Thesis Speculations--On a Posthuman Critical Dystopia/Utopia

I have been wracking my brains to figure out what framework I want to use for my exploration of BioArt (and BioArt as a problematic term). I have read several texts from both artists themselves and crtics/theorists who have explored BioArt from the perspective of posthumanism and other angles including Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker, Eduardo Kac, Patricia Piccinini, Steve Baker, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Stelarc, and others. Haraway thinks she finds something powerful in thinking ethics as an 'sf-worlding', which she defines as an "invitation to speculate, imagine, feel, and build something better" in order to nurture a "more just and peaceful other globalization" (92, 3). Eugene Thacker has explored how Net.Art can fulfill a 'critical function' of science fiction in an age where our technoscience has become science fiction. Thacker explicitly mentions groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble. These artistic movements do much to de-mystify science through parody and theoretical texts.

Eugene Thacker extends Frederic Jameson and other critics' thoughts on SF literature to net.Art and "new media" art. My question is whether we can apply this--or at least use Thacker's ideas--to look at Bioart. Thacker argues that the point of net.art and new media art is to take the critical function of SF and "re-insert it back into the discourse of contemporary technoscience."But since we live in an age where the fictions of SF literature have been incorporated into technoscience, the classical literary SF is insufficient to critique technoscience. Technoscience creates imaginative futures, but creates them in the mode of what Thacker calls "actualization." That is, the point of technoscience's narratives are to actualize them uncritically--leaving the criticism to culture, popular opinion, and, most likely, the courts. New Media/net.Art, in contrast, is in the mode of potentialization: "Regarded as potentiality, as the work of imagining critical futures, science fiction is not locked into the narrow path of simply realizing the future or actualizing it" (Thacker 158). Thacker concludes with the main contrast between SF literary art and the New Media art of which he speaks:

Whereas literary science fiction was limited to describing technologies in exrapolative, near future scenarios, new media and net.art contain the capacity to actually embody and utilize these future technologies in radically new ways [and ask] important questions concerning the future of the human-machine relationship. (158)

 A couple things about this. For people like Jameson and Suvin, the actual technologies that are "extrapolated" are not really considered in their concrete possibility. Rather, reading Jameson, we see him trying to see the big picture of an other world that would be alternative to the current system of global capitalism. He looks at the larger structure of the SF work using interpretive frameworks such as the Greimasian square. Thus, what differs is not only the embodiment of these technologies (more on that later), but also that for Thacker, the specific imaginings and extrapolations ask posthuman questions that tie the political to the biological--the biopolitical. As Donna Haraway puts it, the ethics (and perhaps this is another difference between Jameson and Haraway et. al.--complicated material ethics comes up in addition to macro-political orders and alternative worlds and utopias) "is in the whole ontological apparatus, its thick complexity, int he naturecultures of being in technoculture that join cells and people in a dance of becoming" (138, When Species Meet). Perhaps (and I only mention this as something to be explored later) we can explore Jameson's sense of the power of totalization and closure in order to open up new possibilities and that introduced by Nikalas Luhmann, as explored by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism--are they similar? For Jameson, there is a logic of total revolution; for Haraway, the micropolitical contributes to the macro--the metaphor shifts from revolution to terms from biology--ecology, environment, etc.

Aside from these differences (which I believe give more credence to the actual figures in the text rather than as dismissing them as extrapolations or allegories for larger political structures), because bioartists (even more so, I might argue, than net.Artists) participate in the techniques of technoscience and also uses new media in radical ways, they are able to, in the words of Clair Pentecost, change "the nature of art itself and the apparatus of its distribution" which will help to redefine the public's relationship to science (Pentecost 116), helping to erode boundaries "between research conducted within scientific laboratories and experiments taking place outside" (de Costa 376).

In other words,  we might say that whereas literary fiction, according to Jameson, estranges the present by masking it's particular content, new media art (and by extension BioArt) changes it by transforming its form--although this may be too radical of a claim, and a claim I would have to back up with a lot more evidence, particularly due to the importance Jameson ascribes to form in all his work (and the fiction and cultural objects he works with).

Maybe I should stick here with Pentecost's language--these artists attempt to change art's apparatus of distribution. Rather than estranging us from science, or using science as a  trope for a deeper political structure, BioArt at its core seeks to de-mystify science by encouraging participation in the artwork (even though, I suppose, SF invites the same type of criticism). By looking at science fiction as a genre in which the particular technologies "extrapolated" do not really matter--we do an injustice to SF's engagement

I am arguing myself out of my initial claims, but I"ll try and press on, knowing that I may be making unfair distinctions to serve my own ends. Perhaps we can look at another theorist/artist's conceptual distinction, Eduardo Kac. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of the dialogical, Kac reconfigures and radicalizes it. Whereas for Bakhtin, literature is inherently dialogical, Kac literalizes this concept and argues that most literature and even most net.Art (referring back to Thacker) is still monologic--even if it remains interactive:

Naturally, dialogic art is interactive, but dialogism in electronic art must not be confused with interactivity. many interactive electronic artworks are monologic, for example, a CD-ROM, or a self-contained website. (104)

 So perhaps we can say, agreeing with Thacker that there is a distinction to be made, that rhetorical artistic projects that use new media, but are merely websites rather than incorporating performance, "wet" elements, or some sort of 'live' interaction with the audience, are not "dialogic."

Kac's work strives to be "dialogic," which he relates to another key concept, telepresence:

Crucial in the context of dialogic experimentation in the arts is the understanding that radical works of art cannot be limited by visuality; instead they are lived experiences based on contextual reciprocity (the context of the experience as reciprocal; i.e. it enables one to take the intiative to interfere and alter the experience. (Kac 111)

 Thus, artists are the "creators of contexts," rather than a creator of "works." Dialogic art allows the audience to participate and to change the artwork, whereas "interactive" would mean that they follow a set of patterns that cannot be changed. In this sense, then, Sonya Rappaport's quest to "redeem" Kac's artwork Genesis remains, perhaps, "interactive," but not truly dialogic. Her website for the Golem gene shows her plans for the work and allows the reader a kind of freedom to navigate the website and interpret what she is trying to do, but the view of the site is not welcome to change the code of it--that is, "change" the artwork (her work can be found here: http://users.lmi.net/sonyarap/redeeming/index.html.) In contrast, Kac's initial exhibit, allowed users online to click a button in order to change the artwork. He writes in his essay "Genesis,"

Employing the smallest gesture of the on-line world--the click--participants can modify the genetic makeup of an organism located in a remote gallery. This unique circumstance makes evident, on the one hand, the impending ease with which genetic engineering trickles down into the most ordinary level of experience. On the other, it highlights the paradoxical conditions of the nonexpert in the age of biotechnology. To click or not to click is not only an ethical decision, but a symbolic one [. . .] In either case, the participant faces an ethical dilemma and is implicated in the process. (252)

--But it needs to be said: I can no longer "participate" in this artwork--I am an outside viewer, trying to understand and interpret the artwork purely from its documentation. A question: once the artwork is "over" --once the performance is done--does the artwork remain "dialogic"? Or does the artwork become just as "monologic" as the website or piece of literature---maybe even more so (the website is still 'interactive'). In other words, do the distinctions Thacker made between literary creation and net.Art/new media art still hold and do Kac's work maintain a "dialogic" dimension in his sense? What is the significance of Kac's engagement of the "nonexpert" in terms of the demystification and democratization of science?

To begin to address these questions I plan to look at some of the arguments in Jens Hauser's brilliant essay in Tactical Biopolitics, "Observations on Art of on an Growing Interest: Toward a Phenomenological Approach to Art Involving Biotechnology."  More on that in another blog post.


I'd like to explore these very issues in terms of Kac's work, but also that of the Critical Art Ensemble, and especially the Tissue Culture and Art Project, led by Oron Catts and Ionatt Zurr.

An Apology to Frederic Jameson: On de Man, Politics, and Ethics

I'd like to  apologize for my criticisms of Jameson's "rhetoric" and his interpretation of Paul De Man. After finishing in its entirety Allegories of Reading, I re-read Jameson's comments on De Man and the "writing" seemed to open up to me such that it makes sense. The reason for my naive and angry reading of Jameson had several motivations, but is at least twofold:

1.) I had not read Allegories of Reading, so that some of the links Jameson made seemed a bit random and arbitrary rather than necessary for the argument. This opinion has since been remedied.

2.) I was trying to read Jameson inebriated. A silly thing to do, even though I've heard that he has an affinity for the bottle as well. 

Anyway, I'd like to give Jameson's evaluation the care it deserves. Perhaps the key point to Jameson's reading of De Man is given in the following passage:

We must therefore read DeMan's aesthetic against a larger historical context in which it offers the spectacle of an incompletely liquidated modernism: the positions and the arguments are 'postmodern,' then, even if the conclusions are not (Jameson 255).

Essentially, Jameson sees De Man as saving the aesthetic and literary aspects of language while at the same time eliminating the 'usual' meaning of these categories. Jameson writes, " Aesthetic experience is thus valorized, but without those tempting aesthetic pleasures that always used to seem its very essence" (255). There's an "acetism" in De Man that rejects the kind of sensuousness and sentimentalism associated with aesthetics.  

But for Jameson, the primary achievement of postmodernism is its non-privileging of the literary--culture (art, film, architecture, music, etc.) becomes a text just like anything else. Thus, Jameson criticizes what he calls De Man's "metaphysics," which are trapped in distinctions between 'referent' and 'fiction', even as De Man's discourse seeks to solict (in the sense Derrida uses, 'to shake' or 'rattle') this binary. 

Jameson argues that De Man's aesthetics basically implies a politics of liberalism, characteristic of the high-modernist aesthete, and the "apolitical aesthete at that" (257). Jameson also rightly acknowledges De Man's modernist interest in Irony, as this is the value/term that ends his text, Allegories of Reading. 

But Jameson too has his own assumptions (can we call it metaphysics?) concerning representation: “every ‘system’ of thought (no matter how scientific) is susceptible to representation (De Man would have called it ‘thematization’)” (Jameson 245). But does this not shut off the possibility of “reading” in the sense that De Man has opened for us? Can we represent everything in a system of thought or in a “position” (see previous posts on Derrida, Muckelbauer)? Is there not an impossibility of  what Jamesonc calls “transcoding”?

How does De Man get around discussion of politics? For Jameson, any aesthetics implies a politics (as it does for Kenneth Burke). However, we may question this primacy given to political commitment--can we not? 

But before we get into that, let me discuss a passage in De Man that may give us some guidance with respect to De Man's views on politics (his liberalism). De Man writes, with regard to Rousseau)

We know from empirical experience that the individual is subjected to a more stringent legal control than the executive power which has much more leeway in its actions and initiatives, in international politics, for example, where it is expected to resort to war and to violence ina  manner that could not be tolerated in relationships between individuals. Rousseau accounts for this  by stressing that the private interests of the individual have nothing in common with his political, public interests and obligations (De Man 265).

To me, this passage sounds like a distinction Richard Rorty would make between the private and the public sphere—a classically liberal position. Does Rousseau really think this? If so, it just confirms what we already know about Rousseau—he was a ‘liberal’ thinker.

To excuse his disengagement with “politics,” De Man then will shift from pathos that he finds in some writing to ethics, which is intimately connected with what he calls "rhetoric." De Man's "ethics" is a different from what we generally conceive of as ethics (or my own discussions of ethical responsibility in Levinas). De Man’s emphasis lies in the rhetorical etymology of ethics. He writes,

But in the allegory of unreadability, the imperatives of truth and falsehood oppose the narrative syntax and manifest themselves at its expense. The cancatenation of the categories of truth and falsehood with the values of right and wrong is disrupted affecting the economy of the narration in decisive ways. We can call this shift in economy ethical, since it indeed involves a displacement from pathos to ethos. Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems [. . .] The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a transcendental imperative [Kant?] but is the referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should say, ethnicity) is a discursive mode among others. (De Man 206, italics mine)

Ethos is also related, in Aristotelian rhetoric, to “credibility.” This squares with De Man’s discussion of Rousseau’s text Julie as playing with the authority of author. What does this “ethnicity” imply for reading? Do we sense that there is a moral dimension (rather than an overtly political position) in De Man that we should look for? Perhaps this still makes his readings useful, interesting, and potentially fruitful? 

I am not sure this is the case, but it seems to me that De Man maybe be flirting with what Kenneth Burke calls the ethicizing of language. I hope to investigate this relationship further at another time.

For now, it may be worthwhile to end with Jameson’s attempt at “representing” De Man’s methodology or ‘theory’ in Allegories of Reading:

 If such a theory exists (if it is not, in other words, simply a question of a useful and portable opposition), then it consists in positing two distinct moments of the deconstructive narrative, the second succeeding the first and incorporating it at some higher dialectical level of complexity. First, the initial metaphor is undone—undermined as soon as it has been posited by some deep suspicion of this particular linguistic act. Yet in a second moment, that very suspicion washes back over the first and becomes generalized: what was at first only acute doubt as to the viability of this particular resemblance and this particular concept—a doubt about speaking and thinking—now becomes a deeper skepticism about language in general, about the linguistic process, or about what De Man calls reading, a term which usefully excludes general ideas about Language itself. (242)

On the one hand, it seems that Jameson has succeeded in “representing” Paul de Man’s methodology. But on the other hand, we may ask if this thing we call “reading” is just as enigmatic and complex as De Man thinks it is. Perhaps reading is something a bit more than transcoding? Perhaps there is something to say for “literary” language? And perhaps it is impossible to decide between these two options. . .

De Man, Jameson, and Derrida

Let us look at Paul de Man, who Jameson will engage in Postmodernism as well as a bit in his discussion of Irony in Archaeologies of the Future (although I feel like I never understand Jameson’s point—except perhaps in Archaeologies). De Man takes a kind of “tragic” view of the relationship between what we will call ‘fiction’ and the ‘world.’ Jameson, in one of the more lucid passages from Postmodernism, critiques De Man’s use of these rather antiquated categories in such an age of post-modern discourse. James writes, “If narrative theory today has accomplished anything substantial, it is to have powerfully displaced the old category of the ‘fictive’. For the moment, however, it is enough to signal the operative presence in DeMan’s texts of older categories like ‘fiction’ or ‘irony’ which the Derridan text does not seem particularly to respect or acknowledge” (226). Jameson doesn’t really offer any justification for this, but just claims that it is so. In my opinion, at least De Man is charitable enough to offer such distinctions and evaluations rather than to move through texts without any attempt at argument (which is, I believe, the kind of thing Jameson constantly engages in and the very thing that frustrates the living hell out of me).

What’s interesting to me is the contrast between Derrida and De Man comes up as a sort of ‘implied’ reading of Derrida that Jameson does not really develop much. Perhaps he develops it more in Postmodernism, but I honestly just stopped reading. De Man himself has already admitted in an interview that he does not pretend to come at problems in such a “philosophical manner” as Derrida. It’s a relief to read De Man’s humble words:

The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text. . . I am a philologist and not a philosopher” (“An Interview” 118).

And so, I believe, Jameson creates these false problems and false distinctions. Although, to his credit, part of Jameson’s purpose seems to refute the position that De Man and Derrida are similiarly engaging in deconstruction. I do admit that when Jameson was writing Postmodernism, such assumption in American Criticism were rampant. So to say it is a “false problem” is a bit presumptuous of me, as Jameson wrote Postmodernism when I was 3.

 It is important that we recognize that De Man was a contemporary of Jameson at Yale.  As Lindsay Water writes, De Man created “a situation that allowed for the training under the cooperative tutelage of de Man, Hartman, Bloom, Miller, Derrida, Jameson, and Felman of a number of doctoral students” (liii).  But De Man doesn’t seem to want to engage in philosophical problems. Jameson (I suppose) rightly criticizes him for verbal techniques in his text that try and restore a sense of immanence of reading bypassing the intrusion of history, but one can easily point to Jameson’s own rhetoric as trying to side-step actually making an argument or an evaluation. Jameson has a tendency to use eulogistic (to use Burke’s appropriation of Bentham’s terminology) terminology to refer to other’s readings only to mark them as insufficient. There’s a kind of bad faith going on Jameson where he looks favorably upon someone’s position only to pretend to take a position transcending the works he mentions. Whereas De Man relinquishes the authoritative voice he adopts in his own writing in an interview to praise Derrida, Jameson will offer the praise, but takes a bird’s eye view without, to my mind, justifying it. Jameson asserts without arguing—his is an implicit critique of the texts he works with, or, if you prefer (to use a Jamesonian rhetorical device) an appropriation of figures and texts to serve his own agenda. I find that I am closer to De Man in the authority I give a text over me as an interpreter: I like the text to hold sway over my thoughts and over what I am able to do with it. I think Derrida’s most successful deconstructions operate in this way. 

De Man, Jameson, Burke: Irony

Irony

An old teacher of mine, ironically, hammered in his definition of irony and made us repeat it several times: “A statement or event in which the opposite is said or the unexpected happens.” As I reflect on the meaning of irony as a nascent literary critic and academic, I find that this definition really doesn’t nail irony. A statement in which the opposite is said, perhaps, but the opposite is said but really means the opposite of the opposite (to put it pseudo-dialectically). “the opposite is said”—the opposite of what one intended? In this case, would the well-worn joke about Freudian slips constitute irony? “I mean to say please pass the peas, but I really said ‘you fuckin bitch you ruined my life”?

The definition give by Mr. T. (not the Mr. T. you are thinking of) seems to distinguish between two types of irony: verbal and actual. Of course, this is inadequate considering what we call “dramatic irony,” which is concerned with the relative position of an observer of a play or action. We seem to want to describe irony or the situation, but is not the criteria of irony a kind of feeling? Before you rise up in arms against me, I am not trying to equate irony with some sort of Cartesian (or, in this age, Bergsonian) idea of “intuition.” But, we will say to something “isn’t that ironic?” Or, Alanis Morissette will claim that it is ironic when “its like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.” Morissette tells the story of a man who “played it safe” took a flight (which he was petrified of) and the plane ends up crashing. So—is irony a sort of cruelness of fate? We say sometimes that is “cruelly ironic.” Is this what irony consists in? My god, perhaps Socrates should have asked Euthyphro to define irony rather than Piety does this statement involve itself in ‘irony’ because Socrates is sometimes considered a great ‘ironist’ himself? I do not know and without a clear definition I cannot decide for or against.

In the literary world, irony is one of those concepts that keeps coming up again and again—people deride it and praise it equally. Irony—is it the lack of sincerity? Of aesthetic authenticity? Let us look at some ‘definitions’ (although I hesitate to call these definitions—perhaps, “characterizations” is in order?).

Fredric Jameson characterizes Irony in terms of a Greimasian rectangle in his essay “Synthesis, Irony, Neutralization and the Moment of Truth.” Irony in terms of the G. rectangle is the “complex term,” the “ideal synthesis” rather than the neutral term (which Jameson tries to pinpoint). Irony,

Which promises if not to reconcile the fundamental opposition in question (Art and Life, Private and Public, City and Country, Mind and Body) then at least to allow us to think and practice both at the same time. Irony is thus also a way of unifying opposites. (179)

I have always described the effect of irony as a “stopping” of the mind. . .its like when the dialectic stalls and a pleasureful ‘ironic’ feeling passes over one and action never takes place. Irony is characteristic of the Modernist spirit for Jameson, which is principled on “the modernist value of reflexivity” (178). This reflexivity, for Jameson, exemplifies a state of inaction because it’s a fiction of having one’s cake and eating it too. In political terms, “you can at one and the same time believe in the importance of politics and embrace everything we might lose if we indulged in political practice” (179). Thus, Irony is, for Jameson, a moment of indecision. . .but a moment of indecision that is pleasureful and fulfilling.

In contrast, Jameson wants to offer a vision of the “neutral” term which, rather than “both and” is “neither/nor” and that stays in the realm of the negative. The neutral term, it seems, can only be figured rather than concretely realized. . it is the realm of possibility. This is the space of utopian possibility.

 Its interesting to me that the neither/nor, the negative, gets figured as such a utopian space. The neither/nor –the negative moment—seems similar to what Ernst Bloch calls “the not-yet-conscious.” A sort of objective real possibility, which, though it takes work and effort to realize, is still a possibility. Bloch strives toward hope rather than fear and despair. Bloch is a hopeful Heidegger, which is no Heidegger at all (I'm far from saying that one has to be a Heidegger)

Anyway, I have gotten further away from my first subject: irony. Jameson seems to believe we need to—if you’ll excuse the word—transcend irony. Actually, the better way to frame this is that we need to go in the opposite direction, toward the negative.

But is Irony really a synthesis--the both/and term? That we hope for such terms to break out of fiction into the empirical world and as such transform it? Gerald Raunig in his recent book A Thousand Machines argues that Soviet Theater created such tension without catharsis in order for the catharsis to occur in the streets (his own work, while acknowledging this historical precedent, does not engage this question).  I always thought this hope of a new world order was kind of silly; not because it could not be achieved, but because our writing about it seems a bit like we hope and we hope and we hope for this one thing to happen, for this world to usher in, but then to cover our ass, realize its inevitable failure.  We make this failure an impetus to more hoping, hope for change, hope for a recognition and transformation of the System of Systems, which Jameson would name Global Capitalism.

Jameson may be correct that irony resolves conflicts without action—that it allows for some sort of stagnation; indeed, as I characterized above, it seems that irony results in what can only be called an intellectual and perverse satisfaction in a situation that has occurred. Perhaps I am a bit too modernist and perhaps I am too satisfied with aesthetic satisfaction. However, I do want to be cautious of my use of the word “aesthetic,” since De Man’s Literary Theory comes into being

when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations or, to put it somewhat less crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment. (7)

Rather than aesthetic criteria, De Man argues that we should look at the rhetorical effects: “It is a rhetorical rather than an aesthetic function of language, an identifiable trope that operates on the level of the signifier and contains no responsible pronouncement on the nature of the world” (10). I have been trying to grasp how this relates to Burke’s notion of rhetorical language and his analysis of the rhetorical moments in poetry. De Man writes that language has an ‘autonomous potential’ which “can no longer be said to be determined by consideration of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain” (10). I’m not sure what to make of this passage in light of Burke’s ideas about the motives of language. Is De Man saying that language forces us to feel the illusion of the word’s connection to these abstract ideas? In that sense, De Man would follow Burke in divorcing the symbolic world from the non-verbal. Furthermore, De Man’s sense of the negative is in line with Burke. As Burke says, “man must spontaneously recognize that his word for a thing is not that thing” (Burke, “Dramatistic View” 461). As Jameson would say, ‘we shall see’ that it is no coincidence that De Man hoped to write on Burke before his death when we reach our discussion of irony. Furthermore, we can understand Jameson's understanding of irony as the ideal unifying of opposites, since metaphor/trope is both the thing and not the thing. The interesting part to me is to work on how these two things are different--how the negative functions--rather than dismiss this as a fruitless task. This is, I believe, what Burke does so damn well. 

But let us return to De Man. In her introduction to De Man’s work and life, Lindsay Waters argues that although De  Man’s had a radical turn in thought involving the place of rhetoric, he remained committed to the problems of interiority. According to Waters, De Man disliked what he say as the Modernist emphasis on connecting the subject and the object through finding a symbolic objective correlative that reconciles art and fiction, which was also the kind of resolution sought by the New Critics. For De Man, “the separation of subject from object was absolute” (Waters xliv). Waters  makes a distinction between Eliot’s modernism and De Man’s work. De Man’s ‘interiority’ or ‘inwardness’ is not about psychology—it has nothing to do with the ego. Rather, De Man follows Hegel (particularly through Kojeve, under the influence of Heidegger):

This abstract consciousness is exactly what the heterodox tradition de Man emulated would focus upon, even though the difficulties of keeping clear the distinction between the ontological self and personal self and keeping the notion of consciousness strictly impersonal would prove difficult given the pathos inherent in phrases like ‘unhappy consciousness and the use of the idea of death. (xxxvi)

Perhaps we can say that the Modernists attempted to make their personal fiction, which was always contaminated by the specific ego’s choice of objective correlatives, the criteria for the world. This is close to the position of Kenneth Burke, who sees poets implicitly arguing for their way of looking at the world—to make the world personal. The world becomes a means of expressing one’s own interior ego, but not consciousness as a self-reflective process. It is this self-reflexivity that Jameson argues is characteristic of modernism. But is this Eliot’s Modernism? To me, it seems that by sucking the consciousness out of the poem, Eliot makes the world a reflection of the personal whereas De Man’s reading of the Romantics argues that in some sense they are trying to empty the consciousness of the personal ego to explore, in a Hegelian manner, the movement of consciousness itself.

We need have this background for De Man’s understanding of irony in “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” For De Man, irony reveals a fundamental distance:

The act of irony [. . .] reveals the existence of a temporality that is definitely not organic, in that it relates to its source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for no end, for no totality [. . .] It can only restate and repeat it on a n increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world.

Indeed, if we know anything about Jameson, we can see how a passage like this would be a bit prickly, because it cuts off fiction from making any real change in the outside world; it denies ‘totality’ and it denies the possibility of fiction leading to (or figuring) utopia.

Jameson’s project involves ridding us of a sort of decadent self-reflexivity of the nature of language. De Man is fine with living that contradiction, maintaining even in “Resistance to Theory” a separation between language and reality:

Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge ‘reality,’ but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source about anything but its own language

Theory for De Man is different than Theory for Jameson (who says in Postmodernism that this ‘resistance’ to theory is De Man’s theory). Theory for De Man involves not only a “reading” of a text, but that theory concerns the act of reading itself. Whereas Jameson wants to move past the reading toward the neutral term, the utopia, the new world order, I get the sense that De Man wants to stay within the reading. Whereas Jameson gets from narrative theory a kind of justification to transcode, De Man still puts (admittedly, perhaps a metaphysical) faith in a distinction between the realm of language and the empirical world.

 Let us see if Burke’s view of irony jives with De Man’s. Burke argues, “Irony is the most obvious specific example of the implied feeling for the negative” (461). The negative, for Burke, is also the condition of the possibility for metaphor: “For we could not properly use a metaphor unless, as with the closely related trope, irony, we spontaneously knew that things are not as we literally say they are” (462). We are seduced and persuaded by our metaphors so that “if we find that, over a long stretch of time, a given person’s metaphors all seem to be pointing the same direction, we can legitimately suspect that there is a compulsion within the freedom” (462). Thus, we can understand De Man as making a similar move when he argues that this tropic element of language is its resistance to the world, revealing the rift between the “symbol using, abusing, and making” animal (man) and the surrounding world.

I am not sure which side I am on, but I am attracted to De Man’s willingness to read.