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

[Matt]

I don't have my copy in the office, but I'll find the relevent passages when I get home.

BookSearch, man. The link. This post had some links!

Well thanks Scott, I think I get the gist of WBM's argument now. But I'm hardly convinced. And what if intention still "counts," but just doesn't account for *everything*. Not to be mundane about it, but I do believe he's posing a false dichotomy.

I mean, maybe these early criticisms of deMan were once useful, perhaps in helping others too, hone and nuance their arguments...but do they really hold up that well? Sorry if that sounds at all snooty, but maybe others with more patience can elaborate on why this fails as a reading of deconstruction in its strongest sense.

All this talk of "understanding" sacrificed upon the alter of "experience" would seem to carry intonations for the New Critics as well, no? Insofar as it's a productively hospitable reading of neither the New Critics nor 'deconstruction', I must say I don't see what WMB's contribution amounts to.

All due respect, I think Derrida was also concerned to understand the implications of his arguments, and did so quite well, and if his once-celebrity at Yale some time ago has produced now an institutionalized empire of echo chambers, then why not just move on to more interesting things (I'm not saying it ever was merely an echo chamber, of course, and to be perfectly honest I could give two shits about the whole ceremonial-backlash "deMan affair" when the alternative is discussing his actual books, etc.) This whole, "Oh, but (maybe) not Derrida himself...only deconstruction, only Fish, only deMan" tick/pseudo-retraction the anti-Theory crowd (to use your word) keep making when challenged is getting on my nerves, mainly because it's facile and one should by now know better, but also, one might add, disingenuous when, up until someone painstakingly points out how an individual gets Derrida just exactly wrong, everything brand-marked "Derrida" or "postmodernism" was fodder for the fire. Sorry, old complaint and I'm ranting..

I appreciate the cultural evolution that makes what first passed for postmodernism (MOOS, ghostdance, Pynchon, Tel Quel, what-have-you?) seem now quaint (and in many cases rightly so), but the mantric jubilation with which "Theory" (for lack of a better word) is repeatedly buried should be enough to make any reasonable person pause. It used to be, anyway. And of course this is nothing some (by then disavowed ) "postmodernists" weren't already claiming back in the mid-90s..("in a last grab for headlines," or so the headlines said)...

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'

Well, but aren't they (part of what the reader reads)? Paratexts is really the word, isn't it?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

BookSearch, man. The link. This post had some links!

Yes, but unless they magically make my heavily annotated copy appear, they won't do me much good.

But I'm hardly convinced. And what if intention still "counts," but just doesn't account for *everything*. Not to be mundane about it, but I do believe he's posing a false dichotomy.

I don't think he'd disagree with that second sentence, but he would qualify it thus: it doesn't count for everything, but it is what we talk about when we talk about a work. In short, the only time anyone ever imagines an authorless text, the move is pure polemics; i.e. the reader wants the text to say something he or she imagines it doesn't say, or unwittingly says, but in that case, they're no longer talking about the text but their experience of it (and their experience is what is valued). And if they're talking about their experience of the text, that's necessarily an individual, unrepeatable and incommunicable thing. You can't experience the same text the same way twice; however, you can interpret the same text the same way twice, the reason being the imputation of authorial intent.

The currently popular model offers, in the end, no grounds for disagreement; if my experience is mine, then it can't be yours, and whatever I say about it can't be refuted by anything you say. That's his point, and I think it a valid one.

All this talk of "understanding" sacrificed upon the alter of "experience" would seem to carry intonations for the New Critics as well, no? Insofar as it's a productively hospitable reading of neither the New Critics nor 'deconstruction', I must say I don't see what WMB's contribution amounts to.

I'm unclear what you mean here. Are you suggesting that WBM wants to restore the reputation of the New Critics? Because he certainly doesn't (as the article in n+1 alerts us to). What he says, simply, is that 1) academia values difference over disagreement, and this is bad because 2) difference doesn't force competing ideologies to come into conflict, and that is good because 3) if they don't--say if Intelligent Design and evolutionary theory are merely differences to be respected--then progressive politics may as well hang up its hat...or retreat into the academy, where they can debate these issues at length without changing the world one whit.

This whole, "Oh, but (maybe) not Derrida himself...only deconstruction, only Fish, only deMan" tick/pseudo-retraction the anti-Theory crowd (to use your word) keep making when challenged is getting on my nerves, mainly because it's facile and one should by now know better, but also, one might add, disingenuous when, up until someone painstakingly points out how an individual gets Derrida just exactly wrong, everything brand-marked "Derrida" or "postmodernism" was fodder for the fire.

The problem is, once you get away from the original Yale Group, the quality of the deconstructive readings does decline. I obviously don't include Michaels in this group--and am loath to name any names--but if you scan through the journals circa '78-'85, you'll see plenty of examples of what I'm talking about. In other words, it's not empty rhetoric. Let me put it to you this way:

Imagine a literary scholar who wrote a dissertation about Hemingway and Fitzgerald picking up Derrida for the first time in 1971. That scholar wouldn't be able to understand the context of Derrida's arguments, their place in the philosophical tradition, &c. He or she wouldn't be prepared to understand its import. Now, if this scholar happened to be someone like Hillis, he or she would then spend a couple of years studying the philosophical tradition, learning what was necessary to understand Derrida; but there's a reason I consider Hillis exceptional: he did more work than 99% of my hypothetical scholars would have done...

...and now you see why there'd be so many poor deconstructive readings out there when Derrida first hit the shores. Subsequent generations of literary scholars, however, were taught more about the philosophical tradition, and thus the situation has improved...but I still oftentimes think deconstructive readings by literary scholars are facile, superficial and could have been accomplished sans the mock-Derridian methodology.

Well, but aren't they (part of what the reader reads)?

They're what the reader sees, but I don't think they're what the reader reads.

[Matt]

Ah, but Scott, surely the authorial intention should be fixed firmly enough in the text itself, without having to consult your subjective scrawlings in the margins!

Thanks for the thoughful and patient reply. We may disagree on some pretty basic levels, but I must say it's always a pleasure doing so. The first time I read your comment it made perfect sense. The second time however I was baffled, and all I wanted to do was intersperse with YKW's.

I'm curious if you followed that link; it elaborates quite well on the idea of paratexts (and without the aid of Derrida!), such as the basic question: does it make any sense at all to speak of texts as themselves a sort of paratext?

Of course it's not that I dispute your impression of 'Derrida/deconstruction' in America during those years, so much as disagree about its lingering malevolence perhaps, if not the degree to which it (the hideously poor readings, that is) even interest me in the first place. To return briefly to the anecdotal, I once had an advisor say to me, after I hinted at these things, that "really, there is nothing more tired now, than the debates over whether there's been some alleged watering-down of Derrida in America" etc,etc. "and revisiting that terrain could not interest me less" (in short, he was unequivocal about wasting time there). As you know, I tend to think he was absolutely right.

Why not aim for something better, and not wallow in that stuff?

Obviously there's a thoroughly sentimental, allegedly "pure" and "subjective" way to speak rather meaninglessly and endlessly about a text (this is the ancient complaint/beam in the eye of English as a "discipline," after all). But does that mean all aesthetic appreciation is irrelevant? That everything 'literary' in a work is purely reducible to its Author's sole intention? Obviously not. So maybe some parenthesis are in order.

As for your list of claims:

1) academia values difference over disagreement, and this is bad because 2) difference doesn't force competing ideologies to come into conflict, and that is good because 3) if they don't--say if Intelligent Design and evolutionary theory are merely differences to be respected--then progressive politics may as well hang up its hat

...well it's a very familiar criticism, isn't it? That pervasive PC-like dogma that says everyone is entitled to their opinion? Derrida certainly doesn't endorse that; on the contrary. I'm curious why you thought I needed to hear this. (Have you read Spurs? Has WBM?)

[Amie]

...one must be attentive to every detail of the letter, the literality of the letter defining here the place of what de Man will call materiality. The literality of the letter situates this materiality not so much because it would be a physical or sensible (aesthetic) substance, or even matter, but because it is the place of prosaic resistance...to any organic and aesthetic totalization, to any aesthetic form. And first of all, I would say for my part, a resistance to every possible reappropriation...The materiality in question - and one must gauge the importance of this irony or paradox - is not a thing, it is not *something* sensible or intelligible; it is not even a matter of the body. As it is not something, as it is nothing and yet it works, cela oeuvre, this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance...At work here is a force of resistance without material substance. This force derives from the dissociative, dismembering, fracturing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter.

-JD, Typewritter Ribbon

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

[Let's try this again!]

Matt,

Why not aim for something better, and not wallow in that stuff?

The basic reason is that it lives on, in an institutional sense, as I mentioned in the thread which would not die. I have to seriously consider the merits of the work's that been done before; it's a professional obligation, and it's one I take seriously (even if I sometimes do so unwillingly). Readers of a given work may encounter mine as readers for a journal, and they may reject an article on account of this lapse in research; same thing with publishing houses . . . and same thing with conference presentations, where they may encounter me and ask whether I'd considered their work seriously. I'm reminded of what James Wood wrote in n+1 about taking arguments seriously: doing so does justice to their author, demonstrates that you've thought their work important enough to wrestle with . . . and on this front, at least, Michaels' argument is valuable because he takes seriously the claims of those he disagrees with, and provides someone like me, who also takes these claims seriously, with a way to counter these arguments respectfully, with something more than the wave of a hand. We're obviously coming at this from entirely different (and, in my case, institutionally inflected) perspectives, but I hope you can see my point. Oh, and I also think his critique of De Man spot on. Those are the implications of De Manian thought, whether he wants them to be or not.

I'm curious if you followed that link; it elaborates quite well on the idea of paratexts (and without the aid of Derrida!), such as the basic question: does it make any sense at all to speak of texts as themselves a sort of paratext?

I did follow the link, but the paratextual apparatus isn't what Michaels addresses here: he speaks to the implications of the reading situation as De Man defines it (and as others, including Butler, have expanded upon). If the texts isn't comprised of words to be read--if it includes blank pages which are not "read" for content but experienced for effect--then we lose the ability to say anything about the text itself and "gain" the ability to blather endlessly about our experience of it. He doesn't believe De Man (or anyone else, for that matter) believes that--he couldn't analyze texts the way he does if he did--and that's his (openly deconstructive, methodologically) point: the argument in favor of the materiality of the signifier falls apart under the weight of its own assumptions; therefore, it shouldn't be the basis of so much contemporary literary theory.

...well it's a very familiar criticism, isn't it? That pervasive PC-like dogma that says everyone is entitled to their opinion? Derrida certainly doesn't endorse that; on the contrary. I'm curious why you thought I needed to hear this. (Have you read Spurs? Has WBM?)

I didn't think you "needed to hear this," but you did ask me to explain Michaels' argument, and that's a part of it. As for Michaels' having read Spurs, I would wager he has (I, however, have not); but what I will say is that Derrida himself frequently acknowledged that deconstruction lacked an immanent politics, and part of Michaels' point is that deconstruction, as a tool, can present us with a series of choices, all of which have political implications . . . and that he believes we've made the wrong ones.

[Matt]

Scott, I appreciate your standing up for the seriousness of Michael's reading of deMan. As I said, I would still need to read more, certainly before casting any more nuanced, and perhaps meaningful judgements. That said, I think the way in which his rhetoric at least lends credence to some popular myths about whatever travels under the name 'deconstruction' may indeed be unfortunate.

Michaels'...provides someone like me, who also takes these claims seriously, with a way to counter these arguments respectfully, with something more than the wave of a hand.

Well ok, I guess I can see the benefit of that, insofar as respect is usually preferable to hand-waving. Here's where I have some problems, on a pretty basic level:

In short, the only time anyone ever imagines an authorless text, the move is pure polemics; i.e. the reader wants the text to say something he or she imagines it doesn't say, or unwittingly says, but in that case, they're no longer talking about the text but their experience of it (and their experience is what is valued).

As usual it seems to come down to one's conception of the (speaking/writing) subject, and such things as whether a decentering ever really amounts to a disappearance or dissolution. There is no such thing as an 'authorless text;' such would indeed be the work of imagination. But nobody is in fact saying that.

[fyi]

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/so_is_this_a_masculine_space/