The Resistance to Theory--Paul de Man

The Resistance to Theory

Paul de Man

Study materials for research scholars of Indian Universities.

Dr. S. Sreekumar

Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983) was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States who succeeded in bringing German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. De Man’s companionship with Jacques Derrida proved very influential as both took up the epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity. This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to "resistance" inherent in the difficult enterprise of literary interpretation itself.

 

De Man’s career as the faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University proved very decisive in the history of Deconstruction. Derrida was a frequent visitor to the University at that time and together they piloted the destiny of what is today known as the Yale School of Deconstruction. At the time of his death from cancer, de Man was Sterling Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale. His influence is seen in the writings of Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Johnson and Hellis Miller.

De Man’s Contribution to literary theory

In his 1967 essay "Criticism and Crisis," Man argued that literary works are fictions rather than factual accounts. Thus they exemplify the break between a sign and its meaning: literature "means" nothing, but critics resist this insight.

De Man argued that what critics call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but “literature reappearing like the hydra's head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing 'the nothingness of human matters'."

De Man believed that due to the resistance to acknowledging that literature does not "mean",  English departments had become "large organizations in the service of everything except their own subject matter". He said that the study of literature had become the art of applying psychology, politics, history, philology or other disciplines to the literary text, in an effort to make the text "mean" something.

Blindness and Insight

This is a collection of De Man's earlier essays from the 1960s.  Here he tries “to tease out the tension between rhetoric and meaning”, looking for moments in the text where linguistic forces "tie themselves into a knot which arrests the process of understanding." [By ‘rhetoric’ de Man means figural language and trope]

The collection represents an attempt to seek the paradoxes in the texts of New Criticism and move beyond formalism.

One of De Man's central topic is of the blindness on which these critical readings are predicated, that the "insight seems instead to have been gained from a negative movement that animates the critic's thought, an unstated principle that leads his language away from its asserted stand. . . as if the very possibility of assertion had been put into question.

De Man questions the notion of the poetic work as a “unified, atemporal icon, a self-possessed repository of meaning” free from intentional and affective fallacies. In his argument, formalist and New Critical emphasis on the "organic" nature of poetry is ultimately self-defeating because the notion of the verbal icon is undermined by the irony and ambiguity inherent within it. Form ultimately acts as "both a creator and destroyer of organic totalities," and "the final insight...annihilated the premises which led up to it."

Allegories of Reading

Here de Man explores the tensions arising in figural language in Nietzsche, Rousseau, Rilke, and Proust. He concentrates on crucial passages which have “a meta-linguistic function or meta-critical implications, particularly those where figural language has a dependency on classical philosophical oppositions”. [essence/accident, synchronic/diachronic]. These oppositions are central to Western discourse.

For de Man, an "Allegory of Reading" emerges when texts are subjected to scrutiny and reveal this tension; a reading wherein “the text reveals its own assumptions about language, and in so doing dictates a statement about undecidability, the difficulties inherent in totalization, their own readability, or the "limitations of textual authority."

The Resistance to Theory—An Overview

Attempts to pin down truth in language is an impossible task. The double bind [ see notes 1 ] which is considered as a license by other deconstructionists to pursue meaning as far as their hermeneutic ingenuity [ see notes 2 ] can carry them is accepted by de Man in a spirit of stoical irony [ see notes 3]. ‘The Resistance to Theory’ explains de Man’s position clearly.

De Man views language as unreliable. [This is a position taken by all deconstructionists]. Language is unreliable because of the rhetorical and figural component in it. [See notes 4]. Rhetoric continuously undermines the abstract systems of grammar and logic. [See notes 5]. Literature frankly admits the rhetoricity in it. Thus it avoids the bad faith of other discourses—history and Sciences—that try to repress or deny it. The discourse of traditional literary criticism and literary history also try to repress or deny rhetoricity in language. Since literature/ or literary theory are not reliable sources of information, traditional attempts to connect the world and the book is a waste of time. Hence traditional scholars resist literary theory. Their resistance is also because of their anxiety as they consider literature as a representation of reality.

De Man’s argument does not end here. He says that resistance to theory is a displacement of a much deeper resistance, or contradiction in theory itself. In short, the resistance to theory is in-built in the theoretical discourse itself.

With characteristically wry humor, de Man comments that if anybody thinks that literary theory can be done away with because it is also unreliable it is like ‘rejecting anatomy because it has failed to cure human mortality’.

Critical Summary of the essay

"The Resistance to Theory" first appeared in Yale French Studies 63 (1982) and was widely anthologized. The essay later became part of the book by the same name. It is a key statement in poststructuralist approaches to literary studies. The essay argues that "the main theoretical interest of literary theory consists in the impossibility of its definition."

De Man says that literary theory originates when the approach to literary texts is not on the basis of non-linguistic factors like history and aesthetics. The introduction of linguistic and semiotic terminology into literary studies gives the language, "considerable freedom from referential restraint". This introduction also makes literary studies ‘epistemologically highly suspect and volatile’ [epistemology= the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity and scope]. De Man means that literary study, as a branch of knowledge, is undependable. 

De Man brings in the ideas of Saussure and Nietzsche and points out that ‘the rhetorical and tropological dimension of language makes it an unreliable medium for communication of truths’. Literary language is predominantly rhetorical and figurative. Therefore it is  not a reliable source of information about anything.

Crisis in Literary Studies

Literary language is unreliable. This gives rise to a crisis in literary studies because "literariness" is no longer an aesthetic quality or a mimetic mode.

De Man’s argument about aesthetic quality is interesting. He says that aesthetic effect arises in a work when ‘we mistake the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of the signified by considering language as an intuitive and transparent medium’. [Any signifier is material, in the sense that it can be seen and understood as a signifier. The signified is only a concept or many concepts. When someone writes ‘Africa’, for example, we can see the signifier ‘Africa’ but we can not see the signified (actual Africa). The actual remains only a concept]. But in actuality language is a material and conventional medium.

Mimesis, like aesthetic quality, is also an effect of the rhetorical and figurative aspects of language. [Refer notes 4]. Language is not a transparent and intuitive guide from the textual material to the historical situation. Therefore if we assume that ideological and historical contexts exist as backgrounds for literary texts [as New Historicism claims] our assumption will become problematic. As a result of the ‘disconnect’ between reality and the linguistic representation of the same, the theorists who uphold an aesthetic approach or a historical approach to literary studies find theory inconvenient and challenging. They are the polemical opponents of theory.

De Man’s conclusion

Literary theory is only a linguistic construct like literature. It is unreliable like literary language. De Man states that the resistance to theory may be "a built-in constituent of its discourse." [Resistance is in the discourse about theory itself]. Therefore the real debate of literary theory is not with its opponents ‘but rather with its own methodological assumptions and possibilities.’ This is because "the resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language." The resistance to theory is therefore, according to de Man, a resistance to reading: "Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory 'is' itself this resistance."

De Man concludes however by stating that "literary theory is not in danger of going under; it cannot help but flourish, and the more it is resisted, the more it flourishes, since the language it speaks is the language of self resistance."

  

Detailed Summary

The strong interest in literary theory in the United States coincided with the ‘importation and reception’ of continental influences. But in the 70s and 80s the interest in theory is receding. The reason for this may be satiation or disappointment after the initial enthusiasm.  The ebb and flow of interest and aversion is natural but it makes the depth of resistance to literary theory clear.

However, the predominant trend in North American literary criticism before the nineteen sixties was not against literary theory. Even the theoretically uninterested writers made use of a minimal set of concepts like ‘tone’, ‘organic form’ ‘allusion’, ‘tradition’, ‘historical situation’, etc. The interest in theory was asserted publicly and practised. The influential text books of the era were Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren), Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren), The Mirror and the Lamp (M.H.Abrams), and The Verbal Icon (Wimsatt and Beardsley).

None of the above writers can be called theoreticians in ‘the post-1960 sense of the term’. Their work did not provoke as strong reactions as that of later theoreticians. Their critical approaches experienced no difficulty fitting into the academic establishments. Many of them pursued successful parallel careers as poets or novelists next to their academic functions. ‘The perfect embodiment of the New Criticism remains, in many respects, the personality and the ideology of T.S.Eliot, a combination of original talent, traditional learning, verbal wit and moral earnestness...’. Their main concern was cultural and ideological rather than theoretical. They were oriented towards ‘the integrity of a social and historical self’ rather than towards ‘the impersonal consistency that theory requires’. Culture allows cosmopolitanism and it was the spirit of the American Academy of the fifties. It had no difficulty appreciating and assimilating outstanding products of a kindred spirit that originated in Europe—--Curtius, Auerbach, Croce, Spitzer, Alonso, Valery etc. De Man says that ‘the consensus that brings these extremely diverse trends and individuals together is their shared resistance to theory’.

Literary theory originates when the approach to literary texts is not based on non-linguistic factors like historical or aesthetic considerations. In other words the consideration should not be on meaning or value but on modalities of production and reception of meaning. The question of the relationship between aesthetics and meaning is more problematic because aesthetics is connected to the effect of meaning rather than with the content as such. Aesthetics is part of a universal system of philosophy. It cannot be termed a theory. De Man says that it is difficult to see the modern developments in literary theory as a product of philosophical speculations. He believes that contemporary literary theory is autonomous. It came from outside philosophy and this adds a subversive element of unpredictability to literary theory. ‘...it is something of a wild card in the serious game of the theoretical disciplines’.

Background of theory

The advent of theory (which made it different from literary history and literary criticism) occurred with the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature. ‘Contemporary literary theory comes into its own in such events as the application of Saussurian linguistics to literary texts’.

The link between structural linguistics and literary texts was not obvious in the beginning. Peirce, Saussure, Sapir and Bloomfield were not concerned with literature at all but with the scientific foundations of linguistics. But philologists like Roman Jakobson and literary critics like Roland Barthes took interest in semiology. This highlighted the natural attraction of literature to a theory of linguistic signs. When language was considered as a system of signs and signification, the traditional barrier between literary and non-literary uses of language disappeared. 

The meeting of literature with semiology was more intense than the meetings of literature with philology, psychology or epistemology. The meeting of literature and semiology could only be described in terms of their own, specifically linguistic terms only, whereas the meetings of literature with other disciplines could be paraphrased or translated in terms of common knowledge. The linguistics of semiology and literature has something in common that is related only to them. This something is often referred to as literariness and it has become the object of literary theory.

Literariness

Literariness is often misunderstood for aesthetic response. The use of such terms as style and stylistics (which carry aesthetic connotations) along with literariness adds to the confusion. Again the search (for example, by Roland Barthes) for coincidence between the phonic properties of a word and its signifying function helps to foster the confusion. [ We create such confusion when we speak about the onomatopoeic properties of certain words in the language forgetting the fact that the same effect may not be visible in other languages] Barthes speaks about the Cratylism (see notes 6) in Proust. ‘Proust saw the relationship between signifier and signified as motivated, the one copying the other and representing in its material form the signified essence of the thing’. [Scholars must remember that Saussure saw the relationship between signifier and signified as arbitrary]

 Here de Man comments:

But one may ask whether it is not more or less consciously present in all writing and whether it is possible to be a writer without some sort of belief in the natural relationship between names and essences. The poetic function..would thus be defined by a Cratylian awareness of the sign, and the writer would be the conveyor of this myth which wants language to imitate the idea and which, contrary to the teachings of linguistic science, thinks of signs as motivated signs.

  The convergence of sound and meaning celebrated by Barthes in Proust was later dismissed by Proust himself as ‘a seductive temptation to mystified minds’. This can be considered a mere effect which language can perfectly well achieve. But it has no substantial relationship to anything beyond that effect. De Man says that this effect is rhetorical rather than aesthetic. It is an identifiable trope (paranomasis) (see notes 7) that operates on the level of the  signifier and contains no responsible pronouncement on the nature of the world (though it creates such an illusion). The relationship between word and thing is not phenomenal but conventional.

‘This gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint’. But at the same time ‘the use of language can no longer be decided by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain’. When this autonomous potential of language is revealed, we deal with literariness. This literariness makes us aware of the unreliability of linguistic utterance. The foregrounding of materials and the phenomenal aspects of language create a strong illusion of aesthetic seduction. ‘Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation of aesthetic categories’.

De Man suggests a potentially revolutionary idea when he states:

...whereas we have traditionally been accustomed to reading literature by analogy with the plastic arts and with music, we now have to recognize the necessity of a non-perceptual, linguistic moment in painting and in music, and learn to read pictures rather than to imagine meaning.

[How to appreciate a picture without considering its meaning is left to our surmise. Did de Man seriously think that such a thing is possible?].

Literariness is also not a mimetic quality

Literariness is also not a mimetic quality. Mimesis is another trope among many others. It is language choosing to imitate a non-verbal entity (like nature) ‘just as paranomasis imitates a sound’. Literariness is misrepresented as pure verbalism and this is also one of the main objections against literary theory. When we allow a non-phenomenal linguistics (where the signifier has no value outside itself), we liberate the discourse on literature from ‘naïve opposition between fiction and reality. In genuine semiology, the referential function of language is not denied. Far from it, what is questioned is the authority of language as a model for natural cognition (understanding).

Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge ‘reality’, but because it is not ‘a priori’ certain that language functions according to principle which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world.

Thus it is NOT certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language.

It is unfortunate to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This is clear in the case of light and sound. [‘No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day’’]. But it is not so with regard to the phenomenality of space, time and self. It is very difficult to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future life in accordance with fictional narratives. Ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistics with natural reality. Thus the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations. There are people who discredit literary theory by stating that it is oblivious of social and historical reality. These people are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit.

Why does literary theory provoke strong resistance and attacks?

·        It upsets rooted ideologies by exposing the mechanics of their workings.

·        It goes against the powerful philosophical tradition of which aesthetics is a prominent part.

·        It upsets the established canon of literary works and blurs the borderline between literary and non-literary discourse.

De Man says that the reasons mentioned above are ‘ample enough’. But these are not satisfying answers.

De Man argues that the development of literary theory is itself ‘overdetermined by complications inherent in its very project and unsettling with regard to its status as a scientific discipline’.

Resistance may be a built-in constituent of its discourse, in a manner that would be inconceivable in the natural sciences and unmentionable in the social sciences.

Displaced symptoms of Resistance

De Man says that ‘the polemical opposition, the systematic non-understanding and misrepresentation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objections are all displaced symptoms of resistance’ inherent in literary theory itself. But this is not an excuse for rejecting literary theory. It would be like ‘rejecting anatomy because it has failed to cure mortality’. ‘The real debate of literary theory is not with its polemical opponents but rather with its own methodological assumptions and possibilities’. Instead of asking why literary theory is threatening, we should ask why literary theory has such difficulty doing its business and why very often it lapses into the language of self-justification and self-defence.

De Man adds that such difficulties, as mentioned above, always existed for literary theory. One of the main achievements of the present literary trend is that it created some awareness of this fact.

The Resistance to Theory

 ‘The resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language. It is a resistance to language itself or to the possibility that language contains factors or functions that cannot be reduced to intuition.’ But we think that when we refer to the word ‘language’, we know what we are talking about. De Man says that ‘there is probably no word to be found in the language that is as overdetermined, self-evasive, disfigured and disfiguring as ‘language’’. The classical ‘trivium’, the most familiar and general of all linguistic models, considers the science of language as consisting of grammar, rhetoric and logic. De Man says that it is ‘in fact a set of unresolved tensions powerful enough to have generated an infinitely prolonged discourse of endless frustration of which contemporary literary theory ...is one more chapter’.

The difficulties in the case of language exist within the ‘trivium’ in the internal relationship between the constituents (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and with the ‘quadrivium’ [which gives us knowledge of the world in general and which covers non-verbal sciences of number (arithmetic), of space (geometry), of motion (astronomy) and of time (music)].

Logic as a link between ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’.

In philosophy the link between ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’ is kept by logic. In logic the rigor of linguistic discourse matches up with the rigor of mathematical discourse. In the seventeenth century the relationship between philosophy and Mathematics was very close. This century considered geometry [which is a homogenous concatenation (a series or order of things depending on each other, as if linked together)] between space, time and number, as ‘the sole model of coherence and economy’. All other models created a degree of confusion which only geometrical minds can understand. This is a clear example of a connection between a science of the phenomenal world (Mathematics) and a science of language. Here language is a tool for a correct ‘axiomatic-deductive, synthetic reasoning’.

This articulation of the science of language with the mathematical sciences represent a continuity between a theory of language as logic and the knowledge of the phenomenal world to which Mathematics belongs. In such a system the aesthetics has a place.  However, De Man argues that the link between logic and natural science is not secure. Historical evidence points towards that. Moreover within the confines of the ‘trivium’ itself, the relationship between grammar, rhetoric and logic is unstable / problematic.  Literariness, which is the use of language that foregrounds the rhetorical over the grammatical and the logical function, is an unsettling element which disrupts the inner balance of the model. Consequently it affects the extension of the model into the non-verbal world as well.

Logic and grammar have a natural affinity to each other. A. J. Greimas, the distinguished French semiotician and narratologist, asserted that the grammatical and the logical functions of language are co-extensive. There is a persistent symbiosis betenn grammar and logic. De man says that ‘grammar is an isotope of logic’. [Isotope= any two or more forms of an element where the atoms have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons within their nuclei]

Uncertain relationship between grammar and rhetoric

Any theory of language, as long as it remains grounded in grammar, does not threaten the underlying principles of all ‘cognitive and aesthetic linguistic systems’.

The Study of grammar is the necessary pre-condition for scientific and humanistic knowledge. As long as it leaves this principle   intact, there is nothing threatening about literary theory.

Difficulties originate when it becomes impossible to ignore the rhetorical dimension of the discourse. Then it becomes no longer possible to keep rhetoric as a mere adjunct, a mere ornament within the semantic function.

We see the uncertain relationship between grammar and rhetoric in the history of the ‘trivium’, in the uncertain status of figures of speech or tropes. Tropes used to be part of the study of grammar.  They were also considered to be the semantic agent of rhetoric. They are text-producing functions that are not patterned on non-verbal entity.  But Grammar is capable of extra-linguistic generalization. The tension between grammar and rhetoric arises in the problem of reading, the process that necessarily partakes of both. Thus ‘the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading’. This resistance is more apparent in what are called theories of reading. These theories avoid the function for which they are generated.

The study of literary texts is necessarily dependent on an act of reading. One has to read a text or at least part of it to make a statement about it. To stress the need of reading implies two things:

Literature is not a transparent message. The distinction between the message and the medium of communicating it is not clearly established.

The grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue (remains) of indetermination that cannot be solved by grammatical means.

Contemporary semiology extends grammar to include figural dimensions. This has considerably expanded the knowledge of textual codes. This extension is always directed towards the replacement of rhetorical figures by grammatical codes. The tendency to replace rhetorical figures by grammatical terminology is admirable as it tends towards the mastering and the clarification of meaning.

       

The replacement of a hermeneutic by a semiotic model, of interpretation by decoding, would represent, in view of the baffling historical instability of textual meanings (including those of canonical texts) a considerable progress. Much of the hesitation associate4d with ‘reading’ could thus be dispelled.

No grammatical decoding could unravel the total figural dimensions of a text.  There are grammatical elements in all texts whose semantic function is not grammatically definable. De Man takes The Fall of Hyperion as an example for this:

De Man’s Analysis of the title of the poem The Fall of Hyperion

How will we interpret the genitive in the title of The Fall of Hyperion? [The poem is an unfinished epic by John Keats. (See notes 8)]

What is the meaning of the title? Is it ‘Hyperion’s fall’ (the case story of the defeat of an older power by a newer one)? or ‘Hyperion falling’? [‘Hyperion falling’ is less clear but more disquieting (unsettling/ troubling/distressing) evocation of the actual process of falling. (There is no mention of the beginning of the fall or its end or the identity of the entity (God or Man or thing) to whom it befalls (happens/appears) to be falling.

Keats wrote two poems, ‘Hyperion’ and The Fall of Hyperion. He could not complete both poems.

Now De Man takes up the story of the poem.

The story told in the second poem is about a character who resembles Apollo rather than Hyperion. The same Apollo should be triumphantly standing rather than falling if Keats ‘had not been compelled to interrupt (without any apparent reason) the story of Apollo’s triumph. [De Man refers to the abandoning of the first version by Keats]

Does the title tell us that Hyperion is fallen and that Apollo stands, or does it tell us that Hyperion and Apollo [and Keats, whom it is hard to distinguish (according to De Man) from Apollo] are interchangeable in that all of them are necessarily and constantly falling?

Both readings are grammatically correct, but it is impossible to decide from the context which version is the right one.

De Man suggests: ...Keats was unable to complete either version because of the difficulty in understanding the correct meaning of the title he himself has given to the poem.

Then De Man puts forward an interesting proposition. We can read the word ‘Hyperion’ in the title figurally or intertextually. In this reading, Hyperion is not the historical or mythological character. Here Hyperion refers to the title the poet has given to the first text. In that case, the second text refers to the fall (failure) of the first text. Does it mean that the fall of ‘Hyperion’ is the triumph of The Fall of Hyperion? [the failure of the first text as the success of the second]

De Man says that this is not quite true as the poet fails to complete the second text as well.

Here De Man borrows a favorite theme of deconstructionists: ‘Or are we telling the story of why all texts, as texts, can always be said to be falling’.

This also is not exactly true as the story of the fall of the first text applies only to the first. It is, of course, narrated in the second but it could not be read as the meaning of the second.

The undecidability involves the figural or literal status of the proper name Hyperion as well as the verb falling. It is a matter of figuration and not of grammar.

In ‘Hyperion’s Fall’ the word fall is figural. We read this standing up. But in ‘Hyperion Falling’, this is not the case, for ‘if Hyperion can be Apollo and Apollo can be Keats, then he can also be us and his figural or symbolic fall becomes his and our literal falling as well’.

The difference between the two readings is itself structured as a trope. [a figure of speech in which words or phrases are used with a non-literal or figurative meaning, such as a metaphor].

How we read the title is very important. ‘It is an exercise not only in semantics, but in what the text actually does to us’. Faced with the necessity to come to a decision, no grammatical or logical analysis can help us out. Just as Keats had to break off his narrative, the reader has to break off his understanding. This break off occurs at the very moment when the reader is most directly engaged by the text.

At this moment there is a ‘fearful symmetry’ (the phrase is from William Blake) between the author’s and reader’s plight. The symmetry is a trap and the question of the ‘meaning’ is not ‘merely’ theoretical.

The undoing of theory results in ‘the disturbance of the stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic to a general science of man and of the phenomenal world’. This can be developed into ‘a theoretical project of rhetorical analysis that will reveal the inadequacy of grammatical methods of non-reading’. Rhetoric has a negative relationship to grammar and to logic. This undoes the claims of the ‘trivium’ to be a stable construct.

The resistance to theory is a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language. This dimension is more explicitly foregrounded in literature than in any other verbal manifestations. Grammar and figuration are integral parts of reading. Therefore reading appears to be a negative process in which the grammatical cognition is undone by rhetorical displacement. ‘The model of the ‘trivium’ contains within itself the pseudo-dialectic of its own undoing and its history tells the story of this dialectic’.  

Contemporary theoretical scene

The scene is dominated by an increased stress on reading as a theoretical problem or an increased stress on the reception rather than the production of a text. In the United States the emphasis is on reading. This was the direction of the New Critical tradition of the forties and fifties. De Man says that the ‘contemporary interest in a poetics of literature is clearly linked, rationally enough to the problems of reading’.  The concentration on reading may lead to the rediscovery of the theoretical difficulties associated with rhetoric.

De Man believes that ‘the most instructive aspect of contemporary theory is the refinement of the techniques by which the threat inherent in rhetorical analysis’ is avoided. This avoidance is at the ‘very moment’ when, because of the effectiveness of these techniques, the rhetorical obstacles to understanding can no longer be ‘mistranslated into thematic and phenomenal commonplaces’. The contemporary theoretical scene is dominated by theoreticians of reading. According to De Man the resistance to reading appears in its most rigorous form among the theoreticians of reading.

Theoreticians of reading like Greimas, H.R.Jauss or Wolfgang Iser are committed to the use of grammatical models or ‘to traditional hermeneutic models’ that do not allow for the problematization of reading and ‘remain uncritically confined within a theory of literature rooted in aesthetics’. This argument is easy to make because once a reader becomes aware of the ‘rhetorical dimensions’ of a text, he will find examples from the text that are not restricted by grammar or historically determined meaning. De Man feels that there is a shared reluctance among the readers to follow the obvious ‘rhetorical dimensions’. This remains a puzzle. There is an argument that the textual analysis will be lengthy. De man suggests that the analysis will not be as brief as in the case of the title of The Fall of Hyperion. But to carry the analysis into the critical reception and reading of Keats’ entire text would require much space to be completed.

Speech Act Theory of Reading and the Problems involved

The theoreticians of Speech Act avoid rhetoric. They show a strong interest in certain elements of language which exclude/postpone the consideration of tropes, ideologies etc. They try to establish a link between performance, grammar, logic, and stable referential meaning. The resultant theories are ‘not different from the theories of grammarians and semioticians’ [who aspire for stable referential meaning]. However astute practitioners of speech act theory rightly insist on the necessity to keep the actual performance of speech acts, which is conventional rather than cognitive, separate from its causes and effects. They, in short, keep the ‘illocutionary force separate from its perlocutionary function’ [see notes 9 ].

Rhetoric [which is persuasion] is banished from the preformative moment to the affective area of perlocution [by speech act theoreticians]. Persuasion is inseparable from rhetoric. But it is relegated to the purely affective area. De Man says that rhetoric is persuasion and is a part of literary texts. It is persuasion by proof. When it is thus removed to the affective area it creates suspicion.

To take away the epistemological features [knowledge based] of rhetoric  is to take away the tropological and figural functions of rhetoric. It is like removing rhetoric from the trivium and considering it as a mere correlative of illocution. De Man warns us that if rhetoric is equated with psychology rather than with epistemology, it will open up prospects of banality [triviality, dullness]. Speech act theories stand for the grammatization of the trivium at the expense of rhetoric. Considering the performative aspects as mere convention makes it in effect a grammatical code [which is nothing but conventional] like other codes. De Man concludes his argument thus: ‘Speech act oriented theories of reading read only to the extent that they prepare the way for the rhetorical reading they avoid’. 

Concluding remarks

In conclusion, De Man argues that a ‘true’ rhetorical reading [where there is no phenomenalization or undue grammatical or performative codification of the text] is possible. Aims and methods of literary theory would strive for that. Such a rhetorical reading will undo the grammatical construct and systematically disarticulate the trivium. But it will be theoretically sound and effective.

Technically correct rhetorical reading may be boring, predictable and unpleasant. But it is irrefutable [ unquestionable / convincing].

They are also totalizing and ‘potentially totalitarian’. The structures and functions they expose ‘do not lead to the knowledge of an entity but are an unreliable process of knowledge production that prevents all entities including linguistic entities from coming into discourse. De Man calls them ‘consistently defective models of language’s impossibility to be a model language’.

They are theory and not theory at the same time, the universal theory of the impossibility of theory. ...rhetorical readings...still avoid and resist the reading they advocate. Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.

De Man concludes that literary theory is not in danger of disappearing. ‘It cannot help but flourish, and the more it is resisted, the more it flourishes, since the language it speaks is the language of self-resistance’. With laconic humour De Man concludes: ‘What remains impossible to decide is whether this flourishing is a triumph or a fall’.

NOTES

1. Double bind—A Zen story is a good illustration for double bind. A Zen master says to his pupils: “If you say this stick is real, I will beat you. If you say this stick is not real, I will beat you. If you say nothing, I will beat you”. There seems to be no way out.

The double bind is something that happens in the use of language.  Derrida argues that our understanding of words depends on other words. These words themselves depend on other words for their significance. Thus it is an endless chain of signifiers, pointing to nothing beyond themselves. In short, language depends on nothing, no fundamental logic, science or society. What an author ‘meant’ has no existence outside words. When an author selects one word and leaves out another, he selects one meaning and suppresses other meanings. The final meaning is the result of repeated suppression of other meanings. All these meanings will come out in interpretation. Thus there is no end to interpretation and no escaping it. This is called ‘double bind’ by Derrida.

Notes 2— Hermeneutic ingenuity

Hermeneutic ingenuity arises when interpretations are carried forward in an ingenious (clever, resourceful, inventive) manner. An example for hermeneutic ingenuity is provided here from Derrida’s writings.

In Margins of Philosophy Derrida speaks about ‘differance’. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp 3-27.]

Here Derrida speaks about the letter ‘A’ in ‘differAnce’. He first plays on the "silence" of the ‘A’ in différAnce [it is scarcely heard in French pronunciation] as being like a silent tomb, like a pyramid, like the pyramid (A) to which Hegel compares the body of the sign. [when we write ‘A’,  the letter appears like a pyramid]

A pyramid is a tomb. In Greek language "Tomb" is ‘oikesis’. ‘Oikesis’ is close to the Greek ‘oikos’ (house).  

From the word ‘oikos’ the word "economy" is derived (‘oikos’ ‘house’ and ‘nemein’--to manage).

Thus Derrida speaks of the "economy of death" as the "familial residence and tomb of the proper."

Further, and more elliptically still, Derrida speaks of the tomb, which always bears an inscription in stone, announcing the death of the tyrant. (This seems to refer to Hegel's treatment of the Antigone story in the Phenomenology. It will be recalled that Antigone defies the tyrant Creon by burying her brother Polynices. Creon retaliates by having Antigone entombed. There she cheats the slow death that awaits her by hanging herself. The tyrant Creon has a change of heart too late, and (after the suicides of his son and wife, his family) kills himself). Thus family, death, inscription, tomb, law, economy.

From the above example, I think that the scholars have understood the difficulties in following the thought process of Derrida. The pages (3-27) offer us a dazzlingly wayward discourse. Hermeneutic ingenuity cannot go further.

3. Stoical irony

Stoicism is the school of philosophy founded by Zeno, who taught that people should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submit without complaint to unavoidable necessity [accepting everything in life shrugging one’s shoulders].

  

4. Rhetorical and Figural Component in language.

Figurative language is any figure of speech which depends on a non-literal meaning of some or all of the words used. There are many types of figurative language, including literary devices such as simile, metaphor, personification, and many pun examples, to name just a few. The definition of figurative language is opposite to that of literal language, which involves only the “proper” or dictionary definitions of words. Figurative language usually requires the reader or listener to understand some extra nuances, context, allusions, etc. in order to understand the second meaning. However, figurative language is such a common part of regular speech that adult native speakers of a language can just as easily interpret figurative language as literal language.

We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The ball is in your court.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

5. From the above examples it is clear that Rhetoric continuously undermines the abstract systems of grammar and logic. ‘We will cross the bridge’ is not at all about anyone crossing any bridge. The grammatical and logical meaning have no relevance here. What is important to the reader is the rhetorical meaning.

6. "Cratylian awareness of the sign"

A figure evoked by de Mann, Cratylus is a Platonic character, an essentialist who subscribes to an ideological vision. He positioned the necessary and absolutely perfect correspondence between words and things, i.e., between the signifier and the signified. This is against Sausserian linguistics which states that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary

7. Paranomasis

Paronomasia is a rhetorical term for punning or playing with words. The term paronomasia is sometimes used more loosely to describe a combination of words that are similar in sound.

Examples:-

Horse Lovers are Stable People.

I used to be a tap dancer until I fell in the sink.

Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.

8.  The Fall of Hyperion

The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream is an epic poem written by John Keats. The poem exists in two versions. The first, Hyperion, was begun in 1818 and published, unfinished, in 1820. The second, The Fall of Hyperion, was composed by reworking, expanding, and personally narrating lines from the first poem.  It was also left unfinished and was posthumously published in 1856.

The plot and structure of the poem has been greatly influenced by three previous epics, Virgil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Dante's Divine Comedy.

9. A locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance. An illocutionary act: the pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its intended significance as a socially valid verbal action. And in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not. 

Study materials for research scholars of Indian Universities.

Dr. S. Sreekumar