Derrida's "Typewriter Ribbon Limited Ink (2)

Derrida’s text sends me, machine-like, metonymically (?), to re-read and re-think previous texts of his and of others. For example, Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, writes,

For the moment, however, it is enough to signal the operative presence in DeMan’s texts of older categories [my emphasis] like ‘fiction’ or ‘irony’, which the Derridean text does not seem particularly to respect or acknowledge. Derrida’s interest (to summarize it overhastily) bears not on the fictionality of the ‘experience’ of the past that Rousseau’s account seems to presuppose but on the internal contradictions of his formulations” (226).

Jameson reads DeMan’s text, as I have mentioned in previous blog posts, as a kind of aufhebung of the primacy of the aesthetic rather than its erasure: “it is certain that DeMan’s form of deconstruction can be seen as a last-minute rescue operation and a salvaging of the aesthetic” (251). For Jameson, this is DeMan’s insistence on reading, an action that Jameson sees as a way to erase larger social, historical, and political contexts. Jameson sees “reading” as that saving gesture of the aesthetic—a seemingly outdated process (which Jameson prefers to replace with “transcoding”) that he puts in quotation marks (we are getting closer to the Derridean text). Jameson argues that DeMan covers up his politics with this “reading.”

Perhaps Jameson has refused to “read” de Man’s (and Derrida’s) text. Jameson really does not “need” DeMan’s text as much as Derrida argues that he “needed Paul de Man [. . .] in order to show [. . .] that he had no need of Rousseau in order to show and to demonstrate, himself, what he thought he ought to confide in us” (358). As Derrida points out, Rousseau is used as an example to show what de Man believes is true of writing and texts in general.

Derrida characterizes this trait as a text’s “materiality without matter” (Derrida 352). Materiality is the mechanical aspect of a text that resists being appropriated. Perhaps we could understand this “materiality” as that which makes the text both possible and impossible to read (to be read completely, to have ‘the last word’). The materiality of the Derridean text is what allows me to think each and every time I encounter another, “he discusses this in this text and this text and this text” and which poses the question: did he say it “differently” in that text? Should I go back and re-read those texts? Do I have the time?

The materiality is also that which can be mutilated or destroyed. Derrida’s notion of the text is not ideal—it is always already threatened with mutilation or a break in its integrity. Derrida points to a few places that de Man’s text is subject to a mechanical materiality. For example, de Man decides not to include two words of part of Rousseau’s text: “Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating it or dismembering it in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion? Why does he amputate two of its little words before the period: ‘quite old,’ déjà vieux’” (Derrida 318). Are these omissions as significant as the larger omissions of paragraphs that de Man cuts so that he may say, in a footnote, that “nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection” (de Man qtd. in Derrida 296). Derrida asks how is it that de Man can see this, if it not there? It is obviously not merely nothing. Derrida seems to use such instances as a way to read de Man like de Man is reading Rousseau; Just as de Man claims Rousseau excuses and confesses, Derrida claims de Man makes similar performative gestures. Just as de Man claims Rousseau did not include “precisely stories that narrate mutilations, or, in the metaphor of the text as body, suppressions,” which would threaten the integrity of the text, so Derrida shows that de Man’s own omissions, revealed in footnotes, asides, and mechanical and arbitrary omissions, threaten the integrity of de Man’s own argument—his own text! De Man argues—no, there is nothing in the text that can suggest this association—he closes off reading (something that de Man surely would never “want” to do—but then again, remember, this is mechanical, it is not “unconscious” and has nothing to do with desire—it is merely an event, something that happens, mechanically, arbitrarily). De Man’s insights apply to his own text and Derrida brilliantly brings this out. It is as if one were to say, “ho, wait there, there is nothing in Shelly’s Triumph of Life that could ever have anything to do with Blanchot’s Death Sentence.” But indeed, Derrida has shown that these texts can “love each other.”

But this is not a “failure” of the text—this omission, mutilation, precariousness, perhaps, dare I say, materiality of de Man’s and Derrida’s texts are what make of them textual events. Or, to use de Man’s language, textual events are like  [following Derrida’s emphasis] l’ouevre—works—works in the sense of material work and work as performance, work as act. And here we need to re-read a passage cited above (never, never can I get to the last word). Derrida writes that he “needed de Man” to show that de Man did not “need” Rousseau. But this must be tongue and cheek on Derrida’s part, right? Such would be a pure performative and not an event, not a work. But then again, perhaps we should note that there was nothing essential about Rousseau’s text. Derrida is saying that, like Rousseau with Marion, used the first object presented to him.

Apropos of the previous reflections, is there a meaningful difference between the claims about the ‘work’ in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink” and those claimed for Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Aporias? Or what about the claim about work in “University without Condition.” Derrida writes in Aporias:

In order to welcome into thought and into history such a ‘work’, the event has to be thought otherwise. Being and Time would belong neither to science, nor to philosophy, nor to poetics. Such is perhaps the case for every work worthy of its name; there, what puts thinking into operation exceeds its own borders or what thinking itself intends to present of these borders. The work exceeds itself. (32)

Does the work of de Man “exceed” its own borders? Is this characteristic of texts “in general?”

If this is the case, how can we say, along with Jameson, that the Derridean text excludes such “old categories,” like an “old ribbon,” too old, worn out, dried up and out of ink bound to an outmoded typewriter, textual machine?

Furthermore, if the “materiality” of the de Manian (and, can we extend this to the Derridean?) text is not “matter” than what does that say about the relationship between the bugs in amber and de Man’s text in relation to the arche-fossil? What is the relationship between “realism” (QM) and “materiality” if there is any at all? 

Living On: Borderlines

According to a note in the text, the first version of "Living On" was published in a book that exemplified the "Yale School's" deconstructive method. Apparently, the authors, Derrida included, decided they would give themselves the arbitrary rule that they must "treat of Shelly's long poem The Triumph of Life" (103).

The question I hope to answer is how does Derrida interpret this responsibility. "In other words," how is the essay "Living On" both about and not about Shelly's Triumph of Life. In order to investigate this question, I looked at the recommended reading in Paul De Man's Rhetoric of Romanticism. While I was reading, I was often perplexed at how this related whatsoever to Derrida's essay. But then I realized that in order to get De Man's points, I really needed to read Shelly's poem (at least the finished version). Of course, according to Derrida in "Borderlines," I would also have had  to read all of Blanchot's stories, and his essays including The Step Not Beyond and The Infinite Conversation, and Rousseau, and his own Glas, and parts of Dissemination, and "Ousia and Gramme" (in Margins of Philosophy), and probably more Shelly, and Spenser, and Dante, and and and and and. . . . .perhaps the entire Western Canon?

Of course, this is an impossible task, relating to the "impossible wager" of merely treating Shelly's Triumph of Life (see note on pg 102).

So I contented myself with Shelly, de Man, and Derrida (as well as the Blanchot stories). The best way I found into this question is through de Man. de Man points to the infinite regressive structure (and the re-citative structure) of Shelly's poem as characteristic of all its tropes. The poem is a series of questions that are never answered. When Rousseau asks what is his origin, de Man writes,

[Rousseau] is granted a vision of the same spectacle that prompted the poet narrator's questioning in the first place; we have to imagine the same sequence of events repeating themselves for Shelly, for Rousseau, and for whomever Rousseau chose to question in his turn as Shelly questioned him. The structure of the text is not one of question and answer, but of a  question whose meaning, as question, is effaced from the moment it is asked. (98)

 It is this effacing and "infinite regress" structure that I think "legitimizes" (if such a thing can be said) Derrida's forays into Blanchot's texts, such that they become the focus of the essay. Derrida puts into question the very possibility of remaining within the text of Shelly, affirming that there may be a way in which the two texts "read" each other. This sort of comparative literary analysis, which I am very familiar with, seems to legitimated by many things, but Derrida suggests that it is by the fact of mere language. For instance, in the discussion in "Borderlines" of Blanchot's use of "perfect rose," Derrida muses on the many "roses" in Shelly's Poem (see pg 167 of the essay). Or the connection between Shelly's use of "Brain turning to sand" and the imagery of the "pulse scattering like sand" in Blanchot. Although this would not be "serious" it still seems like there is a connection--an affection at a "distance." This is precisely the wager.


The structural connection I see between Blanchot and Shelly stems from the de Man quote above. This idea of infinite regress, of a repetitive structure that repeats the event within the story. In this sense, perhaps we can ask if Shelly's poem is a recit [?] in Blanchot's sense (Derrida writes: "the Triumph of Life [. . .] belongs in many ways to the category of the recit" pg 112). Rousseau repeats the *same* questions that the narrator of the poem asks and no one is given an answer.


This recitative structure is present also in Blanchot's story, the Madness of the Day, which was initially titled "un recit?" (with a question mark). The narrator begins the story demanded by some forceful men,  "I am not learned. I am not ignorant," which is how the story we as readers read begins as well. It is impossible to tell which came "first." Derrida writes, "it is impossible to say which one cites the other and above all which one forms the border of the other. each includes the other comprehends the other, which is to say that neither comprehends the other" (126).


In the same way, Derrida opens his essay with the question of citing: "In other words on living? This time it sounds to you more surely like a citation" (103). On level, yes, we have already seen this "in other words," but was it in the same context? Can we say that this is a citation of the "first" "in other words on living"? Thus his essay tries to perform the conflict and weird space of "invagination" that he describes. The recit of Madness of the Day has the structure of "the recit of deconstruction in deconstruction" (127). In de Man's language, it is the de-figuring of figuration.



In a way, though, since Madness of the Day re-cites its story verbatim (or is it?), Death Sentence is a better analogy to the Triumph of Life (but can I say analogy?). In Death Sentence, which really should be left in the French: "L'arret de mort." The structure of the l'arret de mort is two "separate" recit's within the same 'title' of "l'arret de mort."


Derrida will ultimately argue that even though we cannot show how these two 'recit's' are connected--indeed, that they may even have entirely different narrators, he thinks that the connection lies in the two women: "they--the two women, the two voiceless voices, tele-phone one another: come. And the relationship, the connection, between the two recits would be telegraphic in nature" (187). The word "telegraphic" can be translated as "that which writes at a distance." Somehow, the language that the two women use connect them--they connect them through the narrator as a kind of "medium."


I keep trying to work out how Derrida arrives at this "mad hypothesis." On one level, we want to connect the two seemingly independent and separate recits, because we want to believe there is a reason for them united under one title: L'arret de mort. We assume the narrators are the same and that these are two different women in his life. Blanchot's language does suggest a connection between these two women, particularly describing them as "statues" or almost like a statue. Derrida picks up this image and runs with it, claiming that "each woman lives off and dies of the other [. . .] each woman preserving the other's narrator" (184).


I suspect that this notion of "preserving" or "monumentalizing" or "statue"-esque themes are why the narrator is so initially disturbed at Nathalie's decision to make a death mask and a cast of her hands. Derrida asks (and qualifies): "Should we say that he gave her the idea of or the desire for the death mask, as he had wished to embalm the other woman, in order to preserve both of them, to keep them alive-and-dead, living on? Yes and no" (189). It is through him that the woman finds the card, but she is the one who finds it, so we cannot simply ascribe agency to the narrator or the woman, exclusively.


This theme of "monumentalizing" brings me back to the de Man reading of Shelly, which it is quite possible Derrida read or knew about (or perhaps these two texts "love" each other): "Is the status of a text like the status of a statue?" (de Man 95). de Man also writes that in order to deal with Shelly (and the Romantics) we "bury them [. . .] to bury them in their own texts made into epitaphs and monumental graves. They have been made into statues for the benefit of future archeologists" (121). How might we understand de Man's reading of Shelly in terms of Derrida and Blanchot?


To me, Derrida's "mad hypothesis" about the two women calling one another to "come" (and, I may add, I cannot but think the erotic connotations of two women telling each other at a distance to "come"), is also the possibility that the two texts, L'arret de mort and Shelly's Triumph of Life call each other, love each other, can be "superimposed" on one another and made to "live on" in a way, perhaps, that does not merely "monumentalize" and bury both Shelly and Blanchot.

Derrida:

I say what must not be said: for example, that a text can stand in a relationship of transference (primarily in the psychoanalytical sense) to another text. And, since Freud reminds us that the relationship of transference is a 'love' relationship, stress the point: one text loves another" (165).

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.