ITTOL - Lecture 11 - Deconstruction II
In Prof. Fry's second lecture on Deconstruction he references Paul de Man's Semiology and Rhetoric (1975) in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2007. 882-893. Print. and compares de Man's and Derrida's views on deconstruction.
Richter, in introducing the essay, lets us know that after de Man's death in 1983, it was revealed that he had written a number of anti-semitic essays during the war (if an article on Brittanica.com is accurate this appears to be a gross understatement of not only de Man's Nazi collaborations but also his character in general.) Prof. Fry also brings up the subject, pointing out that the revelations of de Man's anti-semitic essays caused considerable controversy about de Man and the validity of Deconstruction itself:
Northrop Frye, in discussing Spengler and Frazier, said even the stupidest of men can occasionally have a good idea. It would seem that is also true of those with despicable beliefs. From my own experience, as a woman who despises misogyny, I can only say that one can interact with the work of people who have abhorrent beliefs and behaviours. If that was not possible very few women would be able to go to the movies, read the Western Canon, engage in any profession or acquire even a minimally decent education. That we can and do is proof that anyone is capable of separating the work from the man without overlooking, explaining away, excusing or condoning their unpardonable actions.
So, what does de Man say in his essay? For one thing, he claims that the trend "to reconcile the internal, formal, private structures of literary language with their external, referential and public effects" (883) has arisen from a mistaken belief that Formalism has "fully revealed" all possible techniques for "analysis and interpretation" when in reality "none of [these available techniques] have...evolved beyond the techniques of close reading established in the forties" (883). Fry points out that de Man makes the point that those arguing this forget the key tenet of Formalism: form is content.
Where once form was considered extrinsic, "form is now a solipsistic category of self-reflection, and the referential meaning is said to be extrinsic....internal meaning has become outside reference, and the outer form has become the intrinsic structure." (883) According to de Man this way of thinking accounts for "the metaphorical model of literature as a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside, with the reader or critic as the person who opens the lid in order to release what was secreted but inaccessible" (883).
[Think here he might be referring to the way texts have changed. Where once figures formed the stories and were examined to reveal how they related to human events, today the stories are of human events and we mine them to reveal underlying figures using a variety of framing techniques: gender, history, psychology, etc.]
de Man takes issue with the "inside/outside" approach (883-4) i.e. their being flipped as if there is a one-to-one correspondence. He turns to "Semiology,...the science or study of signs as signifiers; it does not ask what words mean but how they mean....thus freeing critical discourse from the debilitating burden of paraphrase...It especially exploded the myth of semantic [meaningful] correspondence between sign and reference." (884) [Does he mean we should look to how a word acquires the meaning we assign it rather than just focusing on what it means to us? That would free us from paraphrase and require, instead, a full blown explanation of the word.]
de Man questions whether it is legitimate to treat figures as "particular types of combinations" with rules similar to the syntax of grammar (884) given that "the continuity between grammar and rhetoric is not borne out by theoretical and philosophical speculation" (885-6) i.e. instead of looking to understand what the words mean in relation to each other critics now look to understand what the figures mean in relation to each other. But de Man stands with Kenneth Burke who speaks of deflection as "any slight bias or unintended error" that occurs in the "grammatical patterns" which he insists is evidence that grammar and rhetoric are distinct from each other and so cannot be substituted for each other. He also points to Charles Sanders Pierce insistence that "a third presence...the interpretant" always exists between a sign and its object and that the resulting interpretation is itself a 'sign' and not a 'meaning' (886).
de Man's basic argument is that grammar and rhetoric are not mutually exclusive and hence the couple breaks the thesis/anti-thesist, inside/outside pattern of a binary opposition i.e. they don't contain each other. As an example, he makes reference to an All in the Family episode in which Edith asks Archie how he wants his bowling shoes laced: over or under. Archie says "What's the difference?" and gets annoyed with Edith when she takes him literally, rather than rhetorically, and starts explaining the two lacing methods. de Man claims the same "grammatical device", the question, can be interpreted two ways (literally and rhetorically) and that the only way to "dispel the confusion" is by an external intervention (886-7). He gives two more examples, one from Yeats and another from Proust.
Prof. Fry explains that for de Man every sentence is both a predicate (a truth statement) and a metaphor (a poetic lie) such that a sentence is always at odds with itself and so "the worm of interpretation keeps turning" [moving from a grammatical reading to a rhetorical, to a grammatical, back to a rhetorical, and so on.] He quotes de Man as saying "[If] truth is the recognition of the systematic character of a certain error, then it would be fully dependent on the prior existence of this error." (892). Presumably, if that was the case, metaphor and rhetoric would form a binary opposition "interdependent and mutual." But they are not; a predicate does not need a lie (metaphor) to prove its truth and vice versa.
According to Fry, the key difference between Derrida and de Man is that Derrida looks at all discourse as a "seamless web" of "different types: philosophy, literature, theology, science, etc." whereas de Man thinks there is such a thing as literariness and stresses focusing on literature as distinct from other forms of discourse because "[literary language] is the only form of knowledge free from the fallacy of unmediated expression"; it doesn't try to hide that it is a fiction in contrast to other discourses which cannot help but be mediated while purporting to be otherwise.
Richter, in introducing the essay, lets us know that after de Man's death in 1983, it was revealed that he had written a number of anti-semitic essays during the war (if an article on Brittanica.com is accurate this appears to be a gross understatement of not only de Man's Nazi collaborations but also his character in general.) Prof. Fry also brings up the subject, pointing out that the revelations of de Man's anti-semitic essays caused considerable controversy about de Man and the validity of Deconstruction itself:
So, as I say, there was a considerable controversy swirling around this article, and just as is the case with Heidegger, it has been very difficult to read de Man in the same way again as a result of what we now know.According to Fry, at the time of the controversy people appeared to be more upset with de Man's suppression of his past and lack of confession than with the essays themselves. Others, in his defense, argued that de Man's essay, The Purloined Ribbon, in which he claims "that there is no possibility really of confession, that there is no real subjectivity that can affirm or deny guilt or responsibility" is a form of backhanded confession in itself. Fry goes on to say that one has two choices in deciding how to react to what deconstruction would call the undecidablity of the truth of the situation:
- "The negative way is to say that undecidability opens a void in the intellect and in consciousness into which fanaticism and tyranny can rush. In other words, if there is a sort of considered and skillfully argued resistance to opinion–call that “deconstruction”–then in the absence of decently grounded, decently argued opinion, you get this void into which fanaticism and tyranny can rush. That’s the negative response to undecidability, and it’s of course, a view that many of us may entertain."
- "The positive reaction, however, to undecidability is this: undecidability is a perpetually vigilant scrutiny [skepticism] of all opinion as such, precisely in order to withstand and to resist those most egregious and incorrigible opinions of all: the opinions of fanaticism and tyranny."
Northrop Frye, in discussing Spengler and Frazier, said even the stupidest of men can occasionally have a good idea. It would seem that is also true of those with despicable beliefs. From my own experience, as a woman who despises misogyny, I can only say that one can interact with the work of people who have abhorrent beliefs and behaviours. If that was not possible very few women would be able to go to the movies, read the Western Canon, engage in any profession or acquire even a minimally decent education. That we can and do is proof that anyone is capable of separating the work from the man without overlooking, explaining away, excusing or condoning their unpardonable actions.
So, what does de Man say in his essay? For one thing, he claims that the trend "to reconcile the internal, formal, private structures of literary language with their external, referential and public effects" (883) has arisen from a mistaken belief that Formalism has "fully revealed" all possible techniques for "analysis and interpretation" when in reality "none of [these available techniques] have...evolved beyond the techniques of close reading established in the forties" (883). Fry points out that de Man makes the point that those arguing this forget the key tenet of Formalism: form is content.
Where once form was considered extrinsic, "form is now a solipsistic category of self-reflection, and the referential meaning is said to be extrinsic....internal meaning has become outside reference, and the outer form has become the intrinsic structure." (883) According to de Man this way of thinking accounts for "the metaphorical model of literature as a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside, with the reader or critic as the person who opens the lid in order to release what was secreted but inaccessible" (883).
[Think here he might be referring to the way texts have changed. Where once figures formed the stories and were examined to reveal how they related to human events, today the stories are of human events and we mine them to reveal underlying figures using a variety of framing techniques: gender, history, psychology, etc.]
de Man takes issue with the "inside/outside" approach (883-4) i.e. their being flipped as if there is a one-to-one correspondence. He turns to "Semiology,...the science or study of signs as signifiers; it does not ask what words mean but how they mean....thus freeing critical discourse from the debilitating burden of paraphrase...It especially exploded the myth of semantic [meaningful] correspondence between sign and reference." (884) [Does he mean we should look to how a word acquires the meaning we assign it rather than just focusing on what it means to us? That would free us from paraphrase and require, instead, a full blown explanation of the word.]
de Man questions whether it is legitimate to treat figures as "particular types of combinations" with rules similar to the syntax of grammar (884) given that "the continuity between grammar and rhetoric is not borne out by theoretical and philosophical speculation" (885-6) i.e. instead of looking to understand what the words mean in relation to each other critics now look to understand what the figures mean in relation to each other. But de Man stands with Kenneth Burke who speaks of deflection as "any slight bias or unintended error" that occurs in the "grammatical patterns" which he insists is evidence that grammar and rhetoric are distinct from each other and so cannot be substituted for each other. He also points to Charles Sanders Pierce insistence that "a third presence...the interpretant" always exists between a sign and its object and that the resulting interpretation is itself a 'sign' and not a 'meaning' (886).
de Man's basic argument is that grammar and rhetoric are not mutually exclusive and hence the couple breaks the thesis/anti-thesist, inside/outside pattern of a binary opposition i.e. they don't contain each other. As an example, he makes reference to an All in the Family episode in which Edith asks Archie how he wants his bowling shoes laced: over or under. Archie says "What's the difference?" and gets annoyed with Edith when she takes him literally, rather than rhetorically, and starts explaining the two lacing methods. de Man claims the same "grammatical device", the question, can be interpreted two ways (literally and rhetorically) and that the only way to "dispel the confusion" is by an external intervention (886-7). He gives two more examples, one from Yeats and another from Proust.
Prof. Fry explains that for de Man every sentence is both a predicate (a truth statement) and a metaphor (a poetic lie) such that a sentence is always at odds with itself and so "the worm of interpretation keeps turning" [moving from a grammatical reading to a rhetorical, to a grammatical, back to a rhetorical, and so on.] He quotes de Man as saying "[If] truth is the recognition of the systematic character of a certain error, then it would be fully dependent on the prior existence of this error." (892). Presumably, if that was the case, metaphor and rhetoric would form a binary opposition "interdependent and mutual." But they are not; a predicate does not need a lie (metaphor) to prove its truth and vice versa.
According to Fry, the key difference between Derrida and de Man is that Derrida looks at all discourse as a "seamless web" of "different types: philosophy, literature, theology, science, etc." whereas de Man thinks there is such a thing as literariness and stresses focusing on literature as distinct from other forms of discourse because "[literary language] is the only form of knowledge free from the fallacy of unmediated expression"; it doesn't try to hide that it is a fiction in contrast to other discourses which cannot help but be mediated while purporting to be otherwise.