#7.2: You're de Man Now, Paul
Hey gang sorry for the unannounced hiatus. I got a new job and it’s eating up most of my time. But I'm back and we're going to talk about the second half of this theory chapter from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism. I'm going to do a quick recap of the last letter but you can see the whole archive here.
Chapter 7: Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse
Chapter 7 Part 2. Deconstruction as Nominalism
Quick Recap
In the last part, we talked about new historicism and this kind of generalized trend in theory away from actual historicization: For Jameson, new historicism is not so much a discipline as it is a scholarly aesthetic, characterized by a montage of primary sources and curiosities from a particular historical moment and a refusal to connect those sources to any broader argument.
For new historicists, history is a series of discrete moments with no connection to each other, and so the only connection we have to any moment in the past is the textual artifacts it leaves behind. This, for Jameson, is antithetical to the project of "critical theory," which is really built on extrapolating out from these textual artifacts into some kind of broader claim about something that is not so narrowly trapped in its own historical moment. He characterizes this tension as "immanence vs trancendence."
The point I tried to make at the end of the last letter was that while we don't really see people actively identifying as "new historicists" so explicitly, the aesthetic that Jameson is critiquing here is still extremely prevalent: People love to string together little curiosities and go "look at this, this is crazy." And sometimes it is crazy! But it's generally not that satisfying as scholarship.
And that's because new historicism is really best understood as a symptom of that classic theoretical turn we know and love as "poststructuralism," which, as Jameson notes, is a school of thought wherein "all enemies are on the left, [and] the principle target always turns out to be this or that form of historical thinking" (217). By now, a lot of that stuff has just been metabolized by English departments such that it’s just a sort of default mode for doing scholarship.
Homeric Laughter
So Jameson opens the back half of this chapter with a kind of fun analogy for "theory," playing on this tension between immanence and trancendence we talked about in the previous section. He asks readers to "imagine the first sophisticated hominid philosophers, already skeptics of an advanced sort, complaining among themselves about the awkwardness of the rocks their fellows use to beat and break and pound. These clumsy objects, they feel, do not even reach approximation with their concept, the 'instrument' or 'tool'; they are of a piece with the level and quality of social life of the hominid population itself" (218).
For Jameson, these early hominid philosophers may have developed some kind of advanced conception of what these rudimentary tools ought to be (i.e., the platonic ideal of a hammer or whatever), but they just as easily could have concluded that the achievement of genuine "instrumentality" was always going to be impossible for humans, because ultimately we're just these dumb little guys.
The point is that creating something (be it a hammer or a computer or a novel theoretical framework) is always going to be a little clumsy and stupid looking, always going to to fall short of "human intention," but it's equally stupid to dismiss or otherwise condemn those actions just because they look stupid and clumsy.
What's being set up here has to do with the difficulty and clumsiness of thinking new ideas, which is sort of a theme of this chapter. But for now I wanted to run through all of this because it gives us a truly fascinating glimpse into the kind of thing that the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies thinks is funny:
intention is always deeply comical: we do not need the banana skin and the interruption of an intended action for the human act...always to strike us as ontologically inadequate (homeric laughter). For that, it is enough for the intention itself to be separated out from the act and to hover alongside it as a now no longer quite internal standard of judgement: at that point the very project of a human being to walk— even without slipping— is a matter of some hilarity (219).
Rousseau, Derrida, de Man
Jameson then turns to Paul de Man's work on Rousseau as an example of how novel theoretical insights are both sort of heroic but also clumsy and awkward.
Just briefly, sorry: The main thing you need to know about Rousseau for this letter is that he was a renaissance guy who wrote an essay called "Essay on the Origin of Languages" in which, among other things, he makes the point that language is the first social institution and therefore must have arisen from "natural" causes.
De Man's work on Rousseau is being positioned in contrast to our old pal Derrida's discussion of Rousseau in Of Grammatoloy, which, as Jameson notes, is less interested in "the fictionality of the 'experience' of the past that Rousseau's account seems to presuppose but on the internal contradictions of his formulation" (226). Enumerating these contradictions would be a project for a whole other (equally excruciating) newsletter, but the main one is basically: how is it possible for a bunch of people that "possess" language to imagine what it would be like to not have language. For Derrida, the prelinguistic past of humanity is literally unthinkable to us as language-possessing humans, because for us, conceptualizing anything requires language on some fundamental level.
That contradiction, then, becomes the underlying maneuver for discrediting or— to use the contemporary and more annoyingly vague term— “troubling” our access to anything besides the present. As Jameson summarizes, "this particular focus strikes at all imagination of radical change or difference and poses the question of how a being informed by one system in the present could possibly have any appreciation of a condition radically different, since by definition the thesis of difference and change means just that, that the past is inaccessible and unimaginable" (226). This assumption of inaccessibility is the thing that underwrites the new historicist investment in immanence discussed in the previous section, but I’m sure if you’ve done any grad school at all you’ve encountered this kind of move all over the place.
So this all seems really tricky, and it's basically why talking to anyone who is really into Derrida is so exhausting. But here comes our new buddy Paul de Man, who is also a poststructuralist, but who has a decidedly different way of framing this problem of how we can use language to have access to anything.
Metaphor
So how does language work? Well for de Man (in his interpretation of Rousseau) it's all about metaphor. Here's Jameson on de Man on Rousseau:
metaphor is for de Man something like the source and origin, the deeper cause, of the literal and referential illusions themselves: "Metaphor overlooks the fictional, textual element in the nature of the entity it connotes. It assumes a world in which intra- and extra-textual events, literal and figural forms of language, can be distinguished, a world in which the literal and the figural are properties that can be isolated and, consequently, exchanged and substituted for each other" (Allegories of Reading 152). "This is an error," he adds, "although it can be said that no language would be possible without this error" (227).
Let's maybe unpack the chain of who's saying what, exactly, here: for Rousseau, the emergence of language is driven by early hominid's ability to draw comparisons and other types of relationships between things. This tree is taller than that tree, this guy is taller than that guy, this tree is taller than that guy, things of this nature.
For de Man, the ability to compare things is less about the things themselves, but rather through the abstraction required to make the comparison: Comparing things to each other is effectively the production of a whole relationship out of effectively nowhere. Which, crucially, de Man will identify a metaphorical operation: Whether you're saying "All the world's a stage" or "this tree is like that tree," the underlying operation here is to take entities that are ontologically unrelated and forge a kind of relationship between them through language: The world, a stage, this tree, that tree.
For Jameson, this is the key to de Man's whole thing: "this identification of the emergence of abstraction as a metaphorical operation is...a strategic act which enables de Man's unique 'rhetorical' system to come into being"(229).
de Man's Nominalism
So crucially, for de Man, the basic metaphoric nature of language is a kind of error, because to use language is to (in his view, mistakenly) assume a kind of equivalence between ontologically distinct entities: love is not actually a rose, this tree is not that tree, etc.
If you're a theory guy, you may have already clocked the underlying ontological position here as nominalism, which similarly conceptualizes the world as a bunch of discrete objects that we then organize into broad universal categories for the sake of epistemic clarity. For Jameson, positioning de Man as a nominalist allows for his work to be more easily positioned within "the very logic of contemporary thought and culture, from which he otherwise stood aloof, unique, and unclassifiable" (250).
For Jameson, de Man's commitment to the "error" of metaphor that serves as the basis of language is best understood as an effort to smuggle a bunch of anachronistic "literary" things back into the project of deconstruction, which is otherwise pretty hostile to aesthetics or privileging something like "the literary" over other forms of "text." Here's Jameson:
It is certain that de Man's form of deconstruction can be seen as a last-minute rescue operation and a salvaging of the aesthetic—even a defence and valourization of literary study and a privileging of specifically literary language— at the moment in which it seemed about to disappear without a trace (251).
The stakes here are pretty clear: For Jameson, de Man was the deconstructionist who on some basic level understood the damage that deconstruction was going to do to the study of literature. His anachronistic turn to metaphor can be read as an effort to recuperate some kind of space for good old fashion literary devices in an academic climate that was increasingly interested in more or less abandoning "literature" in favour of "texts." As Jameson, de Man's work is "prophetic of the 1980s [due to] the judgement of bankruptcy it pronounces on the elaborate celebration of liberation, the body, desire, and the senses which was one of the principal 'gains' and battlefields of the 1960s" (255).
So this is kind of the point: For Jameson, de Man is the awkwardly heroic figure of deconstructionist criticism. He understood that deconstruction was going to radically change how English departments operate, and he was struggling to find some way to carve out a bit of space for something like the properly “literary” to operate. He isn’t successful, ultimately, but his struggle offers some genuinely compelling insights that might orient future scholarship beyond its current boundaries.
Paul de Man: Just Following Orders
Okay so that is basically where the serious part of the theory chapter ends. But Jameson caps the chapter with a sort of meandering defence of Paul de Man against the "now notorious 'revelations'" (256) that de Man worked as a "cultural journalist" during the first years of the German occupation of Belgium back in the 40s. Uh Oh!
So it turns out back in the 40s Paul de Man published some anti-semitic cultural commentary. There was a sort of fun essay in the New Yorker several years ago that outlines this whole saga, but the gist of it is that the absolute best case scenario seems to be that de Man was not personally anti-Semitic but still cynically and voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis for personal gain—not good!
So we're 250 pages in to this book and Jameson seems to have decided he can just sort of say whatever. For instance here’s he is talking about his “sneaking admiration” for Heidegger's much more overt commitment to National Socialism:
I know I will be misunderstood if I add that I have some sneaking admiration for Heidegger's attempt at political commitment, and find the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism (provided its ideals remain unrealized) (257)
uh what's up?
But de Man and Jameson were buddies. So maybe Jameson has some special insight to bring to the table here:
Nothing of this has any relevance to Paul de Man, for whom the thing dramatically called "collaboration" was simply a job, in a Europe henceforth and for the foreseeable future united and German, and who as long as I knew him personally was simply a good liberal (257).
It was just a job! He thought the Nazis were going to win! Plus we were friends! Fucking hell man.
Okay. Glad to be back, see you guys next week