NABOKOV AND SWIFT, ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE: THE SUBLIME INNOCENCE, OR THE UNCANNY RETURN OF THE REFERENT IN POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORY ALONG THE LINES OF ZENO'S PARADOX
Vadim Linetski
repetition/con/intertextualization of a
given text has to be material in order to be anything at all). And this
clears our analysis of a rebuke for twisting things around to state matters
in Zenonian fashion: far from being another metalanguage (i.e. an instance
of Cretan discursivity), the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise strategy is
the language of interpretation as such. It is this paradox as the impossibility
to ever tie the inter-pretive double bind which makes of an hermeneutic
race a cold war against the notion of truth/full meaning.
The vogue which the Zeno's famous paradox enjoys in poststructuralist theory
is not surprising. It is this paradox which provides a point of convergence
between the main strands associated with the illustrious names of Deleuze,
Lacan and Derrida as well as between the crucial issues of poststructuralist
project - those of difference/alterity, identity construction and the "bar
games" with the referent (Genosko 1994: 7, 41) - furnishing the framework
for the allegedly non-logocentric redefinition of the status of the work
of art and aesthetic activity in general. However, as the attempts to attain
a critical distance from what has already become a poststructuralist orthodoxy
gain in strength and scope, the reasons that of yore have pushed our paradox
to the fore become obscured if not obfuscated. This paradoxical fate of
Zeno's paradox deserves most minute attention.
If the efforts to carve the path beyond deconstruction have thus far so
obviously failed to produce anything worthwhile, then precisely because
the paradoxicality just mentioned points to the very heart of the problem
with which theorists unsuccessfully grapple for the last thirty or so. In
most general terms the problem in question is the undoubdtfully honorouble
task of surpassing logocentric tradition in all its forms and disguises,
the task for which the name of Derrida has become totemic. And yet the very
mood characteristic of the current theoretical scene - that of melancholic
scepticism - seems to suggest that the deconstructive project, by and large,
has fizzled out. Fortunately, as we shall see, the funeral is not fatal,
for the deceased has been buried alive. Put otherwise, it is not so easy
to kill the mocking-bird of deconstruction, this Phoenix of sorts.
Exemplary of the strategy deployed by Derrida's critics 1 are the numerous articles by Irene Harvey focusing
on the issue of exemplarity (Harvey 1988, 1992). Basically, Harvey reproduces
the charge made by B.Johnson according to whom Derrida reproduces precisely
that which he wishes to deconstruct (Johnson 1977; Harvey 1992: 199). However,
over the years the general tone has shifted from benevolence to suspicion
prompting Harvey to identify the mentioned reproduction with the "return
... to classical metaphysics"( 211), with the inability to deconstruct
it. If, for Johnson and those who remain faithful to the banner of the old
school (cf.Sallis 1992), there is an uncanny coincidence between deconstructive
strategy and the strategy of Lacan as an alleged representative/example
of logocentric tradition, now this complicity is traced back to the origins
of the tradition itself (Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Kant), so that Derridaean
strategy becomes a (privileged) example of the tradition to be deconstructed
by it. The paradox with which this train of critical thought pushed by Harvey
to its logical end leaves us with remains unnoticed. In effect, even if
Harvey is correct in her surmise that Derrida has failed to theoretically
justify an example as something which subversively escapes the laws of logocentric
economy (207-216), it is still possible to argue that he has succeeded at
least practically, for in Harvey's account Derridaean discourse becomes
precisely the impossible exemplary non-example (193-194). Of what?, the
reader is allowed to inquire mimicking our critic who cannot help obsessively
reiterating the whats and whys without providing a distinct
answer. Since our solution is bound to be disconcerting to an average reader
infected as s/he is with theoretical commonplaces it will be wise not to
put it before the cart of the evidence.
To assert that a given discourse can at one and the same time fall
under the dominance of a law and subvert the latter does not necessarily
mean to adopt the Derridaean theory of the two laws on which deconstruction
hinges. Harvey is quite correct in conceding, however implicitly, that it
is precisely this theory and the undecidabilty foregrounded thereby which
is responsible for the metaphysical entrapment of deconstruction (200).
What our suggestion boils down to is the necessity to radically reconsider
the logic of this conspicuous coincidence. The paradox is that only thus
we can provoke a coincidence between the best intuitions of Derrida and
his critics, the coincidence which will be fruitful in its uncanniness.
The value of Harvey's analysis stems from the fact that up to this date
she remains the only one to unequivocally charge Derrida with the inability
to discursively situate himself beyond logocentrism. The irony of her discussion
stems from her own inability to maintain this charge, to wit, from the reluctance
to trace the true logic of exemplarity. And this precisely because from
the vantage chosen by our critic one can only show that there is no actual
coincidence between deconstruction and traditional hermeneutics. In other
words, although "one could argue that Derrida's work has from
its inception never been concerned with anything other than exemplarity"(193;
italics mine), it is advisable to think twice before taking this bait
Unfortunately our critic is only all too hasty to violate this sound rule
of commonsense. Whence her wonder that "in his readings" Derrida
"never asks ... : why exemplarity itself?"(207). If Derrida was
actually interested in exemplarity per se then it would have been
surprising that Harvey is compelled to leave the question unanswered, or,
to be more precise, to provide an answer in the manner described by Freud
in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Put differently, Harvey
cannot help to unwittingly mimic Derridaean strategy and in so doing to
bare the text she is reading. Since according to Derrida such is the function
of example and its subversive force, whereas according to Harvey we have
here the first instance of his metaphysical entrapment (197), Harvey's discourse
is immediately transformed into an example of deconstructive exegesis and
added to the infinite series of examples which is the logocentric tradition
itself. But by the same token it becomes impossible to maintain that the
deconstructive discourse and the one to be deconstructed coincide as
a fact (cf.Weber 1987: 10), for the mechanism through which this coincidence
is brought about is that of device-baring that, in the wake of Russian Formalists,
is conceived of as the production of the gap, recently thematized as the
non-logocentric différance. In Harvey's words, "the space
is kept open for the truly non-exemplary example"(196). However, as
she argues in respect to Derrida and uncannily shows in her own practice,
this space is non-logocentric only at the face of it: the dialectizing movement
remains pos-sible, and, I would add, inevitable - so long as one hesitates
to conceive otherwise of the principal terms of our discussion.
The first to be reconsidered among those is the concept of device-baring
which, underpinning the mechanism of exemplarity, represents a more adequate
but not yet the proper name of the logic that interests us here. To bare
the device means to introduce the disparity, unequality between the two
discourses - the one which is subject to deconstructive deciphering and
the deconstructing one. According to Harvey, this is precisely what Derrida
has performed in his reading of Kant: "the list of examples (given
by Kant at least) can be shown to be a hierarchical stacking of far from
equal or substitu-table cases. Some cases (examples) are thus more equal
than others 2. Though
significant and revealing, this analysis again reaffirms the traditional
view that examples are examples insofar and only insofar as they are examples
of a law"(204). The subversion of the latter is concomitant with pondering
over the problem "What else is taking place in these relations between
example - text - example such that ... they can always - even after
Derrida - be read otherwise ... Derrida's analysis here, as elsewhere on
this issue, seems to stop short - on the brink - and turns back to feigning
metaphysical forms, laws, and machinations at the very moment when some
other articulation - not mimetic, not doubling, not castrating or
circumcizing becomes possible"(197; last italics are mine). Why, then,
not rush to seize this possibility to articulate - at long last! - the strategy
of surpassing logocentrism? Precisely because the latter has been equated
with non-mimetic discursive relationship which was previously equated with
the discursive inequality as a hierarchizing/dialecticizing logocentric
movement. It follows that, strictly speaking, there was no baring of depth
structures - neither of those of tradition in the work of Derrida, nor of
those of Derrida in the analysis of Harvey. Instead, "the concealment
of the problematics of exemplarity"(215) for which Harvey takes Derrida
to task is furthered by her own critique. Nevertheless, a certain baring
takes place, and, what is more, takes place in perfect accordance
with the general rules of discursive (self)deconstruction established by
Derrida. However, to conclude that Derrida overtakes his critics
would mean precisely to seize the bait which one should avoid taking.
For the coincidence in question, apparent as it is, is not the one we are
after. In fact, exactly this coincidence lays lame every deconstructive
effort undertaken thus far.
To claim with Derrida that deconstruction is, actually, a self-deconstruction
means to associate logocentric discursive mastery with the self-presence
of intention in the consciousness of an author. Something always escapes
the intention of the subject who cannot master her/his own discourse exposing
thus his/her rear to plucking by a newcomer who suffers the same fate -
and this ad infinitum. It is this process which at first sight is unwittingly
bared but actually barred by Harvey. Witness the following passage:
"There we have it: there is no law, but, then again
this law, that of the example of Rousseau, is now
an example of another law. The law of the law here
is therefore that abssolute laws of inauguration
cannot be found, named, articulated, thematized or
presented. Why not? ... Why has Derrida incessantly
to do the impossible in all of the above? Why does
he now insist that this impossibility is itself a
law, and thus he obeys it and manifests it, and,
therefore, finally, can justify his choice of exa-
mple as unjustifiable justifiably"(214; italics
mine)
Since the quoted passage, exemplary as it is for strategy of Derrida's critics
3, is itself an example
of the general laws of deconstruction as described above, the reader may
wonder what can justify our attempt to see in such a plain affair an example
of device-baring? what can be bared thereby? However, the italicized sentences
should give us pose. For, especially the last one, points to the very heart
of the problem which we attempt to circumscribe.
What justifies our interest in this sentence is the fact that it represents
a version of the paradox of the Cretan Lier which itself is a version of
another paradox which the stoic semiosis boils down to. I mean the para-dox
of Achilles and the tortoise. These paradoxes underpin all the elaborations
of structuralism and its successor barring the break with logocentrism,
and this already by virtue of their filiative interdependence.
In effect, Derrida's view of deconstruction reenacts the Achilles/tortoise
paradox and therefore corresponds neatly to the notion of (literary) history
as indirect filiation propounded by Russian Formalists - indisputable precursors
of structuralism 4.
According to the pregnant formulation of Victor Shklovsky, it is not the
father to whom the son is (intertextually) indebted but the uncle. In terms
of the theory of genres, this view of the the transmission of tradition
boils down to the ressurection of the marginal genres of the day before
yesterday with the (provisional) exclusion of the yesterday's ones 5. The result is the reversal
of generations, the deconstructive version of which provides the celebrated
discussion of the Socrates-Plato relation (Derrida 1980). Derrida's hope
is to undermine tradition by showing that the author never controls his/her
text/utterance being always already before or behind it. Whence the celebrated
undecidability on which the whole postructuralist project stands or falls.
However, the gist of the matter is that, according to Derrida, in order
to be complete deconstruction must show that the author is not simply ahead
or behind the text but is this at one and the same time. Otherwise
undecidability will concern only the outcome of the race but not the identities
of the participants. But there's the rub! For, as Harvey has convincingly
argued, the "and" of deconstruction is in fact the "or"
6 The irony of
the matter stems from the fact the same applies to the paradox of the Cretan
Lier which structures Harvey's discourse 7.
The conclusion which suggests itself may well make a panic-monger of a hard-boiled
poststructuralist who is bound to pay for intellectual astuteness with an
emotional stress. Fortunately, what seems to come very close to a death-sentence
on deconstruction for the first time clears the way for the deconstruction
worth its name, for the deconstruction of the second degree.
In fact, the strategy of Derrida's critics doubles his own in the dimunitive
manner in which the Achilles/tortoise paradox relates to that of the Cretan
Lier. Which means at one and the same time the (logocentric) hierarchization
of both discourses and their non-mimetic intertextual/dialogical
correspondence. It follows, that the deployment of deconstruction, promoting
as it does the possibility of reading as reading otherwise, is the
deployment of the mechanism of the transmission of logocentric tradition
astutely divulged by Harvey. So long as thus far nobody has suggested how
to deploy deconstruction otherwise, it follows that it is impossible to
deploy it at all. Which explains why, despite the conspicuous strategical
coincidence(s) Harvey is at pains to stress that what she is doing "is
not a deconstruction of Derrida"(197) 8. And, paradoxically, she is quite correct at that.
This self-dimunition is what allows us in the first instance to speak about
the paradoxical fate of Zeno's paradox in poststructuralist theory. For
the unavoidable corollary of the deconstructive self-dimunition is the uncanny
return of the referent which, as is generally believed, has been annihilated
once and for all (Baud-rillard 1977; Eco 1986; Genosko 1994: 41-57). My
contention is, however, that only this return can help deconstruction to
do what it strives for.
Another (overtaking) baring of postructuralist project takes place in the
writings of C.S.Peirce who with increasing persisitence is boosted as a
true precursor of poststructuralism (Deleuze 1984, 185), as a thinker who
has precipitatingly solved the quandaries encountered by contemporary theorists
(Weber 1987), as a figure to replace Saussure in theoretical worship. Therefore
one should not be surprised to find that our paradox plays a prominent role
in Peircean ruminations.
Equally, thanks to our exploration, the reader will not be surprised at
the form in which Peirce came to grapple with Zeno's paradox. In effect,
our analysis for the first time allows to divulge why in order to safeguard
dialogicity and a-refentiality of his semiotics Peirce had to prove that
Achilles will overtake the tortoise, or, as a contemporary commentator puts
it, that "he will have (always, already) overtaken the tortoise"
(Weber 1987: 16; italics added). Only this overtaking, by virtue of pointing
"both toward the past and toward the future"(16)
can guarantee the diachronicity of semiotical process (which, allegedly
absent from saussurean structuralism, is said to account for the logocentric
alliances of the latter), to wit, its dialogicity as a possibility of reading
otherwise implicit in Peircean definition of the sign which maintains the
relation of partial equivalence to its object/refernt, albeit the final
logical interpretant (Achilles's final overtaking) on which the diachronical
dialogicity hinges does not itself have an object. However, half-heartedly
and obscurely, Weber cannot help acknowledging that this model is "self-defeating"(14).
I hope that the preceeding part of our analysis has already satisfied an
astute reader as to the logic of this self-defeat. Which is not to say that
there are no more surprises laying in stake. However, to continue in the
same wain we have to take recourse to textual reality which, placing the
post-structuralist theorizing in an uncanny light, will make of our analysis
something more nourishing than a mere rereading of rereadings.
That the poststructuralists one and all are inveterate fans of Achilles
is quite logical, since only his victory in the race can secure the belated
priority of the deconstructingly interpretive discourse situating it both
ahead and behind of the discourse to be deconstructed. In Derridaean terms,
this means to encircle the discourse supposedly guilty of logocentrism with
the parergonal frame (1987: 96-101 et passim). The result is the non-mimetic
mergence between the two. Deconstruction is not the discourse of its perpetrator,
but the effect of the mentioned operation, that is, a process. Now it is
precisely "the process by which /the deconstructive/ Achilles will
overtake the tortoise /of logocentrism/" (Weber 1987: 13) for which
Peicean semiotics "fails to account"(13).
As we have seen, this failure stems from the inability to substitute the
allegedly non-logocentric "and" for the supposedly logocentric
"or". What accounts for the trouble is the reluctance to discern
in the uncannily familiar concepts as deployed in the tradi-tional texts
a potential more subversive than the new sense with which these concepts
are endowed in the deconstructive practice. Paradoxically, this applies
primarily to the concepts on which Derrida's attention has been so long
focused. I mean the notions of "mimesis" and "writing".
According to one of Derridaean seminal postulates, the gist of the matter
is not to restore to writing its dignity, that is, not to simply reverse
the old hierar-chy, but to radically reevaluate the notion of writing in
order to make it include the notion of speech (1981a: 181-182; 1981b: 12).
Which means to show that the new notion of writing which apparently overtakes
the traditional one has been always already operating in the traditional
formulations and therefore is at the same time behind the latter. This explains
why the theory of mimesis becomes the priviliged object of deconstruction,
for the very existence of the latter hinges on the non-mimetic character
of every mimetic doubling. The paradox of the matter is that if Derrida
is correct in his assumptions, then it becomes impossible to deconstruct
prima facie the theory of mimesis.
For, on Derrida's own terms, to strive for truth/referent by deploying the
mechanism of mimesis - and this is what, says Derrida, the Western hermeneuts
have been always already doing - means to endlessly post-pone the advent
of it. Although this endless postponement obviously cannot help but imlicitly
make of the "truth" a simulacrum of sorts, it is the postponement
itself which deconstruction boils down to 9. This reduces the difference (i.e. non-mimetic
coincidence) between the two strategies to the opposition conscious vs.
unconscious, intentional vs.unintentional and thereby re-introduces the
framework of logocentric binarism. However, to rest satisfied with this
conclusion would not only mean to treat deconstruction all too leniently
but in so doing to futher the obfuscation of logocentrism along with the
best intuitions of its critics which uncannily remain in abeyance.
Put bluntly, our conclusion - and up today nobody commenting on the work
of Derrida has managed to propound anything else - is nott up to the point
at all, for it happens to be invalidated by the dialectics of blindness
and insight which seems to establish precisely the structure of "at
one and the same time" as the royal way of deconstruction. Ironically,
precisely this structure turns out to be the very mechanism of transmission
of traditional values.
What deManian dialectics aims at is primarily the undermining of the notion
of self-presence equated in poststructuralist theory with that of truth.
That nobody can claim to be exempt from this dialectics means the non-mimetic
mergence between the two discourses, to wit, the uncertainty/undecidability
as regards the identities of the participants in Zeno's hermeneutic race.
The result is the certainty that someone's rear is always already in the
process of being plucked. The paradox of our paradox is that the conclusion
just reached, far from promoting paradoxicality in the Cretan way, explains
why deconstruction is such a sublime affair. Unfortunately, in the literal
sense of unavoidable evaporation.
The reasons are twofold and interrelated. As we have seen, the difference
between deconstructive and traditional strategies is not the one between
conscious and unconscious deployment of the same strategy, for both are
subject to the same dialectics. Which means that deconstruction in actual
fact has always already been there, for every reading/interpretation as
such, no matter what overt strategy it deploys, cannot be anything else
than a deconstruction. By definition - and in strictly Derridaean sense10. Exactly for this reason
there can be no talk of deconstruction at all, so long as we con-ceive of
it along the Derridaean lines, i. e. as a sub-version of logocentric tradition
by means of the reformulated concept of writing. For the latter does not
need the slightest alteration to satisfy Derridaean demands.
In effect, in Derrida's view there is deconstruction only insofar as it
can be conceived as a process without begginning or end, that is, as perpetuum
mobile of sorts. Which makes of the practice of writing the mechanism of
interpretive transmission just described. However, this mechanism can function
only by diminishing every new interpretation in respect to the preceeding
one. This is not to say that Achilles will not overtake the tortoise, but
that in order to win he has to non-mimetically identify 11 with the tortoise, i.e. to reverse
the quantitative priorities, to (self-deconstructively) diminish himself.
Put otherwise, the postsructuralist belief that the deconstruction is the
baring of the unthought and excluded elements of the traditional discourse
compels the adept to descend into the hole and to have a drop (always already
too much) of the beverage which has made the innocent Alice grow smaller.
The irony of the matter is that this practice of writing has been always
already thematized in the texts which recently have come under the fire
of deconstructive critique as patent examples of logocentric values, mastery
being the first of them.
To cite only two instances: the dimunition inherent in writing conceived
intertextually as the production of new interpretations is foregrounded
in such a work as Gulliver's Travels which can be conveniently viewed as
the encyclopedia of patriarchal prejudices, as an avatar of colonial fiction(s).
However, the narrator - and Gulliver is obviously a self-conscious one just
as a typical postmodern narrator is apt to be - is fully conscious that
the price to be paid for (ethnocentric) dimunition of the Other is the dimunition
of one's own representation, i.e. a certain linkage, aphanisis of rhetorical
force 12. Another
example of the same dimunitive practice firnishes H.James's tale In The
Cage: the movement described as the Achilles's dimuninitive identification
with the tortoise is the very movement of emplotment in James's narrative:
in order to understand - and it is worthwhile to note that this understanding
is a process of a certain non-mimetic coincidence between fiction and reality
- the heroine has to abase herself, which takes the form of the process
of the realization of metaphor, i.e. of device-baring/making-strange 13.
Although the poststructuralist theorists have never addressed themselves
to the process under discussion, let alone recognized in it the very (de)structurizing
move-ment of Derridaean writing 14, our sketch seems to corro-borate the current stance to treat
James as a promoter of discursive mastery under the guise of the commitment
to aesthetism which, according to the general view, is far from being innocent
(cf. Norris 1988; Przybylowicz 1986). For to diminish discursively means
to make characters manipulable. As we have already become tired of hearing,
this patently logocentric way to deal with the Other is especially notorious
in case of women and children. According to Rose, the drive for mastery
- epistemic, sexual etc. - explains why in Barrie's narrative Peter Pan
is not allowed to grow up (Rose 1984: 76-77). However, this strategy can
only be aggravated by the poststructuralist stance to blur the border between
fictional and explicitly referential narratives. In due time we shall take
issue with this stance adopted by Rose in order to show that the genuinely
innovative rereading of children's fiction is impossible on these premises
which lead to the drastic simplification of the textual reality along with
the obfuscation of the subversive power of texts - traditional as well as
recent ones 15. James's
tale is a good intermediary stage of our discussion, for it alerts us to
the fact that matters are far more intricate and intriguing than the recent
theorizing would allow us to believe. And this because dimunition is uncannily
interrelated with intertextuality - this postsructuralist sesam par excellence.
That the perpetuum-mobile of Derridaean writing is intertextuality in etat
pur is obvious enough: there is no beginning of nor foreseeable end
to the text's simultaneous reference to itself and to other texts (Derrida
1981a: 202). The paradoxical consequence of this fundamental rule of deconstruction
is that it leads to the sublime evaporation of the deconstructive project.
For the infiniteness of the intertextual interpretation conceived as the
practice of deconstructive writing cannot help but end with the dimunition
of deconstruction which becomes invisible to the eye as a virtual entity
and thereby proves to be an exact counterpart of the notion of an "aesthetic
object" - perhaps the most troubling one among the concepts of Bakhtin
whose legacy has been all too hastily appropriated by poststructu-ralism
along the dialogical/intertextual lines. As we have shown elsewhere 16, the virtuality of an "aesthetic
object" stems from its being a product of an interpreter /reader who
represents for Bakhtin a fictitious other. Since the latter performs all
the functions with which the Other has been endowed in poststructuralism,
one is justified to conclude that the true otherness is a subversion of
logocentrism precisely by virtue of being a subversion of dialogism, that
is, has to be located beyond the opposition of dialogism vs. monologism
exposed as a logocentric affair. In order to fully appreciate the subversiveness
of Bakhtin's theory we have to attend more closely to the mechanisms which
structure the textual reality by barring the actualization of the virtual
aesthetic object. In so doing we shall not only provide a more adequate
picture of literary tradition but also pinpoint the actual meeting-place
of Bakhtin and Derrida, the place which thus far remains a blank on the
maps of poststructuralist (mis)reading(s).
The sublime fate of the deconstructive
writing is the paradox of Zeno's paradox the consequences of which remain
to be spelled out. What has promoted it to its status of the depth-structure
of poststructuralist theorizing is the hope to annihilate once and for all
referentiality as such. Whence the vogue currently enjoyed by the theory
of the sublime in the version given to it by Kant (cf. Engström 1993;
Ferguson 1992; Lyotard 1991; Readings 1992; Weiskel 1976; Courtine et al.
1988). In effect, the basic feature of the Kantian sublime is its a-referentiality
which has a necessary corollary in the communicability of the sublime feeling.
Part of the value of our analysis stems from the fact that for the first
time it makes explicit the necessary character of the mentioned connection
which has not been spelled out by Kant, whereas contemporary commentators,
for reasons that an astute reader need not be promted to guess, have said
and done all to slyly obfuscate it. The reasons for this obfusca-tion are
just as simple as they are compelling, for the thematization of the sublime
within the poststructuralist framework cannot help but bring about exactly
what should have been precluded by deconstructive machinations, to wit,
the uncanny return of the referent.
This return, unavoidable on the premises of the third Critique, accounts
for the generally acknowledged iadequateness of Kantian theory, for its
openness to deconstructive re-readings. However, the latter can be dubbed
deconstructive only in the sense suggested above. Significantly, it is the
most sustained effort to deconstruct Kant - the one undertaken by Derrida
- which proves the validity of our reasoning and in so doing paves the way
to the theory of discursive innocence which is nothing else than deconstruction
of the second degree.
At first glance, it appears surprising that precisely the uncanny return
of the referent in Kant's theory of the sublime, the return which cries
for deconstruction is carefully avoided in the allegedly deconstructive
reading supplied by Derrida. Unfortunately for the poststructuralist project
our surprise is not justified. For Derrida cannot help referring, however
unwillingly and briefly, to the main contradiction of Kant's treatise and
in so doing to radically undermine his own claims as regards the always
open possibility to read otherwise, that is, to stage the reading on the
grave of an author without taking recourse to his/her intentions.
Derrida's reference comes at the very end of his attempt to substitute logocentric
ergon with non-logocentric parergon and deserves to be cited
in full:
"Why can magnitude, which is not a quantity, and
not a comparable quantity in the order of pheno-
mena, let itself be represented under the cate-
gory of quantity rather than some other category?
... Why this reference, still, to a cise in space?
Then, another question, still the same, if phenome-
nalization is to be admitted, why should the subli-
me be the absolutely large and not the absolutely
small? ... Why this valorization of the large which
thus still intervenes in a comparison between inco-
mparables? ... An object, even if it were indiffe-
rent to us in its existence, still pleases us by
its mere largeness ... and this feeling is univer-
sally communicable ... Kant does not ask himself
why this should go without saying, naturally toward
the largest and the highest ... what decides that,
in this quantum, the more is worth more than the
less, and the large more or better than the small?
The agency of decision or 'preference' can as such
be neither phenomenal nor noumenal, neither sensib-
le nor intelligible. The question comes back to the
origin of presentation. Why does the large absolute
(the sublime), which is not a quantum since it ex-
ceeds all comparison, let itself be presented by a
quantum which does not manage to present it? And
why does this essentially inadequate quantum pre-
sent it all the 'better' for being larger? ... Kant
has introduced comparison where he says it should
have no place. He introduces it ... in an apparen-
tly very subtle manner ... by comparing the com-
parable with the incomparable"(1987: 136-137)
Derrida's manner of handling deconstruction equals Kantian strategy in subtlety
which in both cases happens to be ostensible. Already the purely quantitative
excess of questions over the answers, especially if compared with the discourse
of his critics which winds up with the same correlation, should alert the
most lazy reader to recognize here the strategy of Achilles-becoming-the-
tortoise described above. What distinguishes our own discourse radically
from the critical strategy beyond which thus far nobody has managed to move,
is that we can easily avoid lingering on this formal coincidence which,
as an instance of Cretan discursivity, can only make a tortoise of ourselves.
Our abstinence from falling over the logocentric bait offered by Derrida
will immediately be rewarded.
To succumb to the mentioned temptation means to maintain that Derrida's
questions strikingly miss the point. This would certainly explain their
quantitative excess but by the same token promote the interpretive transmission
the mechanism of which we are at pains to divulge. Fortunately for our enterprise
the outcome of the hermeneutic race hinders the deployment of the blindness/insight
dialectics to which, as might appear at this point, we are bound to fall
prey.
The sleight of Derrida's hand is to make us believe that the question of
the absolute large emerges in Kant's discourse as a Freudian Abkommling
of the concern with the problematics of referentiality qua truth which stamps
the theory of the sublime as a logocentric affair. The paradox of the matter
is that to grant him this point means to assume that Kant's most implicit
intention is to secure precisely the interpretative transmission which hinges
on the success of Achilles's slyness. Which means to exhaust the paradoxicality
of our paradox, to wit, to bring about the interpretive aphanisis as a sublime
evaporation of deconstruction. And this because the result of Derrida's
reading is the baring of the mechanism that can produce simulacra only by
promoting referentiality.
However radical Kant's intentions as regards referentiality may be, runs
Derridaean argument in the cited passage, within the logocentric framework
they can be realized only by an omnipotent subject as a locus of self-presennce
qua truth. The same argument has been turned against Derrida himself by
Harvey, and, as we have seen, can be turned against herself. Ad infinitum?
That is the question ... to which precisely the work of Derrida provides
a negative answer.
If we are to understand why Kant has equated the sublime with the absolute
large, we have, according to Derrida, displace the question in order to
see in it an issue of preference, i.e. of purely deliberate choice. Derrida
is the first to acknowledge that this answer is a displacement, that is,
a misreading. As everybody believes, the reading by definition cannot be
anything else. Derrida's slyness is to (mis)present what actually is a faithful
reading as a misinterpretation.
The sheer quantitative force of Derrida's rhetoric cannot fail to produce
an overwhelmingly sublime effect upon the reader versed in Derridaean writings
prompting her/him to conclude that the message of logocentrism (sublime
as the absolute large) becomes the medium of deconstructive attack. However,
this conclusion - with which Derrida's critics habitually wind up - immediately
undermines itself, for it implies that the coincidence between the two discourses
is not perfect which means to keep deconstruction on the run. Unfortunately,
just the opposite seems to be true. That is we have to account for the mimetic
relation 17 - not
only between the participants in the hermeneutic race but also between the
message and its medium in their discourses.
At first glance, our passage boils
down to the suggestion that in order to clear the theory of the sublime
of logocentrism it is sufficient to equate the sublime with the absolute
small. Further it might appear that this message is quantitatively at odds
with its medium as just another reiteration of Derrida's why the absolute
large and not the small? However, this disparity turns out to be ostensible,
for the effect of reiteration is to make the issue of seize appear indifferent.
It follows that Kant's equation of the sublime with the absolute large does
not make any difference or différance.
The disappearence of the quantitative issue is precisely what enables Achilles
to overtake the tortoise in the hermeneutic race by means of (non-mimetic)
identification. However, the same outcome has the foregrounding of our issue
in Kantian discourse.
In effect, according to Kant, the sublime pertains to the aesthetic domain
only insofar as it shares a-re-fentiality with the feeling provoked by the
beautiful. On the other hand, Kant would like to maintain that the sub-lime
feeling is far more adequately experienced before the objects of nature,
i.e. before referents in etat brute. Now it is precisely this contradiction
18 which the equation
of the sublime with the absolute large allows to solve. At least at first
sight.
In effect, the only way to retain the phenomenological purity of the sublime
feeling and at the same time to claim for it the aesthetic character is
to assume that in producing the art object an artist is deploying the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise
strategy. For the self-dimunition implied in the latter suggests that the
art object overtakes its natural referent which by definition is the absolute
large by making it disappear from eye-sight and by the same token by disappearing
itself. Hence the issue of seize becomes irrelevant/undecidable but only
insofar as we assume that the referent is the absolute large, for otherwise
the referentiality of the latter would make the question of the sublime
disappear as such. Paradoxically this does not mean to do away with referentiality
but to reinforce it.
For, according to the Achilles-becoming-the-tor-toise logic which guides
this train of reasoning, the disappearance of the art object can mean nothing
else than its becoming the referent. Taken at face value, the result is
precisely the one divulged by Derridaean deconstruction. As postructuralism
would have it, striving to bring about the revelation (of truth) as the
disappearance of the sign(ification) logocentrism makes the issue of thruth
undecidable: the sublime evaporation (aphanisis) of the signifying matter
is said to have a corrosive effect on the order of referents/signifieds
transforming the latter into simulacra. Whence the notion of the sign as
pharmakon as well as the view of deconstruction as self-deconstruction.
The reader tolerably versed in Freudian theory would not be surprised at
the uncanny effect of these reassuring views.
According to Derrida, an attempt to naturalize the sign is a logocentric
demarche par excellence. According to Bakhtin, the naturalization of the
work of art is what makes the Formalist poetics founder transforming the
latter into a version of gedonistic (i.e. logocentric) aesthetics and thereby
limiting it to the domain of an isolated (i.e. logocentric) consciousness
(Medvedev 1993a: 117-160). Along these lines Bakhtin can unambiguously be
dubbed an avatar of poststructuralism. However, to regard this issue as
settled would mean only to promote the logocentric tradition.
So long as the movement of naturalization strengthens the position of the
logocentric omnipotent subject and by the same token fosters monologism
generally viewed as a main feature of Western tradition, it seems natural
to conclude that the dialigic option can be considered as a valid alternative
only if it will undermine the very foundation of logocentrism. However,
the means deployed to this end cannot help but have an uncanny effect.
To undermine the (epistemic) omnipotence of the logocentric subject means
to drive him out of his mono-logic seclusion into the polyphonic field of
intertextual forces. This is the task of Bakhtin's critique of Saussure
(Voloshinov 1993) as well as of Derrida's reading of Husserl (1967), both
of them striving to bare those ele-ments of discirsivity which the tradition
has failed to accommodate. The emerging models cannot fail to closely resemble
each other and in so doing to evoke Peircean semiotics as a poststructuralist
alternative to the structuralist Saussurean stance dismissed as logocentric.
It is precisely the retroactively baring recourse to Peirce which accounts
for the sublime fate of poststructuralist theorizing.
The discursive elements on which Bakhtin and Derrida place the stakes of
their intertextuality are identical. According to Bakhtin, what makes a
discourse social are the elements which the tradition has always treated
as marginal, paralinguistic. According to Derrida, exactly the privilege
given to meaningful signs over indicative signs, to expression over indication
stamps Husserlian theory as logocentric (1967: 37 et passim). In order not
to weary the reader who is supposed to be tolerably versed in these matters,
suffice it to say that Bakhtin and Derrida's elaborations can be summed
by the Husserlian dictum read in self-dimunitive reverse: for both theorists,
"facial expressions and gestures /the list can be enlarged/ that /in/voluntary
accompany speech with/out/ communicative intent"(1968 ii/1: 31) become
the object of primal interest. At the same time, it is on this point, indicated
by the parenthetical insertions, that the paths of Bakhtin and Derrida seem
to part. The uncanniness of our story is that this divergence is only provisional,
so that the ultimate coincidence boils down to the contradiction with which
every version of inter-textuality is bound to end.
In effect, the gist of Bakhtin'a argument, as it is habitually read (e.g.Stewart
1986), is that the elements dubbed paralinguistic accompany speech voluntary
and with a communicative intent. It is the involuntary introduction of the
notion of intent which threatens to make of his theory an easy prey for
the logocentric appropriation and at the same time for the deconstructive
critique along the lines of the dialectics of blindness/insight. Significantly,
Bakhtin is fully conscious of this threat. Whence his critique of Freudian
unconscious and the notion of the social evaluation: both allow to avoid
attributing the communicative intent to the subject, i.e. to regard a given
utterance as involuntary. The intertex-tual model grounded in the concept
of the collective unconscious works fine - but only in the absence of the
referent, for example, of the textual reality for the explanation of which
it was primarily designed. By now the reader need not be prompted to recognize
what kind of effect these ruminations are bound to have, for s/he has already
discerned in the disappearance of the referent - both in and of - Bakhtin's
theory the fate of the art object in the Kantian theory of the sublime.
However, in Bakhtin's case the conclusion is more disastrous since his intertextuality
hinges on the celebrated assumption the a (literary) text is never written
in a dead language, i.e. should never become naturalized (Voloshinov 1993:
80-81 et passim).
Ironically, Bakhtin's students deem themselves sufficiently equiped to meet
our argument. I say ironically, for the supposed refutation is advanced
as a departure from the (dead) letter of Bakhtinian legacy in order to adjust
the latter to the demands of the day (Hirschkop 1989), whereas in actual
fact it remains quite faithful in the most conventional sense of the term.
Nei-ther monologism nor dialogism, runs the mentioned objec-tion, is the
property of the text itself, but the way of how it is read under current
social circumstances, that is, of how it is contextualized (24-27). Unfortunately,
on these premises we have either to see a contradiction between Bakhtin's
critique of Formalist aesthetics where the charge hinges on the refutation
of the materiality of the art object and his attack on formalist linguistics
refuted for the disregard to the materiality, to wit, sociality of the signifying
process 19, - or
else to concede that Bakhtin is saying exactly what his legataries say.
That the latter are at pains to deny this in-debtedness is quite understandable,
for to acknowledge it would mean to sign a death-sentence on dialogism/inter-textuality
as a theory of unrestricted debt on which poststructuralism has placed its
stakes.
In order to see why this is so, let us cast a brief look at the path stroken
by Derrida from the point where we have left him. That the parenthetical
modification of Husserl's quote, necessary in case of Bakhtin, would misrepresent
Derrida's position is sufficiently explained by the apparent dissent of
our theorists on the issue of psychoanalysis and the notion of context.
So long as our analysis has already successfully stomached the apparently
indigestible first apple of dissent, we are justified not to pay much heed
to the second.
Derrida's (evaluating, i.e. a not too tight one) cuddle of the Husserl's
quote is a direct consequence of his equation of contextuality with a successful
(truth-revealing) communication (cf. 1982: 307-330). Whence the role of
iterability in his theory: to launch deconstruction in the first head it
is necessary to prove that the sign can be reiterated in the absence of
an author, without recourse to his/her intention(s). Put otherwise, signification,
for Derrida, is essentially an involuntary process without communicative
intent. On the other hand, this very process is said to be triggered by
différance. Whence the return of/to contextuality as an attempt to
solve the contradiction. What makes this return uncanny is the perfect coincidence
between contextuality thus introduced and the notion of context as deployed
by Bakhtin.
Despite (or thanks to) the proliferation of the Bakhtinian studies, the
utlization of his concepts remains amateurish so long as their function,
to wit, genesis remains undivulged. Witness the notion of context. Thus
far nobody has described the paradoxical logic of its apperance in Bakhtin's
work which makes of it another instance of Zeno's paradox.
In effect, the notion of contextuality emerges as a result of the transfer
of materiality from the object of art to the product of interpretation.
The imperative to which Bakhtin thus succumbs is the same which triggers
non-mimetic self-dimunitive identification of Achilles with the tortoise.
The social evaluation can take place only by means of the contextualization
which is the always open possibility of reading otherwise. The privileged
instance of this practice is, according to Bakhtin, intonation that should
secure iterability and at the same time non-coincidence of the utterance
with itself and its referent (Medvedev 1993: 133-144; Voloshi-nov 1995:
69). This assigns to intonation the same fundamental role in Bakhtinian
theory that the notion of différance has for Derrida: in fact, both
concepts are synonyms. The striking difference in their fate, i.e. the marked
reluctance of Bakhtinians to recognize in intonation a concept, let alone
to thematize it 20,
is not surprising, for Bakhtin's intonation turns out to be an innocently
profane version and, by the same token, a mimetic baring of the Derridaean
différance.
On the one hand, intonation throws
light on the most clandestine issue with which poststructuralism has placed
its stakes, substantiating the charge for repe-tition with difference. It
appears that to achieve an (intertextual) splitting it is not necessary
to materially alter anything in the utterance but only to differently intone
it. On the other hand, Bakhtin is candid enough to acknowledge that this
practice, which, once again, should testify to the materiality of the signifying
process, to wit, to its intertextuality and poliphony (social and otherwise)
does not leave any material traces, or, to be more correct, these inter-textual
traces 21 are subject
to inevitable evaporation (Bakhtin 1979: 230-231; Voloshinov 1993: 104).
However, only the most crude among the literal-minded readers will be surprised
at that.
Irony stems from the fact that to save Bakhtinian intertextuality a poststructuralist
reader, this invete-rate adversary of any kind of literality qua referentiality,
has to argue for the literal understanding of Bakhtin's theory, i.e. to
stipulate that materiality on which our problem hinges is used by Bakhtin
in the metaphorical sense. To make matters worse the second part of the
argu-ment does not follow from the first. And this precisely because Derrida's
writing is a neat counterpart of the Bakhtinian intonation.
What the former is at its straightforwardest, shows Derrida's Glas. Derrida's
own discourse inserted between the quotations from the works of Hegel and
Genet, far from functioning as an interpretive go-between, is bent upon
maintaing its independence, which makes of it a quotation of sorts, i.e.
a reiteration. Consequently, the text as it stands is an instance of pure
iterability, repition without différance. The latter, synonymous
with contextualization/intertextualization and deconstruction, can be brought
about only by deploying intonation, i.e. for the time being remains in abeyance.
Intonation will certainly intertextually juxtoppose what as a fact is simply
opposed. Whence the mechanical character of both operations, to wit, their
materiality - and non-coincidence.
However, to make deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence dependent
on the presence of the reader, in itself, does not undermine poststructuralist
claims. Paradoxically, to criticize Derrida solely on these grounds is the
surest way to bar the way for deconstruction worth its name 22. What signs the fate of deconstruction
is not the return of the sovereign reading subject on whose deliberate option
everything seems to hang, but the uncanny return of the referentiality and
the inability to recognize in it the possibilty of the genuine subversion.
To surmise that Derrida remains prey to metaphysical assumptions as regards
omnipotent subjectivity - and up this date nobody has managed to think of
anything better by way of critical reading of his work 23 - means to do him an injury and thereby to misrepresent
the so-called metaphysical assumptions themselves 24. What Derrida's readings of the classical texts
suggest is that there cannot be any omnipotent subjectivity - neither in
his discourse nor in the traditional one. And this is what makes of the
current version of deconstruction as self-deconstruction, or, in terms of
our present discussion, as a deployment of Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise-strategy,
i.e. of Cretan discursivity, a sublimly futile affair.
The same would apply to the Kantian theory of the sublime so long as we
see in it primarily an attempt to secure the interpretive transmission 25 which is obviously the tradition
itself 26. As we
have seen, the Achilles's strategy, underpinning the Kantian account, serves
pre-cisely this end. However, the self-dimunition implied in it radically
undercuts the subject's claims to omnipotence. Whence the coincidence, i.e.
absence of deconstruction, between Kant and Derrida's discourses.
It follows, that the main argument of Derrida's critics who limit his complicity
with tradition to the issue of the metaphysics of subjectivity (Harvey 1992;
M.Frank 1992) is more than shaky. Not only because it is always possible
to counter-act it by claiming that the presence of the reader is always
virtual, i.e., is in fact an absence. But precisely because this counter-argument
bares the literality on which Derridaean project uncannily hinges.
Paradoxically, the first - intertextual - effect of this literality is to
abolish the apparent contradiction between Derrida and Bakhtin, whose theories,
as it seems, are doomed to remain at odds by virtue of different valorization
of the writing and voice respectively. However, to maintain this contradiction
27 one has to treat
both notions literalily and thereby to ascribe metaphoricity to the much
hailed materiality of the signifying process of which Bakhtin remains an
avatar. Unfortunately, writing is material to the same extent and in the
same sense as Bakhtin's speech/intonation was shown to be. Ironically, only
by acquiescing to see matters from our standpoint one can explain the fate
of the Derridaen letter/signifier which is said to be always in danger of
getting lost. To assert that this danger belongs to the structure of every
writing (Derrida 1988: 201) means to give it up to the same doom to which
Bakh-tinian intonation is subject. Appearances notwithstan-ding, this is
not to say that Derrida's writing fails - as a fact - to rewrite the logocentric
structure of the voice. To the contrary.
Witness his strange reluctance - for once and precisely in case of the signature
(1984) - to take recourse to undecidability (i.e. to the immaterial mate-riality
of the naturalized sign interpreted as the phar-makonization of the order
of referents which it joins) which boils down to an implicit acknowledgement
of the disappearance of the deconstructive writing and by the same token
of the Bakhtinian intonation conceived of as interpretive strategies of
intertextual contextualizati-on. Instead, Derrida is bent upon retaining
the factual materiality at all costs and in so doing cannot fail to fall
prey to what was identified in the Bakhtin critique of Formalism as the
main fallacy of the latter, to wit, to the materiality of the art object
conceived in the most crude literal sense of the term. It remains to show
that this recourse, inevitable as it is within the frame-work of Zeno's
semiotics, was not avoided by Bakhtin himself. Fortunately, this return
to/of the referentiality has nothing to do with the dialectics of blindness/in-sight,
for it clears the path for the deconstruction of the second degree.
It is here that Derridaean ruminations on the structural effect of signature
come into play. At first glance, these boil down to a transfer of material
responsibility from the author/text to the reader/interpretation along Bakhtinian
lines: now it is the reader who signs (Derrida 1985: 51-53). Nevertheless,
the signature remains for Derrida primarily that of an author (Derrida 1984).
And it is by virtue of this fact that the whole problem takes a new and
promising turn allowing for the juncture between Derridaean and Bakhtinian
intuitions - nourishingly enriched and delishiously flavored with tho-se
of Kant, Freud and Heidegger - beyond the monologism /dialogism opposition
which underpins the metaphysic of subjectivity.
Our discussion draws part of its value from the fact that the alternative
just evoked, at first sight, seems no alternative at all. The reader may
be inclined to accuse us with leaving him/her with an uneasy choice between
the disappearance of the art object in the Kantian theory of the sublime
and the same fate of the pro-duct of interpretation in poststructuralism.
To make matters worse, at second glance, it appears that the choice itself
is ostensible: however brief, our inquiry into Kant's Third Critique following
in the steps of Derrida's reading has proved that in both cases what is
bound to disappear is the hermeneutic attitude, to wit, the double bind
on which poststructuralism stands or falls. Far from calling for radical
means, the double bind can be untied, and quite easily at that. What distinguishes
it from the Gordean knot, is the impossibility to tye it properly. Which
explains why the untying operation has nothing to do with the return to
logocentrism.
In order to function, the interpretive machine has to do what the production
of the art object supposedly cannot achieve, to wit, to extinguish the referential
traces. Which means to dimunitively identify with the artist and in so doing
to overtake him/her. This is why interpretation cannot be anything else
than the deployment of the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise strategy. By definition
28. It follows that
interpretation hinges vitally on the non-coincidence. As Lacan puts it,
"... what Zeno has not noticed is that the tortoise is not exempted
from the fatality to which Achilles is subject - his every step becomes
more and more small ... And this is why he cannot help but overtake the
tortoise, but he cannot join it"(1975: 13). Whence the foregrounding
of the double bind as a general rule of interpretation, for the double bind
is nothing else than the most radical version of the non-coincidence, non-mimesis.
As was already hinted above, the paradox of the double bind is the impossibility
to tie it.
According to the device-baring logic of the Achilles's strategy divulged
by our analysis, interpretation is bound to evaporate and thereby to bare
the referentiality which it has to abolish. Irony stems from the fact that
what at first glance seems to represent a perfect case of the blindness/insight
dialectic actually sub-verts the very premises for its deployment, for as
a last hope an interpreter has to thematize referentiality, i.e. to quite
consciously take the prohibited step. And this is why the uncanny outcome
is the very opposite of the Cretan discursivity. Witness Derrida's thematization
of the effect of signature.
Taken at face value, the signature as Derrida conceives of it is a step
back in respect to Bakhtin's critique of Formalism, that is a return from
the materiality of interpretation to that of an object of art. For once
the appearances are not misleading. And this is exactly why Derrida's theory
cannot fail but bring about the coincidence between Bakhtin's and the Formalist
theories, which, to believe certain Bakhtinians are destined to remain forever
at variance 29.
As we have already had ample occasion to ascertain ourselves, to subscribe
to the view just mentioned would mean to see in Bakhtin's critique an instance
of Achi-lles's strategy, i.e. to wind up with the conclusion that the radical
deconstruction of the hermeneutic tradition is impossible 30. For what we have been ramming
into the heads of our readers is precisely that on these premises deconstruction
becomes interpretation and shares the sublime fate of every interpretation.
By introducing the notion of signature Derrida directly thematizes the hermeneutic
aphanisis and in so doing brings about the coincidence between textual reality
and the reading of it, the coincidence which precludes the tying of the
double bind that makes of the unreadability an issue of restricted economy.
For Bakhtin, the materiality of
interpretation, to wit, its con/intertextuality, hangs on the notion of
intonation which, as we have just seen, corresponds neatly to the Derridaen
writing. So long as signature is the deployment of writing, it is not surprising
that Derrida thematizes signature in just the same terms which were introduced
by Bakhtin in his thematization of intonation. Theoretically, the result
should be the intratextual grounding of intertextuality, i.e. the promotion
of exegesis along the lines of repetition with difference. Disturbingly
for a poststructuralist reader, his/her expectations are radically subverted
by the textual practice of an author who is constantly called upon as a
reliable witness for the persecution (Hutcheon 1985; Merivale 1967). In
effect, it is nobody else than Vladimir Nabokov whose uncanny intervention
into the hermeneutic race we are discussing helps to rectify a number of
commonplaces which enjoy so much vogue.
Nabokov's short-story "The Potato Elf" is an excellent litmus-paper
for testing the effects of Derri-daean signature. For Nabokov's narrative
is another mise-en-scene of the Zeno's paradox - however, on a more appropriate
Schauplatz.
In order to non-mimetically merge with the text our prefatory lines (i.e.
an outwork of sorts) 31
should be read literally, since the setting of our story is a theatrical
one: what comes to be narrated is a life of a dwarf Frederick Dobson whose
successful circus-career has been by the libidinal complications. The latter
reinforce the grotesque implied in the set-up and thereby seem to make of
a story a hermeneutic double-bind tied in accordance with Bakhtin's instructions
to be found in his theory of the carnivalesque ambivalence 32.
The paradox which underpins the plot is an hermene-utical one. In its turn,
it is doubled by the paradox of the story. Whence the temptation to identify
the structure as that of Derrida's square 33 that boils down to the non-mimetic self-dimunitive
identification of Achilles with tortoise and thereby to baringly equate
the effect of Achilles's strategy with the effect of Derridaean signature.
As we have seen, the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise strategy which should
ensure interpretation by abolishing referentiality as a fact makes the interpretation
dependent on the referent. It follows that the (im)possibility to maintain
the (de)naturalized status of the referent becomes an issue on which poststructuralism
stands or falls. Whence an interest of Nabokov's intervention into the controversy.
What forces the Potato Elf to give up the circus career and, ultimately,
life is the love-affair with the spouse of his one-time partner, the juggler
Schock. After a libidinal bliss, he assumes that Nora will follow the conventional
path and elope with him. Instead she leaves with her husband for America
where the latter has found an engagement. Betrayed by the partner and paramour
Dobson gives up the scene and goes to live in seclusion. The monotony (iterability)
of his existence occupied solely by avid reading, is interrupted by Nora's
sudden reappearance. Her purpose is to inform him that he has a son. The
surprise makes him mute. Upon regaining his wits he remembers that he had
forgotten to ask an address and rushes after Nora in hope to overtake her
on her way to the station. He succeeds but dies of heart-failure unaccustomed
as he is to physical exertion. Nora remains quite callous. Her answer to
the besieging spectators is that she has lost her son. With this phrase
the story ends.
To surmise that at the level of story the crucial junctures boil down to
the issue of overtaking means to commit oneself to a literal reading - in
the non-evaluative sense of the forced proximity to the textual reality.
The subversive force of "The Potato Elf" stems precisely from
this mimetic constraints which bring about the aphanisis of the interpretive
attitude. And this due to the uncanny dependence of hermeneutic overtaking
on the referent.
The first narrative juncture is Dobson's love-affair with Nora. Ultimately,
his aim is as immaterial as an hermeneutic aim could be. To physically overtake
his partner means to assert his discursive equality with the "giants".
According to the poststructuralist doctrine, this equality is synonymous
with dialogical deconstruction of monologism, to wit, with con/intertextualization
grounded in the misreading as the self-dimunitive over-taking which keeps
open the possibility of reading other-wise. Whence the (possible, undecidable)
misreading of Nora's intentions by our hero who is bent upon acting as if
the sexual reunion has actually taken place. In order not to diverge from
the paradoxical manner of presentation, we can say that the Potato Elf has
to take as a fact, i.e.literally/referentially what others (may be inclined
to) take metaphorically. What seems to exhaust the paradox is that intertexuality
thus established cannot help turning out to be of a mimetical order 34: at this point the narrative
is threatened with a dead-end which would leave the reader with a trite
version of adultery.
Which explains why the intertextual iterability should be revitalizingly
doubled by an intratextual différance. Every narrative, claims Derrida,
is its own explicator, to wit, its own best deconstructor. In our case this
can only mean the furthering of the hermeneutic paradoxicality.
At first glance, Nora's appearance in Dobson's (intertextual) seclusion
amounts to an attempt to revitalize the conventions of the adultery genre
by deploying the baring device of making strange. Shortly, we shall restore
to its rights the subversive power of this concept neglected by Bakhtin.
In accordance with the Formalist and contrary to the poststructuralist theory
the price to be paid for discursive revitalization is the return to the
actual/ literal/referential substance of the narrative. In our case this
means that the appearance of Nora immediately abolishes the undecidability
in which intertextuality was grounded. It becomes clear that there was a
sexual union. This amounts to an hermeneutic coincidence between the expectations
of Achilles disguised as tortoise and the tortoise feigning to be Achilles.
If the text is to remain interpretable, the hermeneutic race should con-tinue.
Whence a new - and the last - attempt to tie the double bind - in hope to
prevent both ends from meeting. Ironically, it is precisely an effort to
deploy the Achilles's strategy in a radically poststructuralist way which
brings about the exhaustion of its hermeneutic potential.
In poststructuralist doctrine, the repetition with difference boils down
to an intratextual grounding of intertextuality. The result of this grounding,
which is believed to prevent a text's coincidence with itself, is the undecidability
located, primarily, at the stylistical level. The poststructuralist theorists
are so certain of their success that they deem that thereby they have exhausted
the textual reality. Instead, they have freezed the latter, to wit, taken
it literally and by the same token made of a skating contest a turn of figure
skating.
As an attempt to intratextually revitalize the arid intertextuality, Nora's
appearance should make the mea-ning of "The Potato Elf" undecidable.
Witness her announcement - "I had a son from you..."(289) - which
immedia-tely awakens Dobson to his Achillean destiny giving a new impetus
to the hermeneutic race. On the other hand, her final phrase: "I have
lost a son"(292) seems to make of the race an infinite marathon, prompting
the reader to take the place of the unlucky participant, that is, to non-mimetically
identify with Dobson. However, on more close inspection it proves that our
conclusion has been drawn all too hastily. For the price to be paid for
Achilles's victory makes of it a Pyrhean one.
In fact, undecidability comes to be dependent on referential structure in
its most brute form. For only Dobson's death can prolong the hermeneutic
race to infinity by soliciting Nora's remark which splits the grammatical
certainty of her first statement. Whence the apparent possibility of two
readings - the one supposedly literal, the other - allegedly metaphorical.
Forsooth, Nabokov's textual strategy makes the distinction hard to maintain
- but not in the sense preferred by Derrida (1991: 123-124).
Paradoxically, it is the literal
reading which utilizes the Derridaean supplementarity (there is no contradiction
between Nora's having a son from Dobson and her having lost him). To make
matters worse, the much hailed discursive equality turns out to have a refential
structure that it should abolish (this reading would imply that Nora takes
Dobson seriously: as an equal). Paradoxically, a reading deemed metaphorical
- Nora has been always treating the dwarf as a son - hangs on the same referential
structure, for her last phrase inevitably refers to Dobson's corpse. So
long as it is only this reading which can secure intertextuality by furnishing
it with the intratextual foundation, it follows that what we are dealing
with is not a double bind but the double baring of (1) intertextuality as
an inevitably hierar-chizing device and (2) of referentiality as a true
subversion of logocentric interpretive transmission.
At this point the only possibility left to a stubborn postructuralist is
to take back all the claims as regards the current version of deconstruction
and to argue that our text will retain all its aesthetic force without any
recourse to the problem of meaning. To elicit precisely this admission is
what our discussion was striving for. As we shall shortly see, the restoration
of the notion of aesthetism to honour denied to it by poststructuralism
(Carroll 1987) can clear the path for a genuine deconstruction of the hermeneutic
tradition.
The vicissitudes of the notion of aesthetism in recent theory is another
baring of deconstructive project. Paradoxically, the main argument against
deconstruction which thus far nobody has attempted let alone succeeded refuting
is too weak: it is not true that deconstruction needs a structure produced
by the (logocentric) Other to come into being (cf.Kermode 1989: 85), but
that this structure is produced by deconstruction itself. In other words,
this means that it was necessary at first to make a bogey of aesthetism,
then to equate it with the omnipotent subjectivity in order to be able to
speak of logocentrism at all. Which is not to say that the latter should
be exempted from deconstruction but that deconstruction itself cannot help
promoting tradition precisely by virtue of furthering the interpretive race.
What logocentrism is primarily concerned with, is the safeguarding of conditions
of its own possibility. The accomplishment of this task falls to the part
of deconstruction. Whence the radicalization of the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise
strategy which is the structure of interpretation itself. The inevitable
corollary is the drastic misrepresentation of tradition. In short, it is
intertextuality/dialogism which is the true essence of logocentrism, whereas
the notion of the omnipotent subjectivity should be neither defended nor
deconstructed, but rejected tout court as making no sense at all. It follows
that the beyond of the hermeneutic tradition is the baring of the potential
of mimesis an access to which has been barred from Plato to his poststructuralist
ancestors. And yet it would be too spendthrift not to set Derrida aside
from the latter. For it is nobody else than Derrida who corroborates our
postulate. Witness his interest in the effects of signature which, forcing
the reader to give up the Achilles's strategy, elicit the conclusion mentioned
afore. Now it is up to us to spell out the consequences of the latter.
What allows us to treat Derridaean signature as a synonym of Bakhtin's intonation,
is the fact that to sign and to intone means one and the same thing: to
read. Whence the intertextual appropriation of both practices: intertextuality
as repetition with difference receives a firm foundation, since the signing
(or intoning) of a given text by its author, by definition, can never coin-cide
with how the text comes to be signed/intoned by the reader. Whence the celebrated
undecidability that, in actual fact, is only the reader's uncertainty as
regards the extent to which his/her signing/intoning coincides with that
of an author. However, this self-dimunition is underpinned by another one,
i.e. by an a priori surmise that it is possible to qualitatively (intratextually)
equate the intentions of the author and the reader 35 and consequently to conceive of non-coincidence
as a quantitative (intertextual) affair. One need not be a gourmet to reject
this dish of poststructuralist cousine for its logocentric taste - and this
precisely because one ingredient supposedly essential to logocentrism is
lacking from the receipt.
My contention is exactly that by ommitting the notion of intention the plain
dish has been made more digestible, the text more readable. For it is the
author's intention which makes of a reading a futile enterprise. In order
to clear this statement of all ambiguities, let me render it thus: it is
an author's intention to make a text unreadable, unassimilable by hermeneutic
tradition. Which explains why the signature remains for Derrida primarily
that of an author, but does not as yet explain how the appropriation takes
place. However crucial, this question has not been even posed by the assailants
of the logocentric edifice - with the exeption of Derrida himself (1984;
1985). Unfortunately his remarks remain brief and superficial, so that it
would be fair to say that he takes the appropriation as a fact rather than
trying to examine its mechanism (cf.1985: 28-29). This reluctance, which
in itself is another point in favor of our argument, will ultimately clear
our analysis of deliberate twisting things around in order to state matters
in the chosen fashion, for it proves that the deconstruction of the second
degree is ultimately Derrida's deconstruction put for the first time to
practical use 36.
Derridaean theory of the signature is the best example for the workings
of the mechanism of appropriation which is set in motion the moment we identify
an intention as aimed at the revelation of truth/final meaning instead of
seeing its aim in establishing the possibility of reading (in case of an
hermeneut) and the strategy of the subversion of this possibility (in case
of an author) 37.
To succumb to the first view, accidentally being the current one, and at
the same time to remain coherent can only mean to recognize in intertextuality
what it has always already has been, to wit, a logocentric affair. Significantly,
the recognition will fall especially easy for a psychoanalytically informed
reader.
To be sure, poststructuralism is only all too ready to dwell on the psychoanalytic
underpinnings of our problematics. The subversion of logocentrism cannot
be regarded complete without the subversion of such a no-torious version
of it as the Freudian orthodoxy hanging as it does on the notion of castration.
In accordance with the basic deconstructive rule of pharmakonization of
the discourse subjected to deconstruction, the castration complex is not
rejected but turned against itself. As a result, another Father Figure claiming
absolute know-ledge/unambiguous meaning is exposed to be castrated (cf.Evans
1989; Sprengnether 1995). Which explains why the readings claiming fictionality
of Freud's case histories are so fashionable (Brooks 1984; de Certeau 1981;
Mahony 1984). At this point even the most patient part of our auditorium
will be tempted to mimic the diagnosis recurring throughout this paper.
If we have already exhausted the patience of our readership, only now we
are about to exhaust the referntial uncaninness of the effects of Achilles's
self-dimunitive strategy.
As an intertextual device, Derrida's signature, just as Bakhtin's intonation,
splits and scatters, to wit, castrates the signing/intoning subject barring
him/her from the full meaning. The paradox of Zeno's paradox is that precisely
the impossibility to ever attain an unambiguous meaning turns out to be
the very possibility of reading as such, i.e. of transmission of the hermeneutic
heritage. Which explains why the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise strategy
has been always already used in the most orthodoxical psychoanalytic applications
of the castration complex to the texts of creative writers as well as to
those of neurotics.
Witness S.Ferenczi's paper on "Gulliver Phantasies" (1980 /1926/)
where the dreams of the neurotics as well as an account of Gulliver's travels
are referred to the same source, i.e. to the castration complex as an interminable
vascillation (whence the interminability of analysis qua interpretation
of which Lacan makes so much hail) between penis as dwarf (i.e. referent,
material object) and phallus as giant (i.e. immaterial sign), the vascillation
which, in Lacanian terms, should allow Achilles to overcome, but never to
join his partner in an hermeneutical/sexual race. Whence two fundamental
postulates of Lacanian hermeneutics: sexual relation never takes place but
never stops to write itself (cf. Lacan 1975: 130-132). The constant possibility
to overtake/interpret grounded in the impossibility to coincide coincides
perfectly with the constant errancy as non-arrival of the letter/writing
posited by Derrida. Whence the impossibility to take the much-hailed break
of poststructuralism with psychoanalytic orthodoxy seriously, that is, literally.
Not so much because, for strategical reasons, Lacan was the first to concede
that the hermeneutic sublimation of penis into phallus along the lines of
the Kantian theory of the sublime was launched by Freud himself 38, but owing to the familiar
attempt at de-refenrentialization of the castration complex instead of taking
it literally/materially, the attempt which underpins the whole affair. Whence
the line of divide between Freud and his immediate followers, primarily,
E.Jones - and the poststructuralist appropriation of his legacy, to wit,
the separation between libidinal/hermeneutic aphanisis and the castration
anxiety which is nothing else than the interpretation of the castration
complex, i.e. an aesthetic object in Bakhtinian sense.
Whence the uncanny (referential) coincidence between Lacan's stress on the
indivisability of phallus qua signifier and Derrida's insisitence that just
the opposite is true (Derrida 1988: 194-197). Which explains why the double
bind of the celebrated controversy is ostensible just as it is in case of
"The Potato Elf". The result is the same: the withdrawal of the
issue of undecidability from the foreground of the debate. However our analysis
of Nabokovian textual strategy can only gain by referring to the familiar
theoretical issues.
The as yet unappreciated lesson of Derrida-Lacan controversy is the conclusion
an astute reader cannot fail to draw from Derrida's critique, namely that
the notion of truth/full meaning has nothing to do with real concerns of
logocentrism that boil down to a radical warding off the letter's ever arriving
at its destina-tion. Which explains why Derridaean stance to see in the
non-arrival a possibility justifies our use of culinary allusion to dubb
the difference between tradition and its deconstruction as that between
plain and more refined cousine, i.e. to trace it to the material problem
of digestibility of certain dishes in certain historical circumstances.
The Achillean framework of Lacanian
hermeneutics subjects it to the same sublime evaporation to which Derridaean
and Bakhtinian exegetical models were shown to fall prey. The result of
the aphanisis of interpretive matter is the brute materiliazation of the
object of art. Owing to the self-dimunitive interpretive strategy gro-unded
in the qualitative identification between author's and the reader's intentions
the object of art comes to be regarded by our trio as fundamentally mutilated,
i.e. castrated. In other words, an art object that most fully corresponds
to the demands of poststructuralist theorists is the mutilated statue of
the Milos Venus which, at the same time, has always already been an ideal
object of logocentric aesthetics 39. And hardly surprising, for the Venus statue is simultaneously
the law and example of an attempt to make virtue of necessity to which logocentric
as well as Derridaean theorizing boils down.
What makes of the Venus statue a sublime object, to wit, an ideal object
of interpretation in the Kantian and poststructuralist sense is the uncanny
impossibility to settle an issue of premeditation/unpremeditation, of in-tention
and the lack of it. This undecidability as a constant vascillation between
two participants in Zeno's hermeneutic race is the same which emerges from
Derri-daean interpretation of Socrates-becoming-Plato movement (1980) boosted
as an instance of deconstruction at its best. If the notion of an (omnipotent)
author is equally repugnant to the tradition and its deconstruction, then
precisely because of the uncanny return of referentiality with which an
interpretation cannot adequately cope.
In effect, the issue of undecidability, however crucial for hermeneutic
race, has to be withdrawn accor-ding to the logic which "The Potato
Elf" has allowed us to divulge. The Venus statue amplifies our preceding
discussion by showing that this withdrawal happens for hermeneutic reasons
in order to avoid literality of interpretation, to wit, its materiality.
Whence the paradox of Zeno's paradox: in order to function inter-pretation
has to substitute its own materiality for the materiality of the art object
but in so doing cannot help but trigger the return of the referent which
leaves a reader with an uncanny choice between the literality of interpretation
(in fact, its evaporating coincidence /mimesis with the textual strategy
of an author) and the dematerialization of interpretation (in fact, its
annihilation, since a new reading as a differential
The reasons are as obvious as they are compelling. The case of Venus statue
lays bare the referential structure of interpretive a-referentiality and
thereby provides an ample description of the mechanism of tradition transmission,
i.e. of the (im)possibility of appropriation.
In order to cope with materiality of an art object, interpretation has to
make virtue of necessity, to wit, to direct its force against every attempt
to amplify/fi-nilize the mutilated text, i.e. to take castration literally.
Put in a more familiar terms, the parts which have been cut off should never
be restored: the letter /writing should never arrive at its destination
40. But by the same
token Lacan's persistence on the arrival bares his project as a subversive
enterprise alligning it to the most radical avante-garde attempts at amplification
of the mutilated texts.
Since it is precisely finalization which is the true enemy of hermeneutic
tradition (from Socrates to Derrida and beyond), it is only logical that
the latter, in actual fact, depends on the furthering of mutilation 41, for this process allows
to hope that the dema-terialization of an object of art will be brought
about naturally. Whence an infantile character of interpreta-tion (to be
understood literally and metaphorically): an interpreter is frozen in the
situation of a boy, who on seeing that the girl is lacking a penis decides
that it is only too small and decides to wait, but this waiting can only
end with the full-scope castration complex as a radical abolishing of the
penis 42. However,
even this hope to secure interpretation is doomed to fail, for the hope
itself has a referential structure: to surmise that the immaterial object
is synonymous with the sublimated one means to take immateriality itself
materially 43. Obviously,
it is this purely logocentric concern which underpins Derrida's interest
in negative theology (1989; 1995). It follows that Derrida was correct to
say that the aim of logocentrism is a book as an immaterial object (1981a:
53, 185). But the paradox is that, far from thre-atening logocentrism, the
multiplication of copies is the only conceivable way to attain logocentric
aims. Especially in the age of technical reproduction the law of which is
the Achillean interplay between production and consum-ption - without restance.
According to the laws of the Derridaean unrestricted economy, which is also
the one of hermeneutic tradition 44.
And herewith the description of the mechanism of appropriation may be regarded
complete. Unfortunately, it resembles the prepetuum mobile not in the poststructura-list
sense of perpetuation of the interpretive transmis-sion, but in the crudely
material sense of an impossible, unreal device. For what radically resists
con/intertex-tual appropriation is the referential structure of the art
object, its materiality, which subverts all attempts to dematerialize it
by dematerializing the interpretation. It remains to see what insights this
assessment can buy and whether they should still be paid for by blindness.
Ironically, among the problems with which post-structuralism is unsuccessfully
grappling the most notorious one is that of history/change. Irony stems
from the fact that the relation between poststructuralism and its predecessor
is generally thematized precisely along historical lines: as a shift from
synchrony to diachrony. At first glance, this description might appear sly
and unjust, for all the structuralist concepts can easily be shown to rely
on the concept of literary history as indirect filiation propounded by Russian
Formalists. However, economically speaking, the model in question is not
rentable: the mechanism of interpretive transmission comes to be described
and secured, but only by making of the whole affair a matter of natural
history, i.e. of an all too smooth functioning which leaves no place for
ac-cidents, that is, for the influence of social context. Whence the current
discontent with structuralist historicity and an attempt to improve the
strategy in which our reader has already recognized the Achillean one.
As our analysis of Nabokov's short-story has shown, this improvement boils
down to the intratextual and at the same time intertextual deployment of
interpretive self-dimunition, since the separate deployment of intra- and
itertextuality cannot do away with referntial structure as the hermeneutic
obstacle par excellence. The improvement may indeed appear perfect, especially
since it removes the main charge against deconstruction said to be dependent
on pre-existing structures:
"... in its very relevance this objection /mentio-
ned above/ cannot be sustained ... except by refe-
rring to extra-literary and even extra-linguistic
juridical norms. The objection appeals to law and
calls to mind the fact that the subversion of La
Folie du jour needs the law in order to take place.
Whereby the objection reproduces and accomplishes
its staging within La Folie du jour: the account,
mandated and prescribed by law but also ... comman-
ding, requiring, and producing law in turn. In
short, the whole critical scene of competence in
which we are engaged is party to and part of La
Folie du jour, in whole and in part, the whole is
a part"(1980b: 219; )
In order not to limit deconstruction to a Foucauldian model of trangression
of a pre-given law one has to thematize exactly the extra-literary and even
extra-linguistic elements, to wit, to textualize them. Whence Derridaean
dictum about limitless textuality 45. Unfortunately this dictum looses all its subversive force the
moment it comes to be pronounced. Put otherwise, the true paradoxicality
of deconstruction stems not from the cele-brated (and readily embraced)
difficulties with articulating its fundamental notion of the différance
but from the trite impossibility to articulate the prefix "de-".
Which explains why the succinct description of the invaginating, abyssal
structure just cited turns out to be a perfect example of the famous Kettle-logic
read in reverse, i.e. bared as another version of the Achillean self-dimunition.
If the abyssal intertextuality founders, then not so much due to the fact
that its articulation requires a number of denials/restrictions 46 but primarily because the
final articulation, however mutilated, makes of de-construction a perfect
mimesis of the construction of tradition: what the invaginating stricture
(the text's dependence on the pre-existing structure which is produ-ced
by the textual movement itself) boils down to is the unrestricted accumulation,
to wit, the radical impossibi-lity for anything to get lost: everything
is bound to arrive at its destination: in Formalist terms, everything can
be revitalized, or, as Bakhtin would state it, "every sense will have
its day of ressurection" (1979: 373) 47. Which means that the two fundamental postulates
of poststructuralism - the one about the influence of the social context
as determinant to the act of interpreta-tion, and another concerning the
act of exclusion consti-tutive of the logocentric identity - happen to be
at odds, for an act of exclusion can be conceived only as an accident, and
therefore as a con/intertualizing affair. Morally speaking, this means to
wash logocentrism of all guilt, to claim for the hermeneutic tradition innocence
and in doing so to load guilt on literary texts and their authors exposed
as unremittable debtors. Therefore it is only logical that the most advanced
versions of intertex-tuality are phrased in overtly moral terms of guilt/debt.
Fortunately, to counter this tendency all one has to do is to take recourse
to psychoanalysis. What sharpens the paradoxicality of the proposed move
is that it requires the mediation of a theorist whose current vogue stems
from the belated overtaking of poststructuralism.
The man in question is Mikhail Bakhtin. If one pays too much heed to the
current appropriation of his legacy, the role we are about to make him play
is bound to appear paradoxical, and this not at the least because, as every-body
knows, he was the first to see in Freudianism the logocentric (monological)
bogey which now haunts theory. The true nature of the Freud-Bakhtin connection,
which cannot be divulged from the poststructuralist standpoint, is another
issue that will be added to the list of ques-tions clarified in the course
of our discussion.
Fortunately, the psychoanalytic framework itself seems to need no justistification
since the notion of the unconscious is implied in every attack on the logocentric
subjectivity, whereas Freud's complicity with the latter is believed to
stem from the fact that his unconscious is not unconscious enough, to wit,
remains immaterial and conscious. This charge on which Bakhtinian critique
of Freudianism hangs is unwittingly furthered by poststruc-turalism. Whence
another quandary: how to re-marry the legacies of both men? The solutions
propounded thus far are invalidated by virtue of their perfect coincidence.
For, appearances notwithstanding, to bridge the gap hermeneutically (e.g.
Pirog 1987) means to foreground the ethics of subject creation (Handley
1993) and vice versa. What comes to be barred thereby is the possibility
to divulge the intuitions which make the names of Bakhtin and Freud allies
in the deconstruction of tradition.
Elsewhere we have already bared the sublime fate of the unconscious in the
two dominant versions of postst-ructuralist theory, to wit, the impossibility
to maintain this notion on Derridaean as well as Lacanian terms - precisely
because these terms are hermeneutuc ones (cf. Linetski 1995). It is nobody
else than Bakhtin, an alle-ged avatar of this stance, who highlights how
to preclude the evaporation.
What corroborates the view of Freudianism as an hermeneutic abridgement
of psychoanalysis is an apparent absence of our notion from Bakhtin's major
works. Hence, just as in case of Heidegger, it seems necessary first of
all to find a place where unconscious may appear in Bakhtinian theory (cf.
Richardson 1965). Those who are bent upon remaining blind to the most promising
intuiti-ons of both our thinkers are free to exercise their wits in the
boy-scoutian manner.
To put it in plain language, the notion of the unconscious underpins the
earliest works penned at the moment when Bakhtin, more likely than not,
was as yet anaware of Freudian theory. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) this
innocence, Bakhtin's early view of aesthetic activity deploys our notion
in the way which allows us to treat an essay on "The Author and Hero
in Aesthetic Activity" as a model of applied psychoanalysis at its
best. Whereas his major works can be regarded as extended exp-lorations
of the (im)possibilities to retain the Freudian concept within the framework
belatedly dubbed poststructuralist. Which explains why the genuine return
to Freud can only be a return to early Bakhtin.
An optimal way to prove our point would be to mimic Derridaean mimicing
of the itinerary of Bakhtin's letter and select one of the mature works.
An essay "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry" signed by
Voloshinov suggests itself as a succinct summary of the accepted ideas of
the Bakhtin Circle. Therefore it is not sur-prising that the best summary
of these ideas is provided by our last quotation from Derrida. It remains
to see whether the difference produced by (this) mutual baring is the repetitive/interpretive
one.
At first glance, the argument of our essay proceeds along quite familiar,
i.e. patently poststructuralist lines: The signifying process is fundamentally
a social, to wit, intertextual affair (Voloshinov 1995: 62). The gist of
the matter is to prove that this applies equally to a given text as well
as to its interpretation. Which means the (inter)textualization of the extra-literary
and even pre-linguistic discursive elements, i.e. an inscri-ption of the
reader in the text (81). The result of this Achillean invaginating intratextualization
of intertex-tuality is, once again, the limitless textuality which finds
its limit in the dependence on the referential structure (66). The threat
posed by this dependence explains why it was intonation which was foregrounded
by Bakhtin as an hermeneutic/intertextual device par excellence 48. In effect, the promise
of this notion is to suspend the issue of referentiality as undecidable.
And yet the promise is bound to remain unfulfilled - due to the same necessity
which in case of Nabokov's "The Potato Elf" has forced our reader
to relinquish the same argu-ment. The resoluteness of Bakhtin's representative
to persevere up to the last helps us to exhaust the uncanny logic of Zenonian
discursivity.
At this point we may already flatter ourselves to have suffuciently explained
why con/intertextualization should be equated with intonation or signature.
Achil-les's strategy as the mechanism of interpretive trans-mission hinges
upon a certain amount of self-dimunitive hermeneutic exhaustion: a given
interpretation has to invaginate the possibility of aphanisis in order to
allow for a substitution by a new one (cf.Derrida 1981a: 110-111 et passim).
Whence the necessity to preserve traces or ashes 49. But by the same reasoning, the problem on which
poststructuralism stands or falls turns out to be not that of conservation
as such but of conservation as revitalization. Whence the trouble with the
notion of unconscious as adopted by the psychoanalytic establish-ment. It
is this trouble as well as the way to solve it which is disclosed by Voloshinov.
Within the psychoanalytic framework the postructuralist complicity with
tradition becomes even more evi-dent, for the result of the deconstructive
engagement with Freudian legacy aimed at baring the multiple forms which
the logocentric alliance has in psychoanalysis is the unequivocal equation
of Freud's Copernican revolution with the theory of children's sexuality,
which is said to radically do away with the logocentric attitude to child-hood
as an age of innocence (e.g. Rose 1984: 12-42). The paradox is that precisely
the denial of this innocence is a necessary corollory of the logocentric
stance which is essentially an hermeneutic, i.e. a moral one 50. Witness the psychoanalytic
narrative on the emergence of the castration complex - discarded by poststructuralism
as a patently logocentric fiction - which is possible only on the a priori
denial of innocence. If it were otherwise, it would have been impossible
to claim the childish character of the unconscious and its essential lack
of innocence. However, to rest satisfied with the conclusion that it is
its own innocence which logocentrism is concerned with would mean to drastically
simplify the problem. For the hermeneutic innocence presupposes the textual
victimization 51,
the current form of which is the intertextuality of all stripes. It was
up to Bakhtin, by mimicking overtaking of poststructuralism to remove the
obstacle which barres way to the most fruitful Freudian intuitions as regards
unconscious as well as childhood that can be alligned not along the hermeneutically-moral
lines but along aesthetic ones. Before we pick our discu-ssion where we
have left it, the reader should be reminded that a self-sacrificial act
is the very opposite of a self-dimunitive one.
Significantly, precisely the point in the conventi-onal theory of the unconscious
where logocentric (Kanti-an) underpinnings of it are at the foremost is
explicitly carefully avoided and implicitly strengthened by poststructuralist
theorizing. I mean an attempt to define the unconscious processes by their
indifference to contradictions - a feature which the unconscious is said
to share with savage (Levi-Strauss 1966) and/or child's thought (cf.Piaget
1977). It is this reasoning which triggers the hermeneutic evaporation/dematerialization
of our notion, to wit, the transformation of the material unconscious into
the (immaterial) consciousness. Fortunately, to bar this sublimation it
is sufficient to radically change the framework of theorizing - psychoanalytic
and otherwise: rather than that of Hegel, we should place ourselves in the
shadow of Kant. This suggestion is another point where Derridaean and Bakhtinian
intuitions fruitfully converge.
The disregard to contraditions attributed to the unconscious makes of the
theory of the latter a psycho-analytic transcription of the Kantian theory
of the sublime. Derrida's reading of Kant has pinpointed the unlawful deployment
of mimesis in order to downplay the contradiction (impossibility to compare)
between qua-litatively incomparable entities as the essence of logocentric
stance (1987: 136-137). Understandably, nobody has bothered to draw the
only possible conclusion, namely, that the non-perfect, impure mimesis (Achilles's
non-mimetic identification with tortoise) is the aim which the hermeneutic
tradition has always already been after. To refute this conclusion as a
familiar argument of Derrida's ill-wishers would mean to argue that deconstruction
draws its stregth from the weakness of its adversary and thereby to take
recourse to the Cretan dis-cursivity in its blindness/insight version, that
is, to not simply reintroduce the conscious vs unconscious opposition but
to do this to the detriment of the second term. The sublime fate of Bakhtin's
intonation cannot fail to defamiliriaze this whole passage.
As a theorist, Bakhtin is quite notorious for constantly contradicting himself.
Significant for our discussion is that Bakhtin himself has been more than
conscious of this apparent weakness of which his students can make neither
head nor tail representing it as an instance of faithfullness to the polyphonic/intertextual
messiness of everyday life, i.e. to the discursive materiality. However,
contrary to his students bent upon understanding this "messiness"
metaphorically (Hirschkop 1990: 14, 22), he took it literally. And this
difference makes all the différance in the world.
At first glance, to dub Bakhtin's thematization of intonation contradictory
would mean to treat it too leniently. Paradoxically, this is precisely how
it should be treated from the morally-hermeneutic, i.e. poststructura-list
point of view. For the paradox is that on more close inspection it turns
out not only that seemingly contradictory remarks can be reconciled without
recourse to any elaborate contrivances but that they are subject to a strictly
logical necessity 52.
Witness the evaporation of what may appear as the main aporia of Bakhtinian
theory of intonation pushed to the fore in Voloshinov's essay.
According to Bakhtin, intonation is a primal bearer of social evalution
as a movement of con/intertextualization. Somewhere above we have already
referred to the fact that Bakhtin makes no secret of a precarious fate of
intonation, i.e. its disappearance, to wit, materialization which seemingly
compels the reader to give up every hope of dialogizing retrieval. The only
possibility left is to give the problem an hermeneutical/moral turn and
thereby to radically annihilate a text. This is precisely what will happen
with Bakhtin's text if we succumb to the aporetical solution, i.e. to seeing
here an unparalled example of candidness. Voloshinov spells out all the
consequences of adoption of this stance.
Within the poststructuralist framework to hold to the suggested solution
means to immediately become one's own undertaker. Precisely because the
last chance to se-cure intertextualization is to thematize the very frailty
of its bearer. The materiality of a text fostered thereby impaires interpretation,
makes it impure. However, this impurity as the self-dimunitive triumph of
aporetical Cretan discursivity is precisely what the hermeneut has always
already been after. The paradox of Zeno's paradox as elucidated by Bakhtin's
disciple stems from the impossibility to claim for the referential structure
the simulacroid character. Which boils down to the impossibility to say
one thing and to do another.
"A healthy social evaluation remains in life and
from there organises the very form of utterance and
its intonation, although it never strives to find
an adequate representation in the content of utte-
rance. When the evaluation regresses from form to
content, this is a sure sigh that the re-evaluation
is underway" (Voloshinov 1995: 69)
The provisional death of intertextuality is a necessary moment of interpretive
transmission. An utterance should die, to wit, wash off the traces of previous
interpreta-tions, in order to allow for a revitalization. A Derridaean term
for this moment is "blanc" or "khora" - a scanssion
which punctuates the interpretive chain. It remains to see whether this
punctuation does not accidentally preclude the very possibility of the desired
revitalization.
Certainly, the Cretan discursivity allows to deny our surmise. But the paradox
is that in so doing its adept would have not only to attribute logocentrism
to the main proponents of the attack on the tradition and thereby to accomplish
the work of mourning - a monological enterprise fostering mastery - but
that even this sacrifice - the only hope to preclude coincidence - would
end in the total mimesis of the textual strategy. Since the full impact
of the latter can be appreciated by recourse to psychoanalysis let us follow
the poststructuralist appropriation of Bakhtin and Derrida to its logical
end.
The moment of khora remains an hermeneutic moment par excellence only insofar
as the disappearance of the utterance/text/art object marked by it remains
provisional. Which explains the necessity of the postructuralist rendering
of this traditional goal of Western hermeneutics, to wit, of limitless textuality,
to wit, of the intratextualization of intertextuality as the inscription
of the reader and his/her intonation/signature in the text. Further, we
see why it is necessary to conceive of intertextuality as discursive equality,
that is, to ground it in the blindness/insight dialectics which, in its
turn, becomes the final proof of the subversion of logocentric hierarchies
to be achieved by means of intertextuality. It is the strength of our analysis
that instead of dwelling on the apparent coincidence of the deconstructive
double-bind and the traditional hermeneutic circle (cf. Spanos 1976) we
see the point of complicity in the impossibility to tie the former and to
close the latter, to wit, the impossibility to utilize Derrida's signature
and Bakhtin's intonation as means to post-
structuralist ends.
Within the dialogical framework the disappearance of a text as its discursive
dematerialization means that the intertextualizing device, inscribed in
the text, suf-fers the same fate. Whence the necessity of the uncanny choice
between discursive equality as intertextuality and intertextuality as the
discursive revitalization. To make matters worth both options boil down
to one and the same thing.
The discursive equality precludes the possibility of discursive revitalization
by making the text immortal. For to become material in the discursive sense,
in case of the device(s) of intertextualization, means exactly to save the
text from the moment of khora. This is precisely what Voloshinov is saying.
Whence the necessity to read his statement literally in order to impute
a contradic-tion, to wit, a point of logocentric blindness. In other words,
one has to equate "the living intonation" which, according to
Voloshinov, "leads the word beyond its discursive boundaries"(69)
with a patently logocentric notion of self-presence, whereas in actual fact,
as was mentioned above, it is a patently poststructuralist claim for the
materiality of interpretation. It would have been a fortunate accident if
we were to succeed in proving that this attempt to deploy the Achilles-becoming-the-tortoise
strategy boils down to a self-deconstruction of deconstruction. Unfortunately,
in trying to limit the whole affair to the dialectic of blindness/insight
poststructuralism cannot help making an accident of itself.
On poststructuralist terms, the failure to achieve a textual coma is synonymous
with the reinforcement of traditional notions of truth/full meaning. Since
this reinforcement is a corollary of an attempt to pursue a poststructuralist
aim of materializing interpretation, it follows that the last hope to save
the whole affair is to give up precisely this aim. Which means to treat
the intertextualizing devices - be it Derridaean signature or Bakhtin's
intonation - literally, i.e. in a radically non-discursive sense. Since
it is this suggestion with which Voloshinov leaves us, one has to try to
counter it by suggesting that thereby Voloshinov contradicts himself as
well as another Bakhtin's dummy - Pavel Medvedev whose critique of Freudianizm
has been readily embraced by poststructuralism.
As everybody knows, an apple of dissent between Freud and the Bakhtin's
Circle is the notion of the unconscious which, according to Medvedev and
Voloshinov, puts psychoanalysis into a logocentric corner by virtue of being
a consciousness in disguise, to wit, an anti-social, monologic, and therefore
immaterial affair. When-ce an apparent impossibility to reconcile this attempt
to put Freud to a dialogical school and the program of the latter elaborated
by way of rectifying the Formalist aesthetics.
According to Bakhtin's dummies, what delineates the dialogical imagination
from the monological one is the way of inscription of the reader in the
text. The proper dialogical manner of textualization of the hermeneutic
attitude is to assume that the social evaluation satura-tes a text/utterance
unconsciously (Voloshinov 1995: 83). Within the framework of the Bakhtinian
critique of psy-choanalysis this is an apparent contradiction - but a salutary.
For the Cretan discursivity would have been saved were we allowed to rest
satisfied with the conc-lusion that Bakhtin's disciples say one thing and
do another (or vice versa). Uncannily, such is not the case.
As we have seen, the trouble with intertextuality is that its mechanism
functions all too perfectly, to wit, does not function at all: an essential
moment of khora cannot be produced so long as interpretation claims materiality/intertextuality.
This is precisely what Volo-shinov means by dubbing an intertextual inscription
un-conscious, i.e. a-social, monological. Whence the necessity of an intratextual
grounding, for the moment of khora, of provisional death of intertextuality
cannot be produced otherwise than by intrinsic/innocent means of a given
discourse. Which explains why an ostensibly dialo-gical/unconscious inscription
of the reader is immedia-tely opposed by Voloshinov to the "conscious
taking into account of readership"(83). It remains to see whether the
addition of this ingredient would not make the dish indegistible for the
dialogical stomach.
Certainly, a poststructuralist can always reject to even partake of the
meal but in so doing should be prepa-red to starving to death. For compared
with our dish a Cretan one resembles a hunger ration, if not a hunger hallucination.
To return to plain language, one has to make virtue of necessity and to
sacrifice the very fra-mework of all poststructuralist machinations by making
of the avatar(s) of the latter the epigons of logocentrism.
In effect, the Voloshinov's essay we are examining seems to re-introduce
the logocentric binary (conscious vs. unconscious) to deconstructively undermine
which was the aim of the Bakhtinian appropriating critique of the psychoanalytic
notion of the unconscious substituted by an exproppriatingly extended consciousness.
However, on more close inspection, it turns out that Voloshinov has remained
faithful to the aims of his group and in so doing has baringly barred the
poststructuralist project. Witness his discursive strategy which is nothing
else than a holier-than-Thou version of the Achillean self-dimunition practiced
by poststructuralism. Whence the uncanny overtaking.
In effect, the whole affair boils down to a certain conceptual rechartering:
it leaps to the eye that Voloshinov readily appropriates the terms of the
Freudian theory of the Ego/consciousness to describe intertextual inscriptions.
Which makes of the extended consciousness a neat counterpart of Derridaean
writing, that is, another generalized notion which includes what traditionally
has been splitted as writing and speech. Theoretically, what should have
been produced by this expropriating doubling of the appropriating double
is a de-structure as a beyond of logocentric theorizing aimed at the production
of the subject of knowledge. Whence the vogue enjoyed by the psychoanalytic
theory of mourning and melancholia with which psychoanalytically informed
deconstruction as well as deconstructively informed psychoanalysis have
placed their stakes 53.
At first glance, the melancholic set-up seems to answer perfectly all poststructuralist
needs without contradicting common-sense. To equate the textual pro-duction
with the work of mourning is an obvious move, whereas the product itself
can be said to bear witness to the inability to accomplish this work, the
inability stemming from the human reluctance to give up libidinal ties.
It follows that the impossibility of mastery is natural to human species,
to wit, that logocentrism is a violation of nature itself. But as a result
deconstruc-tion appears as another attempt to return to origins or at least
to the things themselves. The paradox is that this conclusion which at first
glance seems to sign the death-sentence actually would only foster the Phoenix-discursivity
and Cretan textuality. For what it implies is that the impossibility of
deconstruction is the impossibility of this return, to wit its possibility,
since the return to the things is the return of the things, i.e. an instance
of repetition automatism. It is this movement, an hermeneutic movement par
excellence which is put in question by Freud's ruminations on mourning as
well as by Bakhtin's theory of aesthetic activity. Whence their coincidence
at the point which precludes the very possibility of Cretan misrecognition.
At the face of it, the work of mourning as described by Freud is a perfect
instance of self-deconstruction. Irony stems from the fact that the law
remains with-out example whatsoever, for Freud's account cannot be advanced
as an example of the general rule 54.
What the poststructuralist appropriation of our theory has bared is the
notorious impossibility of the work of mourning to ever be accomplished.
In fact, the very success of this process, envisaged by Freud as an exception,
is the impossibility of the success. And this precisely because the giving
up of the object/referent is its inscription within the intrapsychic/intratextextual
household, naturally disruptive of every economy. The result is that the
object becomes a ghost/signifier and comes to haunt the ego. However, it
would be an easy sailing to conclude that thereby the desired intertextuality
has been securely established 55.
At the face of it the latter has indeed received an intratextual grounding.
And yet precisely this grounding happens to disrupt the whole machine: instead
of flaunting the artifice, it bares the referential structure. Which explains
why Freud's conclusion is basically the same with which Voloshinov's essay
has left us with: the point which the theory of mourning just sketched cannot
cope with is mania, to wit, repetition compulsion, to wit, intertextuality
itself (Freud 1916: 446). At first glance this outcome is not so much paradoxical,
as unexplainable.
In effect, the hermeneutic potential of mourning /melancholia stems precisely
from a radical a priori bracketing of the object/referent, the bracketing
which seems to preclude the problem from ever arising at all. The premise
of mourning is precisely the disappearance of the object, the disappearance
with which a mourner/hermeneut has nothing to do at all. On the contrary,
the success or failure of mourning is bound up with with the giving up/preserving
of the signifier and/or signified and not with the referent which has always
already disappeared - by itself, to wit, by natural means. Put differently,
the work of mourning can be launched only after the work of nature has been
accomplished.
The disappearance we are speaking about is the premise of the mourning/interpretation
- but not an un-acknowledged one. To the contrary. Witness Lacan's objet
petit a which grounds discursivity precisely by virtue of its radically
non-discursive nature. It is this grounding which an intratextual one has
to non-mimetically mime but in so doing cannot help evaporating. The result
is the baring of the unconscious an anccess to which should have been barred
by intratextual invagination of intertextuality, to wit, by the work of
mourning as a psychoanalytic version of production of Cretan discursivity.
Whence the splitting of the hermeneutic model: it seems that hermeneutics
as (the semiotics of) unconscious and unconscious as (the semiotics of)
mourning are at odds. And once again the splitting is only an ostensible
one.
The self-defeating, i.e. hermeneutic status of mourning stems from the fact
that the withdrawal of the libido from the outer world does not lead to
the enrichment of the ego but to its impoverishment. To explain this paradox
one has to take recourse to Zeno's paradox and this exactly what Freud does.
Thus we come to hear that it is the Super-ego and not the Ego onto which
libido flaws back. Whence the necessity for the Ego to practice adultery
of sorts, i.e. to try to seduce the Super-ego to fall in love with it -
which can be achieved only by practicing self-dimunition (Freud 1923: 258).
Whence the impossibility to identify the participants of the work of mourning,
for what this view boils down to is another generalized concept - now of
the intrapsychic economy which comes to resemble the Derridaean notion of
writing. Therefore it is not surprising that Freud's troubles are the same
which we have encountered above.
In effect, the Freudian machine functions all too perfectly by virtue of
intratextual flaws. Once again the gist of the matter is to introduce the
provisional death, the essential khora. However, the mourner is a sleepless
creature (Freud 1916: 439), to wit, a dialogical one (434-435). Whence the
problem how to put the patient and a text to sleep?
The first question is no question at all: forsooth nature will do her task
and the analyst his/hers. This is possible because clinically melancholia
relies on the actual/factual disappearance of the object. Significantly,
precisely clinically/literally the disappearance is perfectly Derridaean,
for its first effect is to blur the distinction between natural and accidental.
And this is why melancholia can be cured - as a fact. But by the same token
it becomes impossible to cure/interpret a text.
The paradox is that this impossibility is exactly the very possibility of
deconstruction of which Derrida speaks (e.g. 1995: 43 et passim). What invalidates
the way deconstruction is currently handled is not the fact that the Cretan
discursivity cannot cope with referentiality and therefore blinds itself
to its reliance on the referential structure, but that it copes with it
all too perfectly and in so doing puts itself into a corner from which there
is no Cretan escape.
What sets Freud's account of melancholia aside from the poststructuralist
culmination of the hermeneutic tradition is its rootedness in clinic which
allows him to divulge that it is neither the failure which makes interpretation
nor the success which promotes mastery. If the possibility to cure melancholia
is the impossibility to use the work of mourning hermeneutically, then precisely
because an analyst's success is bound up with the disappearance of the referent
brought about naturally, to wit, accidentally. It follows that in order
to apply the melancholic set up to hermeneutic ends one has to claim exactly
the opposite, that is, to take success literally - as an exercise of mastery.
Which explains why precisely Freud's theory of melancholia is used by poststructuralism
as a main evidence of Freud's logocentric blindness. The Cretan discursivity
would have been saved if the poststructuralist handling of Freudian and
other texts could have been shown to deploy the self-same strategy denounced
for its logocentric implications. Unfortunately such is not the case.
The (im)possibility of (mis)reading is the possibility to impute to an author
an excercise of mastery and to unconsciously practise the same thing. The
necessity of this strategy is the necessity to ground intertextuality intratextually.
However, the radical independence of referentiality thus achieved poses
a supplementary problem which, in strict accordance with Derrida, turns
out to be the one on which the whole enterprise hangs. For the referential
independence is synonymous with the textual immortality, with the absence
of the moment of the provisional death. Logically, to wit, paradoxically,
the only possibility left to introduce the moment of khora is to deploy
Cretan discursivity consciously, that is, to not only accuse others of mastery
but to thematize one's own exercise of it. Obviously enough, the resulting
self-deconstruction could have been only embraced by poststructuralism as
a radical form of discursive Creta-nism enabling Achille to win the hermeneutic
race by practicing self-dimunition. The paradox of Zeno's paradox is the
impossibility of