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Legacies of Paul de Man
Professing Literature:
John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man
Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University
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Legacies of Paul de ManProfessing Literature:
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Notes1 As I note a
little later in this essay, Peggy Kamuf's fine review of
Cultural Capital in Diacritics has almost
nothing to say about the book's chapter on de Man. I
have found Guillory's work a helpful irritant over the
years, and the present essay represents something of an
effort to make payments on an overdue account by
decompressing the brief critiques of Cultural
Capital (and especially of its de Man chapter) that I
offer in Phantom Formations (see 28-29, 35-36,
211-13), and The Politics of Aesthetics (5-8,
187-88). 2 Guillory
borrows the notion of cultural capital from Bourdieu: of
Bourdieu's many writings in this area, see, e.g.,
Distinction. The idea of cultural capital
goes back to Mannheim (at least): "the modern bourgeoisie
had from the beginning a twofold social root—on the
one hand the owners of capital, on the other those
indiviudals whose only capital consisted in their
education" (Mannheim, 156). 3 I
discuss Schiller's notion of the Aesthetic State in
Phantom Formations (via a reading of Goethe's
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre), 95-133; see also
211-13 for a critique of these closing remarks of
Guillory's. 4 The
writing staff of The Simpsons is famous for being
dominated by Harvard Lampoon alumni—a
factoid of significance to the extent that it can remind us
that the graduates of elite schools continue to play a
substantial role in the culture industry. This is not to
dispute the "decline of the humanities," or, for that
matter, the retreat of print culture itself.
According to a National Endowment for the Arts report
released as I finished this essay, only about 50% of
Americans read any sort of novel (or play or story, etc.)
at all over the past year (see "Fewer Noses Stuck in Books
in America, Survey Finds," The New York Times,
July 8, 2004). The point is only that the difference
between "high" and "mass" culture is far more fluid than
writers such as Guillory tend to imply. Furthermore,
as I shall remark later in this essay, the discourse of
aesthetics is not simply a "high cultural" phenomenon;
quite the contrary. 5 Once
again, I permit myself to refer to Phantom
Formations, 1-37, and The Politics of
Aesthetics, 1-4, passim. The persistence of
aesthetics beyond differences between "elite" and "mass"
culture is what Guillory misses—for the sake of the
aesthetic. On this point I would grant precedence to
David Lloyd and Paul Thomas's analysis: "The
differential position of culture...so deeply saturates the
structure of bourgeois society that even the so-called
aestheticization of daily life in the postmodern era has
not fundamentally altered its significance. The
structure of ‘recreationary space,' whether defined
as Arnoldian culture or the mass media, is, in relation to
the specialization of the workplace or the interests of
politics, fundamentally little changed and continues to
provide the mechanisms by which the formal subject of the
state is produced as in this domain
undivided. Without a radical critique, not only of
the terms but also of the conditions of possibility of such
differentiation of spheres, the function of culture in the
reproduction of the state and material social relations
cannot adequately be addressed" (15). 6 Kamuf
dismisses Guillory's explanation of his focus on de Man
with little more than an exclamation of incredulity:
"‘The equation theory-deconstruction-de Man' is, he
claims, ‘already present in the professional
imaginary' [178]. Oh, really? Reading that, one
may be relieved, alarmed, or merely amused at the idea that
there is someone out there who believes he has his finger
on the pulse of the ‘professional imaginary.' Or even
at the idea that someone would so confidently invoke such a
concept, which illustrates too well the violence of
conceptual totalization. To escape this violence
many, if not most, of Guillory's readers (I include myself)
will probably choose to ignore the claim. Which is
not to say that this framing device is easy to ignore: on
the contrary, it intrudes and insists on almost every page
of the [fourth] chapter" (Kamuf, 62-63). 7
Continuing what is no doubt on the one hand shameless
self-promotion and on the other hand the exhibitionistic
airing of an obsession, I take the liberty of noting that
reflections on de Man's charisma are to be found in my
essay "De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception"
(esp. 50-51, 64-65), which predates Guillory's book by a
couple of years. A revised and expanded version of
this essay now makes up chapter 3 of The Politics of
Aesthetics. Many critics have commented in
passing on de Man's peculiar anti-theatrical charisma;
Samuel Weber, for instance, has this interesting remark in
an interview: "I have long felt that de Man, in his
practice as teacher and as writer, was the most Lacanian,
or Freudian, or psychoanalytic of literary critics.
Not explicitly, of course, but in his use of authority, in
his tendency to multiply apodictic statements in a way that
undermined the absoluteness of the claims they seemed to be
making." (185). 8 See
the introduction to this volume for some reflections on the
breadth and complexity of de Man's influence in the
Anglo-American academy. 9 On de
Man's introduction to the Studies in Romanticism
special issue, see Sara Guyer's contribution to this
volume. 10
"Theory of Metaphor" was originally published as an article
in Studies in Romanticism in 1973. The
Proust essay first appeared as "Proust et
l'allégorie de la lecture," in a
Festschrift for Georges Poulet in 1972; versions
of Allegories of Reading's Rilke chapter and one
of its Nietzsche chapters also appeared in 1972. The order
of composition of these texts is, so far as I know, a moot
question. 11
One need look no further than this volume to find an
interesting debate over de Manian materialism: see Rei
Terada's "Seeing is Reading." The Material Events
collection provides another convenient resource. 12
There is one apparent counterexample to my claim here: a
sentence in "Hegel on the Sublime" in which de Man speaks
of a moment in Hegel in which "the idea leaves a material
trace, accessible to the senses, upon the world"
(AI, 108). But as even this fragment of a
sentence, let alone the rest of the discussion, makes
clear, the point is that, although the material trace, like
any sign, is accessible to the senses, its status
as sign causes the phenomenal "presence" of a
sensation to be contaminated by the differential structure
of the trace. 13 I
have elsewhere tried to sketch out an interplay among
aesthetics, technics, and theory: see Politics,
14-29; see also Weber. In particular, for an
extremely helpful meditation on technics and a reading of
Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" that
clarifies how technics may be understood both as a power to
fix and control, and as a "movement of unsecuring," see
Weber, 55-75. 14
Guillory engages in a hard-working and generally respectful
argument with Neil Hertz's essay "Lurid Figures" (see
Guillory, 233-35). I leave aside here the extremely
interesting topic of pathos in de Man; see Hertz's
extraordinary essays "Lurid Figures" and "More Lurid
Figures"; my Politics of Aesthetics, 95-124; and,
most recently, Terada, 48-89 and passim. 15
Once again, see the introduction to this volume for a
discussion of the diverse sort of work that de Manian
theory has inspired. 16
For a meditation on the political dimension of de Man's
thought that is particularly attentive to the violence of
formalization, see Chase. The de Manian project may
only be accused of performing an "imaginary reduction of
the social to an instance of the linguistic" if one's
critique of de Man's notion of "language" has more traction
than Guillory's is able to achieve. When de Man tells
us that historical and political systems are the
"correlate" of textual models (RR, 289), his claim
does not amount to a reduction of epistemological
or ontological complexity. Language provides no
ontological ground to which one could reduce. |