by M H Abrams
IV. Human World and Theory Worlds
The traditional paradigm for considering language and literature presumes a shared world in which human beings live, act, and converse and in which, if they are philosophers, they then go on to formulate theories about that world. In the Platonic dialogues such is the world, with its solid physical settings and lively interpersonal exchanges, in which Socrates proceeds to set forth the theory that this world is merely appearance when measured against the criterion world of Reality. Such also is the world described by Descartes in which, “sitting by the fire, clothed in a winter robe,” he manipulates a lump of beeswax and observed through the window “human beings going by in the street,” while excogitating the possibility of doubting the reality of that world and of everything in it except that he is doubting.30 And it is the world into which, David Hume tells us, the unreasoning force he calls “nature” redelivers him after he has reasoned himself into denying any justification for believing the reality of an outer world, of human beings, and even of his “personal identity” or “self.” From the “forlorn solitude” of his skeptical theory world, Hume says, he returns to the world where “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends”—a human world, that is, in which “I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life”; although only until he again isolates himself in order to recommence his theoretical speculatings “in my chamber, or in a solitary walk by a river-side.”31
Some version of such a world, within which people purposefully act, interact, and communicate, has been the primary site assumed by British and American philosophers of language in the recent past, whether they are analytic philosophers or ordinary language philosophers or write in the tradition of American pragmatism. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later thinking, a special concern, within what he sometimes calls our Weltbild, is with the primitives, the “givens” which, when we set out to justify our beliefs and assertions, turn out to be end points—the “bedrock,” as he puts it, where “my spade is turned.” And at such termini of the “chain of reasons,” he famously declares, “what has to be accepted, the given is—so one could say—forms of life.” Such givens in our “world-picture,” the “substratum of all my enquiring and asserting,” Wittgenstein points out, do not consist of self-evident, asserted truths, or of quasi-visible presences, but of participation in ongoing, shared human practices. “Giving grounds . . . justifying the evidence, comes to an end;—but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part, it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.”32 It might be said, then, that we enact our primitive certainties in the conduct of our lives and of the language that is interinvolved with the ways we live. And among the givens in our lived world are human beings, in whom we spontaneously recognize an I in the other and manifest that affinity in the distinctive ways we feel toward them and with them, and deal with them, and talk to and about them. Such certainties that “stand fast” for us are not empirical assertions capable of proof, but they do not need to be proved, for they function not only as the presuppositions of all proofs but also as the preconditions without which it is not possible to account for the historical development of a common language and for the fact that each of us learns to use and understand a common language.33
To the outlook of a humanistic criticism, such givens are constituents of the world in which we live and move and have our meanings. It is a human world not only in that it contains human beings but also in that it is always and only a world-for-us, given our human senses, physiology, and prior history; what it would be if (in Keats’ phrase) we could “see as a God sees”34 is beyond conjecture. And from the earliest records to the present, such a world has been represented in literature, in which persons recognizably (however distantly) like ourselves perceive, talk, think, feel, and enact a story within a recognizable version (however altered) of the human world we live in; even the authors of Mallarméan, or surrealist, or magical realist, or other works that set out to escape the conditions of our world cannot but rely for their effects of unreality on violating the presuppositions formed by our experiences in that world. Finally, such a world also constitutes the site, or tacit frame of reference, common to traditional critics of literature, including many philosophers who, in their theories about the world, are idealists or skeptics rather than realists—when, that is, they write not as metaphysicians but as critics of specific works of literature.35
Now, what do the distinctive themes and enterprises of radical structural and poststructural theorists look like from the viewpoint of someone positioned, philosophically, within this human world?
One would have to read the major innovative theorists in what Jonathan Swift sardonically called “the true spirit of controversy”—that is, “fully predetermined against all conviction”—not to find a great deal that is profitable and enlightening in what these theorists have to say. A useful way to clarify the nature of their contributions, I think, is to apply to them three criteria that can be disengaged from an early essay by Derrida himself, “Force and Signification” (1963), in which he assayed the achievements, but also the limitations, of structuralism as applied in literary criticism.36
1. First, Derrida attributes to “the structuralist invasion” what he calls “an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object.” Applying this criterion, one can say that certainly, by a radical shift of perspective, poststructuralists as well as structuralists have defamiliarized, and so impelled a reexamination of, what one tends to take for granted; not least by the drastic conversion that turns the human world outside-in, asking us to try the adventure of envisioning human subjects not as the agents but as the functions or effects of texts or discourses.
2. Derrida specifies a second use of a theory as an “operative concept,” or “a heuristic instrument, a method of reading.” It seems obvious that, when employed as a heuristic instrument, or discovery-procedure, each major theory, in part by virtue of the exclusivity of its focus, has effected insights that advance our understanding. What dispassionate inquirer would deny the profit in the structuralist’s distinctive inquiry into the degree to which a literary work manifests the repetition, variation, and internal relationships of preexisting structures, formulas, and codes? Or the kinds of discoveries made possible by Foucault’s innovative approach to the human sciences, not in order to determine whether their predications are true to the way things really are, but in order to investigate the discursive “régime of truth” in which the predications play their role—that is, to inquire into the historical conditions that have engendered the forms of discourse in which such predications are accounted to be true. Or the value of Derrida’s examination of the ways that what we say and think are conditioned by the material and formal features of our language and structured by the deployment of tacitly hierarchical oppositions; and also of his expositions of the ineluctable role that metaphors play in philosophical discourse, especially the figure of visibility, light, and darkness which, he says, is “the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics.”37
3. But Derrida also identifies an aberrant application of structuralism when, no longer simply a heuristic instrument for investigating a literary object, “structure becomes the object itself, the literary thing itself . . . the exclusive term . . . of critical description.” In such instances structure becomes “in fact and despite his theoretical intention the critic’s sole preoccupation” and so “the very being of the work.” Derrida’s objection to what he calls this “ultrastructuralism,” as I read him, is that it transforms a useful perspective into an exclusive doctrine and a heuristic position into an objective imposition. I want to pose the question: Can this charge be leveled also against some widespread uses of poststructural theories? And first, does it apply to Derrida’s own de
constructive procedures, “in despite,” as he said about ultrastructuralism, of the proponent’s own “theoretical intention”?
The answer depends on where you read Derrida and on how you read his elaborately allusive and elusive prose. He insists that by “deconstructing” or “dismantling” the concepts and structures of our logocentric language, he does not “destroy” or “discard” them but simply “situates,” “reinscribes,” or “reconstitutes” them in alternative contexts; and he stresses that deconstruction does not and cannot propound a science of language, or a counterphilosophy to Western philosophy, or an alternative order to that of logocentric truth.38 In such passages, it seems clear, deconstruction is proffered as a tactic to uncover, redescribe, and put to question, but without either the intention or the possibility of destroying, or supplanting, the procedures of our ordinary linguistic practices. As Barbara Johnson describes it, a deconstructive reading “does not aim to eliminate or dismiss texts or values, but rather to see them in a more complex, more constructed, less idealized light.”39
Richard Rorty, assimilating Derrida’s deconstructive intent to his own neopragmatism, has praised Derrida as the inventor of “a new splendidly ironic way of writing about the philosophical tradition”—that is, as providing a novel point of vantage from which to view all philosophies with skeptical irony. But Rorty goes on to ask, Is Derrida in addition a “transcendental philosopher” who sets forth a new and better philosophy of his own? and then acknowledges that Derrida indeed “makes noise of both sorts.”40 To me, Derrida sounds most like a deductive type of transcendental philosopher when, from his theoretical position within the functioning of language-in-general, he posits a prelinguistic and preconceptual nonentity that he calls a “mark” or “trace,” ascribes to it such “structural” (that is, essential) features as différance and iterability (repeatability, hence an inescapable difference from itself, or “alterity”), and then draws consequences that necessarily obtain not only for our practice of language and of all other signifying systems but also for “the totality of what one can call experience.” Derrida asserts, for example: “The graphics of iterability inscribes alteration irreducibly in repetition (or in identification): a priori, always and already.” This iterability, he says, is “the very factor that will permit the mark . . . to function beyond this moment,” but by that very possibility it also “breaches, divides, expropriates the ‘ideal’ plenitude or self-presence of intention, of meaning (to say)”; it thus “leaves us no choice but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say), to say something other than what we say and would have wanted to say, to understand something other than . . . etc.”41 Such reasoning would seem to ensure that, in our actual practice of using and understanding language—and of experiencing the world—we cannot but find the features that we have inserted, “a priori, always and already,” into our theoretical premises.
An inquirer, on the other hand, whose stand is in the world of human relations and interactions, takes language to be a very complex set of shared social practices and, upon investigating those practices, finds that we often manage very well to say what we mean and to understand what someone else has undertaken to say. Such an inquirer—John Austin, for example, about whose views Derrida wrote a deconstructive critique that set off his controversy with John Searle—identifies clear cases of successful speech-acts in our practice of language, and then sets out to explain how that practice works by specifying conditions that, when they are satisfied, will serve to account for our communicative successes and that, when they are not satisfied, will serve to account for our communicative failures. Such an inquirer does this in the recognition that no case of communicative success is an absolutely clear case, in that one can never be absolutely certain that all the conditions necessary for success have been fully satisfied; such infallible judgments require access to a self-warranting warrantor of certainty—whether we call it an absolute, or presence, or transcendental signified, or onto-teleological entity—forever outside the reach of human finitude. To the empirical inquirer into our practice of language, the index of success in communication is more modest than absolute certainty; it is practical certainty, an adequate assurance that we have understood each other, given the kind of language game in which we happen to be engaged and the circumstances of the particular utterance. It remains always and unavoidably possible, however, that we have got the thing wrong, although that possibility may be extremely slight in this or that instance of linguistic interchange.
What on the contrary distinguishes a radical, or strong, poststructuralist is that he or she sets out from a theoretical predetermination of the necessary nature of language as such, or of discourse in general, and reasoning von oben herunter, evolves conclusions about what our linguistic and discursive practices and experiences must necessarily be. And when the ways we in fact use language don’t jibe with these theoretical conclusions, the strong theorist privileges the conclusions to overrule our practices and experiences, which are discredited, or at any rate drastically derogated, as no more than effects, functions, illusions, false consciousness, or mystifications. However one reads the puzzling deliverances on the issue by Derrida himself, this is the typical way of proceeding of all-out practitioners of deconstructive literary criticism. It is also the procedure of the radical Foucauldians who reason down from the universal premise that all discourse, hence all thought and knowledge, consists of cultural constructs effected and directed by the forms and circulation of power; or of the poststructural Marxists who reason down from the premise that all discourse is constituted by an ideology in the secret service of class interests or a controlling elite; or of that special group of poststructural feminists who reason down from the premise that all Western discourse is inherently and in totality phallocentric, thereby disqualifying a priori all possible counterclaims (and for that matter their own claims) as necessarily and irredeemably sexist. In this way a theoretical position that may have value as an adventure in vision, or as a speculative instrument for discovery, suffers a hardening of the categories and becomes a Grand Theory. Or to put the matter in a different figure: a tentative working hypothesis becomes a tyrannical ruling hypothesis whose consequences are projected as the way things really are, because by logical necessity they must be so. In such extreme instances the result is that the human world in which people deploy language in their diverse purposes, for good and for ill, is displaced by a theory world in which people are not agents but agencies, not users of language but used by language, not effectors but themselves only effects.
V. The Alien Vision
I don’t have confidence that the divergence between a confirmed humanist and a confirmed poststructuralist stands much chance of being overcome by rational argument; in each instance, the initiating position, or founding intuition, is too thoroughly implicated in an overall outlook to be vulnerable to counterreasoning from an alternative outlook. The deep-rooted and ever-reviving disputes that make up the history of philosophy indicate that there is no knock-down, drag-out argument that will dislodge a proponent from an initiating position; he can be dislodged only by a philosophical conversion experience—“a conversion,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had himself undergone such an experience, described it, “of a special kind,” in which one is “brought to look at the world in a different way.”42 But recognition of this circumstance has never stopped philosophers from arguing against counterphilosophies; nor will it stop me from concluding this talk with a couple of arguments—more properly, a couple of considerations—that bear against inhumanist modes of poststructural criticism; realizing that these will seem convincing only to those who already occupy the humanistic position, yet with the faint hope that someone out there is listening who may be susceptible to a perspectival conversion.
My first consideration is exemplified in the response of the young Goethe when he read the Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770); this wa
s an early and ably reasoned form of postscientific inhumanism, in which d’Holbach, arguing against religious supernaturalism, undertook to undo human consciousness, purposiveness, and initiative as philosophical primitives by reducing them to the material operation of causal laws. This book, Goethe wrote, “appeared to us so dark, so Cimmerian, so deathlike, that we found it difficult to endure its presence, and shuddered at it as at a specter. . . . How hollow and empty did we feel in this melancholy, atheistical half-night, in which earth vanished with all its images, heaven with all its stars.”43 Note that Goethe’s response is not an argument addressed against d’Holbach’s arguments but an expression of incredulity toward the world that is the consequence of d’Holbach’s arguments—a world that Goethe finds to be unreal, and also morally repulsive. And then there is Samuel Johnson’s response to Boswell’s challenge that it is “impossible to refute” Bishop Berkeley’s claim that “every thing in the universe is merely ideal.” Johnson’s reply is not an argument but a gesture—“striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’ ”44 It is common to say that Johnson’s response is naïve, but anyone who has read Johnson’s essays knows that he is not in the least philosophically naïve. The stone that Johnson kicks is an object out there in the human world, and the gesture tacitly declares that he finds Berkeley’s theoretical stone, existing only as a collection of ideas in minds, to be humanly unbelievable; perhaps with the further implication that if one’s reasoning leads to unbelievable consequences, it would be reasonable to reconsider the epistemological premises that result in these consequences.