do people really find this kind of thinking seductive? I mean, God, he sort of misses the point (of both Beloved and 'deconstruction') pretty much entirely. Just sayin'.

[Bureaurat]

Ben, and everyone:

HTML is now allowed. Go nuts.

[Ray Davis]

About Benn Michaels, I got nothin'. Nothing he's written has interested me enough to respond, much less seduced me. About all I can say is that I've gotten more from attacks on his writing than from defenses of his writing.

Insofar as this is a problem, it's clearly my personal problem since other people seem to get very excited over the fellow. Maybe my problem lies in what Scott says about him being (by nature?) a literary scholar first? It could be that a literary scholar trying to banish annoying creators, philosophers, and the politically concerned (ducking "efficacious" for now) from the Republic of Letters just isn't very practical. Maybe, like Plato (except for the not-interesting-me part), he'll just end up embodying what he's trying to eliminate? I mean, he says he wants redistribution of wealth, but there he is concentrating instead on the fallacies of identity-based interpretation and attacking affirmative action. (By the way, speaking as a white former lower-class kid [whether construed economically or culturally], I'm all for affirmative action. Yeah, class barriers are a big problem in America and getting bigger all the time, but racism has always stabilized them.) He says "there's no one writing today whom I admire more than Susan Howe," but he hasn't exactly devoted himself to obtaining more appreciative readers for her. If you spend half your time trying to stop discussion of political constructions like race and gender or philosophical problems of language, and the other half denying that you want to talk about politics or philosophy, what's that leave you? Hugh Kenner was dullest when he got curmudgeonly -- seems like Benn Michaels might have done better emulating his interesting side.

(This has been a Shit and Garbage [tm The Weblog] Comment.)

[ben wolfson]

(By the way, is s/he really the seventh Luther Blissett, or is the name his/her tribute to the original seventh?)

I thought "Luther Blissett" was a name available to anyone who wanted to take it? A number of contributions to O'Reilly's Python Cookbook are from some one or ones by that name.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt,

In first passage you cite, Michaels discusses Hegelian seriousness: if you take the premises seriously, then you have to acknowledge these results. He's doing so in the context of dismantling De Man's argument about the materiality of the signifier. That example is from the introduction; later in the book he demonstates why he thinks his examples the case. I don't have my copy in the office, but I'll find the relevent passages when I get home.

The second citation is more complicated: but fortunately for me, already discussed it at some length. Here's the relevent part:

Michaels argues that ideas of "special inheritance" and the "materiality of the signifier" inevitably slide into identity politics. I'll tackle the more complicated, less convincing case first. What Michaels means by "the materiality of the signifier" is a De Manian commitment to the "material vision" of a text. The text becomes a thing, a series of physical marks readers don't interpret but experience. This focus on the experience of the readers leads, inevitably, to identity politics. Building on "Against Theory," Michaels wants to prove that

if you think the intention of the author is what counts, then you don't think the subject position of the reader matters, but if you don't think the intentions of the author is what counts, then the subject position of the reader is the only thing that matters. (11)

That's the Short Version.* This argument hinges on the materiality of the text because, in the first case, you believe that the author of the intention is inscribed in every single copy of the text for anyone to interpret, but in the second, you value your experience with this particular copy of the text and you're the only one who can experience your experience. If this sounds like a strange argument to be making, it's because 1) it is and 2) Michaels is arguing against the position that every last dash, stroke, line and doodle in Emily Dickinson's notebooks is a part of her poems (and that if you only reproduce the words and dashes you're not reading the "real" poems). In other words, he's arguing against the De Manian position that all these marks "count as part of the object...not because they are important to the 'purpose' of the object's maker but because--insofar as they are part of the object's 'sensuous appearance'--they are part of what the reader 'reads' or 'sees' without reference to the maker's purpose" (6). One that necessarily individual experience is privileged, people can't disagree about what a poems mean; they can only discuss the different things it means to them. We can't argue about what it means because it doesn't mean anything, it's only experienced differently by people with different perspectives. And "different perspectives" means "identity politics," because people with different subject positions "can without disagreement give the same mark different meanings" (66).

[Ray Davis]

Well, yeah, Ben, but wasn't someone at some point the seventh person to do so? (Now I'm trying to cast an imaginary Val Lewton production called "The Seventh Luther", which is a good sign that I'd better get back to work....)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Ray,

I obviously disagree. As to why, well, it's involved: he doesn't want to de-politicize ltierary studies, or have it focus more on its specific literary qualities; he wants literary scholars (and, be extension, theorists) to understand the implications of their own arguments. It's the very thing I championed in my TE post, and it's a worthy goal. It's not, as Charles suggested, a return to the '70s so much as a return to an academic culture in which scholars test and refine ideas in an academic community which was more than an echo chamber...and yes, I do think the balkanization of the English department has created a number of tiny, highly specialized echo chambers.

[Amie]

'Its [deconstruction] critique of the subject – its insistence that no one can control the meaning of an utterance – amounts from this perspective to nothing more than a reminder that there are, after all, other subjects.' from the WBM passage above.
This is a pretty amazing statement, on many levels. For one, WBM is ignoring, or rather effacing, Derrida's questioning of Husserlian/phenomenological intersubjectivity, where Derrida argues that others are precisely not alter egos, other subjects.